The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, counsels that in adversity it furthers to be persevering, and specifically to keep ones inner light while veiling it outwardly, enduring a hostile time without provoking it. The Image speaks of the superior person who governs the people by veiling his brightness, tempering clarity with restraint. The core theme is the concealment of ones light and integrity in a dark period. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.

The Judgment and Image paraphrased above draw on two of the Ten Wings, commentarial texts appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution was already doubted within the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and modern scholarship instead dates their composition to roughly the fourth to second century BCE, well after the Zhou Yi core itself. Wang Bi's third-century commentary read passages like this one from Ming Yi philosophically, playing down the trigram image-correlations earlier commentators relied on, while Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi pushed back the other way, insisting the book remain readable as the divination manual it began as.