The Judgment, in paraphrase, likens the situation to a maiden given in marriage with due ceremony, which brings good fortune, and it rewards perseverance, for lasting progress unfolds step by step in the proper order. The Image speaks of the superior person who abides in dignity and virtue and so improves the customs of the people. The core theme is gradual, well-ordered development, advancing by stages as a courtship moves through its forms. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.
Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered this Jian through, treated the Judgment above first as a divination formula and only secondarily as moral instruction, a corrective to Cheng Yi's more purely philosophical Yichuan Yizhuan. The Mawangdui silk manuscript, recovered from a sealed Han tomb in 1973 and dated before 168 BCE, preserves closely related material in a wholly different sequence, organized by paired trigrams rather than the King Wen order, evidence that the hexagram texts still circulated in more than one arrangement this late. In the King Wen sequence, Development (Jian), hexagram 53, is paired with its inversion: The Marrying Maiden (Gui Mei), hexagram 54. Translations of the Judgment above vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads the same lines closer to a historical record.