The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success, pictures the king approaching his temple to reunite the people in reverence, and favors crossing the great water, for this is a time to dissolve hardness of heart and egotism and so to gather what has been scattered. The Image speaks of the ancient kings who offered sacrifice and built temples to draw the divided together. The core theme is dispersion of what has grown rigid or estranged, dissolving barriers to restore union. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.

The core judgment behind Huan belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, Dispersion (Huan), hexagram 59, is paired with its inversion: Limitation (Jie), hexagram 60. 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 that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, 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 than a philosophical one.