The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success and freedom from blame, rewards perseverance and favors having somewhere to go, for what endures does so not by standing still but by renewing itself along a steady course. The Image speaks of the superior person who stands firm and does not change his direction. The core theme is duration and constancy, the lasting that is achieved through faithful movement rather than rigidity. 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 Heng 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.