The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, finds success in fellowship formed openly and in the field, that is, on broad and public grounds rather than in a narrow clique; it favors great undertakings, even crossing the great water, and rewards perseverance. The Image speaks of the superior person organizing the clans and distinguishing things by their kinds. The core theme is community and shared purpose grounded in openness. Moving lines change to their opposites and yield a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Tong Ren 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, Fellowship (Tong Ren), hexagram 13, is paired with its inversion: Great Possession (Da You), hexagram 14. 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 series reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.