The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises supreme success where perseverance is maintained and there is no blame, for one leads best by first knowing how to serve and adapt. The Image speaks of the superior person going indoors to rest at nightfall, following the natural order of activity and repose. The core theme is following and adapting, whether being led or leading through responsiveness. Moving lines transform into their opposites and generate a second hexagram that refines 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 Sui 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. In the King Wen sequence, Following (Sui), hexagram 17, is paired with its inversion: Work on the Decayed (Gu), hexagram 18. 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 series reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.