The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success, pictures the king approaching his temple to draw the people together in reverence, favors seeking a great person and finds good fortune in great offerings, for gathering a multitude requires a worthy center and a shared devotion. The Image speaks of the superior person who renews his weapons to meet the unforeseen, since large gatherings bring their own risks. The core theme is congregation and assembly around a legitimate focus. 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 Cui 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.