The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, allows success in small matters and favors having somewhere to go, while implying that grace and ornament are fitting for lesser affairs but should not be relied on where substance is required. The Image speaks of the superior person who brings clarity to everyday matters yet does not presume to decide grave questions by outward form alone. The core theme is beauty and form, valuable but secondary to inner worth. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that refines the counsel.

The core judgment behind this Bi 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, Grace (Bi), hexagram 22, is paired with its inversion: Biting Through (Shi He), hexagram 21. 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.