The Judgment, in paraphrase, is brief and strong: supreme success. The Image counsels curbing evil and furthering good, obeying the benevolent will of heaven, so that great wealth is held with clarity and modesty rather than pride. The core theme is abundance possessed rightly, strength joined to clear-sighted humility. Any line received as a moving line transforms into its opposite, producing a second hexagram that modifies the reading.
Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Da You through, treated the Judgment above first as a divination formula and only secondarily as moral instruction, a corrective to Cheng Yi's more purely philosophical Yichuan Yizhuan. The Mawangdui silk manuscript, recovered from a sealed Han tomb in 1973 and dated before 168 BCE, preserves closely related material in a wholly different sequence, organized by paired trigrams rather than the King Wen order, evidence that the hexagram texts still circulated in more than one arrangement this late. In the King Wen sequence, Great Possession (Da You), hexagram 14, is paired with its inversion: Fellowship (Tong Ren), hexagram 13. 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.