The Judgment, in paraphrase, is that perseverance furthers, a terse counsel that great power is safe only when joined to what is right. The Image speaks of the superior person who does not tread any path that is not in keeping with propriety, and the line texts warn, through the picture of a goat butting a hedge and catching its horns, against force used blindly. The core theme is great strength that must be governed by righteousness rather than spent recklessly. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.
Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Da Zhuang 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 Power (Da Zhuang), hexagram 34, is paired with its inversion: Retreat (Dun), hexagram 33. 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 reads the same lines closer to a historical record.