The Judgment, in paraphrase, describes a sagging ridgepole yet still favors having somewhere to go and promises success, for an extraordinary and overloaded time calls for resolute, even unconventional action. The Image speaks of the superior person who, when he must stand alone, is unconcerned and, if he must renounce the world, does so without regret. The core theme is critical excess, a burden at its limit that demands extraordinary measures. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that colors the reading.
Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Da Guo 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 Preponderance (Da Guo), hexagram 28, cannot be paired by inversion, since turning it upside down reproduces the identical figure; instead it is paired by opposition, every line reversed from yang to yin or yin to yang, with Nourishment (Yi), hexagram 27. James Legge's more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads such passages closer to a historical record, against the mystical cast Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German version, carried into English by Cary Baynes in 1950, gave most twentieth-century readers.