The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, rewards perseverance, holds that not eating at home (that is, serving in public rather than idling privately) brings good fortune, and favors crossing the great water, for accumulated strength is meant to be put to great use. The Image speaks of the superior person who studies the words and deeds of the past to build up virtue. The core theme is the great restraint that stores energy and knowledge until they can act decisively. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that adjusts 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 Da Xu 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.