The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, finds good fortune in union but urges one to examine whether one truly has the constancy and standing to be a center around which others gather; those who come in good time share the good fortune, while the one who comes too late meets misfortune. The Image speaks of ancient kings who established many domains and cultivated close ties with their people. The core theme is alliance and mutual support. Moving lines transform into their opposites, producing a second hexagram that refines the reading.

Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Bi 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, Holding Together (Bi), hexagram 8, is paired with its inversion: The Army (Shi), hexagram 7. 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.