The Judgment, in paraphrase, favors having somewhere to go and even crossing the great water, for this is a time of expansion in which those above give to those below and great things become possible. The Image speaks of the superior person who, when he sees good, imitates it, and when he has faults, rids himself of them. The core theme is increase, a generous time of growth in which benefit flows downward. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.
Yi stands 29th of 64 in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and ascribed to Fu Xi, distinct from its forty-second place in the King Wen sequence traced above. This was the arrangement Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit in Beijing, sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1701, letting Leibniz read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1. Translations of the Judgment above vary substantially 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, and modern scholarly translators such as Richard Rutt and Edward Shaughnessy strip away both registers in an attempt to recover the text's original Western Zhou divinatory idiom.