The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success and rewards perseverance, and finds good fortune in taking a maiden to wife, for genuine influence works through attraction and receptivity rather than force. The Image speaks of the superior person who keeps his mind open and receptive, letting others reach him. The core theme is influence exercised by stimulation and answered by openness, the basis of courtship and of all persuasion. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that refines the counsel.

Tradition assigns the hexagram statement to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius; modern scholarship accepts none of the three attributions, treating the core instead as an anonymous Western Zhou compilation later overlaid, from the fourth to second century BCE, by the Ten Wings that supply the Image and the language of the superior person used above. Between them stand two further layers of reading, Wang Bi's third-century philosophical commentary and Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi; the one played down the trigram image-correlations, the other reasserted the text's identity as a divination manual.