The Judgment, in paraphrase, holds that inner truth reaches even to pigs and fishes, the least responsive of creatures, and so brings good fortune; it favors crossing the great water and rewards perseverance, for sincerity at the center wins even the difficult. The Image speaks of the superior person who deliberates criminal cases and delays executions, tempering judgment with compassion. The core theme is inner sincerity and confidence that, being genuine, moves others. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.
Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered Zhong Fu 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, Inner Truth (Zhong Fu), hexagram 61, cannot be paired by inversion, since turning it upside down reproduces the identical figure; instead it is paired by opposition, every line reversed, with Small Preponderance (Xiao Guo), hexagram 62. James Legge's more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads such passages closer to a historical record than the mystical cast Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German version, carried into English by Cary Baynes in 1950, gave most twentieth-century readers.