The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises supreme success through perseverance, but warns that one who departs from what is right will meet misfortune and that it does not favor scheming undertakings; the innocent should simply act rightly and let results follow. The Image speaks of the ancient kings who, rich in virtue and in tune with the times, nourished all beings. The core theme is naturalness and integrity free of ulterior motive. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors 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.