The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success but adds that bitter or galling limitation must not be persevered in, for boundaries make freedom and order possible yet must themselves be moderate. The Image speaks of the superior person who creates number and measure and examines the nature of virtue and correct conduct. The core theme is limitation and measure, the discipline that channels energy, provided the limits are not so harsh as to become unbearable. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The Judgment and Image paraphrased above draw on two of the Ten Wings, commentarial texts appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution was already doubted within the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and modern scholarship instead dates their composition to roughly the fourth to second century BCE, well after the Zhou Yi core itself. Wang Bi's third-century commentary read passages like this one from Jie philosophically, playing down the trigram image-correlations earlier commentators relied on, while Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi pushed back the other way, insisting the book remain readable as the divination manual it began as.