The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises good fortune to perseverance and counsels attention to nourishment, both to how one nourishes others and to what one seeks to fill ones own mouth. The Image speaks of the superior person who is careful of words that leave the mouth and temperate in eating and drinking that enters it. The core theme is nourishment of body and spirit and the discernment of what is worth taking in. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that shades the counsel.

The core judgment behind this Yi belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, Nourishment (Yi), hexagram 27, cannot be paired by inversion, since turning it upside down reproduces the identical figure; instead it is paired by opposition, every line reversed, with Great Preponderance (Da Guo), hexagram 28. 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.