The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, holds that the southwest (the direction of retreat and ease) furthers while the northeast does not, favors seeking a great person and rewards steadfast perseverance, for in the face of an obstacle one should not force ahead but turn to allies and to self-cultivation. The Image speaks of the superior person who turns his attention to himself and molds his character. The core theme is obstruction met by patience, inward work and the seeking of help rather than reckless advance. 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.