The Judgment, in paraphrase, allows that in small matters there is good fortune, for although unity is broken and wills diverge, minor undertakings may still succeed and opposites can be made to complement one another. The Image speaks of the superior person who, amid general fellowship, retains his own individuality. The core theme is opposition and estrangement, together with the possibility that difference need not mean enmity. 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 Kui 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, Opposition (Kui), hexagram 38, is paired with its inversion: The Family (Jia Ren), hexagram 37. Translations of the Judgment above vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads the same lines closer to a historical record.