The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success in retreat and holds that in small matters perseverance still furthers, for a timely and dignified withdrawal preserves strength rather than wasting it in a losing stand. The Image speaks of the superior person who keeps inferior forces at a distance, not with anger but with reserve and dignity. The core theme is strategic retreat, yielding ground deliberately while the time is unfavorable. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Dun 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, Retreat (Dun), hexagram 33, is paired with its inversion: Great Power (Da Zhuang), hexagram 34. 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 that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East series reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.