The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success and rewards perseverance, permits small undertakings but not great ones, and offers the image of a flying bird that leaves a message: it should not strive upward but rather stay below, where there is great good fortune. The Image speaks of the superior person who gives preponderance to reverence in conduct, to grief in mourning and to thrift in spending, that is, to modest excess in fitting things. The core theme is a time of small exceeding, when careful attention to modest matters, not grand ambition, is right. 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.