The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success but notes dense clouds gathering from the west that bring no rain yet, the sign of forces accumulating before they can be released. The Image counsels refining ones outward conduct and cultural graces while the greater work waits. The core theme is gentle, gradual restraint and the patient buildup of small influences. Any line received as a moving line changes to its opposite and yields a second hexagram that shades 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. In the King Wen sequence, Small Taming (Xiao Xu), hexagram 9, is paired with its inversion: Treading (Lu), hexagram 10. 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.