The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, is a warning: it does not favor setting out anywhere, for this is a time when inferior forces are undermining the good and one can only wait and hold still. The Image speaks of those above securing their position by generosity toward those below, since the house stands only on a firm base. The core theme is deterioration and the wisdom of patience when circumstances are adverse. 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 Bo 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, Splitting Apart (Bo), hexagram 23, is paired with its inversion: Return (Fu), hexagram 24. 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.