The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, holds that an army requires perseverance and a seasoned, disciplined leader; under such leadership there is good fortune and no blame. The Image likens the superior person to one who, like the earth holding water, nourishes the people and gathers a following. The core theme is disciplined collective effort under legitimate command. Lines received as moving lines change into their opposites and generate a second, related hexagram that modifies the counsel.

The core judgment behind Shi 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, The Army (Shi), hexagram 7, is paired with its inversion: Holding Together (Bi), hexagram 8. 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 reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.