The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, holds that the perseverance of the woman furthers, pointing to the well-run inner life of the home as the root of wider order. The Image speaks of the superior person whose words have substance and whose conduct has consistency, so that the family is regulated by example. The core theme is the family and the proper ordering of relationships, from which social order grows. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Jia Ren 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 Family (Jia Ren), hexagram 37, is paired with its inversion: Opposition (Kui), hexagram 38. 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.