The Judgment, in paraphrase, allows success in small matters, favors having somewhere to go and favors seeking a great person, for gentle influence, repeated and unremitting like the wind, accomplishes what force cannot. The Image speaks of the superior person who spreads his commands abroad and carries out his undertakings, working by steady, penetrating persuasion. The core theme is gentle, penetrating influence that works gradually and from within. 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 this doubled Xun 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, The Gentle (Xun), hexagram 57, is paired with its inversion: The Joyous (Dui), hexagram 58. 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.