The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises success and rewards perseverance, for joy that is inward and sincere, then shared, strengthens people and disposes them to willing effort even in hardship. The Image speaks of the superior person who joins with friends for discussion and practice, since learning shared in good company is doubly fruitful. The core theme is joy and open encouragement, gladness that is genuine rather than merely indulgent. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors 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.