The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, is a stern one: to undertake action brings misfortune and nothing furthers, for one enters here without proper standing, in a relationship or position that is inherently subordinate or irregular, and must proceed with great care. The Image speaks of the superior person who understands the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end. The core theme is a subordinate or unofficial relationship entered with due caution and awareness of its limits. 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.