The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, allows success in small matters and holds that perseverance brings good fortune to the wanderer, for a stranger in unfamiliar places must be reserved, correct and modest to fare well. The Image speaks of the superior person who is clear-minded and cautious in imposing penalties and does not protract lawsuits. The core theme is the condition of the traveler or outsider, transience met with caution and propriety. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind this Lu 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 Wanderer (Lu), hexagram 56, is paired with its inversion: Abundance (Feng), hexagram 55. 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.