His commentary on the Book of Changes made an argument about how to read that has organised the field ever since. There are three levels: the words, the images, and the meaning. Words exist to explain the images and images exist to hold the meaning, so once the meaning is grasped the image can be let go, exactly as a fish trap is forgotten once the fish is caught and a snare once the rabbit is taken. Anyone who keeps hold of the image has kept the trap and lost the fish.
The target was specific. The Han specialists, Jing Fang above all, had built an enormous apparatus of correspondences attaching hexagram lines to calendar periods, heavenly stems, earthly branches and directions, and Wang Bi cleared it away as machinery that had stopped serving what it was built for. The consequence is that Chinese readings of the Changes divide into two lineages, one concerned with meaning and pattern and descending from him, the other with image and number and reconstructing what he discarded, and the division still structures scholarship on the text. He argued all this and was dead at twenty three, which is among the more striking facts in the history of Chinese philosophy.
His commentary also settled the physical text. The version he wrote on became the received arrangement, with the judgement and the image placed under each hexagram rather than the appendices being kept separate at the end, and that layout is what nearly every printed edition and translation has followed since. A commentary telling its readers to discard the apparatus ended by supplying the frame through which the classic is still read.