The Judgment, the Image, and the Changing Lines

The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises supreme success and favors even crossing the great water, provided one attends carefully to what came before the task and what must follow it, for corruption inherited from the past can be reversed by patient effort. The Image speaks of stirring up the people and strengthening their spirit. The core theme is the repair of decay and the setting right of what has been neglected. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Gu 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, Work on the Decayed (Gu), hexagram 18, is paired with its inversion: Following (Sui), hexagram 17. 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.