The Judgment, in paraphrase, holds that one may tread on the tail of the tiger and it does not bite, for correct and courteous conduct carries one safely through danger, and there is success. The Image distinguishes high and low and settles the aims of the people, an ordering of proper stations. The core theme is right conduct and careful advance through peril. Lines received as moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that adjusts the reading.
The Judgment and Image paraphrased above draw on two of the Ten Wings, commentarial texts appended to the Yijing and traditionally credited to Confucius, though the attribution was already doubted within the Chinese tradition by the eleventh century and modern scholarship instead dates their composition to roughly the fourth to second century BCE, well after the Zhou Yi core itself. Wang Bi's third-century commentary read passages like this one from Lu philosophically, playing down the trigram image-correlations earlier commentators relied on, while Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi pushed back the other way, insisting the book remain readable as the divination manual it began as. In the King Wen sequence, Treading (Lu), hexagram 10, is paired with its inversion, the figure formed by turning it upside down: Small Taming (Xiao Xu), hexagram 9. 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 series reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.