Deliverance

Deliverance, or Hexagram 40, describes the moment after obstruction has been removed and makes the restoration of order, rather than victory alone, the test of what follows. Its central counsel is conditional: when no further operations are necessary, return to established conditions; when they are, conduct them promptly. The commentary applies that distinction to a kingdom emerging from conquest, where governing well means knowing both when to act and when to stop.

Meaning and Political Counsel

The hexagram’s opening judgment locates advantage in the southwest and promises good fortune in returning to the old conditions if no further operations are called for. If more operations are required, good fortune lies in conducting them early. The two alternatives are not competing slogans: they turn on whether the work of subjugation is complete. Once it is, restraint and restoration serve the kingdom better than continuing action for its own sake.

The commentary explains the name through the image of loosening a knot or unravelling a complication. Deliverance is the improved condition in which the obstruction indicated by the preceding hexagram has been removed. The question is consequently how to handle the new state, not merely how to reach it. If active operations are unnecessary to complete the country’s subjugation, the sooner affairs return to their old channels, the better.

That return carries a specific political warning. The new masters should not be anxious to change all the old manners and ways of the people they have conquered. The commentary points to the Duke of Zhou’s treatment of the subjugated people of Shang as its example. Conversely, if further operations remain necessary, they should be carried through without delay. The judgment thus connects political legitimacy to discernment: neither needless intervention nor avoidable delay is presented as good governance.

Lines and Images

The line statements give the broad counsel a series of particular images. The first, a divided line, says its subject will commit no error. The second, undivided, depicts a hunter catching three foxes and obtaining yellow, or golden, arrows; with firm correctness, the outcome is fortunate. These details turn the hexagram’s account of release into scenes of action and successful recovery, while the accompanying qualification makes correctness part of the favorable result.

At the other end of the figure, the sixth line shows a feudal prince shooting with his bow at a falcon on top of a high wall and hitting it. The effect is advantageous in every way. The image gives the prince a precise target and a successful shot, in contrast to the opening line’s assurance that no error will be committed. Together, the line readings place effective action within a larger pattern: action can be beneficial, but the judgment’s political rule still depends on whether more operations are actually called for.

The commentary also notes that the judgment itself says nothing about discountenancing and removing small men, meaning unworthy ministers or officers; that subject appears in more than one line. It adds that the first place contains a weak line where a strong one would be expected, compensated for by its strong correlate in the fourth place. The reading therefore attends not only to the political images but also to the figure’s internal line relations as grounds for interpretation.

Textual Layers and Interpretation

The translator’s account distinguishes the older Text from the Appendixes traditionally associated with Confucius. He traces the Text to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, while emphasizing that the Appendixes are much later. Even if they were Confucius’s work, they could not have begun before 483 BC: the portion attributed to King Wen preceded them by 660 years, and that attributed to the Duke of Zhou by nearly 630. The translator argues that centuries of changing interpretation make it misleading to treat the two portions as a single work in the proper sense.

He identifies the blending of Text and Appendixes, begun by Pi Chi of the first Han dynasty, as a major obstacle to understanding. In common editions, five Appendixes, by the customary reckoning, were broken up and printed beside the Text. The resulting intermixture of ideas made it difficult for foreign students to grasp the meaning. The Kangxi edition instead printed the two portions separately, although the translator says that native critics had rarely questioned whether they formed a homogeneous whole or whether every Appendix came from Confucius.

The translator does not dismiss the commentarial tradition. He credits native commentaries with high value and says they had already accomplished much to elucidate the Text. He also describes the Kangxi imperial edition, first published in 1715, as drawing on the discussions and decisions of its editors, which helped raise interpretation toward a science. His own preparation used that edition as well as a second-hand copy of the Daily Lectures on the Yi, whose previous owner’s punctuation, interlineations, and marginal notes recorded a sustained effort to work through difficult passages.

Preservation and Historical Reception

The work’s survival and later study form part of the background to the translator’s account. In 213 BC, when Li Si advised the ruler to consign old books to the flames, books on medicine, divination, and husbandry were excepted. Because the I Ching was treated as a divination book, it escaped the destruction that devastated much of China’s ancient literature.

A catalogue of the imperial library prepared by Liu Xin near the beginning of the Common Era listed works on the I Ching and its Appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, comprising 294 portions of varying size. The later Kangxi edition quoted 218 scholars, covering a span from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. The translator presents these figures as evidence of an extensive, continuing effort to interpret the book, not as proof that its meaning was beyond recovery. Against the claim that generations of scholars had reached only the conclusion that its significance could no longer be found, he stresses the value of their commentaries and their contribution to elucidating the Text.