Wang Bi and the meaning school: forget the image, keep the meaning

Wang Bi (王弼, 226–249) wrote the commentary that turned the I Ching from a web of symbolic correspondences into a book about situations and how to act in them. His slogan, "once you have the meaning, forget the image" (得意而忘象), launched what later scholars called the meaning-and-principle school (義理派). Through the Song-dynasty commentary of Cheng Yi, which built on it, his approach still shapes most modern readings, including Wilhelm's.

Before Wang Bi: the Han image-and-number school

Han-dynasty scholars such as Meng Xi, Jing Fang and Yu Fan treated the Changes as a precise model of the cosmos. To explain why a line text mentions a horse, an ox or a carriage, they searched the hexagram for a trigram that could stand for that thing, using nuclear trigrams, hexagrams "changed from" others, calendrical correspondences and elaborate rules of transformation. This is the image-and-number (象數) approach. Some of its tools, like the twelve sovereign hexagrams and Jing Fang's eight palaces, are still used today.

By the third century the method had grown so complicated that almost any image could be "found" in almost any hexagram. Wang Bi, a brilliant young scholar of the Wei dynasty who also wrote a famous commentary on the Laozi, thought this missed the point.

"Forget the image once you have the meaning"

In a short essay, the Clarifying the Images (明象) chapter of his Outline of the Zhouyi (周易略例), Wang Bi set out a three-step chain: words exist to clarify images, and images exist to hold meaning. His formulation is:

言者所以明象，得象而忘言；象者所以存意，得意而忘象。

"Words are the means of clarifying the image; once you have the image, forget the words. The image is the means of holding the meaning; once you have the meaning, forget the image." The wording deliberately echoes the Zhuangzi, where the fish trap is forgotten once the fish is caught.

He then turned this on the Han method directly: "If the meaning lies in strength, why must it be a horse? If the category lies in compliance, why must it be an ox?" (義苟在健，何必馬乎？類苟在順，何必牛乎？). The horse in a line text matters because it expresses the strength of Qian; the ox because it expresses the yielding of Kun. Once you see the quality, you do not need to hunt for a hidden trigram to justify the animal.

Notice what he is not saying. He does not tell you to ignore images. He tells you that images serve meaning, and that a reading which piles up symbols without arriving at a meaning has failed.

Hexagram as time, line as movement

Wang Bi replaced cosmic machinery with a simple, powerful frame: "A hexagram is a time; a line is the change that fits the time" (夫卦者，時也；爻者，適時之變者也). Each hexagram describes a type of situation, and each line describes one position within it and how to move there. Several of his principles became standard tools for reading lines:

• Position. Odd places (first, third, fifth) suit yang lines; even places (second, fourth, sixth) suit yin lines. A line in its proper place is "correct". Wang Bi added a twist: the first and top lines have no fixed yin or yang position, because they mark the beginning and end of the situation rather than a rank within it. See correct place and central lines.
• Centrality. The second and fifth lines, at the centre of the lower and upper trigrams, tend toward balance and good fortune.
• Correspondence. Lines one and four, two and five, three and six "respond" to each other when one is yin and the other yang. Wang Bi read such relationships as alliances or tensions within the situation. See line correspondence and holding together.
• The ruling line. "The many cannot govern the many; what governs the many is the most solitary" (夫眾不能治眾，治眾者，至寡者也). In many hexagrams one line, often the only yin or only yang line, sets the meaning of the whole. This idea is behind the ruler of the hexagram.

Wang Bi's legacy

Wang Bi commented on the classic and on the Tuan, Image and Wenyan commentaries; Han Kangbo (韓康伯) later added notes on the remaining Wings in the same spirit. In the Tang dynasty, Kong Yingda's official Correct Meaning of the Zhouyi (周易正義) adopted the Wang–Han commentary as its base. From then on, Wang Bi's was the standard reading, and most of the Han commentaries survived only as quotations, many preserved in Li Dingzuo's (李鼎祚) Tang anthology.

Not everyone approved. Critics, especially Qing-dynasty scholars who revived Han learning, accused Wang Bi of reading Daoist metaphysics into a Confucian classic and of throwing away genuine ancient methods. The debate between images and meaning has never been fully settled; see image and number versus meaning and principle.

Cheng Yi carries the meaning school forward

In the Northern Song, Cheng Yi (程頤, 1033–1107) wrote the Cheng Commentary on the Changes (程氏易傳), the great work of the meaning school. He kept Wang Bi's focus on situations and line relationships but replaced Wang Bi's Daoist colouring with Confucian ethics: each hexagram becomes a lesson in self-cultivation, family life and government.

The preface sums up his view in a famous phrase: what is most subtle is principle, what is most evident is image, and "substance and function come from one source; the manifest and the subtle have no gap between them" (體用一源，顯微無間). Image and meaning are not rivals; the image is principle made visible.

Cheng Yi's commentary became, with Zhu Xi's, the examination standard. Zhu Xi admired it but thought it underplayed the book's original use in divination; see Zhu Xi and the Zhouyi Benyi. Wilhelm, working from the Qing compendium that contained both, absorbed much of Cheng Yi's moral reading.

Reading a cast in Wang Bi's spirit

• Ask what time this is. Before reading the lines, put the hexagram into one sentence: what kind of situation is this? A time of waiting? Of retreat?
• Locate yourself. Your changing line is your position in that time. Is it correct, central, answered by another line? Use these as clues, not as a scoring system.
• Find the governing line. If one line clearly dominates the hexagram, its text often explains the whole.
• Let images point beyond themselves. When a line mentions a fox, a well or a cart, ask what quality it shows, and how that quality appears in your situation. Then, as Wang Bi says, keep the meaning and let the image go.

The changing lines guide explains which line to read; this approach helps you understand what it is saying. When you're ready, cast a reading and try it.