The forty-third hexagram, Guai ("Breakthrough" or Resolution), places Dui (Lake) above Qian (Heaven). Five strong lines press upward against a single weak line at the top, like water risen to the sky and about to burst, the image of a decisive breakthrough. It follows Increase in the King Wen sequence.
Tradition assigns the hexagram statement to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius; modern scholarship accepts none of the three attributions, treating the core instead as an anonymous Western Zhou compilation later overlaid, from the fourth to second century BCE, by the Ten Wings that supply the Image and the language of the superior person used above. Between them stand two further layers of reading, Wang Bi's third-century philosophical commentary and Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi; the one played down the trigram image-correlations, the other reasserted the text's identity as a divination manual. In the King Wen sequence, Breakthrough (Guai), hexagram 43, is paired with its inversion: Coming to Meet (Gou), hexagram 44. Translations of the Judgment 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 it closer to a historical record.