Punishment and Justice
Appears in ten chapters
Where the image appears
Punishment and justice names the penal imagery of the Book of Changes: stocks and cangue, mutilations of nose and ears, the lawsuit and the prison. It recurs because obstacles to social harmony do not vanish of their own accord, and the oracle must teach both the necessity of penalties and their strict limit. The theme's home is 21 Shih Ho - Biting Through, whose Judgment declares, "BITING THROUGH has success. / It is favorable to let justice be administered," and whose Image founds the law itself:
Thus the kings of former times made firm the laws
Through clearly defined penalties.
The lines of Biting Through run the whole scale of correction, from the mild first sentence, "His feet are fastened in the stocks, / So that his toes disappear. / No blame," to the incorrigible man at the top: "His neck is fastened in the wooden cangue, / So that his ears disappear. / Misfortune." But the ground rule is stated already in 04 Mêng - Youthful Folly: "Punishment is never an end in itself but serves merely to restore order."
The sequence then drifts steadily from law toward leniency. In 55 Fêng - Abundance (Fullness) the superior man "decides lawsuits / And carries out punishments," applying what Biting Through laid down; in 56 Lü - The Wanderer he is "clear-minded and cautious / In imposing penalties, / And protracts no lawsuits," for penalties should pass quickly as fire over grass, and "Prisons ought to be places where people are lodged only temporarily, as guests are." The crown of the sequence is 61 Chung Fu - Inner Truth:
Thus the superior man discusses criminal cases
In order to delay executions.
There the commentary calls "a deep understanding that knows how to pardon" the highest form of justice.
The Taoist parallel lies in this same drift from law to leniency. Tao Te Ching 57 is suspicious of multiplying laws, holding that the more prohibitions there are, the poorer the people become. The Changes does not abolish the penal code, but it bends the whole weight of the tradition toward mildness, until justice at its height looks less like the cangue and more like the pardon.