The Superior Man

The superior man (Chinese chün-tzu, "son of the ruler," the noble or realized person) is the recurring human ideal of the Book of Changes. He appears above all in the THE IMAGE of each hexagram, where the disposition of the trigrams is turned into a rule of conduct. He is not a man of rank but a man of character: one who reads the tendency of the time and shapes himself to it.

Wilhelm sets the pattern in the first hexagram, THE CREATIVE:

The movement of heaven is full of power.
Thus the superior man makes himself strong and untiring.

The commentary draws out the discipline this implies:

With this image as a model, the sage learns how best to develop himself so that his influence may endure. He must make himself strong in every way, by consciously casting out all that is inferior and degrading.

Where the Receptive is the model, the same figure learns breadth instead of force: "the superior man who has breadth of character carries the outer world." The superior man is therefore the hinge between the cosmic images and everyday ethics — the reader for whom the oracle's counsel is written.