Increase (Yî)

Increase (Yî), also called Addition and identified as Hexagram XLII, makes increase a test of responsibility rather than a license for private accumulation. Its governing image is a ruler or government that dispenses benefits to the people and enlarges their resources; the hexagram’s promise of successful movement, even across a great stream, is set against the final line’s warning about a powerful figure who increases himself while giving nothing to those below him.

Meaning and Political Principle

The hexagram’s judgment declares that movement is advantageous and that it is advantageous even to cross the great stream. The commentary explains this confidence through a political reading: the ruler’s proper work is to benefit the people and increase their resources. Success in undertakings, including the overcoming of great difficulties, follows from this public orientation, not from increase considered as an end in itself.

The contrast within the figure makes that qualification decisive. The fifth line, the ruler’s place, is strong, correctly positioned, and central; its proper correlate is the second line. The sixth line is also strong, but occupies a position that should be weak. Its strength becomes self-concentration: its subject seeks increase for himself and does not consider benefiting those below. The result is that others seek to assail him and the line declares misfortune. Increase therefore turns against its possessor when authority ceases to serve a wider community.

Lines and Their Circumstances

The first line supports a great movement despite the low position that might ordinarily seem to rule out major enterprise. Under the hexagram’s favorable general meaning, and because the line responds to its proper correlate in the fourth place, its subject is encouraged to act. Great success can cause the rashness of such a move to be overlooked; the line thus makes favorable consequence, rather than position alone, the measure of the undertaking.

The second line is divided but occupies the central place of the lower trigram and corresponds to the fifth line. Its subject receives ten pairs of tortoise shells whose oracles cannot be opposed, and is told to persevere in firmness and correctness. The line extends its favorable outcome from gifts and divinatory confirmation to royal sacrifice: if the king employs the virtues thus distinguished in presenting offerings to God, the offering is accepted and good fortune follows. The commentary reports a traditional interpretation in which human benefactors, the divinatory oracles, and Heaven’s acceptance form successive expressions of benefit.

The fourth line is associated with a minister positioned near the ruler. Although its subject is weak, the place is appropriate; by following the due course, the minister gains a hearing and can support the ruler in critical movements. The commentary connects the line’s reference to changing the capital with the historical frequency of capital transfers in feudal China, noting that the capital of Shang had been changed five times. This example situates the line’s political counsel in consequential state action rather than private advantage.

The fifth line provides the hexagram’s clearest image of legitimate authority. Strong, central, and in its fitting position, it is the ruler’s seat; its correspondence with the second line allows the ruler’s good qualities to operate through a capable counterpart. The commentary treats the favorable indications of the hexagram as belonging to this ruler, linking rightful position to the capacity to make increase beneficial.

Text, Interpretation, and Divination

The account of Increase belongs to a work that the translator describes as sixty-four brief, symbolically expressed essays on themes chiefly moral, social, and political, each founded on a six-line figure. In his account of the composition of the text, King Wen interprets each hexagram as a whole, indicating its significance and sometimes the appropriate action and its fortune; the Duke of Zhou then interprets the lines, beginning at the bottom, through symbolic or emblematic statements. The whole-hexagram judgment and the combined significance of its lines are meant to accord. Increase exemplifies the interpretive method: its political theme emerges not from one line in isolation but from the pattern of ruler, minister, correlate, and misdirected strength.

The translator also insists that a literal rendering cannot adequately convey the Chinese text. In his view, the written characters are symbols of ideas, and their combination expresses thought rather than simply reproducing spoken words. Translation must therefore bring the reader into contact with the author’s thought and supply, sparingly, what that thought leaves implicit; he says that such additions are generally enclosed in parentheses. This approach matters to Increase because its lines are compact, while their commentary draws out relationships of position and political application that are not self-evident from the brief wording alone.

The distinction between the text and later philosophical interpretation is equally important. The translator argues that the hexagram discussions concern changing phenomena in nature and human experience, and cautions against reading into the early text a fully developed theory of primordial matter that he associates with much later Confucian speculation. He likewise treats numerical operations in divination as aids for constructing a hexagram, not as a doctrine that numbers are the substance or first principle of things.

In the divination procedure described in the appended treatise, forty-nine stalks are manipulated three times for each line, making eighteen manipulations for a hexagram. Odd and even numbers determine strong and weak lines, with the resulting figure interpreted through King Wen’s judgments and the Duke of Zhou’s line statements. The translator distinguishes this practice from absolute foreknowledge: divination, as he understands it, asks whether contemplated plans or conditions are likely to turn out luckily or unluckily. Read in that context, Increase offers an auspicious judgment on action while making its benefit conditional on the way power and resources are directed.