Progress

Progress, Hexagram 35, presents advancement not as sudden elevation but as earned recognition: a feudal prince secures the people’s tranquillity, receives the king’s favour, and is granted three audiences in a single day. Its line texts complicate that rise with delays, sorrow, and the risk of coercion, making constancy and measured conduct essential to success. The commentary identifies the image with the sun advancing toward full daylight, while its account of the I Ching’s history shows how later editorial choices also shaped what readers could recognize in the text.

Advancement and Royal Recognition

The hexagram’s central political image is a prince whose services to the country have made him acceptable to his king. His achievement is not described in the abstract: he secures the people’s tranquillity, receives numerous horses as a royal gift, and is admitted to interviews with the king three times in one day. Advancement is therefore both a public consequence of service and a visible sign that the sovereign has acknowledged it. The commentary links the name Progress with movement toward greater light, likening it to the sun shining more and more toward the perfect day. That image gives the prince’s rise a gradual shape. Recognition may increase, but the lines show that progress is neither effortless nor immediately secure.

The Uneven Course of Progress

The first line depicts someone wishing to advance but being held back. The prescribed response is firmness and correctness; if trust is withheld, the person is to maintain a large and generous mind rather than answer obstruction with resentment. The commentary reads this as a small, obstructed beginning: the line is weak in the lowest place, and its correspondence with the fourth line offers no ready support. Noble conduct, rather than immediate belief from the king, is what carries the subject toward good fortune. The second line makes the delay more inward: its subject appears to advance while remaining sorrowful. The line promises good fortune through firmness and correctness and speaks of receiving a great blessing from a grandmother. The commentary explains that the wording literally means “the king’s mother,” an established appellation that can mean grandmother; it also records that earlier interpreters proposed historical women as possible referents. The blessing thus belongs to the imagery of the line, while the commentary distinguishes its conventional kinship meaning from attempts to identify a specific person. At the other end of the sequence, the topmost line shows advancement expressed through horns used to punish rebels in the subject’s own city. The position is perilous, and even firmness and correctness cannot prevent every occasion for regret. The movement from obstructed beginnings to authority over a city is not an uncomplicated ascent: the final image warns that the means used to consolidate order can make advancement dangerous.

The Text’s Earlier Political World

The commentary situates the I Ching’s political concerns against its account of disorder under the Yin or Shang dynasty. A description attributed to a brother of the reigning king portrays law and social trust as eroded: nobles and officers violate the laws, crimes go unpunished, and people commit violent outrages against one another. The account compares the dynasty’s condition to a person crossing a great stream with neither ford nor bank, an image of peril without a secure passage. A declaration delivered when the son of King Wen took the field against the Shang ruler presents a parallel indictment of government. It accuses the king of contempt for virtue, alienation from Heaven and the people, rewarding bad advisers, neglecting laws and sacrifices, and driving away those responsible for instruction and guardianship. Against that political background, Progress’s prince is defined by the opposite result: tranquillity among the people earns recognition from the ruler. The commentary does not identify the hexagram as a direct account of a particular historical episode, but its political interpretation makes good government and public order the measure of legitimate advancement.

Preservation and Interpretation

The history of the I Ching also illustrates how the conditions of transmission affect interpretation. In 213 BC, the book escaped Qin’s destruction of many ancient works because the decree exempted books concerned with medicine, divination, and agriculture; the I Ching was preserved as a book of divination. A catalogue prepared by Liu Xin near the beginning of the common era listed works on the I Ching and its appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, arranged in 294 portions. The imperial edition published in 1715 quoted 218 scholars, spanning from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. The commentary insists on distinguishing the older Text from the Appendixes associated with Confucius. It dates the Text to King Wen and the Duke of Zhou, while observing that even if Confucius composed the Appendixes, he could not have begun them before 483 BC—centuries later than the Text. It consequently rejects treating the two portions as a single homogeneous work. The blending of five Appendixes into the Text in common editions, a practice traced to Pi Ji of the early Han dynasty, made their different ideas harder for readers to distinguish; the Kangxi edition printed them separately. This editorial history bears directly on how a hexagram such as Progress can be read: its political image belongs to an older text, while later interpretive materials and arrangements influence the explanations readers inherit. The commentary acknowledges the value of native scholarship and the long accumulation of interpretation, but argues that separating the Text from the Appendixes is necessary to see their different historical layers clearly.