“Great progress and success”

“Great progress and success” is a recurring expression in the I Ching, signaling favorable development while the surrounding judgments specify what makes that outcome possible. Across several hexagrams, the promise is qualified by correctness and firmness, caution about movement, sincerity, or the circumstances of the situation; elsewhere, it marks good fortune following a change in political balance. The formula therefore does not function as an unconditional prediction. Its force depends on the conduct and conditions described alongside it.

Formula and Conditions

In Khien, the expression belongs to a judgment that also names what is great and originating, penetrating, advantageous, correct, and firm. The concentration of favorable terms frames progress as part of an ordered pattern, not a reward detached from right conduct. The judgment makes correctness and firmness integral to its account of auspicious development.

Kun likewise predicts “great progress and success,” but immediately warns against lightly undertaking movement in advance. It adds that appointing feudal princes will be advantageous. The wording holds promise and restraint together: favorable prospects do not remove the need to assess whether action is timely, and political appointments form part of the judgment’s practical counsel.

In Măng, progress and success follow a specifically described relation between an inexperienced seeker and a teacher. The teacher does not go in search of the young and inexperienced; the learner comes seeking instruction. A sincere first recourse to divination is answered with instruction, whereas repeated second and third inquiries become troublesome and receive no further answer. The judgment then recommends firmness and correctness. Here the favorable phrase is attached to disciplined learning: the seeker must approach sincerely, and the instructor must distinguish an honest request from an unproductive repetition.

Hsü joins brilliant success to sincerity, firmness, and the advantage of crossing the great stream. Its line judgments give that broader promise a sequence of particular circumstances: waiting at a distant border, then waiting on the sand beside a mountain stream. The second position includes the small harm of being spoken against, yet ends in good fortune. Read beside its judgment, the expression belongs to purposeful waiting and steadiness, not simply to immediate advance.

Caution, Conflict, and Changing Fortune

The judgment for Sung provides a marked contrast to the success formula. A person may be sincere in a contention and still meet opposition and obstruction. Apprehensive caution can bring good fortune, but pursuing the dispute to its bitter end brings evil; seeing the great man is advantageous, while crossing the great stream is not. These qualifications show how the book distinguishes favorable outcomes from mere persistence. Sincerity alone does not make every course of action successful, and a conflict may require limits rather than escalation.

Thâi uses the language of favorable fortune and progress in a different way: the little has gone and the great has come. Its opening line compares advancement to grass pulled up with the connected stalks and roots that come with it, and says that advance will be fortunate. The next line describes someone able to bear with the uncultivated, cross the Ho without a boat, remember the distant, and avoid selfish friendships. The image of progress thus extends beyond private gain; the judgment associates it with breadth of consideration and conduct aligned with the due Mean.

Tâ Yû gives the most compact form of the expression among these examples, indicating great progress and success under the circumstances the hexagram implies. Its first line nevertheless warns that a position may contain injury or danger even when no harm has yet been approached: recognizing the difficulty is what prevents error to the end. The second line pictures a large wagon carrying its load and says that advance in any direction will bring no error. The pair places success alongside both vigilance and the capacity to bear a substantial burden.

Political Meaning and the Work’s Historical Reading

The book’s language of progress is interpreted against a political background of disorder and failing rule. The account of the Yin polity describes a land in which rulers and people have lost their way, laws are violated, and violent offenses spread; its condition is compared to crossing a large stream without finding either a ford or a bank. A later proclamation condemns Shang’s king for contempt toward virtue, estrangement from Heaven and the people, neglect of sacrifices, and the elevation of bad advisers. These passages supply a historical and moral counter-image to auspicious development: when rule collapses into disorder, progress cannot be understood as a bare change in fortune.

The discussion of the seventh hexagram, Sze, makes that political dimension explicit through the interpretation of hosts. The title means both hosts and multitudes, since the people of a feudal kingdom could become its army when needed. The hexagram is described through the image of waters collected on earth, which the commentary connects with assembled people. In its account of military leadership, the central undivided line represents the leader of the hosts; the commentary on the fifth line then treats the destruction of plunderers and invaders as legitimate, while warning against sharing command with younger men. The final line’s distribution of office to rulers of states and chiefs of clans adds a further test of political judgment: small men should not be appointed to such positions. In this setting, success rests on rightful authority and competent leadership rather than force alone.

A separate commentary on Kwâi reads its imagery as a political struggle against a corrupt but powerful figure who sustains a failing government or dynasty. The task, as interpreted there, is to remove such a figure through force of character more than force of arms and by awakening general sympathy. The leader must denounce the criminal openly, make clear to adherents how reluctantly arms are taken up, and proceed with an awareness of the undertaking’s danger. This reading makes progress a collective and ethically constrained achievement, not simply the victor’s advance.

Text, Translation, and Transmission

The expression appears within a work that the translator describes as unusually difficult to render because of its peculiar style. His first translation, made in 1854, attempted to reproduce the Chinese concision in English and became nearly unintelligible. He came to argue that a translator should not pursue a literal word-for-word version: written characters, in his account, are symbols of ideas, and their combination represents what the writer thinks rather than simply what the writer would say. The translator’s task is therefore to apprehend and express the author’s thought accurately, adding occasional words where English needs to make implicit connections clear. The formula’s repeated appearance across judgments is especially legible when read within those differing contexts, rather than as an isolated English promise.

The translator also insists on distinguishing the ancient Text from the Appendixes. He dates the Text associated with King Wen and the Duke of Zhou many centuries earlier than the Appendixes traditionally linked with Confucius, and argues that treating the two as a single homogeneous work has obscured interpretation. In common editions, five Appendixes were broken up and printed alongside the Text; this arrangement, he says, encouraged confusion through the intermixture of ideas. The official Kangxi edition, by contrast, printed the two parts separately. His account makes editorial form part of the expression’s interpretive setting: judgments do not reach readers untouched by the ways the book has been divided and arranged.

The phrase also belongs to a long history of preservation and commentary. The I Ching escaped the Qin book burning of 213 BC because divination was among the subjects exempted from destruction. A catalogue prepared by Liu Xin near the beginning of the Common Era listed works on the book and its Appendixes from thirteen authors or schools, in 294 portions. The Kangxi imperial edition of 1715 quoted 218 scholars whose commentaries ranged from the second century BC to the seventeenth century. The translator further credits a marked-up copy of the Daily Lectures on the Yî and the imperial Kâu Yî Keh Kung with helping his work; he praises the latter’s discussions and decisions as bringing interpretation close to a science. Against this accumulated history, “Great progress and success” is not a free-standing guarantee: its meaning is repeatedly shaped by the judgments around it and by the traditions through which those judgments have been read.