Decrease (Sun)

Decrease (Sun) is the hexagram of measured reduction: diminishing or restraining what is excessive so that it accords with right and reason. Its decisive qualification is sincerity. Reduction is not automatically virtuous, nor does it always require surrendering one’s own resources; its value depends on judgment about what should be corrected, what help is appropriate, and whether the act is genuinely directed toward the good.

Text and Principle

The hexagram’s opening judgment promises great good fortune, freedom from error, and firmness that can be maintained when the reduction is sincere. It extends the principle even to sacrifice: two baskets of grain may be offered, with nothing else, and still suffice. The smallness of the material gift does not invalidate it; sincerity gives the act its worth.

The commentary distinguishes this reading from an older, narrower interpretation that treats Decrease as taxation: subjects surrendering part of what they have to support their ruler or government. Such a political application may have been present to the hexagram’s traditional authors, but the commentary argues that the symbolism reaches further. It includes every reduction or restraint of excess undertaken to bring conduct into line with right and reason. The relevant question is therefore not simply what is taken away, but whether the diminution corrects an imbalance.

Giving, Restraint, and Judgment

The first line pictures someone interrupting his own affairs and hurrying to help the person associated with the fourth line. He does not err by offering assistance, but must consider how much of his own resources he should contribute. The image makes generosity a matter of proportion: readiness to help is valuable, yet it does not remove the need to judge the limits of the gift.

The second line gives a different counsel. Its subject is to maintain firm correctness rather than act to assist his correlate in the fifth position; holding his own place is presented as the better way to help. The commentary explains that this line is strong and central, though it occupies a position assigned to a weak line. Its subject should therefore remain steady instead of moving outward to offer support. Together, the first and second lines reject a single rule for giving: one situation calls for aid carefully measured against one’s own affairs, while another is best served by remaining in place.

At the upper end of the hexagram, the text describes someone who increases others without diminishing himself. If he maintains firm correctness, his actions bring good fortune and advantage; he will find ministers too numerous to be counted by their clans. This ending widens the hexagram’s concern beyond subtraction itself. Proper reduction and restraint can contribute to relationships in which others are strengthened without requiring the benefactor to impoverish himself.

Interpretation and Context

The commentary reads the hexagram through both its whole and its individual lines. Its account of the text’s interpretive method emphasizes that the meaning of a line depends on the hexagram’s name and subject, as well as on the line’s position and relation to its correlate. A line cannot be treated as a free-standing maxim: the same structural features take on different applications in different hexagrams.

This method also helps explain why the commentary resists reducing Decrease to one fixed policy, such as taxation. The opening judgment, the contrasting instructions about assistance, and the final image of increasing others without taking from oneself make the hexagram a study in discerning what should be diminished and what should be sustained. Its ethical force lies in the relation between restraint and purpose: reduction is beneficial when sincere judgment brings what is excessive into accord with right, not merely because something has been given up.