Increase

Increase (Yî), Hexagram 42, makes increase a public obligation rather than private accumulation: its central image is a ruler or government enlarging the people’s benefits and resources. The hexagram’s promise of advantage—even for crossing a great stream—sets a broad horizon for action, while its lines test whether that action is supported by trust, proper purpose, and disciplined conduct.

Meaning and Political Aim

The hexagram’s opening judgment says that movement undertaken in its condition is advantageous, extending even to the demanding undertaking of crossing a great stream. The commentary explains the governing idea through the contrast with Decrease: King Wen’s subject was a ruler or government that dispenses benefits to the people and increases their resources. The emphasis falls on what authority gives outward, not what it gathers inward.

The figure’s political logic is also reflected in its structure. A strong line occupies the ruler’s fifth place, while a weak line stands in the corresponding second place. The commentary treats this arrangement as an indication of a ruler able to act successfully and overcome great difficulties. Increase is thus not simply a favorable condition: it joins authority to a relationship in which benefit can reach beyond the ruler’s own position.

The Lines: Enterprise, Trust, and Warning

The first line, though low in position, is encouraged to undertake a great movement. Its place might seem to disqualify its subject from a major enterprise, but the commentary points to the hexagram’s general auspiciousness and the line’s correspondence with the fourth. Great success can cause the initial boldness to be forgiven. The line makes opportunity, rather than rank alone, the basis for action.

The second line presents increase as help received from others. Its subject is given ten pairs of tortoise shells whose oracles cannot be opposed, and is urged to remain firm and correct. The commentary reads the gifts as benefits conferred by people and the favorable oracles as benefits attributed to spirits; the king’s offering to God completes the sequence, with Heaven conferring benefit from above. Material support, divinatory confirmation, and sacrifice converge, but the line’s condition remains steadfast correctness.

The sixth line turns the promise inside out. Its subject receives no contribution to his increase while many seek to attack him; he follows no regular rule in ordering his heart, and the outcome is evil. Set against the opening promise of shared benefit, this ending marks the limit of increase pursued without disciplined inward governance: accumulation alone cannot secure support, and disorder at the center exposes its subject to assault.

Divination and the Work of the Text

The commentary presents the hexagram within the I Ching’s layered composition. Its sixty-four hexagrams are the bases for short, symbolic essays on moral, social, and political themes. King Wen interprets each whole figure and indicates the likely fortune of action in the circumstances it symbolizes; the Duke of Zhou then treats the lines individually through emblems and corresponding judgments. In this account, the interpretation of the whole and the meanings of its lines are meant to work together.

The book’s divinatory form does not, in the commentator’s view, make it a device for discovering future events absolutely. Divination is described as testing whether contemplated plans and conditions are likely to turn out well or badly. The distinction matters for Increase: its favorable judgment does not promise success detached from conduct, but frames the prospects of action and the choices through which benefit may be realized.

The stated procedure uses forty-nine plant stalks, manipulated three times for each line, making eighteen manipulations for a six-line hexagram. Odd numbers produce strong, undivided lines and even numbers weak, divided ones; the emblematic numbers 9, 8, 7, and 6 help form the figure. Once it has been formed, the operator turns to King Wen’s judgment and the Duke of Zhou’s emblematic line texts. Numbers assist in producing the hexagram; the commentary rejects the idea that they function as an independent doctrine governing the substance of things.

Historical Setting and Interpretive Limits

The commentary places the I Ching’s political language against a picture of disorder under the Shang rulers: the people and officials are described as lawless, the dynasty as sinking toward ruin, and the realm as a traveler unable to find a ford or bank while crossing a great stream. It also recounts that King Wen, lord of Zhou, was imprisoned in Youli in 1143 BC after the ruler’s suspicion fell on him, and that he occupied himself with the lineal figures. The commentator imagines him using those figures to consider nature, human society, and the condition of the kingdom, turning divinatory speculation toward reasoned counsel. That reconstruction is presented as an interpretation, not as a claim established by the hexagram’s own wording.

The same caution shapes the book’s account of divination. Tortoise-shell divination is attested in early sources, and stalk divination is described as an established practice; the stalks are called spirit-like in an appendix. Yet the commentator distinguishes the appendix’s belief in their subtle virtue from his own assessment of their function, and argues that the stalks and numbers serve to generate the figures rather than to disclose every future event. Increase therefore stands at the meeting point of an inherited oracle form and a moral-political reading: its favorable signs become counsel about how authority should benefit the people, and under what conditions action can be justified.