The forty-second hexagram, Yi ("Increase"), places Xun (Wind) above Zhen (Thunder). Wind and thunder reinforcing each other, each strengthening the others power, gives the image of increase. It follows Decrease in the King Wen order, its complement, and here the movement runs from the higher to the lower.
Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi, the Song Neo-Confucian synthesis most later readers encountered this Yi through, treated the Judgment above first as a divination formula and only secondarily as moral instruction, a corrective to Cheng Yi's more purely philosophical Yichuan Yizhuan. The Mawangdui silk manuscript, recovered from a sealed Han tomb in 1973 and dated before 168 BCE, preserves closely related material in a wholly different sequence, organized by paired trigrams rather than the King Wen order, evidence that the hexagram texts still circulated in more than one arrangement this late. In the King Wen sequence, Increase (Yi), hexagram 42, is paired with its inversion: Decrease (Sun), hexagram 41. Translations of the Judgment vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads it closer to a historical record.