The Judgment, in paraphrase, promises supreme success, counsels seeking a great person without fear, and finds good fortune in setting out toward the south, that is, toward light and warmth, for advancement now comes through steady, patient steps rather than sudden leaps. The Image speaks of the superior person who, following his nature, piles up small things to achieve the high and great. The core theme is ascent by gradual accumulation, growth like that of a plant. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.
The core judgment behind Sheng belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, Pushing Upward (Sheng), hexagram 46, is paired with its inversion: Gathering Together (Cui), hexagram 45. Translations of the Judgment above 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, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads the same lines closer to a historical record.