The forty-sixth hexagram, Sheng ("Pushing Upward"), places Kun (Earth) above Xun (Wind, here Wood). Wood growing upward through the earth, rising steadily toward the light, gives the image of gradual, effortful ascent. It follows Gathering Together in the King Wen sequence.
Sheng stands 40th of 64 in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and ascribed to Fu Xi, distinct from its forty-sixth place in the King Wen sequence traced above. This was the arrangement Joachim Bouvet, a Jesuit in Beijing, sent to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1701, letting Leibniz read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.
Read from the bottom, the six lines of Pushing Upward run yin, yang, yang, yin, yin, yin. A later interpretive layer absent from the original Zhou Yi, the nuclear hexagram (hu gua), treats lines two through four as a lower trigram and lines three through five as an upper one; here they combine as Zhen over Dui, forming hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden (Gui Mei), a hidden figure first associated with the Han-dynasty scholar Jing Fang, whose Yijing commentary of the first century BCE is credited with the earliest appearance of nuclear trigrams. Pushing Upward's King Wen partner is hexagram 45, Gathering Together (Cui); most of the sixty-four pair this way, related by turning the whole figure upside down, while the eight hexagrams built from a single doubled trigram pair instead by inverting every line. Mawangdui (1973) orders hexagrams by trigram, not King Wen; names here follow Wilhelm and Baynes, 1950, not Legge, 1882.