The fifty-third hexagram, Jian ("Development" or Gradual Progress), places Xun (Wind, here Wood) above Gen (Mountain). A tree growing slowly on the mountain, advancing by stages, gives the image of orderly, gradual development. It stands fifty-third in the King Wen sequence and is often paired with the following hexagram.
In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, this Jian stands 53rd of 64, the same number it happens to carry in the King Wen sequence traced above, though the two orderings are built on entirely different principles; it was this arrangement the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who read its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.
Read from the bottom, the six lines of Development run yin, yin, yang, yin, yang, yang. 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 Li over Kan, forming hexagram 64, Before Completion (Wei Ji), 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. Development's King Wen partner is hexagram 54, The Marrying Maiden (Gui Mei); 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.