Increase

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.

The Judgment, in paraphrase, favors having somewhere to go and even crossing the great water, for this is a time of expansion in which those above give to those below and great things become possible. The Image speaks of the superior person who, when he sees good, imitates it, and when he has faults, rids himself of them. The core theme is increase, a generous time of growth in which benefit flows downward. Moving lines transform into their opposites, generating a second hexagram that shades the reading.

Yi stands 29th 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-second 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. Translations of the Judgment above vary substantially 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 the same lines closer to a historical record, and modern scholarly translators such as Richard Rutt and Edward Shaughnessy strip away both registers in an attempt to recover the text's original Western Zhou divinatory idiom.