Pushing Upward

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.

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.