Small Preponderance

The sixty-second hexagram, Xiao Guo ("Preponderance of the Small"), places Zhen (Thunder) above Gen (Mountain). Thunder on the mountain, its sound magnified but its reach modest, gives the image of small things slightly exceeding, a time when minor matters preponderate. It follows Inner Truth in the King Wen sequence.

In the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary order devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi, Xiao Guo stands 52nd of 64, apart from its place near the very end of the King Wen sequence traced above; 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 Small Preponderance run yin, yin, yang, yang, 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 Dui over Xun, forming hexagram 28, Great Preponderance (Da Guo), 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. Small Preponderance's King Wen partner is hexagram 61, Inner Truth (Zhong Fu); 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 success and rewards perseverance, permits small undertakings but not great ones, and offers the image of a flying bird that leaves a message: it should not strive upward but rather stay below, where there is great good fortune. The Image speaks of the superior person who gives preponderance to reverence in conduct, to grief in mourning and to thrift in spending, that is, to modest excess in fitting things. The core theme is a time of small exceeding, when careful attention to modest matters, not grand ambition, is right. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

Tradition assigns the hexagram statement to King Wen of Zhou, the line statements to the Duke of Zhou and the Ten Wings commentary to Confucius; modern scholarship accepts none of the three attributions, treating the core instead as an anonymous Western Zhou compilation later overlaid, from the fourth to second century BCE, by the Ten Wings that supply the Image and the language of the superior person used above. Between them stand two further layers of reading, Wang Bi's third-century philosophical commentary and Zhu Xi's twelfth-century Zhouyi Benyi; the one played down the trigram image-correlations, the other reasserted the text's identity as a divination manual.