咸 → 益
Hexagram 31: Influence → Hexagram 42: Increase
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 4 changing lines (lines 1, 3, 4, 6).
Line 1
初六 咸其拇。
Six at the beginning means: The influence shows itself in the big toe.
Line 3
九三 咸其股。執其隨。往吝。
Nine in the third place means: The influence shows itself in the thighs. Holds to that which follows it. To continue is humiliating.
Line 4
九四 貞吉悔亡。憧憧往來。朋從爾思。
Nine in the fourth place means: Perseverance brings good fortune. Remorse disappears. If a man is agitated in mind, And his thoughts go hither and thither, Only those friends On whom he fixes his conscious thoughts Will follow.
Line 6
上六 咸其輔頰舌。
Six at the top means: The influence shows itself in the jaws, cheeks, and tongue.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
耕石不生，棄禮無名，縫衣失針，襦袴不成。
Plowing stone, nothing grows; abandoning ritual, losing one's name. Sewing a garment, the needle is lost; jacket and trousers cannot be finished.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
A lake upon a mountain, but nothing grows and nothing holds together. Plowing stone yields no harvest — a reprise of the futile-labor motif. Abandoning propriety leaves one nameless and without standing. Sewing a garment but losing the needle means the trousers and jacket can never be completed. Each image strips away a necessary tool: the farmer's fertile soil, the scholar's ritual standing, the tailor's needle. Without these essentials, effort produces nothing. From Influence to Increase, the mountain's receptive openness transforms into wind and thunder, the dynamic of improvement through correcting faults. The verse presents the condition that demands Increase's remedy: everything has been diminished to the point of dysfunction. Only by restoring the missing fundamentals — good soil, proper ritual, the right tools — can the pattern of loss be reversed.
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