升 → 損
Hexagram 46: Pushing Upward → Hexagram 41: Decrease
Changing Lines
This transformation involves 3 changing lines (lines 1, 3, 6).
Line 1
初六 允升大吉。
Six at the beginning means: Pushing upward that meets with confidence Brings great good fortune.
Line 3
九三 升虛邑。
Nine in the third place means: One pushes upward into an empty city.
Line 6
上六 冥升。利于不息之貞。
Six at the top means: Pushing upward in darkness. It furthers one To be unremittingly persevering.
Trigram Changes
Yilin Verse
盲瞽獨宿，莫與共食。老窮於人，病在心腹。
The blind man lodges alone; no one shares his meal. Aged and destitute among men, his illness lies deep within.
— Jiao Yanshou, Yilin (Forest of Changes), 1st century BCE
Commentary
Wood grows within the earth, but the blind and sightless sleep alone with no one to share even a simple meal. Old, impoverished, and rejected by everyone, illness gnaws at the very heart and belly. Every human connection has been severed: no sight to find others, no companion to ease the darkness, no sustenance to maintain the body. Mountain over lake, the image of Decrease, reduces the lower to benefit the upper — but here the reduction has no beneficiary at all. From Pushing Upward to Decrease, the ascending impulse is stripped of everything that once supported it. What grew through slow accumulation is now diminished to bare, painful existence. The verse inverts the promise of patient growth: sometimes what rises is ground back down to nothing.
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