Decrease, Line 1

The first line of Decrease (King Wen 41) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as leaving off one's own business and hastening to help another, judging for himself how far to go without doing himself injury. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns sincerity in one who practices decrease brings great good fortune, freedom from error, firmness and correctness maintained, advantage in every movement, and even in the use of two small dishes for sacrifice, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the lowest place of the lower trigram Dui, lake in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Gen, mountain in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads a marsh beneath a mountain; the superior man restrains his wrath and represses his desires, and the first line takes its place inside that combined picture of Dui below and Gen above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Dui is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, Leaving Off One's Own Business and Hastening, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

As a divinatory line, nine at the first place of Decrease reads within the hexagram's overall concern with sincerity in one who practices decrease brings great good fortune, freedom from error, firmness and correctness maintained, advantage in every movement, and even in the use of two small dishes for sacrifice. The line occupies a place proper to its own nature in the classical doctrine that odd places favour a firm, yang line and even places favour a yielding, yin line. Its own text, that leaving off one's own business and hastening to help another, judging for himself how far to go without doing himself injury, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The first line corresponds by classical convention with the fourth line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Dui in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the opening of the situation, before the trigram above it has any part in the reading, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yang to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the first line of Decrease turns Dui into Kan while the other trigram, Gen, stays as it is, which yields Decrease's changing partner, Youthful Folly (King Wen 4), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.