Increase, Line 2

The second line of Increase (King Wen 42) is drawn as yin, the numeral six in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as parties add to his stores ten pairs of tortoise shells whose oracles cannot be opposed, good fortune if he perseveres in what is firm and correct, and the king even employs him in presenting offerings to God. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns advantage in every movement undertaken, even advantage in crossing the great stream, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the middle place of the lower trigram Zhen, thunder in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the upper trigram of the hexagram is Xun, wind in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wind and thunder together; the superior man, seeing what is good, moves toward it, and seeing his errors, turns away from them, and the second line takes its place inside that combined picture of Zhen below and Xun above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Zhen is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Parties Add to His Stores Ten Pairs, 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, six at the second place of Increase reads within the hexagram's overall concern with advantage in every movement undertaken, even advantage in crossing the great stream. 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. It is also one of the two central lines of the hexagram, the place classical reading treats as the most balanced regardless of the line's own character. Its own text, that parties add to his stores ten pairs of tortoise shells whose oracles cannot be opposed, good fortune if he perseveres in what is firm and correct, and the king even employs him in presenting offerings to God, is the particular fortune assigned to this one stage of the situation, not to the hexagram as a whole.

The second line corresponds by classical convention with the fifth line, and the two correspond here, since one line is yin and the other yang. Read together with the trigram it belongs to, Zhen in the lower position of the figure, the line marks the situation settling into its own character, still wholly inside the lower trigram, one stage in the six stage movement the hexagram traces from its first line to its last.

A change at this line, from yin to its opposite, is the mechanism the tradition uses to move from one hexagram to another. Flipping the second line of Increase turns Zhen into Dui while the other trigram, Xun, stays as it is, which yields Increase's changing partner, Inner Truth (King Wen 61), the hexagram this line is recorded as transforming into.