Decrease

The forty-first hexagram, Sun ("Decrease"), places Gen (Mountain) above Dui (Lake). The lake at the foot of the mountain is deepened by giving up some of its own substance to enrich the heights, the image of the lower diminished to benefit the higher. It follows Deliverance in the King Wen sequence.

Sun holds a further position in the xiantian, or Earlier Heaven, arrangement, the binary ordering devised by Shao Yong in the eleventh century and traditionally ascribed to Fu Xi: fifteenth of 64, apart from its forty-first place in the King Wen sequence above. This was the Fu Xi ordering that the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet sent from Beijing in 1701 to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who recognized its broken and unbroken lines as his own binary 0 and 1.

Read from the bottom, the six lines of Decrease run yang, yang, yin, yin, yin, yang. 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 Kun over Zhen, forming hexagram 24, Return (Fu), 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. Decrease's King Wen partner is hexagram 42, Increase (Yi); 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, holds that decrease joined with sincerity brings supreme good fortune, and that even two small bowls may suffice for the sacrifice, since what is offered in truth matters more than its quantity. The Image speaks of the superior person who controls his anger and restrains his desires. The core theme is deliberate decrease and simplicity, the willing reduction of the lesser to serve the greater. Any moving line changes to its opposite, yielding a second hexagram that colors the counsel.

The core judgment behind Sun belongs to the Zhou Yi, a Western Zhou divination record that Edward Shaughnessy and other scholars now place around the late ninth century BCE, centuries before the Ten Wings commentary layered onto it added the Image and the language of the superior person quoted above. Wang Bi's influential third-century commentary, part of the received Zhouyi zhu, read the resulting text as philosophy rather than as a network of trigram correlations, a stance that shaped how it has been transmitted ever since. In the King Wen sequence, Decrease (Sun), hexagram 41, is paired with its inversion: Increase (Yi), hexagram 42. Translations of the Judgment above vary by tradition: Richard Wilhelm's 1924 German rendering, carried into English by Cary Baynes for the 1950 Bollingen edition, gives the text a mystical, aphoristic cast that shaped most twentieth-century readers' sense of the book, while James Legge's earlier and more literal 1882 translation for the Sacred Books of the East reads the same lines closer to a historical record than a philosophical one.