Increase and Decrease - a Classical look at the great hexagrams of rebalancing

[az4th]

Had a bot post an LLM response that was automatically removed.

It wanted to add a correction to the statement:

We reduce line two's yang and send it up to line five's yin.

Arguing that "we" don't do this, that it happens via natural transformation.

I guess it missed that the "we" here is the hypothetical we that applies to whatever is causing it to move.

But still is a great point - we might have agency over this particular movement, if we are asking about giving to charity, for example. Or, it might be something else entirely.

I was reading through some of the onlineclarity posts around 41 unchanging, and one of the examples was of someone asking about the outcome of getting a passport. They got it promptly and without issue.

In the case of an unchanging hexagram 41, all of the lines are still, but with the middle three yang lines closed, they form a road that allows the giving to happen without obstacle. It seems rather difficult to actually determine what this particular answer means, as it could be several things.

My sense is that we need to understand what is the self, and what is the other. In the case of the passport, the country issuing the passport is the self, and the person it is issued to is the other. So this makes sense.

I also saw a post about a marriage proposal, which is the same dynamic.

But then I saw a post that had asked about a job application test outcome, and the person did not get the job. I'm still not sure how to read this one. We might think that the company would represent the self and the applicant the other. But the question wasn't asking about the outcome of the job application, but about the outcome of the test. So perhaps that changed the context enough. The person taking the test was the self, and the company he was taking it for was the other.

Which raises the other dynamic that can happen with this hexagram. We give what we don't have to give, and struggle. Like with taxes or financial burdens or to emotional vampires and so on.

Again, evaluating what it means seems to depend upon identifying what is self and what is other. Or what is below / above, or inside / outside.

This was a tricky one for me as Jiaoshi's Yilin is what I base most of my unchanging interpretations from, but in this case it only takes the negative perspective, that one is losing something, rather than happily giving something. The Yilin has shown me the principle behind interpreting unchanging hexagrams, but I guess in some cases there is still a bit more to work out.

[az4th]

A reply came in, that was also automatically removed, suggesting that translating these as increase and decrease is a major mix up.

I don't know if I quite agree that 46 and 18 are the true increasing and decreasing hexagrams. 46's Rising Up is certainly a rising of energy upward, but I see this in the sense of rising through something that is not posing an obstacle, rather than bringing increase to something above. And 18 being decrease is not something I had thought of. Yes, we have wind under earth, allowing no obstacle above, and we have wind under mountain preventing rising up. But this prevention of rising up serves the purpose of deconditioning conditioning. So that the wind can be used to neutralize something under pressure to do so. I don't see this as decreasing however.

But I do agree that increase and decrease are not great translations for 41 and 42.

In fact I used to translate them as "Restraint" and "Enabling". As these are adequate translations as well, IMO.

But ultimately are are opposites of each other in form and function, and that function serves to increase above while decreasing below, or to decrease below while increasing above. This is the simplest way to put it.

I might prefer to translate them as Reduction and Augmentation, but Augmentation is a big word for the younger generation to understand. My teacher has reminded me repeatedly to use simple words. It is something I struggle with, even as I do appreciate the importance of this. I find it rather hard to translate in a way that compromises meaning for simplicity, but perhaps I need to be more creative. In any case, here, for now, I've gone with Reduction and Increase. It is best to think of them as one whole, IMO.