The lake at the mountain's foot giving up its vapor to nourish the height: Sǔn is decrease — deliberate reduction, simplicity chosen, less below so that something higher may increase.
Its dignity is total: decrease joined with sincerity brings supreme good fortune, and two small bowls suffice for the offering. Anger curbed, appetites restrained, pretense dropped — what this hexagram takes away was weight, not wealth. Poverty of display, richness of substance.
問Sǔn counsels simplification in love: fewer demands, fewer accessories to the bond, more of its plain substance. Its arithmetic is honest — when three walk together, one departs; intimacy is a economy of two, and something (an old habit, an outside claim, a cherished grievance) may need decreasing for the bond to increase. Sincerity makes even the modest offering enough.
Professionally, Sǔn is the discipline of the lean season: cutting scope, trimming costs, decreasing the lower to sustain the higher priorities. Done with candor, it builds rather than demoralizes — people forgive small bowls when the sincerity is visible. Its personal ethic: decrease your faults quickly; that reduction, the fourth line notes, makes others hasten toward you.
Inwardly, Sǔn is the subtractive path: curbing anger, restraining appetite, removing what obscures rather than adding what impresses. Each honest decrease uncovers something that was always underneath. Its promise is the paradox all contemplatives report — the one who decreases sincerely ends the sequence increased from every side.
A line speaks only when it is a changing line in your own casting.