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Hexagram 42 · Yì

Increase

益 · yì
A time of gain; extend benefit to others.
Xùn · Wind
above
Zhèn · Thunder
below

Core Meaning

The Judgment: Increase: it rewards one to undertake something. It rewards one to cross the great water.
The Image: Wind and thunder strengthen each other. So the wise person, seeing good, imitates it at once; finding a fault, casts it off.

Wind and thunder strengthening each other: Yì is increase — the expansive season, when what is above pours benefit downward and every undertaking finds a tailwind.

Its ethics of abundance are active: use the time — cross the great water, accomplish great deeds. And conduct the increase as the Image directs: seeing good, imitate it at once; finding faults, drop them. Gain hoarded curdles; the final line's isolated hoarder ends struck from all sides.

Increase in Your Question

Love & Relationships

Yì is generosity's hexagram in love: a season when giving multiplies rather than depletes, when benefit extended returns enlarged. Deepen boldly now — the crossing is favored. Its one warning is the last line's: a heart that takes without increasing anyone attracts blows. Keep the wind and thunder mutual, each strengthening the other.

Career & Money

Professionally, Yì is the growth window: resources flowing, leadership disposed to invest downward, the moment for the ambitious project. Move on it — great deeds are explicitly furthered. Sustain it by the hexagram's method: rapid imitation of what works, rapid dropping of what doesn't, and gains shared visibly enough that the increase recruits its own allies.

Personal Growth

Inwardly, Yì is the growth mindset this book proposed three millennia early: see good, copy it immediately; see your fault, discard it without ceremony. Even misfortune, its third line says, enriches the sincere. The kind heart that asks no acknowledgment — line five — is the increase that needs no season and fears no reversal.

The Six Lines

A line speaks only when it is a changing line in your own casting.

Line 1
The time of increase empowers great deeds. Supreme good fortune; selfless work carries no blame.
Line 2
Someone increases him beyond all resistance; no oracle could speak against it. Lasting steadfastness brings good fortune — favor visible even to the highest.
Line 3
Enriched even by misfortune, when one stays sincere and walks the middle path, openly accountable for every step. No blame.
Line 4
Walking the center, mediating honestly between high and low, one's counsel is followed even in the greatest undertakings.
Line 5
A kind heart that asks for no acknowledgment: supreme good fortune. Kindness itself will be recognized as your worth.
Line 6
He increases no one; hearts strike at him from every side, for his heart held to nothing constant. Misfortune.

Related Hexagrams

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