Ascending — 升

What Is Hexagram 46?

Hexagram 46, Shēng (升), Ascending, is Earth above Wind, ䷭ — 巽下坤上, four yielding lines with the only two firm ones standing in the second and third places, low in the figure, and the whole upper trigram soft. It is the figure of climbing by degrees: a shoot coming up through the ground, a rank taken one step at a time, a name that grows out of small goods rather than a single stroke.

The name is the verb for going up, and the subcommentary defines it in the shortest way possible: 升者，登上之義，升而得大通，故曰「升，元亨」也 — 升 is the meaning of mounting upward, and where the mounting finds a great openness, the judgment says so. The Sequence that carries the figures along arrives here from the crowd and explains itself: 聚而上者，謂之升，故受之以升 — what has gathered and then goes up is what 升 names. And the same chapter already knows where it ends: 升而不已，必困 — a climb that never stops meets its obstruction next, at Hexagram 47. The whole arc of the figure is in those two clauses. It rises, and it does not come back down.

The 雜卦 states the pair from the other side, and its formula is the one worth keeping on this page: 萃聚而升不來也 — the gathering gathers, and the rising does not return. Everything both figures are about is packed into that contrast. A gathering can be left; the people disperse and the hall is empty and the thing is over. A rise has no reverse gear built into it. Whatever has gone up — a price, a position, a reputation, a person's demands — stays up until something takes it down, and the book's own answer to where that ends is the figure immediately after this one.

What makes the figure interesting before a single line is read is a missing piece. The fifth place of a hexagram is the ruler's seat, and the book's habit is to put something firm there. In this figure the fifth line is yielding; the two firm lines are at the second and third places, which is to say, at the bottom of the ladder. Wang Bi's note on the judgment starts from exactly this absence: 巽順可以升，陽爻不當尊位，無嚴剛之正，則未免於憂，故用見大人，乃「勿恤」也 — a compliant pliancy can rise, but the firm lines do not hold the honored place, so there is none of the severe firmness that a ruler's seat supplies; worry is therefore unavoidable, and it is avoided only by looking to the great one. The figure of ascent turns out to be a figure about authority that lags behind position. Something is going up and nothing up there knows how to hold it.

Trigram Structure

Shēng is 巽 below and 坤 above. The 說卦's list of one-word natures names both: 巽，入也 and 坤，順也 — penetrating at the bottom, compliant above. The 彖 builds its account out of those two plus one line: 柔以時升，巽而順，剛中而應，是以大亨. The soft rises by its time; there is penetration and compliance; a firm line holds the middle and something answers it; and out of that comes the great passage.

Wang Bi's gloss on that clause separates the two ways a rise can fail: 純柔則不能自升，剛亢則物不從 — pliancy alone cannot lift anything, and firmness held too high finds nothing that will follow it. The subcommentary says the same in a parallel pair, 純柔則不能自升，剛亢則物所不從, and then draws the conclusion that matters here: 卦體既巽且順，爻又剛中而應於五，有此眾德，故得「元亨」. Neither softness nor hardness is the recipe. The recipe is a soft thing that can enter, a firm thing that stays in the middle, and an answer between the two — which is precisely the arrangement the figure has, with 九二 in the center of the lower trigram and 六五 answering it from above.

The first word of the 彖 is about timing rather than about effort. 柔以時升, and Wang Bi makes it a condition: 柔以其時，乃得升也. The subcommentary locates the phrase in the ruler's place and reads the whole figure's name out of it: 「升」之為義，自下升高，故就六五居尊，以釋名「升」之意 … 若不得時，則不能升耳 — the meaning of 升 is to go from below to above, and the fifth line holding the honored place is where that meaning is read off; a line rising to a noble seat cannot rise at all if the time is not with it. The figure's ascent is not the reward of strength. It is what happens when a yielding thing and a good moment line up.

The two trigrams have catalogues of their own, and the entries that govern this page are the ones about shape. 巽為木、為風、為長女、為繩直、為工、為白、為長、為高、為進退、為不果、為臭; its further entries are 其於人也，為寡髮、為廣顙、為多白眼、為近利市三倍, and the closing line is 其究為躁卦. Two of those words are the figure itself: 為長 and 為高, long and high, the only trigram in the list credited with height. Two others sit next to them as warnings that belong to the same trigram: 為進退 and 為不果, wavering and inconclusiveness, and it is worth noticing that the book files the trigram of rising and the trigram of hesitation under the same heading. The same page defines it with one character elsewhere, 巽，入也: what rises here rises as something works its way in.

坤 brings the scale that makes the climb possible. 坤為地、為母、為布、為釜、為吝嗇、為均、為子母牛、為大輿、為文、為眾、為柄; its closing note is 其於地也為黑. The entries that matter to an ascent are 地 and 為均, earth and level measure, and 為眾, the many — a wide, even, anonymous ground. In the chapter of the body the pair is given the thigh and the belly, 巽為股 and 坤為腹, which is the shape of the act: a limb that carries the body upward beneath a mass that contains what it carries. And in the compass chapter both trigrams stand in the same list of the year's work: 帝出乎震，齊乎巽，相見乎離，致役乎坤 — 巽 is where things are leveled and ordered, 齊也者，言萬物之潔齊也, and 坤 is where everything is put to work and fed, 坤也者，地也，萬物皆致養焉，故曰致役乎坤. Rising, in this figure, is the interval between being set in order and being made to serve.

Two chapters of the 繫辭 put the lower trigram at the level of a discipline rather than a shape. The list of nine figures and their virtues gives 巽 three separate clauses, 巽，德之制也, 巽，稱而隱, 巽，以行權 — the measuring of virtue, weighing without display, and proceeding by weight rather than rule. That is a strange trio to find under an ascent, and it is the figure's own correction to any reading of rising as force. What gets up is what has been weighed.

Turn this figure's six strokes upside down and they become Hexagram 45, Gathering Together — the pair the 序卦 joins with the sentence quoted above. Exchange each line for its contrary, and the same six strokes become Hexagram 34, Great Vigor. The two firm lines stand in the second and third places, and both of them have an answer above: 九二 answers 六五, 九三 answers 上六. The bottom line has nothing answering it, since 初六 and 六四 are both yielding, and the third, fourth and top places are the three whose occupants are right for their positions. Among those three is 六五's immediate neighbor below it — 六四 — and not 六五 itself: the honored seat is held by a yielding line in a firm place, which is the missing strictness Wang Bi's note on the judgment opens with.

The Judgment

升：元亨，用見大人，勿恤，南征吉。

Shēng: yuán hēng, yòng jiàn dà rén, wù xù, nán zhēng jí.

Our rendering: Ascending: the great passage. Look to the great one; carry no worry. Marching south: good fortune.

Four clauses, and the second and third belong together. The judgment grants the widest possible opening — 元亨, the pair that runs through the book from Qian onward — and then names the one condition the figure cannot supply on its own. Wang Bi reads 用見大人 and 勿恤 as a single instruction with a single reason: 陽爻不當尊位，無嚴剛之正，則未免於憂，故用見大人，乃「勿恤」也. Because the firm lines are not in the honored place, there is no severity in the seat; because there is no severity in the seat, something in the situation is always about to be mishandled; and the remedy is not a firmer grip but a sight of someone greater. The subcommentary spells out what kind of person is meant: 故用見大德之人，然後乃得無憂恤 — it is a person of great virtue who is to be seen, and the anxiety is put down afterwards, not before.

That is a specific and slightly awkward piece of advice for a figure about rising, and it is the reason to trust it. Nothing here says that climbing builds authority. It says the opposite: an ascent can outrun the competence of the one ascending, and the correction is to look up rather than to grip harder. The word 用 matters too. 用見大人 is not an obligation to obey anybody; it is an instrument, the way the figure says the ascent is to be used.

The fourth clause points the instrument in a direction. 南征吉, going south is good fortune, and Wang Bi's gloss is an image rather than a geography: 以柔之南，則麗乎大明也 — the yielding thing that goes south attaches itself to the great brightness. The subcommentary explains why south and not simply forward: 南是明陽之方，故云「南征吉」也 — south is the quarter of bright yang. The 說卦's own compass chapter says where that comes from, since 離 is given the south there and defined by light, 離也者，明也，萬物皆相見，南方之卦也，聖人南面而聽天下，嚮明而治. In the book's spatial grammar, south is the direction a person faces when they are governing in the open. The judgment's last clause is therefore not a piece of travel advice. It is the difference between rising in the dark and rising in view of something.

The 彖 then distributes the four clauses among three causes, and the last two assignments are the ones to keep. 用見大人，勿恤，有慶也 — where the great one is looked to, there is something to be glad about, not merely an absence of harm; the subcommentary reads it as the promise that a great openness does not end in blockage, 以大通之德，「用見大人」，不憂否塞，必致慶善. And 南征吉，志行也 — the southward march is good fortune because the aim gets to move. The subcommentary's gloss draws the contrast with the alternative: 之於闇昧，則非其本志 — to go into the dark would not be this figure's own intention; 今以柔順而升大明，其志得行也. Height is not what the figure wants. Being seen while going up is.

One textual remark, since a reader who counts will notice it. The pair 元亨 opens ten judgments in the book, and six of them run straight on into 利貞: Qian, Zhun, Wu Wang, Lin, Sui, Ge. This is one of the four that do not, along with Kun, Da You and Gu — and of those four it is the only one whose next words are about a person: Kun's run on to a mare, Gu's to a river, and Da You's judgment stops at the two opening characters. The opening is left open on purpose, and what fills it is somebody to look at.

Jungian reading. The judgment's second clause describes a limit that Jung put at the center of his account of psychological development, and the limit is not moral but structural: what grows cannot authorize itself. His name for the thing a person has to encounter in order to grow past the ego's own arrangements was the archetype, and the point of the concept is that it cannot be manufactured by the ego, any more than a plant can decide on the sun. In his late work on alchemy he kept returning to images of growth that take place below the level of the will — the seed, the moist root, the philosophical tree with its roots in the earth and its crown in the light — and the reason those images appealed to him was that they let him describe a change that no amount of effort can hurry. The figure says the same thing in the language of offices: the ascent is real, and the firm lines are not in the seat, so the climb needs an object outside itself to steer by. Jung's clinical version of the warning is inflation, the state in which a person has risen in some real sense and mistakes the new altitude for a new self; his remedy is contact with something larger than the ego, whether that is called the great one or the objective psyche. 用見大人 is not a devotional instruction. It is the structural condition under which rising does not become self-congratulation.

The Image

象曰：地中生木，升；君子以順德，積小以高大。

Dì zhōng shēng mù, shēng; jūn zǐ yǐ shùn dé, jī xiǎo yǐ gāo dà.

Our rendering: Wood growing inside the earth: Ascending. The noble one therefore lets his virtue go along its own grain, and adds what is small until it stands high and broad.

The picture is a tree before it is a tree. The subcommentary keeps the emphasis on what is not yet visible: 「地中生木」，始於細微，以至高大，故為升象也 — wood in the earth begins tiny and reaches height, and that is why it is the image of ascent. Then it says the same thing twice more with growing concreteness: 地中生木，始於毫末，終至合抱 — it starts as a hair's tip and ends as what two arms cannot span. The Image's whole doctrine lives in that interval, and the instruction attached to it is not about ambition at all. It is about the size of the additions.

The two verbs of the instruction are worth taking apart. 順德 is usually read as following or according with one's virtue, and the subcommentary makes it a manner rather than a quantity: 以順行其德 — to carry one's virtue out by going along with it. The second half is arithmetic: 積其小善，以成大名 — pile up the small goods, and the great name is what they come to. Nothing in the line asks anyone to attempt something large. Everything in it asks that the small things be actual goods rather than gestures, and that they be repeated. And the commentary closes by reaching for the passage in the 繫辭 where the same law is stated negatively: 故《系辭》云：「善不積不足以成名」，是也 — where the text says that goods not piled up are not enough to make a name.

Set that against the two trigram catalogues and the choice of image stops being decorative. 巽為木 is the wood, 坤為地 is the ground, and the thing about wood in the ground is that it does not choose its direction: the bottom trigram enters, the top trigram complies, and what results is a shape produced by pressure rather than by plan. It is the image in which the ascent happens to something rather than being done by somebody. The tree does not lift itself; it is lifted by what it does with the dark.

There is a related pair in the book that throws this one into relief. Hexagram 35, Progress, is 明出地上，晉, brightness coming out of the earth, and its Image asks the noble one to bring his own brightness into view. This figure is 地中生木, wood inside the earth, and its Image asks for accumulation instead of display. One figure is about a light that has already arrived and has to be shown; the other is about a growth that is not yet visible and has to be fed. Readers who take 升 as a straightforward symbol of promotion miss the half of it that is spent underground.

Jungian reading. Jung's word for the underground half of the process was germinatio, seeding, and in the alchemical material he worked with it names the stage in which nothing is yet visible and everything is being decided. His reading of those texts is consistent about the two ways the stage goes wrong: it can be hurried, by taking a symptom or an insight for the whole transformation, or it can be claimed, by announcing the fruit while the root is still forming. Both mistakes produce what he called inflation, and the figure's instruction is a precise antidote to both. 積小以高大 is a rule about the size of the unit of work — one small real good at a time, with no announcement — and 順德 is a rule about the relation between the worker and the work: you go along with the growth rather than directing it. Jung put the reason for that rule in the character of the psyche rather than in modesty. What is growing in a person is not under the person's command; the most a conscious mind can do is keep the conditions right and refuse to dig the plant up to see how it is doing.

The Lines

初六：允升，大吉。 (Yǔn shēng, dà jí.) Where rising is fitting: the great good fortune.

The figure that climbs begins with the line that has nothing to climb on. 初六 is yielding, and so is 六四 above it, which means the first place has no answer in the figure at all; and yet it is this line, at the very bottom, that is handed 大吉, the great good fortune. Wang Bi explains the line by company rather than by correspondence: 允，當也。巽卦三爻，皆升者也。雖無其應，處《升》之初，與九二、九三合志俱升 — 允 means fitting; the three lines of the lower trigram all rise, and this one, though nothing answers it, stands at the beginning of the ascent and goes up together with 九二 and 九三 in a shared aim. The subcommentary fills in the anxiety the word 允 is answering: 惟初無應於上，恐不得升。當二、三升時，與之俱升，必大得矣 — having nothing above it, it is afraid it will not be allowed up; but when the second and third lines rise, it rises with them, and the gain is great. The Small Image puts the whole mechanism in four characters, 允升大吉，上合志也, and the gloss identifies the word 上 as the two firm lines: 上謂二、三也.

This is the figure's flattest and most useful piece of advice, and it does not depend on anyone deserving anything. The bottom place has no leverage, no answer, and no seat; what it has is the company of two things that are going up anyway, and the verdict comes from rising with them rather than from any quality of its own. It is also worth counting where 大吉 falls in this book, because it falls rarely. Across the whole classic it is written five times once the judgments and the line texts are counted together, and four of those are handed to single lines — 初六 here, 六四 of Hexagram 37, 九四 of Hexagram 45, 上九 of Hexagram 50 — and this is the only one of the four at the bottom of its figure. The strongest word used anywhere in the verdicts of this hexagram is handed to the lowest place in it, and it is handed there for joining what was already moving.

九二：孚乃利用禴，无咎。 (Fú nǎi lì yòng yuè, wú jiù.) Where there is trust, a lean offering will serve: no blame.

The second line is firm in the middle of the lower trigram and answers the yielding ruler at 六五, which is the one pairing the 彖 calls out by name. Wang Bi's note explains why such a position can get away with so little: 與五為應，往必見任。體夫剛德，進不求寵，閑邪存誠，志在大業，故乃利用納約於神明矣 — it answers the fifth place and will be trusted when it goes up; it carries firm virtue, rises without angling for favor, closes the crooked and keeps the sincere, and sets its aim on a large work; on those terms it may bring a compact offering to the spirits. The subcommentary repeats the sequence so that the order of the clauses is not lost: 九二與五為應，往升於五，必見信任，故曰「孚」。二體剛德，而履乎中，進不求寵，志在大業，用心如此，乃可薦其省約於神明而無咎也. Trust, firmness, the middle, no hunting after favor — and the offering follows as a consequence rather than as a payment. The Small Image gives it two words and a particle of gladness, 九二之孚，有喜也, glossed as what happens when both sides of the exchange land: 上升則為君所任，薦約則為神所享.

Two things are worth adding. The four characters 孚乃利用禴 stand, character for character, in one other place in the classic: the second line of Hexagram 45, the figure directly before this one, where they are preceded by 引吉 and 无咎. The same compact rite, offered by two different lines in two consecutive figures, in both cases by a line that is central and correct rather than rich. And the last word of the line text is a limit rather than a prize: the verdict is 无咎, no blame. A thin offering honestly brought buys an untroubled passage and nothing more, which in this figure is exactly what the second place should be asking for.

九三：升虛邑。 (Shēng xū yì.) He rises into an empty town.

Four characters with no verdict word in them at all — no 吉, no 咎, no 利, no 貞 — and of the six lines of the figure it is the only one of which that can be said. Wang Bi's note supplies the reason from position and direction: 履得其位，以陽升陰，以斯而舉，莫之違距，故若「升虛邑」也 — it stands in the place that belongs to it and rises as a firm line into a yielding one, and nothing opposes a move like that, which is why it looks like rising into an empty town. The subcommentary names the town's emptiness as the absence of resistance and nothing else: 九三履得其位，升於上六，上六體是陰柔，不距於己，若升空虛之邑也. The Small Image confirms that there is no doubt left in the situation, 升虛邑，無所疑也, and Wang Bi's gloss on it is three characters long, 往必得邑 — go, and the town is yours.

There is nothing unkind in the line and nothing tested in it either. The third place is the only one in the lower trigram that has its own proper position, it is firm, and the thing it answers is soft, so the ascent meets no friction anywhere. The commentary calls the result an empty town rather than a conquest precisely because there was never a contest. What the line describes is the moment in any rise when nothing on the way up says no — and the fact that the book leaves the line without a verdict is a way of declining to call that a success. There is no warning in it and no reward in it, only a description of a floor that gives way, standing between the line that was trusted for its restraint and the line that has to decide whether to open the door.

六四：王用亨于岐山，吉，无咎。 (Wáng yòng xiǎng yú Qí shān, jí, wú jiù.) The king presents his offerings at Mount Qi: good fortune, and no blame.

The fourth line stands just above the seam between the two trigrams, at the bottom of the yielding earth, and it is the first thing the rising lines below it meet. Wang Bi's note is a small treatise on doors: 處升之際，下升而進，可納而不可距也。距下之進，攘來自專，則殃咎至焉。若能不距而納，順物之情，以通庶志，則得「吉」而「無咎」矣 — standing at the crossing of the ascent with everything below pushing up, it may take them in and must not push them back; to block what is rising and hold the traffic as one's own brings harm, and to receive it instead, following the feeling of things so that the common intentions get through, brings both the good fortune and the absence of blame. The historical image that the note and the subcommentary attach to the line is an assembly rather than a sacrifice, 事同文王岐山之會, the gathering that King Wen held at Mount Qi, where the point was that no one who came was turned away: 岐山之會，順事之情，無不納也. The Small Image says 順事也, and the gloss reads it as following the feeling of things in order to accomplish something, 順物之情，而立功立事.

Two notes on the text. The verb is printed 享 in the classic page and 亨 in the commentary page, and the two readings are the same ancient word doing double duty: in this line it is the offering, at the judgment it is passage. The formula the line uses is rare and this figure owns one version of it. 王用亨于岐山 stands here; the top line of Hexagram 17 has 王用亨于西山, and the second line of Hexagram 42 has 王用享于帝 — three kings, three places, no repetition, which is the classic's habit of using a fixed frame for unique occasions. What the line is really about is a stage rather than a sacrifice: whoever stands at the top of a lower trigram is the floor for whoever is below, and the one decision available at that place is whether the door is open.

六五：貞吉，升階。 (Zhēn jí, shēng jiē.) Holding to what is correct, good fortune: he climbs the steps.

The seat of honor in this hexagram belongs to a yielding line — the wrong kind of occupant for that position — and it answers the firm line at the second place. Wang Bi's note gives it three clauses and makes them one act: 升得尊位，體柔而應，納而不距，任而不專，故得「貞吉，升階」而尊也 — it has risen to the honored place, its substance is yielding and it has an answer, it takes in without blocking and employs without monopolizing, and so it is granted the correctness that brings good fortune and the climb of the steps. The subcommentary draws the same conclusion about power: 六五以柔居尊位，納於九二，不自專權，故得「貞吉，升階」. The word 階 is the point of the line. The throne is not taken in this figure; it is climbed, one step at a time, by a line that holds the seat loosely enough to let the firm line below do its work.

This is where the figure's structural oddity pays off. The 彖's opening word, 柔以時升, is read by the subcommentary as a sentence about exactly this line — the yielding line that has risen to a noble seat, whose rise is possible only while the time allows it — while the judge's worry that the firm lines do not hold the honored place is a worry about this same seat; and the remedy the judgment prescribes, looking to the great one, is the same solution seen from below. Everything the figure says about ascent converges on a ruler whose authority is not in its own strength, and whose verdict is the quietest in the hexagram. The Small Image's four words are 大得志也, and the gloss reads them as a statement about composure rather than about scale: 居中而得其「貞吉」，處尊而保其「升階」 — to hold the middle and get the correctness, to stand high and keep the climb.

上六：冥升，利於不息之貞。 (Míng shēng, lì yú bù xī zhī zhēn.) Rising in the dark: it serves to hold, without stopping, to what is correct.

The last line keeps going after the light has gone. 冥 is the word for darkness, and Wang Bi's note reads the line as motion that has outlived its illumination: 處貞之極，進而不息者也。進而不息，故雖冥猶升也 — it stands at the extreme of correctness and advances without stopping; because it does not stop it keeps rising even though it can no longer see. Then the note draws the line between two uses of the same energy: 故施於不息之正則可，用於為物之主則喪矣 — turned toward an unceasing correctness it is acceptable, and used to dominate other things it is ruin. The subcommentary states both branches concretely, 若宴升在上，陵物為主，則喪亡斯及；若潔已脩身，施於為政，則以不息為美, and reads 冥 as plain darkness, 冥猶暗也.

The Small Image closes the figure on a phrase with no comfort in it, 冥升在上，消不富也, and Wang Bi's note on the image is four more characters, 勞不可久也 — toil cannot last. The subcommentary glosses the pair as consumption rather than catastrophe: 雖為政不息，交免危咎，然勞不可久，終致消衰 — the unceasing work does avoid danger and blame, and still it wears out and thins. There are two figures in the book whose last line is given the character 冥, and this is one of them; the other is Hexagram 16, where 冥豫 is the haze of an enthusiasm that has run past its hour. A figure that began with wood under the ground ends with a climb that has lost the sight it started with, and the Sequence chapter has already told anyone who reads ahead where that goes: 升而不已，必困.

Daily Life

The figure's most portable instruction is a rate rather than a goal. 地中生木，始於毫末，終至合抱 — the tree does not begin as a tree; and 積小以高大 is not a promise that small goods add up to a large reputation, it is a description of what a person is made of at the end. Read as a rule for work, it says that the unit of the work has to be small enough to be real. A plan of a hundred items that includes forty gestures toward other people is worth less than four that are actually goods, and the figure's arithmetic is deliberately uninterested in scale. The same section of the 繫辭 that the commentary reaches for puts the negative case: 善不積不足以成名. Nothing gets a name by being announced.

The judgment's condition is the figure's flintiest piece of advice for anyone actually climbing. 陽爻不當尊位，無嚴剛之正，則未免於憂 — the ascent is real, and the seat it reaches is not firm enough to hold it. The book's answer to that is not to slow down and not to grip harder. It is 用見大人，勿恤, to look to the great one and put the anxiety down; and the direction it gives that look is south, 南是明陽之方, the quarter of brightness, which for a person means doing the climb where it can be seen and where someone who knows more is standing. An ascent kept private is the version of this figure that has no remedy in it at all.

The fourth line's problem is the one most often met and least often recognized: standing at the top of the lower half of anything, with people rising underneath. 可納而不可距 — take them in, do not push them back; 距下之進，攘來自專，則殃咎至焉, block the ones below and hold the movement as your own and the harm arrives. The figure is precise about which failure matters here. It is not vanity; it is the desire to be the door rather than to keep it open, and the verdict on that desire is 殃咎. The counter-image is 岐山之會, an assembly where nobody was turned away, and the Small Image's word for it is 順事, following the shape of what is actually happening.

The end of the figure is the part to keep for a bad week. 冥升 is what an unstopped climb turns into when the sight that began it is gone; 勞不可久也 says that the toil cannot hold; and 消不富 says what the line costs — it consumes and does not accumulate. The subcommentary's split is the practical one. The same unrelenting energy is acceptable when it is turned on oneself, 潔已脩身, 施於為政, and ruinous when it is turned outward as rule, 陵物為主. The figure does not tell anyone to stop climbing. It tells them which direction the continuing effort has to face, and what happens to a figure whose rise never once comes back down: the next page is 困, and the Sequence says so in one clause, 升而不已，必困.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What does Hexagram 46 mean in one sentence?

That an ascent is real and its authority is not, and that the work of the figure is to keep the two together: 柔以時升，巽而順，剛中而應, with the firm lines standing in the second and third places and nothing strict in the honored seat, so that the climb is steered by looking to someone greater, 用見大人，勿恤, and built out of small actual goods rather than gestures, 積小以高大.

Why does a figure about rising need a great one to look at, and what is the worry being dismissed?

Because position has outrun competence in a way the structure shows. The fifth place is the ruler's seat and it is occupied by a yielding line here, while the only firm lines sit low; Wang Bi's note on the judgment reads the consequences directly: 陽爻不當尊位，無嚴剛之正，則未免於憂，故用見大人，乃「勿恤」也, and the subcommentary identifies the person to be looked to as one of great virtue, 故用見大德之人，然後乃得無憂恤. The worry is not nerves; it is the specific hazard of rising without a firm hand at the top, and the remedy is an instrument rather than an obligation — 用見大人, use the sight of the great one.

Why does the strongest single verdict in this figure land on its bottom line?

Because the bottom line has nothing else to rely on. 初六 is yielding, and the line it would answer at 六四 is yielding too, so the first place has no correspondence in the figure at all; what it has is the company of the two firm lines above it, and Wang Bi's note says that is enough: 雖無其應，處《升》之初，與九二、九三合志俱升. The Small Image's four characters are 允升大吉，上合志也, and the gloss names those two lines as the 上. 大吉 is granted five times in the classic when the judgments and the line texts are counted together, and of the four times it goes to a single line this is the only one at the bottom of its figure — which is either a coincidence or the book's quietest statement about where an ascent actually starts.

What is 冥升, and what happens when a rise does not stop?

冥 is darkness, and Wang Bi reads the line as advancing past the point where anything is visible: 進而不息，故雖冥猶升也 — because it does not stop, it keeps going up in the dark. The same note splits the two uses of that energy, 施於不息之正則可，用於為物之主則喪矣, and the subcommentary's contrast is between turning it on oneself and turning it on others, 潔已脩身，施於為政 as against 陵物為主. The cost is on the Small Image, 消不富也, with Wang Bi's four-character note 勞不可久也: consumption without accumulation, and toil that cannot hold. The Sequence has already named the next stop for a climb that never comes down: 升而不已，必困.

The I Ching is a mirror for reflection, not a prediction machine.