EN (English)
䷨
Hexagram 41 of 64
Decrease
損 · Sǔn
A lake wearing down at the foot of a mountain, its substance going upward. The hexagram is about deliberate reduction, and the classic treats it as a form of investment.
decrease
simplicity
sacrifice
voluntary loss
- King Wen number
- 41 of 64
- Above
- ☶ Gèn · Mountain
- Below
- ☱ Duì · Lake
- Composition
- Mountain over Lake
- Lines, bottom to top
- Solid · solid · broken · broken · broken · solid
- Chinese
- 損 · Sǔn
The Judgment
With sincerity, supreme good fortune and no blame. One may hold to this. It helps to undertake something. How is it to be done? Two small bowls will serve for the offering.
The two bowls are the whole argument. When means are short, the offering is reduced and it still counts, because sincerity is what the ritual was measuring.
The Image
The lake at the foot of the mountain: Decrease. So the noble person checks their anger and holds back their appetites.
The first thing to be decreased is your own reactivity. The classic starts the reduction at home.
What it means
Sun is decrease, and the classic's argument is that decrease chosen deliberately is not loss. A lake erodes at the mountain's base and the substance moves upward, which is the hexagram in one image: something below gives, and something above gains.
The Judgment's two bowls have become one of the book's most quoted passages. When you cannot afford the proper offering, use two small dishes and the ceremony still holds, because the sincerity was always the substance and the vessels were always the form. Ritual poverty is not ritual failure.
The second line then heads off the obvious misreading. You do not increase others by diminishing yourself. Self-sacrifice is not the mechanism; sincerity is, and the fourth line makes it concrete by decreasing faults rather than resources.
The third line goes somewhere else entirely, and the Great Treatise stops to comment on it. Three people walking together lose one; one person walking alone finds a companion. Groups shed a member and solitude attracts one, because relation in this book works in twos. It is the least practical line in the hexagram and the one people remember.
In a reading
Decrease as an answer says something has to be given up, and that giving it up deliberately makes it work.
The counsel is to simplify: fewer resources, plainer means, less anger, fewer appetites. What matters is that the sincerity survives the reduction. If you are helping someone, the first and second lines add the balance: give without depleting yourself, and be honest about the cost to others.
The six lines
Read a line's text only when the cast made it a moving line. They are listed from the top of the figure down, the way the hexagram is drawn.
-
Nine at the top
Increased without depriving anyone. No blame. Steadfastness brings good fortune. It helps to undertake something. One gains servants and no longer has a separate household.
Gain that costs nobody. What it costs is privacy: the household dissolves into the larger body it now serves.
-
Six in the fifth place
Someone increases him. Ten pairs of tortoises cannot argue with it. Supreme good fortune.
Tortoise shells were the older oracle. Even they cannot contradict this. The classic's strongest form of certainty.
-
Six in the fourth place
Decreasing his faults makes the other hasten over gladly. No blame.
Reduction applied to your own defects, and the effect it has on someone who was staying away.
-
Six in the third place
When three walk together, one is lost. When one walks alone, they find a companion.
The most quoted line in the hexagram. Groups shed a member; solitude attracts one. The classic treats this as a law of pairs.
-
Nine in the second place
Steadfastness rewards. To set out brings misfortune. Without diminishing yourself, you can increase others.
The line that corrects the hexagram's obvious reading. Self-depletion is not the mechanism.
-
Nine at the beginning
Finishing your own work and going quickly to help: no blame. But weigh how much you take from others.
Generosity with a caution attached. Helping is good; helping at someone else's unexamined expense is not.
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