Hexagram 42: Increase Changing to Hexagram 26: The Taming Power of the Great

I Ching casting meaning · Yi → Da Chu

All that expansive energy is being asked to bank itself — The Taming Power of the Great, where increase stops spending its growth and starts storing it. This isn't contraction; it's the reservoir phase after the growth spurt. Delay the next expansion, hold the line on the current scale, and keep building capacity while lesser opportunities walk past. Train, deepen, accumulate reserves. What you're really doing is raising the ceiling on what your eventual next growth wave can accomplish. Great increase held in reserve doesn't diminish; it concentrates. When this hexagram finally releases, the growth that follows dwarfs everything that came before. You're loading, not retreating.

A casting that moves from Increase into The Taming Power of the Great means the situation you asked about is not static — it begins as one pattern and resolves into another. The first hexagram describes where you stand; the second describes where events are carrying you.

Highlighted in red: lines 2, 3 and 5 are moving — counted from the bottom. A moving line is where the change is actually happening: it flips from yang to yin or back, and that flip is what turns Increase into The Taming Power of the Great.

The situation: Hexagram 42, Increase

True increase. Wind and thunder multiply each other.

Wind and thunder feeding each other — energy that multiplies instead of canceling out. This is one of the great draws: genuine increase, the kind where resources, opportunities, and momentum all rise together. The classic instruction has a spine to it, though: increase flows to people who use it well. See good, copy it fast. See your own faults, cut them faster. This is also the season to do something significant with the surplus — invest in people, take the meaningful risk, fund the thing that matters. Increase hoarded curdles; increase circulated compounds. You're being given more because the universe expects you to move it.

Structurally, Increase is Thunder below Wind — the inner state meeting the outer condition. That pairing is the lens for everything above.

Where it's heading: Hexagram 26, The Taming Power of the Great

Great power held in reserve. Store strength for the right release.

The changed hexagram is the trajectory, not a verdict. As the moving lines settle, the energy of Increase gives way to The Taming Power of the Great (Da Chu) — Heaven below Mountain. The advice that belongs to this outcome: Hold your strength back and feed it daily. You're loading, not stalling.