Decrease and Increase: Why Giving Can Add and Taking Can Cost

Your finger has been resting on the transfer amount, and you have changed the number three times. Your brother is short on the down payment; your mother's medicine is a fixed sum each month; and you yourself, these past few years, are not as comfortable as everyone assumes. Give too much and you will be running tight for half a year; give too little and the money never reaches where it was meant to go — it becomes a kind of shrug instead. All at once you see it: this generous-looking act called giving has a cold arithmetic underneath it — every sum handed out is, at the same moment, subtracted from somewhere. This chapter is about that arithmetic — why decrease and increase are so often two names for a single act.

What do Decrease and Increase actually say?

Sun, "Decrease" (hexagram 41), is about what to do when your resources are contracting. Most people hear decrease and their stomach drops — yet the hexagram opens with inner truth, supreme good fortune:

"Decrease: with inner truth, supreme good fortune, no blame. One may hold to this. It is favorable to have somewhere to go. What does one use? Two plain bowls may serve for the offering." — Judgment of hexagram 41, Zhouyi, received text (Ruan Yuan's Shisanjing zhushu edition)

Two plain bowls is the eye of the whole hexagram. A sacrifice was supposed to demand lavish vessels — but Decrease says two rough clay bowls are enough for a solemn offering, provided the sincerity inside is full. What you cut away is the outward display; what you raise up is the inward truth. Everything turns on those two words, inner truth: this reduction is one you choose willingly, not a loss forced on you. Reduction chosen is increase; loss suffered is the only real decrease.

Yi, "Increase" (hexagram 42), is the reverse situation: those above are willing to give ground, those below are being nourished, and the whole system rides a rising current. The judgment is brief:

"Increase: it is favorable to have somewhere to go. It is favorable to cross the great river." — Judgment of hexagram 42, Zhouyi, received text (edition as above)

Windows like this open rarely and do not stay open — precisely the moment to launch the great project and cross the difficult passage. But the true secret of Increase is not in the gaining; it is in how the gain arrives. The hexagram's founding sense is decrease above, increase below: subtract a measure from the high place, and a measure grows in the low one. What was taken off the top has not vanished — it has changed position and gone on growing.

Take one line from each and the arithmetic shows its face. Decrease's third line: "Three travel together, and one is lost; one travels alone, and finds a companion." Three together must shed one; the solitary walker gathers a true friend. Here the loss of one is the gain, and going alone is the real cohesion. And the last line of Increase is the coldest of all: "None enrich him; someone strikes at him instead; a heart without constancy — misfortune." The one who only takes and will not give finds, in the end, that no one adds anything to him; someone comes to strike at him instead. A heart that only receives and never releases invites disaster. To take without giving looks like pure profit; it is the largest loss of all.

The mirror: turn Decrease over and it is Increase

Decrease and Increase are an inverse pair — turn hexagram 41 fully upside down and you get exactly hexagram 42. This is no coincidence; it is the I Ching using the shape of the hexagrams to say one thing: decrease and increase are the two ends of a single transfer.

One thing moved from here to there: stand at the end being drained and it is decrease; stand at the end being fed and it is increase. So Decrease's founding sense is decrease below, increase above, and Increase's is decrease above, increase below — the same two words, only the direction reversed, and the hexagram's name flips from one to the other. What the I Ching wants you to see is this: whether an act of giving is loss or gain is not decided by the amount, but by the direction. Give downward, willingly reduce, and the low place grows — that is increase. Take upward, suffer the loss, and however handsome the figure on the books, that is decrease.

This unknots the most hidden term in the arithmetic that had you stuck: some giving is loss. Giving that hollows you out and drowns the other, so that the one who receives never grows roots of their own — that giving wears the coat of increase and does the work of decrease. And the reverse: some cutting is gain. You step back, vacate a place you could have held yourself, and in that place another person grows up — and something grows between you that was never there before.

The path: the ox-goad, the same stroke wounds and guides

In this book's arrangement, this chapter corresponds to the path of Lamed (ל, the Ox-goad) on the Tree of Life — the pointed staff that drives the ox forward. This correspondence is an editorial design of this book, not a native mapping in either tradition.

The ox-goad is a difficult instrument: to drive the ox on, you must prick it. That prick is a wound and a steering both — one act, which is loss where it meets the flesh and gain where it meets the direction. The arithmetic of giving is hard to compute for exactly this reason: the giving that actually helps almost always carries a small loss inside it, while the giving that looks most complete, that wounds no one, often moves nothing at all. In tradition the letter Lamed also carries the sense of to teach and to learn — and teaching is precisely goad-shaped giving: you must be willing to let someone bear a little of the present sting, for that subtracted comfort is what buys the thing they grow into later. One who knows how to give knows the exact weight of that stroke: too light and the ox will not move; too heavy and the ox is hurt.

What is this chapter asking you?

The sign on any gift — plus or minus — is set not by the amount but by direction and willingness: reduce from above, freely, and the low place grows — that is increase; be drained from below, under compulsion, and however good it looks, that is decrease.

Before you carry this chapter away, answer three questions inside your own situation:

1. The giving you are calculating right now — is it a downward yielding (you have a surplus; you choose to reduce), or an upward draining (you are short, yet forced to lose)? These two kinds of giving deserve completely different states of heart.
2. Is there a giving you have long counted as increase that is really decrease — one that hollows you out and blocks the other from growing their own roots? Two plain bowls may serve reminds you: when the sincerity is full, the vessel can be rough; but when the sincerity is empty, even the richest gift is only display.
3. Increase's top line says none enrich him; someone strikes at him. Somewhere in your relationships, are you standing at the take without giving end without knowing it? If you reversed the direction, which measure of loss in your hand could actually make the whole situation grow?