Hexagram 41, Decrease

Less, chosen on purpose. That is the whole of it, and it takes most of us a lifetime to learn.

The figure

The lower trigram is Lake, the youngest daughter, open and joyous. The upper is Mountain, the youngest son, keeping still. Put them together and you have a lake lying at the foot of a mountain, giving up its mist every morning to feed the slopes above it. The lake gets lower. The mountain gets greener. Something below is spent so that something above can grow.

I think it is one of the kindest pictures in the book. Taking from the bottom to feed the top sounds harsh until you notice the lake is doing what lakes do.

A small aside for the tidy minded. The old name of this hexagram is Sun, and the Wind trigram is also written Sun in the spelling we use here. They are two different words in Chinese that happen to come out the same in English letters. Go figure.

Decrease is paired with Hexagram 42, Increase, which is this figure turned upside down. Taking from below to give above, and taking from above to give below, are one movement seen from two ends.

When it comes up in a reading

When Decrease comes up for a question I take it as a plain answer. The situation asks you to do with less for a while, and to be at peace with that.

This is a lean season, and lean seasons are when a person finds out what they are made of once the decoration is gone. If money is the question, spend less and mind what is left. If time is the question, drop what you were only doing out of habit. If a relationship is the question, strip the talk back to what is true and let the rest fall away.

Decrease also asks what the sacrifice is for. The lake feeds the mountain. So before you give something up, name what the giving up serves. A cut with a purpose is discipline. A cut with no purpose is just going without, and the book has a lower opinion of that than people expect.

The hardest part is the attitude. The tradition says, in its own way, that a very modest offering is acceptable when it is made sincerely. You do not have to be impressive this season. Two small bowls given with a whole heart outweigh a banquet given to be seen. Keep what matters, let the surplus go without a speech about it, and watch where the saved energy wants to flow.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you are someone who understands simplifying. What your life has too much of, you can put down. You value substance over piles of stuff, and you would rather have one good thing than ten average ones.

You know how to invest a present reduction in a future result. Saving while others spend, studying while others go out, working a quiet year so the next one can be bigger. Others often mistake this for a lack of fun. You are simply looking further down the road. You are generous with it too, giving what you can spare to what deserves it, and you may well live more simply than your circumstances require.

The gift is the wisdom of less. In a culture built on getting more, your example of choosing less quietly serves everyone who watches you do it.

The shadow is austerity for its own sake, the version that cuts what should never have been cut and treats every comfort as suspect. That is Decrease mistaken for a permanent setting, and it produces a smaller life, which was never the point. The work is telling healthy reduction from self deprivation, and the difference is not always obvious from the inside.

At maturity the Decrease person has lived with sensible reduction across a whole life and pointed the savings at things that mattered. The one who chose less tends to end up with more of what actually counts.

If a line moves

When you cast this hexagram with a moving line, its position tells you where the leanness sits. A line moving low in the figure is the beginning of the matter, the first decision to do with less. A line moving in the middle is the heart of it, living on less and finding out whether you can. A line moving high is the end of the matter, often where the giving up has done its work and should stop, because decrease carried past its purpose becomes plain loss. Change the moving line to its opposite and you have the second hexagram, where the situation is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows the step with a worked example.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives Lake and Mountain their own sections and shows how a pair of trigrams is read. The Chinese Astrology section covers yin and yang, the two forces every line here is built from. In the tarot, my own association for Decrease is The Hermit, the figure who walks away from the crowd carrying one lamp and finds that the lamp was enough. Take that as my pairing and nothing stronger.

What could you put down this month that you would not actually miss?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.