Hexagram 28: Preponderance of the Great

A massive wave crests toward Mount Fuji, its claw-like foam dwarfing the fishing boats caught beneath. Katsushika Hokusai carved this image around 1831 as part of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, capturing the moment before the wave crashes down on vulnerable craft. The compositional weight overwhelms—water dominates three-quarters of the frame, Fuji reduced to a distant triangle. The boats tilt at impossible angles, oarsmen clinging to their positions. Everything hangs in the instant before impact, forces grotesquely out of balance.

This is Da Guo (大過), the hexagram of Preponderance of the Great. Lake (Dui) sits above Wind (Xun): joyous waters accumulate above penetrating movement below, creating a structure top-heavy and unstable. Ancient diviners saw this configuration as a ridgepole sagging under excessive load—the central lines too strong, the outer lines too weak, the whole construction near collapse. Hokusai's wave embodies this imbalance literally: water massing far beyond sustainable proportion, gravity about to reassert equilibrium violently. The boats must ride through or perish.

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The Judgment text addresses critical juncture: "The ridgepole sags to the breaking point. It furthers one to have somewhere to go. Success." When normal structures buckle under abnormal loads, movement becomes necessary—standing still means being crushed. Zhou Dynasty records show this hexagram appearing during floods, invasions, or political upheavals when conventional responses failed. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary action. Hokusai painted during Japan's late Edo period, when Western pressure was beginning to destabilize the traditional order; the wave carries that historical weight. The boatmen cannot turn back, cannot pause—only forward movement through the crisis offers survival.

The Image Text states: "The lake rises above the trees. The superior person stands alone without fear and withdraws from the world without melancholy." When outer conditions become extreme, inner independence sustains. The oarsmen in Hokusai's print maintain their positions with eerie calm, bodies adapted to the wave's contour. In the I-Ching's sequence, Preponderance of the Great follows Nourishment: after sustaining strength (27), one faces moments when forces exceed safe limits (28). The wave hangs frozen in woodblock ink, perpetually about to fall, teaching that critical mass demands not resistance but fluid passage through the unbearable.