Organic Growth
Appears in twelve chapters
Where the image appears
Organic growth is the sprout, the seed, and the tree: growth as the Book of Changes' model of all right development. The image recurs because the oracle measures every human undertaking against the way plants actually grow, from below, against resistance, at their own pace, and from seeds too small to notice. It stands at the very threshold of action: the name of 03 Chun - Difficulty at the Beginning "really connotes a blade of grass pushing against an obstacle as it sprouts out of the earth," hence its meaning of difficulty at the beginning.
Growth binds like to like at the root. In 11 T'ai - Peace, and again in 12 P'i - Standstill (Stagnation), "When ribbon grass is pulled up, the sod comes with it," for the stalks are connected underground and the able man draws his kind along with him. Standstill adds the mulberry: "When a mulberry bush is cut down, a number of unusually strong shoots sprout from the roots," the image of making success certain by caution. In 28 Ta Kuo - Preponderance of the Great the old poplar shows renewal and its counterfeit side by side: "A dry poplar sprouts at the root" when the old joins the lowly, but "A withered poplar puts forth flowers" only "exhausts its energies thereby and only hastens its end." Even ruin carries seed: in 23 Po - Splitting Apart, "There is a large fruit still uneaten," and "it is just when the fruit falls to the ground that food sprouts anew from its seed."
The tempo of growth is the whole counsel. In 46 Shêng - Pushing Upward, "wood in the earth grows upward without haste and without rest," bending around obstacles; in 53 Chien - Development (Gradual Progress), "A tree on a mountain develops slowly according to the law of its being and consequently stands firmly rooted," while the swamp plant that shoots up has no such roots. To discern "the seeds of coming events" turns the botanical image into the art of reading the time itself.
The Taoist parallel is Tao Te Ching 64: the tree that fills a man's arms grew from a downy tip, the nine-storied tower rose from a basket of earth. Growth that cannot be hurried is the standing Taoist argument against forcing, and the Changes agrees down to the root: what is to stand firm must sprout slowly.