Literal translation: The past events are counted as trends and the future events are predicted as contrarian, so the Book of Changes uses inverse numbers.

Note: The past is the trend. The past refers to the past, from simple to complex, from one to many in words. Ma Qichang said: "The number of the world begins with one, one and two, two and three. This is the nature of the past. As for ten, a hundred, a thousand and ten thousand infinity, they are all from less to more.

Know what is going against the trend: contrary to the meaning of the previous sentence, it means to predict the future against the trend, that is, from complex to simple, from more to less with numbers. The number of Zhouyi begins with the number of six, seven, eight, nine and ten thousand. The method used in the Book of Changes is, "Use the number of fifty to get twenty-eight, thirty-two, thirty-six and twenty-four." Therefore, numbers are also inverse numbers. (Ma Qiyun's words) Therefore, this section draws the conclusion that the Book of Changes is also an inverse number. Some people interpret divination as a bottom-up reciprocal, which may be wrong.

The number here refers to the number in the Confucian "number of rites and music shooting imperial books", that is, tricks, not mathematics.