Key 10, 履 Lǚ: walking behind the tiger

Meaning

履 is a shoe, and to tread, and from there the way a person carries themselves. The figure puts the lake, the youngest daughter and the softest of the trigrams, directly behind heaven, the strongest; its one yielding line is in the third place, close under the strong lines above. The Judgment gives the scene in one sentence: treading on the tail of a tiger, which does not bite. Our gloss is treading, conduct. For the text see the hexagram 10 page.

The tradition reads the tiger as the powerful and the danger they carry, and the hexagram as the art of moving among them by tact rather than force. Key 10 pairs with key 9, its figure turned over.

The three bands

The Shadow band, Recklessness, is the third line, 眇能視, 跛能履, 咥人凶: a one-eyed man who thinks he can see, a lame man who thinks he can walk, and the tiger bites. It is confidence that has not looked where it is stepping. The Gift band, Decorum, is the Judgment, 履虎尾, 不咥人: the tail is trodden on and the tiger does not bite, because the conduct is considerate enough that danger stays calm. The Siddhi band, Plainness, is the first two lines, 素履 and 履道坦坦: simple steps, and a path walked level and easy, by someone with nothing to prove.

The bands run from careless stepping to careful bearing to an ease that no longer needs care. They are ways of looking at conduct, never a judgement of anyone's.

In a profile

Key 10 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 28°15′ Sagittarius and 3°52′30″ Capricorn at birth or at the design moment, and so it can fill any of the thirteen rows or the three further tags.

The Sun passes through it each year from about 20 to 25 December. People born then have key 10 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 15, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 17 to 22 March, it is the Radiance, where the Sun stood at the design moment.

Each of its six lines is 56′15″ wide. A position from 28°15′ Sagittarius is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 2°56′15″ Capricorn is in line 6, Overview. Every key's lines take the same six themes of ours, and the line of a fast body like the Moon depends on the birth time to the hour.

Correspondences

Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.

Hexagram and number

履 Lǚ, hexagram 10 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Lî sourced

Trigram images

Lake / marsh below, Heaven above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced

Our gloss

treading, conduct: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction

Our words for the three bands

Recklessness, Decorum and Plainness, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction

Opposite on the wheel

Key 15, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced

Pair in the received order

Key 9, 小畜 Xiǎo Xù: the same six lines turned upside down, next to it in the received order sourced

Within and upside down

Lines 2 to 5 give 37 家人 Jiā Rén; the figure turned upside down gives 9 小畜 Xiǎo Xù sourced

Codon ring (Rudd)

Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Humanity, which he ties to arginine: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced

Place on the wheel

Gate 10 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 28°15′ Sagittarius to 3°52′30″ Capricorn (268.25° to 273.875° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced

How the schools read it

The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)

One treads on the tail of a tiger, which does not bite; progress and success. The text in full is on the hexagram 10 page.

Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)

Gate 10, in the G centre. The parent system gives the gate its own name and reading, which are Jovian Archive's and which we do not give here.

Richard Rudd, The Gene Keys (2009)

Key 10, read at three bands he calls the Shadow, the Gift and the Siddhi, each with a word of his own, under a chapter title of his own; we reproduce neither. He names key 15 its programming partner.

EsoTerrier

Conduct on dangerous ground: it steps blindly onto the tiger's tail, moves with such consideration that the danger stays calm, and at its peak walks the level road with nothing to prove.

Claims about it

• Key 10 is a code held in the genes, and contemplating it changes how they are expressed.

  unverified

  What the record shows: The central metaphor of Rudd's system, given by its author, not a finding. The profile is the positions of thirteen bodies at two moments, read on a 64-part wheel; no gene, codon or measurement of the body enters it.

• Key 10 belongs to the Ring of Humanity, a chemical family in the body tied to arginine.

  unverified

  What the record shows: Rudd's grouping. His ring sizes follow the real number of codons per amino acid in the genetic code, but which hexagram goes with which codon is his own choice, and nothing in genetics links a hexagram to an amino acid.

• The place of key 10 on the zodiac, 28°15′ Sagittarius to 3°52′30″ Capricorn, is an old I Ching teaching.

  false

  What the record shows: The wheel is Ra Uru Hu's, fixed between 1987 and 1989 by turning Shao Yong's 11th-century circle of the hexagrams so that hexagram 41 begins at 2° Aquarius. No Chinese source we know ties the hexagrams to degrees of the zodiac.

Elsewhere on EsoTerrier

• Hexagram 10: Treading the I Ching text this key is read from
• Key 15: 謙 Qiān, modesty its opposite on the wheel
• Key 9: 小畜 Xiǎo Xù, small restraint, gathering little its pair in the received order
• Key 37: 家人 Jiā Rén, the household, its roles the hexagram within it, lines 2 to 5
• Human Design gate 10 the same place in the system the profile is calculated by