Meaning
At first sight the figure looks upside down: heaven, which rises, is underneath, and earth, which sinks, is on top. That is the point of it. Each moves towards the other, so the two meet and mix, and 泰, ease or peace, is the name for that exchange. The Judgment reads it as the small departing and the great arriving, with good fortune. Our gloss is flow, heaven and earth meeting. The text, with Legge's English, is on the hexagram 11 page.
Key 11 and key 12 are the same six lines turned over and also every line reversed: each is at once the other's pair in the received order and its opposite on the wheel. The tradition reads them together as the turning of a season.
The three bands
The Shadow band, Complacency, is the third line, 无平不陂: there is no level ground without a slope, no going without a return. It is the assumption that the good time will hold of its own accord. The Gift band, Interchange, is the Image, 天地交: heaven and earth in communication, the high and the low meeting and trading what each has. The Siddhi band, Mutuality, is the Judgment's 小往大來: the small goes, the great comes, everything given and received at the same time.
So the key ranges from taking a good season for granted, through keeping it in motion, to a give and take with no account kept.
In a profile
Key 11 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 22°37′30″ Sagittarius and 28°15′ Sagittarius 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 15 to 19 December. People born then have key 11 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 12, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 11 to 16 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 22°37′30″ Sagittarius is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 27°18′45″ Sagittarius 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
- 泰 Tài, hexagram 11 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Thâi sourced
- Trigram images
- Heaven below, Earth above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced
- Our gloss
- flow, heaven and earth meeting: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction
- Our words for the three bands
- Complacency, Interchange and Mutuality, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction
- Opposite on the wheel
- Key 12, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced
- Pair in the received order
- Key 12, which here is also the opposite: the received order pairs the two by reversing every line sourced
- Within and upside down
- Lines 2 to 5 give 54 歸妹 Guī Mèi; the figure turned upside down gives 12 否 Pǐ sourced
- Codon ring (Rudd)
- Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Light, which he ties to threonine: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced
- Place on the wheel
- Gate 11 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 22°37′30″ Sagittarius to 28°15′ Sagittarius (262.625° to 268.25° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)
- The small goes and the great comes; good fortune with progress and success. The text in full is on the hexagram 11 page.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)
- Gate 11, in the Ajna 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 11, 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 12 its programming partner.
- EsoTerrier
- A time of exchange: it grows complacent and assumes the good season will hold, keeps high and low meeting and trading, and at its peak gives and receives at once.
Claims about it
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Key 11 is a code held in the genes, and contemplating it changes how they are expressed.
unverifiedWhat 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.
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Key 11 belongs to the Ring of Light, a chemical family in the body tied to threonine.
unverifiedWhat 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.
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The place of key 11 on the zodiac, 22°37′30″ Sagittarius to 28°15′ Sagittarius, is an old I Ching teaching.
falseWhat 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.
