Meaning
Here everything is where it naturally goes, and that is the trouble: heaven rises, earth sinks, and with heaven already above and earth already below, nothing passes between them. 否 means to deny or to block. The Judgment speaks of a want of understanding between people, a time when the great departs and the small arrives, the reverse of key 11. Our gloss is blockage, heaven and earth apart. The text is on the hexagram 12 page.
We read 否 as a description of a season in which channels are closed. Its pair and opposite is key 11.
The three bands
The Shadow band, Acquiescence, is the second line, 包承: bearing and putting up with things, enduring what has stopped working for everyone rather than naming it. The Gift band, Reserve, is the Image, 君子以儉德辟難: the noble person keeps their worth in check and so avoids the trouble of the time, holding gifts back until they can land. The Siddhi band, Watchfulness, is the fifth line, 其亡其亡, 繫于苞桑: "it may be lost, it may be lost", and so it is tied to a clump of mulberry, a plant with deep roots. Care is what makes the shaky thing hold.
The bands move from passive endurance to deliberate restraint to an attentive care that sees the season through.
In a profile
Key 12 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 22°37′30″ Gemini and 28°15′ Gemini 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 14 to 19 June. People born then have key 12 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 11, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 13 to 18 September, 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″ Gemini is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 27°18′45″ Gemini 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
- 否 Pǐ, hexagram 12 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Phî sourced
- Trigram images
- Earth below, Heaven above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced
- Our gloss
- blockage, heaven and earth apart: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction
- Our words for the three bands
- Acquiescence, Reserve and Watchfulness, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction
- Opposite on the wheel
- Key 11, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced
- Pair in the received order
- Key 11, 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 53 漸 Jiàn; the figure turned upside down gives 11 泰 Tài sourced
- Codon ring (Rudd)
- Rudd groups this key in two of his rings, the Ring of Secrets and the Ring of Trials, both of which he ties to the stop codons: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced
- Place on the wheel
- Gate 12 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 22°37′30″ Gemini to 28°15′ Gemini (82.625° to 88.25° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)
- The want of good understanding between men; unfavourable to the firm and correct; the great goes and the small comes. The text in full is on the hexagram 12 page.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)
- Gate 12, in the Throat 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 12, 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 11 its programming partner.
- EsoTerrier
- A closed season: it puts up with what has stopped working, keeps its gifts out of sight until they can be received, and at its peak watches over the fragile thing and ties it to deep roots.
Claims about it
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Key 12 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 12 belongs to two rings, the Ring of Secrets and the Ring of Trials, a chemical family in the body tied to the stop codons.
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 12 on the zodiac, 22°37′30″ Gemini to 28°15′ Gemini, 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.
