Meaning
坤 is earth, and the figure is all yielding lines. Where key 1 starts things, key 2 receives them and brings them to completion; the Judgment gives it the firmness of a mare, an animal of the earth that keeps going, and says that whoever goes first loses the way, while whoever follows finds a lord. Our gloss, yielding that carries all, takes its sense from the Image, in which the earth's breadth bears every thing on it. The text in full is on the hexagram 2 page.
The tradition reads 乾 and 坤 as a pair that frames the book: the strong and the yielding, father and mother in the family of the trigrams. Key 2 is therefore the opposite of key 1 in every line, and also its pair in the received order.
The three bands
The Shadow band, Rivalry, is the top line, 龍戰于野: dragons fighting in the wild, their blood dark and yellow. The yielding has pushed so far that it meets the strong as an enemy instead of completing it. The Gift band, Supportiveness, is the Image, 厚德載物: with a broad and generous character, carry things. It is the skill of holding what others bring and giving it room to grow. The Siddhi band, Amplitude, takes up the Judgment's promise that following, not leading, finds its master, 先迷後得主, and the earth's own extent: room for everything, with nothing turned away.
We wrote these words from the Chinese text in October 2026. They describe a quality at three degrees: receptiveness that competes, that carries and that simply holds.
In a profile
Key 2 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 13°15′ Taurus and 18°52′30″ Taurus 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 4 to 9 May. People born then have key 2 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 1, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 4 to 9 August, it is the Radiance, where the Sun stood at the design moment.
Each of its six lines is 56′15″ wide. A position from 13°15′ Taurus is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 17°56′15″ Taurus 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
- 坤 Kūn, hexagram 2 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Khwăn sourced
- Trigram images
- Earth below, Earth above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced
- Our gloss
- yielding that carries all: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction
- Our words for the three bands
- Rivalry, Supportiveness and Amplitude, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction
- Opposite on the wheel
- Key 1, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced
- Pair in the received order
- Key 1, 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, and the figure turned upside down, both give key 2 again sourced
- Codon ring (Rudd)
- Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Water, which he ties to phenylalanine: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced
- Place on the wheel
- Gate 2 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 13°15′ Taurus to 18°52′30″ Taurus (43.25° to 48.875° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)
- Legge's Judgment gives the same four qualities as hexagram 1 but with the firmness of a mare, and advises following rather than leading. The text in full is on the hexagram 2 page.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)
- Gate 2, 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 2, 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 1 its programming partner.
- EsoTerrier
- Strength that receives and completes: it supports by giving room, turns into rivalry when it competes with what it should carry, and at its peak is as wide as the ground.
Claims about it
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Key 2 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 2 belongs to the Ring of Water, a chemical family in the body tied to phenylalanine.
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 2 on the zodiac, 13°15′ Taurus to 18°52′30″ Taurus, 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.
