Meaning
大過 is great excess, the great preponderating: too much weight in the middle and too little to hold it at the ends. The figure has four strong lines between two yielding ones, and the Judgment's image is a ridgepole that sags. Wood lies under the water of the lake, as trees are drowned in a flood. Yet the statement of the hexagram adds that it is good to have somewhere to go, and that there is success. Our gloss is great excess. The text is on the hexagram 28 page.
Key 28 is the reverse of key 27 in every line and its pair in the received order; within it lies key 1, all strong.
The three bands
The Shadow band, Overloading, is the third line, 棟橈: the ridgepole bends, misfortune. It is piling on until the frame gives. The Gift band, Fearlessness, is the Image, 君子以獨立不懼, 遯世无悶: the noble person stands alone without fear, and withdraws from the world without regret. The Siddhi band, Greening, is the second line, 枯楊生稊: a dry willow puts out shoots, new life in old wood.
The bands describe a time of too much at three settings: collapse under it, courage within it, renewal out of it.
In a profile
Key 28 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 2°00′ Scorpio and 7°37′30″ Scorpio 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 25 to 30 October. People born then have key 28 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 27, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 20 to 25 January, it is the Radiance, where the Sun stood at the design moment.
Each of its six lines is 56′15″ wide. A position from 2°00′ Scorpio is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 6°41′15″ Scorpio 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
- 大過 Dà Guò, hexagram 28 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Tâ Kwo sourced
- Trigram images
- Wind / wood below, Lake / marsh above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced
- Our gloss
- great excess: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction
- Our words for the three bands
- Overloading, Fearlessness and Greening, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction
- Opposite on the wheel
- Key 27, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced
- Pair in the received order
- Key 27, 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 1 乾 Qián; turned upside down the figure is unchanged sourced
- Codon ring (Rudd)
- Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Illusion, which he ties to aspartic acid: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced
- Place on the wheel
- Gate 28 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 2°00′ Scorpio to 7°37′30″ Scorpio (212° to 217.625° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)
- A beam that is weak; advantage in moving in any direction; success. The text in full is on the hexagram 28 page.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)
- Gate 28, in the Spleen 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 28, 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 27 its programming partner.
- EsoTerrier
- A load past what the frame can bear: it piles on until the beam bends, stands alone without fear when the time demands it, and at its peak brings new growth out of old wood.
Claims about it
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Key 28 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 28 belongs to the Ring of Illusion, a chemical family in the body tied to aspartic acid.
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 28 on the zodiac, 2°00′ Scorpio to 7°37′30″ Scorpio, 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.
