Meaning
坎 is a pit, and the trigram is water, a strong line caught between two yielding ones. Doubled, it is danger upon danger, the only one of the eight doubled trigrams that the text names for its peril. The statement of the hexagram nevertheless speaks of sincerity, a mind that gets through, and action that is valued. Water does not stop at a hollow: it fills it and goes on. Our gloss is the pit, peril doubled. For the text see the hexagram 29 page.
Key 29 and key 30, fire doubled, are pair and opposite at once, the two middle trigrams of the family doubled.
The three bands
The Shadow band, Sinking, is the first line, 入于坎窞: going into the pit, into its deepest hole. It is going further down while trying to get out. The Gift band, Practice, is the Image, 君子以常德行, 習教事: water flows on without stopping, and the noble person keeps virtue constant and goes over the work of teaching again and again. The word 習, repeated practice, is in the hexagram's other name, 習坎. The Siddhi band, Fluency, joins the Image's 水洊至, water arriving again and again, to the fifth line's 坎不盈: the pit is not filled to overflowing.
So the three bands describe how difficulty is met: by sinking, by steady repetition, by flowing through. They describe a quality and give no counsel about any real danger.
In a profile
Key 29 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 24°30′ Leo and 0°07′30″ Virgo 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 17 to 22 August. People born then have key 29 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 30, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 15 to 20 November, it is the Radiance, where the Sun stood at the design moment.
Each of its six lines is 56′15″ wide. A position from 24°30′ Leo is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 29°11′15″ Leo 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
- 坎 Kǎn, hexagram 29 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Khân sourced
- Trigram images
- Water below, Water above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced
- Our gloss
- the pit, peril doubled: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction
- Our words for the three bands
- Sinking, Practice and Fluency, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction
- Opposite on the wheel
- Key 30, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced
- Pair in the received order
- Key 30, 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 27 頤 Yí; turned upside down the figure is unchanged sourced
- Codon ring (Rudd)
- Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Union, which he ties to valine: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced
- Place on the wheel
- Gate 29 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 24°30′ Leo to 0°07′30″ Virgo (144.5° to 150.125° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)
- Sincerity, through which the mind penetrates; action in accordance with it will be of high value. The text in full is on the hexagram 29 page.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)
- Gate 29, in the Sacral 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 29, 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 30 its programming partner.
- EsoTerrier
- Danger met again and again: it sinks further into the pit while trying to climb out, does the right thing over and over until it carries, and at its peak moves through difficulty as water does, filling each hollow and flowing on.
Claims about it
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Key 29 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 29 belongs to the Ring of Union, a chemical family in the body tied to valine.
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 29 on the zodiac, 24°30′ Leo to 0°07′30″ Virgo, 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.
