Key 3, 屯 Zhūn: a shoot in hard ground, and the threads to sort

Meaning

The character 屯 pictures a sprout bent under the soil, and the hexagram puts thunder, movement, under water, danger: energy that has begun to move but has not yet found its way out. The Judgment promises great success while warning that no move should be made lightly, and that it helps to appoint helpers. Our gloss is first shoots, hard going. For the whole text see the hexagram 3 page.

In the received order 屯 comes straight after heaven and earth, the first thing born of their meeting, and the tradition reads it as the confusion of every start: plenty of energy, little order yet. It pairs with key 4, its figure turned upside down.

The three bands

The Shadow band, Floundering, is the third line, 即鹿无虞: chasing a deer without a forester to guide you, only to plunge further into the woods. The text's advice is to give up the chase rather than go on alone. The Gift band, Weaving, is the Image, 君子以經綸: clouds and thunder, and the noble person puts things in order as one sets the warp and weft of a loom. The Siddhi band, Emergence, follows the Judgment's success and its call to establish helpers, 利建侯: the shoot clear of the soil because the ground around it was prepared.

All three are about beginnings. The difference between them is whether a start is pushed blindly, worked at with patience and help, or carried through into the open.

In a profile

Key 3 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 26°22′30″ Aries and 2°00′ 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 16 to 21 April. People born then have key 3 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 50, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 17 to 22 July, it is the Radiance, where the Sun stood at the design moment.

Each of its six lines is 56′15″ wide. A position from 26°22′30″ Aries is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 1°03′45″ 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

屯 Zhūn, hexagram 3 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Kun sourced

Trigram images

Thunder below, Water above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced

Our gloss

first shoots, hard going: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction

Our words for the three bands

Floundering, Weaving and Emergence, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction

Opposite on the wheel

Key 50, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced

Pair in the received order

Key 4, 蒙 Méng: the same six lines turned upside down, next to it in the received order sourced

Within and upside down

Lines 2 to 5 give 23 剝 Bō; the figure turned upside down gives 4 蒙 Méng sourced

Codon ring (Rudd)

Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Life and Death, which he ties to leucine: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced

Place on the wheel

Gate 3 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 26°22′30″ Aries to 2°00′ Taurus (26.375° to 32° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced

How the schools read it

The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)

Great progress and success, with advantage in firmness; no move should be made lightly, and it helps to appoint helpers. The text in full is on the hexagram 3 page.

Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)

Gate 3, 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 3, 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 50 its programming partner.

EsoTerrier

Beginnings that come hard: the tangle is sorted thread by thread with the right help, rushed it only goes deeper, and at its peak the new thing breaks clean through.

Claims about it

• Key 3 is a code held in the genes, and contemplating it changes how they are expressed.

  unverified

  What 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.

• Key 3 belongs to the Ring of Life and Death, a chemical family in the body tied to leucine.

  unverified

  What 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.

• The place of key 3 on the zodiac, 26°22′30″ Aries to 2°00′ Taurus, is an old I Ching teaching.

  false

  What 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.

Elsewhere on EsoTerrier

• Hexagram 3: First Shoots the I Ching text this key is read from
• Key 50: 鼎 Dǐng, the cauldron its opposite on the wheel
• Key 4: 蒙 Méng, the untaught, covered mind its pair in the received order
• Key 23: 剝 Bō, stripping away the hexagram within it, lines 2 to 5
• Human Design gate 3 the same place in the system the profile is calculated by