Key 38, 睽 Kuí: fire rising, the lake sinking, and the two moving apart

Meaning

睽 is to look askance, to be at odds. Fire rises and the lake sinks, so the two trigrams move away from each other; the middle and youngest daughters live under one roof but their wills go different ways. The statement of the hexagram is modest: in small matters, good fortune. Our gloss is estrangement, facing apart. The full text is on the hexagram 38 page.

The Image turns opposition into a virtue: the noble person, in the midst of agreement, keeps their difference. In the sample profile on our system page, key 38 is the IQ row. Key 38 pairs with key 37 and has key 39 as its opposite.

The three bands

The Shadow band, Misreading, is the top line, 見豕負塗, 載鬼一車, 先張之弧: one sees a pig covered in mud, a cart full of demons, and first draws the bow. It is taking a friend for an enemy. The Gift band, Distinctness, is the Image, 君子以同而異: the noble person shares the common ground and still remains distinct. The Siddhi band, Recognition, is the same line's turn, 後說之弧, 匪寇婚媾: then the bow is put down, for these are not robbers but people come to woo.

So the key moves from suspicion, through a difference held calmly, to recognition.

In a profile

Key 38 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 9°30′ Capricorn and 15°07′30″ Capricorn 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 31 December to 5 January. People born then have key 38 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 39, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 28 March to 2 April, it is the Radiance, where the Sun stood at the design moment.

Each of its six lines is 56′15″ wide. A position from 9°30′ Capricorn is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 14°11′15″ Capricorn 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

睽 Kuí, hexagram 38 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Khwei sourced

Trigram images

Lake / marsh below, Fire above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced

Our gloss

estrangement, facing apart: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction

Our words for the three bands

Misreading, Distinctness and Recognition, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction

Opposite on the wheel

Key 39, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced

Pair in the received order

Key 37, 家人 Jiā Rén: the same six lines turned upside down, next to it in the received order sourced

Within and upside down

Lines 2 to 5 give 63 既濟 Jì Jì; the figure turned upside down gives 37 家人 Jiā Rén sourced

Codon ring (Rudd)

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

Place on the wheel

Gate 38 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 9°30′ Capricorn to 15°07′30″ Capricorn (279.5° to 285.125° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced

How the schools read it

The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)

In small matters there will still be good success. The text in full is on the hexagram 38 page.

Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)

Gate 38, in the Root 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 38, 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 39 its programming partner.

EsoTerrier

Difference and how it is seen: it mistakes a friend for an enemy, keeps its own character while sharing the ground, and at its peak recognises the friend behind the stranger's face.

Claims about it

• Key 38 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 38 belongs to the Ring of Humanity, a chemical family in the body tied to arginine.

  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 38 on the zodiac, 9°30′ Capricorn to 15°07′30″ Capricorn, 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 38: Estrangement the I Ching text this key is read from
• Key 39: 蹇 Jiǎn, obstruction, limping its opposite on the wheel
• Key 37: 家人 Jiā Rén, the household, its roles its pair in the received order
• Key 63: 既濟 Jì Jì, already across the hexagram within it, lines 2 to 5
• Human Design gate 38 the same place in the system the profile is calculated by