Meaning
漸 means gradual, by degrees, as water seeps in. A tree grows on the mountain, slowly, rooted and visible far off. The statement of the hexagram is a marriage made in good order, the stages kept, with good fortune and firmness. Our gloss is step by step. The text is on the hexagram 53 page.
Its six lines are a single image: a wild goose moving by stages, to the shore, to the rock, to the dry plain, to a tree, to the hill, and up to the heights. Key 53 is pair and opposite at once to key 54, the younger sister's marriage.
The three bands
The Shadow band, Hurrying, is the reverse of the name itself, 漸: skipping the stages, and so losing the way the stages would have shown. The Gift band, Pacing, is the line texts from the first to the fifth, 鴻漸: the goose advancing by stages, each place reached before the next. The Siddhi band, Exemplarity, is the top line, 其羽可用為儀: its feathers can be used in the dance, a path walked so well that others take it as their pattern.
The three bands describe growth hurried, paced, and become an example.
In a profile
Key 53 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 15°07′30″ Cancer and 20°45′ Cancer 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 7 to 12 July. People born then have key 53 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 54, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 6 to 11 October, it is the Radiance, where the Sun stood at the design moment.
Each of its six lines is 56′15″ wide. A position from 15°07′30″ Cancer is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 19°48′45″ Cancer 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
- 漸 Jiàn, hexagram 53 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Kien sourced
- Trigram images
- Mountain below, Wind / wood above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced
- Our gloss
- step by step: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction
- Our words for the three bands
- Hurrying, Pacing and Exemplarity, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction
- Opposite on the wheel
- Key 54, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced
- Pair in the received order
- Key 54, 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 64 未濟 Wèi Jì; the figure turned upside down gives 54 歸妹 Guī Mèi sourced
- Codon ring (Rudd)
- Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Seeking, which he ties to serine: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced
- Place on the wheel
- Gate 53 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 15°07′30″ Cancer to 20°45′ Cancer (105.125° to 110.75° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)
- The marriage of a young lady, with good fortune; advantage in being firm and correct. The text in full is on the hexagram 53 page.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)
- Gate 53, 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 53, 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 54 its programming partner.
- EsoTerrier
- Development stage by stage: it skips the stages and loses the way, moves step by step like geese along the shore, and at its peak walks a path so well that others take it as their pattern.
Claims about it
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Key 53 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 53 belongs to the Ring of Seeking, a chemical family in the body tied to serine.
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 53 on the zodiac, 15°07′30″ Cancer to 20°45′ Cancer, 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.
