Key 59, 渙 Huàn: wind over water, the ice breaking up

Meaning

渙 means to disperse, to dissolve, as ice breaks up in spring. Wind passes over water and breaks its surface into waves; what was fixed is loosened. The statement of the hexagram sends the king to his ancestral temple and says it is good to cross the great river: dispersal answered by a centre that gathers again. Our gloss is scattering, dissolving. The text is on the hexagram 59 page.

The Image ties the hexagram to the old kings' offerings and the founding of temples, rites that drew a scattered people together. Key 59 pairs with key 60, measure; its opposite on the wheel is key 55.

The three bands

The Shadow band, Fragmentation, is the name's darker sense, 渙: scattering, everyone going off to their own corner. The Gift band, Loosening, is the Image, 風行水上: wind moving over the water, melting what has frozen hard between people. The Siddhi band, Universality, is the fourth line, 渙其群, 渙有丘: it disperses its group, and the dispersal makes a hill; the small circle dissolved into something larger.

So the key moves from breaking apart, to thawing, to joining a larger whole.

In a profile

Key 59 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 0°07′30″ Virgo and 5°45′ 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 23 to 28 August. People born then have key 59 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 55, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 20 to 25 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 0°07′30″ Virgo is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 4°48′45″ Virgo 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

渙 Huàn, hexagram 59 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Hwân sourced

Trigram images

Water below, Wind / wood above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced

Our gloss

scattering, dissolving: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction

Our words for the three bands

Fragmentation, Loosening and Universality, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction

Opposite on the wheel

Key 55, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced

Pair in the received order

Key 60, 節 Jié: the same six lines turned upside down, next to it in the received order sourced

Within and upside down

Lines 2 to 5 give 27 頤 Yí; the figure turned upside down gives 60 節 Jié 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 59 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 0°07′30″ Virgo to 5°45′ Virgo (150.125° to 155.75° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced

How the schools read it

The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)

Progress and success; the king goes to his ancestral temple; advantage in crossing the great stream and in being firm and correct. The text in full is on the hexagram 59 page.

Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)

Gate 59, 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 59, 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 55 its programming partner.

EsoTerrier

Dissolving what has set hard: it scatters everyone to their own corner, melts what has frozen between people, and at its peak dissolves the small circle into something larger.

Claims about it

• Key 59 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 59 belongs to the Ring of Union, a chemical family in the body tied to valine.

  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 59 on the zodiac, 0°07′30″ Virgo to 5°45′ Virgo, 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 59: Scattering the I Ching text this key is read from
• Key 55: 豐 Fēng, fullness, the noon its opposite on the wheel
• Key 60: 節 Jié, measure, the joint in the bamboo its pair in the received order
• Key 27: 頤 Yí, nourishment, the jaws the hexagram within it, lines 2 to 5
• Human Design gate 59 the same place in the system the profile is calculated by