Gene Keys profile, key 8: 比 Bǐ

Key 8 is 比 Bǐ, water lying on the earth, the hexagram of joining and alliance. The text asks who one joins with and when, and our three words for its bands come from the wrong company, the early choice, and the king who leaves one side of the hunt open.

Meaning

比 means to stand side by side, to keep close. Water lies directly on the earth with nothing between, and the single strong line in the fifth place is the centre everyone else draws towards. The Judgment speaks of good fortune, tells the one at the centre to examine himself again, and warns that those who come late meet misfortune. Our gloss is joining, alliance. The text is on the hexagram 8 page.

Where key 7 is a force ordered from within, key 8 is a gathering that people join by choice; the two are a pair in the received order, the same lines turned over.

The three bands

The Shadow band, Misalliance, is the third line, 比之匪人: joining with the wrong people, those who do not share the aim. The Gift band, Belonging, follows the Judgment's warning against coming late, 後夫凶: choose early what to belong to, and keep faith with it. The Siddhi band, Latitude, is the fifth line, 王用三驅, 失前禽: the king hunts with beaters on three sides only and lets the game in front escape. The bond that holds best is the one that leaves a way out.

The key moves from the wrong alliance, through faithful membership, to a bond that keeps people by not holding them. It is a theme about belonging.

In a profile

Key 8 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 24°30′ Taurus and 0°07′30″ Gemini 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 15 to 20 May. People born then have key 8 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 14, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 15 to 20 August, 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′ Taurus is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 29°11′15″ 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: 比 Bǐ, hexagram 8 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Pî sourced
Trigram images: Earth below, Water above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced
Our gloss: joining, alliance: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction
Our words for the three bands: Misalliance, Belonging and Latitude, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction
Opposite on the wheel: Key 14, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced
Pair in the received order: Key 7, 師 Shī: 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 7 師 Shī sourced
Codon ring (Rudd): Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Water, which he ties to phenylalanine: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced
Place on the wheel: Gate 8 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 24°30′ Taurus to 0°07′30″ Gemini (54.5° to 60.125° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced

How the schools read it

The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882): Good fortune; let the principal party examine himself, and those who come late will meet with evil. The text in full is on the hexagram 8 page.
Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward): Gate 8, in the Throat 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 8, 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 14 its programming partner.
EsoTerrier: Belonging and its terms: it joins the wrong company when the aim is not shared, chooses early what to stand with, and at its peak binds others by leaving them free to go.

Claims about it

Key 8 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 8 belongs to the Ring of Water, a chemical family in the body tied to phenylalanine.
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 8 on the zodiac, 24°30′ Taurus to 0°07′30″ Gemini, 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

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Key 8, 比 Bǐ: water close upon the ground

Facts