Meaning
The figure is a mouth: a whole line at the bottom and the top like jaws, four broken lines between. The hexagram is about what one takes in and what one gives, and the tradition reads it widely, as the care of others and of oneself, in what is said as much as in what is eaten. Legge's Judgment gives the method: "We must look at what we are seeking to nourish, and by the exercise of our thoughts seek for the proper aliment." The Image has the superior man watch his words and moderate his eating and drinking.
Human Design places gate 27 from 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Taurus, in the Sacral centre, the motor the system ties to working and life-force energy. Its channel, which the school names Preservation, runs to gate 50 in the Spleen; the pair is one of the two channels of what the school calls the Defense circuit, in its Tribal group.
The engine names the gate Caring. Read with its hexagram, we take it in our own words as the impulse to look after others, and the question the Judgment asks of it: look at what you are caring for, and choose it with thought. The line texts make the same point by contrast; the first gives up its own sacred tortoise to stare at another's food, and the third goes against the way of nourishing altogether. At the channel's other end gate 50 carries the cauldron, the vessel that feeds a household and a temple. The two can be read together as care that holds to what a group values.
Opposite gate 27 is gate 28, great excess, and in the I Ching's order the two are also a pair, each the other with every line flipped. We describe the figures and the system's terms only; nothing on this page is advice about food or anyone's body.
On the wheel
Gate 27 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Taurus, the 17th gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 22 April to 27 April, and within a day of those dates in other years. Each of its six lines covers 56′15″:
- Line 1: 2°00′ to 2°56′15″ Taurus
- Line 2: 2°56′15″ to 3°52′30″ Taurus
- Line 3: 3°52′30″ to 4°48′45″ Taurus
- Line 4: 4°48′45″ to 5°45′ Taurus
- Line 5: 5°45′ to 6°41′15″ Taurus
- Line 6: 6°41′15″ to 7°37′30″ Taurus
In a chart the gate is active when any of the 26 positions falls in it, and the channel Preservation is defined only when gate 50 is active too, by either set.
When the Personality Sun is in this gate, the school's table names the cross by the angle of the profile: the Right Angle Cross of the Unexpected (27/28 | 41/31), the Juxtaposition Cross of Caring (27/28 | 19/33) or the Left Angle Cross of Alignment (27/28 | 19/33). The four numbers are the Personality Sun and Earth, then the Design Sun and Earth. We give the names only.
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 (the I Ching)
- 27 頤 Yí ䷚: Thunder below, Mountain above; Legge (1882) spells it Î sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Taurus, 32° to 37.625° of the tropical zodiac: a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Centre (the system's association)
- Sacral: the system ties it to working and life-force energy. A name and an association, not anatomy sourced
- Channel and circuit
- 27-50 Preservation, to gate 50 in the Spleen: Defense circuit, Tribal group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 28, The Game Player, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of the Unexpected (27/28 | 41/31); Juxtaposition Cross of Caring (27/28 | 19/33); Left Angle Cross of Alignment (27/28 | 19/33) sourced
- Gate name
- Caring: the name the engine prints, the same as the Definitive Book's title as the pyhd tables record it. A name, not the hexagram's sourced
- Gene Keys (Richard Rudd, 2009)
- Key 27, from the same hexagram at the same place on the wheel; our Gene Keys Profile page for it gives our own words sourced
- Our reading
- Looking after others, and choosing what is worth looking after: read as care given from working energy, guided by a sense of what matters. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “We must look at what we are seeking to nourish, and by the exercise of our thoughts seek for the proper aliment.”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate Caring and sets it in the Sacral centre, at one end of the channel Preservation. Its descriptions of the gate and its six lines are in Ra Uru Hu's books, in copyright; we do not quote or paraphrase them.
- The independent schools
- Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler, Chetan Parkyn, Karen Curry Parker and later teachers compute the same gate at the same place, and read it in their own words.
- EsoTerrier
- Looking after others, and choosing what is worth looking after: read as care given from working energy, guided by a sense of what matters.
Claims about it
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Gate 27's place on the zodiac, 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Taurus, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 27.
falseWhat the record shows: The wheel is Ra Uru Hu's arrangement: Shao Yong's 11th-century circle of the 64, rotated so that hexagram 41 starts at 2° Aquarius. No Chinese source ties a hexagram to degrees of the zodiac.
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The Sacral centre, where gate 27 sits, is an organ or gland, and the gate tells something about the body.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: The centre's name is a name. The schools' pairing of the centres with organs and glands, taken from the chakra books of the 1920s, has no physiological correspondence that anyone has shown, and we never read a gate or a centre as the body or its health.
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Gate 27 is one of the 64 codons of the genetic code, so it marks something in a person's genes.
falseWhat the record shows: Both sets have 64 members because both are built from a small alphabet in groups: two kinds of line in six places, four bases in three. Nothing beyond the count matches.
