Meaning
Water over water, one hollow after another: the hexagram is the abyss, the repeated danger. It is one of the eight hexagrams made of a trigram doubled, and the book treats it with respect. Legge's Judgment finds in it "the possession of sincerity, through which the mind is penetrating", and action in keeping with that "will be of high value". The Image sees water flowing on without stopping and filling every hollow on its way, and asks the superior man to keep his virtue as constant and to practise his teaching.
Human Design places gate 29 from 24°30′ Leo to 0°07′30″ Virgo, in the Sacral centre, the motor the system ties to working and life-force energy. Its channel, which the school names Discovery, runs to gate 46 in the G centre; the pair is in the Sensing circuit of the Collective group.
The engine names the gate Perseverance, and the water of the Image gives it a shape: not holding on in one place, but moving through one hollow after another without losing its nature. We read the gate, in our own words, as commitment, the energy that stays with something once it has begun and is carried through difficulty by it. The line texts are honest about the cost; several are caught in the pit. Joined to gate 46, the hexagram of ascending, the gate can be read as perseverance that finds out what it was for only by going on.
Opposite gate 29 on the wheel is gate 30, fire doubled, which is also its pair in the I Ching's order: the two doubled trigrams of water and fire. The school names a cross, Contagion, from 29 and 30 with 8 and 14.
On the wheel
Gate 29 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 24°30′ Leo to 0°07′30″ Virgo, the 37th gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 17 August to 23 August, and within a day of those dates in other years. Each of its six lines covers 56′15″:
- Line 1: 24°30′ to 25°26′15″ Leo
- Line 2: 25°26′15″ to 26°22′30″ Leo
- Line 3: 26°22′30″ to 27°18′45″ Leo
- Line 4: 27°18′45″ to 28°15′ Leo
- Line 5: 28°15′ to 29°11′15″ Leo
- Line 6: 29°11′15″ Leo to 0°07′30″ Virgo
In a chart the gate is active when any of the 26 positions falls in it, and the channel Discovery is defined only when gate 46 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 Contagion (29/30 | 8/14), the Juxtaposition Cross of Commitment (29/30 | 20/34) or the Left Angle Cross of Industry (29/30 | 20/34). 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)
- 29 坎 Kǎn ䷜: Water doubled; Legge (1882) spells it Khân sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 24°30′ Leo to 0°07′30″ Virgo, 144.5° to 150.125° 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
- 29-46 Discovery, to gate 46 in the G: Sensing circuit, Collective group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 30, Recognition of Feelings, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of Contagion (29/30 | 8/14); Juxtaposition Cross of Commitment (29/30 | 20/34); Left Angle Cross of Industry (29/30 | 20/34) sourced
- Gate name
- Perseverance: 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 29, 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
- Going on through what is hard because one has said yes to it: read as commitment that keeps flowing, the way water fills a hollow and moves on. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “Khan, here repeated, shows the possession of sincerity, through which the mind is penetrating. Action (in accordance with this) will be of high value.”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate Perseverance and sets it in the Sacral centre, at one end of the channel Discovery. 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
- Going on through what is hard because one has said yes to it: read as commitment that keeps flowing, the way water fills a hollow and moves on.
Claims about it
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Gate 29's place on the zodiac, 24°30′ Leo to 0°07′30″ Virgo, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 29.
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 29 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 29 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.
