Meaning
A lake lies on a mountain: the mountain holds it up and the lake keeps the mountain moist. The hexagram is mutual influence, the stirring of one thing by another, and it opens the second part of the I Ching as heaven and earth open the first. Legge's Judgment promises free course and success, with good fortune depending on correctness, as in a marriage. The line texts climb a figure from the feet upward, each a movement made too soon, until the last moves only the jaws and tongue, influence by talk.
Human Design places gate 31 from 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Leo, in the Throat centre, which the system ties to expression and action. Its channel, which the school names The Alpha, runs to gate 7 in the G centre, the centre of identity and direction in its terms; the pair is in the Understanding circuit of the Collective group.
The engine names the gate Influence, which is also part of the common English name of the hexagram; the hexagram keeps its own name here. We read the gate, in our own words, as the voice that moves others by being responded to. The Image gives the condition: the superior man receives others with emptiness, without pressing his own view, and that is what lets him influence them. Joined to gate 7, the army under its leader, the gate can be read as leadership given voice, and accepted only as long as the voice stays answerable.
Opposite gate 31 on the wheel is gate 41, the decrease, the gate where the wheel begins. The school names a cross, the Alpha, from gate 31 at its Left Angle, the same name as the channel.
On the wheel
Gate 31 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Leo, the 33rd gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 24 July to 30 July, 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″ Leo
- Line 2: 2°56′15″ to 3°52′30″ Leo
- Line 3: 3°52′30″ to 4°48′45″ Leo
- Line 4: 4°48′45″ to 5°45′ Leo
- Line 5: 5°45′ to 6°41′15″ Leo
- Line 6: 6°41′15″ to 7°37′30″ Leo
In a chart the gate is active when any of the 26 positions falls in it, and the channel The Alpha is defined only when gate 7 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 (31/41 | 27/28), the Juxtaposition Cross of Influence (31/41 | 24/44) or the Left Angle Cross of the Alpha (31/41 | 24/44). 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)
- 31 咸 Xián ䷞: Mountain below, Lake / marsh above; Legge (1882) spells it Hsien sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Leo, 122° to 127.625° of the tropical zodiac: a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Centre (the system's association)
- Throat: the system ties it to expression and action. A name and an association, not anatomy sourced
- Channel and circuit
- 7-31 The Alpha, to gate 7 in the G: Understanding circuit, Collective group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 41, Contraction, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of the Unexpected (31/41 | 27/28); Juxtaposition Cross of Influence (31/41 | 24/44); Left Angle Cross of the Alpha (31/41 | 24/44) sourced
- Gate name
- Influence: 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 31, 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
- Influence that works by response, not by force: read as a voice that leads because others are moved by it and choose to follow. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “Its advantageousness will depend on the being firm and correct, (as) in marrying a young lady. There will be good fortune.”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate Influence and sets it in the Throat centre, at one end of the channel The Alpha. 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
- Influence that works by response, not by force: read as a voice that leads because others are moved by it and choose to follow.
Claims about it
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Gate 31's place on the zodiac, 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Leo, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 31.
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 Throat centre, where gate 31 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 31 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.
