Meaning
Wood grows up out of the earth: a tree rising slowly from the ground. The hexagram is ascent, and the tradition reads it as progress made by accumulation, not by leaps. Legge's Judgment promises "great progress and success", and advises seeing the great man and setting out towards the south. The Image has the superior man attend to his virtue and add to it little by little until it is high and great, as a tree grows.
Human Design places gate 46 from 28°15′ Virgo to 3°52′30″ Libra, in the G centre, which the system ties to identity and direction. Its channel, which the school names Discovery, runs to gate 29 in the Sacral, the motor it ties to working and life-force energy; the pair is in the Sensing circuit of the Collective group.
The engine names the gate Love of the Body. The Definitive Book, as the pyhd tables record it, titles it The Determination of the Self, one of the eight places where the two sets differ in substance. We read the gate, in our own words, as ascent through being present in each step: the self that rises by attending to where it is, the way the tree grows by its small gains. That is a reading of a hexagram and a place on a wheel; it says nothing about anyone's body or how it should be treated. Joined to gate 29, water doubled, the gate can be read as rising by staying with what one has committed to.
Opposite gate 46 on the wheel is gate 25, without pretence, and the school names the Right Angle Cross of the Vessel of Love from 46 and 25 with 15 and 10.
On the wheel
Gate 46 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 28°15′ Virgo to 3°52′30″ Libra, the 43rd gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 21 September to 27 September, and within a day of those dates in other years. Each of its six lines covers 56′15″:
- Line 1: 28°15′ to 29°11′15″ Virgo
- Line 2: 29°11′15″ Virgo to 0°07′30″ Libra
- Line 3: 0°07′30″ to 1°03′45″ Libra
- Line 4: 1°03′45″ to 2°00′ Libra
- Line 5: 2°00′ to 2°56′15″ Libra
- Line 6: 2°56′15″ to 3°52′30″ Libra
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 29 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 Vessel of Love (46/25 | 15/10), the Juxtaposition Cross of Serendipity (46/25 | 52/58) or the Left Angle Cross of Healing (46/25 | 52/58). 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)
- 46 升 Shēng ䷭: Wind / wood below, Earth above; Legge (1882) spells it Shăng sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 28°15′ Virgo to 3°52′30″ Libra, 178.25° to 183.875° of the tropical zodiac: a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Centre (the system's association)
- G: the system ties it to identity and direction. A name and an association, not anatomy sourced
- Channel and circuit
- 29-46 Discovery, to gate 29 in the Sacral: Sensing circuit, Collective group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 25, Innocence, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of the Vessel of Love (46/25 | 15/10); Juxtaposition Cross of Serendipity (46/25 | 52/58); Left Angle Cross of Healing (46/25 | 52/58) sourced
- Gate name
- Love of the Body: the name the engine prints. The Definitive Book (2011), as the pyhd tables record it, titles the gate "The Determination of the Self". A name, not the hexagram's disputed
- Gene Keys (Richard Rudd, 2009)
- Key 46, 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
- Rising by being fully where one is: read as a self that grows through the plain experience of each step, and is glad of it. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “Shăng indicates that (under its conditions) there will be great progress and success.”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate Love of the Body and sets it in the G 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
- Rising by being fully where one is: read as a self that grows through the plain experience of each step, and is glad of it.
Claims about it
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Gate 46's place on the zodiac, 28°15′ Virgo to 3°52′30″ Libra, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 46.
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 G centre, where gate 46 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 46 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.
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Gate 46 has one canonical name.
disputedWhat the record shows: Several sets circulate. The engine prints "Love of the Body"; the Definitive Book, as the pyhd tables record it, has "The Determination of the Self". We keep the engine's so the chart and the page agree.
