Meaning
The character 蠱 is a bowl with worms in it, and its sense runs from decay to the harm that comes of neglect. The figure puts the wind under the still mountain, a stagnant air trapped beneath a slope. The surprise is the Judgment. It does not lament the rot; it promises great progress, allows the great crossing, and gives the book's most quoted rule of timing: weigh the three days before the turning point and the three days after it.
The Image turns the picture outward and inward at once: the superior man stirs people up and nourishes his own character. In our reading, 蠱 is the hexagram of repair. Something was left too long, and the work is to set it right, deliberately, thinking about what led to the break and what follows it. The line texts place that work in a family, which makes it a matter of inheritance as much as of effort.
The lines
Five of the six lines speak of a child dealing with what a parent left undone. The first and third take on the father's troubles, the first carefully and the third with some small regret but no great fault; the second deals with the mother's and is told not to push its correctness to the limit. The fourth looks on the father's troubles indulgently and comes to regret it; the fifth deals with them and wins praise. The top line stands outside the work: it "does not serve either king or feudal lord", in Legge's words, and attends to its own affairs.
Its pair and opposite is 隨, hexagram 17; within 蠱 lies 歸妹, hexagram 54.
In the birth cast
The time cast arrives at 蠱 when the year, month and day leave 7 on eight, which puts 艮 mountain above, and the same total with the hour added leaves 5, which puts 巽 wind below. Which line moves depends on what the whole total leaves on six, and each line turns the figure into a different hexagram:
- Line 1 (初六) moving: becomes 26 大畜 Dà Xù, Great Restraint
- Line 2 (九二) moving: becomes 52 艮 Gèn, Stopping
- Line 3 (九三) moving: becomes 4 蒙 Méng, The Untaught Mind
- Line 4 (六四) moving: becomes 50 鼎 Dǐng, The Cauldron
- Line 5 (六五) moving: becomes 57 巽 Xùn, Entering Wind
- Line 6 (上九) moving: becomes 46 升 Shēng, Ascent
Lines 2 to 5 give the hexagram within, 54 歸妹 Guī Mèi, The Younger Sister Weds. Everyone born in the same lunar day and double hour has the same cast, so the figure describes a moment, not a person.
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.
- Trigram virtues (Shuogua, chapter 7)
- 巽 entering, pervading below; 艮 stopping, at rest above, in our English sourced
- Trigram family places (Shuogua)
- eldest daughter below, youngest son above sourced
- Trigram body and animal images (Shuogua)
- thighs and fowl below; hands and dog above sourced
- Trigram phases (a classical correspondence: the Plum Blossom text's table)
- Wood below, Earth above. The Han assignment of 梅花易數, book 1, also used by Jing Fang; not stated as such in the Zhouyi sourced
- Inverse and opposite
- Upside down: 17 隨 Suí, Following; every line flipped: 17 隨 Suí, Following sourced
- Human Design gate
- Gate 18, from 183.875° to 189.5° of the tropical zodiac on Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Our English title
- Repairing Decay: EsoTerrier's own, from the sense of 蠱 our construction
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “(He should weigh well, however, the events of) three days before the turning point, and those (to be done) three days after it.”
- The Image (大象), one of the Wings, in our paraphrase
- Wind at the foot of a mountain; the superior man helps the people and nourishes his own virtue.
- The Plum Blossom method (Ming)
- A figure reached by numbers: 艮 above when the year, month and day leave 7 on eight, 巽 below when the same total with the hour leaves 5.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987)
- Takes the number for its gate 18 and puts it on the zodiac; its own reading, which we do not quote.
- EsoTerrier
- Wind under the mountain, and things left to spoil: the work of setting right what came before, done decisively, with thought given to the days before and after.
Claims about it
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Gate 18 of Human Design, at 183.875° to 189.5° of the zodiac, is where the I Ching itself places hexagram 18.
falseWhat the record shows: The wheel is Shao Yong's circle rotated by Ra Uru Hu in 1987 to 1989 so that hexagram 41 starts at 2° Aquarius. No Chinese source we found puts the hexagrams on degrees of the zodiac.
-
Being born under 蠱 Gǔ fixes a person's character.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: A modern reading with no source in the tradition. The Zhouyi has no birth hexagram; the cast reads a figure, not a person, and everyone born in the same lunar day and double hour shares it.
