Meaning
The character 屯 is drawn as a sprout pushing through the ground, and the hexagram is about that moment: something new has started and has not yet broken through. Its lower trigram is thunder, movement, and its upper is water, danger and the rain cloud; the movement is real, but it is moving into difficulty. The Judgment promises great progress all the same, on two conditions. Nothing should be pushed forward lightly, and help should be organised: Legge's English keeps the feudal language, "advantage in appointing feudal princes".
The Image puts clouds over thunder, a storm still gathering, and draws from it a lesson about order: the superior man sorts out his affairs the way one sorts the threads of warp and weft. In our reading, 屯 describes a stage rather than a failure. The confusion of a start is normal, and what the text asks for is persistence without force while things are still unformed.
The lines
The line texts are full of chariots that will not go forward. The first line finds advancing hard and is told to stay firm; the second and fourth show a woman whose horses seem to turn back, and who is being sought, the text explains, not by a raider but by a suitor. The third is the most quoted: a hunter following deer "without (the guidance of) the forester", in Legge's words, ends up lost in the forest, and the wiser course is to give up the chase. The fifth finds it hard to share out favours that are expected of it; the top line, the end of the struggle, weeps.
屯 is paired in the received order with 蒙, hexagram 4, the same figure upside down: the hard beginning and the untaught mind that follows it.
In the birth cast
The time cast arrives at 屯 when the year, month and day leave 6 on eight, which puts 坎 water above, and the same total with the hour added leaves 4, which puts 震 thunder 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 (初九) moving: becomes 8 比 Bǐ, Alliance
- Line 2 (六二) moving: becomes 60 節 Jié, Measure
- Line 3 (六三) moving: becomes 63 既濟 Jì Jì, Already Across
- Line 4 (六四) moving: becomes 17 隨 Suí, Following
- Line 5 (九五) moving: becomes 24 復 Fù, Return
- Line 6 (上六) moving: becomes 42 益 Yì, Increase
Lines 2 to 5 give the hexagram within, 23 剝 Bō, Stripping Away. 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)
- 震 moving, startling below; 坎 sinking, perilous above, in our English sourced
- Trigram family places (Shuogua)
- eldest son below, middle son above sourced
- Trigram body and animal images (Shuogua)
- feet and dragon below; ears and pig above sourced
- Trigram phases (a classical correspondence: the Plum Blossom text's table)
- Wood below, Water 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: 4 蒙 Méng, The Untaught Mind; every line flipped: 50 鼎 Dǐng, The Cauldron sourced
- Human Design gate
- Gate 3, from 26.375° to 32° of the tropical zodiac on Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Our English title
- First Shoots: EsoTerrier's own, from the sense of 屯 our construction
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “(But) any movement in advance should not be (lightly) undertaken. There will be advantage in appointing feudal princes.”
- The Image (大象), one of the Wings, in our paraphrase
- Clouds and thunder form the figure; the superior man sorts out his affairs as one sorts the threads of warp and weft.
- The Plum Blossom method (Ming)
- A figure reached by numbers: 坎 above when the year, month and day leave 6 on eight, 震 below when the same total with the hour leaves 4.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987)
- Takes the number for its gate 3 and puts it on the zodiac; its own reading, which we do not quote.
- EsoTerrier
- New growth pushing through hard ground while everything is still tangled; not a time for rushing ahead, but for finding helpers and sorting the threads one by one.
Claims about it
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Gate 3 of Human Design, at 26.375° to 32° of the zodiac, is where the I Ching itself places hexagram 3.
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.
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Being born under 屯 Zhūn 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.
