The Book of Changes · Pi

Hexagram 12: Standstill

Heaven (the sky) over Earth (the field)

The inverse of peace, and the mechanism is the same: heaven rising, earth sinking, the two moving apart. Communication has stopped and effort spent forcing it makes the stop worse.

The image

Heaven over earth, not meeting. The reading is that a person withdraws their worth from view rather than spending it where it will be wasted.

Heaven, above

Force, and the initiative that does not wait to be asked.

Earth, below

Yielding, carrying, and what receives without insisting.

The six lines

Read from the bottom up.

1. Line 1Pull one reed and others come. Perseverance brings good fortune even now.
2. Line 2Bearing and enduring. The great person keeps their own quality through it.
3. Line 3They carry shame. Feeling it is the first honest thing here.
4. Line 4Acting on what is actually mandated. Those with you share in it.
5. Line 5The standstill ends. Tie it to a mulberry shoot: still fragile, still tied.
6. Line 6It stops. First it stood still, then it is glad. The end is not the middle.

The same figure in Human Design

Human Design took its sixty four gates from this book, in this numbering, so hexagram 12 is Gate 12, Caution.