The Book of Changes · Kun

Hexagram 2: The Receptive

Earth (the field) over Earth (the field)

Pure yielding, which the tradition is careful to say is not weakness: it is capacity. This is the ground that carries what the creative starts, and nothing gets built without it.

The image

Earth doubled: it holds whatever is set on it. The reading is that breadth of character is what lets a person carry things that would break someone narrower.

Earth, above

Yielding, carrying, and what receives without insisting.

Earth, below

Yielding, carrying, and what receives without insisting.

The six lines

Read from the bottom up.

1. Line 1Frost underfoot. The first cold is small and it is telling you what season is coming.
2. Line 2Straight, level, wide. What is done without calculation goes further here.
3. Line 3Do the work without needing your name on it. The result stands either way.
4. Line 4A tied sack. Say nothing, claim nothing, and nothing can be held against you.
5. Line 5Quiet authority that does not announce itself. The most fortunate line in the figure.
6. Line 6Yielding pushed past its limit becomes a fight, and nobody wins it.

The same figure in Human Design

Human Design took its sixty four gates from this book, in this numbering, so hexagram 2 is Gate 2, Direction of the Self.