The Book of Changes · Bi

Hexagram 8: Holding Together

Water (the gorge and the deep) over Earth (the field)

Union, and the question of whether you belong to what you have joined. The tradition asks the person to examine their own constancy before they ask for anyone else's.

The image

Water over the earth, filling every hollow. The reading is that a bond forms by fitting the shape of the thing, not by being pressed onto it.

Water, above

Danger, depth, and what has to be gone through.

Earth, below

Yielding, carrying, and what receives without insisting.

The six lines

Read from the bottom up.

1. Line 1Sincere from the start, and it fills up quietly. Good comes of it that nobody arranged.
2. Line 2Hold together from the inside. Joining out of need alone does not hold.
3. Line 3Holding together with the wrong people. Common enough, and worth naming.
4. Line 4Openly attached to the one worth being attached to. No concealment needed.
5. Line 5The hunt is driven from three sides and the fourth is left open. Whoever stays, stays freely, and that is the point of leaving it open.
6. Line 6No head to it. Union that begins without a centre has nothing to gather around.

The same figure in Human Design

Human Design took its sixty four gates from this book, in this numbering, so hexagram 8 is Gate 8, Contribution.