Gen · Mountain

Meaning

Gen ☶ is the mountain: a whole, yang line at the top over two broken ones, a firm summit on soft ground, the shape of a hill against the sky. The Discussion of the Trigrams gives it one word, stopping, and sets it in the north-east between the end of winter and the start of spring, where, it says, all things come to their end and to their beginning. In the family of the trigrams it is the youngest son, the yang line in the top place.

The tradition reads in it stillness, reflection and the wisdom of knowing when to stop: the pause before a decision, the calm that lets things settle, the patience of a mountain that does not need to move to be there. Its difficulty is stillness that has outlived its reason, a stop that becomes a stand-still, a reserve that keeps others out as well as the noise. The Book of Changes says that the mountain keeps still when it is time to keep still, and moves when it is time to move.

Its opposite is Dui ☱, the lake, the youngest daughter: the mountain over the lake makes Sun, decrease, and the lake over the mountain Xian, attraction, which the Flying Stars name in the pairing of the 7 and the 8.

In practice

• The Kua number: Gen is Kua 8, of the West group. Its four supportive directions are the south-west (Growth), the north-west (Restoration), the west (Harmony) and the north-east, its own place (Stability).
• The rule for 5: a Kua of 5 has no trigram of its own, and the yin count takes Gen, as most schools do; the yang count takes Kun.
• A Gen house: a home sitting in the north-east and facing south-west is a Gen house of the West group.
• The Flying Stars: the north-east is the Gen palace, home of the 8 White, Zuo Fu, the star of property and lasting gains, timely through Period 8, from 2004 to 2023, and just past its time in Period 9.
• The 24 mountains: Gen’s 45° hold Chou, Gen and Yin, from 22.5° to 67.5°; Gen itself, the middle one, is a mountain named after the trigram.

Across traditions

• In the Book of Changes Gen doubled is the 52nd hexagram, mountain upon mountain, which Richard Wilhelm named Keeping Still: rest that is not idleness, the back kept still while the mind becomes quiet. Human Design’s Gate 52 is that hexagram.
• In the Celtic year Imbolc, at the start of February, falls between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, as Gen’s season does around Lichun: two calendars that mark the quarter between the seasons.
• In Japan its reading, ushitora, names the north-east, the corner of the Ox and the Tiger, between Chou and Yin as on the luopan.

Origin and history

The Discussion of the Trigrams, one of the Ten Wings of the Book of Changes, written between the Warring States and the Han, gives Gen the hand among the parts of the body and the dog among the animals, and images of what stands and holds: the mountain, the by-way, small stones, the gate and its watchman, fruits and seeds. In the Early Heaven arrangement, which Shao Yong and the Song scholars traced to Fu Xi, Gen stands in the north-west; in the Later Heaven arrangement, traced to King Wen, which Feng Shui follows, it holds the north-east, where the old year ends and the new one begins.

Richard Wilhelm’s translation of 1924 named it “Keeping Still”. The compass schools set it in the north-east of the luopan, one of the four corner trigrams among the 24 mountains, and the Ba Zhai Ming Jing makes it the trigram of the eighth Kua, and of the yin count’s Kua 5; the Flying Stars, after Shen Zhureng, read its palace as the home of the 8.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune draws Gen from its lines, broken, broken and whole from the bottom up, rather than from a font. The trigram holds the north-east in the Later Heaven order and carries the Lo Shu’s number 8: the yin count gives Kua 8 for a solar year such as 1984, 1993 or 2002, and for the years whose count would give 5, such as 1990, 1999 or 2008; the yang count gives it for 1983, 1992 or 2001.

Its directions follow from the lines. The south-west’s Kun differs from Gen in its top line alone, Growth; the north-west’s Qian in its two lower lines, Restoration; the west’s Dui in all three, Harmony. The four trigrams of the East group give Gen’s four challenging directions.

Correspondences