The Channel of Mutation joins the Sacral centre to the Root centre through Gates 3 and 60, and both of those numbers are borrowed. They are positions in the King Wen sequence of the I Ching, the Chinese divinatory classic whose sixty-four hexagrams Human Design maps one to one onto the sixty-four gates of its bodygraph. Read as I Ching rather than as Human Design, the two numbers name two independent oracle texts.
Hexagram 3, Difficulty at the Beginning (Zhun). Thunder labouring beneath water. Its image is the first blade of grass forcing its way out of the earth, the ordained chaos that attends every genuine beginning, and its counsel is perseverance and the appointing of helpers.
Hexagram 60, Limitation (Jie). Water held above the lake. It is measure and articulation, the limits that give life form, with the caution that galling limitation must not be persevered in.
The I Ching itself never sets these two hexagrams in a pair. Each stands alone in the sequence, consulted about a changing situation and answered in counsel that passes. The pairing is a construction of Ra Uru Hu's system, published from 1987, which fixes each hexagram to a position in a birth chart and reads the joined pair as a lasting trait of the person. The correspondence of number is real, and both hexagrams can be followed into their own entries in this atlas; the pairing, and the character read out of it, belong to the modern system alone.