The Great Vessel Blog

Wine - Spirits of the classic of Changes

A great guest article, Wine by Scott Davis  - is now posted on our site.

Scott Davis is a unique voice, one of the most interesting and imaginatively fertile scholars in the Yijing field. He has a PHD in Anthropology from Harvard, a lot of experience with eastern shamanism and a truly vast knowledge of old Chinese myth, culture and writing. He opens up the deep structure of Yijing in a way no one else does, demonstrating the limits of simplistic “historical” analysis. A lot of Scott’s work is not generally available and he has very kindly allowed us to post his paper ‘Wine’ on this site.

This article shows that there is a deep structural design which guides the placing of words in the Yijing. He takes the word Wine (jiu) and examines the hexagrams, trigrams and contexts in which it appears. He shows that it appears appropriately both in terms of its line position and in particular trigrams in such a way as to reflect and emphasise both its own meaning and that of the trigram. Additionally he shows how there are correspondences between its appearances in two different hexagrams much in the way that one might expect to find correspondence between the meaning of lines 2 and 5 within a hexagram in traditional Yijing practice.

He not only shows that words may appear in the Yijing in a highly structured fashion, but also points at an approach which could open up additional levels of meaning in the text.

We hope to be hosting more of Scott's work in the near future. Meanwhile there are some wonderful pieces on his website