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Wine:

Spirits of the Classic of Changes

Scott Davis Ph.D.

A short biographical note can be found here.

 

On Reading the Zhouyi

How should we read an archaic text like the Zhouyi, that is so difficult to understand and uses so much strange vocabulary, that we do not know exactly how to translate, and that puts the words in such strange arrangements? It will of course depend on what you want to do with it. Whether you want to use the Zhouyi for divination, or just read it as a work of philosophy, there exist formidable commentary traditions with a full array of guidelines and techniques to assist your reading. One is not lacking in materials for study if one approaches the classic through its traditional applications.

 

Or, if we believe that reading a text is finding the exact shade of meaning for each lexical item and locating the choice of each lexical item in comparison with contemporary texts, so that one constructs a matrix of usages for each lexical item, then we can turn to the methodology of philology to assist us in readings and derivations. Applying this matrix to determining the frequency and distribution of phrases helps derive the nuance of meaning for each instance of each word in a given text. Then, good luck adding up the nuances word by word to get the whole text!

 

How was the Zhouyi composed?

It will soon be clear that this essay is not philologically motivated. The ambition of this essay, moreover, is to do neither divination, cosmology nor moral edification. On the contrary, the only thing I want to know about the Zhouyi at this point is simply: how was the text composed? Though it gives us a decent focus for investigation, this is clearly a more humble and limited question.

 

Of course, there is a chance that the answer to the question is that the text was not composed, but rather just tossed together randomly like a bushel of autumn leaves, so that one can only say the question is senseless; however, at the beginning of our inquiry, there is nothing in the question itself that is senseless. It is a perfectly reasonable question to ask as a starting point, and simply proposes to examine the organization of the text as a composition.

 

Moreover, inasmuch as there are indications that the text is highly organized and not just randomly raked together, there are perfectly good reasons to insist on asking the question of its composition. When one asks this question, one finds that the plenitude of traditional guidelines, techniques and materials vanishes. One finds oneself in uncharted territory.

 

Aims of this Study

The present study aims to present a favorable case in which the question of textual composition can be answered in a clear and measured way, so that readers can consider the merits of the question on its own terms and decide the benefits and drawbacks for themselves.

 

Thus, the single point this essay essays to make is that if one is pursuing the question of composition—namely, how was this text composed? — then it behooves one to treat elements of the text not as isolated items, but rather to study, first the relations among subsets, and then between them and the rest of the text, as whole subsystems functioning within the text as a whole composition. One will note that such a procedure amounts to a requirement to study the text from the top down, from larger units to smaller.

 

The Lexical Subset “wine”

For support of this guideline, I turn to the example of what I will translate (strictly for convenience sake) as “wine” in certain loci in the Zhouyi text.

 

It is easy to define the set of loci that constitutes our object of concern here. Looking for the character 酒 (now pronounced /jiu3/ in Mandarin Chinese), we quickly isolate all four—and only four—instances of its use in the Zhouyi. They are scattered through the text at #5.5, #29.4, #47.2 and at #64.6. These are the only references to “wine” in the text. Therefore, this is now our paradigm set, and we will endeavor to elucidate its structure, that is: its mutual relations within itself, and its positioned setting within the text.

 

“#5.5” means the fifth (yang) line in Hexagram #5, translated here (strictly for convenience sake and with all options of subsequent philological refinement open to the philology enthusiasts) as “Waiting for Nourishment”: “Waiting (for nourishment) from wine and food” (rather than vex the reader with continuous adverting to the tentative character of the translations, I simply state that my concern in this analysis is structure and not philology, and that nothing in the systematic analysis hangs on the choice of translated word here or there; this applies to the remainder of the work and will not be repeated although it probably needs to be for sinologically oriented readers).

 

“29.4” means the fourth (yin) line in Hexagram #29, tentatively translated here as “The Pit”: “A goblet of wine, a bowl of grain, to make a pair, earthenware vessels simply handed in through the window.”

 

“47.2” means the second (yang) line in Hexagram #47, translated here as “Oppression”: “Oppressed with (difficulties of) drink and food.”

 

“64.6” means the top (yang) line in Hexagram #64, “Before Completion”: “In truth, one drinks wine. No blame. One wets one’s head. In truth, one loses it.”

 

Exploring the Structure

Once more, let’s tear ourselves away from intensifying translation quibbles and take a look at the structure of this set with all the features that are there to read for anybody who wants to see.

 

The set is internally complex. Its first division runs between the textual loci that mention drink and food in pairs, and those that mention drink singly. Next, there is a division of the former into those mentioning drink and food themselves, and those mentioning vessels for drink and vessels for food, together. Finally, the former set is further divided into positive and negative episodes of drinking and eating. Thus, we arrive at the first structural determination of the set:

 

 

Articulation of the Semantic Features

These structured semantic features are articulated upon a formal structure of hexagrams and lines. This set of hexagrams has quite a few water trigrams in it, as one would expect for a structure expressing a problem about alcoholic beverages. Each of the four has at least one Kan trigram, the image of water (010); #29 is doubled Kan. #47 not only has water in the Kan trigram but also has the image of the “lake” (or wetland) in the Dui trigram. Finally, there is a Sky trigram in #5 and, significantly, a fire trigram in #64.

 

The lines referring to “wine,” in its positive or negative drink or food instance in the paired mode, are both located in the strong, yang central line of the water trigram. Of course the wine and grain vessels are located in a Kan trigram, too, because #29 consists of doubled water trigrams. But for the single example of drinking wine only, the line is located in the top yang line of the Li, “fire” trigram. There is something significant about this because the problem here is to express the direction of fermentation away from water and towards fire. Alcoholic beverages of course are a way fire is embodied in water. 

 

The strong connection of this set with fire and water can be further demonstrated by remarking that Hexagrams 5 and 47 resolve to similar (in fact identical but rotated) “nuclear hexagrams” (that is, a new hexagram constituted by taking lines 2, 3, and 4 as a new lower trigram, and lines 3, 4, and 5 as a new upper trigram). The “nuclear hexagram” of Hexagram 5 is #38, while that of Hexagram 47 is #37. Hexagram 38 is itself fire over the lake, while Hexagram 37 is an image featuring the family hearth.

 

Positive and Negative Placing

Taking a closer look at these two Hexagrams 5 and 47, we have seen that they pair at the lowest level of the structure of differences just illustrated, by giving positive and negative episodes of drink and food. As well, we have commented that these episodes are located in the strong (yang) line of the Kan (water) trigram, giving us the sense of the “strong in the weak” or the “hard in the liquid” that is part of the phenomenology of fermented beverages.

 

Moreover, we find that the positive episode of “waiting (for nourishment) of wine and food” is located in the top hexagram, thus is line five or the ruling line of the whole hexagram. On the other hand, the negative episode where one seems to be overly fed, or rendered a helpless victim by being plied overly with drink, in Hexagram 47, is located in the bottom hexagram, thus is line two or the supporting, ministerial line of the whole hexagram.

 

In other words, these two lines would have the relation of “correspondence from a distance” (xiang ying 相應) were they found within one and the same hexagram. The relation between second and fifth lines is often like a dominant overtone in a field of interactions, such as are postulated by the traditional interpretations of Yijing hexagrams (taken one by one, let it be noted).

 

As it appears here, it would seem that at least in this case it is possible that lines can “correspond from a distance” across long regions of the text. Their siting in the hexagrams and relative to each other gives a key to interpreting the lines: a higher site makes a good episode, in the mode of anticipation, while a lower site gives a bad episode, in the perfective mode. 1

 

Containers and Mediation

If this is so, why is the image of the goblet of wine and the tureen of grain found in the fourth line of the doubled water hexagram at #29, Kan? We can see the set of differential features in terms of a primary opposition at the lowest level of its structure, with positive and negative episodes facing each other the way the second and fifth lines normally face each other in mutual correspondence from a distance.

 

How does the image of the containers mediate this opposition? Structurally, it does so by a simple device: when #29.4 changes, the resulting new hexagram is #47. This gives us a sense of resolution or mediation inasmuch as the negative component directly gives rise to the next level of synthesis. At the same time, the shift from the drink and food themselves to the vessels that carry them, from the contents to the containers, marks the new level as well.

 

We do not know how to translate or explicate the obviously ritual context here, since the vessels are to be handed in at the window and not at the door, but this inversion also marks the movement away from the basic opposition of positive nourishment at drinking and eating versus negative oppressive drinking and eating, to some intermediary image that focuses on the formal mediations—conveyance, containers, style of service—rather than the contents and the circumstances of their consumption.

 

Drinking Alone

Turning now to the most remote node of the tree, we see at once that the single reference to drinking is quite extraordinary, clearly differentiated from the other members of the set, and bearing a distinct textual mark to match its formal placement there. To begin with, it is the end of the “book,” a fact that should give us pause for thought. It is the last line of the last hexagram. Thus it concludes a locus of the text given to a meditation upon what is not-yet concluded. There are certainly plenty of suggestive indications to fuel a thematic discussion here. We, however, defer to the philosophers while insisting on the possibility of a structural reading of the text. Briefly, though, we may say that much of the contemplation of finality in the final hexagram pair reminds us of the Viking text The Sayings of the High One (Hàvamàl) where we are warned:

Praise the day at nightfall,
a woman when she’s dead
a sword proven,
a maiden married,
ice you’ve crossed,
ale you’ve drunk.

 

These cautions about imminent change evidently stem from lots of hard experience in the northern regions. In the Chinese case, we see alcoholic spirits brought together with a hint of ice in the final pair of hexagrams. This is where the little fox may be crossing the thin ice, running the risk of wetting its tail. It is where the brave man, drinking, runs the risk not only of getting his head wet, but of losing it.

 

Intoxication brings about the blurring of the previously clear demarcations, and what is better than the fox to manifest the boundary-crossing state such as we find at the text’s terminus? Thus, whereas we open the text with the clearest possible distinctions between hexagrams of all yang and all yin, in a mode Lévi-Strauss described as “diatonic” in analogy to music, in the conclusion we are in the same structural sectors of mythical thought as the rainbow, fish poisons, emotional saturation, intoxication, the fox, and small intervals—that realm that, structurally, is well-characterized as “chromatic” in the sense of a Carlo Gesualdo or a trout glistening under water like gold or flame.

 

Crossing the Ice

The tentative nature of one crossing the ice is a well-known theme in ancient China, as we see it in Laozi at #15, where the adept of the Dao is: “hesitant like one wading a stream in winter… giving way (huan) like ice just about to melt”—the word huan is commonly duplicated to give the manner of ice melting, huanhuan (ran) (渙然冰釋).

 

Huan is the name of Hexagram #59 of the Zhouyi and indeed, in this hexagram we do see an individual in the throes of dying, dissolving, gushing something, disintegrating. Crossing the thin ice is an apt image of attenuation, extremity and imminent finality. Accordingly, Zengzi (a very important direct successor of Confucius, and whose death is recorded in the Analects by five contiguous passages 2) cites the Classic of Poetry as he lies dying in the Analects. Indeed, Zengzi cites a phrase that is curiously repeated in the Classic of Poetry in the two contiguous poems “XiaoMin” and “XiaoWan” of the Lesser Elegentia.

 

To be perfectly clear, “Little Min” and “Little Wan” are poems located at number 5 and 6 of the 10 poems constituting the “Ten Jie Nan Shan”—since the Lesser Elegentia are commonly composed of ten poems in a package—and these two are in the central positions (#5/6) within the “Jie Nan Shan” group. They are peculiar because they both end with these lines that Zengzi quotes when he dies. The lines read (the middle line is omitted in “Little Min”): “Watch out! In fear and trembling! Like approaching the brink! Like walking on thin ice!” Why are these lines repeated in a pair in the Classic of Poetry,in a way that is unusual for poems found in this classical collection? It is a good question.

 

Moreover, later treatments of this famous episode of the death of Zengzi associate it, and these lines concerning walking on thin ice, with Hexagram #64. We see this by comparing juan 10 of the Han text Shuoyuan, entitled “Jing Shen (Respect and Caution)” with a phrase from the roughly contemporary Hanshi Waizhuan, juan 8.

 

The Shuoyuan collection (presented to the throne in 17 B.C.) organizes material about risks and prudence in the tenth juan, with the Classic of Poetry quote about walking on thin ice appearing prominently in the first entry, and reappearing near the end of the chapter (it does not appear in the rest of the text). In this chapter, too, Zengzi lies dying.

 

Zengzi was ill. Zeng Yuan held his head, Zeng Hua held his feet. Zengzi said, “I am not as talented as Yan [Yuan]. What do I have to expound upon to you (as last words)? Although I am useless, a lordly person strives for benefit. Heaven is what is resplendent but insubstantial. Humans are what say much but do little. There are birds that fly so high that mountains seem low; they build their storied nests in the lofty crags. There are fish and terrapins that consider an abyss shallow and borrow in its depths. One can get them with bait, however. If a lordly person does not let himself be harmed by seeking profit, then how can insult get to him? An official becomes lazy with success; disease increases through small remissions. Disaster is born through laxity; wives and children weaken filial piety. Be vigilant about these four points; be as careful with the end as with the beginning. The Poetry [Classic] says, “Everybody starts, but few can get to the end.”

 

The Hanshi Waizhuan, an alternate tradition of poetry classic commentary, does not mention Zengzi at all. However, the same point is observed in its juan 8, but with the addition of the fox:

 

An official becomes lazy with success; disease increases through small remissions. Disaster is born through laxity; wives and children weaken filial piety. Be vigilant about these four points; be as careful with the end as with the beginning. The Yi says, “The little fox nearly gets across the water but wets his tail.” The Poetry [Classic] says, “Everybody starts, but few can get to the end.” 3

 

This demonstrates, therefore, that in Han times, people were connecting the theme of walking on ice, through the last words of Zengzi, to the fox in the last hexagram. 4

 

The Domain of the Images

We seem to have lost our focus on “wine,” by going into such great lengths to examine the suggestions (there is no direct mention in the text, but only in much later commentary) of ice in the terminal hexagram as well as in nearby hexagrams. The final domain of the text is being used to deploy symbols for finitude and death, among other things.

 

The symbolism of ice, however, is not independent from the symbolism of wine. We must understand the language of classification of this culture, which some might be pleased to call “proto-scientific.” By the terms of this calculus, fermented beverages are fire in water, and in the same way, ice is water further transforming away from fire, the subtraction of fire from water. 5 On the other hand, blood is more like alcoholic spirits, involving the addition of something yang to something liquid like water. 6 What is redder than the fox? 7

 

We do see blood gushing in Hexagram 59. Hexagram 64 warns us that drinking wine, and getting foxed, may lead to getting our head wet, and losing it. Now we want to examine the set of our “wine” loci again and see if there may be any systematic connection of such elements, or do they remain at the level of word-play and suggestion?

 

A Review of the Hexagram Forms

By now we are aware that a text like the Zhouyi embodies the relations it comprises, so that to “understand the meaning” of an element, or better, of a subsystem, we must discover the structural logic of its composition. It is not a text that “contains” interesting ideas for us to “get out” and “take away” as the “meaning” of the words. The text is its own meaning.

 

Thus we must review the series of hexagram forms and texts that we have isolated by the criteria stated at the beginning of this exploration. Doing this review shows us that there are several associated symbols, found only in these loci, that amplify and consolidate the patterns discovered so far. Of course, we cannot expect to isolate these symbols totally without consideration of associated systems, as we can see from the present investigation, but the following analysis attempts to focus primarily on the hexagrams arrived at through the criterion of referring to wine (#5, 29, 47,64), along with their paired hexagrams and in some cases closely associated indicators within the region of their siting.

 

The Game of Hexagrams 64 and 5

Thus we see that a game in the last hexagram pair, to begin our review, works with the character “to get wet” (濡). The fox wets its tail, the drinker wets his head and may lose it. This game is not restricted to the hexagram, though, since it can be seen at the other end of this set, at #5 Waiting (for Nourishment) in the character Xu 需.

 

Whatever this character is, it is inside the other (there is also the character ru 繻 [or 襦] “silk jacket” at #63.4 that participates in this system). The uses are similar. There is a tendency to rely on the elaborated form (ru 濡) to translate the unelaborated form (xu 需), particularly because the lines of Hexagram 5 are organized around the formula xu yu X (“waiting in/at X”) where X can be replaced with “border shrine,” ”sand,” “mud,” “blood,” and “drink and food.” Line 4 which we tentatively approximate with “waiting wet in blood” goes on to add “get out of the pit”; while the top line says, “entered the pit.” Thus there is a temptation to say that one is “getting wet” at the border shrine, in the sand, in the mud, in blood, and… at drink and food.

 

Our present purpose is not to decide about this translation dilemma, but to alleviate it and simply acknowledge that the structure of this subsystem supports the merging of these concepts along the lines of their written affinities. The text clearly is interested in the affinity, as it was designed to be so. We do, meanwhile, see that the symbol of blood does indeed enter the system as we predicted from our considerations of ice and alcoholic spirits. It enters along with images of the pit and some kind of progressively threatening danger that is happening in this pit (increasing as the lines go up through the hexagram) and that is resolved miraculously with the arrival of three unexpected guests, once one is already over one’s head in the pit at the end of the hexagram.

 

Making Rain

It is very reasonable to interpret these images as aspects of a ritual to make rain. The image of the hexagram is moisture (clouds) rising up in the sky. The word xu lends itself to such interpretations, as Shirakawa Shizuka points out. This is of particular interest inasmuch as xu is featured in the term Ru 儒, that in a later context is often rendered as “Confucian.” One speculates with good reason that the shamanic background of ancient Chinese thought can be glimpsed in these connections. The use of the word heng 恆 in Hexagram #5 is quite interesting in this context. In the Zhouyi, it would seem that the first segment of hexagrams from #1 to #10, which particularly features matters pertaining to the kingship such as divination, enfoeffment, hunting/warfare, marriage alliances, and so forth, is provided a center at #5/6, where the major functions of the king are displayed: hearing lawsuits (#6) and rain-making. 8

 

Structural Implications

While all of this seems very reasonable, the present investigation temporarily eschews this interpretive tactic based on the translated meaning-content of the words and names. Here, we are proceeding in a more structurally controlled way, looking at a set we have derived on strong structural criteria. Even under such constrained conditions, though, it is clear that the rain-making rituals of Hexagram 5 are connected to “dense clouds but no rain” and “rain and rest” that arrive after an interval of three hexagrams, like three unexpected guests, thus in Hexagram 9.

 

This is not a fanciful association, since the text has carefully set up a scenario in an almost cinematographic way, in Hexagram 5, of the drama that unfolds in the border shrine (5.1), where someone is wet/waits in sand (5.2), in mud (5.3), in blood (5.4: “get out of the pit!”)—and the interlude of anticipation of positive drinking and eating at #5.5—and then, the odd climax, “enter the pit” and if some magical conditions are met (strange visitors arrive who must be treated with respect—this is the stuff of folklore and popular religion), there will be a happy outcome.

 

Voilà, this line (the yin line of #5.6) changes and the hexagram becomes #9, where the sought-after blessings are in fact delivered, the rain falls in line #9.6, and peace is found. The bloody scene that disturbed us has faded (#9.4: “Blood disappears; fears vanish”). Thus, structurally we can see that the rain sacrifices are not only central (#5) to the first segment of the Zhouyi but also form a link to the peripheral (#9) hexagrams of the section as well.

 

The Pit of Hexagram 29

Of course, the first section of the Zhouyi from #1 to 10 is very carefully “wired together,” with these sorts of compositional devices; though it is fascinating to examine these, to do so would take us too far from our stated goals here. For now we simply proceed to the next element of the set; that is, very obviously, “The Pit” that we have been dealing with in this extended fashion already. Although it is not the same character for “pit” as in Hexagram 5, Kan 坎 is known to be the name of the pit dug to receive the blood during a sacrifice for alliance. The ear of the sacrificial animal is cut and the blood is kept on a plate, until the oath is sworn and the blood is transferred to the pit, while the covenant is buried. A common short-hand expression for such rituals in the Zuozhuan is “dig pit, sacrifice, bury covenant” (坎用牲埋書, Duke Zhao 6 and 13) or “pit the blood and add text” (坎血加書, Duke Xi 25).

 

Ritual Stages

Thus the Pit at Hexagram 29 is certainly in line with the use of the pit in Hexagram 5, where we saw that blood also appears. In Hexagram 29 we also find, “Enter the pit” as we saw in Hexagram 5. Although repeatedly using “ritual” as an explanans to pretend to interpret symbols generally is not very helpful, still there are several images in Hexagrams 29 and 30 that are clearly marked as special occasions with special procedures. They must be rituals. This includes the odd detail of handing the vessels in through the window thus avoiding the door. We also have the top line of Hexagram 29: “Bound with black cord. Shut in between thorn-hedged prison walls.” 9 In Hexagram 30 we find the only reference to beheading in the entire text. 10 It is true that the beheading is mentioned in the context of a military expedition. However, the proximity of beheading in #30 and the pit to receive the blood of sacrifice in #29 is a mark that this locus of the text is given in part to sacrificial killing (certainly not incompatible with military measures anyway). We might consider the stages of ritual as something like what is described in the Liji, “Jiaotesheng”: “First, perform the ablution, then receive the sacrifice” (既灌，然後迎牲) in which case #20 (“the ablution is made but not yet the offering”) and #50 (“the bronze ding is full [with the offering]”) are first and final stages (with white grass spread ritually at #28). The sacrifice itself is at #30. In any event, the constant conjunction between the pit and blood continues in these elements of our target set.

 

Hexagram 47

Finally, Hexagram 47 needs examining. As we have seen, this hexagram evokes a person in a situation of great difficulty. We must leave aside the complex exploration of the inter-connections of hexagrams in the “forties,” that in part show the way Hexagram 47, as drought, contrasts with its rotated pair The Well, #48, a continuous source of water, and the way that Hexagrams 43 and 44, with their formal symbolism of breaching, are connected to water management, irrigation, summer crop care, and other issues about the periodic supply of water to the fields. These issues about water of course articulate with our problem of “wine,” but we cannot divert our attention from this set to explore further ramifications. We are going to concentrate on what seems to be an ordeal where somebody is being tortured in this hexagram. 11

 

The crisis in Hexagram 47 is described in harsh terms such as, “Oppressed under a bare tree… a gloomy valley”; “Oppressed by stone 12… thorns and thistles”; “Oppressed by a carriage decorated with bronze”; “His nose and feet are cut off”; “Tied with kudzu vines to the wobbling pole, he says, ‘Every time I move it brings remorse.’” 13 We have seen thorns and thistles (of a different kind) in Hexagram 29 already; there, they were used as a prison, and here they add to the oppressive setting. This bleak hexagram also features men with knee bands of vermillion or purple, ranked officers of the court (notably, named only in this region of the text) and they seem to be approaching this captive man who seems to be in the unenviable position of being tortured by them. 14 The mutilating punishments, but not the officers who apparently execute them, are also mentioned in Hexagram 38 (specifically: in #38 the head is tattooed and the nose cut off; in #47 the nose is cut off and the foot/feet is/are amputated).

 

Carriages and the Framework of Government

In fact, two hexagrams in pairs making termini of a segment of ten and whose numbers add to (3 + 8 = 4 + 7 =) 11, #38 and #47 are linked in other ways as well as by these disfiguring injuries. Particularly, they belong to the “carriage” system that is centered upon the “Big and Little Hexagrams” that we cannot examine here at all.

 

In #38, one’s carriage is taken away from one. Also, a carriage carries ghosts. Here, one is honored by the receipt of a special carriage decorated with bronze, which, as we know from several bronze inscriptions, 15 were sometimes presented to loyal members at court; in this case, however, somehow the honor acutely endangers the recipient. 16 Hexagrams 38 and 47 are disorderly flip-sides of the images of stability named “Family” and “The Well” respectively. Thus we see in them disturbing scenes of filth, death, desperation, chaos and shocking violence.

 

Hexagram 47, located in the “decade” of the 40s, is situated within a context emphasizing the governmental apparatus appropriate to the man in his forties who is called upon to serve in it. Accordingly, the character of this hexagram can be read as reflecting difficulties in political struggles and situations of carefully applied violence, such as the abduction of one’s family or court intrigue with bad endings.

 

Of course, underlying this, there is the simultaneous seasonal sense of summer drought involved here. The privative relation of the well (#48) and drought (#47) appears as a pendant to the hexagrams of breaching and irrigation (#43/44) on the other side of the central 5/6 hexagrams (#45/46, showing feudal gathering and ascent up the ceremonial mound); there, we find the limping man (much like Yu the Great) and other signs of water management along with associations concerning the place of the lady in relation to the lord. 17 Thus the ordeal, the torture or punishment, is given a connection to drought and suffering, all within the framework of the governmental management of Zhou society.   

 

Overall Context of Hexagram 47  

Be that as it may, we have digressed and departed from our stated principle of analysis in order to consider the context in which this Hexagram 47 is located, since it makes these difficult symbols easier to comprehend.

 

Nonetheless, at minimum, whatever we say about them, we can see mutilation and oppression, and we furthermore know that this kind of difficulty is associated with drought because of the imagery of the hexagram. From the other parts of our artificially isolated subsystem, we know enough to see that Hexagram 47 participates in a knot of images connected with alcoholic beverages, ice, blood, rainfall and pits where various bloody sacrifices and ordeals take place, for the sake of rainfall. Our set is a block of hexagrams showing us how fermentation, intoxication, extreme pain and blood loss, freezing, and rainfall are connected in an archaic cultural system.

 

The underlying “issue” of this block shows the differential relations between fire and water, the “canonical opposition” (Lévi-Strauss). The connections of these concrete signifiers were of a sort that people could perform operations over them. They could permute them, and they could perform actions that evoked one symbol by using others. Furthermore, they could interpret events by locating them within the complex of relations. The logic that inter-relates these symbolic regions as embodied in myth and ritual is the same logic that the composers of the Zhouyi followed when they put together the blocks of “integrated circuits” like assembling piece molds on a bronze vessel about to be cast.

 

Using the Study of a Subsystem

We have conducted a concise study of one such subsystem, in this short essay. The results show us that one can learn a lot about the composition of the text by working from the whole text to the parts, and from the parts to the words. By defining a set of formal and textual symbols, we isolated the relevant components, and were then able to establish the systematic inter-relatedness of this set, through examining and re-examining their coherence in respect to varying axes of deployment.

 

The set, as defined strictly by the criterion of the appearance of the word for “wine” in the text, has proven to be coherent and systematically distributed. By our approach, we have not gone on to investigate everything there is to say about rain-making or pits in the text, nor about mutilation or ordeals or carriages, etc. Wine alone has been the focus of the discussion and we have looked at almost all of the relevant symbolism for wine. We have determined systematic relations amongst the components, and we have seen how this subset of the text has been integrated into the text as a whole.

 

Although this is not a thematic investigation, one could elaborate from it a thematic concern for rainfall and for the means to procure water through bloody sacrificial offerings involving a pit. But this structural analysis is not delimited by thematic exposition, instead revealing the structural network of features supporting any number of themes and their development, sometimes in mutually contradictory directions.

 

Implications for the Composition of Zhouyi

On the other hand, however, it requires little reflection to realize that, if our inquiry has demonstrated the utility of a structural analysis of the composition, by going from whole text to parts to words, then this is due to the fact that the text was actually composed this way by its designers. The lexical item “wine” was distributed deliberately in the four loci we have dealt with here, more or less for the reasons we have adduced. Likewise, every form and symbol in the text was similarly arranged with particular care for its siting in each case. We may not be able to fathom the motivations for each, but the text we have gives us eloquent testimony of the skill of the arrangers in structuring the features and components of the composition.

 

Issues Raised by a Structural Analysis

In this way, our results may eventually have something to tell us, if only indirectly, about the issues put in abeyance at the beginning of the essay, namely divination, philosophy, and even philology. We have conducted an exploration of the structural organization of one small subset of the whole text, and have learned why it has been given its properties with respect to the whole text.

 

Our primary focus, then, is on the structure of the text, rather than on the words or their meanings. We do not treat the lexical items as if they are point sources that sustain exclusive and predominant interest in an investigation that is supposed to get closer and closer to one exact meaning. Rather, we are working with a field of meanings, with a structure, and can be content with various degrees of approximation with respect to the integrity of the structure. The predominance of the structure gives us a certain—though of course not infinite—space for accommodation of different philological outcomes. Although it is moderately grandiose to evoke Wittgenstein here, the way of reading this text suggested here is an attempt to show the philological fly out of the bottle. We can somewhat relax our anxious philological vigil.

 

Structural Reading and Divination

Is this way of reading the text not more consonant with the divinatory background of the Zhouyi in the first place? The whole problem of divination is not just to discover a meaning in an event, but rather to be in a position to perform a meaningful reading for any event, because events—for all their singularities—always occur within structures, even if these are structures their occurrence itself has evoked or solicited.

 

Structure means discrete, co-occurring components of a configuration; encountering one sets one on the search for operational links to another part of the matrix. And, in the case of archaic China, is this divinatory approach not the foundation for the so-called traditional philosophical thought or, better, the thought of tradition itself? At least, we do know that the divinatory mission is fundamental to the ancient Chinese writing and textual tradition. The present research is one more small indication of what this fact implies: we are not seeking a particular meaning, but for the structural apparatus allowing us to move from a meaning towards any number of other meanings. It is in this sense precisely that the text is truly a classic that changes.

 

 

Sources

1 For the relation of inebriation to the perfective sense, one may consult Gilles Deleuze’s exemplary The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), “Twenty-second Series—Porcelain and Volcano,” pp. 154-161.

 

2 It would be preferable to ignore the problem of the arrangement of other texts besides the one we are studying now, the Zhouyi. It is difficult enough to study just the one text. However, the state of scholarship in Chinese classical studies being what it is presently, there is, across the board (with a few odd exceptions), almost no concern for the questions of composition with these important texts. One cannot appeal to pre-existing contributions in the study of other texts to lend weight to one’s analysis of one text. I would prefer to leave it aside, but other readers of my work have criticized me for leaving out the very strong evidence we have that texts like the Analects were themselves composed with reference to a framework like the Zhouyi. Texts such as the Analects, Zuozhuan, Shijing, Laozi and others are simply not addressed with the question of their composition! However, these five Analects passages (8.3-7) describing the death of Zengzi fall in L#60 through L#64, ending just at the end of the matrix built on the 8 X 8 array of the Zhouyi structure.

 

3 曾子有疾，曾元抱首，曾華抱足，曾子曰：“吾無顏氏之才，何以告汝？雖無能，君子務益。夫華多實少者，
天也；言多行少者，人也。夫飛鳥以山為卑，而層巢其巔；魚鱉以淵為淺，而穿穴其中；
然所以得者餌也。君子苟能無以利害身，則辱安從至乎？官怠于宦成，病加于少愈，禍生于懈惰，孝衰于妻子；
察此四者，慎終如始。詩曰：‘靡不有初，鮮克有終。’”Shuoyuan, (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuji, 1985), v.2, p. 97.
官怠於有成，病加於小愈，禍生於懈惰，孝衰於妻子；察此四者，慎終如始。易曰：‘小狐汔濟，
濡其尾。‘詩曰：‘靡不有初, 鮮克有終。’Hanshi Waizhuan, (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1985), v. 2, p. 107.

 

4 “In the cold, the ice [of the Yellow River] is many zhang thick. When the ice begins to coalesce, one wouldn’t dare to cross it with carriages and horses. One should follow the fox in going: that is, this creature has good hearing. It crosses only where there is no water below. Only when people see the fox going can one cross.” (This passage of the Shuijing Zhu cites Shuzhengji by Guo Yuansheng, and is in turn cited by Huang Fan, Zhouyi: Shang Zhou Zhi Jiao Shishilu, vol. 1, p. 493

 

5 The existence of an extended network of ice symbols should be noted here, that opens in the first line of the Kun hexagram (#2), “Treading on frost” (footsteps motif taken up in #10—echoed in #21.1—and repeated in #30.1). Particularly, the unique reference to “congeal one’s mandate” in the image of #50 the Ding (bronze) vessel gives an acknowledgement of the way the users of the text understood the design to give a systematic matrix of changes of state in the way suggested here. This same hexagram, the ding bronze vessel at the heart of the ritual system, also participates in the “rainfall” system, as its line three promises the end of remorse at the onset of rainfall.

 

6 Readers familiar with Chinese folk tradition might recognize the opposition of blood and ice in the stories involving the Earth God. For it is the Earth God or his wife who intervenes in the Meng Jiang Nü stories. Meng Jiang Nü was the grieving widow who went to the Great Wall to collect the white bones of her husband. Her hot tears and/or red blood so moistened and enlivened the bones that they started to come back to life. The Earth God tricks her by various means, including having her carry the bones on her back, so that the livening effect was interrupted. On the other hand, the Earth God himself came into this position in the spirit bureaucracy, having been a servant who was carrying the daughter of his master on his back across a winter landscape, but by the time he reached the girl’s father, she was frozen dead. As a result, the servant became the Earth God.

 

7 “Nothing redder than the fox/nothing blacker than the crow”—thus the Classic of Poetry establishes the contrast set in the primary colors (this contrasts with the white snow in the poem “North Wind,” Mao #41). We know that the “mad youth” (kuangfu狂夫) in ritual wore “bi-colored” clothing to indicate their exceptional state, similar to the bi-colored garb (偏衣 pian yi, each side a different color)Taizi Shensheng was forced to wear while being sent off by his father to die (Zuozhuan, Min 2; Guoyu Jinyu 1). I hereby hazard a speculation that the “chromatic” nature of the final set may have been expressed in red and black color mixing to indicate the extraordinary state of “burning water” at the end of the text.

 

8 Shirakawa Shizuka, in Koushiten (Tokyo: Chuokoron Shinsha, 1991), pages 77-81, discusses this association of rain-making and proto-Ru practices, bringing in the etymology of xu and its definition in the Shuowen Jiezi, where the Yijing text is heavily relied upon to make a connection with the idea of waiting for rain. Shirakawa notes that the place name in the bronze inscription sources written as wu xu 無需 is likely to be similar to the rain altars called 舞雩 for example in the Analects (11.24; 12.21) and Zhouli (Spring Officials, Siwu). The appearance of heng in #5 is similar to the way it appears in L#5 (in the Zhouyi-based matrix of the Analects) in the famous quote (13.22) about the “saying of the southerners” that “one must have heng to be a shaman.” The fifth position, like an X, is the intermediary crossing between sky and earth (thus Laozi #5 is also a relevant example), and it is reasonable to have rain-making an issue at this locus.

 

9 The L#29/30 evidence, along with the K29/30 evidence (taken from the time Confucius was alive during the chronology of the Zuozhuan), is absolutely pertinent to understanding the #29/30 site of the Zhouyi. In all these sites, there is an obvious emphasis on the conjunction of fire and water, day and night. L#29/30 also includes the lines from the Analects (5.1 and 5.2) about the preparations for marriage for the family of Confucius. The man who is married to Confucius’ daughter is first presented bound in black ropes. This must be a complex involving an ordeal before marriage, as we see in the ordeals of fire and water undergone by Shun to marry the daughters of Yao. Marriage of course was to occur (for men) at age 30.

 

10 To be very clear: the term zheshou 折首appears only in Hexagram 30. Hexagram 8 may contain a hidden reference to the myth of Fangfeng arriving late to the assembly called by Yu the Great and being beheaded for it; we have seen that the last line of the last hexagram warns of losing one’s head.

 

11 This is an interpretation: the reader need not accept it! However, certain symbolic items appear in the text and can be scanned, whatever they mean, for their participation in the matrix of the text. That is what we are doing now. Note that the word for mutilating punishment, xing 刑, is etymologically related to the word “well,” jing 井.

 

12 If I may be allowed to quote an authentic expert on oppression: “I have stones in my pathway, my road seems black as night/And these pains in my heart: they have taken my appetite…’Cause my enemies have betrayed me, have over taken this boy at last/ And there’s one thing for certain: I have stones all in my path.”

 

13 The top line is said to be a pole partly because of the frequent reading wu 杌for the difficult niewu 臲卼. This is the wu in taowu 檮杌. This is a kind of monster, a kind of chronicle (warning readers about punishable behavior), and, according to Granet, a kind of torture (Danses et Légendes de la Chine Ancienne, [Paris: Felix Alcan, 1926], page 240 footnote 1). Nie, for its part, has been described as a post used as a target in archery; associated with law, it also conveys stern judgment. The emphasis on the pole being “shaky” or “wobbly” may show the captive’s physical responses to the torture.

 

14  One could try imagining a similar line had the classic been written in the Ming dynasty: “The Embroidered Uniform Guards (Jinyi Wei) are coming…oppressed by the Embroidered Uniform Guards.”

 

15 For example, see LuBoDong Gui, Shirakawa Shizuka, Kinbun tsuushaku 17.92:209-232. With a slight variation in writing, the famous Mao Gong Ding also records a gift of bronze carriage. See a list of pieces showing this gift in Shirakawa’s treatment of the Mao Gong Ding, 30.181:683-84.

 

16 E.g. the gift of horses to Guan Qi of Chu, in Zuozhuan, Xiang 22, which led to his being drawn and quartered by carriages as punishment, around the year of Confucius’ birth. Huang Fan, Zhouyi—Shang Zhou zhi Jiaoshi Shilu (Shantou: Shantou University Press, 1995), v. 1, p. 3; v.2, p. 785, suggests this image is of King Wu’s funeral cortege in a bronze carriage or a carriage decorated with bronze.

 

17 See S.J. Marshall, The Mandate of Heaven: Hidden History in the I Ching (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 113-117.