The vessel with a jade handle
The Vessel, ding, is the name of hexagram 50. It refers to a particularly beautiful and sacred bronze vessel, fit for food to be shared with the ancestors, strong enough to inaugurate a dynasty.
You move your ding by inserting a carrying handle through its ‘ears’, loops on its rim. Hexagram 50, line 6, says that a vessel with a handle of jade means ‘great good fortune, nothing that does not bring harvest.’ So what is it about jade that creates such exceptional good fortune?
Here’s an excellent article on jade, offering the kind of cultural context that nourishes the imagination. Jade is beautiful. It’s part of an artistic tradition older than memory, with jade bi discs and cong tubes crafted with exquisite care dating back 5,000 years and more.
The cong – described by the British Museum as “among the most impressive yet most enigmatic of all ancient Chinese jade artefacts,” are square in cross-section, with a round hole through the centre. While the BM says that “their function and meaning are completely unknown,” I’ve seen it suggested that they were used in ritual that joined heaven (round) with earth (square).
Jade, unlike bronze, endures without tarnishing. (The effect when looking at museum pieces is quite uncanny – Neolithic jades seem new.) It was used to make complete suits to cover the body for burial – completely enwrapped and protected in the eternal stone.
Working jade isn’t like chipping flint, or even casting bronze, which can always be melted down and recast. It’s a very hard mineral, much too tough to be simply carved, and must be abraded and polished into shape, as human virtue is refined through education. Jade artefacts represent a tremendous investment of time, dedication and resources; to possess them is a sign of great cultural wealth and sophistication.
A jade handle for your ding is a sign of its great beauty and value, of its spiritual and enduring nature, and of how much you have invested in it. What it isn’t, though, is a practical way to lift and move the vessel. Some ding are quite small and manageable; some really aren’t. Jade is hard, but also quite brittle; it seems very unlikely you could lift a jade-handled vessel of any size.
So to give a ding a jade handle is also a sign that you no longer need to move it around. This is the Vessel Enduring (changing 50.6 takes you to 32): like some other sixth lines (think of 53.6), it’s moved beyond the realm of the merely useful and become pure symbol.
May 27th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Have you noted the Chinese characters for Jade? The interesting thing is that in many bronze characters they look almost identical to the character for king (wang3). In the modern rendition of yu4 (jade), you find the character for king plus a little dot under the “belt” of the character, signifying that which the king treasures and possess. The only main difference between the the bronze characters for both is that wang3 has what I call the “belt line” but is the line representing Man, between the lines representing Heaven and Earth, a little off-center and higher and close to Heaven, signifying that who is above other men. The other interesting thing to note is that that resemblance of characters (wang3 and yu4) does not occur in the OBI. The characters were quite different then. So, that distinction in the OBI was revised in Zhou times and their bronzes.
Funny that the simplified character for guo2 (country) is the character for jade enclosed in walls…
May 27th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
No, I hadn’t looked at the character at all. Interesting – thank you.
May 28th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
The occurrence of jade in 50.6, like other ideas in the appended text, may be accounted for by the hexagram’s embedded trigrams. The reference may not be to actual material.
http://onlineclarity.co.uk/answers/2007/05/07/the-family-of-hexagram-37/
In 50,
T1 = Xun
T2 = Qian = jade
T3 = Dui
T4 = Li
Jade is the heavenly or spiritual material.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taotie
Taotie on ding
T2 in 50 is the place of the Taotie. The Taotie represents ancestral spirit, as I remember from Wiegner. Thus, jade.
For another example, given the idea that the hexagram is like a person, in line 1
T3 = concubine
T2 = the son she carries
I have been encouraged by the work of Sakis Totlis
Tom
May 28th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I am not qualified to say whether the reference is to jade or a taotie (which I understand to be an artistic motif – a vaguely feline monster face that is traditional on this type of vessel) or to something else, or what its significance might be in divination. But I am qualified to comment on the properties of jade as a material. I’m a geologist who has specialized in ultramafic rocks (jade, serpentine, kimberlite, etc.) and a metalworker who collaborated with a world-class jade carver on several projects. So I feel compelled to address Hilary’s comment on the physical properties of jade.
Jade is very hard, of course, but its hardness (that is, its resistance to abrasion) is the same as agate or quartz (7 on the Mohs scale). What makes jade unique is its toughness, or resistance to shattering upon impact. It is one of the toughest known natural substances, which is why it can be carved into intricate shapes and even made into knives. A jade handle would be superior to the bronze in both hardness and toughness (not to mention corrosion resistance and insulating ability – it would stay cool longer if the vessel was filled with hot liquid). The ancient Chinese skill in casting objects such as these vessels has yet to be surpassed with “modern” technology, yet even on these masterpieces, the handle, legs, and other small parts were the most vulnerable to breaking, since cast metals are actually quite brittle.
Sorry to butt in – we now return to our regularly scheduled program…:-)
May 28th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Lorena, that’s really good to know -thank you! So how useful would a long, presumably thin-ish jade handle be for lifting a heavy vessel? How would it compare to bronze?
What you say about the legs being vulnerable to breaking is interesting, too, as that’s exactly what happens at 50.4. I wondered whether that would be a sign of poor workmanship in casting the vessel in the first place – or maybe casting the legs separately and attaching them. Is that plausible, or would this just be something that happened sometimes, even with the best quality casting?
Tom… I’m going to be boringly literal-minded about this. The taotie is part of the cast bronze, the sixth line isn’t part of the lower nuclear trigram, and it does actually say ‘jade handle’. So I expect it means ‘jade handle’.
May 29th, 2008 at 12:01 am
An athletic mind might jump directly to line 6, but as I saunter upward I take in the view.
Translators have different thoughts about 鉉 xuà n:
Legge, Wilhelm: rings
Whincup: the caldron’s carrying rod
Blofeld, Balkin : handles
Shaughnessy: cauldron’s jade bar
The character translated as handles in 50.5 is 耳 ěr = ear and should be the two ear-looking projections with holes. If a ding had ears, 鉉 xuà n should refer to rings.
Roderick Whitfield, author of “The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes,” says that “bronze and jade were only combined in the late eastern Zhou period (770 to 221 B.C.)….”
http://media.sundial.csun.edu/media/storage/paper862/news/2006/05/04/News/Seven.Experts.Say.Objects.Not.Genuine.Antiquities-1900734.shtml
which suggests a date for the composition of the appended text.
Tom
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Hilary, I think the jade handle would do fine, but it’s also possible that it wouldn’t have been made entirely of jade. I haven’t seen any of these artifacts, but my guess is that some would at least have had bronze ends with hooks to accomodate a chain or rope. As for the legs breaking – these vessels were hollow-cast in several pieces using the lost-wax process in a clay mold. The bowl would have been cast first, and the legs added afterwards. This is extremely difficult to do, and nobody since then seems to have mastered it with the skill and versatility of ancient Chinese metalsmiths. The hollow legs (relatively thin-walled compared to the vessel itself) would have been vulnerable to breaking off with wear or rough handling. The alternative (whole vessel cast in one piece, with solid legs) would have been easier to make and more durable, but was much heavier, used a lot more of the precious bronze, and wouldn’t allow for much fine detail on the legs.
June 2nd, 2008 at 5:47 pm
That’s exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know – thank you. It’s not what I expected – I would have thought jade would bear less weight than bronze. Shows what I know
So when the vessel’s legs break off, this might be a sign that you handled it roughly, but it’s not a sign it was made badly. You never know when that kind of detail could be important in a reading.
Thanks!
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:00 am
This isn’t related to the Yi or mineralogy, but more about the subtle properties of Jade. Stones are interpreted in many ways & this is only an excerpt from one expert.
“Jade is known as a ‘dream stone’ and as a “stone of fidelity,” bringing realization to one’s potential and devotion to one’s purpose. It improves one’s remembering of dreams and assists in ‘dream-solving.’ It is used to release suppressed emotions via the dream process…
As the visible world is nourished by the invisible, humanity can be sustained and preserved by the lovely visions of dreamers. One who reveres a beautiful vision or ideal can utilize the energies of Jade to assist in realizing those thoughts. Jade helps one to cherish one’s desires and facilitates the building of one’s dreams in this physical reality. It releases one’s limitations such that permission is granted which allows one to actualize aspirations and to attain limitless achievements. It inspires and induces ambition toward the accomplishment of objectives.”
–Melody
June 4th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Thank you… that’s startlingly apt for hexagram 50 in places, particularly the part about nourishing and sustaining. The commentary on hexagram 50 talks about the offerings (made sacred in the ding) being used to nourish wisdom and virtue.
May 3rd, 2011 at 12:42 pm
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