| Chapter 1: | Uproarious Prologue |
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An ancient Chinese word family shows connections of splitting open and humorous laughing. Its graphs present a kneeling man with upturned face, praying: the common character for both zhu 
, “pray (celebrate, intone, cantor, invocator),” and xiong 
, “older brother,” privileged to conduct ceremonial duties to ancestors.1 Over this graph, add two marks indicating topmost splitting open. The character now is read dui 
, a trigram in the Classic of Changes (featuring a yang/yang/yin structure, or for short, 110): two horizontal, unbroken [= yang] lines with one broken [yin] line on top).
Figure 2. Dui trigram.
With a heart/mind radical showing mentality (or word radical showing language), the yue 
(or shuo 
) character is in turn used homophonically for yue 
, “music,” or (now also pronounced le) “joy.” One has in this series of intersubstitutable graphs a network of concepts relating to music, joy, laughter, and splitting at the top.
Like a classifying dictionary, a late appendix (“Shuo gua,” 17, SSJZS, 1:186) to the Classic of Changes outlines the Dui trigram’s associations: “The Joyous is lakes, the youngest daughter, shamans, mouth and tongue. It means smashing and breaking apart, dropping off and bursting open.”
Chen Mengjia (Yinxu Buci Zongshu, 61) well stated, “One must have full knowledge of the ancient society if one wants to understand correctly the meaning of an ancient written character.” Interpretation of this list of