| Chapter 2: | Spirits of the Zhou yi—An Essay on Wine |
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and distribution of phrases helps derive nuances 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!
It will soon be clear this chapter is not philologically motivated. Its ambition, moreover, is neither divination, cosmology, nor moral edification. On the contrary, the only thing to ask about the Zhou yi at this point is simply, how was the text composed?—a decent, though humble and limited, focus for investigation.
There may be a chance the answer to the question is the text was not composed but rather just tossed together randomly like bushels of autumn leaves. Then one could only say the question was senseless; however, at this inquiry’s beginning, there is nothing in the question itself that is senseless. It is a perfectly reasonable starting point, simply proposing to examine the organization of the text as a composition. When one says “book,” one generally approaches texts as integrated units, not collections of isolated words.
Moreover, inasmuch as there are indications the text is highly organized and not randomly raked together, there are perfectly good reasons to insist on examining 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.1
This study aims to present a favorable case in which the question of textual composition can be answered in a clear and measured way. Readers can consider the question’s merits on its own terms and decide benefits and drawbacks for themselves.
The essential point of the compositional question—namely, how was this text composed?—is not to treat textual elements as isolated items but rather to study, first, relations among subsets, and then between them and the rest of the text, as whole subsystems functioning within the text as a whole composition. Such a procedure amounts to requiring textual study from the top down, from larger units to smaller.
To support this guideline, consider the example of “wine” in certain loci in the Zhou yi text.