| Chapter 2: | Spirits of the Zhou yi—An Essay on Wine |
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Figure 4. Feature analysis of the “wine” system.
Semantic features articulate upon formal structures of hexagrams and lines. This hexagram set has many water trigrams, structurally expressing alcoholic beverages. Each of the four has at least one Kan trigram, the image of water (010). Doubled Kan is #29. Hexagram #47 not only has Kan, water, but also the “lake” (wetland) image 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 water trigram’s strong, yang central lines. Wine and grain vessels appear in a Kan trigram, too: #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 Li, fire trigram. There is something significant about this: the problem here is to express the direction of fermentation away from water and toward fire. Alcoholic beverages are a way water embodies fire.
These two hexagrams, 5 and 47, pair at the lowest level of the structure of differences just illustrated, giving positive and negative episodes of drink and food. Appearing in the strong (yang) line of the Kan (water) trigram gives a sense of the “strong in the weak” or “hard liquid,” part of the phenomenology of fermented beverages.
Moreover, one finds the positive episode of “waiting for (nourishment of) wine and food” located in the top trigram, at line five, the whole