Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The Line Statement and The Caldron with Rings of Jade

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The Line Statement and The Caldron with Rings of Jade

The sixth line of The Cauldron (King Wen 50) is drawn as yang, the numeral nine in the old divination manuals. James Legge's translation renders the line as the caldron with rings of jade, great good fortune, and every movement advantageous. The image sits inside a hexagram whose judgment as a whole concerns great progress and success, and this line supplies one stage of that larger reading rather than a complete statement on its own.

Structurally the line stands at the topmost place of the upper trigram Li, fire in Legge's readings of the eight trigrams, while the lower trigram of the hexagram is Xun, wind in the same traditional set of images. The Great Symbolism of the hexagram reads wood entering into fire, the image of cooking; the superior man keeps every position correct and makes secure the appointment received from heaven, and the sixth line takes its place inside that combined picture of Xun below and Li above.

Read on its own the line neither opens nor closes the hexagram's argument. It marks the point where Li is either forming (in the lower trigram) or completing itself (in the upper), and later interpreters treat its image, The Caldron with Rings of Jade, as the concrete case through which the hexagram's abstract judgment becomes visible in a single situation rather than a general principle.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.