The Cauldron

Hexagram 50 is named after the ding, a ritual bronze cauldron standing on three or four legs, used for cooking sacrificial offerings and, more importantly, for signifying that the person who owned it had the right to make them.

Ding are among the most substantial physical objects surviving from Shang and Zhou China. They were cast in sets, inscribed, buried with rulers, and treated as regalia; possession of the ding of a dynasty was possession of its legitimacy. That is why this hexagram follows Revolution in the sequence. One figure describes the overthrow; the next describes the vessel of the new order.

The line texts are correspondingly concrete and unusually domestic for a sacred object. The cauldron is overturned so that stale contents can be emptied out, which the text calls fortunate. Its handle is altered and its movement impeded, so that the fat of the pheasant is not eaten. The legs are broken and the prince's meal is spilled, which is called misfortune. There are golden carrying rings, and finally rings of jade.

That mixture, ritual object, cooking pot, broken legs, spilled dinner, is characteristic of the oldest stratum, and it is one of the passages where the distance between the Zhou Yi and the philosophical tradition built on it is easiest to feel. This is a text about an actual pot.

The philosophical reading built on it, the vessel of transformation, nourishment offered to the worthy, the culture that cooks raw material into something civilised, is developed at length in the Ten Wings and is genuinely fine. It is also unmistakably a later reading, and the broken legs and the spilled dinner are what it was built out of.

In reading practice hexagram 50 describes something being established: an institution, a household, a body of work, a new arrangement given a form that will hold it.

The favourable readings are strong. The judgement gives supreme good fortune and success, which is rare, and the fifth and sixth lines, golden rings, then jade rings, are among the most auspicious in the book. What is being described is nourishment properly organised: not the resource itself but the apparatus that makes it available to others, which is why the figure is often read for organisations and for work that will outlast the person doing it.

The warnings are structural. The fourth line, with the legs broken and the meal spilled, describes a container that has been overloaded or badly supported, and the traditional reading is of responsibility accepted beyond capacity. The second line has the vessel full and enemies envious, which is a plain observation about what happens to visible success.

The first line is the one most often useful: the cauldron is turned upside down to empty out what has gone stale, and the text calls this fortunate rather than shameful. Clearing out the old contents is presented as the ordinary preparation for use, not as a failure. Read alongside hexagram 49, the two figures give a complete argument about change, remove, then rebuild, and expect the rebuilding to be the longer and less exciting of the two tasks. Most of what is written about change concerns the first half; this hexagram is one of the few places in any divinatory system that takes the second half seriously.