After going one step at a time through the Oracle texts of hexagrams 40 and 59, I thought I’d try the same with Hexagram 48, the Well. This is not the first time I’ve revisited this hexagram, and probably won’t be the last. I suppose that’s to be expected! (‘They come and go, the well wells.’)
I’ve been reading through the Oracle text again, trying to understand how it unfolds line by line:
‘The Well. Moving the city, not moving the well.
Without loss, without gain,
They come and go, the well wells.
Almost drawn the water, but the rope does not quite reach the water,
Or breaking one’s clay jug,
Pitfall.’
Moving the city, not moving the well.
井
改邑不改井
The well.
Moving the city, not moving the well.
This first statement is starting to sound to me like a riddle. Hold on a minute… we built our city, and we built our well. Both are built, both are ours. How come one of these things can be moved, but not the other?
This might be a good moment to pause and understand what ‘moving the city’ means. Both in Zhou times and before, Chinese settlements sometimes had to be moved. There are many possible reasons for this: fields losing fertility, creeping drought that drove people south over generations, encroaching hostile tribes. It seems it was generally understood as something required of the people by Heaven.
In the Shangshu, the Book of Documents, you can read the story of a Shang king, Pan Geng, working to persuade his people of the need to move. (Here it is, in Legge’s translation: parts 1, 2 and 3.) It’s immediately apparent that this move was a major undertaking, one that meant immediate hardship for quite distant long-term gain. The people would take their livestock, sacred objects, weapons and tools, leave their homes and rebuild from scratch – including, of course, digging a new well.
The Oracle text of this hexagram doesn’t say ‘a city can be moved, a well cannot be moved.’ There is a word for ‘possible to’ or ‘capable of’ in the Yi, and it’s not found here. So it seems to me this is not just a theoretical contemplation of what’s possible – it’s more likely that it mentions moving cities because a city is being moved. A change is happening, or called for, and it’s hard work. Time to understand the difference between all the things that change, and the one thing that doesn’t.
So what exactly does it mean to say that the well doesn’t move? The city’s buildings – heavy timbers on rammed earth walls – aren’t going to be moved, either. They, like the well, are left behind.
However, you can rebuild them exactly as they were, wherever you choose. What you cannot move is the place where a well can be dug. A well isn’t a building; it’s an opening. Minford compares the possible sites for a well – those places where conditions are good and the water table is high enough – to acupuncture points on the human body. I find that a wonderfully rich comparison. The site for the well is there before anyone starts digging.
You can move your whole life – from the royal court to the family pig – but you can’t move the contours of bedrock and water table. No wonder Pan Geng had to overcome so much reluctance among his people: as well as moving everything, they were going to have to discover and dig new wells – a whole different kind of work.
This starts to give me a different sense of Hexagram 48 in readings. Wherever you are, you have to find a way to connect to what sustains you. You may have a lot of work to do on the horizontal axis, as it were, moving from point A to point B across the surface – but there is also this vertical axis, the need to rediscover and renew your connection to source, and this is a different kind of thing altogether. More ‘moving’ activity will not help.
Without loss, without gain
无喪无得。
I don’t believe this means that the water level in the well never varies. The water level in a well does rise and fall, and in a hard drought, the well might dry up altogether.
Besides, the words translated here as ‘loss’ and ‘gain’ aren’t associated with having less or more of something, but with whether you have it at all.
They first appear, together, in the Oracle of Hexagram 2:
‘Fruitful in the south and west, gaining partners.
In the east and north, losing partners.’
You could also lose sheep at Yi, lose a horse (don’t chase it!), not lose the sacred ladle, lose coins, or a servant, or money and an axe, or the carriage curtain. According to the dictionary, you could lose troops, or livestock, or the support of the people, or your life; the oldest meanings involve mourning at a funeral.
‘Gain’ might be better translated simply as ‘get’: the ancient character shows a hand grasping a cowrie shell (used as currency before coins). In the Yi, you might get allies, or honour, or a metal arrowhead.
‘Without loss, without gain’ seems to me to be a way of offering immediate reassurance for the insecure, uncertain business of moving the city.
I need my well! I can’t live without it! What do you mean, I can’t take it with me?
No, you can’t take the well with you, but that doesn’t mean you’ve lost it. It isn’t something you can lose.
It also isn’t something you can get. (You can’t go to the market and trade for a new well, or become rich by stockpiling wells.)
‘This is our house that we built.’
‘This is our well that we built.’
And yet it wasn’t built in the same way, and we don’t own it in the same way.
In readings, all this is a powerful invitation to reflect on what sustains us, what we think of casually as ‘ours’, without ever owning it at all. Hexagram 48 famously represents the Yi itself. I’ve often seen it representing mental health and emotional resilience – and most recently (in a reading recorded for a future podcast episode), it stood for someone’s family.
Go come well well
往來井井
I love the poetic economy of this line. Go-come, a pair of opposites, two words on their way to becoming one, representing coming-and-going, the passage of time, exchange and relationships. Well-well: ‘the well is the well’ (Bradford Hatcher); ‘the well wells’ (me); ‘it remains the same well, pure and still’ (R.J.Lynn).
This is the perfect, perfectly succinct reassurance. You can’t move the well, but there’s no need. In all your comings and goings, the well is always present.
However…
汔至
Nearly arrived/reached
亦未繘井
And-also not well-rope/drawing water well
(This is universally translated as ‘the rope does not reach the water’.)
羸其瓶。凶。
Breaking the jug. Disaster.
There seems to be a heavy emphasis on how that well-rope is nearly long enough. As a ‘cellist, it reminds me of being nearly in tune (another way of saying ‘out of tune’): it sounds like someone making an excuse. If you nearly reached the water, you are still just as thirsty.
The broken pitcher is a different failure mode, and perhaps even more frustrating: it reached the water, touched the potential, but can’t draw it all the way up into use.
The well is a strange, unique thing: you can’t hold it, move it, or lose it; it is always present, underlying and unaffected by all your changes. However, this does not mean ‘it’s always there for you’ no matter what you do. Reaching what it offers is a constant challenge – it’s just that the work of reaching it is quite unlike any other work, one at right-angles to regular busy-ness.