The Yi has quite a bit to say about food and drink generally, and wine in particular. While food has always seemed to me to be a fairly simple image for how you participate in your world – what you internalise, how you meet your essential needs – wine is more complicated. It’s not only sustenance: it also has the power to change your mental and emotional state. Also, alcoholic drink has undergone its own change of state by fermentation, creating the mystery of a liquid that burns.
Wine, jiu 酒, plays an important role in 5.5, 47.2 and 64.6. (I’m calling it ‘wine’ – it could be beer. Definitely something alcoholic, anyway.) It also gets a mention in 29.4, which changes to 47, and is poured from a good vessel in 61.2.
5.5
‘Waiting with food and drink.
Constancy, good fortune.’
需于酒食, xu yu jiu shi, waiting with/at wine (and) food: the very best kind of Waiting. The fifth line of any hexagram tends to be the ‘ruler’s’ place: the line with the greatest sense of autonomy and choice. You can’t choose not to have to wait, but you can most certainly choose how you wait.
The core meaning here is simple: waiting with confidence and enjoying yourself in the meantime. If you imagine the farmer waiting for rain, knowing that if it doesn’t rain he will have no crops and no food… it might seem natural to go on starvation rations and stare anxiously at the sky hoping for clouds. But Waiting calls (in its Oracle text) for fu, sincere trust, confidently expecting and moving towards what you need.
The authors of the Image enlarged on line 5, clearly seeing it as the ideal way to Wait:
‘The clouds are above heaven. Waiting.
A noble one eats, drinks and relaxes with music.’
Eating and drinking isn’t only an expression of confidence that there will be good crops to come; it may also be a way to invite the spirits to share your meal, bless you with their presence – and nudge some helpful rain clouds your way.
This line changes to Hexagram 11, Flow: Waiting in and with Flow, in full knowledge that everything works.
And the wine? It shows this is a celebration. Its mental/emotional effects reduce fear and second-guessing, make us more present and trusting, more able to enjoy the moment without worrying about the future.
47.2
Compare that with 47.2…
‘Confined while drinking and feasting,
Scarlet knee-coverings come from the regions.
Fruitful to use thank-offerings and oblations.
Setting out to bring order: pitfall, no mistake.’
5.5: 需于酒食, ‘Waiting with drink and food’.
47.2: 困于酒食, ‘Confined with drink and food’.
Not only does the wording follow the same formula, but both of these are the central line of kan, between two broken lines, showing the active liquid within its container. (Scott Davis pointed all this out in his book.)
The emotional experience, though, is very different. Wine should create trust and encourage social bonding – drinking with a group says, ‘I feel safe to let my guard down with you all.’ But Hexagram 47 is isolating: trust between people is exactly what it does not have.
Looking at experiences with this line, being ‘confined with drink and food’ generally means there is food and drink, nourishment and trust or good things in general, just not for you, or not quite what you need. (Which feels extra-frustrating, as surely it ought to be?)
For instance, I’ve had it about beautifully designed software I couldn’t quite get on with – one of those situations where I spend more time trying to adapt the way I work to fit with the software than I do getting any actual work done. And I remember someone complaining the I Ching Community was dying and he’d had this line about it – when the community was actually in rude health, but its culture was shifting and he wasn’t quite as in tune with it as before.
There is a great Gathering (47.2 changes to 45) of people, or of energy and focus in a shared project, but you are not quite in phase with it. To change that, you’ll need to engage with its ‘scarlet knee-coverings’ (authorities, requirements, rules, how it works…) gently and politely, without ‘setting out to bring order’.
(This is one of those odd omens: ‘pitfall, no mistake.’ Perhaps your reasons for wanting to fix everything and make it work are all good, but it still won’t end well.)
29.4
‘A cup of wine, a pair of dishes,
Using earthenware.
Let in with ropes from the window.
In the end, no mistake.’
Another mention of jiu 酒, wine, another changing line in the trigram kan. This one’s a yin line, though, perhaps because it’s the ropes that are active, rather than the liquor itself. And this line changes to 47, reinforcing the thematic connection – and more importantly, indicating that this is about reaching a prisoner.
In readings, I think this is about getting past barriers, finding an opening to make a simple connection – just enough to provide what’s needed. The line’s about delivering the wine rather than drinking it.
61.2
‘Calling crane in the shadows,
Her young respond in harmony.
I have a good wine vessel,
I will share with you, pouring it all out.’
This line doesn’t include the character jiu, but the theme of trust and connection would be hard to miss! The hexagram is named zhong fu, Inner Truth, with the same word for ‘truth’ as is used in the Oracle of Hexagram 5 (and again, twice, in 64.6). Rapport, mutual responsiveness, trust, truth and confidence – all are represented by both the cranes and the wine-sharing.
That part is immediately relatable: if you have a good wine stored away, then you open it when you have a friend to share it with. The speaker offers a good wine vessel, one that would be used for festivals. Perhaps they are like the young crane, responding to the call of an ancestral spirit, using wine and the subtly altered psychological state it offers to step outside the everyday and into the shadows.
And you can see this in the hexagram structure, too: there is no kan here, but Hexagram 61 is its opposite trigram, li, writ large (with each line doubled individually), creating a big container for Inner Truth. It’s the vessel that’s active, containing and sharing – motivated by Hexagram 42, Increasing, and its desire always to pour in more.
64.6
‘Being true and confident in drinking wine,
Not a mistake.
Soaking your head,
Being true and confident, losing your grip on that.’
I love very much that this ancient, profoundly wise and greatly honoured oracle concludes with advice on how drunk to get.
This is the top line of the trigram li, fire, above kan: a hexagram of ‘fire water’ (Scott Davis pointed this out, too), with the emphasis on its intoxicating effects. Wine creates fu – sincerity, confidence and trust – and sometimes a little too much of it.
Disinhibition and an increase in confidence can be exactly what’s needed when you have a river to cross: you can be less anxious about the future, more capable of anticipating success, more willing to take risks – the imagination crossing the river ahead of the rest of you. But the aim is a subtly altered consciousness: believing in yourself enough to try, but not so much you lose your grip on reality.
I have an example of this one from just a couple of weeks ago. I’m in the final stages of learning to drive – an unfortunate example for the metaphor, I suppose, but there we go… – and the process is having the nice side effect of giving me lots of vividly-illustrated, crystal-clear readings.
I started learning in a state of abject terror, with a lovely instructor who managed to transmute that into a good blend of confidence and caution. Now I’m continuing to learn with my husband, I need to manage that blend for myself.
Remembering I can drive and I’m going to pass a test soon – not a mistake. Losing presence of mind and driving on into the middle of the river a tight space between a van and a bus (just for example, you understand…) – not so good. I can see more clearly now how this line engages with Hexagram 40, Release: it needs the freedom to decide what to do next in each situation. With no place to go, to hold back and wait for the van to finish turning is good fortune…