What Words Can't Say
書不盡言，言不盡意。
The weavers in The Sorceress of Morning Song are illiterate in “men’s words,” but they use the knot language of their guild mystery to communicate essential information. The language has two letters: a knot, which we show as a dash “—” or “X;” and a space with no knot—a double hyphen “- -” or “O.” Three of these letters make a word, each of which has a name and a large number of possible meanings. These are the well known “eight trigrams bagua 八卦” seen in fengshui 風水, Chinese medicine, the lunar calendar, and gongfu 功夫.
O X O X O X O X
O O X X O O X X
O O O O X X X X
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8The weavers call these eight the “Little Patterns.” In a very general way, you can assign any thing or action to the eight Little Patterns. To get more specific, you can combine two of them and have sixty-four terms. That was as much as was necessary in the simpler times of the Sage Ruler, Fuxi 伏羲, who devised it.
What a six-knot Pattern means depends on how one understands the way its two Little Patterns work together. For instance, the old I Ching fortune tellers identified the overall meaning of hexagram 25 ䷖ as “bō 剝,” “splitting apart” in the Wilhelm/Baynes translation. Its first Little Pattern, read from the bottom, is OOO ☷. It is taken to mean “yielding,” in this context; and the top three lines OOX ☶ are seen as “firm” as are all three trigrams with one X type line and two Os. The commentary says, “the yielding changes the firm (ror bian gang ye 柔變剛也).” That is, the five O lines, which are weak individually but strong together, are pushing the one remaining X or “firm” line out of the way.
Shrpo, Second Sister, and Fahng know the fortune-teller’s words as well, but as they were spoken, not as they were written down “in men’s words” by the Spring Bureau scribes. It was one of the scribes’ jobs to preserve cultural expressions for the edification of their rulers. We believe that they transcribed the verses in the Book of Poems (Shijing 詩經) for that purpose around the time of my story. In the same way, some of the numerous city state governments likely “collected” fortune telling prompt books. One of those, the I Ching won out as the official text over time, but we know of two others that now exist only in fragments with different wording.
Each Chinese word only has one syllable, and, while we can’t be sure about how it would have been spoken in Morning Song, modern Mandarin only uses around a tenth of the number of syllable sounds that English does. Pronunciations have changed dramatically over time and still differ from one another in regional dialects. Cantonese is as different from Mandarin as French is from Italian. But the relatively few number of sounds available means that all forms of Chinese have been full of words with the same pronunciation.
Naturally, the weavers’ understanding of spoken words was oriented toward their world of cloth and work. The scribes recorded the fortune tellers’ version, and then the scholars edited the manuscripts to suit their needs. At that point, the oral history was locked into the men’s words that have come down to us. They were already ambiguous, but still when you read them aloud you open a daunting array of possible meanings.
When I quote the I Ching’s words in my story, I always check the definitions in the oldest full dictionary, called the Shuowenjiezi 說文解字. The dictionary’s entries were a revelation to me after a lifetime of reading the I Ching from the perspective of the Confucians. They would quibble over nuances at times, of course—that’s what scholars do. But they pretty much stuck to a narrow range of possibilities that supported their belief in the book as a moral and ethical guide. By contrast, if one plugs in the Shuowen’s equivalents to the I Ching’s brief, unpunctuated statements, they change the entire feel of the book.
It surprised me that the outcome of this approach frequently leads to the jargon of cloth making. For example, the name of hexagram 25, “bō 剝,” can mean “splitting apart” as the Confucian scholars chose to read it. But the Shuowen 說文, says it means “liè 裂”—“silk remnant.” That’s what the weavers hear in the name of OOOOOX, the one-knotted Pattern they also pronounced however bō was pronounced then.
Fahng’s roommate Sansan tells her, “All the Patterns have names that Shrpo learned from her masters. Second Sister teaches them to us after we know the order. The name of Pattern 4 is “colored gauze 繻” for weaving. But that sounds like the word for ‘wait 需,’ too. I’ve heard Shrpo call it that when she tells fortunes.” The two written characters are the same except that the one for “colored gauze” adds the element for “silk 糸” on the left. Both are now pronounced xū.
In this case, both words are used in the I Ching—in its simple form as the name of hexagram 5 and with the silk element as a word for a kind of cloth in hexagram 63. As more and more of the spoken language was written down, new characters were devised by adding elements to more basic words that sounded the same. That still happens with names for chemical elements and other discoveries. So quite a few words in the I Ching can be read with the silk or “clothing 衣” elements, and show how a weaver might have heard them.
Fahng increasingly hears “the words of the Patterns” in her thoughts as she masters the sampler’s secrets. Like all of us who “Observe [the I Ching’s] images and play with its words (guan qi xiang er wan qi ci 觀其象而玩其辭),” she begins to understand the world in their terms and consider their connotations of good or back luck when making decisions. They are also her path to controlling the power of qi 氣 energy in gongfu, and most importantly, they give her the clues she needs to solve The Weaving Maiden’s Mystery.