Sacrifice and Offering
Appears in thirteen chapters
Where the image appears
Sacrifice and offering is the Book of Changes' model of sincerity made visible: the rite in which an inner state must take an outward form, and is judged entirely by the heart behind it. The image recurs because the oracle constantly needs a test that separates substance from show, and the offering is that test in miniature. What matters is never the size of the gift. In 41 Sun - Decrease, a hexagram of scanty resources, the Judgment asks how decrease is to be carried out and answers:
How is this to be carried out?
One may use two small bowls for the sacrifice.
The same teaching travels word for word through 45 Ts'ui - Gathering Together (Massing) and 46 Shêng - Pushing Upward: "If one is sincere, It furthers one to bring even a small offering." The commentary to Gathering Together adds that "the Divinity graciously accepts a small offering if it comes from the heart." The great comparison comes in 63 Chi Chi - After Completion:
The neighbor in the east who slaughters an ox
Does not attain as much real happiness
As the neighbor in the west
With his small offering.
For, as its commentary says, "while man sees what is before his eyes, God looks into the heart." The rite also gathers the community: "The king approaches his temple" in 45 Ts'ui - Gathering Together (Massing) and again in 59 Huan - Dispersion (Dissolution), where the clan is bound together at the ancestral sacrifice. In 51 Chên - The Arousing (Shock, Thunder) the rite becomes the measure of composure: though "The shock terrifies for a hundred miles," the reverent man "does not let fall the sacrificial spoon and chalice." And the oracle knows the dead ritual too. In 54 Kuei Mei - The Marrying Maiden the bond that has died inwardly is an offering kept up in form alone:
The woman holds the basket, but there are no fruits in it.
The man stabs the sheep, but no blood flows.
Nothing that acts to further.
Here the Changes touches the Taoist critique of ritualism: outward simplicity carrying inward fullness, form worthless without content. But where the Tao Te Ching is ready to discard the rite altogether, the Book of Changes keeps it and purifies it, insisting only that the two small bowls be filled from the heart.