The Vessel
Appears in eight chapters
The vessel is the container as image of nourishment, character, and emptiness. It recurs because the Book of Changes thinks about human worth the way one judges a pot: by what it holds, whether it can be drawn from, and whether it is sound. The only two man-made objects to name hexagrams stand at the center of the image. The first is 48 Ching - The Well, the inexhaustible common source:
THE WELL. The town may be changed,
But the well cannot be changed.
It neither decreases nor increases.
They come and go and draw from the well.
Political structures change, but the well of life "exists for one and for all"; the only dangers are the rope that does not reach and carelessness, "by which the jug is broken." The second is 50 Ting - The Caldron, the bronze ting "that held the cooked viands in the temple of the ancestors," culture refining nature until food becomes offering: "THE CALDRON. Supreme good fortune. / Success."
Around these cluster the humbler vessels, and in every one the content outweighs the form. The full earthen bowl of 08 Pi - Holding Together (union) shows sincerity "in which the content is everything and the empty form nothing." In the danger of 29 K'an - The Abysmal (Water) ceremony is stripped to essentials: "A jug of wine, a bowl of rice with it; / Earthen vessels / Simply handed in through the Window." In 41 Sun - Decrease, "One may use two small bowls for the sacrifice"; in 61 Chung Fu - Inner Truth the shared vessel is friendship itself, "I have a good goblet. / I will share it with you." And the empty basket of 54 Kuei Mei - The Marrying Maiden is the vessel's negative: form preserved after the content has died.
The Taoist parallel is the closest in the whole book. Tao Te Ching 11 finds the usefulness of the vessel precisely in its emptiness, and chapter 4 describes the Tao itself as an empty vessel that is never exhausted by use, which is almost a paraphrase of the Well's judgment. The well that neither decreases nor increases, drawn on by generation after generation, is the Tao with a rope and bucket.