The Seba library treats Mulberry in 4 passages, across 4 authors (including Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, Place, Robert M., Watson, Burton).
This might be lost, this might be lost, so tie it to a healthy, flourishing mulberry.
Wang Bi’s commentary on Hexagram 12 deploys the mulberry tree as a symbol of secure, vital anchorage during the Dao’s deterioration, counseling the superior man to bind his precarious position to its flourishing rootedness.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
the Chinese began to make a pulp from the bark of the mulberry tree and press and dry it into thin sheets.
Place locates the mulberry tree at the material origin of paper and thus of all printed symbolic systems—cards, books, and money—making it foundational to the history of divination and symbolic transmission.
, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting
According to Chinese nature lore, the mud dauber can transform mulberry caterpillars into its own young.
Zhuangzi’s text invokes the folk belief that mulberry caterpillars can be metamorphosed into entirely different creatures, illustrating the Daoist theme that fixed identity dissolves under the transformative operations of nature.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013supporting
Eurydamas’ servants came back bringing a pair of earrings with triple drops in mulberry clusters, and there was radiant charm in them.
The Odyssey passage associates the mulberry’s form and deep color with feminine adornment and radiant charm, preserving an ornamental-aesthetic dimension of the symbol within the Homeric world.
, Odyssey of Homer, 2009aside