The Seba library treats Pheasant in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Thomas Cleary, Liu Yiming, Liu I-ming, Rudolf Ritsema, Stephen Karcher).
“Shooting pheasant” means not using illumination; “one arrow is lost” means not using strength. Not using illumination, illumination is replete; not using strength, strength is complete—the whole psychophysical being is sublimated
Liu I-ming’s Taoist commentary reads the pheasant-shooting image as a paradox of non-use: refraining from deploying illumination and strength allows both to reach their fullest, sublimated expression.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
5 yin: Shooting pheasant, one arrow is lost; eventually one is entitled, because of good repute. EXPLANATION Being flexible and receptive, open and balanced, is like “shooting pheasant, one arrow is lost.”
The fifth yin line of Hexagram 56 is interpreted as a figure of flexible, receptive virtue: the apparent loss of the arrow-shot pheasant is reframed as a form of entitled accomplishment grounded in good repute rather than force.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
Six at-fifth a) Shooting a pheasant. The-one arrow extinguishing. Completing uses praising fate. b) Completing uses praising fate. Overtaking the above indeed.
Ritsema and Karcher’s structural rendering of Hexagram 56, fifth line, presents the pheasant’s shooting as an act whose completion is not destruction but a praising-alignment with fate, carrying symbolic weight beyond the literal hunt.
, I Ching: The Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, 1994thesis
The fat of the pheasant is not eaten. Once rain falls, remorse is spent. Good fortune comes in the end.
In Wilhelm’s commentary on Hexagram 50 (The Caldron), the pheasant’s fat — signified by trigram Li — remains uneaten because the vessel’s handle is altered, emblematizing spiritual nourishment blocked by structural misalignment.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950thesis
the contents, indicated by the upper trigram Li, which means pheasant, are eaten, but this is not the case. The vessel is not portable, because the handle has been altered.
Wilhelm’s exegesis explicitly identifies trigram Li with the pheasant and interprets the blocked consumption of its fat as a failure of transmission resulting from formal impediment rather than lack of substance.
, The I Ching or Book of Changes, 1950supporting
After the long, long night as long as the dragging tail of the copper pheasant morning finally dawns!
Dōgen cites the copper pheasant’s dragging tail from a classical waka to figure the prolonged duration of illusion or samsaric endurance before the moment of awakening — a temporal rather than cosmological use of the bird.
, Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki, 1234supporting
Whereas “Ge [Radical Change] means ‘get rid of the old,’” Ding [The Caldron] means completes the new.
Wang Bi’s commentary on The Caldron hexagram, within which the pheasant image is embedded, frames the vessel’s purpose as completion and transformation — the conceptual context in which the pheasant’s withheld nourishment acquires meaning.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994aside