The Seba library treats Well in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, Alfred Huang, Jung, Carl Gustav).
Jing [The Well] is the ground from which virtue springs. Jing [The Well] demonstrates how one stays in one’s place and yet can transfer what one has to others.
Wang Bi’s commentary establishes the Well as the paradigmatic symbol of rooted, inexhaustible virtue that nourishes others without displacement of self.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
The well nourished all the people who lived on the lord’s land… The Commentary on the Decision says, ‘The well supplies replenishment but is never exhausted.’
Huang grounds the Well’s symbolic meaning in the ancient well-field agrarian system, where the well’s inexhaustibility encodes the ideal of communal, self-renewing nourishment.
, The Complete I Ching: The Definitive Translation, 1998thesis
water as a symbol of wisdom and spirit can be traced back to the parable which Christ told to the Samaritan woman at the well… puteum sensibilem Jakob, puteum rationalem, et puteum sapientialem.
Jung connects the well as symbol of wisdom to both the Biblical Samaritan parable and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa’s three-tiered schema of sensory, rational, and sapiential wells, embedding it within depth-psychological alchemical hermeneutics.
, The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, 1954thesis
water as a symbol of wisdom and spirit can be traced back to the parable which Christ told to the Samaritan woman at the well… puteum sensibilem Jakob, puteum rationalem, et puteum sapientialem.
Parallel to the preceding Jung passage, this CW16 text confirms his sustained argument that the well’s depth-symbolic register encompasses the full range from animal nourishment to divine wisdom.
, Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy, 1954thesis
Once in an impasse, they cannot forcibly seek a way out; they should dress themselves in humility and hide their treasure, suffer alone and work alone. Then gradually there will be joy.
Liu I-ming’s Taoist commentary transforms the Well hexagram’s context of impasse into a discipline of patient self-cultivation, where the well-spring of Tao is reached only through endurance rather than coercion.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986thesis
while one cannot proceed directly on the path, having long been in a state of exhaustion and impasse, if one comes gradually, one will eventually achieve one’s aim.
Cleary’s rendition of the Taoist I Ching foregrounds the Well’s transitional role between exhaustion and renewal, emphasizing gradual approach as the proper method of accessing the well’s nourishment.
, The Taoist I Ching, 1986supporting
the cunning fisherman weaves osiers to make his light weel (nassa) with its wide mouth… By the trick of this contracted aperture he keeps the fish drawn from the sea from making its way back.
This passage uses ‘weel’ in its archaic sense of a fish-trap, providing a philological aside that distinguishes the vessel-as-container from the depth-symbolic well, with no direct relevance to psychological meaning.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997aside