吉 (jí) — Auspicious · The Favorable Reading · A Date That Is Right

A Shang diviner drilled a row of hollows into the back of an ox shoulder blade or a turtle's underside, touched a hot point to one of them, and read the crack that opened on the front. What the scribe then cut into the bone beside it follows a fixed shape, and the answer is frequently one character: 吉 — set beside the crack on its own, or closing the king's own reading, 王占曰：吉. That is the earliest work this character is known to have done, and it was technical work. 吉 is the favorable answer in a two-answer system, and the language later fixed its opposite as 凶. By the time of the 周易 the two were welded into a pair, and 吉凶 is still how Chinese refers to the two possible outcomes of anything at all. 说文解字 (c. 100 CE) files 吉 in the 口 section and defines it in two characters, 吉，善也 — good — then takes the seal graph apart as 士 over 口. The bone forms do not support that. 于省吾 read the upper element as a hafted weapon set point-down into its rack — 置句兵于卢之上 — and took the sense from the solidity of a weapon stowed rather than carried; others have read the same shape as a plug or a clay stopper closing a vessel's mouth. The graph is not settled. The word's job never has been in question.

What the character then attached itself to is time. 《诗经》 contains a hunting poem titled simply 吉日, and its first line names the date by its cyclical sign rather than by any quality of the weather: 吉日维戊. 《礼记·曲礼上》 goes further and writes down the manners of picking one — 丧事先远日，吉事先近日, for a funeral take the further date, for a 吉 occasion the nearer. That single line does two things at once. It shows that days were chosen rather than accepted, and it shows the word already serving as a category label: 吉事 covers the whole class of occasions that are not a death. The ritual codes run the same split through everything they touch. 《周礼》 sorts state ceremony into five kinds with 吉礼 at the head and 凶礼 immediately after it, and 吉服 is the dress a household is entitled to again once a mourning period is over. To be back in 吉服 is not a claim to be happy. It records only that the household has come out the other side.

The 周易 marks its line statements with a small recurring set of judgements — 吉, 凶, 悔, 吝, 厉, 无咎 — and 吉 sits at the top of it. Inside the book it is also the only one of the six that comes in grades. 元吉, the highest grade, is what the fifth line of 坤 receives for yellow lower robes: 黄裳元吉. The habit of grading outlived the book: a Chinese temple sorts its hundred slips into 大吉, 上吉, 中吉, 中平 and 下下, and a Japanese shrine prints 大吉, 中吉, 小吉 and 末吉 on its omikuji. Grading is possible at all because the word reports a reading rather than a wish, and no reading is ever guaranteed to come back favorable. That is also the sense in which 吉 differs from the character it eventually fused with. 祥 named the sign as it turned up in the world; 吉 named how the sign was answered. When the two ran together into 吉祥 the compound kept the good side of both and left the other one to 不祥.

• 吉日维戊，既伯既祷。田车既好，四牡孔阜。

  《诗经·小雅·吉日》(Book of Songs, "A Good Day," c. 9th–7th c. BCE)
  The good day is the day wù — the horse-ancestor has had his offering, the prayer is said, the hunting chariot is in order and the four stallions are in condition. — The poem is named after its date rather than after its hunt, and the date is identified by its cyclical sign, not by a season or a mood. This is 吉 at its oldest and plainest: not a description of what the day was like, but a finding that this is the one to go on.

• 吉人之辞寡，躁人之辞多。

  《周易·系辞下》(Book of Changes, Great Commentary II, c. 300 BCE)
  The 吉 person says little; the restless one says a great deal. — The passage around it is a short manual for reading people off their speech — the man about to betray you sounds ashamed, the man in two minds branches. It is the place where the character steps off the calendar and onto a person, and here it comes closest to the 善也 gloss 说文 gives it — the commentators read 吉人 as a good man. What the passage adds is that the goodness is legible from outside, off nothing but how much someone talks.

• 丧事先远日，吉事先近日。

  《礼记·曲礼上》(Book of Rites, "Summary of Ceremony" I, c. 200 BCE)
  For a funeral take the further date first; for a 吉 occasion, the nearer. — A working rule for divining a day, and the reasoning under it is human rather than technical: a burial should not be hurried, and everything else should not be put off. The line also catches 吉 doing duty as a category — 吉事 is the blanket term for the whole celebratory side of Chinese ritual life.

Every Lunar New Year, the flower markets of Guangzhou and Hong Kong sell potted kumquat trees by the truckload, and the reason is a sound. The character on the pot is 桔, gat in Cantonese — and so is 吉. A tree covered in 桔 is 大吉 made physical and left standing in a doorway for the length of the season, and a matched pair at a shop entrance is read as 大吉大利. The same substitution runs in the other direction in ordinary Cantonese speech, where 空 (empty) is avoided because it sounds like 凶: a vacant flat advertised for rent is a 吉屋, an empty parking bay is a 吉位. The word for the good answer is doing duty as a polite way of saying nothing is there.

The other half of the pair is never far away. 逢凶化吉 — to meet the 凶 and turn it into 吉 — is among the most-used four-character phrases in the language, and it only parses because both words are answers produced by the same procedure. That is what makes 吉 sayable after something has already gone wrong, which most of this vocabulary is not. Choosing the date was also a trade. The 通书 almanac is printed annually and still sold, and the specialist a family hired to read its 宜 and 忌 columns for a wedding or an opening day is a 择日先生. What survives most widely now is the short version of the same practice: two people checking a handful of dates against a calendar before they book anything.