bǔ · 卜 · verb · noun · to divine; the crack
Crack
the split in a heated bone, read as an answer
卜 is a picture of the crack itself. Shang diviners applied heat to ox shoulder-blades and turtle plastrons until the bone split, and read the direction and shape of the fracture as an answer; the question, and often the outcome, were then carved beside it. That practice produced the oracle-bone inscriptions, the earliest substantial body of Chinese writing we have. It is worth stating plainly what that means: in this tradition writing does not begin with accounts, laws or poetry. It begins as the annotation of a crack — a caption added to a mark nobody made on purpose. 兆, the omen, is a pair of the same fractures; 貞, to divine, sits in the same practice.
Sources · 3
- documented The oracle-bone corpus from Anyang — the inscriptions, their form, and their divinatory context.
- documented Xu Shen, Shuowen Jiezi, on 卜 and the related graphs.
- traditional That 卜 is also onomatopoeic, imitating the sound of the bone splitting. A long-standing and attractive claim about a sound nobody recorded.