How the Sansai Trinity Vase Came to Be

In 1986 in Nagasaki City, Japan, I was researching Chinese ideographs which incorporated drawings of a sheep when in awe I sensed that three of them seemed designed to reveal the Trinity of the Bible. It seemed incredible that these Chinese picture words of several millennia past illustrated in striking detail the God Christians understand from the Bible as three in one and one in three. As a missionary working in the Japanese language which uses Chinese characters, I knew that many of them clearly illustrate Bible truths. However, these illustrations came mostly from the contemporary makeup and arrangement of the characters. My “enlightenment” saw something deeper and more detailed.

It was also in 1986 that a niece gave me The Discovery of Genesis (Nelson and Wang, Concordia Press), a book which presents tens of characters which seem to have been invented to tell what the Bible records in chapters one through eleven of Genesis. My research into the subject became a passion and I began to gather resource materials to delve into what seems to be an infinite number of Chinese ideographs. I began a column for The Nagasaki Compass, a monthly English news bulletin published for 27 years in Nagasaki. (This column appeared from May 1986, through August 1998, when my wife and I returned to the U.S.A. for our pre-retirement home assignment.)  During the ensuing months I noted the three “sheep” characters mentioned above could symbolize the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that the three traditional colors of green, brownish-red, and yellow of Sansai pottery of Nagasaki could be used to reinforce the meanings.

Sansai pottery originated in the Middle East, entered China, and then Japan. Our association with the Eguchi family of the Village of Sansai Pottery of Omura, Nagasaki, one of two places in Japan which feature Sansai, began over forty years ago at the late Mr. Hiroshi Eguchi’s pottery shop, Amanoya, in downtown Nagasaki City (see under Helen Keller Connection).

After I put the Sansai colors and the three sheep characters together in my mind, I began to think about some Sansai pottery item to accommodate the characters with the message about the Trinity that I wanted to portray. I talked about this with our Sansai Village friends Tsukasa and Chiseko Eguchi. Mr. Eguchi, the son of founder, the late Hiroshi Eguchi, is president and master potter of the Village, a welfare entity, and Mrs. Eguchi operates Nagasaki Yaki, a private business for selling Sansai pottery. Mr. Eguchi gave considerable time and provided samples and prices. Since I wanted to use the vases primarily as gifts to family and friends, and to pastors, leaders, and host families of churches who invited us to speak of our missionary work, we needed to hold the cost down. The triangular bud vase pictured is the result. Mr. Eguchi had already produced a triangular bud vase with the usual traditional Sansai “scrambled eggs, ketchup and green peppers look,” as I came to describe it. Now he had to engrave the characters into the mold. No easy task! Then he needed to apply the color producing raw materials in such a way that the assigned color for each character’s background on its side of the vase would dominate after firing in the kiln, avoiding the uniformly scrambled three-color appearance. Finally, he would pass this knowledge to his student artisans who would prepare each vase for firing. Mr. Eguchi did an excellent job for which we thank him, Mrs. Eguchi, and his Village of Sansai artisans. We hope the following Bible truths illustrated by the Sansai Trinity Vase will help bind your mind and spirit firmly to God who loves you sacrificially as Father-Creator, Son-Redeemer, and Holy Spirit Communicator.

The Trinity Vase Speaks

The Sansai Trinity vase brings together ancient pottery style and Chinese writing to express the triune God of the Bible and Christianity. Sansai means “three colors” literally, but also “rich in color.” Its basic colors are green, brownish red, and yellow.

The triangular-shaped vase has three very important Chinese characters: 美 bi, “beauty,” 義 gi, “righteousness,” and 譱 zen (an older form of) 善 zen, “goodness”), all featuring 羊 yoh, “sheep”, as the top portion of each. Why does a sheep dominate these precious Chinese picture words? The Bible suggests the answer. In it sheep are choice animal sacrifices for sins and symbolize the sacrificial love of God who gave His unique Son, Jesus Christ, as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). They also reflect that Chinese people of several thousand years ago used sheep as sin offerings much like the people of the Bible. The fact that hundreds of other Chinese characters derive from animal sacrifices proves the importance of animal offerings in ancient China. It was through such sacrifices that God prepared people of old to know Him as a God of holiness who requires payment for sin, but at the same time, One who mercifully and lovingly accepted the death of the animal given in the worshipping sinner’s stead.

The three characters on the vase, and the three colors of Sansai pottery, mesh to symbolize this God of the Bible who reveals Himself therein as one God, manifest as Father-Creator, Son-Savior-Redeemer, and Holy Spirit-Communicator.

The predominantly green face has the character 美 bi, “beauty.” Why does a sheep dominate this ideograph for “beauty?” It is a compound consisting of 羊 yoh, “sheep” plus 大 dai, “big.” It represents God the Father-Creator, who created all things beautiful. The climactic beauty was man, made in God’s own image, to rule over all other creatures. The original meaning of 大 dai, “big,” is “a noble human being.” Reduced to its two parts we have 人 jin, a person with legs spread, plus a horizontal line, 一, depicting outstretched arms which indicate authority. The dominant green background exudes the beautiful life of God’s original creation which included mankind, “big” or “noble” enough to walk and talk with God, his Father-Creator, in a fresh and verdant paradise called “Eden.”

The pristine beauty of this creation was such that even after noble Adam and Eve ignobly disobeyed their Companion-Creator, and brought death and ruin into it all, fantastic vestiges of it remain to this day to fill us with wonder and awe. God, of course, knew that man would bring the curse of sin and death upon both himself and the creation God gave him, over which to rule. God knew before the beginning that creating beings in his own likeness, with the power of moral choice, would eventually cost Him the horrible death of His unique Son, Jesus Christ, in order to open the way for fallen mankind and creation to again be supremely good and beautiful in His sight. The sheep speaks of this kind of sacrificial love being present even as the Father-Creator capped creation by beginning a race of beings who in the future would have to be redeemed at such a great price. The Sansai Trinity Vase’s brownish red side and its Chinese picture word represent the Father-Creator’s way of bringing the beauty back through His Son-Redeemer, Jesus Christ.

The brownish-red face of the Trinity Vase hosts the ideograph 義 gi, “righteousness.” Dissecting this combination character, we get 羊 yoh, “sheep,” plus 我 ga, “I” or “me.” The latter in turn is made up of 手 te,（才), “hand” plus 戈 hako, “halberd,” a long weapon for killing. On the vase 義 gi represents God the Son-Redeemer, or Son-Savior. God sent Him from heaven to earth the first Christmas to become the means of creation’s redemption or salvation. Through Him man can have his transgressions forgiven and become righteous in God’s sight again. The dominant brownish-red color here symbolizes the blood of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, which he shed for the sins of all human beings on a Roman cross almost 2000 years ago. The hand, 手 te, and spear-like halberd, 戈 hako, in this character literally picture how Jesus died. According to the Bible, a Roman soldier, in the process of executing Jesus, “pierced his side with a spear” (John 20:34). In this way Jesus Christ, “who knew no sin became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (II Corinthians 5:21).

The idea of becoming righteousness through a substitutionary sacrifice is further symbolized by the original meaning of 我 ga. It meant “to kill with a halberd.” Aside from these literal meanings, Christians have long noted that the formation of 義 gi, with its 羊 sheep placed over 我 ga, “I” or “me,” portrays exactly the Bible idea of righteousness— “covered by the sacrificed Lamb.” This central Bible idea began when God replaced Adam and Eve’s fig-leaf garment with the skin of a sacrificed animal (Genesis 3:21).

The character on the yellow face of the vase is 譱 zen, “goodness.” It is 羊 yoh, “sheep,” plus 言 gen, “word” written twice 言言. It represents the Holy Spirit-Communicator of the Trinity. Just as the color yellow naturally attracts attention and communicates powerfully, so does God the Holy Spirit in His main role. He is the expert communicator who helps man to give attention to and understand the things of God the Father-Creator, and God the Son-Redeemer. The Bible, which the Holy Spirit uniquely inspired, teaches that the Holy Spirit also helps man to communicate with God in prayer and praise, and to communicate God’s Word to others. Yellow is also a color of fire, light, and warmth. The Holy Spirit, in a spiritual sense, provides all of these for the well-being of those who trust and obey God as he shows Himself in Bible truths.

The doubled “word” component (言言) of 譱, the unabbreviated form of 善 zen, dramatizes the work of the Holy Spirit. One recorded meaning of the component character 言 gen, “word,” is “the heart coming out of the mouth.” Applied to the Holy Spirit, He would be as the “mouth” of God communicating God’s heart. But more than likely, 言 gen, “word,” pictures a prayer container, 口 sai, with a noise maker, vibrating needle of bamboo or metal protruding from its cover (older forms, eg., 言, have a vertical line at the top). Writers of the prayers placed in the container hoped for a supernatural response signaled by the sound of a vibrating needle. Though this appears superstitious, the Biblical idea that God communicates with a person who prays shines through its crude simplicity. Genuine prayer, the Bible teaches, is the sphere and work of the Holy Spirit.

When the Holy Spirit came to intensively take up this role as communicator of, to, and for God on earth, as Jesus promised His followers, there was an explosion of words, “tongues,” of prayer and praise. This happened on the Day of Pentecost, some ten days or so after the resurrected Jesus returned to heaven. At that time, mysterious fire-like tongues appeared above the waiting believers, who then “began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:3 & 4). This was God’s final sacrificial love-gift to enable man to experience His absolute goodness. Receive His Spirit and one receives God the Father and God the Son’s guarantee of heavenly communication now and forever. In this way God’s goodness and mercy will follow His created, redeemed and “communicated with” human beings all the days of their lives and they will dwell in his house and glorify Him forever.