Chinese Mythology and Tales

A Trip to the Moon STOR

Edward H. Schafer

Journal of the American Oriental Society, Volume 96, Issue 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1976),27-37.

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A TRIP TO THE MOON*

EDWARD H. SCHAFER

UNIVERSTIY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

The problem of investigating travel in outer space during the T' ang dynasty is to determine what or where outer space was. For the Taoists, especiall) the masters and adepts of the celebrated school of Mao-shan, outer space was indistinguishable from inner space. The paper discusses the "astronauts" of medieval China and alternative methods of "space travel."

THE REAL PROBLE~I OF INVESTIGATING TRAVEL

in outer space during the T' ang dynasty is to determine what or where outer space was. The Taoists, especially the masters and adepts of the celebrated school of Mao-shan, dominated large areas of thought and even of public life during this period, and for them outer space was in- distinguishable from inner space. To put it an- other way, they made no significant distinction between interstellar and intercellular space. The chambers within the human body were inhabited by powerful spirits which were identical with the deities who display themselves to our eyes in the forms of stars and planets. In a properly conducted meditation the initiate could either summon one of the spirits of the Great Dipper to lodge within his cranium, where he would become both visible and audible to his spiritual faculties, or, con- versely, the adept might elevate himself to the realm of the circumpolar asterisms and there see the Jade Princess in her coat of feathers as plain as I see you now. and draw directly on her arcane wisdom and power. Both procedures were, in the final analysis, the same. Imagine that your skull is a kind of organic planetarium which projects the stars-the outward aspects of the gods, as in Dante's Paradiso they are angels made visible- against the black vault of the celestial dome for the refreshing contemplation of our physical eyes ... and you're ready for blast-off. My remarks this evening will take this basic "truth" (but what

* This after-dinner entertainment was read as the Presidential Address at the 185th meeting of thc American Oriental Society at The Ohio State University on 23 April 1975. I hope, in the near future, to publish the factual and interpretative materials on which this phan- tasmagoria is based as part of a much larger enterprise, with added coherence and respectable documentation.

27

is truth?) about the most successful astronauts of medieval China into account, but I propose also to consider certain alternative methods of space travel, and finally to provide a kind of simple travelogue to assist any of you who may wish to employ one of these time-tested techniques for a holiday beyond tIte stratosphere-specifical- ly, for a trip to the moon.

Tours of space ,,,ere a commonplace of ancient China. For persons \yl1o lacked the resources to make such journeys in person, fully documented reports, dictated by the cosmonauts themselves, were readily available. The most popular of these flight-logs survive in the familiar and much com- mented on classical collection of the Ch' u tz' u, a title which may be rendered as the "Word Hoard of Ch' u. " These richly and elegantly phrased rhapsodies, based on the god-seeking soul voyages of the Chinese shamans, despite differences in plot and style, settings and stage business, have much in common-an important difference of detail being the mode or vehicle of flight. Sometimes the sky-traveller projects his soul over the rainbow and beyond the clouds-sometimes he seems to go in the flesh, like John Carter on his notorious trip to Mars, or as we all shall do at the sound of the last trumpet. But often it is not easy to be sure which vehicle the poet intends, or if he intends to be precise on this crude point at all. Sometimes the protagonist flies off on the back of a beast powered by some undescribed metaphysical fuel-the dragon being a prime fa- vorite. Or he may even glide aloft in a chariot, drawn by a divine animal, or else invisibly-propel- led by some primitive anti-gravitational device. In either case, he skims the housetops of the star- gods, as easily as Santa Claus, hobnobs with the porter at Heaven's gate-but his ultimate goal is always the City of God, the pure and holy center

28 Journal of the American Oriental Society 96.1 (1976)

of the universe, where all antinomies are resolved and all anxieties evaporate. These evolved sha- mans and refined medicinemen were very familiar with the stars, and their familiarity is no mere nodding acquaintance-they treat them in an off- hand, neighborly way, and even exploit them, much diminished it would seem to us, for trivial purposes. The reader is sometimes reminded of Hollywood cartoons-Bugs Bunny shuffling about purposefully in the moon dust. Our ghostly heroes of Ch' u wield comets as falchions-or as pennants; they drink perfumed wine from the Dipper-or twist off its handle to use as a magic wand.

Such visions as these were crystallized-prob- ably about the beginning of the Christian era- along with other elements of folk belief and reli- gious practice, into the system we call "Taoism." Today we can still see super-beings astride winged dragons, as if they were horses, in the tomb reliefs of that period, and, in the same era, other media of transport, for instance the magical Man- churian crane, began their long careers of develop- ment as indispensible attributes of the immortals.

It was also possible for Taoist initiates to gain mastery over the stars and their inhabitants either by soul projection or by feats of imitative magic. Allusions to these arts can be found even in pre- Taoist literature; an example from the old songs of Ch' u tells of "treading the array of stars to the limits of light."

While still earth-bound, the Taoist initiate, following the precedent of his ancient shamanistic predecessors, could walk among symbolic stars- or, in some sense, actual stars-tracing out their formations in order to achieve mastery over them or draw power from them, as a sorcerer can enchant a person by reciting the syllables of his name or manipulating his image in a manner ap- proved by wizardry. Since as far back as the Chinese records show, an instant injection of super- natural energy was the portion of the adept who danced the step of Vii, the archaic divine king- sometime's called "the shaman's step." This halt- ing but potent dance is thought by some to have originated in the shambling of a bear, impersonated in an archaic animal cult, and by others to re- present the hemiplegic gait of Yii himself-the demigod had sacrificed part of his physical powers to gain heavenly ones. It is still performed by female shamans in south China. But its most sophisticated and dramatic development was in the esoteric practices of the Taoists, who followed the sequence of stars in the most powerful as-

terisms, especially that of the great Northern Dipper. The most exalted class of Taoist initiates could summon the high polar deity named "Grand Unity"-he is also known by more elaborate titles-by "pacing the road of the Nine Stars." These are the nine stars of the true dipper-the dipper of the Taoist cabala. The identity of the two stars other than the familiar seven is some- what ambiguous. Medieval Taoist texts call one of these two ancillary stars "Sustainer" (fu) and the other "Straightener" (pi). The former is our little Alcor, close to the great star Mizar; the latter is said to be attached to topaz-yellow Phec- da-but in fact Straightener is an invisible star, and one of its names is "Void." It is an anti-star, a "black hole."

One T' ang work on Taoist practices advocates an internal approach to the dipper: the walk involves a simultaneous vision of the star Alcor seen as a spark behind the closed eyelids. So, in the end, it is within the bony planetarium of the skull that the divine asterisms are spread- identical, through a kind of supernatural topology, with the constellations we think we see above our heads. Travel by trance is easily the best method, far superior to a Fokker Crane or a Sopwith Dragon.

The outline of the Dipper was only one of many sidereal paths available to the adept. He might, for instance, choose to make the circuit of the Five Planets, hopping along the ecliptic. He would normally hold his breath while performing along his stellar lifelines-the "mainstays of heaven," for instance the Jade Mainstay and the Gold Mainstay that made possible the transit of the Three Eminences, an important asterism below the Dipper (These Mainstays [kang] are the cosmic meridians which bind the stars to each other and to the poles, above all to the little star named Knot [niu] which marked the celestial pole in the T' ang period. Some say that there were twelve of them, corresponding to the twelve an- nual stations of the Jupiter cycle. The southern nexus of the Mainstays is an asterism which is itself named "Heaven's Mainstay," and represented by our delia Piscis Australis, near the great reddish star Fomalhaut. This is exactly in the antipodes of the Northern Dipper. Perpendicular to the Mainstays are the Strands [or "filaments" (chi)] of the sky, lesser bindings which have a symbolic counterpart in the constellation "Heaven's Strands" whose lucida is ~ Coronae Borealis and extends horizontally across the norther part of Hercules, connecting 13, ?;, and other stars of that group.)

SCHAFER: A Trip to the Moon 29

The Mainstays then are the sturdier elements in the cosmic net, while the Filaments are the slen- derer elements attached to the stays; together they may be compared with the "standards" and "threads" of basketry, and the space-walker clung to them in order to climb or skim along from star to star. There were some dangers inherent in this undertaking. One of our sacred texts says: "The method for treading the :\<Iainstays: do not proceed horizontally, infringing on the Mainstays. To cut across-transgressing on the ~Iainstays of Heaven -is to hack and cut at the Way of Heaven, and is absolutely taboo."

In the T' ang dynasty there were still poets to testify to the power of the shaman's shuffles over the domain of the night sky. Yuan Chen, relaxing in a Taoist friary, where many such great tradi- tions were still observed, wrote about Taoist adepts and their magic swords:

"For binding oaths-their golden sabres are weighty; For beheading trolls·-their precious swords are keen. \Vhen they pace like Yii the Starry Stays are moved, \Vhen they burn their spells the furnace spirit does

homage" (The "furnace spirit" is the deity who presides over the alchemist's fire and hermetic egg).

But the most sublime instances of poetic space flight are provided by the verses of \Vu Yun, whose name is associated with the Taoist court of Hsuan Tsung. A mountain recluse early in life, his repu- tation for sanctity earned him an invitation to the palace, where he was installed in the Forest of Quills among the most successful writers of the realm. Somehow he could not live permanently under these worldly circumstance. \Vhatever the causes, he returned to the life of a hermit in the middle of the eight century. His poems abound in astral flights. Above all, he is concerned with paraphrasing cliches that suggest passage into the Infinite. The emphasis is not so much on providing such conventional metaphors as "farflight" in place of "alienation," "departure," and "escape" as did many of his materialistic contemporaries, but on suggesting, however imperfectly, the ecsta- tic bliss of empyreal being. He yearns for the ultimate but featureless sublimity-which becomes a kind of white glare in some of his poems-of the state where even the stars are grimy particles far belo'w the feet. In the end, he aims to transcend what is already transcendental. All of these long- ings are expressed in radiant language, spangled with the very distinctions which he hopes to

negate. To suggest the ultimate transition he rings the changes on all conceivable phrases for otherworldly travel. These are displayed at their most typical in a series of ten poems collectively styled "Treading the Void," an old song title also favored by other T' ang poets. In these he pOints the way though the "myriad heavens;" he spirals upward, "footloose and fancy-free" above the Grand Aurora; he is irradiated by the silvery bril- liance of Venus; finally he achieves the passage of the "Grand Emptiness." Here is a prosaic version of one of \Vu Yun's more sparkling journeys:

"Gently, easily, away from man's domain, Leaving, quitting, drawing near the town of God, Up far beyond the strands of starry chronograms, Looking down on the lights of sun and moon Swiftly now, past the Great Tenuity: The shine of a sky dwelling-gleaming, glittering I"

The eager collector of golden streets and pearly gates will have a happy time with Wu Yun, but will have to temper his enthusiasm for jewelled imagery with a due appreciation of abyssal plunges and cruises through black or blinding gulfs.

Fortunately the heritors of the mystic sky- journeys of Wu Yun multiplied. One of the most eminent was Lu Yen, who failed the great exam- inations during the second half of the ninth century, and thereafter haunted the bistros of Ch' ang-an until he discovered his own Tao. Then he vanished, later to achieve apotheosis in the popular com- pany of "Eight Immortals." He left for us a long series of untitled poems in seven-syllable lines on alchemical and transcendental themes. Sometimes he does not disdain the plain, familiar imagery that Po Chu-i made so popular, but intermingled with it there are usually phrases of cosmic and philosophic import conveying an entirely different flavor: in these poems we find that we have left the world of romantic fiction and endless love for the world of metaphysical devotions and the lure of invisible, almost inconceivable universes:

"Girding the lightning, coursing the clouds, I fly to sun and moon;

Goading the Dragon, urging the Tiger, I pass beyond both Potent and Latent"

or again: "Without image, without contour, flying beyond the

Formed Mutations:

There is a gate, there is a door, placed in both Potent and Latent"

The created, phenomenal world counts for nothing here-the search is for the road that leads beyond

30 Journal of the American Oriental Society 96.1 (1976)

such illusory distinctions as the world we know provides. Outer space has become inner space.

At the very end of T' ang and throughout the tenth century, the flights of the poets' minds into immensity underwent continuous development, and the writers ransacked their souls and their thesauri for the words to express the inexpressible in new and untarnished ways. Happily the name of Kuan-hsiu, the magnificent monk of the court of Shu in Szechwan, who made new and exciting discoveries in these fantastic \'lord-worlds, is no longer as unfamiliar as it once was. . .

He made a specialty of dream travel. This IS a fairly obvious way of solving the problems of the transit of interstellar space, particularly since it was the common old Chinese view that dream experiences were true experiences. The soul, com- pletely endowed with personality, went. abroad, met friends in distant towns, bedded mistresses, and carried out all kinds of other normal activ- ities-as well as many that were rather difficult when encumbered with carnality. For Kuan-hsiu, however, what the soul saw and encountered in dreams were by no means everyday things, or even extensions of them, but imperfect shadows of the truly real-perfect entities that are con- cealed from us during our waking hours. For him, the inner eye sees, in the phantasmagoria of dreams, only wavering segments of the ultimate vision.

At the opposite end of the scale of devices which provided mobility above the earth were crasser instruments-themselves not neglected in verse. Much in the tradition of the seven-league boots of Hop-o'-my-Thumb are the faintly comical "Flying Cloud shoes." The tale that Po Chu-i himself owned a pair while he was engaged in alchemical pursuits in Kiangsi is doubtless apo- cryphal, but there is no doubt that people were sometimes actually shod with such dynamic foot- wear. In T<ang times magic shoes could be taken as seriously as the "pace of Yii" in lifting their wearer beyond the grime of this world. The following poem, translated in its entirety, is the work of Li Po. He wrote it in honor of his friend the Taoist priestess Ch' u, surnamed "Thrice Pure," on the occasion of her departure for the sacred mountain in Hunan:

"Lady of the Tao-from the Kiang in Wu, With lotus flower kerchief borne on her head, And a rainbow dress unwetted by the rain- Unique and rare--a cloud from Yang-t' ai.

Under her feet far-wandering shoes, To skim the waves, raising pure-white dust- To find the transcendents, heading for South Holy HilI-- Surely she will see the Dame of Wei."

There are a number of rather conventional al- lusions here-almost all to divine women of the past-flattering comparisons are inevitable. Lady Ch' u would surely be diminished if we were to style her a "Taoist nun," a practice commonly but poorly employed when writing of these proud and often liberated women, \'lho should remind us rather of the daughters of medieval French and English kings-who might also do turns as secular abbesses. This "nun," so-called-no timid drab recluse-wears splendid silks and a real or arti- ficial lotus on her massed black hair. The rain and rainbow dress symbolized the rainbow goddess of vVu-shan, the ancient fertility goddess and consort of kings, celebrated in the eight century in the notorious fairy dance of Yang Kuei-fei. A goddess who "skims the waves" is herself so pure as to stir up little dust, and that a dust of holy whiteness, in her wet path-a kind of can dent moonglade. The prototype of this snowy vision is the goddess of the Lo River, whom Li Shang-yin invested with the garb of the moon-goddess Ch' ang- o to tread, not the water of a river of earth, but the icy surface of the moon. We shall have a closer look at her in a moment.

By such means as these, then, some rare in- dividuals came, if not to transcendental bliss, at least to the buoyant but solidly set paradises where White-limbed, angelic beings lived their endless lives. To us these castles in the air appear as if placed behind wavering mists or semi-trans- lucent glass, although occasionally they are sharp- ly defined, like the cunningly constructed copies of them built by royal architects in the great cities of Asia. In their more hazy versions, they are only partly revealed to the profane eyes of the poet through amethystine fogs, imponderable clouds high above the clouds that drift over the fields of earth, magic mists charged with energy analogous to the pink swirls of the aurora borealis, billowing far above the familiar world of rain and snow. The poet Ch' en Ching-an obscure writer of mid-T' ang times-describes the divine city, in one of a long set of "Pacing the Void" poems, as a "town of white clouds" (or "in white clouds"), near the sun and the moon. The eminent Taoist metaphysician and mythographer Tu Kuang-t' ing has its palatial structures actually carved and

SCHAFER: A Trip to the Moon 31

twisted out of cloud-matter: "Formed of knotted pneumas, framed in the void of clotted clouds."

* * * Despite the many available modes of transport

the cosmos is infinite. For our first trip we must aim low. Let us consider, then, what we must expect of our first landing field, the shimmering skin of Dante's "eterna margarita," the "massy pearl of the night."

The ancient opuscule "Questions of Heaven" (T'ien wen) posed, among other difficult questions, the following;

"To what are sun and moon attached, And how is the array of stars laid forth?

And specifically of the moon:

"What is the virtue of the light of night That when it dies it is bred once more, And what is gained by a hare in its belly?"

The answer is not simple. We know at least that the moon is anti-sun. As the sun is concentrated yang, made visible to the human senses, so the moon is the sensible aspect of the Grand Yin. The noumenal entity underlying the shining disc presented to our eyes was, then, quintessential yin-an energetic storage battery (as it were) which is the necessary complement to that power- ful generator the sun. But yin is, in all of its aspects, no mere passive entity, as has sometimes been suggested by hasty interpreters of the verbal symbols of the yin-yang school. It is not merely derivative, secondary, and recessive. Its cold na- ture is primary, and it is not so much passive as actively receptive. Too much has been inferred by analogy from the supposed social status of women in early China: quiescent, unoriginal, obe- dient, and placid as they were supposed to be, it was easy to project these qualities about the glittering, dazzling globe in the sky.

Similarly it was and is easy to imagine that if yang is somehow "spiritual" in the same sense as the human male, yin must therefore be "material" like the human female. By no means. For us of the twentieth century the moon is a solid, non- luminous body, despite its remarkable albedo-a dead mass of cooled lavas, conglomerates, and other end-products of ancient magmas, all over- laid with dust, like an untended mausoleum. No crusted dowager, the Chinese moon was more truly feminine than our telescopes display. Its

energy, however, was potential rather than kinet- ic-its true brightness was latent, and in this sense it was dependent on the light of the sun which, like an ultra-violet lamp, irradiated all or part of its surface to stimulate the characteristic moonglow, as the ultraviolet "black light" evokes the "cold light" in a luminescent object, such as a cluster of fluorite crytals. It is not an accident that the phosphorescence of the oceans was called yin huo "yin-fire"-for the "feminine" principle has its own kind of cool flame-and that the modern Chinese word for "fluorescence" is "firefly light" (ying kuang)-that is, the kind of light shed by naturally luminescent creatures.

A Taoist text extant in early T' ang times gives a picture of this inner phosphorescence emanating from the mineral components of the moon: "The moon," it says, "is 1,900 Ii horizontally and ver- tically. The moon's nimbus is 7,840 Ii in circum- ference. \Vhite silver, veluriyam and water crystal illuminate its interior. The light of flames shines brightly on its exterior. Within it are city walls, fortifications and human beings. There is a ba- thing pool of Seven Jewels, and the Forest of Waning grows in its interior."

This demonstrates plainly that the moon is il- luminated from within and that its relationship with the sun is purely a matter of cosmological balance, not of dependence, as we have noted elsewhere. (Perhaps it is also worth remarking that simple calculation from the figures provided by this text shows that the nimbus extends ap- proximately 100 U.S. miles above the moon's surface.)

The same sources provide a picturesque ex- planation of the waxing and waning of the moon, in terms of a lunar population dedicated to the continual refining and polishing of the crystalline moon-matter so that it may radiate to best ad- vantage:

"The men in the moon are sixteen feet tall, and all are dressed in blue colored garments These men in the moon, from the first to the sixteenth day of the moon, regularly take white silver and velmiyam and refine them in the smelter of flame-light. Therefore when the moon swells to the limit its light is bright and clear and most sheer white; and from the seventeenth day to the twenty-ninth day they gather the flowers of the Three Pneumas below the Forest of Waning to wipe clean the light of the sun and moon; therefore, as the moon fails to its limit its light is imperceptible and its luminosity occulted."

32 Journal of the American Oriental Society 96.1 (1976)

One of the Goliard poets expressed the medieval idea af the relation between sun and moon very well:

"Dum Dianae vitrea sero lamp as oritur, et a fratris rosea luce dum succenditur "

I venture to render this as follows: "\Vhen the glassy lamp of Diana rises late, then it is kindled by the rosy light of her brother." These lines reveal the late rising of the full moon in the east, just after the sun has sunk below the western horizon. Phoebus' fire, potent from a vast dis- tance, lights Diana's crystalline lamp-the latter not a bad image from the Chinese point of view. T' ang poetry abounds in lunar metaphors of a similar cast-"silver candle," "crystal dish," and so on. To sum up, I propose to confute the wrong- headed notion that yin symbolizes dark, shaded things, where the yang rays do not reach, and that therefore the light of the moon is merely the reflection to our eyes of the lordly sunlight, as from a mirror to our eyes (but in fact the Chinese did sometimes figure the moon as a mirror-but a magic mirror).

I am quite persuaded of the truth of Milton's vision. The great poet, faced with the difficulty of revealing the damned towers of Hell, a place plunged in preternatural darkness, not only to our eyes but to the burning eyes of Lucifer and his host, displays it lit by flames-not by earthly flames, but by a species which shed "no light, but rather darkness visible." Similarly, moonlight is a unique product of the moon, incited perhaps, invoked perhaps, yet of its own, sui generis, and self-generated.

The moon was also water-or rather made up of water most refined, most subtle, most perfect, superior to, but akin to, all earthly waters. This followed from its yin nature, which was the polar opposite of the fire-essence of yang. Its unique perfection among yin creatures lay in its purity, its homogeneity. It was unmixed, it was not contingent: unlike camels, marshes, & women, which embodied or exemplified yin only in larger degree than most beings, the moon was yin un- contaminated-a fact which removed it from the realm of natural objects altogether. But it shared more with natural waters than with anything else in the mortal world.

To take the watery nature of the moon as a fact of natural history rather than as an ontological

truth was fatal to some old but persistent myths, such as the belief that among the denizens of the moon were a rabbit and a toad. In the first century of our era, Wang Ch' ung-otherwise a sensible fellow-used this oversimplified inter- pretation of the traditional belief to confound the "Confucian" pedagogues of Han, who could not reject even the most fantastic tradition if it ap- peared sufficiently sanctified by age, or had been blessed by one of the sages of the past. If the moon is water, wrote Wang Ch 'ung, the unhappy hare and toad, aliens in such an environment, would long since have drowned. (Toad and hare & other moon creatures, although they were al- ways a source of uneasiness to the literal-minded, gave no difficulty to the metaphysicians and the poets, whose moon creatures were inorganic. Or if they had veins, they carried ice water rather than blood.)

The wateriness of the moon has its western analogues. From early times we have given the name of "seas" to the broad gray areas of that satellite. Among them are Mare Foecunditatis, Mare Nectaris, Mare Vaporum, Lacus Somniorum, and many other fancifully labelled wastes of water. But these imagined seas and lakes, like the sup- posed canals of Mars, were not only (as we now know) non-existent, but, in the end, bear little resemblance to the pervasively humid character of the moon as envisaged by the Chinese.

To sum up, leaving the problems of charting the moon's journeys and the computation of its perigees and apogees to the historians of science, and focusing our attention on its nature, we have our surest guides in folk belief and literature. T' ang poetry leads us to a vision of the moon as simul- taneously crystalline and aqueous; sometimes as a lovely but frigid entity-to be personified as a snow queen or an icy maiden. Without personi- fication, we are compelled to see it as a crystal- line mass, cognate to rock crystal which, as all the world knew, was petrified ice, eons old, altered to transparent quartz.

In his poem "Moon" the tenth-century poet Hsii Yin attributes the crystalline charm of the moon-fashioned, it seems, from glittering icy dendrites-to the special intervention of the abstract and universal entity which (or who) stamps concrete and specific objects and events out of mere Potentiality:

"In a cyan abyss who can detect the authority of the Fashioner of Mutations-

SCHAFER: A Trip to the Moon 33

Which condensed the frost and congealed the snow to create her unique allure?"

Although we are persuaded by our television screens that, despite appearances, the moon is stony, and even dusty-something of a disap- pointment in short-the Chinese version (since we need remote and incredible comparisons) re- minds us readily of the great outer planets of the solar system with their cores of metallic hydrogen and their crusts of frozen methane and ammonia. Or we may wish to compare it to the nucleus of a comet, which has been characterized as "a dirty snowball." The climate of the ancient Chinese moon appears to us as wintry and bleak as the climate of Cocytus, the lowest of Dante's layers of Hell, whose cold is truly preternatural.

As was well known to the Chinese, the moon is furnished with a cinnamon tree, and a man who is perpetually engaged in the futile effort to chop it down. The story of the tree, which has af- finities with a host of sacred trees, world trees, jewel trees, and fairy trees in all nations, has been told in many books. Tonight I have only a few words to say about its lunar version, chiefly as a means of introducing the reader to the lunar landscape. Here are the words of Tuan Ch' eng- shih, that indefatigable collector of curiosa in the ninth century:

"From of old it has been said that there are a cinnamon and a toad in the moon, and it is said in books of curiosa that the moon cinnamon is five thousand feet tall. Below there is a man who chops at it constantly, but the gash in the tree always closes up. The man is surnamed \Vu and named Yang. He was a person of Hsi-ho who studied transcendentalism but went astray. He was ostracized and commanded to hew at the tree. In the Shakya (Le., Buddhist) books itis said thatthere is a jambu tree on the south face of Mount Sumeru. As the moon passes, the shadow of the tree enters into the moon. Some say that the toad and the cinnamon in the moon are shadows of the earth, while the empty places are the shadows of water. This assertion is quite close [to the truth]."

This precis of lunar information needs expansion and point by point examination. There was general agreement about the cinnamon tree. But opinion varied about the other shadows, reflections, images or entities there. A familiar book surviving from the Chin period had the authority of age, and was therefore not to be dismissed lightly:

"As to the vulgar tradition about transcendent people and a cinnamon tree in the moon: look at it now when

it is first born and you will see that the foot of a tran- scendent being has gradually been taking shape. The cinnamon tree appears there as a later growth."

It is not altogether clear whether we have to do with an actual foot, or with a footprint in some lunar debris. It is at least thinkable, however, that the moon is no globe of subtle yin-foam buoyant in the ether, but is solid enough to support living creatures on its surface (in some accounts, however, it seems to be penetrable, like a ball of water held together by its own gravity). This in turn allows the possibility that the surface may be landscaped, somewhat like the surface of the earth. A close study may lead to the suspicion that some of the shadowy shapes on the moon are mountains, as Wu Jung fancied in this poem, "Staying in a High Building-an Autumn Evening":

Inside the moon the blue hills are faint-as if so painted, Within the dewdrops the yellow leaves are filemot-

sere-just so for autumn.

I lean outward from the steep railing-in no way in- clined to sleep,

\Vondering only if the Starry Ho may find a way into this high house.

Observe that the pale blue hills are unambiguously inside the moon-so that we can be confident that \Vu Jung was not seeing a surface feature. Simi- larly, and carefully so patterned in the quatrain, the falling yellow leaves are reflected in the round dewdrops-miniature moons. The moon is pene- trated by hills, as moss agate by arboreal land- scapes, and crystal by spicules of rutile. So also, with luck, the poet's lofty room may be penetrated by the flow of the star river on this brilliant night.

But more prosaic minds could still imagine a solid moon. The tale was told (or at least it reached Tuan Ch' eng-shih somehow) that two men once lost their way on Mount Sung. There they encountered a stranger dressed in pure white (it does not take a quick imagination to recognize him for a moon man). In answer to their inquiries, he informs them: "Are you aware, milords, that the moon is in fact composed of Seven Jewels? Or that the moon is contoured like a bullet? The images on it are the sunshine on its convexities. Ordinarily there are 82,000 households caring for it. I myself once counted them." (Whereupon he gave the travellers a bit of magical jade medicine- undoubtedly moon dust-to ward off illness, and pointed out the way to the public road, which would obviously be familiar to an all-seeing night- traveller like the moon.) This well-tended mosaic

34 Journal of the American Oriental Society 96.1 (1976)

moon would appear to be solid enough-but- its gemmy substance is crystalline, and crystals have an ambiguous place in the Chinese imagina- tion. They are allied to water, and in a profound sense permeable.

Now, by way of contrast, consider the moon as pitted and honeycombed, like a volcanic rabbit- warren. From Han times at least we hear of "moon dens" or "moon burrows"-phrases used ambiguously from very early times. In one sense they refer to the dank and gloomy hiding place of the moon at the western extremity of the world -the counterpart of the solar Fu-sang tree in the extreme east. It naturally follows that they also symbolize the cold and remote lands of the western barbarians, the homeland of the ancient Kushans, whose name, in its Chinese version, even contained the element "moon," and was extended in T' ang times to include the benighted Turks and Iranians beyond the Pamirs. Moreover, whether near the Oxus and Jaxartes Rivers, or penetrating the moist substance of the moon, the caves are not only dark, they are wet. The dampness does not suggest that these lunar holes made pleasant hab- itations, but the darkness at least afforded secu- rity for some creatures. It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that the moon-dens housed not only felt-hatted Tajiks who, doubtless, deserved no better, but a certain familiar leporine resident of the great sky lantern. His burrow was dark, and so was he. It follows naturally that lunar bolt- holes provided convenient double images and bi- valent allusions, in which it was easy to suggest a connection between earth and sky, mundane and divine. Li Po, a fairly moon-obsessed man, wrote the following about a celebrated hero of ancient times who made his reputation among the nomads beyond the frontier:

Thirsly-he ate ice from the dens of the moon; Hungry-he dined on snow from high in the sky.

In short, while enduring privations, the warrior was still heaven-nourished-and indeed it is hardly possible to overlook his proximity to the Mountains of Heaven that stretch across Central Asia and, in T' ang times, separated the partly sinicized Iranian oases from the wild horsemen of the steppes. Similarly, in the following century, Liu Yii-hsi, testifying in verse to the nobility of a colleague about to depart on a ritual pilgrimage into the West, wrote:

The Moon Dens play the host for all of Hsiu- Cloud Officer descends from the Nine Heavens.

("All of Hsia" is a collective term for the Chinese people. Once more, earthly and celestial affairs run parallel, and the magnates of our world have their doppelgangers above the clouds: the poet's friend is-as a magistrate of T' ang-an emissary of Heaven going as guest to the caverns of the moon-is it in the western mountains, or in the lunar hills above? The distinction is fit only for nit-picking literalists.)

In all of this there is a mythological strain, even if it is sometimes rather tenuous. The hare's den is a microcosm of the moon's womb-and beyond this universal symbol lie the images of the germinal "sky grottoes" and the underworld to which souls pass, and from which they emerge for new beginnings. For instance, to make a meal of the lunar ice from the ice-pits in the sky (which had their earthly analogues) is to be born again, spiritually and figuratively. The interested reader may trace this thread to wherever it may lead him

Where there are secret dwelling places, we may expect dwellers. We have already seen a host of them, furbishing the multicolored surface of an enamelled moon. These ant-like and undifferen- tiated inhabitants of the treasure-orb, however, do not have quite the appeal of the recognizable individuals that have been detected there.

The lunar fauna is generally treated by sino- logists as if it were negligible, except as nuggets of lore for the earnest researcher in comparative folklore or for the indefatigable explorer of the endless trails followed by migratory Grand Myths. But in itself the hare in the moon remains only faintly amusing-certainly not to be taken serious- ly. Or so we imagine. It is enough, we think, to remember the standard tale about his elevation to that chilly planetoid, and to notice with mild interest his repeated appearance as a motif in decorative art, usually grinding away at his mortar like a good tireless beast. That is enough, and by that token he becomes-though we hardly dare admit it publicly-a tiresome beast. I con- ceive it to be my mission to rescue him from his patient alchemical chores, and put him on center stage, hopefully to introduce to you facets of his personality that have escaped the attention of most earthly observers-as they did not escape the poets of T' ang. For although many of them saw him as a trivial stock figure, like a moral- monger out of Aesop or a children's cliche from the received Mother Goose, many others saw him

SCHAFER: A Trip to the Moon 35

as a complex person-by no means as simple- minded and unenterprising as we, in our deluded folly, imagine him to be. Certainly he is no mere paper cutout-he is a numinous hare, a hare of power. And even more, he is a mysterious and sometimes unpredictable hare.

Metaphysically, the hare was an alien element in the cold, impassive moon. The true lunar es- sence--the yin component in the symbolic sym- biosis-was the toad, whose damp emanation was neutralized in part by the presence of his rabbity associate, "the yang within the yin." Such, then, was the hare as a cosmic force-but even this philosophical eminence is not his most significant attribute. We must turn to the poets to discover the more subtle facets of his nature.

For some of them, the moon hare could be sheer fun. See him now as a rebel-a free-wheeler in the void. The poet is Yao Ho, an eminent official of the mid-ninth century:

Jade rabbit on silver wheel drifting towards the east. Gemlike and crystal clear-and the third watch, just

right for roving 1 A slip of black cloud rises-from somewhere: Its inky net cages back a ball of water germ 1

Here we have to do with a delinquent rabbit, not in the guise of a grim grinder-out of seasonal decay, a determined time-marker, but a wanderer, a rebel against clocks. "Silver" and "jade" are commonplace images of whiteness, always ap- propriate to the moon and its inhabitants. They put the spotlight on the vagrant hare and his silver-penny unicycle. Why vagrant? you ask. It is there, in the first line of the poem, I answer. He is pedalling irresponsibly towards the east, when he has been programmed to glide placidly toward the ,...-est, where he should descend (grace- fully but tiresomely) into the evening sky. He will not. The moon-the vehicular hare, that is-is at its most gemlike and crystalline when high in the midnight sky: the third watch. The roads of heaven are nicely lit, and off he goes on his ramble. But the dark hand of ineluctable fate, in the form of a streak of black cloud, reaches up to seize him, seemingly out of nowhere. (The physical counter- part of this censorious arrest is the illusion of an east-bound moon created by the actual contrary westward movement of clouds across the sky-an illusion any connoisseur of moon-hares may verify for himself.) Caged in a celestial Black Maria the illusory culprit, now plainly revealed in his nou- menal form as a crystal ball ("water germ" is rock

crystal, is the planets, is the Milky Way, is the moon I), is jerked back to his proper path, aimed at the western horizon.

The magic of poetry could also transmute the moon hare into a figure of fright and inevitable doom, a scythe-bearer, akin to a grinning death's- head. This is how he is presented now by poet Szu-k' ung T' u, who himself saw the fall of T' ang:

Fly-y-y ... crow ... fly-y-y 1 Hop, hare, hop 1 (or, "bound, bunny, bound" I) ~!ake mornings come and evenings go: spur on the

seasons' sections I Kua Woman knew only how to patch the blue sky- She did not know how to boil a glue that would stick

sun and moon [to it].

These verses have the superficial simplicity of a nursery rhyme, beginning with the smooth, easy flight of the sun-crow across the sky, followed by the leaping leporid who represents the variable but irreversible passage of the moon. It ends with the figure of the creatrix Nii Kua, shown frustrated, holding a useless paste pot-is it the same one she used to patch the damaged vault of heaven? She is lost in moody speculation about how to devise an adhesive that might arrest the onward progress of sun and moon, and with it seasonal change,-in the end, victory over night and death. The verbal images themselves are light in tone- but they tell a message of pessimism and despair: mutability is the only law of nature, and even the gods cannot arrest time in its flight.

That Faustus may repent and save his soul, a len ie, lenle currile noctis equi 1 The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike ...

Our frost-furred friend is a deadly timekeeper with a staccato thump.

But now to the famous moon maid. Ch' ang-o (as we now call her) may well have been an ancient deity, but her modern name does not appear to be particularly old, and the legend of how she fled to the moon with the elixir of immortality appears to have been artificially attached to her. We need not linger on these difficult matters, which still need serious attention by the philo- logists. Suffice it to say here that by T' ang times she was a standardized figure in popular mytholo- gy, and, despite the importance of the moon in official religion and astrology, she was not-under that name at any rate-a great deity. But her role in the poetic imagination was immense.

The moon goddess, understandably, provided the poets with a natural disguise for bewitching

36 Journal ot the American Oriental Society 96.1 (1976)

entertainers of men. She had the legendary jade- white complexion, which her mundane counter- parts could and did approximate with white lead; she was simultaneously charming and aloof, in the grand tradition of fertility goddesses in the guise of mortal women. Many writers of inferior talent found it easy to devalue the goddess in order to make her image detectable in the figure of a Ch' ang-an courtesan. Others, perhaps of no greater ability, were able to elevate the courtesan into the realm of traditional fantasy, where she could, like a Dresden china shepherdess, serve transiently as an attractive piece of heavenly clockwork, marking the passage of the months, the fading of beloved images-in short, a symbol of all the depressing residue of separation. Some poets, more than others, were prone to lend her silver mask to the silk-garbed haunters of palace halls. Li Shang-yin was one of these secularizers, who-whatever their great gift for words-man- aged to divest the goddess of much of her charm and mystery. But \ve must not hurry to discover white-painted courtesan or white-gowned queen in every ninth-century poem about the moon and its shining spirit.

That orbed maiden with white fire laden, \Vhom mortals call the Moon.

So she appeared to Shelley, and so she appears to us. So too she appeared to the bes t T' ang poets, as has already been intimated in our more im- personal discussion of the noumenal and pheno- menal qualities of the lovely sky lamp. The goddess could easily assume the physical attri- butes of the moon-silver train or white fire or crystalline glitter-but it was also possible to make a trace of maidenly panic, or other fugitive signs of mortal frailty in her. Let us now see her in some of her more equivocal-perhaps really un- fathomable-epiphanies, where we cannot say for certain whether she is all mist and mystery, or suffers spiritual uncertainties and even carnal perplexities-whether, in short, her cold flame reddens with latent heat.

A poem by Tu Fu titled "Moon" is set in the chilly post-midnight hours, towards the end of the last month of autumn, with the moon waning towards its final crescent. It is the first new moon of winter. (All of this is apparent in the imagery of the poem, which is also well supplied with fine conceits.) Tu Fu's tone isjovial, even jocular. Evi- dently he was in no mood to sympathize with a love- ly but lonely nymph-"give her a drink I" says he:

Fourth watch-the hills spit out the moon. Shrinking night-the water lights the tall housCj A dusty casket starts to disclose a mirror. A windy curtain lets a hook free to rise. [Or: frees a

hook to rise 1 The hare must suspect its locks are a crane's The toad for its part loves its sable cape. Ladle out a draft for widowed Heng-O: In the sky's cold she must bear the Autumn Ninth.

Perhaps this is obscure enough to deserve a minimal commentary: the east-facing crescent ap- pears, and is reflected from the dewy pavement in front of the house-dewdrops are almost always little moons. The lunar disc seems to be a shining mirror whose edge is shown as above a newly- opened make-up case (the dust refers to the dusty hills where the moon has been hiding); it is a curtain-hook of rock crystal, set free to sail up into the air. Cranes are bald-headed and the moon-hare wonders if he is not too old and hairless for such bitter cold; the shining toad is largely concealed-but happy-in its black comforting furs. The poor goddess, with no husband to warm her, could profit from a beaker of good wine. ("Autumn Ninth" is the ninth month of the year-the last of autumn.)

Meng Chiao, the great moon-fancier, took an entirely different tack in a poem that begins with a listing of the ways in which certain beautiful things in nature are shown at their best:

Flowers are most charming when afloat in a springtime font;

Bamboo is most charming when encaging dawn-glow and haze;

Courtesans are most charming when not overdoing artifice;

The moon is most charming in her natural appeal; At the midpoint of night Ch' ang-o attends the levee of

the Grand Monad: ~aturally no one among men is her peer in charisma. The officers of Han got such royal favor only on a few

occasions; Both Flying Swallow and the Duchess are jealous-how

they envy her I

Here what begins as a connoisseur's pocket-list is suddenly transformed into a paean of praise for the unique loveliness of the moon goddess: what the great beauties of Han could not achieve she achieved -and more: a midnight rendezvous with the em- perorin the sky 1 Here, unlike so manyotherCh' ang- o rhapsodies, there is no question of flattering a mortal beauty-she will always outshine them all.

SCHAFER: A Trip to the Moon 37

The theme of jealousy was a natural one, and one which was well-exploited by the poets. An- other example, in a rather different tone-that of a trained Taoist with a sense of humor-appears in one of the long sequence of poems on "Saunters to Sylphdom" written by Ts' ao T' ang. I have rendered the vignette in rather insipid prose:

They quite forgot to tell someone to lock the Rear

Palace: Now the reconstituted Cinnabar is all lost-the jade

cup empty. If Ch' ang-o had not stolen the numinous medicine, There would be a struggle for long life to be achieved

within the moon.

What has happened is this: the "rear palace" (women's quarters) of some divine king has been left unattended; the girls have escaped and ap- propriated the elixir of immortality ("reconstituted cinnabar") that the god kept in a goblet of jade. These pretty cats, with portions of the super- natural cream at their disposal, wish with all their hearts that Ch' ang-o, their prototype and in- spirer, had not gotten to the glorious moon ahead of them with her elixir, to reign forever as unique and immortal queen of the night.

But there are other ways of treating the goddess. For instance, she can be reduced to a painted image in the sky constantly in need of restoration. In the poem which follows we discover an at first unidentifiable white cloud image. This turns out in the end to be a divine being, serving a far greater entity than himself. As the perpetually employed agent of the "Primal Harmony," the great balancing and harmonizing power in nature, it is his responsibility to restore the face of Ch' ang- o monthly with celestial white lead, for the satis- faction of mankind. The poem is by Mao \Ven- hsi, who wrote in Szechwan in the tenth century. It is set to the tune, "A Single Wisp of Cloud at Shamanka Mountain":

A semblance covers the colors of Shamanka Mountain, A talent surpassing these waves that have rinsed ply-

chrome damask: \Vho is it that takes up his brush, ascends the Silver Ho

To depict Ch' ang-o inside the moon? Thin-spread-he applies the powdered ceruse, Full-blown-he hangs the white-damask net: It is the servant of the sweet-flag flowers, his dreaming

soul prolific, Years and eons in the employ of the Primal Moderator!

Let me explain: 1. The shape of the cloud blots out the colors

of the celebrated spirit mountain. 2. The waves of the Yangtze below, sparkling

with the colors of a richly patterned fabric, give no hint of the extent of his artistry.

3. As the sky darkens he slides up the white Milky Way.

4. To limn the aspect of the goddess on-or in -the crystal moon-stuff.

5. He covers her face with snowy make-up. 6. He clothes her in fine white cloth, more

subtly figured than the polychrome. 7. He is the "dreaming servant" of ancient

legend who is a king by night. He has some of the qualities of a conventional Taoist figure, but essentially he is a supernatural artist, nourished on the flowers that give eternal life (which he needs to carry out his endless job)-his dream life full of esthetic visions.

8. Engaged in his eternal routine, he serves the principle of eternal adjustment.

Here, and perhaps it is suitable that "here" should mean "finally," we leave the moon lady- an illusion, a figment, almost a philosophical in- stance. But perhaps the moon itself is no more. Tonight it is two nights short of full. Let us hope that the Great Scene-painter in the Sky is restoring the make-up! You have been briefed. Be ready at zero hour I

GLOSSARY

Ch I en Ching 1Td;-Is- I~ "J\

chi 1£ fu !fIfJ

kang\~~ Kuan-hsiu 1It;l~

LU Yen (5'~

niu };.::a ~L.I-

pi .ga5 Szu-k1ung T'u

Tu Kuang-t'ing

Wu

Wu

Jung ~~

YUn ~ f~