Summary
Chang'e 嫦娥, called 姮娥 Héng'é in the oldest books, is the wife of the archer Hou Yi in early Chinese tradition. She took the drug of immortality that her husband had brought back from the Queen Mother of the West, rose with it to the moon and lives there.
The oldest account of her is two lines of the divination book Guicang 歸藏, on bamboo slips found in 1993 in a Qin tomb at Wangjiatai 王家台: "In the past Heng Wo 恆我 stole the drug of not dying", and "fled to the moon and had the stalks cast". Shaughnessy, Unearthing the Changes, slips 307 and 201, as quoted by Kostecki. Then comes a single sentence in the sixth chapter of the Huainanzi: Yi asked the Queen Mother of the West for the drug of not dying, Heng'e stole it and fled to the moon, and Yi was left grieving over his loss, with nothing to replace it. The book uses the story as a parable for someone who takes a thing without knowing where it comes from: Yi did not know the source of the drug, so when he lost it he could not find another.
The second-century astronomer Zhang Heng 張衡 tells it at more length in his treatise on the heavens, the Lingxian 靈憲. The sun, he says, is the essence of yang, which gathers and becomes a crow with three legs; the moon is the essence of yin, which gathers and becomes a creature like a hare; and later someone came to live in it. Yi asked the Queen Mother of the West for the drug of not dying, and Heng'e stole it to flee to the moon. Before she left she had the stalks cast by the diviner Youhuang, who said: "Good fortune. Fluttering, the maiden goes to her husband's house; alone she will go west; she will meet a dark and dim sky; do not be startled, do not be afraid; afterwards there will be great prosperity." So she lodged herself in the moon and became a toad. Zhang Heng, Lingxian. The toad in the moon is older than this story: the seventh chapter of the Huainanzi says that in the sun there is a squatting crow and in the moon a toad.
The idea her story turns on is that immortality taken by stealth separates its taker from people. The drug was the fruit of Yi's journey to the far West; his wife took it for herself alone, and her body did not die, but she left the earth and her household. The archer who brought down the suns stays among people and dies as they die, and his wife lives in the moon, on the yin side of the sky, alone and in a shape not her own. The diviner himself tells her that she goes alone.
We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method. The oldest spelling is 恆我 on the Wangjiatai slips, and both its graphs are in the Baxter and Sagart reconstruction of Old Chinese: 恆 *[g]ˤəŋ, a voiced g followed by a nasal made at the back of the mouth, and 我 *ŋˤajʔ, the sound element of 娥, which begins with the same back nasal and ends in y. Where the two nasals meet they become one n, and what remains is j, n and y, the letters of Arabic janā. In Lane, janā al-thamara is "he gathered, plucked, or took from the tree, the fruit", and janā ʿalayhi is "he committed against him a crime"; one says janayta hādhā ʿalā nafsika, "thou hast brought this as an injury upon thyself". The verb the oldest line uses of her is 竊, "stole". On this reading Chang'e is the one who gathered and offended: she took the fruit that another had brought, the taking was an offence against her husband, and she bore its result alone in the moon.
Linguistic Root
| Form | Meaning or place |
|---|---|
| 恆我 Héng Wǒ | the oldest spelling, on the Guicang slips from Wangjiatai, third century BCE |
| 姮娥 Héng'é | her name in the Huainanzi and the Lingxian |
| 嫦娥 Cháng'é | the later, common form |
| hong | 姮 in Middle Chinese, read like 恆 |
| *[g]ˤəŋ | 恆, "constant", in Old Chinese |
| *ŋˤajʔ | 我, the second graph of the oldest spelling and the sound element of 娥, in Old Chinese |
| *[d]aŋ | 常, "constant", on which 嫦 is read |
The Kangxi dictionary says that 姮 is read like 恆, that it is a woman's name written together with 娥, and that 嫦 is 姮 itself in a popular form read like 常. The Shuowen jiezi says that in Qin and Jin a beautiful woman is called 娙娥, and the Kangxi dictionary cites the Fangyan for Qin calling what is fair 娥. Strikingly, the two graphs that have written the first syllable, 恆 and 常, both mean "constant" in the Baxter and Sagart list, so in Chinese the name comes close to "the lasting beauty", and the moon wanes and returns. The writing moved from 恆 to 常 because the personal name of the Han emperor Wen, who reigned from 179 to 157 BCE, was 恆, as the commentary to the Shiji records from the Sounds and Meanings of the Book of Han: "his tabooed name was 恆"; a graph of the same meaning was written in its place, and Shaughnessy explains this very name in that way.
In the comparison with janā, j answers the voiced g, since Arabic jīm was once pronounced as a voiced g and still is in Egypt; n answers the two back nasals where they meet between the syllables; and the final weak letter answers the y that closes *ŋˤajʔ. Lane also records an old proverb about the jānī, the gatherer of fruit: "This is what I have gathered, and the best of it is in it, when every gatherer has his hand to his mouth", that is, every gatherer puts the best of what he gathers into his own mouth. That is what Chang'e did with the drug. Two objections used to stand against the reading: neither 姮 nor 娥 is itself in the list, and the later spelling 嫦 begins with d. The oldest spelling 恆我 answers the first, since both its graphs are in the list. The d of 嫦 comes from putting one graph for another of the same meaning because of the tabooed name, not from a change of sound. So all three letters rest on an attested spelling; what remains is that Arabic has no back nasal, and n answers it.
Neither of the project's Chinese essays mentions Chang'e, so the reading is proposed on the method.
Key Mythic Narratives
The hare and the toad
In the Lingxian two creatures meet in the moon: the creature like a hare, the image of yin when it gathers, and the toad that Heng'e became. Opposite them, in the sun, is a crow with three legs, the image of yang. The seventh chapter of the Huainanzi matches the human body with heaven, making a person's ears and eyes his sun and moon, and says that when sun and moon leave their course they are eaten by eclipse and lose their light.
The moon's light from the sun
A few lines after the story of Heng'e, Zhang Heng explains in the same treatise that the sun is like fire and the moon like water: fire shines outward, water holds an image, so the moon's light comes from the sun's light falling on it and its dark part from the side the sun does not reach; facing the sun it is full of light, drawing near the sun its light disappears. The moon where Heng'e lives has no light of its own.
The archer's wife
The early books tell nothing more of Chang'e than this story. The Kangxi dictionary calls her "Yi's concubine", citing the treatise on astronomy in the History of the Later Han, and gives the same story there: she stole Yi's drug, fled to the moon and became a toad. What later literature added to her story is unknown to these books.
Symbolic Reading
The rereading essay does not mention Chang'e, but in its chapter on yin and yang it reads yin as receiving and the feminine, and yang as sending and the masculine. That is the picture Zhang Heng draws: the woman goes to the moon, the essence of yin, and the moon receives its light from the sun and sends none of its own, while the crow of yang is in the sun. The story also holds what people see every month: the moon wanes and returns without dying, and its face carries a shadow they see as an animal, a hare or a toad. The Huainanzi reads the story as the sages read: life sought from another is lost, and whoever knows the source has no need to beg, which is the book's idea of the Dao. Chang'e in the moon stands opposite her husband, the archer of the suns, so the story divides between the two sides described on the yin and yang page.
Cross-Cultural Parallels
Tsukuyomi, the moon god of the Nihon shoki, was to be the consort of his sister Amaterasu, the sun goddess, and share her rule of heaven; when he killed the goddess of food she said in her anger, "Thou art a wicked deity; I must not see thee face to face", and they were separated by one day and one night and dwelt apart. In China it is a couple that parts: the archer who brought down the suns stays on earth, and his wife lives in the moon. Both stories make the moon a dwelling after a wrong that separates two people; they part in that Tsukuyomi is a god born from his father's eye, while Chang'e is a woman who rose with a drug.
In Mesopotamia the moon is a male god, Nanna to the Sumerians and Sîn to the Akkadians, who travels in a boat and by whom the month is counted; in China the moon is a woman's house and the essence of yin. Both make the moon that wanes and returns an image of life renewed.
The plant of youth that the snake took from Gilgamesh while he bathed answers the drug that Chang'e took from her husband: immortality is carried from far away, and then someone other than the one who laboured for it takes it.