Hou Yi

Summary

Hou Yi 后羿 is the archer of early Chinese tradition: he shot the suns when ten of them came out together and burned the crops, killed the beasts that were eating people, and then sought the drug of immortality and lost it. His name is 羿 Yì; 后 hòu is a title meaning lord or sovereign.

The eighth chapter of the Huainanzi says that in the time of the emperor Yao the ten suns came out together, scorched the crops and withered the grass and trees, so that people had nothing to eat. Beasts were harming people too: Yayu the man-eater, Chisel-Teeth, the Nine Infants, the Great Wind, the giant boar and the long snake. Yao sent Yi, who killed Chisel-Teeth on the plain of Chouhua, killed the Nine Infants on the Baleful River, brought down the Great Wind with a corded arrow at the marsh of Qingqiu, shot the ten suns above and killed Yayu below, cut the long snake in two at Dongting, and took the giant boar alive in the Mulberry Forest. The people rejoiced and made Yao Son of Heaven, and the text adds: "then, for the first time, the world, wide and narrow, rough and easy, far and near, had roads and distances". Huainanzi 8. The Shanhaijing says that Di Jun, the Supreme Ruler, gave Yi a red bow and white corded arrows to help the lands below, and Yi began to lift their hardships from people.

In the Shanhaijing the ten suns are the children of Xihe, Di Jun's wife. They bathe in the hot-water valley in the east by the Fusang tree, nine resting on its lower branches and one on its top branch, and they go out one after another; the tree belongs to the world tree. So the disaster in Yao's time is that the turn-taking broke and all ten came out at once. Shanhaijing 9, 15. The Huainanzi does not say how many suns Yi hit. Wang Yi, the second-century commentator on "Heavenly Questions", reports it this way: Yi shot at the ten suns and hit nine; the nine crows inside them died and their wings fell, and one sun was left. The poem itself asks: why did Yi shoot the sun? why did the crows shed their feathers? "Heavenly Questions" with Wang Yi's commentary.

Yi then asked the Queen Mother of the West for the drug of not dying, and his wife Chang'e took it and fled with it to the moon, leaving Yi grieving over a loss he could not replace. The Huainanzi uses the story as a parable: Yi did not know where the drug comes from, and the text goes on to say that begging fire is not as good as making it with a fire-drill, and borrowing water is not as good as digging a well.

The idea his story turns on is that the strength that brings the world back to its measure does not protect its owner. Yi removes what is too much: nine suns out of ten, and beasts that eat people, so that the land can be farmed and travelled again. But he seeks immortality from another and loses it, and in other accounts he becomes a king who trusts his bow and leaves the people's affairs for hunting, and is killed by his own household, or by the pupil he taught to shoot.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method. In Old Chinese 羿 began with a nasal made at the back of the mouth in a pharyngealized syllable, followed by a vowel and an r: the modern reconstruction gives *[ŋ]ˤer-s, with -s a suffix. What remains is a sound from the back of the mouth, a vowel and r; Arabic gh is made at the same place, so these are the letters of ghirār. In Lane ghirār is "the point, or edge, of a spear and of an arrow and of a sword" and "the model, or pattern, according to which iron heads of arrows are fashioned": ḍaraba niṣālahu ʿalā ghirārin wāḥid, "he fashioned his arrow-heads according to one model"; and one says ramaytu thalāthata ashumin ʿalā ghirārin wāḥid, "I shot three arrows in one course". Lane also gives al-gharrān as "two lines by the two sides of the lower part of the ʿayr", the ridge in the middle of the iron head of an arrow, and ʿayr is besides "a lord, or chief, of a people; a king". So both readings fall on the same arrowhead: ghirār with gh, the nearer to the back nasal in its place of articulation, and ʿayr with ʿayn, which carries the lordship of his title hòu. On this reading Yi is the master of the arrowhead who shoots in one course: he shot the suns one after another until nine had fallen, and his arrows made him a lord.

Linguistic Root

The Shuowen jiezi places the name in the section on feathers, glossing it "an ancient lord; some say, master of archers", and writes it in the section on the bow with a variant graph that has the bow in place of the feathers: "archery officer of the emperor Ku, destroyed by Shaokang of the Xia", quoting the Analects, "Yi was good at shooting". So the graph is written once with feathers, the feathers of the arrow, and once with the bow.

In the comparison with ghirār, gh takes the place of the old back nasal: both are made at the back of the mouth, and the nasal differs only in letting the air through the nose. That nasal dropped from the front of the name in Mandarin, leaving yì. The r answers r, and the -s falls away as a suffix, as it does in 共工 Gònggōng. In the comparison with ʿayr, ʿayn takes the same place; the Old Chinese syllable was pharyngealized, and ʿayn is the pharyngeal letter. The weak point is that the authors put the nasal in square brackets because its identity is uncertain, and that a back nasal against gh or ʿayn is not yet attested in a second Chinese-Arabic pair.

A third reading keeps the same gh: ghayyara, "he made the thing other than it was", as Lane gives it. "Heavenly Questions" says: "the Supreme Ruler sent down Yi of the Yi to change the woes of the Xia people", and the verb in the text is 革 gé, to change, which Wang Yi explains as Yi changing the Xia way of government. In both stories Yi is a changer: he changes the number of the suns, and he changes the rule.

Neither of the project's Chinese essays mentions Yi, so all three readings are proposed on the method.

Key Mythic Narratives

Chisel-Teeth

The Shanhaijing says that Yi fought Chisel-Teeth on the plain of Shouhua east of Kunlun, Yi holding bow and arrows and his enemy a shield, and Yi shot and killed him. Another chapter records in a single line: Chisel-Teeth, whom Yi killed.

The River Lord and the giant boar

"Heavenly Questions" asks why Yi shot the River Lord and took the goddess of the Luo River as his wife. Wang Yi's commentary tells that the River Lord turned himself into a white dragon and swam by the water; Yi saw him and shot him, blinding his left eye; he complained to the Supreme Ruler, "Kill Yi for me." The Ruler answered: had you kept to your sacred place you would not have been hit; you made yourself an animal, so it is natural that men shot you; what crime has Yi committed? The poem also asks: Yi shot the giant boar and offered the fat of its meat to the Supreme Ruler, so why was the Ruler not pleased with him? "Heavenly Questions" with Wang Yi's commentary.

The Yi who took the rule of Xia

The Zuozhuan tells of "Lord Yi of Youqiong". When the Xia declined, Yi moved to Qiongshi and took the government from the Xia with the Xia people's own help; then he relied on his archery, left the people's affairs for hunting beasts in the wilds, sent away his good ministers and raised Han Zhuo, a man his own lord had cast out for slander, as his chief minister. Han Zhuo flattered the palace, bribed outside it and kept Yi busy hunting until he had taken his state, and when Yi came back from the hunt his household killed him. "Heavenly Questions" asks about the same story: Zhuo married a woman of the Chunhu house and she plotted with him; how could the two of them swallow up Yi, whose arrows pierced hide? The Mencius says: Feng Meng learned archery from Yi, and when he had mastered all of it he thought that only Yi in the world was better than he, so he killed him; and Mencius adds that Yi too was at fault, in choosing whom to teach.

So the accounts set Yi in two ages: an archer serving Yao, and a lord who took the rule of the Xia generations after Yu the Great. The Shuowen jiezi joins them when it makes him the archery officer of the emperor Ku whom Shaokang destroyed, and "Heavenly Questions" joins them when it has the Supreme Ruler send him down to the people of Xia.

The archer and the bow

The Xunzi says: Chui made the bow and Fuyou made the arrow, but it was Yi who mastered shooting, and no one masters two things. Wang Chong, in the Lunheng, reports the scholars' story that Yao himself shot at the ten suns, nine went away and one remained, and rejects it: an arrow carries no more than a hundred paces, the sun is fire, and if Yao could shoot the sun away he would have shot the flood away too.

Symbolic Reading

The rereading essay does not mention Yi, but it says that the figures of Chinese myth are kings, engineers and inventors more than gods, and that the Chinese read their stories as history. The Zuozhuan reads Yi in just that way: a lord of the Xia age undone by hunting and by trust in his bow. The story of the suns, for its part, describes what a severe drought does to the land as it is: burnt crops, withered grass and trees, people without food. The heat in the story is not a stronger sun but too many suns out at once, an order broken, so the cure is the return of that order: one sun in the sky and nine in the branches. Killing the beasts of the marshes, rivers and forests makes the land habitable, which is why the Huainanzi ends the story by saying that the land now had roads and distances.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Heracles, troubled by the sun's heat on his way to Geryon's cattle, bends his bow at Helios, who admires his daring and gives him a golden cup in which to cross Ocean. Heracles also kills the Hydra, the nine-headed snake of the Lerna marsh, and brings back the Erymanthian boar alive, as Yi cuts the long snake in two and takes the giant boar alive. The two archers share the bow drawn against the sun and the clearing of the land of beasts of water and forest; they part in that the Greek sun bargains with the archer, while Yi brings down nine suns. In Ovid's story of Phaethon the sun's chariot burns the earth when driven by one who cannot control it, and Jupiter, the Greeks' Zeus, strikes him with the thunderbolt: in both stories excessive heat is stopped by a blow from afar.

In the Rigveda the sun is one, Sūrya, drawn by seven mares and seeing everything; the Chinese sky has ten suns carried by crows, and only one is left in it after Yi's arrows.

Gilgamesh takes from the bottom of the water a plant that restores youth, after Utnapishtim has told him of it, and a snake eats it while he bathes. Yi obtains the drug of not dying from the Queen Mother of the West, and his wife takes it before he can swallow it. Immortality slips from both heroes while it is in their hands and goes to another: the snake renews itself, and Chang'e rises to the moon.

The eighteenth chapter of the Shanhaijing counts him among the first makers and helpers, with the first makers of the boat, the cart and the bow and arrows, so he belongs with the culture heroes. His killing of the long snake and the water beasts, and his shot at the River Lord in the shape of a white dragon, are among the images of combat with sea and serpent.