Jingwei

Summary

Jingwei 精衛 is a bird in early Chinese tradition that was once a girl, the youngest daughter of the emperor Yandi 炎帝, "the Flame Emperor", named Nüwa 女娃, "the little girl". She drowned in the Eastern Sea and became a bird that carries twigs and stones from the western mountains to fill up the sea that drowned her.

The chapter of the northern mountains in the Shanhaijing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, says: on Mount Fajiu grow many wild mulberry trees, and there is a bird shaped like a crow, with a patterned head, a white beak and red feet, named Jingwei, whose cry calls its own name. It is Yandi's youngest daughter, named Nüwa. Nüwa went swimming in the Eastern Sea, drowned and did not come back, and so became Jingwei, which always carries in its beak the wood and stones of the western mountains to fill up the Eastern Sea. From this mountain the Zhang river flows east into the Yellow River.

The Shuyiji, Records of Strange Things, attributed to Ren Fang in the sixth century CE, adds that the bird mated with a sea swallow and had young: the females looked like Jingwei and the males like the swallow. It says there is a place in the Eastern Sea where Jingwei swore an oath: she had once drowned there, so she swore never to drink its water. So she is called "the bird of the oath", "the wronged bird" and "the bird of resolve", and people call her "the emperor's daughter sparrow".

The idea the story turns on is that the weak one does not accept the strong one's verdict. The sea took the girl; the girl became a small bird; the bird has nothing but its beak, and still it never stops carrying twigs and stones from west to east. The work never ends, but it is not a punishment like that of Sisyphus, for no one laid it on her: she swore it herself. So poets read her story as a story of resolve. In the fifth century Tao Yuanming gave her the tenth of his poems "On Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas": "Jingwei carries a little twig to fill the vast sea", right after a poem on Kuafu, who raced the sun.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method. The book says that the bird's "cry calls its own name", so the name is a sound before it is a meaning, and we read it with two words of birdsong. 衛 was *[ɢ]ʷ(r)a[t]-s in Old Chinese; the final -s is the tone suffix, not part of the word, which leaves a rounded ɢ, an r and a t: the letters of gharrada. In Lane gharrada is said of a bird that "sang, or warbled", raised its voice, prolonged it and modulated it sweetly. 精 was *tseŋ, an s sound led by t and a back nasal, which we read as sajaʿa: in Lane its primary sense is "he pursued an even, uniform course, following one order", and from it sajaʿat al-ḥamāma, "the pigeon continued its cry uninterruptedly in one uniform way". So the reading says what the book says of the bird: a cry that does not stop, and a labour that goes on in one way without stopping.

Linguistic Root

Baxter and Sagart give 衛 as *[ɢ]ʷ(r)a[t]-s: the first letter is a voiced uvular stop with rounded lips, bracketed because its exact identity is uncertain; the r is bracketed as possible, the final t of the stem is likewise uncertain, and the -s is the suffix of the departing tone. Arabic gh is a voiced uvular sound, the closest Arabic letter to the Chinese initial; r is r; and t and d stand in one group of tongue-tip letters in the Juthoor laws. So the three letters of gh-r-d stand in place. 精 *tseŋ begins with an s led by t, which is Arabic s, and ends in a back nasal, which the Shennong page reads as j; that gives s-j, the first two letters of sajaʿa.

In Lane under gh-r-d: gharrada, ghārida and taghharrada are said of a bird that sang, raised its voice, prolonged it and modulated it sweetly; also of a pigeon that cooed and a cock that crowed; ughrūda is a song or a warbling. Under s-j-ʿ: sajaʿa, "he pursued an even, uniform course, following one order", which is "the primary signification"; sajaʿat al-ḥamāma, "the pigeon continued its cry uninterruptedly in one uniform way", and the saying "I will not come to thee as long as the pigeon cooes", meaning never. That is what the Shuyiji says of Jingwei: she swore never to drink the sea's water, and to fill it for ever.

The weak points are three. The back nasal has been read as j in only one name before this one, which is not enough to make a rule. The final ʿ of sajaʿa has no counterpart in 精, though the Juthoor laws allow ʿ to fall. And Chinese reads the two graphs for their meanings, "essence" and "guard", so the name is understood as "guardian spirit"; we do not know which came first, the bird's cry or the meaning.

Key Mythic Narratives

Nüwa and Nüwa

The girl's name 女娃 is pronounced today like that of Nüwa 女媧, who made humans from clay, but the second graph is written differently, and they are two people. Their stories face each other: Nüwa of the clay melts the five-coloured stones and patches the sky with them when it broke, as the Liezi says, and Yandi's daughter carries the mountains' stones to fill the sea. One closes a gap in the sky; the other closes the sea that opened its mouth on her.

Her father the Flame Emperor

Yandi, the Flame Emperor, is made in later accounts one with Shennong, the teacher of farming. The last chapter of the Shanhaijing says that from the line of Yandi's wife came Zhurong, lord of fire, and from Zhurong came Gonggong, master of water. So Jingwei is a daughter of the house of fire whom the water takes, and she spends her life filling it in.

Symbolic Reading

The Chinese essay rereading the myths reads the flood stories as engineering: Gun blocks the water with earth and fails, and Yu cuts channels for it and succeeds. Jingwei does Gun's work on a smaller scale: she fills the water with twigs and stones, and the water has no end. The difference is that her work is an oath, not judged by any result: she does not wait for the sea to fill, and it is enough for her not to stop.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

In the world of the dead Sisyphus pushes a stone to the crest of a hill and it rolls back each time he is about to get it over, as Odysseus sees. Jingwei carries stones to the sea and it never fills. Both labours are endless, but Sisyphus's is a punishment the gods laid on him for cheating death, and Jingwei's is an oath she chose after death had overcome her.