Xihe

Summary

Xihe 羲和 is the lady of the sun in early Chinese tradition. In the Shanhaijing she is the mother of the ten suns, whom she bathes; in poetry she drives the sun's chariot; and in the Book of Documents her name belongs to two families of observers who receive the sun when it rises and see it off when it sets. Her husband is Di Jun 帝俊, the supreme ruler, who in the same book gives the archer Yi his bow.

The fifteenth chapter of the Shanhaijing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, says: beyond the south-eastern sea, between the Sweet Waters, lies the land of Xihe. There is a woman there named Xihe, bathing the suns in the Sweet Abyss. Xihe is the wife of Di Jun, and she bore the ten suns. The ninth chapter says: below is the hot-water valley, and above it the Fusang tree, where the ten suns bathe; it stands in the water, a great tree with nine suns on its lower branches and one sun on its top branch. The fourteenth says: above the hot-water valley is the Fu tree; as one sun arrives another goes out, and all of them are carried by crows. The supreme ruler has another wife, Changxi, who bore twelve moons, and in the sixteenth chapter she bathes the moons as Xihe bathes the suns.

The third chapter of the Huainanzi lays out the sun's whole day as a road of stations. The sun comes out of Yanggu, the Bright Valley, bathes in the Xian pool and brushes past the Fusang: this is "dawn light". It climbs the Fusang and sets off; it reaches Kunwu: "exact noon"; and so on until it reaches the Sad Spring, "where it halts its woman and rests its horses", which is called "the suspended chariot"; then the Yu Abyss, "yellow dusk", and the Meng Valley, "settled dusk". The sun goes in at the bank of the Yu Abyss and dawns at the shore of the Meng Valley, having crossed nine regions and seven stations. Huainanzi 3. In the poem Lisao, "Encountering Sorrow", attributed to Qu Yuan, the poet says: "I ordered Xihe to slow her pace, to gaze at Mount Yanzi and not draw near it." Wang Yi, the second-century commentator, explains: "Xihe is the sun's charioteer; Yanzi is the mountain into which the sun goes", and says the poet fears that evening and old age will overtake him before he meets a worthy king. The poet then waters his horses at the Xian pool, ties his reins to the Fusang, and breaks a branch of the Ruo tree to strike the sun and turn it back.

In the Book of Documents Xihe is not one woman. The emperor Yao commands Xi and He to follow vast heaven with reverence, to calculate and chart the sun, moon and stars, and to give the people their seasons for work. He sends Xi Zhong east to the Bright Valley to receive the rising sun as one receives a guest and to order the work of spring; he sends He Zhong west to the Dark Valley to see off the sun as it goes in and to order the harvest of autumn; and he sends their brothers south and north. Then he tells them: Xi and He, the year has three hundred and sixty-six days; fix the four seasons with the intercalary month and complete the year.

The idea Xihe's stories turn on is that the sun is not left to itself. It has a mother who bathes it in the hot valley before it goes out, a driver who brings it out in the morning and halts its horses in the evening, and observers who receive it in the east, see it off in the west and count its days. The suns are ten and go out one after another; when that turn-taking broke and all ten came out together in Yao's time they burned the crops, until Yi shot down nine. In these stories the day and the year are the work of hands that hold the sun and count its days.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a reading proposed on the method. In Old Chinese 羲 began with a voiceless nasal made at the back of the mouth, followed by a vowel and y, and became xje in Middle Chinese; 和 began with a voiced stop made at the uvula, at the very back of the throat, followed by w and y, and became hwa. The first syllable gives the letters of ḥayyā: ḥ in place of the voiceless back sound, then y. In Lane ḥayyāhu is "he prayed for his life", then "he saluted him"; ḥāyaytu al-nār, "I revived the fire by blowing"; and muḥāyāt is the nourishment of a child, "that whereby is his life". The second syllable gives the letters of hawā as Middle Chinese pronounced it: h, w, then a. Hawā is to fall from above; hāwiya is an abyss whose bottom cannot be reached; mahwāt is the space between two mountains; and the Qur'an swears "by the star when it hawā", when it falls. On this reading Xihe is she who greets the sun and revives it in the morning and lets it fall in the evening, which is just how the Book of Documents divides the work between the two families: Xi receives the rising sun in the Bright Valley, He sees off the sun as it goes into the Dark Valley, and in the Huainanzi the sun goes down into an abyss.

Linguistic Root

Baxter and Sagart give the first syllable as *ŋ̊(r)aj, with a voiceless nasal made at the back of the mouth and a bracketed r whose presence is uncertain, and mark the graph as a proper name; 犧, "sacrificial animal", is pronounced the same. In Middle Chinese this voiceless nasal became a sound like Arabic kh. The Fuxi page reads the same graph in his name with ḥ, so the comparison here follows the same road. They give the second syllable as *[ɢ]ˤoj, with a bracketed uvular stop, made where Arabic gh is made, which became h in Middle Chinese, so that its Middle Chinese form hwa is hawā letter for letter. H, gh and ḥ belong to one group of throat letters in the Juthoor laws.

In Lane under ḥ-y: ḥayyāka Allāh, "may God preserve thee alive, prolong thy life"; ḥayyāhu, "he prayed for his life", and then "he saluted him"; ḥāyaytu al-nār, "I revived the fire by blowing"; muḥāyāt, the nourishment of a child, "that whereby is his life". Under h-w-y: hawā bihi, "he made it to fall down"; hāwiya, "an abyss; a depth of which the bottom cannot be reached"; huwwa, a deep hollow in the ground; mahwāt, "the space between two mountains". The mother who bathes and feeds the suns, and the observers who receive the sun as a guest, belong to the first entry; the sun that goes into the Yu Abyss and into Mount Yanzi belongs to the second.

The weak points are that a voiceless nasal against ḥ and a uvular stop against h have not yet been met in a second Chinese-Arabic pair, and that 和 means harmony in Chinese, not falling. Neither of the project's Chinese essays names Xihe, so the reading is proposed on the method.

Key Mythic Narratives

Di Jun and his sons

In the Shanhaijing Di Jun is father of the suns by Xihe and of the moons by Changxi, and also father of the first makers: among his descendants are the first maker of boats and the first makers of the zithers qin and se; his eight sons were the first to sing and dance; and from his line comes Chui the Skilful, the first to teach people the crafts. He is the one who gave Yi a red bow and white arrows to help the lands below, so through his sons he belongs among the culture heroes. Shanhaijing 18.

The crows and the nine suns

Crows carry the suns in the fourteenth chapter of the Shanhaijing. When the poem "Heavenly Questions" asks why Yi shot the sun and why the crows shed their feathers, Wang Yi explains from the Huainanzi that in Yao's time the ten suns came out together and the crops burned; Yao told Yi to shoot, and he hit nine, so the nine crows inside them died and their feathers fell, and one sun was left. The same poem asks: before Xihe raises the sun, how do the flowers of the Ruo tree shine? And Wang Yi again explains: Xihe is the sun's charioteer.

The Ruo tree in the west

In his commentary on the Lisao Wang Yi says the Ruo tree stands at the far western end of Kunlun and its flowers light the earth below. So the sun has a tree at each end of its road: the Fusang in the east, where it bathes and climbs, and the Ruo in the west, where it goes in; both are forms of the world tree. Lisao with Wang Yi's commentary.

Symbolic Reading

The Chinese essay rereading the myths reads the figures of the beginnings as engineers, kings and inventors more than gods, and says the Chinese themselves read these accounts as history. The essay does not name Xihe, but the Book of Documents does with her what the essay describes: it makes the name two families of officials whose work is to calculate the sun, moon and stars and to set the year at three hundred and sixty-six days with an intercalary month. The mother of the suns in the Shanhaijing, the sun's driver in poetry and the observers in the Book of Documents are three pictures of one work: bringing the sun out on time and counting its days.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Xihe is one of the drivers of the sun in the sun's journey. In the North Sól drives the two horses that draw the sun's chariot, and Helios drives his own chariot down to Ocean; the Chinese poet waters his horses at the Xian pool as Helios's horses go down to the sea in the evening. In China a woman drives the sun; in the North a woman is the sun.

In Mesopotamia twin mountains guard the rising of the sun, and scorpion-men guard the sun at its going out and coming in, as Xi Zhong receives the sun in the Bright Valley and He Zhong sees it off in the Dark Valley; see Shamash. Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet IX, 37–45.

Xihe bathes the suns in a hot valley, and in the Qur'an Dhu'l-Qarnayn reaches the setting-place of the sun and finds it setting in a murky spring.

The count of ten suns that broke when they all came out together, and Yi's shooting of nine, are on the Hou Yi page; the man who ran after the sun until he caught it as it went in is on the Kuafu page.