Religious Affairs Office

China has some of the world’s oldest historical records. All because of the great respect the Chinese people had for preserving their traditions. Even so, the fact that they are preserved does not always mean their origins or reasons for existence are known. Studying the Chinese calendar presents a good example of how the wealth of knowledge of traditional sciences may be forgotten or reduced to their commonest and utilitarian applications, such as divination and superstition.

As with most other peoples in ancient times, knowledge of the traditional sciences is rooted in myths for the Chinese. Figures such as the emperors Fu Xi and Yu are presented as benefactors of humanity, with the revelation of a synthetic knowledge on which the various developing sciences, arts and crafts are based. All the sciences in traditional Chinese civilisation share a common origin and are harmoniously interlinked.

Tradition puts special emphasis on the ba gua trigrams, the Hetu diagram and the Luo Shu chart, all symbolically relating to animals emerging from the Yellow River. These graphics are based on the deployment of the possibilities implicit in the supreme unity (tai ji), where the duality (liang yi) comes from, the four cardinal points (si xiang) and the eight changes (ba gua). This symbolism was originally numeric and geometric, as expressed by the ruler and compass in the hands of Fu Xi and his wife or sister, Nu Wa. Yi jing is one of the best-known books featuring and studying these combinations.

The Chinese calendar arranges these figures around the solar ecliptic circle so they describe the various stages of the year. The four seasons are to be arranged in relation to the four cardinal points: blue dragon, black turtle, white tiger and red bird. Each of these symbols will be subdivided into two aspects representing the eight changes: sky, lake, fire, thunder, wind, water, mountain and earth. If they are subdivided into seven, they will then represent 28 lunar mansions (xiu).

The circle contains the centre, thereby giving rise to the symbol of the five interactions (wu xing): wood/east; fire/south; metal/west and water/north, with the earth at the centre. The five interactions become ten when we take into account the reactions (5 x 2) of generation (yin) and control (yang). This symbolism must not be confused with the five elements that Western tradition usually ascribes to Empedocles (5th century BC).

Three types of calendar have coexisted in China since antiquity: the solar, the lunar and the lunar-solar. The official calendar adopted following the creation of the First Republic of China in 1912 was the Gregorian solar calendar. The festivities and agricultural cycles, however, always followed the lunar-solar calendar, which was also shared by the Chinese community outside China and in other countries such as Vietnam, Korea and Japan (until the end of the 19th century).

The origin of this lunar-solar calendar goes back to 2697 BC and is linked to the mythical figure of the emperor Huang Di, although its most important reforms were made during the Shang dynasty (14th century BC) and the Zhou dynasty (7th century BC). The annual solar cycle is subdivided into twelve monthly lunar cycles, and the gap between the two cycles is corrected by adding seven every nineteen years (Metonic cycle).

The days traditionally began at midnight and were counted following the decimal system. The months, by contrast, started with the new moon and followed a duodecimal system: ten days were ten suns, and twelve months were twelve moons. All that reflects, once again, the original duality of the female and male principles (yin and yang). The straight lines are measured with the chart and based on a decimal division, whereas the circular lines are measured with a compass and based on a duodecimal division.

We find this same symbolism once again in the ten heavenly stems (tian gan) and the twelve earthly branches (di zhi), which, combined, make up sixty-year cycles. These are the bases of the calendars for the rites for ancestors (bai zu), the lunar almanacs (tung shing) and the astrological tables (e.g. The qi men dun jia and the da liu ren).

Whether months or years, even hours, all the duodecimal cycles relate directly or indirectly to an animal symbolism: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, cock, dog and pig.

The sixty-year cycles in all these ancient astronomical traditions are related to the historical cycles of the various dynasties and the planet Jupiter's twelve-year cycle around the Sun. That explains why Jupiter is known in Chinese as the “star or planet of the year” (sui xing).

 

THE FESTIVITIES ON THE CHINESE CALENDAR

The festivities on the Chinese calendar follow the seasonal cycles. For example, the Chinese New Year festival and the Lantern Festival relate to the spring; the Canoe Festival to the summer; the Moon Festival to the autumn, and the Laba Festival, to the winter.

Popularly, while all the celebrations usually invite good luck and wealth, each festivity has its own distinctive trait, which if it is to be properly understood, should be related to its location within the annual cycle (macrocosm) and its correspondence with the human body (microcosm). The second aspect has been thoroughly studied in the Taoist medicine and alchemy tradition, which also has its traditional origin in the emperor Huang Di. In effect, according to the subtle anatomy study in ancient Chinese medicine, the human body is crossed by a series of channels or meridians that unite sensitive points with organic functions. Two of these meridians, those of control (du mai) and function (ren mai) respectively, form a circuit that surrounds the vertebral column and thorax: this is called, in the Taoist context, the “small heavenly revolution” (xiao zhou tian) and in the Chinese Buddhist context is it compared to the “wheel of law” or dharma (zhuan falun). The “small heavenly revolution” is an image of the solar ecliptic.

For example, the Magpie Festival, also known by other names as the Lovers’ Festival, the Seven-Night Festival, the Seventh-Sister's Festival and the Seventh-Month Festival (tanabata in Japan), it is hard to understand without relating it to astronomy and Chinese medicine. The central myth in this festivity is the love between a weaver girl and a cowherd who meet up once a year to court. The weaver girl is traditionally linked to the star Vega (zhi nu) and the cowherd to the star Altair (he gu er), which, together with the start Deneb (tian jin si), make up a triangle particularly visible in the summer. Her correspondence with the human body can be found in the symbol of the “magpie bridge” (xi qiao), which is one of the names for the perineum, precisely where the two meridians of control and function join together. The perineum joins the pubis with the coccyx and is anatomically formed by a series of muscles in a rhombic arrangement, that is, in a form that unites two triangles.