Dividing the sky into 28 parts, like segments of an orange, easily enabled Chinese astronomers to keep track of the days of the lunar month, as the first of the preceding two passages suggests. Since it takes 27V& days to make a complete circuit among the stars, the moon would change its position by one lunar mansion per day. But the system also gives the observer a ready reference to the solar position among the stars, so that Chinese timekeepers also could determine the time of the year as well. To do so, the careful sky watcher would need to make a nighttime observation of the passage by the meridian (the north-south line that passes overhead) of any of the perpetually visible circumpolar stars. Knowing the equatorial constellations that lay along the extension of a line from the celestial pole through the given star group, and knowing that the full moon would always lie in the mansion directly opposite the one housing the sun, a timekeeper could thus keep track of the position of the sun on their equatorially based zodiac.
Technology is one element of Chinese time reckoning that particularly fascinates Westerners, mainly because many of the Chinese physical celestial models antedate our own. They used the gnomonic sundial as early as 1500 b. c. (a full thousand years before the Greeks). Three thousand years later, though the basic design, like much Chinese astronomical instrumentation, remained unchanged, they developed sundial clocks of notable proportions (figure 9.2). They also kept time by water clocks. Figure 3.2C shows a thirteenth-century European water clock whose design was likely influenced by the Chinese. Their armillary spheres are even more complex; some were celestial analogue devices like the ancient Greek simulacra, powered by waterwheels and designed to move precisely in tune with the sky above. By the eighth century a. d., they even had invented and employed a clock escapement.
In building such immense time-measuring machines and keeping meticulous records of the observations made with them, the goal of astronomy in the Chinese state was to remove the ominous threat that accompanies any unforeseen event—to bureaucratize the heavens. In practical astronomical terms, this goal translates into the replacement of any uncertainty inherent in the sky with a set of mathematically computable cycles.
The linear nature of Chinese bureaucratic timekeeping is the
FIGURE 9.2 Sundial on front court of Hall of Supreme Harmony, Imperial Palace, Beijing (compare figure 3.2A and B). Source: Photo courtesy of Robin Rector Krupp.
Product of a historically minded people very much like ourselves. Yet these people were also concerned with temporal events that repeat themselves. Chinese cyclic time had a very early origin that was likely astral, though we cannot prove it. The basic time unit, like the Babylonian system, is based upon multiples of the number 6, the largest definable unit being a 60-year cycle composed of 10 written characters of one set, known as the heavenly stem, that were joined to 12 characters of another set, called the 12 earthly branches. Since 60 is the lowest common multiple of 10 and 12, no consecutively paired set of characters will repeat until 60 years have elapsed. This principle of commensuration is quite like the harmonic pairing of the cycles of 13 and 20 days of the Maya tzolkin to yield 260 uniquely definable date pairs.
The 12 earthly branches, or ti-chih, like the 28 lunar houses, employ yet another way of dividing up the equatorial zodiac, which is familiar to us in the naming of Chinese New Year. Each branch bears the name of an animal: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Hare, Dragon, Snake, Horse,
Sheep, Monkey, Fowl, Dog, and Pig. These 12 assigned names resemble the Maya year bearers in their 52-year cycle, except that they circulate five times in each 60-year cycle instead of four times in 52. Reflecting the principle of complementarity, six of the animals are wild and six are domestic. Each belongs to either the yang (active, wild, male) element or the yin (passive, domestic, female); for example, the obedient dog who guards the house at night, and the slow pig who bends his eyes earthward, partake of yin, while the yang element dominates in the swift horse and terrible tiger.
Thus, the flow of time through the year passes in waves from one phase to the opposite and back again, the totality always achieving perfect balance. No one really knows where this 60-year cycle originated, but astronomical roots have been suggested. We know that the 60-year period is a perfect fit to the period of conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, the two slowest-moving planets. Actually close conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn happen every 20 years, but the third of each set takes place in the same constellation of the zodiac. These constitute the trigon of conjunctions, also recognized and developed in Western astronomy.
The ancient Chinese watched Jupiter as avidly as the Maya tracked Venus. As a result of their early attention to a moon-based calendar and the importance of the number 12 in the lunar zodiacal cycle, they may have become fixed upon the twelveness inherent in Jovian cycles. They related the 12-year Jupiter cycle to the 12 earthly branches, each station of the zodiac corresponding to one of the feudal states. Thus, by observing the position of Jupiter in the zodiac, the astrologer acquired a prediction or omen concerning the political turf in whose celestial station the planet resided.
About the same length as the Mesoamerican Calendar Round of 52 years that unites the 260- and 365-day cycles, every part of the Chinese 60-year cycle likewise can be experienced perhaps but once in a lifetime. Coincidentally, the Dogon people of Africa also measure a 60-year time base; the three 20-year stages of life that comprise it were said to represent the phases of life. At twenty, one attains adulthood; at forty, elderhood; and at sixty, seniority.
World History
