The lexicology of ri 日
What does man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? (Eccl 1:3)
In ancient Chinese texts, there is a certain figure named Yi 羿, sometimes Hou Yi 后羿. He is an enigma, many-faceted, sometimes spoken of in praising terms and at other times in cautionary or denigrating ones. He appears in three important Warring States-era texts, the Documents 《尚書》, the Chuci 《楚辭》 and the Zhuangzi 《莊子》, where he plays three very different roles.
In the Documents, Hou Yi is the prince of Youqiong (Youqiong Hou Yi 有窮后羿). He is portrayed as a hero of the people of Xia, and also a rival who challenges King Taikang: 有窮后羿因民弗忍，距于河。 ‘Yi, the prince of Qiong, taking advantage of the discontent of the people, resisted (his return) on (the south of) the He.’ (Documents, Book of Xia 夏書, ‘Songs of the Five Sons’ 五子之歌 1) The rebellion failed, and Yi was killed—as later legend would have it, by one of his subordinates. But the Documents uses the event as a framing device to offer a scathing political criticism of Taikang and the other sons of Yu ‘the Great’.
In the Zhuangzi, Yi is portrayed as a man who has reached the peak of human ability with the bow, someone whose skill has acquired legendary proportions: 羿工乎中微 ‘Yi was skilful in hitting the minutest mark…’ In several places in the Zhuangzi he is used as an exemplar of superlative skill. Yet Zhuangzi critiques him on several grounds. He speaks of Yi as boastful and proud, and further chides him for making the entire world a cage for birds, who have no means of escape from his arrows (Zhuangzi 23:18).
Qu Yuan is the one who bridges the two interpretations—Hou Yi the political rebel and Yi the ‘divine’ archer—but adds his own twist. He appears in two of Qu Yuan’s poems in the Chuci: ‘Li Sao’ 離騷 and ‘Heavenly Questions’ 天問. He alludes to Yi’s skill as an archer in the ‘Li Sao’, and also to his rebellion against the Xia king in the ‘Heavenly Questions’. He also alludes to the mythological tale of Yi shooting the suns, as well as another tale of his seduction of Luo, the wife of the river god Bo. In Qu Yuan’s telling, Yi takes on an expansive range of mythological roles as solar hero, trickster and political rebel. The Chuci’s treatment of Yi is particularly interesting because it deprecates astral worship and euhemerises the solar deities. Hou Yi 后羿, a human hero, is valorised over the sun (ri 日), just as his consort Chang’e 嫦娥 serves a similar purpose over the moon. Both of them are punished for their hubris by a higher authority in Heaven.
The lexeme ri 日 is one of the oldest, best-attested and most recognisable pictographic (xiangxing 象形) characters in the Chinese language. It is a circle, often (but not always) with a dot representing a sunspot inside, representing the disc of ‘the Sun’. Our Han Dynasty friend Xu Shen rather wryly quips that the basic function of this character is obvious: Ri, shi ye 日，實也. He further remarks that太陽之精不虧 ‘the energy of the Sun is never exhausted’, before speaking of the character’s composition: an enclosure (wei 囗) marked in the centre with a single line (yi 一), and appending the formula that all characters with the ‘sun’ radical are derived from ri.
The character retains its ancient functionalities mostly unchanged. It can still be used as ‘sun’, though usually in compounds like riluo 日落 ‘sunset’. More often it is used to refer to a ‘day’ or a ‘date’: shengri 生日 ‘birthday’; rizi 日子 ‘day’; riqi 日期 ‘date’; jieri 节日 ‘holiday’; meiri 每日 and richang 日常 ‘daily’. It is also used in the back-translation of Nihon 日本 ‘Japan’, nowadays a politically-correct term preferred over the dated Dahe 大和 ‘Greater Yamato’ and Dongying 东瀛 ‘Eastern Marsh’, as well as the rather pejorative Woguo 倭国 ‘Dwarfland’.
One common idiomatic phrase that is found repeatedly in the Odes is riji yuezhu 日居月諸 ‘the sun dwells [among] many moons’, which is used either to invoke the sun and moon, or else to say something similar to ‘time flies’. 日居月諸、照臨下土。乃如之人兮、逝不古處。 ‘O sun; O moon, which enlighten this lower earth! Here is the man, who treats me not according to the ancient rule.’ (Book of Odes 《詩經》, Odes of Bei 邶風, ‘Sun and Moon’ 日月 1) The same lexeme is used in classical Chinese, as in modern Chinese, to refer to a ‘day’, or for a day ‘to pass’: 終風且曀、不日有曀。 ‘The wind blew, and the sky was cloudy; before a day elapses, it is cloudy again.’ (Odes, Odes of Bei, ‘The Wind Blows’ 終風 3) Or: 叔兮伯兮、何多日也。 ‘O ye uncles, why have ye delayed these many days?’ (Odes, Odes of Bei, ‘High Mound’ 旄丘 1) It can also function adverbially as ‘daily’: 若昔朕其逝，朕言艱日思。 ‘Formerly, at the initiation of this expedition, I spoke of its difficulties, and thought of them daily.’ (Documents, Book of Zhou 周書, ‘Great Announcement’ 大誥 8)
The double function of ‘sun’ with ‘day’ seems to be common to the logographic writing systems. The Sumerian utu 𒌓 could function, similarly to the Chinese ri 日, either as ‘sun’ or as ‘day’. This dual-usage Sumerogram utu 𒌓 was later borrowed into Akkadian, where it could be given the phonetic value of šamšum ‘sun, daylight’, or ūmum ‘calendrical day’. These two phonetic values were later represented in the Semitic roots š-m-š ש-מ-ש and y-w-m י-ו-ם, respectively. The root š-m-š is found across practically all branches of the Semitic language family: Arabic šams شمس ‘sun, sunny, sunlight, to sun-dry’; Ugaritic šapšu 𐎌𐎔𐎌 ‘sun, sun goddess’; Aramaic and Syriac šimša’ ܫܡܫܐ ‘sun, sunlight, star, gold’; Hebrew šemeš שמש ‘sun’; Old South Arabian šems 𐩪𐩣𐩦; Tigre šämš ሸምሽ ‘sun’. The root y-w-m is similarly widespread: Arabic yawm يوم; Ugaritic yōmu 𐎊𐎎; Aramaic and Syriac yawmā’ ܢܘܡܐ; Hebrew yôm יום; Old South Arabian yūm 𐩣𐩥𐩺; Ge’ez yom ዮም; Tigrinya lom ሎም—all with the function of ‘day’ or ‘today’.
Another interesting commonality is the demotion of the sun gods in Semitic and Sinitic civilisations. The multifaceted, contradictory portraits of Hou Yi passed down from the Documents, the Zhuangzi and the Chuci point to a mythologised event in the Xia Dynasty, in which Hou Yi played a key role, which led to the abandonment of sun-worship in favour of a more generalised cultus of Heaven. One possibility is that Hou Yi was an ambitious warrior who took advantage of an oracular pronouncement based on the Sun’s position, in order to rouse a revolt against Taikang. This rebellion was subsequently betrayed from within and Taikang’s rule was restored, after which Taikang or his heirs suppressed Sun-worship as politically unreliable. Another possibility, put forward by Dr. Chen Jiangfeng of Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, is that possibly several folkloric characters of Hou Yi were adopted from a neighbouring non-Sinitic tribe, the Dongyi 东夷 who lived to the southeast.
A similar shift happened in the Semitic world, though it seems to have taken quite a bit longer. Sun-worship is immediately deprecated in the first chapter of Genesis. The light of that first ‘day’ (l’ôr yôm לאור יום, Gen 1:5) precedes the creation of the sun on the fourth day—and the sun is not even named as such, but instead called hammā’ôr haggādōl המאור הגדל ‘the greater light’ (Gen 1:16). The ‘greater light’ being younger than the day it governs, and not even named as the sun, are both ways in which the Tanakh belittles sun-worship. The sun, in fact, only appears by name, hašŠemeš השמש, in the fifteenth chapter, when Abram is defending his not-yet-accepted sacrifices to God from the carrion-birds that would take them (Gen 15:12). The Qur’ān in its sixth sūra passes comment on this episode in particular. The reason God did not accept Abram’s sacrifice, was so that he would see the fickleness of the sun, the moon and the astral bodies, and come to accept Allāh as the greater and more constant Lord (6:75-79).
The stricture against worshipping the astral bodies is also set forth explicitly in Deuteronomy: וּפן־תּשּׂא עיניך השּׁמימה וראית את־השּׁמשׁ ואת־היּרח ואת־הכּוכבים כּל צבא השּׁמים ונדּחתּ והשׁתּחוית להם ועבדתּם אשׁר חלק יהוה אלהיך אתם לכל העמּים תּחת כּל־השּׁמים ‘And beware lest you lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and worship them and serve them, things which the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.’ (Deut 4:19) If even the writ of this stricture did not indicate that such astral worship was present and a problem, the Kǝtubîm also attest to it. והשׁבּית את־הכּמרים אשׁר נתנוּ מלכי יהוּדה ויקטּר בּבּמות בּערי יהוּדה וּמסבּי ירוּשׁלם ואת־המקטּרים לבּעל לשּׁמשׁ וליּרח ולמּזּלות וּלכל צבא השּׁמים ‘And [Josiah] deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places at the cities of Judah and round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Ba‘al, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens.’ (2 Kgs 23:5) The Lord maintains His position of supremacy over the sun and moon and stars throughout the Nǝbī‘îm, controlling their movements (Jos 10:13; Isa 38:8), and hiding them (Eze 32:7; Joel 3:15; Amos 8:9), and outlasting and outshining them (Isa 60:19-20). The one exception is Malachi, who describes the Lord as šemeš ṣǝdāqâ שמש צדקה ‘the sun of righteousness’ (Mal 4:2); but this is in reference specifically to hayYôm היום ‘the Day’ in which all the proud and workers of iniquity shall be burnt up like dry straw (Mal 4:1).
Another set phrase which appears specifically in the book of Ecclesiastes is taḥat haššāmeš תחת השמש ‘under the sun’. This is used to evoke certain universal inferential truths. Human beings at all times and in all places seek after comfort and pleasure and wealth, and build up for themselves vineyards and palaces. Those who have power use it to oppress others, and make them toil until their bodies are ruined. And those who have power do not listen to those who warn them that they are indeed mortal and vulnerable… until it is too late. There is no new thing under the sun (Ecc 1:9).
This is, in a nutshell, also the teaching of the Documents. Each dynasty begins with a lofty ideal: Xia, for the enrichment and material betterment of its people; Shang, for clean governance and the fairness of the ‘rule of law’; and Zhou, for the rigour and potential for self-correction in ritual. Yet each of these ideals falls harder than the one before it, with despots and warlords and oligarchs and out-of-control bureaucrats despoiling the land and provoking Heaven’s terrors. All such schemes for reform are ‘vanity’, just as the schemes and plans of men in Ecclesiastes are ‘vanity of vanities’. Yet both Ecclesiastes and the Documents end on a note of hope. At the end of the Documents, Duke Mu of Qin holds out hope for yiren 一人 ‘one man’ (Documents, Book of Zhou, ‘Speech of the Marquis of Qin’ 秦誓 4) who might begin to fear Heaven; just as the Qohelet, despite decrying all the vanities of man, expresses the firm hope that את־כּל־מעשׂה האלהים יבא במשׁפּט ‘God will bring every deed into judgement’ (Ecc 12:14).
