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The Chinese Sky 

Li Bai's Milky Way - Tang Astronomy - Maybe

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Li Bai's Milky Way

In “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon” the 8th century Daoist poet Li Bai writes about dancing with his shadow, drunkenly beneath the moon. Here’s an excerpt — in two different translations:

[…] I make the moon and the shadow my company
To enjoy the springtime before too late

The moon lingers while I am singing
The shadow scatters while I am dancing
We cheer in delight when being awake
We separate apart after getting drunk

Forever will we keep this unfettered friendship
Till we meet again far in the Milky Way

— Ezra Pound, 1915

[…] with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave
I must make merry before the Spring is spent.
To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the sky.

— Arthur Whaley, 1919

Li Bai suggests an ambiguous mystical intimacy with the natural world, from the shadow beside him to the distant stars in the sky. This combination of intimacy and distance, connection and detachment, isn’t surprising when one remembers that the Daoist version of Deity is impersonal and yet connected somehow to the human psyche. The legendary author Laozi (circa 6th C. BC) says that the Dao “produces (all things) and nourishes them” and that it “does all, and yet does not boast of it” (The Tao Teh King, 9.3, trans. James Legge). The Dao came “into existence before Heaven and Earth” and It “may be regarded as the Mother of all things” (25.1). Yet despite the nourishing and motherly nature of this obscure origin of everything, the universe itself is fairly ruthless: “Heaven and Earth do not act from (the impulse of) any wish to be benevolent; they deal with all things as the dogs of grass are dealt with” (5.1). Legge explains that the dogs of grass were used in sacrifice, and “when the sacrifice was over, were thrown aside and left uncared for.”

Distant yet near, the Dao is by definition (or anti-definition) impossible to grasp. The 4th century BC Zhuangzi writes that the Dao “is something inexhaustible, and yet men think it has an end; it is something unfathomable, and yet all men think its extreme limit can be reached” (The Texts of Taoism 11.4, trans. James Legge).

Zhuangzi’s stories are filled with references linking the concept of the infinite Dao with the infinite space of the cosmos. In one of these, Starlight asks Non-entity if the former exists: 

‘Master, do you exist? or do you not exist?’ [Starlight] got no answer to his question, however, and looked steadfastly to the appearance of the other, which was that of a deep void. All day long he looked to it, but could see nothing; he listened for it, but could hear nothing; he clutched at it, but got hold of nothing. Starlight then said, ‘Perfect! Who can attain to this?’ (5.8)

In its emphasis on mystical experience of the Void and infinite space, Daoism joins Vedic Hinduism as one of the first major religions of astronomical space. Many early religions and philosophies talk about space, yet they often talk more about astrological space than astronomical space. Often these early religions try to anthropomorphise outer space, try to make it correlate with human systems, crops, wars, disasters, and notions of predestination or fate. Astronomy, on the other hand, doesn’t make the same assumptions about correlation and connection.

Daoism mixes intimate, meaningful human experience with an otherwise endless and inhuman universe. Zhuangzi counsels us to enjoy ourselves “with the Tao in the land of Great Vacuity,” “pursue the Great Way (on a grand scale)!”, “cultivate a grand similarity with the chaos of the plastic ether,” “roam in the Grand Void,” and “Be large-minded like space, whose four terminating points are illimitable, and form no particular enclosures.” We are encouraged to “mount on the bird of the light and empty air, proceed beyond the six cardinal points, and wander in the region of non-entity, to dwell in the wilderness of desert space” (3.2, 3.3, 11.5, 5.7, 17.6, 7.3). Zhuangzi defines the Dao spatially as “the limit of the unlimited, and the boundlessness of the unbounded” (5.6).

In its refusal to define the afterlife or prescribe a clear code of conduct and belief, Daoism also shares more with agnosticism than with the great world religions. In regard to the afterlife, Zhuangzi asserts that “All things have the life (which we know), but we do not see its root; they have their goings forth, but we do not know the door by which they depart” (8.8). He says that “What we can point to are the faggots that have been consumed; but the fire is transmitted (elsewhere), and we know not that it is over and ended” (3.4). In regard to conduct and doctrine, Zhuangzi asserts that “to start from nowhere and pursue no path is the first step towards making the Tao your own” (5.1). Unlike Confucianism, which is often seen as a complementary philosophy, Daoism refuses to elevate doctrine or morality, expressing instead a haughty disdain for rules, systems, and words.

Daoism offers no clear definition of God or spirit, and no clear path to get to these elusive things, yet it does suggest that those who seek knowledge won’t find it in a pre-packaged, traditional form, complete with rules and comprehensive patterns. In this way Daoism is closer to Buddhism, and to the epistemology of the Buddhist poet Jia Dao (779–843):

Under a pine I asked the pupil, who said, “The Master is gone to gather balm somewhere in the mountains, but the cloud is so thick that I cannot say where."

Li Bai and Jia Dao both suggest that Truth isn’t something that you can grasp. Nor is it something that someone can give you. Both poets also suggest that we look for truth in the natural world, beyond human norms and conceptions, whether in the forest or the stars.

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In Li Bai’s poem, the universe may be indifferent, yet it isn’t actively cruel, like pagan gods who act like wanton boys who kill us for their sport (as Shakespeare puts it in King Lear). Nor is it as crushing as the grim Naturalist universe that followed in the footsteps of Darwin in the late Nineteenth Century. The natural world may be close or far, yet it shares a strange intimacy with the human psyche. In the face of nature’s indifference, there’s the possibility of an amicable encounter between humans, the moon, and the Milky Way: “Forever will we keep this unfettered friendship / Till we meet again far in the Milky Way.” 

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Tang Astronomy

Writing in the middle of the Tang Dynasty (618-987), Li Bai couldn’t have known many hard facts about what he refers to as “the Milky Way,” or what Whaley translates as “the Cloudy River of the sky.” Not that Chinese astronomy wasn’t advanced for its time: astronomical observations began as early as the Shang Dynasty (2nd millennium BC). The British biologist and sinologist Joseph Needham “has described the ancient Chinese as the most persistent and accurate observers of celestial phenomena anywhere in the world before the Islamic astronomers.”

In his book China (2008), Needham writes that something as basic as the chronology of the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC) is “anchored on an eclipse recorded in the texts and identified astronomically as occurring in 841 BC, ‘the first absolute date in Chinese history’.” Nor were the Chinese afraid to speculate: during the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), Xuan Ye “viewed the heavens as infinite in extent and the celestial bodies as floating about at rare intervals.” He believed that "the speed of the luminaries depends on their individual natures, which shows they are not attached to anything." The Chinese were also “aware that new stars could appear. In 185 AD, they were the first to observe and write about a supernova, now known as the SN 185.”*

Li Bai’s 8th century also saw substantial advances, boosted by input from India (which had built on Greek and Babylonian astronomy, and had also made crucial advances in decimal notation). For instance, Yi Xing set up thirteen astronomical observation sites from Vietnam to Lake Baikal.* 

Despite these advances, Li Bai couldn’t know if Xuan Ye’s earlier notion of infinite space was likely to be true. Without the spectrography used by Doppler and Hubble he couldn’t know that a nebula differed from a far-off galaxy, or that Andromeda existed in a realm of space many orders more distant than the sources of light in our own galaxy. He couldn’t really know what, or even where, the Milky Way was.

Despite his Daoist propensity to ponder the vastness of the cosmos, Li Bai couldn’t know that the stars were in fact, and not just in poetic speculation, the closest thing we know to the infinity he attributes to his cherished Dao. 

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May Be

There may be realms or beings that exist beyond matter, waves, gravity, and light. Zhuangzi may be right when he says that there’s a “grand perfection of Heaven and Earth” and that the Dao “seems to be lost in obscurity, but it continues; now it seems to glide away, and have no form, but it is still spirit-like. All things are nourished by it, without their knowing it” (3.4, 5.2).

There may be a ring of saints in the highest Heaven, encircling God in what Dante called the Blessed Rose. Nel ciel di più della sua luce fu io (“In the heaven which contains more of [God’s] Light was I”) is a fine phrase indeed.

The poetic possibilities are tempting. Drunk on love, or in the mystic’s tavern, each star beckons from the abode, where the eternal are, to borrow Shelley’s phrase from Adonais.

Each beauty seems divine. Lips pink as morning clouds, hearts red as roses in the archetypal Garden of Love. Angels dancing on a pinprick of light, seven billion light-years away.

There may be any number of wonderful places.

Maybe.

Yet for the moment at the core of everything, beyond the misty peaks and circling satellites, lie the enormous lattice-work of the gravity-bound stars.

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* See Needham and Ronan, Cosmic Understanding: Philosophy and Science of the Universe, Princeton UP, 1993; China, Chapter 2: “Sages and Heroes: Footprints of Zhou”; Wikipedia pages on “Chinese Astronomy,” “Stars; Observation History,” and “Yi Xing.”

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