The Sky River

The Sky RiverAuthor(s): Edward H. SchaferSource: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1974), pp. 401-407Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/600583 .

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THE SKY RIVER

EDWARD H. SCHAFER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY

The familiar Western tradition that the visible edge of our galaxy was created by the over-vigorous sucking at Juno's breast by the infant Hercules has a long tradition in European literature and art, reaching its literary climax in seventeenth century England. It was quite unknown to the Chinese. To them the galaxy was not a "way" or "road" but always a river in the sky - a quintessential emanation of a great Chinese river, either the Ho (Yellow River) or the Han (a tributary of the Yangtze), characterized in literature as "heavenly," "cloudy," "starry," "silver," and so on. The epithet "silver" was most commonly applied to it by poets for its appearance in the autumn season, when it sparked handsomely out of the normally clear skies that follow the summer monsoon. The versions of the popular legend of the divine lovers (represented by the stars Vega and Altair) separated by the river during most of the year, is one of many popular tales which are founded on the notion that stellar apparitions are not only matched with but are actually derived from terrestrial events and conditions. Another example is the idea that the Sky River is connected with the source of the Ho in the west and with the deep springs of the ocean in the east, which make it possible for an occasional lucky human to travel up into the sky by one of these routes. Similarly, the Sky River could be a source of rain, and there are many examples of this in literature, especially the notion that the region near the Hyades tended to overflow rather easily. The Sky River also moved earthwards at times as a sign of approval of particularly holy persons and places.

JOHN HEYWOOD, who played the virginals and sang for Henry VIII and Queen Mary, refers to the notion that the moon is made of green cheese.1 In modern times we owe to Albert the Alligator, Pogo's friend, the probably unverifiable "discovery" that the sun is made of strawberry ice cream.2 But these are not the only alleged products of the Great Dairy in the Sky. A long splash of milk stretches above us from horizon to horizon. The Romans styled this pretty stripe "via lactea," and the name passed into Middle English as "milky way." The Greek word for "milk" gave us our word "galaxy."

Classical authors often refer to it as a milky road, but mythographers are strangely mute about how it got there. Ovid, for instance, a seemingly obvious authority, writes, "There is a lofty road, plain to see in a clear sky; it has the name 'milky', and is famous for its brilliance. This is the way taken by Those Above to the roofs and royal house

1 Proverbs, part II, ch. 7. 2 Walt Kelly, The Pogo Sunday Parade (New York,

1958), p. 19.

of the great Thunderer."3 Clearly it is a divine road, but the learned poet says nothing of its origin. Other standard authorities are equally silent on this point. However the astronomer Eratosthenes, who served in Alexandria as librar- ian to Ptolemy Euergetes in the third century, B.C., wrote down the true tale in his Katasterismoi, a catalogue of constellations.4 There we learn that Alkmene, fearing the jealous wrath of Hera, ex- posed her son Herakles-whom Zeus had fathered on her-in a field near Thebes. But Athena, in the company of Hera, came across the lusty infant, and persuaded the divine queen to suckle him. The child gave her such a mighty nip on the teat that she jerked him away, and her milk spurted across the sky, where it can be seen to this day. Other classical writers, such as Diodorus Siculus,5 while they know of the painful encounter in the fields, are unaware of its connection with the Milky Way. Sometimes the guilty brat is not

3 Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 168-171. 4 I owe thanks to my colleague, Joseph Fontenrose,

for guiding me to this source. 5 Alo6&Qov fltfltoOrlx tarooetr], Book IV, 9.

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Journal of the American Oriental Society 94.4 (1974)

Herakles, but Hermes-but Hermes never at- tained a permanent place in the composite myth.

The story was well known to the men of the Renaissance. Rabelais, in his account of the fantastic Pantagruel,6 observes that the poets of panache-"les plus huppes poetes"-of his day claimed that the Milky Way "... is that place where the milk of Juno fell when she suckled Hercules." Soon after, in the sixteenth century, Vicenzo Cartari7 tells the tale in some detail to explain these events as they were illustrated in well-known pictures. To the classic account he adds that Juno's milk fell on certain lilies and whitened them, so that they came to be called "le rose di Giunone"-"Juno's roses." His contemporary, the painter Tintoretto, did a specta- cular depiction of the celebrated scene at Thebes, furnished with smiling gesticulating deities, and illuminated by a tasty chowder of star-spangled milk.

But soon the poets began to neglect the classic myth for more up-to-date and fleshly comparisons. The seventeenth century was a particularly good time for the Milky Way in English literature. Some grip on the starry original is retained by Sir John Suckling in a fine line in "The Tragedy of Brennoralt":

Her face is like the milky way i' the sky A meeting of gentle lights without name.8

Indeed this usage can hardly be called sensual. An intermediate case is provided by Richard Crashaw in his poem on the penitent Magdalene, entitled "The Weeper." First, the saint's eyes- "Heavens of ever-falling stars"-are pictured as founts replenishing the Milky Way. Then,

Upwards thou dost weep, Heaven's bosom drinks the gentle stream.

Where th' milky rivers meet, Thine Crawls above and is the Cream.

Heaven, of such fair floods as this, Heaven the Crystal Ocean is.

Crashaw has delicately avoided any direct reference to the Magdalen's saintly bosom but there is no avoiding the creamy substance, which adds a new and richer dimension to the lacteal products that decorate the sky. Inevitably all pretense of

6 Book II, ch. 2. 7 Edition of Venice, 1647, p. 104. Another colleague,

Stephen D. Orgel, led me to this reference. 8 Act III, scene 1.

direct connection with a real heaven was abandoned. In the seventeenth century Thomas Brown, re- nowned as the contriver of "I do not love thee, Dr. Fell," wrote of the "white enchanting breast" of a certain Serena:

But oh two snowy Mounts, so near her Heart, Still keep it cold, and quench Love's hottest Dart; Between those Hills, a milky Way there leads, Not to the Skies, or the Elizian-Meads; For which the Gods have oft forsook their own.9

The milky character of the sky road survived into modern times, and is well illustrated in Ben- jamin Disraeli's novel Trancred or the New Crusade.l0 Lady Constance bubbles to Tancred her estimation of the pseudo-science expounded in a new book entitled The Revelations of Chaos:

It shows you exactly how a star is formed; nothing can be so pretty! A cluster of vapour, the cream of the milky way, a sort of celestial cheese, churned into light, you must read it, 'tis charming.

Without a direct carnal reference, Disraeli has coagulated the whole Milky Way into a curdy substance, where Crashaw had carefully separated the superior layer of Mary Magdalene's tearful cream from the common milk beneath.

Such is our tradition. But for multitudes of men in many centuries the "milky way" was not a road at all, but a river. Many ancient Semitic peoples, it appears, conceived it to be a river flowing from the throne of god.l We encounter the notion of a celestial river also among some American Indian tribes.12 But let us skip blindly over the Near East, where rustic ideas of dripped trails of celestial chaff were seriously entertained,

9 "The Beauties, to Armida." The transfer of the "milky" or "curdy" epithet to the breasts themselves, as opposed to their natural product, offers (at least) an alternative to the familiar "snowy." An early example appears in canto XI, 68, of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where we may profitably contemplate the pectoral attri- butes of the fair Olimpia: "le poppe ritondette parean latte/che fuor dei giunchi allora allora tolli." But some confusion always remained. When Robert Herrick, in his Fresh Cheese and Cream, wrote "Wo'd yee have fresh Cheese and Cream? / Julia's breast can give you them." the ambiguity was surely deliberate.

10 New edition of London, 1887 (?), p. 109. 1 James Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and

Ethics (New York, 1962), Vol. X, 371. 12 Ibid., Vol. VI, 886.

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SCHAFER: The Sky River

and make our way to the Far East, where the shining nocturnal band was never demeaned by association with lactating femininity. The Chi- nese, unlike their nomadic neighbors the Mongols and Tibetans, have always regarded milk and milk products with loathing. What right-minded Cathayan could imagine the great deities who govern the world from the high blue vault above

wading ankle-deep in a stream of the nauseous fluid ? For them it was a river, and almost always a barrier-hardly ever a means of passage.

It was not that the Chinese rejected the idea of roads in the sky. Their astronomers, at least, were familiar with several. These, however, were abstract, imaginary paths visible only to the inner

eyes of men learned in scientific matters. They corresponded to the imaginary lines which we have set in the sky, such as the equinoctial colure and the azimuth circle. For them, as for us, the most

important ones were the "Red Road" (our celestial equator) and the "Yellow Road" (our ecliptic). But although the expression "road of stars" occurs very rarely in early Chinese literature, it is an anomaly and an exception. For almost everyone the pale streak in the sky was a river.

The sky river had no single name in China. The Chinese were more fortunate than we who are restricted to the single phrase "Milky Way." They named it after two of their major rivers, the Ho in the north (our "Yellow River") and the Han, the famous tributary of the Yangtze I(iang south of it. These names, combined with a set of adjectival stereotypes-"heavenly," "cloudy," "starry," "silver," and occasionally "luminous"- yielded a considerable variety of combinations, such as "Heavenly Ho" or "Sky Ho," "Cloudy Ho," "Starry Han," "Silver Han" and the like. The use of the first of these epithets might be styled the "locative" group, the second the "nebu- lar" group, the third the "stellar" group, and the fourth the "esthetic" group of names.

The oldest literary references to the sky river occur in two passages in the Shih ching. In both of them it is called "Han"; once it is "cloudy"13 and once "in the sky."'4 Possibly this priority was given to the Han River because the earthly Han was markedly more clear and sparkling than the normally sluggish and muddy Ho. (Indeed, so rarely was the water of the Ho clear that in medieval times such a remarkable phenomenon was of-

13 Shih, Ta ya, "Tang." 14 Shih, Hsiao ya, "Ta tung."

ficially declared to be a "Great Auspicious Token," indicative of the special favor of Heaven, on a par with the apparition of a phoenix or dragon.)15

By Han times, at least, the sky river was regarded as a mysterious emanation from the great rivers of China, congealed on the celestial dome. Fragments of a book that survive from that period contain such statements as "When the virtue of a river spreads its quintessence, it creates a mass of stars above."'6 Hence, "the quintessence of the Ho becomes the Sky Han above."17 Some sources attempt more explicit explanations of the presence of this strange stellar water. The stars are formed, they say, out of a primordial breath, which is mystically related to the water of earthly rivers. One such source-a very respectable one-states: "Now the Han is also a dispersed pneuma of Metal, and its source is called the Han of water. When its stars are abundant, water is abundant, and when they are few, we have drought."18 "Metal" here is purely metaphysical. It is the "Element" whose color is white-revealed also in snow, tigers, and death. A couple of centuries later the great poet-astronomer Chang Heng wrote, "The quintessence of water makes the Heavenly Han,"19 while a minor philosopher of the third century, A.D. wrote, "The stars are of the essence of the primordial pneuma-and the quintessence of water." This subtle, nebulous vapor drifts up- ward from terrestrial rivers to form the great river in the sky, and "the host of stars emerge from it."20 To summarize, the glittering stream above is composed of a subtle substance allied to earthly water but transcending it. It is related to all watery and crystalline substances, including rain, frost and snow (I have also read of a "great Snow Drift of the Skies" in Zufii legend).21 The imagery applied to it in literature is exactly the same as that applied to distinct stars and also to the sparkling and twinkly surfaces of waters on earth. The metaphysical correspondence of the waters of

15 Ta T'ang liu tien, 4, 18b. 16 Ho t'u kua ti hsiang (Han hsiieh t'ang ts'ung shu

ed.), p. lb. 17 Ibid. 18 Shih chi (K'ai ming ed.), 27, Olllb. 19 Chang Heng, Ling hsien (quoted in T'ai p'ing

yii lan, 8, lOb). 20 Yang Ch'ian, Wu li lun (quoted in T'ai p'ing yii

lan, 8, lla). 21 Hastings, Encyclopaedia, Vol. VI, 886.

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earth and of heaven is exact, although the upper streams are the more pure and perfect.

As to the epithet "silver" applied occasionally to the sky river, a medieval commentator22 on a poem by Tu Fu entitled "The Sky Ho" writes: "When autumn comes the sky Ho becomes the 'silver Ho'." The reference is to the language of the first of the two quatrains that make up Tu Fu's poem, which goes something like this:

In usual season it allows itself either light or dark: When autumn comes it is dependably distinct and bright. Then, even covered by faint clouds, It can keep its clarity all through the night.23

In short, the sky river, divinely autonomous, permits itself to be bright or dim during most of the year, but at the end of summer it chooses to put on a constantly brilliant show. This is because at that season it must provide a properly lighted stage and steady flow for a great annual event. In crass, material terms it means that the season of clouds and rain-the summer monsoon-is fin- ished in north China, and the sky is mostly clear and clean.

The second quatrain of Tu Fu's poem continues like this:

It contains stars which move the Double Towers; As moon's companion it lights up frontier towns. Cowboy and Girl ford it year after year Whenever has it bred windy waves ?

This allusion-heavy passage requires at least a few comments. To begin with, stars are the abodes of powerful spirits who control the destiny of the nation. They brood over the watch-towers at the gate of palace of the Son of Heaven. Doubtless Tu Fu was predicting-as he did frequently-better days for the Chinese monarchy. The lovely moon sheds its light simultaneously on all parts of the empire, binding parted friends and lovers to- gether-and so does the endless glittering band of the Heavenly Han which, windless and waveless, permits the divine pair (Cowboy = Altair; Girl = Vega) an annual autumnal reunion. This is the season when the constancy of the starry flow- which puts it beyond the interest of dithering diviners and anxious astrologers concerned only with such ominous irregularities as comets and supernovae-is most marked.

22 Kuo Chih-ta. 23 Tu Fu, "T'ien Ho," Ch'iian T'ang shih, han 4, t'se

3, ch. 10, 15b.

The familiar bridge of heavenly magpies which, in the popular myth, affords transit to the stellar lovers on the seventh night of the seventh moon is in fact not necessary, since Chinese astronomers recognized a permanent ford of the sky river. Its stars are mostly in our constellation Cygnus- the great swan that flies forever down the Milky Way. This ford, we are told, " . . . is the master of the fords and bridges of the Four Conduits; it is the means whereby the deities communicate with the Four Quarters."24 The "Four Conduits" are the four great rivers of classical China, and just as the Sky Han is the ethereal prototype of these rivers so is the celestial ford the unearthly and refined equivalent of the crossings of the Ho, the Kiang, the Chi and the Huai.

It was believed that the Sky Han passed below both horizons to connect with inferior waters that also fed the deep springs of the oceans. Moreover, the tumult engendered by the diurnal rotation of the sky in the region where the down-pouring stream is divided below Vega and Altair produces a surplus of water which we call the tides.25 This connection of heavenly river with earthly seas allowed an occasional fantastic voyage up into the sky:

An old saying tells that the Ho in the sky is connected with the sea. In recent times a certain man lived on a sea isle. Year after year, in the eighth month, a raft would float in, coming and departing without ever missing the date. The man had a strange ambition: he installed a flying gallery on the raft, and provided it with an abundance of provisions. Then he boarded the raft and departed. During some ten or so days he could still observe the stars, moon, sun and planets. But after that they became obscure and indistinct, and he was unaware of either day or night. He went on for some ten days until he reached a place where there were what seemed to be city walls and fortifica- tions, and houses and other buildings, all very imposing. Far off he could see a woman in a palace much en- gaged in weaving, and he saw a male person leading a cow, who stopped to water it. The man leading the cow was startled and asked him: "From what place have you come here?" This person told him of his wish to make the trip, and asked in return what place this might be. "Go back to the county of Shu, milord," was the reply, "and inquire of Yen Chun-p'ing - then you will understand." So in the end he never went ashore, but returned on schedule. Later he went to

24 Chin shu (K'ai ming ed.), 11, 1103a. 25 Pao p'u tzu (quoted in T'ai p'ing yii lan, 68, 5b).

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SCHAFER: The Skl. Riverl

Shu and inquired of Chiin-p'ing, who said, "On a certain day of the month of that year there was a stranger star that trespassed on the constellation 'Ox- puller'." He calculated the year and the month- it was precisely the time when this person had arrived on the Sky Ho !26

This tale is a medieval version of an old story which purports to go back to the third century-as it well may. The Cowboy and Weaving Girl are im- mediately identifiable. Yen Chiin-p'ing was a celebrated diviner and astrologer of the first century, B.C. The expression "stranger star" or "visitor star" is applied to a brilliant star that appears in the sky where none had been before and then fades. We call such an apparition a supernova. This particular visiting luminary had been the ad- venturous stranger from earth.

Not surprisingly, there is a similar old story which demonstrates that the sky river was connected at the opposite, western end with one of its earthly counterparts, the Ho River:

Long ago there was a man who sought the source of the Hlo. He saw a woman washing silk gauze. When he asked her about it she said, "This is the Sky -lo." Then she gave him a stone, which he took back with him. He inquired of Yen Chiin-p'ing, who said, "This is a stone that propped the loom of the Weaving Woman. -27

This little anecdote, evidently a folktale put into the literary language, has respectable analogues. Tu Fu, for instance, imagined, as he was ferrying the Kiang in Szechwan, that he saw that river's further extremity in the hazy distance, flowing into the Cloudy Han.28 Merely a poetic fancy, perhaps. But his equally eminent contemporary Li Po wrote more positively: "Han Water has from the first communicated with the flow of Starry Han."29 'I'his is not just poetry-it is accepted belief ex- pressed in poetic language.

Many poems of the T'ang dynasty celebrate the advent of a yellow dragon over a pool at the residence of the talented young prince Li Lung-

26 Chang Hua, Po wu chih (reconstructed version in Ts'ung shu chi ch'neg), p. 19.

27 Chi lin (quoted in T'ai p'ing yii lan, 8, lla). 28 Tu Fu, "Po sha tu," Ch'iian T'ang shih, han 4, ts'e

1, ch. 3, 15a. 29 Li Po, "Shang huang hsi hsiin nan ching ko, shih

shou," No. 8, Ch'iian T'ang shih, han 3, ts'e 4, ch. 7, 4a-4b.

chi, who was later to become a benign and bene- ficent monarch, usually known to posterity under his posthumous title of Hsiian Tsung, and popu- larly as Ming Huang.30 The official diviners of Ch'ang-an naturally interpreted this surprising event as a premonition that the prince would become the next Son of Heaven (there were a number of other hopefuls). The pool came to be known as "Dragon Pool" and the verses that proclaimed its premonitory fame treated it reg- ularly as linked with the glowing sky river. One of these poems describes how the royal dragon leaped from anonymous seclusion in the blessed pool into the highest heavens:

The pool is open to the Sky Han where it bisects the Yellow Road;

The dragon heads for the Gate of the Sky and enters the Purple Tenuity.31

To put it plainly, the divine reptile makes for the intersection of the Milky Way with the ecliptic, and then heads by way of the "Gate of Heaven" (in our constellation Virgo) to the palace of the greatest of the celestial deities, the Palace of Purple Tenuity. This high god had chosen Li Lung-chi as his earthly representative, and the dragon, having performed his duty as emissary and intermediary below, had returned to that seat of magic power, which flashes with purple light. (The purple walls of the palace were situated in two circumpolar constellations, in the form of a pair of lunettes largely composed of stars in our constellation Draco, with a few from such aster- isms as Cepheus and Cameleopardus).

This poem also describes, rather fancifully, an elaborate court ballet performed in honor of the draconic revelation. Evidently the dance showed a colorful replica of the dragon leaping up towards the Heavenly Han.32 Much later, when Li Lung- chi was well established on the throne, surrounded by a court appropriately enriched by hunian stars and luminaries representing all the arts, he him-

30 For a reasonably sober account of the incident, see T' ang liang ching ch' eng fang k' ao, 3, 28b, and Ch'ang-an chih, 9, 2b (both in Hiraoka Takeo, ed., Choan to Rakuyo [Kyoto, 1956]).

31 Shen Ch' ian-ch'i, "Lung ch'ih p'ien," Ch' iian T' ang shih, han 2, ts'e 5, ch. 2, 10b.

32 Cf. the "Dragon Pool Music," the only one of the special orchestras among Hsiian Tsung's "seated sections" which did not use the music of Kucha (T'ang shu [Szu pu pei yao ed.], 22, 2b).

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self wrote a poem reminiscent of the auspicious poolside event. At his request, his noble and gifted minister Chang Chiu-ling composed a matching poem in which he observed, perhaps more prudently than poetically, that "Its heaped- up waters still join the Heavenly Han."33

Between the sky waters and the ground waters is the more spotty factor in the great water cycle- precipitation. It was known from the earliest times that the Sky Han had something important to do with rainfall. In 100 B.c. the emperor of Han declared the initiation of a new era, to be called "Sky Han." The title had a double signi- ficance, since the Han empire had been named after its founder's fief on the Han River. But more significantly the proclamation was a magical act intended to alleviate a long period of severe drought. It was expected that the heavenly river would respond to the honor by sending down some of its excess.

Near Aldebaran, the red eye of Taurus, and the nearby rainy Hyades, there was a kind of focus of intensity in the sky river. This was close to the intersection of the Starry Han with the ecliptic. Since early antiquity it had been believed that when the moon approached this part of the sky, heavy rains would ensue. It was also thought that this region of heaven controlled weird apparitions in mountain forests.34 Here was a kind of divine spout or spigot from which the surplus of divine water poured into the void. The poets of T'ang frequently took notice of this im- mediate source of rain. One of them, Wang Chien, who lived in the eighth and ninth centuries, on contemplating the weather at night, conceived the decreasing rain as retreating to its source above:

A summer night, newly clear-but stars rather few. Rain gathers in-the remnants of water gone into the

Sky Ho.35

This was a constant theme-the mild but dazzling leakage from the sky river. Ma Tai, a ninth century writer, provides a typical example:

33 Chang Chiu-ling, "Feng ho sheng chih lung ch'ih p'ien," Ch'iian T'ang shih, han 1, ts'e 9, ch. 2, 12b.

34 Chin shu, 11, 1103b. Cf. Shih ching as interpreted by Joseph Needham in Science and Civilisation in China, III (Cambridge, 1959), 468.

35 Wang Chien, "Hsin ching," Ch' iian T'ang shih, han 5, ts'e 5, ch. 5, 15a.

Diamond-sparkling the Starry Ho falls, Drenching the moss and sprinkling the pines 136

Another kind of liquid sometimes dripped from a different part of the sky. This was the precious substance known as "sweet dew." An authority of the Han period, the sceptical Wang Ch'ung- although presumably he never tasted it-tells us that it had a flavor like honey. This rare heavenly manna was a sure token of universal peace, and its coming was the occasion of rejoicing through- out the realm. It constitutes our sole example of milk-connected astronomy in China-and a remote one at that. The star which exudes this welcome juice was named "Nipple of Heaven."37 This divine mamma is in our constellation Serpens, which is handsome in the summer sky. But it had nothing to do with the Milky Way.

Learned writers of the T'ang period were often inspired to embody the sky river in appreciative poems written during or after a stay in a Taoist or Buddhist monastery. In part this must have been the outcome of empty evenings spent under exceptionally clear skies. But it was also the poet's wish to please his monkish hosts by attributing the special holiness of their establishment to celestial influences. Ch'i Mu-ch'ien, a poet of the mid-eighth century, wrote some verses in this vein after an overnight sojourn in a Taoist monastery. His lines are appropriately sprinkled with images from the world of ethereal beings-in- habitants of outer space. He pictures the monastery as a sky palace-a suitable residence for supernatural creatures. Its numinous power even pulls the sky river closer:

This evening I reached a resting place in a jade palace, Where, mysterious and remote, the Cloudy Han

descends.38

In a magical poem written by a visitor to a Taoist monastery in the ninth century, we behold such a pious establishment transformed into a kind of earthly paradise-a replica of a Taoist palace in the sky. Appropriately the poem is laden with the imagery of air and sky: clouds, snow, wind, thunder, and a "chip of moon." Of particular interest is the earthly appearance of the divine

36 Ma Tai, "T'ung Chuang hsiu ts'ai su Chen-hsing kuan," Ch'iian T'ang shih, han 9, ts'e 2, ch. 1, 8a.

37 See Needham, op. cit, p. 273. 38 Ch'i Mu-ch'ien, "Su T'ai-p'ing kuan," Ch 'iian T' ang

shih, han 2, fs'e 9, 3a.

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river itself: "In the heart of its pool the Starry Han is doubled."39 Mystically, this reflection transmutes the monastery into a true paradise set among the stars.

The idea of the descent of the celestial Han towards a place of particular holiness on earth is common in poetry. Consider the case of Fang Kan, who visited a Buddhist monastery named "Dragon Spring" in the ninth century. Dragons, as masters of the waters of heaven, despite their occasional hibernation in terrestrial pools, have ready access to the sky river, as observed above. Fang Kan commemorated his visit with a poetic description of the close approach of the starry river after an early spring storm. The storm's purpose, apparently, was to allow the easy passage of the rain-breeding dragon to the sky: "In mid- sky the vapors clear-the Starry Ho comes close."40

Appropriately, the divine palace of the Son of Heaven was also frequently blessed by the lowering of the sky river. But when a court poet used this image he was not merely employing flattery: it was truly believed that the actions of the Son of Heaven produced automatic reactions in Heaven. So Tu Shen-yen, writing on command at a court banquet in the seventh century, observed:

39 Hsiieh Ying, "Su Hsien-tu kuan yin wang erh chiin hsiu tao ch'u," Ch'iian T'ang shih, han 8, ts'e 10, 7a.

40 Fang Kan, "T' i Lung-ch' iian szu chueh ting," Ch' ian T'ang shih, han 10, ts'e 3, ch. 5, 2a.

At the Palace Gate-the Starry Ho lowers to brush the trees;

From the Basilica Court-the lamp candles send up perfume to Heaven.41

Other royal persons might be honored in the same way. So Su T'ing, a poet contemporary with Tu Shen-yen, did a command performance at a party in honor of a royal princess. In his verses he dis- plays the water of the Sky Han falling on the trees of the palace garden, probably as actual dew or rain.42 Celestial entities will condescend to honor any sacred person.

To sum up: the essential qualities of the Chinese sky river are its aqueous natures; its linkage with earthly rivers; its founts of rain and dew; its affinities with dragons, holy persons, and sacred places. These qualities were constantly in the mind and language of any medieval Chinese poet when he looked up at the glowing band in the night sky. He fancied that he saw a sparkling, crystalline, numinous emanation from the great rivers of earth. Unlike us, he was not compelled to remember (for instance) the "heaving milky way" of Alan Ramsay's d6collete Scottish maid,43 or indeed any kind of lacteal image.

41 Tu Shen-yen, "Shou sui shih yen ying chih," Ch'iian T'ang shih, han 2, ts'e 1, 5b.

42 Su T'ing, "Shih yen An-le kung-chu shan chuang ying chih," Ch'iian T'ang shih, han 2, ts'e 2, ch. 1, 9b.

43 "Tartan; or the Plaid."

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The Sky River