Tales Of The Gùshì Yuán
You can buy or order this book in print and eBook formats from Amazon by clicking on the book cover to the left, or by using the order button below.
You can also buy or order this book from your favoutite bookseller by quoting the ISBN numbers listed below.
You can read a sample from this book in the sections below...
ISBN #
Hardback:
Paperback:
eBook:
978-1-915081-06-3
978-1-915081-07-0
978-1-915081-05-6
Story:
The Lady Of The Moon
synopsis
This volume, Tales Told By The Gùshì Yuán, is the first in a set of collections covering indigenous tales from what we in Europe know now as The Far East. These tales cover a wide range of sources and tales emerging from the wider Chinese diaspora. Many of these tales hark back to older times, well before the significant changes that have taken place in China during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but they do, I believe, still hold relevance as a channel through which we can glimpse the cultural splendour of peoples and cultures with a such a distinct and long history.
A Story...
The Lady Of The Moon
In the days of the Emperor Yau there lived a prince by the name of Hou I, who was a mighty hero and a good archer. Once ten suns rose together in the sky, and shone so brightly and burned so fiercely that the people on earth could not endure them. So the Emperor ordered Hou I to shoot at them. And Hou I shot nine of them down from the sky. Besides his bow, Hou I also had a horse which ran so swiftly that even the wind could not catch up with it. He mounted it to go hunting, and the horse ran away and could not be stopped.
Hou I eventually came to Kunlun Mountain and met the Queen-Mother of the Jasper Sea. And she gave him the herb of immortality. He took it home with him and hid it in his room. But his wife who was named Tschang O, once ate some of it on the sly when he was not at home, and she immediately floated up to the clouds. When she reached the moon, she ran into the castle there, and has lived there ever since as the Lady of the Moon.
On a night in mid-autumn, an emperor of the Tang dynasty once sat at wine with two sorcerers. And one of them took his bamboo staff and cast it into the air, where it turned into a heavenly bridge, on which the three climbed up to the moon together. There they saw a great castle on which was inscribed, ‘The Spreading Halls of Crystal Cold.’ Beside it stood a cassia tree which blossomed and gave forth a fragrance filling all the air. And in the tree sat a man who was chopping off the smaller boughs with an axe.
One of the sorcerers said, “That is the man in the moon. The cassia tree grows so luxuriantly that in the course of time it would overshadow all the moon’s radiance. Therefore it has to be cut down once in every thousand years.”
Then they entered the spreading halls. The silver stories of the castle towered one above the other, and its walls and columns were all formed of liquid crystal. In the walls were cages and ponds, where fishes and birds moved as though alive. The whole moon-world seemed made of glass. While they were still looking about them on all sides the Lady of the Moon stepped up to them, clad in a white mantle and a rainbow-colored gown. She smiled and said to the emperor, “You are a prince of the mundane world of dust. Great is your fortune since you have been able to find your way here!”
And she called for her attendants, who came flying up on white birds, and sang and danced beneath the cassia tree. A pure clear music floated through the air. Beside the tree stood a mortar made of white marble, in which a jasper rabbit ground up herbs. That was the dark half of the moon. When the dance had ended, the emperor returned to earth again with the sorcerers. And he had the songs which he had heard on the moon written down and sung to the accompaniment of flutes of jasper in his pear-tree garden.