TWENTY-FOUR SOLAR “NODES” IN CHAINESE CALENDAR
Solar sequence consisting of twenty-four “nodes” (chieh , the analogy is with the nodes of a bamboo) spaced at approximately fifteen-day intervals through the year. The primary “nodes” were those of the two solstices and equinoxes, and, spaced evenly between solstices and equinoxes, the Chinese four beginnings of the seasons. The complete sequence follows:
The use of this solar sequence goes back at least to the late Chou
and conceivably considerably earlier. Several “nodes”, notably those of the
solstices, equinoxes, and seasonal beginning, are the foci for observances
described in this book. With a lunar calendar that fluctuated as much as a
month from one year to another, the utility to the Chinese, especially for
agriculture, of having a parallel fixed solar reckoning is obvious. The twenty four
“nodes” constituted, and have continued to constitute, a sort of
agriculture calendar.
A striking feature of the calendar is its schematization. Sometimes this
seems justified, as when Slight and Great Heat (nos. 11-12) are balanced
against Slight and Great Cold (nos. 23-24), with each pair immediately
following the respective solstice. Other correspondences, however, appear
arbitrary, as in the balancing of Small Fullness of Grain and Grain in Beard
(nos. 8-9) against Slight and Great Snow (nos. 20-21), each pair coming
immediately before its respective solstice. The growth of grain during late
May and early June is reasonable enough, but anyone familiar with the
North China climate knows that even a little snow is unlikely to fall as early
as November 22, and that “Great Snow”, if it falls at all (not too likely
because of the dry North China winters), will probably do so considerably
later than December 7. It would seem that the pair of snow terms has been
inserted to achieve symmetry with the grain counterparts rather than for
genuine meteorological reasons
Still more striking is the emplacement of the seasonal beginnings
exactly midway between the solstices and equinoxes instead of, as in the
West, six weeks later. In the West, August 8 is still the height of summer
whereas in the Chinese calendar it marks the beginning of autumn;
November 8 is still autumn in the West but in China it inaugurates winter;
and so on. There is no doubt that the Western seasons are better dated
than their Chinese counterparts as far as climatic actually is concerned, but
from the point of view of formal symmetry their arrangement violates the
harmonious balance which is so prized by the Chinese mind. (Is it not
“natural” that the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, should come
at the middle, and not the beginning, of the summer season?) Not
infrequently, and especially in the five elements cosmology to which we
shall come in the next section, the Chinese have been ready, when
necessary, to sacrifice objective reality for the sake of formal symmetry.
From another point of view, however, Chinese calendar-making has
enabled the Chinese to keep closer to nature than is permitted for us by our solar calendar. When Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. inaugurated the calendar
bearing his name, with its non-lunar months consisting of thirty or thirty-one
days each, he took a great step in the separation of man from nature — one
perhaps symbolic of Western man. Like other traditional peoples the world
over and unlike Western man, the Chinese have always enjoyed the
aesthetic satisfaction and psychology security of knowing that the several
phases of the moon will invariably fall on the same days of each month. On
the other hand, they have avoided the opposite extreme, exemplified by the
Arabs, of allowing their lunar calendar to drift freely without even periodic
attempts to adjust it to the movements of the sun. The result, for the Arabs,
is a calendar which makes a complete revolution through all four seasons of
the year in the course of thirty-two solar years, thus effectively divorcing
Islamic festivals from the climatic phenomena, which, in pre-Islamic days,
had given them birth. To the Chinese, with their insistence on the
interrelationship of man and nature, such a separation of festival life from
the round of the seasons would be just as unthinkable as Caesar’s
separation of the months from the phases of the moon.
So far as we know, the Chinese are the only major people who have
used two parallel calendrical systems, and thereby, one might say, have
enjoyed the best of both worlds, lunar and solar. Because, however, of the
basic incommensurability of movement between the two heavenly bodies,
the Chinese lunar and solar calendars could never be correlated with
complete satisfaction. According to the lunar calendar, for example, the
beginning of the year, and with it the beginning of spring, could occur
anywhere between January 21 and February 20 (Gregorian reckoning),
whereas according to the system of the twenty-four solar “nodes”, the day of
Spring’s Beginning fell always on a fixed solar date corresponding usually to
February 5. This means that the Chinese solar beginning of spring
sometimes fell in the twelfth lunar month and sometimes in the first. In other
words, it could either precede or follow the lunar beginning of spring. Similar
discrepancies, of course, marked the other seasonal beginnings.
