Lady Chang’e and the Moon Day
As Chinese legend goes, a long long time ago right here on this planet, ten suns suddenly appeared in the sky and refused to go away.
The land was burning and the people were dying.
A man named Houyi heroically shot down the nine suns and left only one to light the sky. Life on the Earth returned to order.
Chang’e found Houyi was all she longed for and all she worshipped and adored, so she fell in with him and the two happily became husband and wife.
But the nine suns that Houyi shot down were nine celestial princes in heaven, thus Houyi was charged by Heavenly Court for abusing his martial power and sentenced him to life in solitary confinement on the moon.
Chang’e realised the people on the Earth needed Houyi to be their guardian angel, so she stole the pill that handed down to her husband by the Heavenly Court.
As soon as she swallowed the pill, Chang’e instantly flew towards the moon without a chance to say goodbye to the man she loves.
Since then, Chang’e has endured a lonely life on the moon until this day. Her only companions are a jade rabbit and an osmanthus tree, the native animal and native plant on the moon.
But Chinese people haven’t forgotten the sacrifice she made for their hero.
Each year at the Moon Day festival on the lunar fifteen when the moon in the northern hemisphere looks the most spherical in shape and bright in colour, Chinese celebrate the Moon Day with lantern shows and moon cake feast.
In recent years, China sent a robotic Jade Rabbit and several Chang’e lunar probes to the moon.
Hope she is not so lonely now.
Beijing Opera: Chang’e Flies to the Moon
Singer: Zhang Huoding (张火丁)
Fly me to the moon
Let me stay alone
Let me experience autumn
With Jade Rabbit and Osmanthus bloom
In other words, release my hand
In other words, kiss me goodbye, my love
Fill my heart with sorrow
And let me sing forever more
You are all I long for
All I worship and adore
In other words, please stay on the Earth
In other words, keep protecting our people
Traditional Moon Day Celebration
Traditionally Chinese celebrate the Moon Day with lantern shows and riddle-cracking game.
Chinese traditionally eat mooncakes while appreciating the fullest moon in the year on the lunar August 15. It is also one of the three major family reunion occasions.
The moon on Moon Day, lunar August 15, 2015, the Wooden Goat Year, looked bloody red due to the total solar eclipse.
In traditional Chinese culture, the blood moon is conventionally viewed as a warning sign for possible war or coup, or other large-scale unrest/upheaval in the coming years.
Daoism regards the moon as the Ultimate Yin and the sun as the Ultimate Yang, which are two primary sources of dual forces that formulate and sway the environment and life on earth.
COMMENTS FROM GOOGLE PLUS
Nicole Wildman:
Moon Day? That sounds beautiful and romantic as well 🙂 That moon must have looked really magical.
Were you high above ground when that mountain of water was rolling your way? I could only imagine the powerful sound. The ground must have been vibrating. :-0
All Things Chinese:
Yes. On that day, the moon pops up remarkably early in the evening before the sky grew dark.
It looks exaggeratedly big in size and surreally orange in colour and oddly rapid in its rising speed.
Once I went with my friends to a secret cave under a cliff at a nearby beach to appreciate the moon. Since it was three days after Moon Day, the celestial single eye did not appear until well after 7 pm when the sky was completely dark.
From that cave we couldn’t see any light, so we sat for about an hour just to view pitch-blank nothingness.
Then all of a sudden, we saw a bloody red dot appear from nowhere in the black background, looking like a wolf’s eye peeping through a hole from a world beyond this universe. The scene was so bizarre and weird, making my hair stand on end.
Gosh, I can never forget that experience…
Eric Horrobin:
Well, that is just awesome and a great legend. I think they should send her 99 red roses on the next visit to the moon of ultimate yin. I like moon pie also 😁
All Things Chinese:
Is this an appeal to the Chinese space program team? Please add my name on the petition 🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹
Michael Cammock:
I wonder? Is this why the European / Pagan people of old called Monday as a shortened version of Moonday?…. Am I right?….
All Things Chinese:
I don’t think so, Michael. Monday/week is part of Christian mythology that regards the world being created by their God in seven days, so the calendar is shaped in a seven-day circle.
But the Chinese calendar is based on the real events in heaven, the movements of the sun and the moon, which are not circled in seven days so there is no concept of the week, let alone Monday.
Michael Cammock:
I was taught that the seven-day week was all dependant upon Paganism… And the Romans of the Christian belief system were the ones that introduced the seven day week as part of their keeping theirs and the British Pagans belief systems in conjunction with the Gospel of Jesus and so, therefore… Everything that New Zealand has inherited from those days, all came from an intertwining of both Pagan and Christian Principles… That is also why I challenge the so-called “purity” of the Gospel of Jesus?….
All Things Chinese:
Seven is a special number in fact.
In Daoism, the number seven is the basic numerical unit: you may walk seven steps in a ritual to communicate with a higher world; you may recite a mantra 49 times to activate a hidden force ……
All mythologies and religions have some truth in them. It’s like a group of blind men assessing an elephant.
Michael Cammock:
Funny that You should make mention blind men assessing an elephant… As this was also what I was taught about the so-called mysteries of life… So? what if people were not so blind from now on?….
I mean to say… Daoist’s believe in connecting with the so-called Universal Life Force… So why is that any different to the so-called Out Pouring of the Holy Spirit as described in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles Ch 2?…. In the Holy Bible and I have been saying this for very many years…
All Things Chinese:
The difference is whether the force is internal or external and if the force is part of oneself or a separate alien entity.
Everyone is, in fact, living in an environment that is the externalization of his own internal state, in other words, he is experiencing a world manifested by his own imagination, thus the so-called higher (or lower) worlds or hidden forces or the God or gods are just part of himself, or more precisely, part of his consciousness, just which do not fall into the scope of his current mental focus, therefore, he is unable to detect them through his sensing tools (eyes, ears, nose, tongue and body) particularly employed for human life form on this planet.
Hence, as long as you use your physical organs to assess the world, you are a blind man since you are looking at the world from holes in a wall that has obstructed your view and prevented you from seeing the whole landscape.
When you have realized the oneness between your external and internal worlds, and cultivate in expanding the scope of your perspective until it includes your entire universe, there will be no higher and lower worlds, no hidden forces, no heaven no hell and no gods. Because you are the one, you are the all, you are the God, you are the director of your life drama and you are the master of your world.
By then and only by then you are no longer blind because you don’t use your eye to see the world.
But for those who believe in the existence of an external God and submit themselves to its power, they have divided themselves into pieces and will never be able to see the whole picture.
Michael Cammock:
The physical and spiritual are intertwined and only separate upon death, where the Soul / Spirit of a person is what makes up the personality of the person and because We are all here in the physical until We die? That means that our senses “are” quite limited to some degree or the other…
And where some claim to have reached the ultimate so-called Nirvana or Highest state of Consciousness through dedicated meditation…
Still, I have to come out of the state of meditation so as to wake up and face the ongoing realities of this physical world on a daily and ongoing basis…
And so therefore this kind of meditation could be seen as a type or a way of escapism to another plane of existence where nothing else can distract the individual from His or Her concentrated efforts of reaching a Higher Spiritual state that is of more of a comfort than the physical “Outside World” in a manner of speaking…
And so, therefore… While We are all here on Planet Earth very many people try and find many other different ways to reach the same kinds of Spiritual Enlightenment that those who meditate try and achieve…
And so, therefore… I really do believe that every single Human Being is and has an internal spiritual connection to an external Power or Entity depending on how anyone from any part of the World wants to interpret it?….
And so I have written about My views on this type of thing before, and so, for now, I thank You for taking the time to explain some of Your beliefs and I think that it is ultimately working on towards a greater World Wide Enlightenment if You will? Where all Humanity will realize just what it has been for that We should all experience so very many thousands of years of generations and heading into the future with more knowledge of how to put right all of the wrongs in this World as our final and ultimate goal…
I see on other posts from other people that there is a by far greater expectation of very many people around the world to experience a new type of Spiritual Consciousness that the whole world has never seen before…
And so I do believe that this is coming to the more people realize the need for equilibrium and focused prayer and meditation…
All Things Chinese:
Physical and spiritual are essentially the same thing. They are all generated by a portion of our consciousness through the interplay of life energy (qi) in yin-yang dual forms, just the former is more consolidated and hard to sway by pure mental power while the latter is more fluent but difficult to be detected by physical organs or instruments.
The so-called life and death is just the regeneration and disintegration of a world, either physical or ethereal, created by our consciousness.
Once we die, the twisted (or say structured) and stained (or say featured) consciousness portion (or say spirit) that once functioned as front consciousness (activated programs) and sub-consciousness (default settings and memory storage) lost the shelter (physical body or ethereal framework) to keep it relatively intact for a certain period of time, so is forced to find another life form to express itself (experience the imagination).
In the process of migrating from one platform to another (a bit like migrating an account from Google Plus to Facebook), most data (memory files) will be lost and the spirit returns to factory reset.
However, your long-established habit (your options preference in setting) hasn’t been changed, and potential reactions in response to your previous actions (karmic force) are still valid from the worlds of other consciousnesses (your posts and comments on other people’s blogs or social media accounts).
Thus once you have assumed a new life form (downloaded an operating system on a new digital device), you are most likely to go to the same websites and create similar files and store comparable data. In the time when your world collides with other worlds where your old traces still remain (such as your words or the memory of you), the reactions to your previous actions will be invoked and you will find yourself at the receiving end of the good or bad karma.
Is there a way to escape from this undesirable karmic force and dreadful circle of death and rebirth?
Yes. If you can ditch your desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone but go to the cloud source directly, your device will never crash, your account will never be closed and your files will never get lost.
Can that hyper-jump be accomplished?
Since time non-beginning, numerous attempts have been made by the countless. Many have succeeded.
Yet regardless of which path they followed to reach that no-death no-birth free world, meditation is the essential step to take, just like regardless of what profession you want to go into, you will have to study at school and do your homework.
Meditation is a way to work with the mind, a starting point to change your default setting therefore the plane of your existence.
The goal of the most advanced meditation is to bypass the mind and awaken the full consciousness, therefore you will no longer think and will produce no mental impressions.
As for ecstasy and other drugs, they are like virus programs that hijack your mind to generate meaningless junk files.
Before you can use the infinite and eternal cloud source (so to speak), you will need to know what is the cloud source and see how it works. You can’t physically go there as a novice, so you send forth your mind which is more fluent therefore easier to break through the rigid self-imposed confinement.
Will any meditation lead you there?
Not necessarily.
Most meditation may just land your mind on another plane of existence (desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone in various brands and versions), some even worse than what you currently have.
Of course, meditation is just a part of training and practice. As you mentioned in your comment, you will need to apply what you have learned during the meditation to your daily life to complete the total transformation.
When your entire consciousness, including the condensed and consolidated portion known as physical, has transcended to the cloud source, you no longer need any device to express yourself. You will never die so you will never need to be reborn. This is the state of NIRVANA.
Only after you have reached nirvana, you can play around without experiencing any restrictions in space and time. You are free and you are eternal.
I’m not sure if I have confused you in one way or another. But I’m confident some guys here will know exactly what I’m talking about.
Guido Stepken:
The Jewish religion is different. Their main motto is: “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth!”. You can watch the result of that philosophy in palestine. Since jews, before WWII, immigrated the U.S. in masses, Christians in the so-called ‘bible belt’ also follow that old Testamentarian / Tora philosophy.
Result: Escalation, wherever you look: Israel, U.S./Mexico border, Ukraine, Uganda, … a spiral of violence.
On the other side, there are “European Christians” who rather follow the ideas of the ‘forgiving Jesus’ (“If you get beaten on one cheek, hold the other!”). Old Testament of the Bible isn’t read/cited in Europe any longer, it’s getting ignored.
All Things Chinese:
Old and New Testaments are in direct conflict with each other. I’m always wondering how any sensible person can intellectually and morally follow both of them. 🙄
Guido Stepken:
The Chinese philosophical principle of establishing “harmony” isn’t that bad. Finally, it’s all about emotions.
All Things Chinese:
Emotions are like colours that categorize our memories of events, serving as a convenient index to retrieve the files.
If thoughts are like bricks produced by our mind in response to the prompts from the environment when certain karmic fruits are ripe therefore the particular internal states have been externalised, emotions are like mortar mainly from our heart (or any other part in our body) that bring the previous memories over the similar events out to the front and string the old and new together.
Each such process makes karmic fruits grow big and ripe fast and materialise as external environment repeatedly.
Although the involuntary thoughts prompted by the external stimulus waste our time and deplete our energy, it is the emotion that traps us in the karmic loop.
People become psychotic because they keep recycling a single karmic event and the scope of their mental focus has been reduced to a tiny dot; beyond that point, they are unable to see and contemplate.
But when you keep reminding yourself of maintaining harmony, you will try to look at things from multiple angles which makes emotion hard to categorise the thoughts and helps you broaden your mental scope.
Soxfan1957:
Love this story of Houyi and Chang’e. A friend brings moon cakes every year to work. Now I have some history behind them.
Very interesting and informative articles thank-you for sharing, sincerely Mrs.Wages ☺️
Happy New Year, Mrs.Wages ☺️