Dong [phrase omitted] 'East' and the Chinese 'Indian Circle'.

AuthorSmith, Jonathan

REORIENTATION

Chinese characters are used to write words, and as far as we know always have been. A natural first hypothesis when we discover Character X to represent Word Y in the earliest available materials, therefore, is that this observed relationship represents the original state of affairs. In the case of the character shown just below, early inscriptions show it to write the Old Chinese (OC) word *[phrase omitted] 'east' (with neither character nor associated word much changed to the present). Perhaps, then, this odd shape was crafted with precisely the word *[phrase omitted] 'east' in mind:

This interpretive direction is reflected as early as the Shuowen jiezi [phrase omitted] of around 100 CE, where we find the claim that the character depicts "the sun in a tree" [phrase omitted]. (1) A few modern proponents continue to see in the glyph the rising sun, a tree (sometimes the mythological "sun-tree" Fusang [phrase omitted]), or the spring as the season of Wood (mu [phrase omitted]) and the East within Han-era Five Phases correlative cosmologies. (2) However, as is now widely recognized, these suggestions do not bear paleographical scrutiny. Early inscriptions on bone and bronze from the late second to the early first millennium BCE show clearly that the resemblance of to glyphs writing the words ri [phrase omitted] 'sun' and mu [phrase omitted] 'tree; wood' was the result of formal reanalysis of an earlier arrangement consisting of only four interlocking lines, two curved and two straight: (3)

As claims for an original relationship with *[phrase omitted] 'east' thus seemed less likely, most twentieth-century investigators took a different approach: perhaps this character was devised not to write *[phrase omitted] 'east' but some (approximate) homophone, only later to be adopted to write 'east' on the basis of phonological closeness. Parallel processes are certainly well attested. A pitfall here, however, is the tendency to latch onto a favored interpretation of graphic form and in so doing to lose sight of the more essential matter of words. As regards , sure enough, we are told simply that the character's OBI forms bear a resemblance to early renderings of ([1] and [2] below), writing *lhok (> shu) 'bind; bundle', or to two characters found in Western Zhou bronze inscriptions ([3] and [4] below), which may be predecessors of a character and further relatable to , writing *thak (> tuo) 'bag; bellows'. (4) Apart from the fact that both ideas are based on already dubious formal claims, it has long been clear that neither *lhok 'bundle' nor *thak 'bag' will qualify as a "near-homophone" of *[phrase omitted] 'east', meaning that the idea of early rebus borrowing never so much as gets off the ground. I confine here to an ungainly footnote some consideration of the logic of these older analytical directions. (5) The takeaway is that the persistence--indeed, the increasing inviolability--of the linguistically unmoored ideas that first depicted a bundle or a bag is an embarrassment not for these ideas' originators but for the current generation of researchers, as we have thus far failed to leverage ever more sophisticated historical phonological tools toward a critical reevaluation of this and many other of our field's conventional wisdoms.

Note that the problem is one of methodological rigor and not specifically with the idea that might at first have been a drawing of a tree or a bag or a bundle, suggestions regarding which the only proper a priori attitude is neutrality. Neither is there any a priori reason to consider favorably the current proposal that this character instead reflects an "Indian Circle"-type geometric method for the determination of due east--a return to the old assumption that the relationship between and the word *[phrase omitted] was "first love" for both. (6) I do hold that this approach offers a refreshingly sharp account of early character structure. However, a more fundamental virtue is simple avoidance of violence against widely agreed paleographical and linguistic fact. Also crucial, and considered in conclusion, is that this direction allows us to explain for the first time a few mysterious reapplications of the form within early character coinages that are known not to have been licensed by phonological proximity.

FULL CIRCLE

The earliest known description of the "Indian Circle" method for determination of the east-west line by use of the vertical gnomon appears within the Katyayana-sulbasutra (ca. third century BCE) in relation to construction of sacrificial altars. (7) The key passage is translated as follows by Michio Yano:

Driving the gnomon into the levelled (ground), and drawing a circle with the rope whose length is equal to the gnomon (length), one drives two pegs at (the intersections of) the two lines where the shadow of the tip of the gnomon falls. This is the east (-west) line. (8) This simple but ingenious procedure takes advantage of the fact that the movement of a vertical gnomon's shadow over the course of a day displays a symmetry across the meridian that reflects that of the sun's apparent path across the sky. Given a circle centered on the gnomon, then, the two points at which the tip of the shadow is observed just to meet the circle will define a line running due east and west. This idea is illustrated in Figure 1 above, a simplified re-rendering of the depictions of Yano (1986: 18 fig. 1) and Liu (1999: 16 fig. 1). (9) Mid-morning sun is here shown at top, mid-afternoon sun at right.

We can easily imagine on this basis the construction of a perpendicular (north-south) line by means of a set square, or through bisection of the angle separating the two key shadows above by one or another means. (10) It is the initial establishment of the east-west line, however, which defines the Indian Circle, so designated by the Persian polymath Al-Biruni (973-1048) in his treatise on the mathematics of shadows. (11) The use of such a procedure was hardly restricted to early India: in addition to modern applications, there is the description from Vitruvius (fl. 70-15 BCE) of a Roman tradition with Greek precedents, for example, while several scholars have considered the possibility that such a technique was used in Old Kingdom Egypt for alignment of the Great Pyramids or associated structures. (12)

Of particular interest here are several more and less straightforward Chinese parallels to the Indian Circle, considered systematically in the 1999 study of Liu Dun [phrase omitted]. Liu opens with an anecdote from commentary to the mathematical text Shushu jiyi [phrase omitted] (ca. sixth century CE) relating an exchange between the legendary Rong Cheng [phrase omitted] and a nameless (and directionless) backwoodsman (chuanren [phrase omitted]). (13) While no comment is made on levelness of surface (a critical factor in the method's precision), we otherwise find in Rong Cheng's instructions a neat medieval Chinese counterpart of Figure 1 above in all its essentials, ending with a determination of the meridian via fixing of a midpoint:

One must set vertical a wooden pole to serve as gnomon, tie a rope to the gnomon, and then draw the rope around the gnomon so as to mark out a circle on the ground...

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