Chinese Horoscope
(Chinese Horoscope Fortune)
According to one legend, in the sixth century B.C. the Jade Emperor
invited all the animals in creation to a race, only twelve showed up:
the Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Lamb, Monkey,
Rooster, Dog, and Pig, and according to their places in the race, the
Jade Emperor had given them each a number starting with the Rat who
was the winner of the race.
Many legends arose from the Race of the Chinese Horoscopes. One told
of the reason why cats and rats shall always be enemies: He and the
cat (at the time good friends) were poor swimmers, so they asked the
ox if they could stay on top of his head to cross the river. Along the
way he pushed the cat off of the ox's back. And the cat, incapable of
swimming, lagged behind. The rat stayed on top of the ox's head until
the ox was almost at the finish line. And as the ox was about to cross
it, the rat jumped from the ox's head and became first place. And the
cat and rat have been enemies ever since.
Another legend tells that the cat had asked the rat to wake him up the
day of the Race. The rat agreed, but on the said day, he did not wake
the cat in his greed to win. When the cat finally woke up and got to
the racing ground, he found the race to be over. The cat then swore
revenge upon the rat.
The legend of the Zodiac Race, of course, is by far the least credible
of all explanations of the origin of the Chinese Horoscope. Because
the "twelve earthly branches" which correspond with the zodiac, was
already in existence as early as the Zhou era, long before the advent
of Buddhism. A parallel decimal set of symbols called "ten heavenly
stems", corresponding with yin-yang dualism and the five elements
(wood, fire, earth, metal, water) was in existence in the Shang
dynasty as the stems were part of Shang rulers' names. The order of 12
Chinese Horoscope animals was based on the number of toes/hooves,
alternating between even and odd numbers. Rat was the first because
unlike other animals of the Chinese Horoscope which all had the same
number of toes/hooves on each leg, rat has four toes on the front legs
and five on the rear legs, so it was selected to be number one. Ox is
second with four hooves on each leg, and tiger is the third three with
five toes, hare is the fourth with four toes, dragon is next in line
with five fingers on its claw, while snake ranks number six because it
lacked any legs and zero is an even number, etc.
The Zodiac, or the "twelve earthly branches" is probably devised
together with the ten heavenly stems. However, according to Derek
Walters, British scholar and author of several related books, there is
no historical evidence for the 12 animals correlation with the Earthly
Branches prior to the late Tang or early Song eras. Susan Whitfield
asserts that it was not until the Tang Dynasty that the 12 animal
cycle was imported along the Silk Road from Buddhist people in
Chinese Horoscope.[1]
As a duodecimal numeral system, the twelve earthly branches is
probably evidence for trade between early tribes that later
contributed to the Chinese civilization on the one hand, and the
Mesopotamian civilization, which perfected duodecimal arithmetics, on
the other.
The Chinese Horoscope, though not entirely identical with the Greek
zodiac, nonetheless shares with it the duodecimal system and the idea
of using animals as numerical symbols. This is a hint for the
triangular relations between early Chinese, Mesopotamian and Greek
cultures.
When the Bulgars, an early Turkic tribe within the Hun tribal
federation that invaded Europe at the end of the Roman Empire, brought
with them the very same Chinese Horoscope. This is a probability that
the Chinese Horoscope is of northern Chinese origin, commonly shared
among Altaic and northern Chinese tribes.
Currently, the Thai and Tibetans use the same zodiac with slight
modification, probably due to millennia of contact with the Chinese
civilization.
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