Riding the wind of rebirth

Chapter 1786 Oracle Inscriptions and Celestial Phenomena

The earliest Chinese calendar can be traced back to the Yellow Emperor era, known as the Yellow Emperor Calendar.

According to legend, Huangdi ordered people to formulate a calendar after he defeated Chiyou and unified the world. The original calendar rules have been lost until now, but we can learn a little about it from some ancient books. The Huangdi Calendar is a yin-yang calendar. The year begins in the month of Jianzi, when the handle of the Big Dipper points to the Zi position, and includes the month of the winter solstice.

Don't underestimate this simple sentence. It is called "observing the celestial phenomena and telling the time". Before the discovery of the star map and green pine dragon and tiger burial objects of the Erlitou culture, the Chinese believed that the starting point of "observing the celestial phenomena and telling the time" was the "Calendar of Emperor Huangdi".

The main achievement of the Yellow Emperor's calendar was the creation of ten heavenly stems and twelve earthly branches to express the yin and yang and the five elements, and to use leap months to determine the four seasons and the year. This practice laid the foundation for the traditional Chinese calendar and has been passed down to this day.

The calendar starts from the day when Huangdi ascended the throne, which is the root of "the first year and the first day of the new year". According to the coordination of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, a cycle of sixty years is called a Jiazi.

It is said that the day Huangdi ascended the throne, the above astronomical phenomena occurred at the same time, and that day happened to be the winter solstice and the first day of the new moon, so Huangdi made the calendar and used that day as the starting point of the Taoist calendar, namely: Jiazi year, Jiazi month, Jiazi day, Jiazi hour.

Because the early calendar was not accurate, it would lead to deviations. After Zhuanxu ascended to the throne, he carried out a large-scale revision of the Yellow Emperor's calendar, which was the Zhuanxu calendar.

The achievement of this calendar was the introduction of the leap year, which adopted the method of seven leap years in nineteen years. A tropical year was 365 and 1/4 days. This method of division was a type of "quarter calendar", which later had a profound impact on Chinese legislation.

A new and full moon is 29 499/940 days. October is the beginning of the year. The leap month is placed after September and is called the last September.

The Zhuanxu calendar was replaced by the Xia calendar during the Xia Dynasty, but it was restored in the Qin Dynasty. After Qin Shihuang unified the six kingdoms, it was re-issued and widely used, and then it continued until the early Western Han Dynasty.

In addition to the records in history books, the Zhuanxu calendar is also a calendar confirmed by archaeological relics. The Yinqueshan Han Dynasty bamboo slips record this calendar in detail.

Many years later, during the Xia Dynasty, the more advanced Xia calendar began to be implemented.

The achievement of the Xia calendar is the adoption of the "fixed new moon method" - taking the new moon day as the first day of each month, dividing the tropical year into 24 solar terms, and adding a leap month in the month without the middle solar term. This reflects both the impact of the sun's thermal force on the earth and the periodic changes of the resonance of the moon and the sun's tidal force on the earth, integrating the yin month and the yang year into one.

This achievement is also remarkable. Until now, all calendars in the world are basically either lunar or solar, and only the Chinese calendar is a perfect combination of the lunar and solar calendars. This is not only an achievement in astronomy, but also has influenced the philosophy and thinking of the Chinese people.

For example, the West prefers "dichotomy", "binary opposition", and "simple handling of complex problems"; while the Chinese are keen on "binary fusion", "contradiction transformation", and "complex handling of simple problems".

When it comes to judging which is better, the West will of course think that its own way is better, but the East will not think so. They will only believe that at different stages of the development of things, the two methods may always have their own advantages and disadvantages, and it only depends on which one is more suitable for current development.

This is actually a direct reflection of the thinking of "simple problems with complex processing".

Next is the Yin calendar, which is also a Yin-Yang calendar, but more detailed. Each year is divided into spring and autumn, with a long month of thirty days and a short month of twenty-nine days. The leap month is placed at the end of the year and is called the 'thirteenth month'.

In the Zhou Dynasty, the situation became more complicated. The Zhou calendar was not a Zhou Dynasty calendar in a pure sense. It was developed on the basis of the Sifen calendar and absorbed many of the achievements of the former. In addition to the different eras, it also had more sophisticated features.

However, the promotion of the Zhou calendar was not unified. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, different regions used the three calendars of Xia, Shang and Zhou, and each country had different choices. Therefore, if you want to have a deep understanding of the ancient books before the Qin Dynasty, you need to first understand the differences between the three calendars in order to grasp the timekeeping of the calendar system in the ancient books before the Qin Dynasty, which was not unified.

For example, "Spring and Autumn Annals" and "Mencius" mostly use the Zhou calendar; "Chu Ci" and "Lüshi Chunqiu" use the Xia calendar; "Book of Songs" depends on the specific poems. For example, "Xiaoya·April" uses the Xia calendar, and "Binfeng·July" uses both the Xia calendar and the Zhou calendar. In "Book of Songs", whenever "July" is mentioned, it must refer to the Xia calendar, and whenever there is "the first day" etc., it refers to the Zhou calendar.

The projects carried out before Zhouzhi originated from oracle bone inscriptions. Oracle bone inscriptions are of course from the Shang Dynasty, but the way of recording time on them is not entirely based on the Yin calendar. In other words, because the Shang Dynasty spanned a very long period of time, the calendar underwent a long period of development during this period. Therefore, the calendar chronology in oracle bone inscriptions from different periods of the Shang Dynasty is different.

Astronomical research in the early Shang Dynasty focused on observing and recording the laws of celestial motion. There was no clear calendar system at that time, but through continuous observation and practice, people gradually mastered the cycle of the new and full moons and the length of the solar year, and recorded and judged some important celestial phenomena.

The earliest calendar appeared in the early Shang Dynasty, called the "Jia Zi calendar", with the Jia Zi day, that is, the first day of the first lunar month, as the starting point of the calendar.

In the middle period around 1400 BC to 1200 BC, some relatively systematic calendar compilations began to appear, the most famous of which were the "Xundai Calendar" and the "Xia Calendar".

The Xundai calendar is based on a week of ten days, a month of three decades, and a year of thirty-six decades. The Xia calendar takes the summer solstice as the beginning of the year and the Lesser Heat day as the end of the year. The year is divided into twenty-four solar terms, which are used for agricultural production and sacrificial ceremonies.

In the late Shang Dynasty, the calendar was mainly based on the lunar month and the solar year, which was more accurate and more uniform. This shows that by the late Shang Dynasty, astronomical research had accumulated a considerable amount of observations and records of the sun, moon and stars, and gradually developed some divination and prediction techniques, laying the foundation for the later development of astronomy and divination.

At this time, some institutions specializing in astronomy and calendar research also emerged, such as the Imperial History Bureau and the Imperial Astronomical Bureau, completing the transformation from individuals such as wizards to institutional organizations.

This group of people who observed celestial phenomena and made records became a group in the Shang Dynasty. They were the historians called "Zhenren" in oracle bone studies.

They not only recorded some natural phenomena they observed, such as celestial phenomena and weather, but also recorded all the phenomena observed by others.

If we remove the superstitious elements from the oracle inscriptions, we can see the changes in the relevant natural phenomena at that time.

The first important type of observations are solar and lunar eclipses.

This was a major event that the ancients paid great attention to observing and recording. As early as the Xia Dynasty, there were historical records of solar eclipses.

In the Shang Dynasty, in addition to historians observing the sun and moon eclipses in the capital, any eclipses observed in other places were also reported to the king in a timely manner. For example, an oracle bone divination during the reign of Wu Yi read: "Guiyou divination: There will be an eclipse at dusk, only if? Guiyou divination: There will be an eclipse at dusk, not if."

Meaning: On the day of Guiyou, the question is: Is it auspicious or unlucky to see a solar eclipse at dusk?

A very interesting feature of this divination is that it was performed twice on the same day and was inscribed on oracle bones.

This may be a relatively long process, so this record is likely to be a record of a total solar eclipse, because a total solar eclipse is a relatively long process.

If we calculate all the time points of total solar eclipses that occurred in Yin in history into a timetable and combine it with the historical time period of Wu Yi's activities, we can roughly infer several key time points recorded in this divination text.