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The Duty of the Son of Heaven: Orientation
 There is good reason why the human race has been searching the skies for so long. For astronomy has given us the ideas of space and time.It is hard for us to sense what it must have been like for human beings to live upon an unknown Earth, knowing only that endless expanses opened out in all directions. For them there were landmarks only in the immediate neighborhood.
The world into which each person was born seemed limited by the horizon. "as far as the eye could reach," but the horizon always moved along from one place to the next. The ultimate boundary discovered by the boldest travelers was the ocean, but it too stretched on into infinity. Real stability seemed to exist; in the firmament. The sky appeared to revolve constantly, but its lights again and again returned along the selfsame tracks. The Sun, Moon, and stars alone enabled men to find their way about their world; these alone made possible orientation upon Earth.
"Orientation" originally meant directing oneself toward the east, toward the rising Sun. Direction, in fact, exists only in relationship to the sky; on Earth, all directions were blurred.
At first only east and west were taken into consideration these being the directions of the rising and setting of heavenly bodies. The concept of north grew out of a fairly difficult observation: that not all stars rose and set. Certain of them seemed to turn in a circle in a particular region of the sky.
The most noticeable of these were seven bright stars' arranged in a curious way. Like seven oxen tramping around a threshing-floor, these stars paraded in a circle every night.
The Romans called this constellation the Seven Oxen, and identified the point around which they revolved, the north.
The Greeks saw the constellation as a bear-hence the Arctic, the land of bears, came to mean the north. Many other ancient peoples, however, spoke of the Great Wain or Wagon whose path guided them easily and safely toward the north.
This nocturnal signpost was held in special reverence by the Chinese, who have always laid great stress upon the four quarters of the sky. They assigned a center to them: the polestar in the heavens; China herself was the center on Earth-the "Middle Kingdom," around which they conceived a square world. Out of this image sprang a comprehensive world-view, a pattern for all the basic ideas of Chinese thinking.
The Chinese established a system of references to the four cardinal points and their center for such varied matters as the constellations and the planets, the seasons and the time of day, the elements of matter, the fundamental properties of things, the principal species of animals and plants, the important internal organs of human beings, the chief processes of psychic life, and the major epochs of history under their legendary emperors.
The Sun and the Moon were assigned a special position as the masculine and feminine principles, Yang and Yin. These two could be combined with any single concept within the all-embracing intellectual scheme.
Orientation by the cardinal points was a political problem of the utmost importance. The exact position of the heavenly pole had to be determined for each city. Every temple, every building, every grave had to be aligned with absolute precision in a north-south direction. The emperor's throne, the seat of the master of a house, and the front door of every house, must face strictly to the south. Consequently, Chinese astronomers enjoyed a great prestige. Teachers and scholars par excellence, they chose the right places and the right times for all activities, from battles to hunts, sowing of seed, baths, and even the sweeping of the house. In short, they regulated the entire business of living.
The north-south direction for government buildings was set by the emperor himself, in an involved ceremony. As the Son of Heaven he offered the annual sacrifice at the time of the winter solstice. This rite, performed in the geometrically laid-out temple area on the round hill near Peking, was the most important religious act of the year in ancient China.
The sky had a soul-tablet just like a deceased emperor; Sun, Moon, the five planets, and the constellations-the Great Bear being specially distinguished-likewise were provided with soul-tablets. Mandarins sacrificed before these tablets. Thus there evolved, out of the human need for "orientation," a pure religion of the heavens. Upon this religion a superficial veneer of Buddhism was later set.
During the millennium before Christ, Chinese civilization was based exclusively and thoroughly upon astronomy. The prerequisites for such a development existed also in Egypt.
There the art of orientation reached possibly a higher pitch of perfection than in China. The five-thousand-year-old Pyramid of Cheops deviates only by a few minutes of a degree from the cardinal points. The steep entrance shaft is a "telescope" which pointed directly at the celestial pole.
The Pharaoh called himself Son of the Sun. Like the Chinese Son of Heaven, he established the directions for temples and even made the astronomical measurements with his own hand: "I grasp the stake, seize the handle of the mallet, and hold the string together with the Goddess of Wisdom. I turn my countenance toward the course of the stars. I fix my eyes upon the Great Wagon and stake out the corners of the temple." But the Egyptians were much too attached to their native beast-headed gods to espouse a religion of the sky. It took the priests of their central shrine, Heliopolis, a long time to establish the doctrine that all local divinities represented mere forms of the sun-gad Ra. When, in the New Kingdom, Pharaoh Ikhnaton attempted to impose an abstract worship of the Sun upon the people, he failed utterly. The Egyptians were far more traditional and earthbound than the intellectual Chinese.
No doubt Ikhnaton's famous hymn to the Sun was, for all the reverential spirit it expressed, a purely personal and romantic poem. The Son of Heaven in the Far East would never have addressed the supreme star in such intimate language:
Thou shiniest so beautifully on the horizon of heaven,
Thou living Sun, who created life.
Thou standest on the eastern horizon
And hast filled all lands with thy splendor.
Thy rays embrace the lands to the very end
Of all thy Creation.
Thou makest the lands subject to thy beloved Son,
Pharaoh lkhnaton . . . .
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