The Jade Rabbit (玉兔): What the Moon Rabbit Is Actually Pounding

Everybody can see the rabbit. That is the first remarkable thing about it. Across an enormous stretch of the world, from Beijing to Kyoto to Seoul and, quite independently, across Mesoamerica, people have looked up at the same gray blotches on the same satellite and agreed that what they are looking at is a hare. Not a face. Not a woman. A hare, in profile, with its ears back.

And in the Chinese version the hare is holding a pestle, and it is working.

So here is the question nobody thinks to ask, which turns out to have an answer, and the answer turns out to be strange. What is in the mortar?

Two rovers are named after it

Start with the modern end, because the modern end is spectacular.

When China went to the moon it named the spacecraft after the goddess and the rovers after her rabbit. The first, Yutu, was named by a worldwide public poll and set down on the surface on 14 December 2013. It seized up in its first lunar night, could no longer move, and then simply refused to die: it kept returning data for 972 days, more than ten times its design life, from a spot it could not leave.

Its successor did better. Yutu-2 rode down with Chang'e 4 and on 3 January 2019 became the first machine ever to land softly on the far side of the moon, the side nobody on earth has ever seen with their own eyes. It is still the longest-working lunar rover in history, by a margin that keeps growing.

Consider what that means. An animal whose entire mythological job description is grinding out the medicine that stops things dying was put on the moon by engineers, and then outlived its own life expectancy by years. Twice.

Lord Rabbit of Beijing

Meanwhile, back on earth, the rabbit has a second career as a small clay man.

The earliest description of him comes from a Ming writer, Ji Kun, active around 1636, in a collection with the marvelous title Surviving Drafts from the Pavilion of the Flower King. In the capital at Mid-Autumn, he writes, they mostly model rabbit shapes out of clay, robed and capped and squatting like a person, and the sons and daughters make offerings to it and bow.

That is Lord Rabbit. Two and a half centuries later the Records of the Seasons of the Capital catalogues the range on offer, and the range is glorious. Every Mid-Autumn, it says, the cleverer traders model toads and rabbits out of yellow clay and sell them. Some are robed and capped with a canopy raised over them. Some are in armor with a banner strapped to the back. Some ride a tiger. Some just sit there. The big ones are three feet high and the small ones a little over one.

So: a rabbit's head, with the cleft lip and the long ears, on a human body in painted parade armor, mounted on a tiger, being bowed to by children.

Then something happens that happens to a lot of gods. By the late Qing he is a toy. The bowing gets shorter, the playing gets longer, and a figure people once made offerings to is what you buy a child at the festival market. He is now on China's national register of intangible cultural heritage, listed under Beijing painted clay sculpture, which is the modern way of saying we noticed we were about to lose him.

There is a Beijing joke that survives the demotion. Lord Rabbit is addressed with enormous formality, grandfather, sir, and he is about six inches tall and made of mud.

What the mortar is for

Now the old texts, and the good part.

By the Jin dynasty the question had already been asked and answered in four words. The poet Fu Xuan wrote a set of verses imitating Qu Yuan's Heavenly Questions, and one of them runs: what is there in the moon? A white rabbit pounding medicine. Question, answer, done. Everyone already knew.

But the fullest early account is older and much odder, and it is not a myth at all. It is a piece of court flattery. The Dong Tao Xing is an anonymous Han song preserved in Guo Maoqian's great Anthology of Yuefu Poetry, and if you read only the famous line out of it you get a rabbit pounding medicine. If you read the whole thing you get a supply chain.

It opens with a man climbing a mountain toward the five sacred peaks, where the palaces are made of gold and the magic herbs grow. He arrives at the gate of the Jade Hall and does not have the heart to turn back. A herald comes out. What does the man outside want? And he answers: I want to follow the holy way and beg one thing, that my life be extended.

Then comes the fourth stanza, and this is the passage that ought to be famous:

Orders went down to the officers, and they gathered the divine herb from the branch tip of the Ruo tree. The white rabbit kneels and pounds the toad pills. They are presented to His Majesty on a jade dish, and whoever takes this medicine may become an immortal.

Read that again slowly, because four things in it are not in any children's book.

The rabbit kneels. Not sits, not hops, not perches decoratively on a moon: it kneels, in the posture a subordinate takes in front of a throne. It is one link in a chain of command that starts with a petition and ends with a delivery. The medicine is going downward, to a named recipient, and the recipient is not the goddess and not the Queen Mother of the West but His Majesty, the living emperor. And the last stanza confirms it, dissolving into pure court chorus: long life and old age to Your Majesty, on all four sides they bow their heads, may Your Majesty be kept as long as heaven itself.

This is a Han emperor's immortality program, sung. The rabbit is not a pet, a mascot or a symbol of anything. It is the night shift at the imperial pharmacy.

And the shift never ends, which is the part the poets seized on. Li Bai, raising a cup to the moon and asking it questions on a friend's behalf, gets to the fifth couplet and puts the two residents side by side: the white rabbit pounds its medicine, autumn and then spring again, and Heng'e sits up there alone, so who exactly is her neighbor? It is a small, sly line. The rabbit is right there, has been right there the entire poem, and is such a fixture that Li Bai can use it as the setup for a joke about loneliness. He also calls her Heng'e rather than Chang'e, using her older name, which she lost to an emperor's naming taboo.

The toad pills

One phrase in that stanza deserves a flag rather than a flourish.

The thing the rabbit is pounding is called, in the original, toad pills. And the oldest surviving version of what happened to Chang'e, the woman who stole the drug and fled to the moon, ends with her arriving there and turning into a toad. That is not a legend I am reaching for; it is on her own page, and it is in the sources.

So the literal reading of the Han text is available and it is horrible: the rabbit is grinding up the neighbor.

The sober reading is almost certainly the right one. Toad pill is very likely just a drug name, of the same species as the tiger balm on a pharmacy shelf, and Chinese pharmacy really did use toad secretions. Han carving and Tang mirrors show the rabbit and the toad pounding side by side, colleagues rather than one being the ingredient. But the phrase sits there in the earliest full description of the most famous rabbit in Asia, and the coincidence is the sort of thing a text throws up when it is old enough not to have been tidied.

The origin story is Indian

Now the correction, and it is a big one.

Ask an English speaker where the jade rabbit came from and you will very often get this: three animals, a monkey, a fox and a rabbit, meet a starving old man. The monkey brings fruit, the fox brings fish, the rabbit has nothing, so it builds a fire and throws itself in. The old man reveals himself as the Jade Emperor and sets the rabbit's image on the moon in honor of the sacrifice.

That is a real story, beautifully told, and it is not Chinese. It is the Sasa Jataka, the birth story of the wise hare, number 316 in the Pali collection, in which the Bodhisattva is born as a hare with an otter, a jackal and a monkey for friends. The hare, having nothing but its own body to offer, shakes itself three times first so that any insects in its fur will not burn with it, and leaps into the coals. The fire does not warm it. The brahmin is Sakka, king of the gods, who has come to test him, and Sakka squeezes a mountain and paints the sign of a hare on the disc of the moon with the essence of it.

Swap Sakka for the Jade Emperor and the otter and jackal for a fox, and you have the version circulating in English.

Here is the ordering problem. The Chinese rabbit is on the moon in Han poetry and Han tomb art, pounding away, centuries before that story could plausibly have been naturalized in China. The Chinese rabbit therefore did not come from the fire. It has no origin story at all in the early record, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a mythological figure and much more interesting than the tidy version. It simply is there. Nobody asks how, in the same way nobody asks how the moon got there.

Both stories are now part of the tradition and there is no need to pick between them. But the self-sacrifice story explains the Buddhist hare, and the mortar explains the Chinese one, and they are answers to different questions.

Everyone's moon has a rabbit, and they are all making something different

Japan's swap is the one people notice, and it is a good-natured piece of cultural translation: the pharmacist becomes a cook, and the moon's most famous resident spends eternity making a snack. Korea has the rabbit too. So, entirely separately, does Mesoamerica, which never spoke to any of them and looked at the same blotches and saw the same animal.

Why a rabbit at all

Because of what the moon does.

The moon is the only thing in the sky that visibly dies and comes back, every month, without fail, and any culture watching it closely will eventually want an animal that behaves the same way. The toad qualified first, being a creature that vanishes into the mud and returns. But rabbits do something even more to the point: they are the standing symbol of a population that cannot be killed off, because there are always more of them by next season.

Put an animal like that on an object like that and give it a mortar, and you have compressed the entire human argument about death into one small white figure grinding away at something it never finishes. She left her whole life behind to get up there. The archer she left never got any of the medicine at all. The rabbit just keeps working, and, if you would like to know whether you were born in one of its years, the answer is a scroll away.