Introduction: Why Should We Look Anew Upon "Rain Water"$1

Between Heaven and Earth, all things have their season. When we speak today of "Yushui" (Rain Water), we tend to treat it merely as an inconspicuous mark on the calendar—the second solar term after the Beginning of Spring, seemingly no more than a reminder that the skies are about to open. Yet such an understanding does a disservice to the millennia of labor our ancestors devoted to gazing upward at the heavens and downward at the earth. Yushui is by no means a simple weather forecast. It is the crystallization of the ancients' profound apprehension of the workings of the Way of Heaven, clear evidence of that ancient and subtle bond between humanity and nature, and, still more, a solemn tribute paid by Chinese civilization to water—that cosmic wellspring of all things.

Why revisit Yushui from the vantage point of the pre-Qin and high-antiquity world$2 Because that was the age in which this solar term was born, an age in which its meaning had not yet been buried beneath layer upon layer of later commentary and forgetting. In that age, the solar terms were not knowledge but survival; not concepts but faith; not cultural symbols but a real and solemn exchange between Heaven and humanity. A timely spring rain, to people today, may seem no more than an inconvenience requiring an umbrella—but to the ancients, it was Heaven's bestowal of grace, the Earth's answering response, and the very occasion of life itself: a matter of the gravest consequence, bearing on a year's harvest or famine, on the survival or ruin of the entire clan.

The "Canon of Yao" in the Book of Documents (Shangshu) records: "He then charged Xi and He, in reverent accordance with august Heaven, to calculate and delineate the sun, moon, and stars, and respectfully to bestow the seasons upon the people." These few words exhaust the fundamental reason for the birth of the solar terms—"to respectfully bestow the seasons." The word "reverent" and the word "bestow" together lift astronomical observation to a height nearly religious. To observe Heaven was not to satisfy curiosity, but to be "reverent"—to hold the Way of Heaven in awe. To bestow the seasons was not merely a convenience for daily life, but to "bestow"—to transmit Heaven's will down into the human realm. And among the Twenty-Four Solar Terms, none embodies this sense of "bestowal" more fully than Yushui. For rain is precisely Heaven's most direct "gift" to Earth, and to humankind. Rain falls from Heaven, water descends from above—this is in itself a gesture of "bestowal."

This very question touches the core of pre-Qin thought. To the ancients, time was not a uniformly flowing river, but possessed rhythm, cadence, and qualitative distinction. The season of winter differed from the season of spring; the moment of the Beginning of Spring differed, too, from the moment of Rain Water. What the Yushui solar term marks is an exceedingly subtle and profound transformation: the weather turns warm, ice and snow begin to melt, and water—which had been frozen fast between Heaven and Earth in the form of "snow"—now begins once more to flow, in the form of "rain." Water in its solid state becomes water in its liquid state; water that had slumbered becomes water that awakens. This is not merely a change of physical state, but a signal that the vital force of the cosmos has been switched on anew.

The Tuanzhuan (Commentary on the Judgments) to the Qian hexagram in the Book of Changes (Zhouyi) declares: "Clouds move and rain is bestowed, and the manifold things flow into form." Clouds move across the sky; rain falls to nourish the earth; and each of the ten thousand things takes on its own particular shape. These sixteen characters might almost have been written as a gloss tailored precisely to the solar term of Yushui. Why can the manifold things "flow into form"—flowing so as to accomplish each its own shape$3 Because there is "the bestowal of rain." Without the nourishment of rain water, seeds would not sprout, plants would not stir, and the earth would remain that silent, hardened, sealed-off world of winter. The moment Rain Water arrives, that gate of life between Heaven and Earth, which winter had frozen shut, is once again struck open.

This essay proceeds from the core thought of the pre-Qin Confucian and Daoist schools, and traces its inquiry back further still to more ancient myth and folk tradition, in order to offer as deep a reading as possible of the solar term "Rain Water." We wish not only to know what Rain Water is, but to ask why it is so; not only to understand what the ancients did during the season of Rain Water, but to grasp why they did it. We shall ask: Why did the ancients so exalt "water"$4 Why does Laozi say "the highest good is like water"$5 Why was the otter's laying out of fish read by the ancients as a form of "sacrifice"$6 Why was the wild goose's return northward regarded as a kind of "trustworthiness"$7 Why was rain repeatedly used as a metaphor for the sovereign's grace and virtue$8 In pursuing this chain of questions, we may perhaps once again touch that ancient world in which all things possessed spirit, Heaven and humanity resonated with one another, and the Way was contemplated through water.