The hare in the Moon: from the Buddha to China's jade rabbit
The lunar hare in Asia and the Americas: the sacrifice of the Sasa Jataka, Chang'e's jade rabbit, Japanese mochi and the rabbit of the Aztecs.
Not everyone sees a man in the markings of the Moon. Across much of East Asia, in India and in Mesoamerica, the same arrangement of lunar maria was interpreted as a hare or a rabbit, with its long ears turned towards the edge of the disc. From this image various legends arose, sharing the idea that a small animal lives on the Moon, often as a reward for a virtue or as a witness to an event at the beginning of time.
The sacrifice of the hare
One of the oldest versions is found in the Buddhist tradition, in the Sasa Jataka, one of the tales of the Buddha's previous lives. A hare lives in the forest with other animals and resolves, on a day of religious observance, to offer something to anyone who begs for alms. When the god Sakka, that is, Indra, appears disguised as a hungry brahmin, the hare, having nothing else to give, throws itself into the fire to offer him its own body.
By a wonder, the fire does not burn it. Sakka reveals his identity and, so that the hare's virtue may be remembered for ever, draws its image on the Moon. In Sanskrit the Moon is also called sasin or sasanka, terms meaning «bearing the mark of the hare», confirming how ancient and widespread this reading of the lunar disc was. The tale enjoyed great success throughout Buddhist Asia, from Sri Lanka to Japan.
The jade rabbit
In China the lunar animal is the jade rabbit, Yutu, depicted pounding the elixir of immortality in a mortar. Its figure is linked to the myth of Chang'e, the woman who, according to tradition, drank the elixir and rose to the Moon, where she lives in a cold palace. One of the oldest images of the theme is the silk banner from the tomb at Mawangdui, of the second century BC, where the lunar crescent holds a toad and a small hare.
In Japan and Korea the lunar hare instead pounds glutinous rice to make traditional sweets, Japanese mochi and Korean tteok, and its image accompanies the autumn festivals devoted to moon-viewing. The link with the sky has reached all the way to space exploration: Yutu is the name of the Chinese rover that touched down on the lunar surface in December 2013 with the Chang'e 3 mission, followed in 2019 by Yutu-2 on the far side.
The rabbit of the Aztecs
In pre-Columbian America the same figure takes on a cosmic meaning. According to the account collected in the sixteenth century by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún in the Florentine Codex, at the beginning of the present age the gods gathered at Teotihuacan and two of them threw themselves into the fire to become the Sun and the Moon. Since the two shone with equal brightness, one of the gods hurled a rabbit at the Moon's face, dimming her splendour: since then its mark has remained on the disc.
In Europe the association between hare and Moon is less well documented in ancient sources, and many reconstructions linking it to supposed Germanic moon goddesses go back to nineteenth-century hypotheses lacking solid foundation. The hare nevertheless appears in European folklore as a nocturnal animal, linked to fertility and transformation, and in some traditions it was believed to be a shape taken by witches, a theme that brings it close to the lunar world.
The lunar hare shows how much the perception of the sky depends on culture. The same markings that in Europe became Cain or a gatherer of sticks took, in Asia and in Mexico, the form of a gentle animal, a symbol of sacrifice, immortality or cosmic balance. It is an example of how every civilisation has read its own story in the Moon.