As in most parts of the world, the moon has significant roles in the mythologies of Asia. In the Chinese creation myth (see Chinese Cosmogony) the eyes of the primal cosmic man are the sun and the moon. When the sun eye is open there is daytime, when the moon eye is open there is night. There is also a Chinese myth about the ten suns and twelve moons, the former inhabited by crows, one of the latter by a hart and a toad. The moons stand for the annual lunar cycles. The moons have a mother, Changyi, who regularly bathes her children in a sacred lake in the west. The famous archer Yi (see Yi), who destroys nine of the ten suns to save the world, takes possession of the drink of immortality, which is then stolen from him by his wife Henge who, having run to the moon, becomes the lunar toad. In this connection, it is of interest to note that in Indian mythology, where soma (see Soma) is the ambrosial source of immortality for the gods or the means of communication with them, the moon is also its storage place and is sometimes personified as the god Soma. A Daoist (see Daoism) tradition in China holds that the source of immortality, or at least long life, is the cinnamon tree in the moon, a tree that no amount of chopping can fell. Finally, in China, the moon and the sun are representative of the perfect yin and the perfect yang in the well-known yinyang symbol (see Yinyang).
A similar yinyang association of the sun, the moon, and other elements occurs in the Indonesian Moluccas, where the wholeness or unity of the Absolute divinity is based on the coming together of the opposite but complementary Father Sun and Mother Moon. But as in the Chinese yinyang system, there is maleness in the moon and femaleness in the sun as well. Thus the moon is female in its waning and male in its waxing.
In Korea, as in China, there is a mythological archer who shoots down unwanted heavenly bodies—in this case, one sun and one moon (see Korean Mythology).
As in most of the world, Asian moons are usually predomi nantly female, but in Vedic (see Vedic entries) India the moon is male when personified. There are myths in which this male moon marries the daughter of the sun. In Cambodia, there are stories of marriages between lunar and solar deities. The Khmer believed that the moon protects humans by at least dimly lighting up the night world by riding a silver chariot each night across the sky.
