The rabbit people see in the Moon, from Buddhist fables to Chinese rovers
Look at the full Moon's dark patches and much of Asia sees a rabbit working a mortar and pestle. In China it grinds the elixir of life for the goddess Chang'e; in Japan and Korea it pounds rice cakes. Far across the Pacific, Aztec and Cree storytellers spotted a rabbit up there too.
The oldest Chinese mention comes from the Chu Ci, a Western Han collection of Warring States poetry, which places a toad and a hare on the Moon, the hare forever grinding herbs for the immortals. It really was a hare at first, because rabbits had not yet reached China. Han poets used phrases such as Jade Hare or Gold Hare as stand-ins for the Moon itself, and the Tang poet Li Bai wrote of the lunar rabbit mixing medicine to no purpose. From China the figure spread across Japan, Korea, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Myanmar.
A Buddhist version explains how the rabbit got there. In Jataka tale 316, a monkey, an otter, a jackal and a rabbit vow to perform charity on a full-moon day. When an old beggar appears, the others bring fruit, fish, a lizard and curds, but the rabbit, able to gather only grass, leaps into the man's cooking fire to offer itself. The flames leave it unharmed, the beggar turns out to be the god Śakra, and he draws the rabbit on the Moon, still wreathed in smoke. A Japanese retelling swaps in a fox as one companion.
Many autumn holidays grew around the legend, including China's Mid-Autumn Festival, Japan's Tsukimi, Korea's Chuseok and Vietnam's Tết Trung Thu, where the rabbit, the Moon Lady and a figure named Cuội come down to hand out lanterns and mooncakes to children. In the novel Journey to the West the Jade Rabbit even escapes to Earth disguised as a demoness before being taken home.
The Americas produced their own versions, likely from the same trick of seeing shapes in lunar shadows. In one Aztec tale a starving Quetzalcoatl is saved when a rabbit offers herself as food, so he sets her image on the Moon. A Cree legend says a crane carried a rabbit there, stretching its legs long and gaining a red head patch from the rabbit's paw. China named its lunar rover Yutu after the Jade Rabbit; it landed on December 14, 2013, and Yutu-2 reached the far side on January 3, 2019.
Source: Moon rabbit
