Deities

Hou Yi
(后羿)

The archer who shot nine suns out of the sky to save the world, and lost his wife to the elixir he was supposed to drink first.

Jackie Vs. AI

Hou Yi is the Chinese archer-hero of the Ten Suns myth, the figure who saved the earth from incineration when the ten sun-birds of Emperor Jun all rose at once and burned the crops to ash. He drew his bow and shot down nine of them, leaving the single sun that still rises today. As reward, the Queen Mother of the West gave him an elixir of immortality. He gave it to Chang'e to hold for him. She drank it. He stayed mortal, alone, with a bow and a story.

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

Hou Yi appears in Jackie as a name on a wall. The Council of Eight Immortals' dining hall in Chapter 6 has a long mural — Tang-style, the kind with names painted in vermilion beneath each figure — and Hou Yi is on it, near the edge, holding a bow that points away from the table. He Xian'gu notices Jackie noticing. "He is not on the Council," she says. "He never wanted to be. The man who saves the world by shooting it usually does not want to keep being asked." The line reads as an aside. It is, structurally, the Council telling Jackie what is being asked of him.

Later in the same chapter, when Lü Dongbin shows Jackie the four divine weapons he cannot yet hold, Jackie asks why archery isn't among them. Zhang Guolao answers: "Hou Yi's bow is in a museum in Taiwan. It is not in the rotation. The Lotus Prince is asked to do something different than save the world by removing nine of its ten suns. The Lotus Prince is asked to keep the one sun warm." Jackie does not understand the line until Chapter 18, in the Statue of Liberty torch.

Mythological Origin

The Hou Yi legend predates most of the Chinese mythological corpus that frames the Chronicles. The earliest references are in the Shanhaijing and the Huainanzi, both of which describe a sky with ten suns — the children of Emperor Jun and Xihe — that ordinarily took turns rising one at a time. When all ten rose together (the Huainanzi blames a breakdown in the celestial schedule), the world began to burn. Hou Yi, sometimes called Yi the Archer (羿), was sent down by Emperor Jun himself to discipline his own sons. He shot nine. The tenth survives as the sun that crosses the sky today.

The aftermath varies by source. In some, Hou Yi becomes a king and a tyrant and is murdered by his retainer Han Zhuo. In others, he loses Chang'e to the moon and lives out his life as a teacher of archery. The Chronicles use the second tradition: Hou Yi as the world's first hero who learned that the methodology rewards saviors with elixirs they can't share, and that the distance between heroism and isolation is the dose.

Key Ideas

The nine arrows. Hou Yi's act is one of the few in Chinese myth that is unambiguously good — and the universe still punishes him for it. The Chronicles treat this as the original data point in their thesis about methodologies that reward the right action with the wrong outcome.

The bow not in the rotation. Zhang Guolao's line in Ch6 — that Hou Yi's bow is in a museum, not in the Lotus Prince's kit — is a quiet definition of Jackie's assignment by what he is not being asked to do.

The husband who stayed. Every Chang'e story is also a Hou Yi story. The Chronicles refuse to let his grief disappear into her ascension.

Saving by removing. Hou Yi solves a sun problem by subtraction. The Lotus Prince, the Council suggests, will solve a voice problem by addition — by giving the family back the one voice that was theirs.

In the Lotus Prince Chronicles

Mythological Origin

Key Ideas

Related Entries

Further Reading