Japanese Fortune Calendar
Описание книги
This guide to the Japanese zodiac gives a complete explanation of all 12 animal years.Like people of the West, Eastern people have a zodiac. Unlike that of the West, however, the Eastern system has a cycle of twelve years instead of months. Each year of the cycle has its own particular animal symbol whose roots of meaning, origin, and influence stretch back to ancient India and China.One of the traditional Japanese stories pertaining to this zodiacal system and how it started runs as follows. On a certain New Year's Day, ages ago, Buddha called all the animals of the world to him. He promised that those who came to pay him homage would receive a gift for their fealty. As a mark of honor, they would be given a year which would thereafter be named for them. Of all the animals in the world, only these twelve came, and they came in this order: the rat and the ox, the tiger and the rabbit, the dragon, the snake, and the horse, the sheep and the monkey, the rooster, the dog, and the boar.
Отрывок из книги
LIKE people of the West, Eastern people have a zodiac. Unlike that of the West, however, the Eastern system has a cycle of twelve years instead of months. Each year of the cycle has its own particular animal symbol whose roots of meaning, origin, and influence stretch back to ancient India and China.
When each animal received its year, each contributed its characteristic traits to that year, making the year distinctly its own. According to Japanese belief, people born in one of the cycle's years will have those characteristic traits peculiar to the year's animal.
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Serving as a guide, the end pages of this book have six cycles of the Japanese Fortune Calendar dating from 1900 to 1971. The animal years are in their proper sequence, and the standard calendar years on which they fall are listed. To discover your animal year, count backward from this present year in reverse order of the animal-year sequence, to the year of your birth. If you were born in 1928, for example, and this is 1965, the year of the snake, you would count: snake, dragon, rabbit, tiger, ox, rat, boar, etc., etc. backward until you reached your birth year, which would be the year of the dragon.
Coincidentally and conveniently enough, the 1900's started with the year of the rat. If you wish to count forward from the year 1900 to your birth year, you may find it easier. The Japanese find it easier for them to count from the present year back.
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