Rabbit In The Moon

The rabbit in the moon is a mythological character/spiritual creature from Chinese religions. When people look up to the moon, some of them see images. In America we are taught that there is a man on the moon, as we can see a man's face in the moon. But for East Asian cultures, they're taught that there is a rabbit in the moon, pulverizing something with a handled object. In China they teach that medicine is being pulverized. In Japan they teach that it's making mochi. 
== History ==
In the Questions To Heaven (Tianwen) by Qu Yuan (written sometime before 220 BC) he writes in song/poetic form questions about the truth of mythology. Like a child of today before they're taught science, he asks how he knows various mythologic aspects of buildings, places, and people can be true and how they came to form. In it he mentions the Gùtù (顧兎) which, depending on the translation as I don't speak Chinese, was either created in the stomach of the moon or just lived in it.Heavenly Questions: An Ancient Chinese Epic with a Hybrid of Questions about the Riddles and Enigma Concerning the Universe, Genesis, Nature, and the Rise and Fall of Dynasties by Hong Yuan The word Gùtù means something like "leporid turning around" or "rabbit paying attention" or "rabbit attending to something" from what I can tell.https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A1%A7#Chinese https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%85%8E#Chinese The book calls it a mutant tiger-rabbit-toad. This source says that it is a rabbit created by the yin essence within the moon's belly.https://cidian.qianp.com/ci/%E9%A1%BE%E5%85%94 It also gives it an alternative spelling, 顾菟. Going through wiktionary's translation line, the first character is either the same meaning as the last one or can mean "quiet" instead. The latter character is used in a name for a sea anemone, a dodder seed, or an old word and now unused word for tiger (wūtú), which was mentioned by the book. Thus there's some connection between a tiger in the moon and a rabbit in the moon, but I'm not sure if it was a similar name by coincidence, a pun, or the evolution of a mythological character from one idea to another.
== References ==
Category:Chinese folk religion
Category:Rabbits
Category:Hares
Category:Shintoism
Category:Lunar animals