The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[rikforto]

P.S. I can get into why this is wrong besides the obvious 360 degrees and evenly spaced meridians problem:

Yet the 15 or 30 "things" in the VMS Zodiac diagrams seem to be somehow associated to stars.  If that is the case, then the stars may have been a way to determine the current point in the current solar term.  That is, instead of the diagram telling the reader where to find the star okeedy, it may be  saying "when you see the star okeedy crossing your meridian at midnight, the Sun is 6/15 of the way into the 5th solar term".

But the short version is that at that time solar astronomy in time was much more exact than stellar astronomy in space, so there is a huge tradeoff if you try and force the sun onto the stars. Westerners made it because the sun and the stars interact in Western astrology, but they don't in Eastern astrology so there is no reason to posit they did. Before we argue too fiercely about that, though, we need to deal with the fact that China didn't have this kind of stellar astronomy to make the trade with