The Scorching Sun (Vali)
Vali is the Bunun word for the sun and, in the tradition's best-known myth, names the searing celestial being at the centre of the sun-shooting story. In the first age there were two suns that shone by turns, leaving no night and parching the mountains; when a couple's infant, covered only by a withered leaf against the heat, was transformed into a lizard, the bereaved father took his eldest son to take revenge. They shot one sun in the eye, wounding and dimming it. The wounded sun is then transformed into the moon (buan), establishing the alternation of day and night. Vali thus stands at the boundary between a destructive cosmic force and the ordered, life-sustaining sky that follows its humbling; it is a mythic numen of the sun rather than an anthropomorphic deity.
Domains
- sun and daylight
- heat and drought
Powers
- to scorch the earth and crops with unending heat
Sources
- Yushan National Park Headquarters, National Park Service, Ministry of the Interior (Taiwan), 'Myth' (Bunun sun-shooting legend).
- H. Hong, 'Cultural Transmission of the Bunun People in Taiwan,' Encyclopedia 5, no. 4 (2025): article 209.