Garuda also appears in Japanese legendary art as gario, or binga, or bingacho, or karobinga, half woman, half bird, a sort of winged and feathered angel with a tail like a phenix and legs like a crane. This reminds us of the harpies of Greece. The Malays recognize the image, and when a cloud obscures the sun Perak men will say: “Gerda is spreading his wings to dry.”
The Chinese, and after them the Japanese, had a phenix-like bird in their mythical aviary, which persists in the faith of the more simple-minded of their peoples, and as a fruitful motive in the decorative art of each. It was one of the four supernatural creatures that in ancient Chinese philosophy symbolized the four quarters of the heavens. The Taoists, whose religious ideas are older than Confucianism and prevailed especially among the humble and unlearned, called it the Scarlet Bird, and associated it with the element Fire, and with their mystic number 7. Archaic pictures show a crested bird with long tail-feathers—a figure that might well be meant for a peacock. The creature itself is said not to have been seen by mortal eyes since the time of Confucius, but it has by no means been forgotten, for it is the fung-whang, or feng-huang (which is the names of the male and the female of the species conjoined); and it lives even now on embroidered screens and painted vases, or proudly distinguishes royal robes, from the Thibetan mountains to the Yellow Sea.
A recent writer on Eastern art[68] describes the proper fung as a gorgeously colored bird with a long tail. Its feathers are red, azure, yellow, white, and black, the five colors belonging to the five principal virtues; and the Chinese ideograms for uprightness, humanity, virtue, honesty, and sincerity, are impressed on various parts of its body. Its cries are symbolic, its appearance precedes the advent of virtuous rulers. As in the other cases this bird carries something away—this time an eminent philosopher, Baik-fu, was translated. In Japan the peasantry, at least, still hold to the reality of the same bird under the name ho-ho, and artists and symbolists have beautifully utilized the conception.[90] The belief is that the sun descends to earth from time to time in the form of the ho-ho, as a messenger of love, peace, and goodwill, and rests on one or another of the torii. It appears to have become a badge of imperial rank in China before the time of the Ming dynasty, and, in Japan it became the symbol of the empress, and in old times, as we are told, only empresses and royal princesses could have its likeness woven into their dress-goods.