A god in yellow armour stands on a cloud and tips his can, and the dry fields below turn green. The Chinese witness, a 1922 compilation of Chinese myth, sets among its ministry of thunder and storms one Yü Shih, "the Master of Rain," "clad in yellow scale-armour," who "from a watering-can pours rain upon the earth"; the compiler adds that "He is obviously the Parjanya of Vedism." The record's warmest scene, though, belongs to Ch'ih Sung-tzu, called up in "a terrible drought" in the reign of the ancient sovereign Shên Nung. "Nothing is easier," he says; he asks only for "a bottleful of water into an earthen bowl", plucks a branch from a mountain, "soaked it in the water, and with it sprinkled the earth" — and "Immediately clouds gathered and rain fell in torrents". A few flung drops become a flood: the sympathetic magic of like calling to like.

The compiler's own aside — that the rain-master is India's Parjanya, the personified rain-cloud — points straight to the second witness. In the Rigveda (Vedic hymns, c. 1500–1200 BCE; this translation 1889–1890), the hymn to Mitra and Varuna, "Guardians of Order," makes its plea outright — "We pray for rain" — and tells how the two lords work "by the Asura's magic power" — the might of an asura, a lordly divine being — to "cause Heaven to rain". The Maruts, the storm-winds, yoke their car; Parjanya sends out a mighty voice; and the rain streams down "with sweetness" from heaven. What the Chinese god does with bowl and branch, the Vedic verse does with named power and unbroken law — two shelves apart, the same conviction that weather can be commanded.

Does the sky answer the branch and the bowl, or only the god who holds them?