East Across the Traditions

East, a bearing of 90 degrees, is the quarter of sunrise, and it is the most consistently privileged direction across unrelated traditions for that reason. The sun does not rise due east except at the equinoxes, moving north in summer and south in winter, and many ancient monuments are aligned to a solstitial rather than an equinoctial sunrise.

Christian churches were built ad orientem, with the altar at the east end, from late antiquity onward, and the dead were buried facing east in expectation of the resurrection; the practice is not commanded in scripture and developed as custom. In Hindu Vastu the east belongs to Indra and is favourable for entrances and for the morning; in Chinese cosmology it is the wood phase, spring, the Azure Dragon and the trigram Zhen. Zoroastrian, Vedic and Roman practice all favour the east in different ways, and in each case the sun is the reason.