West, a bearing of 270 degrees, is the quarter of sunset, and it carries in a great many traditions the associations of ending, of the dead, and of what lies beyond. In Egyptian religion the west is the land of the dead without qualification: the necropolis lies on the west bank of the Nile, the dead are called westerners, and Osiris bears the title Foremost of the Westerners; the goddess Amentet personifies the west.
Greek myth places the Hesperides and the isles of the blest in the far west, Celtic tradition places its otherworld islands there, and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism places Amitabha's western paradise, Sukhavati, in that quarter, which is why Pure Land practitioners face west. Chinese cosmology gives the west the metal phase, autumn, the White Tiger and the trigram Dui, and treats it as the quarter of harvest, gathering-in and, in the Han imagination, of the immortals of Kunlun.