A Chinese Epic

These cryptic verses which open the twenty-four hundred year old poem, "Heaven Questions," attest to the skepticism regarding myth that was already in evidence before the Han dynasty when Confucianism finally attained the status of state ideology. Confucius himself considered poetry crucial to the education of worthy men. But for him poetry was primarily a didactic tool of moral instruction, which unfortunately sometimes drained its images of their color. In like manner mythical elements were often allegorized, and literal significance was downplayed in favor of utility. By the time Confucianism was a dominant school of rational thought, "superstitions" were not legitimate subjects for intellectual discussion.

It is fortunate that thinkers who constituted other schools of philosophy, although oftentimes trained in the doctrines of Confucian propriety, were not averse to making reference to mythical tales when expounding their own unorthodox beliefs. By the eclectic Warring States period (403-249 BCE) even commentators on Confucian classics like the Yijing or Book of Changes were employing mythical and mystical explanations. It is in these diverse writings that many fragments of ancient Chinese myth are to be found.

Chinese mythology is surely one of the least familiar of the major world traditions. One reason for this unfamiliarity is the lack of a Chinese epic, a strange omission, especially when one considers that there is no shortage of epical heroes in the pre-classical tradition. Why the Chinese did not collect disparate threads of narrative and weave them into a national epic is a subject that others have discussed. My poem, "In a Calabash," is an attempt to address this literary and historical void.

I searched the corpus of pre-imperial myth for those fragments which pertain to origins, and then joined these elements into a narrative that describes the creation of the world. While a considerable amount of poetic license was employed in connecting heretofore unrelated myths, I adhered as faithfully as possible to the content and spirit of the relevant mythical tales. In no way is this poem a mere translation--the body of fragments I consulted would scarcely fill two or three pages of text. What follows then is a short discussion of those fragments utilized in my poem which have been called cosmogony and theogony.

Hundun

One of the most intriguing myths of the corpus relates the story of the sad demise of Hundun. The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi (370-301 BCE) records the earliest reference to this mythical being.¹

Zhuangzi uses this tale as a parable to illustrate the benefit of ridding the body of desires. The statement of a Daoist master earlier in the chapter could just as easily be applied to this passage: "I demonstrated to him how it was before first emerging from our Ancestor." Early commentators described Hundun as the primal Oneness which first divided into heaven, earth and the ten-thousand things. An even more terse account appears in chapter 42 of the Laozi: "Dao begat the one; one begat two; two begat three; three begat the ten-thousand things." What is perhaps most intriguing about this cosmogony is the fact that the world was not perceived as beginning in chaos. Hundun did not impose order upon the preexistent confusion and thus bring law into being. Hundun, or the Dao, was the pre-cosmic order.

A separate fragment that describes another faceless emperor is recorded in the Former Han dynasty (206 BCE-25 CE) Classic of Mountains and Seas.²

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Some scholars believe that the two passages merely assign different names and characteristics to the same figure. Emperor Jiang has been identified as Huangdi or the Yellow Emperor, since Heaven's Mount (also known as Mt. Kunlun) is located at the center of the earth and, according to some traditions, is the earthly residence of Huangdi. The yellow sack points both to the Yellow Emperor and Hundun. Hundun, also pronounced huntun (wonton in Cantonese), is an acoustic binome, or rhyming disyllabic word, signifying in ancient Chinese, "turbid-torrent" (somewhat like "topsy-turvy"). Both ideographs making up the term contain the "water" classifier, intensifying the idea of "swirling." If "water" is exchanged for the "food" classifier, the binome would then signify the meat-filled sack or dumpling familiar to diners in Chinese restaurants.

Pan Gu

The Hundun myth in its earliest form would probably not qualify as a recognizable cosmogony were it not for subsequent textual illumination. But there is another myth that has parallels in other parts of the world which received early attention from the Chinese. This is the tale of Pan Gu. Scholars believe the Pan Gu myth is not indigenous to China proper but originated in the Miao and Yao tribes of Burma and Yunnan province, China, where a Pan Wang, or King Pan, is still worshipped. During the Three Kingdoms period (220-265) the literatus, Xu Zheng, collected the legends of Pan Gu from these southern peoples and formulated the tale of creation as it existed in his day.³

Another piece of Xu Zheng's work which appears in the Song dynasty (960-1280) encyclopedia, Taiping Yulan, combines the two myths appearing above to form a narrative of successive states in the creation of the world.⁴

Fu Xi and Nü Wa

If a cosmogony was relatively late in developing, an intricate theogony, or more correctly, "anthropogony," was already in place by the Former Han dynasty. The fragments of myth that describe the sibling rulers Fu Xi and Nü Wa are relatively abundant in the classical corpus, as are pictorial representations of their intertwined half-dragon, half-human forms. The derivation of their names is unclear but in the case of Fu Xi seems to point to the "hunter" or the "cook."

The sister's name is the character for "woman," plus a second unique character containing the "woman" classifier in its ideographic make-up. If the "worm" classifier is substituted for this "woman" then the common word for "snail" results. Perhaps this is suggestive of the physical appearance of Nü Wa. The fact that the ideograph of her name is so predominantly feminine has prompted some scholars to speculate that remnants of her myth are evidence of an ancient matriarchal culture. Although Fu Xi is normally considered the first of the legendary rulers (reigned 2852-2737 BCE), some registers indicate that Nü Wa came before him.

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The second of the next two fragments utilizes a particularly Chinese version of the motif of virgin birth.⁵

Nü Wa is not mentioned here, but the aforementioned poem, "Heaven Questions," contains this cryptic reference.⁶

Since a later version of her myth describes how she created humans out of yellow clay, it is understandable why the ancient Chinese were curious as to how the creatrix herself was formed. Unfortunately there is no answer to this question.

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If the Yellow Emperor is interpreted as another name for Hundun, and if the two unknown beings--Shang Pian and Sang Lin--are understood as manifestations of Pan Gu, then this passage would appear to link the three creators. If this interpretation is correct, then the seventy transformations of Nü Wa (which are enigmatic in the tradition, but are thought to describe her creation of humans) are parallel to the nine transformations of Pan Gu as he created the world.

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This passage is useful in illustrating the early Chinese conception of the transformation of mental image into written symbol. First the physical object is observed, then a mental image or thought is formed, and finally a physical symbol is created to capture the meaning of the image. In other words, the symbol represents not the object but the thought. The eight symbols in question are graphic representations composed of three combinations of a solid and a broken line, which are traditionally thought to share a visual equivalence with the mental images they represent. Thus the trigram for water resembles the pictograph for stream, the assumption being that the trigrams preceded Chinese pictographs in time and thereby influenced their formation.

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According to legend it was seventeen centuries after Fu Xi when King Wen, founder of the great Zhou dynasty (1122-221 BCE), finally doubled the trigrams to form the sixty-four hexagrams of the Yijing. This period of time marks the origin and flowering of the great bronze culture of China. At the risk of euhemerizing the myth, we might imagine that the person of Fu Xi embodied the memory of a particular culture hero or clan leader with a dragon totem. His inventions may have enabled his tribe to progress at a rate that propelled it culturally far ahead of surrounding tribes, thus assuring immortality in the memories of his descendants.

Nü Wa may precede Fu Xi as the last matriarch; her institution of marriage would signal the beginning of patriarchy. A Later Han dynasty (25-221 CE) text describes the conditions of this primitive age.¹⁰

Certainly the legend of Fu Xi's miraculous birth would support this conclusion. Only his mother's name is known. But this speculation does not account for the supernatural aspects of their characters. The ancient Chinese have been accused of a kind of reverse-euhemerizing, turning their oldest deities into legendary rulers. Whether the human or the dragon, that is, the ruler or the god, came first is a question that cannot be answered.

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No similar images of Hundun exist in the religious or literary traditions, except for one exception. Some arrogant kings, to show their total defiance of heaven, were known to have filled a leather sack with blood to represent the deity, and then punctured it with arrows. Their end was never a peaceful one. If there was once a cult of Hundun, which is quite likely, then the physical attributes of its god were borrowed by the Daoists, whose primitive concepts might better be called Hundunism. Pan Gu, on the other hand, has been represented at least since medieval times as a stocky, bearded giant embracing the taijitu, or "symbol of the Great Ultimate" (the circular symbol of yin and yang). Sometimes an axe is grasped in one hand. He is clothed in foliage and looks distinctly barbaric.

In a Calabash

While it is safe to say that the three bodies of myth outlined above originated separately, perhaps as creation myths of different tribes or cultures, it may seem questionable to try to link them into one story. Still, if the priest or bard felt no need to formulate a Theogony or epic, at least the scholar-official sometimes felt compelled to consolidate the confused mass of legend into a recognizable "history." The fact that the Chinese themselves tried at times to attach disparate myths together in a linear progression justifies such an endeavour. In the absence of literary evidence of such an epic, I have taken the liberty of creating a Chinese pantheon with these three deities at the top.

After the spontaneous generation of Hun Dun (Hundun), the primal blob, and its transformation through Pon Ghu (Pan Gu) into heaven and earth, Shewah (Nü Wa) is born into paradise, having hatched from the primal egg. She marries her twin brother, Fuh He (Fu Xi), is seduced by the river god, Huh Boa (He Bo), has an affair with the sky god, Hoh Yih (Hou Yi), and then creates human beings before finally vanquishing the water demon, Gongong (Gong Gong), and repairing the devastated world for her human descendants. All characters in the poem are based on actual mythical figures, and the structure of the poem is based on the line texts of hexagrams 1 and 2 of the Book of Changes.

One final note. The calabash, or bottlegourd (hulu in Chinese), is an ancient and pervasive symbol in the Chinese tradition. Zhuangzi recounts the story of a man who could float across a river in a giant calabash. In Daoist iconography the bottlegourd (often seen hanging from his gnarled staff) is the immortal's receptacle for the elixir of long life. Its double-helix shape (reflected in the double-syllable rhyme of hulu) was probably an early representation of Hundun.

I dedicate "In a Calabash" to Wilson Harris, the novelist and professor who honed my meager talents, and the poet Gary Snyder, whose moral support guided me through the many years of the poem's gestation.

 

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