Pangu was the first living being and the creator of all in Chinese mythology.
The Pangu legend
In the beginning there was nothing in the universe except a formless chaos. However this chaos coalesced into a for 18,000 years. Within it, the perfectly opposed principles of Yin and Yang became balanced and Pangu emerged from the egg. Pangu is usually depicted as a primitive, hairy with horns on his head and clad in furs. Pangu set about the task of creating the world: he separated Yin from Yang with a swing of his giant axe, creating the Earth and the Sky . To keep them separated, Pangu stood between them and pushed up the Sky. This task took 18,000 years, with each day the sky grew ten feet higher, the Earth ten feet wider, and Pangu ten feet taller. In some versions of the story, Pangu is aided in this task by the four most prominent beasts, namely the Turtle, the Qilin, the , and the .
After the 18,000 years had elapsed, Pangu was laid to rest. His breath became the wind; his voice the thunder; left eye the sun and right eye the moon; his body became the mountains and extremes of the world; his blood formed rivers; his muscles the fertile lands; his facial hair the stars and milky way; his fur the bushes and forests; his bones the valuable minerals; his bone marrows sacred diamonds; his sweat fell as rain; and the fleas on his fur carried by the wind became the fish and animals throughout the land. Nugua the lady God than used the mud of the water bed to form out the shape of humans. These humans were very smart since they were individually crafted. Nugua than became bored of individually making every human so she started putting a rope in the water bed and than let the drops of mud coming down be new humans. These small drops became new humans not as smart as the previous.
The first writer to record the myth of Pangu was Xu Zheng during the Three Kingdoms period.
Source documents
*Xu Zheng , in the book "Three Five Historic Records" , is the first to mention Pangu in the story "Pangu Separates the Sky from the Earth".
*Ge Hong , in the book "Master of Preserving Simplicity Inner Writings" , describes Pangu .
*Ouyang Xun , in the book "Classified Anthology of Literary Works" , also refers to Pangu.
*Carus, Paul in the book "Chinese Astrology, Early Chinese Occultism" based on an earlier book by the same author "Chinese Thought", published in 1907.
Origin of this myth
Three main views emerge to describe the origin of the Pangu myth.
- The first is that the story is indigenous, and developed or was transmitted through time to Xu Zheng. The evidence for this is slender indeed. It can only be assumed from the following discussion:
:Senior Scholar Wei Juxian states that the Pangu story is derived from Western Zhou Dynasty stories 1000 years earlier. He cites the story of Zhong and Li in the "Chuyu" section of the ancient classics . In it, the King Zhao of asked Guanshefu a question: "What did ancient classic "Zhou Shu" mean by the sentence that Zhong and Li caused the heaven and earth to disconnect from each other?" The "Zhou Shu" sentence he refers to is about an earlier person, Luu Xing, who is having a conversation with the King Mu of Zhou . King Mu's reign is much earlier and dates to about 1001 to 946 BC. In their conversation, they discuss the "disconnection" between heaven and earth. - An indirect but possibly more substantive conclusion is that China is unique in not "creating" its creator. In this view, Xu Zheng perpetuates the Pangu myth from other cultural influences:
:Professor Qin Naichang, head of the Guangxi Institute for Nationality Studies proposes the myth originated in Laibin city, Guangxi, in the center of the Valley. He believes that there are older stories of Pangu from this region and that they originally involved two people. He suggests China has no myth about the creation of the universe and that the Chinese mythology of Pangu had came from , , or Babylon. Apparently, this story mingled in with the origin stories of other cultures, eventually changing into the later narrative more popular today.
:This is professor Qin's reconstruction of the true creation myth preceding the myth of Pangu. Note that it is not actually a creation myth:
::"A brother and his sister became the only survivors of the prehistoric Deluge by crouching in a gourd that floated on water. The two got married afterwards, and a mass of flesh in the shape of a whetstone was born. They chopped it and the pieces turned into large crowds of people, who began to reproduce again. The couple were named 'Pan' and 'Gou' in the Zhuang ethnic language, which stand for whetstone and gourd respectively." - From Paul Carus, Chinese Astrology, Early Chinese Occultism, 1974, from an earlier book by the same author, Chinese Thought, 1907, Chapter on “Chinese Occultism.” Note: in 1907 the Wade-Giles system of transliteration was used.
:“P’an-Ku: The basic idea of the yih philosophy was so convincing that it almost obliterated the Taoist cosmology of P’an-Ku who is said to have chiseled the world out of the rocks of eternity. Though the legend is not held in high honor by the literati, it contains some features of interest which have not as yet been pointed out and deserve at least an incidental comment.
:“P’an-Ku is written in two ways: one means in literal translations, “basin ancient”, the other “basin solid”. Both are homophones, i.e., they are pronounced the same way; and the former may be preferred as the original and correct spelling. Obviously the name means “aboriginal abyss,” or in the terser German, Urgrund, and we have reason to believe it to be a translation of the Babylonian Tiamat, “the Deep.”
:“The Chinese legend tells us that P’an-Ku’s bones changed to rocks; his flesh to earth; his marrow, teeth and nails to metals; his hair to herbs and trees; his veins to rivers; his breath to wind; and his four limbs became pillars marking the four corners of the world, -- which is a Chinese version not only of the Norse myth of the Giant Ymir, but also of the Babylonian story of Tiamat.
:“Illustrations of P’an-Ku represent him in the company of supernatural animals that symbolize old age or immortality, viz., the tortoise and the crane; sometimes also the dragon, the emblem of power, and the phenix, the emblem of bliss.
:“When the earth had thus been shaped from the body of P’an-Ku, we are told that three great rivers successively governed the world: first the celestial, then the terrestrial, and finally the human sovereign. They were followed by Yung-Ch’eng and Sui-Jen the later being the Chinese Prometheus, who brought the fire down from heaven and taught man its various uses.
:“The Prometheus myth is not indigenous to Greece, where it received the artistically classical form under which it is best known to us. The name, which by an ingenious afterthought is explained as “the fore thinker,” is originally the sanskrit pramantha and means “twirler” or “fire-stick,” being the rod of hard wood which produced fire by rapid rotation in a piece of soft wood.
:“We cannot deny that the myth must have been known also in Mesopotamia, the main center of civilization between India and Greece, and it becomes probable that the figure Sui-Jen has been derived from the same prototype as the Greek Prometheus.”
Other Chinese creation myths
This myth appears to have been preceded in ancient Chinese literature by the existence of Shangdi or Taiyi. Other Chinese myths, such as those of , or the Jade Emperor, try to explain how people were created; and do not necessarily represent "world creation" myths. It is important to note there are many variations of these myths.
Other Pangu myth
Pangu is also honored as the creator of the world in Buyei legend, but in addition, he is also honored as the ancestor of Buyei people. According to the Buyei legend, Pangu became an expert in rice farming after creating the world, and subsequently married the daughter of Dragon King, and that was the beginning of Buyei people. The daughter of Dragon King and Pangu had a son named Xinheng but later, the son disrespected his mother, and the angry mother returned to heaven and never came down, despite the repeated pleas of her husband and son. Pangu was forced to remarry and eventually died on the sixth day of the sixth month of the lunar calendar and Xinheng's nightmare had begun. The stepmother treated Xinheng badly and almost killed him, and the angry Xinheng threatened to destroy the rice harvest of his stepmother. Realizing her mistake, the stepmother made peace with Xinheng and since then, on every sixth day of the sixth month of the lunar calendar, they paid their respect to Pangu. The day became an important traditional Buyei holiday for ancestral worship. This legend of creation is one of the main characteristics that distinguishes Buyei from Zhuang.
Pangu worship
Pangu is worshipped at a number of shrines in contemporary China. However, most if not all of these are modern creations built since the 1970s. In these shrines, Pangu is usually depicted in stereotypical "caveman" regalia, with leopard-skin tunics and long hair. symbols, such as the , are associated with Pangu in these shrines.
No comments:
Post a Comment