Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [178]
The most influential of China’s Creation stories describes the universe simply coming into being from a cloud of vapor that is suspended in darkness. Out of this primordial chaos come the two essential forces, yin and yang. Dual opposites—stuck together like cosmic peanut butter and jelly—these forces profoundly affected Chinese culture and society, especially in the philosophic system that later emerged, called Taoism.
Often represented by a circle with dark and light areas, yin and yang exist in a delicate balance and underlie the entire Chinese universe. While yin is associated with the qualities of the “feminine”—cold, heaviness, darkness, and earth, yang is linked with the “masculine” qualities—warmth, light, brightness, heaven, and the sun. The interaction of these opposites is believed to have created a major portion of the universe, the seasons, and the natural world. Yin gave birth to water and the moon; yang gave birth to fire and the sun.
As historian Alasdair Clayre writes in The Heart of the Dragon, “Thinking in yinyang terms means analyzing the universe into pairs of fluidly netting opposites, such as shadowed and bright, decaying and growing, moonlit and sunlit, cold and hot, earthly and heavenly or female and male…. Men and women are not seen as exclusively yangor yin: each has only a predominance of the one aspect or the other…. The relation of the two elements of a yinyang pair is not a static one, but is thought of as a continuous cycle in which each tends to become dominant and responsive in turn.”
The Creation is described in several other stories that were well known to the ancient Chinese. Two of most popular involve a pair of China’s most important gods, Panku (Pan Gu, P’an Ku), a gigantic primeval deity described as the child of yin and yang, and Nü Gua (also Nü Kua, Nu Wa), a popular deity known as “gourd woman” or “woman Gua.” The latter name refers to snail-like creatures that lose their shells and symbolize regeneration.
In the Creation myth of Panku, whose story became the widely accepted Chinese Creation myth by the third century Common Era, the world is an enormous egg filled with chaos, in which the giant Panku has been sleeping for 18,000 years. When Panku—whose name is translated as “coiled antiquity”—grows large enough to crack the egg, its clear, translucent fluid (the ethereal yang matter) oozes out and floats up and becomes the heavens. The yolk and heavy (yin) parts drip down to become the earth. Afraid that sky and earth might converge, Panku pushes the sky up with his head and the earth down with his feet. Like the Greek Atlas, he remains that way for another 18,000 years, until he realizes that the sky is high enough and won’t fall. Exhausted by his efforts, Panku lies down to rest and dies in his sleep. As he is dying, his breath becomes the wind and the clouds, his voice the thunder. One of his eyes becomes the sun and the other the moon. His limbs become mountains and his veins turn into the roads. No part of his giant body goes unused in the creation of the world. In later versions of the story, even the flies, fleas, and other parasites on his body are transformed into the ancestors of man.
Prefer a Creation story that is a little more “dirty”? The chaste Chinese don’t have a very sexy Creation tale, but there is one that involves playing in the mud.
Try a very old tale featuring Nü Gua, the fertility deity and mother of Creation, who is lonely after the world has come into being. Scooping up some wet clay from the bank of the Yellow River, Nü Gua presses it into tiny figures and impregnates each one with the force of yin or yang, so the figures come to life. Those who receive yang become men, and those who receive yin become women. When Nü Gua tires of molding the figures one by one, she spins clay off the end of a rope, or vine, that she has dragged in furrows across the muddy ground. The misshapen figures that come from the gobs of falling mud become humans born into poverty, while the handsome figures, molded by the goddess’s hand from the clay of the Yellow