The
viewpoint that China is strangely devoid of obvious myth has
characterized much of the academic Western view of early Chinese
religion for well over a century. Impressed by the I Ching and
the philosophy of Confucius, as well as the absence of the long
mythological narrative so characteristic of Classic civilizations
in the West, Western scholars quickly identified the brilliance
of the Chinese mind at creating succinct, abstract philosophy
and finding essential, pragmatic truths in the world about us.
Ubiquitous ancestor worship became the model for a tightly woven
system of ethics and morality that was devoid of easily identifiable
myth and it was applied both to the family, and the society
at large, in the hands of Confucius. Where were the Gods and Goddesses?
K'o
(1993) sees three reasons why there is a widespread impression
that China lacks a coherent mythology. 1) Historians cannot
find in Chinese history the incredible bards and poets who populated
most Western cultures and whose lives were devoted to the learning
and then retelling and/or performing epic myths at a high level
of literary modality. There are no counterparts in ancient Chinese
society to such Western figures as Homer or Taliesin. Written
Chinese myth is fragmented, truncated, condensed and appears
in comparatively late texts. 2) Pictographic in origin, early
Chinese script could not embrace the sophisticated metaphor
of myth and so mytho-poetics were ‘restricted’ to
an oral tradition. 3) Early Chinese scholars viewed myth through
a negative lens, particularly if they were Confucianists. Determined
to remain grounded in pragmatic reality, myths were viewed with
prejudice and often dismissed as fanciful tales of little value
unable to contain deep meaning. More often than not, myths
were converted into ‘history’
The
evidence of gods, narrative myth and, more specifically, the
Goddess herself is hard to find and is unlike the encyclopedic
data that exists in the West. “ ... (W)hy is there so
little myth in early Chinese texts ... ?” (Allen 1991:
ix) From the Neolithic until this century, the focus of Chinese
cult and ritual has been ancestor worship; people live on after
death and exercise power over the living. Deceased ancestors
need food and provisions. Throughout the Neolithic in China,
pottery vessels filled with grain were buried with the dead.
The extraordinary bronze vessels of the Shang Dynasty were filled
with food and buried in tombs. The elaborate and costly system
of oracle bone divination supported by the court was used to
determine the appropriate gifts to be made to the ancestors,
in order to avoid their curses and make use of their powers
to solve problems in this ‘world’. While none of
these premises is unknown in the West, the degree to which it
dominated Chinese ritual is unknown elsewhere and serves to
place Chinese mytho-poetics in a unique position. “Within
this system, the spirits were only important as they related
to the living; they had no life of their own after death. There
was no ‘other’, supernatural world of gods who were
different in kind from human beings and interacted with one
another” (Allen 1991: 19).
If
we restrict the investigation to the better known texts, it appears that the
Chinese mind never contacted a pantheon of deities, each with
complex lives, relationships and personal dramas. There could
be no equivalent to the Greek pantheon situated on Mt. Olympus,
the epic adventures of Odysseus or the great cycles of Celtic
myth. Furthermore, the endless fascinating dalliance of gods
with mortals, both within and without the bedchamber, so characteristic
of the West is nearly absent in China. There was no First Eon
in China when the gods inhabited the earth before they created
mortals. The Chinese deities of early and Classic texts appear
to be deceased mortals, ancestors who expanded their influence
to include those not related to them.
But if we dig deeper, we can find fragments of a mythopoetics in ancient China, gods, goddesses
and first causes. At least two different origin myths, each of which culture specific can be identified. We can find true mythology that predates the dominance of ancestor worship and Confucianism. Let us begin ...
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