![]() ![]() 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." Both are homophones, i.e., they are pronounced the same way and the former may be preferred as the original and correct spelling. P'an-Gu is written in two ways: one means in literal translations, "basin ancient", the other "basin solid". 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-Gu: 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. The couple were named 'Pan' and 'Gou' in the Zhuang ethnic language, which stand for whetstone and gourd respectively.ġ9th-century comparative religion scholar Paul Carus writes: They chopped it and the pieces turned into large crowds of people, who began to reproduce again. The two got married afterwards, and a mass of flesh in the shape of a whetstone was born. Note that it is not actually a creation myth:Ī brother and his sister became the only survivors of the prehistoric Deluge by crouching in a gourd that floated on water. This is how Professor Qin Naichang ( 覃乃昌), head of the Guangxi Institute for Nationality Studies, reconstructs the true creation myth preceding the myth of Pangu. In their conversation, they discuss a "disconnection" between heaven and earth.ĭerk Bodde linked the myth to the ancestral mythologies of the Miao people and Yao people in southern China. King Mu's reign is much earlier and dates to about 1001 to 946 BC. In it, King Zhao of Chu asked Guanshefu ( 觀射父) a question: "What did the ancient classic "Zhou Shu (周書)" 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 (呂刑), who converses with King Mu of Zhou. He cites the story of Zhong ( 重) and Li ( 黎) in the "Chuyu (楚語)" section of the ancient classics Guoyu. Senior Scholar Wei Juxian states that the Pangu story is derived from stories during the Western Zhou Dynasty. The first is that the story is indigenous and was developed or transmitted through time to Xu Zheng. Three main elements describe the origin of the Pangu myth. In other versions of the story, his body turned into the mountains. His breath became the wind, mist and clouds his voice, thunder his left eye, the Sun his right eye, the Moon his head, the mountains and extremes of the world his blood, rivers his muscles, fertile land his facial hair, the stars and Milky Way his fur, bushes and forests his bones, valuable minerals his bone marrow, precious jewels his sweat, rain and the fleas on his fur carried by the wind became animals. Īfter the 18,000 years had elapsed, Pangu died. In others, Pangu separated heaven and earth, which were already yin and yang, with his axe. In some versions of the story, Pangu is aided in this task by the Four Holy Beasts (四靈獸), the Turtle, the Qilin, the Phoenix, and the Dragon. ![]() With each day, the sky grew ten feet (3 meters) higher, the earth ten feet thicker, and Pangu ten feet taller. To keep them separated, Pangu stood between them and pushed up the sky. Pangu began creating the world: he separated yin from yang with a swing of his giant axe, creating the earth (murky yin) and the sky (clear yang). Pangu is usually depicted as a primitive, hairy giant who has horns on his head. Pangu inside the cosmic egg symbolizes Taiji. Within it, the perfectly opposed principles of yin and yang became balanced and Pangu emerged (or woke up) from the egg. This primordial state coalesced into a cosmic egg for about 18,000 years. In the beginning, there was nothing and the universe was in a featureless, formless primordial state. However, his name was found in a tomb predating the Three Kingdoms period. The first writer to record the myth of Pangu was thought to be Xu Zheng during the Three Kingdoms period. ![]() Pangu ( Chinese: 盤古, PAN-koo) is a primordial being and creation figure in Chinese mythology who separated heaven and earth, and his body later became geographic features such as mountains and rivers. ![]()
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