11.9 — China and Japan

Pangu and Nüwa

The Chinese creation stories are late as written texts and probably much older as traditions.

In the beginning, the universe was an egg containing chaos.

Inside it slept Pangu, who grew for eighteen thousand years, and then broke it. The light clear parts floated up and became the sky; the heavy turbid parts sank and became the earth.

And Pangu stood between them, pushing them apart, growing taller every day for another eighteen thousand years.

Then he died, and his body became the world. His breath the wind, his voice thunder, his eyes the sun and moon, his limbs the mountains, his blood the rivers, his hair the stars, and the creatures on his body became human beings.

The world made from a body again (11.5, 9.1).

And then Nüwa, a goddess with a serpent's lower body, who was lonely and made people out of yellow clay — shaping the first ones carefully by hand, and then, finding it slow, dipping a rope in the mud and flicking it, so that the drops became people too.

And the tradition says the hand-made ones became the nobility and the flicked ones the common people — a founding myth for social hierarchy, and it is worth noticing that the Chinese version, unlike the Purusha hymn (9.1), is openly about the maker getting tired.

Nüwa's greater deed: when a pillar of heaven was broken and the sky tilted and fire and flood came, she melted stones of five colours to patch the sky and cut the legs off a giant turtle to prop up its corners.

And she could not fix it completely. The sky still tilts, which is why the sun and moon move west and why the rivers of China run east. A repair that visibly did not fully work, and the world still shows it.

Yi and the ten suns

Ten suns lived in a mulberry tree and took turns crossing the sky, one per day.

One day all ten came out together and the earth began to burn.

The archer Yi shot down nine of them.

And he was given the elixir of immortality for it — enough for one person — and his wife Chang'e drank it, and floated up to the moon, where she lives alone.

She is still there, with a rabbit, and the Mid-Autumn Festival is for her.

Two things to notice. The problem was excess of a good thing — ten suns, not a monster. And the reward for saving the world produced a permanent separation.

The Monkey King

The most beloved figure in Chinese literature, from the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, which fictionalises the real seventh-century pilgrimage of the monk Xuanzang to India for Buddhist texts.

Sun Wukong is born from a stone egg on a mountain.

And what follows is a career of escalating outrage.

He becomes king of the monkeys. He learns magic, immortality, seventy-two transformations, and the ability to travel enormous distances in one leap.

He goes to the dragon king of the sea and takes a pillar as a weapon — an iron staff that changes size and can be shrunk to the size of a needle and kept behind his ear.

He goes to the underworld and crosses his own name out of the register of the dead, and the names of all the monkeys with him.

Heaven tries to co-opt him by giving him a job. He discovers it is a menial one — keeper of the horses — and revolts.

They give him a grander title, Great Sage Equal to Heaven, and no duties. He eats the peaches of immortality, drinks the elixir, and fights the entire celestial army to a standstill.

And finally the Buddha intervenes.

He bets Monkey that he cannot jump out of his palm.

Monkey leaps to the end of the universe, finds five pillars, urinates at the base of one and writes his name on it to prove he was there, and leaps back.

And the Buddha holds up his hand, and the writing is on his finger.

He is pinned under a mountain for five hundred years.

And then released, to escort the monk to India, wearing a golden band on his head that tightens when the monk recites a spell.

What it teaches

The most obvious reading is the Buddhist one the novel intends: an uncontrolled mind, enormously capable, which cannot be defeated and must be disciplined into service.

And the sharper observation is in the palm. Monkey genuinely made the leap. He genuinely reached the end. His achievement was real and it was contained the whole time, and he could not see the container from inside it.

Which is 10.3's cave, from a completely different tradition: real competence, exercised entirely inside a frame you cannot perceive.

And the novel does not despise him. He is the hero, he is funnier and more capable than anybody, and the reader is on his side the whole way.

Japan

Izanagi and Izanami

Two deities stand on the floating bridge of heaven and stir the sea with a jewelled spear, and the drops that fall from it form the first island.

They descend and marry, and produce the islands of Japan and many gods.

Then Izanami dies giving birth to fire.

And Izanagi goes to the underworld to bring her back.

She tells him to wait outside and not to look at her.

He waits, and grows impatient, and lights a comb as a torch, and looks.

She is rotting, and covered in maggots.

He runs, and she pursues him in fury, and he escapes and seals the entrance with a boulder.

And through it, she says: I will kill a thousand of your people every day.

And he says: then I will cause fifteen hundred to be born.

That is where death and birth come from.

The same story as Orpheus and Eurydice, and as several others across unconnected cultures: go to the land of the dead for somebody you love, be given one condition, break it, and lose them permanently. 11.1's rhyme, in its clearest single instance.

And the Japanese ending is different from the Greek one, and better. It does not end in loss; it ends in a negotiated rate. A thousand deaths and fifteen hundred births, daily, forever.

Amaterasu in the cave

Izanagi washes after escaping the underworld, and from his left eye comes Amaterasu, the sun goddess.

Her brother Susanoo, the storm god, behaves outrageously — destroying her rice fields and throwing a flayed horse through the roof of her weaving hall, killing one of her attendants.

And she withdraws into a cave and seals it.

The world goes dark. Crops fail. Evil spirits come out.

The gods try everything and she will not come out.

So they hold a party outside the cave.

They hang a mirror and jewels on a tree, and the goddess Ame-no-Uzume dances, wildly and comically, and the assembled gods roar with laughter.

And Amaterasu, inside, cannot bear not knowing what is funny.

She opens the door a crack and asks why they are celebrating when the world is dark.

They tell her they have found a better goddess, and show her the mirror.

She leans out to look at the shining figure, and a strong god takes her arm and pulls her out, and a rope is stretched across the entrance behind her.

What that one teaches

And it is one of the best psychological observations in this Part.

The gods could not reason her out and could not force the door.

What worked was making the outside more interesting than the inside, and specifically making her curious.

Which is the actual mechanism for a person who has withdrawn. Argument does not work. Pleading does not work. Telling them the world needs them does not work. What works is that life outside continues audibly, and is not miserable, and at some point they want to know what is going on.

And the mirror. What draws her out is seeing herself, and being told it is somebody better.

What to carry from this page

The problem is sometimes an excess of a good thing. Ten suns.

The repair does not fully work and the world still tilts. Nüwa patched the sky and the rivers still run east.

You may be making a genuine leap entirely inside a palm you cannot see.

And when somebody has shut themselves in, do not argue at the door. Make the outside audible, and interesting, and let curiosity do the work.

Next: 11.10 — Africa, and the figure who appears in every mythology on earth and is never quite on anybody's side.