A Basic Introduction to Chinese Mythology and Folklore
This article is intended as a basic introduction to some of the most important concepts of Chinese mythology and folklore. By “Chinese”, I mean Ancient China, for my area of expertise stops after the uprising of 1911, which overthrew the long-standing Empire.
But, even with this limitation, “Ancient China” covers vast areas of both time and space: the last significant unification of the Chinese Empire took place in 214 BC; and China itself is vast enough to be a continent: even the reduced territory it occupied during most of its history covers more than half the surface of Europe. This vast country was far from uniform in its beliefs, and to cover it in detail would require one if not several bookshelves. I will focus here on the dominant, Han culture which flourished near the capital and not on that of the several minorities which peopled Ancient China.
The three sections of this article correspond to the three belief systems that cohabited in Ancient China: Confucianism, Daoism (Taoism), and Buddhism. To a certain extent, this is an artificial distinction, since many elements of the folklore pertain to several traditions at once. Nevertheless, I have chosen to retain that distinction for ease of reading.
Confucianism
Confucianism is often referred to as the state religion, a term that is misleading; for although Confucian practises and ideology formed the basis of the Chinese state, Confucius himself had little to say on spirits and the non-material world: one of his most famous sayings was “Respect the spirits, but stay away from them”. It’s typical of the Chinese psyche that the existence of spirits is acknowledged and documented, sometimes in great detail, but that political and economical matters are considered to be purely the province of men: calling on the spirits in those domains was an indication of failure.
Nevertheless, in spite of this Confucian lay ideal, a number of traditions can be traced back to Confucianism: on its insistence on an ordered universe, where everyone knew their place and their role, and on its conception of the state as the extension of family--the Emperor’s relation to a subject being much like the absolute authority a father had over a son. Also, Confucianism had, to some degree, to yield to the expectations of ordinary citizens--who needed some supernatural recourse against famine, floods and other disasters.
The main tradition that is tightly linked with Confucianism is ancestor worship. Age was a defining factor of superiority in Ancient China: the young were meant to respect and obey the old, particularly their direct ascendants. When those ascendants died, they became shen, benevolent spirits watching over the family’s fortune, to whom regular offerings of incense, food and paper money were made by the household. The focus of this worship were the ancestor tablets bearing the posthumous name of the deceased. Those kept in a special shrine: form of this ranged from a corner of a room to several lavish, dedicated buildings, either within the house or in the countryside, at the family’s traditional seat.
Other spirits, though, were not so benevolent. Gui were the yin counterpart of shen, responsible for many afflictions ranging from accidents to illnesses or crop failures. Many gui were dead who had not been properly honoured, though some might also be forces of nature.
The Chinese believed that spirits travelled in a straight line, so the entrance of most houses didn’t consist only of a gate opening on the outside, but also of a screen, a wall laid across the gate as a protection from the depredations of gui. Additional wards, which are seen in Chinese temple to this day, are guardian spirits, painted on either side of the door: those two life-sized pictures represent two generals of the Tang dynasty, who volunteered to protect the Emperor from a vengeful ghost.
The other thing Confucianism contributed to Chinese mythology was a detailed and complex hierarchy of spirit officials, from the humble earth god who watched over a village, to the city gods--all the way up to Heaven and its Courts, in a mirror of the Imperial power structures. Those spirits were part of official worship: the temple of the city god, in particular, received the petition of governing civil servants in case of natural disasters. City gods had not been born gods, but were mortals who had distinguished themselves by their upright conduct, and had thus been found fit to mediate between the people and Heaven.
Daoism
In many ways, Daoism is the polar opposite of Confucianism. Confucianism exalts the ideal of service to the nation, secure in one’s knowledge of one’s own place; Daoism advocates severing the ties of kinship and society, and meditating in the wilderness. Confucianism was highly ritualised and organised; Daoism made of the unknowable its supreme concept. Confucianism promoted hard labour and dedication; Daoism advocated “wuwei”, “[action] without action”, which involved knowing when not to act rather than acting.
The founder of Daoism was the legendary Lao Zi, who is said to have dictated his book, the Dao De Jing, before riding a water buffalo into the unsettled land west of China. His disciples, such as Zhuangzi, started a tradition of philosophy that soon had a profound impact on Chinese thought. In parallel, religions sects based on the Dao developed, the most famous being “The Tradition of the Mighty Commonwealth of the Orthodox Oneness”, popularly known as “The Five Pecks of Rice” after the offering that every faithful had to make upon joining the sect. Daoists established their own mythology and rituals, far apart from the elaborate pomp of officialdom.
One key element of Daoism was the search for immortality: Immortals were men who had transcended their mortal condition, being not only immune to death but also the possessors of fabulous powers which allowed them to transport themselves instantly from one place to another, or to vanquish demons (one major function of Daoist priests is to perform exorcisms). To become immortal was very much a matter of discipline: though the quest often involved the brewing of an elixir, the main point was refining one’s own body through a strict regimen of fasting and meditating, until the Dao, the supreme Way, had finally been attained.
Daoism filled in the top of the Heavenly hierarchy: the Jade Emperor, the ruler of Heaven, is worshipped as the supreme deity by some sects; and his wife (sometimes mother) Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, is the foremost immortal on Mount Kunlun: she dispenses prosperity, longevity and immortal bliss. It’s in her gardens that grow the legendary peaches of immortality, which ripen once every three thousand years.
Daoist immortals sit side by side with the often staid Confucian deities--whose sole distinction tends to be moral superiority. On the contrary, the Eight Immortals (Ba Xian, a twelfth-century addition to the pantheon) are often rowdy and colourful, engaging in drinking bouts and flashy swordfights. They range from the crabby old Iron-Crutch Li, who hides his soul in a gourd, to their leader Lu Dongbing, a known womaniser who should not be summoned to solve romantic problems; from the ambiguously-gendered Lan Caihe, to the eccentric Zhang Guo, who brews liquors and wine as a hobby. In many ways, the Eight Immortals are very much human, if larger than life--which contributes to explain their continued popularity.
Buddhism
Unlike the previous two, Buddhism isn’t a native religion, having been brought over from India by missionaries in the 1st century AD. It was gradually assimilated into Chinese society as its fundamental texts were translated from Sanskrit. Buddhism holds that men are bound by the weight of their actions, carrying over the karma of their past lives into their next reincarnations. Until they can free themselves from desire, they are bound to suffer. One who is genuinely free from desire can follow in the Buddha’s footsteps, and attain nirvana, a state of utter freedom from the cycles of rebirth.
In China, there are two main intermediate states between the mortal man and nirvana: lohans (translation of the Sanskrit arhat) are enlightened men, whereas pusas (more commonly known as bodhisattvas) are people who would be capable of attaining nirvana, but defer their enlightenment to help their fellow men ascend. The most popular pusa is undoubtedly Guanyin, “She Who Listens to the Sounds [of the World]”, the personification of compassion and kindness: Guanyin relieves suffering, and has the power to grant children to barren women.
Another popular (albeit a great deal less conventional) Buddhist figure is Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, a mischievous and intractable character who attains his status of “Buddha of Victory Through Strife” by helping the monk Xuanzang retrieve Buddhist sutras from India in Journey to the West.
Like Confucianism and Daoism, Buddhism has its own demons, lower beings into which evil men can reincarnate to expiate their past wrongs.
All three religions combined to some extent to form Diyu, the Chinese Hell, but Buddhism contributed the bulk of it, since Hell is a place where punishments are visited on the sinners before they are allowed rebirth. The hierarchy of Hell looks much like that of a Chinese tribunal, presided by Yanluo, who judges the dead on their arrival; punishments for specific sins are dealt in a variable number of courts (three to four in some traditions, eighteen in others). The last court hosts the Wheel of Rebirth, where Old Lady Meng awaits, making the soul drink a potion of oblivion before sending it out into the world.
Bibliography
Sources of Chinese Tradition, William Theodore de Bary, Irene Bloom, Columbia University Press, 2000
Chinese Creeds and Customs, V.R. Burkhardt, Book World Co., 1958
A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols, Wolfram Eberhard, Routledge, 1986
Imperial China, the Historical Background to the Modern Age, Michael Loewe, Praeger, 1965
China’s Cultural Heritage, the Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912 (Second Edition), Richard J. Smith, Westview Press, 1994
Monkey: Journey to the West, Arthur Waley, Penguin, 2005
ALIETTE DE BODARD’s short fiction credits include Aztec mysteries ("Obsidian Shards”, published in Writers of the Future XXIII) and other stories inspired by Mesoamerican culture. Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy, Interzone and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. She is a Campbell Award Nominee for 2009.
Visit her website or her blog for more information.
