Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (51 page)

 

I

n 1793, King George III sent an emissary to the court of Chinese emperor Qian Long. Arriving in what was then called Peking, the British ambassador displayed a lavish array of gifts for the Chinese ruler, including six hundred cases of scientific instruments. The emperor, a member of the Qing Dynasty, who had been on the throne for nearly sixty years, was polite but unimpressed. “There is nothing we lack,” he told Lord McCartney, the British envoy. “We have never set much store on strange or indigenous objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.”

It was seemingly true. For much of its nearly 4,000-year-long history, China had thrived in splendid isolation, a mysterious and unwelcoming empire that neither needed nor desired contact with outsiders. Cut off from most of its neighbors by natural boundaries—the Himalayan mountains to the west, the Gobi desert and forbidding Mongolian territory to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the east—China had expended vast sums and countless lives building walls.
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Behind these formidable barriers of earth and stone, sheltered from the gaze of potential invaders and eager Christian missionaries, China’s successive dynasties had developed a civilization that was in many ways far more advanced than any of its contemporaries. Not only did the Chinese create a vast network of rural villages held together by a remarkable bureaucracy and a single written language, they invented paper, printing, gunpowder, fireworks, the seismograph, noodles, the compass, and ships capable of sailing the world long before Westerners did. China was, as historian Daniel Boorstin once called it, “an empire without wants.”

Yet, in spite of its early history of writing, China did not leave the world’s richest written mythic legacy. Unlike the Egyptians, who stored thousands of funeral texts in their grand tombs, the Chinese were seemingly far less concerned with elaborate burial rites, and left no detailed road maps to the afterlife, although they built expansive tombs. Though nearly every great ancient civilization composed epic poems of love and war, there is no ancient Chinese
Gilgamesh
,
Iliad
, or
Ramayana
. China certainly had its cornucopia of Creation and Flood accounts—as many as six separate Creation stories and four Flood narratives, each featuring different characters. But, intriguingly, these tales don’t emphasize heavenly retribution for sinful behavior. And while the Chinese acknowledged a wide range of nature gods, mythical semidivine rulers, and prophetic priest-kings in their fourth-century treatise
Questions of Heaven
and their third-century encyclopedia of gods,
The Classic of Mountains and Seas
, it was human ingenuity—not divine intervention—that was seen as the solution to most problems.

No surprise, then, that myth never formed in China the deep cultural identity that is typically associated with Greece or India. Or became the monolithic state religion, or powerful priesthood associated with Egypt. Quite to the contrary, China’s vast size and regional differences checked the development of a single “national” mythology that could unite the country. Even as generations of Chinese students immersed themselves in the myth-tinged works of Chinese literature called the Five Classics, their goal was not to become priests. They were preparing for the ancient Chinese SATs, or “civil service exams,” required to climb the imperial bureaucratic ladder or advance in the army. (The Chinese even had an “examination god” named Kui Xing, who was called upon by scholars for divine assistance at test time.)

But where myth failed to unify China, philosophy succeeded. Far more important than China’s poets and storytellers were its sages and wise men. Think China, and you think Confucius, not a poet like Homer.

The two great strands of native Chinese philosophy, Confucianism and Taoism—both introduced around 500 BCE—clearly shaped China’s history, government, and culture more than any myth or religious belief did. Emphasizing social order, loyalty to family and king, and ancestor worship, Confucianism is a moral code of proper behavior designed to achieve an ideally gentle world in which every individual has a place within the family and every family has a place within the society. Confucianism places the virtue of a disciplined communal order above the need to appease the gods, while Taoism, the second major school of Chinese thinking, stresses the importance of individuals living simply and close to nature. By far the more influential of the two, Confucianism was made the state religion in 136 BCE, during the powerful Han Dynasty—a 400-year period in Chinese history often equated with the Roman Empire in terms of its size and prestige. Just as Confucianism was being institutionalized, Buddhism was imported from India, adding a spicy new accent to China’s philosophical potpourri and creating in China a picture markedly different from other great civilizations, where myth was often all-pervasive.

One other significant but very modern factor has diminished China’s mythic legacy. The study of Chinese myths and mythic sources was severely stunted under Communist rule. The all-powerful official Chinese Communist Party that has governed China since 1949 largely suppressed all religions, which were regarded as mere superstition. Classical Confucianism was opposed by the Maoist “powers that be”—which created a mythology of its own to lionize Chairman Mao—because it emphasized the past and, in the Party view, justified social inequality.

The Five Classics, studied by aspiring bureaucrats and functionaries for two thousand years, were set aside in favor of Karl Marx and Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. During decades of strict Communist authoritarian rule, the Party turned Buddhist and Taoist temples into museums, schools, and meeting halls, and the study of mythology and other ancient Chinese traditions suffered. An entire generation of academics, scholars, and researchers was largely eliminated in the violent upheaval of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when universities were shut down for years, and foreign embassies closed. Some 7 million students, teachers, and others in the professional classes were sent to be “reeducated” on rural collective farms, where many did not survive the purges and repression of the Red Guard era.
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The diplomatic “opening” of China that followed President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit has also unlocked China in other ways that relate to its mythic past. Ancient Chinese healing arts, such as acupuncture, “energy healing,” and herbal medicines, are now a growing part of the Western medical arsenal. Many Westerners now decorate their homes and offices with careful attention to feng shui (
fuhng shway
), the ancient Chinese art of placing objects with the goal of creating a sense of balance and harmony. According to feng shui, the life-force energy called chi flows from every living and inanimate object, and can be promoted with the careful placement of furniture and the proper use of colors.

In the arts, a band of Chinese filmmakers known as the Fifth Generation has introduced American audiences to Chinese history and folk traditions in such films as
Raise the Red Lantern
,
Yellow Earth
, and
Farewell My Concubine
. Chinese-American filmmaker Ang Lee wowed the world with his legendary folktale
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
. Acclaimed Chinese-American writers such as Amy Tan, author of
The Joy Luck Club
and
The Kitchen God’s Wife
, have reached wide audiences as they explored Chinese mythic and family traditions and their impact on a generation of Chinese-Americans. Even Disney got on the Chinese dragon-wagon with its animated
Mulan
, a 1998 “girl power” version of a Chinese folktale, whose heroine takes her father’s place in battle and is the same Fa Mu Lan whom Maxine Hong Kingston wrote about in her award-winning memoir
Woman Warrior
.

During the past thirty years, along with this vanguard of a new “cultural revolution,” a generation of archaeologists and scholars has also been allowed to peek over the “Great Wall” that surrounds China’s ancient history. As they do, they have begun to reveal the rich, imaginative, and colorful myths born in “the empire without wants.”