China's Cosmological Prehistory: The Sophisticated Science Encoded in Civilization's Earliest Symbols

INTRODUCTION

This is the fourth in a series of books about the creation traditions (or cosmologies) of ancient cultures. The purpose of these books is to discuss the underlying foundations of ancient cosmology and language, and to explore the many commonalities that are evident among classic ancient creation traditions. The series began with The Science of the Dogon, a work that examines the intriguing system of myths and symbols of a modern-day African tribe from Mali called the Dogon and the many parallels it exhibits, both to the creation traditions of various ancient cultures and to modern cosmological science. These initial discussions continued in a second volume titled Sacred Symbols of the Dogon, in which I outlined an alternate approach to interpreting ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols and words, using Dogon cosmological terms and drawings as a reference. In the third and most recent book of the series, The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol, I correlated aspects of the Dogon and Egyptian cosmologies to the very similar ancient Buddhist stupa tradition in India. I also compiled a list of attributes that are commonly shared by the Dogon, Egyptian, and Buddhist cosmologies, which proved to be predictive of what I found as I examined the outwardly similar creation tradition and hieroglyphic language of a little-known Tibetan and Chinese culture called the Na-khi (whose name is sometimes given as Na-xi).

The Dongba language of the Na-khi is the last known surviving hieroglyphic language in the world and is considered to have been a predecessor to the Chinese hieroglyphic language. It is also believed that this written language was primarily intended to express concepts of cosmology, since the set of glyphs it defines are not capable of expressing the full spectrum of ideas that relate to the daily life of the Na-khi. So both the cosmology and the associated hieroglyphic language of the Na-khi suggested that ancient creation traditions in China could be fundamentally similar to the ones I was already pursuing. I also knew that the earliest cosmological references in China date from around the same period as similar references in ancient Egypt, as does the approximate time frame for the emergence of written Chinese language. So since my intention has been to sustain a coherent cosmological and geographical progression for our studies, it made sense that China would become the focus of this latest book in my series.

From many different perspectives, China has long been an enigma to Western cultures, so it should come as no surprise that ancient Chinese religious traditions and practices often reflect similarly enigmatic aspects. Some of the mystery of these traditions may reflect tangible differences in mind-sets between Eastern and Western cultures; some of it may be the result of the long periods of relative isolation that have existed in China that have shielded some of these traditions from outside view. Some may be the result of modern political trends that work to de-emphasize ancestral religious traditions in China. However, it may also be possible that some of these mysteries of Eastern thought simply coincide with obscure aspects of the ancient esoteric tradition that I have been working to decipher.

In this current volume, my approach to exploring the ancient Chinese creation tradition will take a form similar to the method I employed when studying the Na-khi. It is my intention to revisit each of the points of the civilizing plan outlined in The Cosmological Origins of Myth and Symbol and discuss how they may or may not have applied to ancient China. I plan to consider how Chinese concepts of cosmology were expressed in various myths, symbols, words, and concepts. Through these discussions I hope to gain new insights about shared aspects of the Dogon, Egyptian, and Buddhist cosmologies and to test the limits of possible correspondence to ancient Chinese traditions. I intend to discuss important themes of ancient Chinese cosmology that may not have played a well-defined role in the traditions of the other cultures I have studied. It is also my purpose to consider Chinese perspectives on various themes of cosmology and language already introduced in prior volumes of this series.

In the case of ancient China, as we will explore together in the following pages, we may find that there is less direct evidence on which to base our observations than in other cultures I have studied. This circumstance arises largely because events that transpired in China in the era of 3000 BCE were often not reflected in surviving written texts until many centuries later. Consequently, we find less consensus of opinion among scholars as to the true nature of any particular aspect of cosmology in earliest China.¹ Sarah Allan writes in The Shape of the Turtle: Myth, Art, and Cosmos in Early China:

One problem in reconstruction is that there are very few texts from the period immediately following the overthrow of the Shang. Indeed, it is some five centuries before we begin to have a significant corpus of literature. Another problem is that early Chinese texts do not normally recount myth, even euhemerized as history, except in very abbreviated references within the context of other discussion. These references must be pieced together to form an intelligible pattern.²

The lack of scholarly consensus can mean that definitions comparable to ones that are often overtly stated among the Dogon and the Buddhists, or that may be broadly agreed on by most traditional Egyptologists, may seem to be carved in mud rather than stone when it comes to ancient China. In China, fundamental disagreements can persist over even the most rudimentary aspects of historical or cosmological study, such as to which specific group of deities a traditional title may refer or whether a given term properly represents the name of a deity or the name of a dynasty. Even in situations where a single opinion may predominate, there often remains a significant amount of wiggle room when it comes to any finalized definition. Consequently, it becomes difficult to make definitive statements with any degree of confidence. For a researcher such as myself, whose preference it is to frame each interpretation in relation to an overt statement on the part of the culture involved, the only secure interpretation is one that can be effectively anchored in some tangible way. The difficulty of doing this in relation to ancient China may require us to find novel approaches to validating our interpretations in this study.

My view of ancient cosmology as an instructed plan implies, in regard to its study in China and in other cultures, that any such plan would have existed in its most coherent form at the time when it was initially presented. This means that, for the sake of our comparative studies, we will want to focus our attention on the very earliest forms in each culture. If these systems were initially similar to one another, then it makes sense that changes introduced over time could be largely responsible for the divergences we will see in the surviving elements of the various traditions we will compare. From that standpoint, it makes sense that we assign less weight to how cultures interpreted these symbolic elements at 300 BCE than we might to how the same elements are understood to have existed at 3000 BCE. We should understand that these exercises in comparative cosmology would not likely be fruitful unless the creation traditions of the cultures involved were at one time fundamentally similar to one another; otherwise, our studies would simply amount to comparing apples to oranges, and so would reveal only the occasional or random similarity. The greater the number of parallels we are able to credibly demonstrate between the cosmologies of these cultures, the more sensible our argument becomes that they were all once fundamentally similar.

Historically, ancient China was home to a number of outwardly different religious traditions, although an overlap in concepts and practices among those traditions can often be seen. It is firmly documented that in the late centuries BCE or early centuries CE, a wide variety of religious doctrines were introduced into ancient China, although only a few of these ultimately took root. For example, Buddhist practices are known to have been brought to China from India and to have greatly influenced the religious profiles of China and Japan. One question that scholars still ponder centers on why Buddhism came to be so warmly embraced in China, when other traditions apparently were not. Any early links we may uncover in China to a shared plan of cosmology could argue that the archaic Chinese traditions had originally been framed in similar ways to the ancient Vedic tradition in India.

Written language also went through a series of transitions in China, so our best hope for positive correlation to other writing systems may again lie with its earliest forms. However, there are certain outward features of Chinese language that we can immediately see align well with what we know to be true about the Egyptian hieroglyphs. First, each Chinese glyph or character is understood to represent a tangible concept, object, or action. Therefore, the process of reading a Chinese word involves a process similar to what I have employed for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic words: substituting concepts for glyphs to create a kind of symbolic sentence, rather than replacing letters with phonetic values, as is the practice in many modern languages. Like the Egyptian hieroglyphic language, Chinese writing encompasses literally thousands of different glyphs. Just as the spoken language of the Dogon combines a number of simple, predefined phonemes to create more complex words, so a Chinese glyph can sometimes be formed by combining a series of discrete signs, each with its own associated meaning. And like the Egyptian glyphs, any given Chinese glyph may convey more than one symbolic meaning.

When working with any single one of these ancient creation traditions, it is not uncommon to discover a theme or reference that is not well defined or that does not seem to connect in a meaningful way with what I have seen in other cultures, so it constitutes a kind of symbolic loose end. This can leave us with unresolved questions about how and why the reference might have come to exist and how it properly relates to a larger system of references. Each time we examine the similar creation tradition of another culture, evidence can turn up to resolve some of these loose ends. The same is often true in regard to the meanings of certain less-well-understood symbols. For example, it sometimes will become clear from our readings of Egyptian words that a certain glyph shape must imply a particular symbolic concept. However, even though the meaning is implied contextually, it might not always be clear why the concept pertains to that specific symbol. As we expand our base of referent cultures, languages, and creation traditions, a more multidimensional picture begins to emerge and we sometimes find that an underlying rationale for these symbolic assignments becomes evident.

Many of the interpretations I will put forth in this volume regarding symbols and their likely meanings will be based on resemblances that can be shown to exist between cosmological words. One of the China scholars whose work I rely on as a reference for Chinese cosmology, Norman J. Girardot, flatly rejects this method of interpretation. His view is that to base an inference about Chinese symbolism on the similar pronunciation of two words would be as meaningless as trying to pose an argument about modern word meanings based on the idea that the word egg sounds like the word keg.³ However, it is a clearly stated principle among the Dogon and the Egyptian priests that similarities of pronunciation imply a conceptual relationship between two words. Also, in my view, the key terms of ancient cosmology, unlike ordinary words in everyday usage, constitute a very special case because they relate to what is apparently an organized system. If it can be convincingly shown that other aspects of this system existed in similar form in ancient China, then the validity of this same principle of pronunciation is arguably implied there.

Our ability to favorably compare the meanings of cosmological terms from different cultures is one way of demonstrating that the cosmologies were fundamentally similar. Differences in the nuances of meaning that may exist between these words can often shed new light on the cosmological concept that is actually being expressed. When the words are also defined in relation to the same mythic theme or symbol in both cultures, then these references provide us with further means to cross-check and confirm the likely meanings of the shared terms. It is enormously helpful to my studies that the authors of many of my source references take special care to explain the many shades of meaning that may attach to these words. This practice reflects a well-founded understanding on the part of these authors that such references may prove invaluable to other researchers.

Numbers also play a significant role in aligning the traditions of various cultures—both the recurrence of certain key numbers themselves and the specific symbolism associated with those numbers. Some of these, such as the number of days in a year, were simply dictated by nature. However, others reflect a consistency of practice from culture to culture that has no obvious root in environment. For example, it seems curious that the Chinese and Egyptians both chose matching units of measure for time (a 360-day year, 30-day month, 10-day week, 24-hour day, and 60-minute hour) that appear to have been founded on even factors of the grand cycle of precession (the very gradual apparent rotation of the background constellations in relation to the rising sun).

The success that I have met with so far in these cross-cultural comparisons outlines important ways in which many ancient creation traditions seem remarkably similar to one another. For example, anthropologists know that ancestor worship was a common feature of ancient cultures, but they may not always be aware that this reverence for ancestors was often expressed in markedly similar ways from culture to culture. For example, it may be a natural human instinct to honor the memory of your predecessors. However, there is nothing in that impulse to insist that these predecessors be conceptualized as seven ancestors or in relation to seven honored ancestral families. Yet we can see this same organizational framework for the notion of ancestors, expressed in similar terms, in culture after ancient culture. Likewise, because mothers are pivotal to a familial society, it seems natural that cultures would evolve traditions that honor a mother goddess. It may even seem natural to associate the mother as a giver of life with the formation of matter. But nowhere in that mind-set do we find natural associations with the concepts of waves, weaving, and spirals that predominate so many ancient concepts of how matter is formed. The suggestion is that some factor other than mere human impulse could be at work here.

As I have worked with these ancient traditions, one thing I have noticed is that the same subtle rules of symbolism apply to each system that I explore. During the early, noniconic periods of each tradition, I can see that animals became associated with concepts. Owls came to symbolize knowledge and elephants came to imply abundance. Eventually serpents, which were initially revered, came to represent evil. In later periods, deities took on associations with specific animals. Oftentimes the symbolism assigned to an animal reflected some salient aspect of that creature; for example, in Dogon culture, the twitching of a rabbit or hare came to represent the concept of vibration. By the historic era, starting with the earliest surviving written text from around 2600 BCE, the rulers of many cultures (often cast as representatives of gods) had adopted much of the same animal symbolism that had been initially assigned to deities. Not only did various rules of symbolism seem to cross the boundaries of sometimes distant cultures, but so did the evolutionary trends of association and occasional outright reversals of that symbolism. Again, we can see some cross-cultural force at play other than natural human tendencies.

A number of different theories have been put forth to explain the near-universal nature of various themes and symbols of the ancient creation traditions. Perhaps cultures that are at the same stage of development simply tend to create similar forms. Or perhaps humanity is psychologically wired to conceptualize themes of creation in specific ways. My outlook is that the complex symbolism that attaches to various cosmological forms flatly contradicts any theory of parallel development, especially when that symbolism seems logically distanced from the form itself. In China, we find a set of traditions that were for many years also geographically and culturally distanced from the other ancient traditions. Surely if we were looking for a unique set of ancient practices, we would expect to find them in a location as remote as China. However, given the many commonalities known to have existed among the cosmological traditions of ancient Africa, Egypt, India, and Asia, the coincidence of finding many of