What can we know from the Chinese mythology?

Last time, I talked about something about the Chinese mythology and Norse mythology. After learning about this topic, now I have some more information about this topic after doing some research.

First I want to talk about some more about the Chinese mythology. Last time I talked about the mythology from China of the time of gods. And today I want to talk about something about the time of the heroes. They are the offspring of those gods, but more like human beings nowadays. The time of heroes in Chinese mythology is more likely like a transition of the mythology and the real history, lots of heroes real exists in the history, but the mythology gives them some legendary deeds. Some of the mythology are quite famous nowadays, and I would like to pick one of them to talk about.

This story is about Kuafu. He is the leader of a big tribe, and very tall and strong. At that time, the sun was so hot, and people were suffered from the high temperature. Crops cannot grow cause it was too hot, and rivers dried up. Kuafu felt so sad that his clansmen cannot live, so he decided to chase the sun when the sun declined westward, and ask the sun to follow his order and serve the people. He started to chase the sun, and he runs so fast through the mountains and rivers. After nine days, he finally caught the sun, but he felt so hot when he tried to get close to the sun, and felt very thirsty. So he drank over the water of the Yellow River, and the Wei River. But he still felt very thirsty, and want to go to the north of the land for the water, but he was too thirsty, and thirst to death on his way. Kuafu felt very regretful before he died, and he threw his cane, and the place that the cane landed became a forest for travelers to rest.

This is a very famous story of Chinese mythology, and we can find a lot of information from it. As I talked about last time, the mythology can reflect how people feel and live in the ancient time. The first thing I can learn from this story is the change of the ability of a “god”. The gods before are so powerful and omnipotent, they can do everything they want, and has the power to change everything. But at this time, people realized that god is not omnipotent, and there is a lot of things that gods also cannot change. Gods tend to become a more powerful human. The second thing I can know is people wanted to control the nature. At that time, the science and technology was not developed, people cannot understand how nature works, and they did not have the ability to resist the nature disastrous. So people at that time wanted to have the power to control the nature, they believed that the nature is controlled by someone, and the disastrous are caused by some monsters, and they hope someone could do something to stop the disastrous, so they could live happily. And also, we can found some information of how ancient Chinese people consider the world from the part of “how the sun works”. From the story, we can found that ancient Chinese people think that the sun rises from the ground, and will fall into a place like a valley. But the western part of China are mostly deserts and mountains, and are very cold. So ancient people cannot live in that place, or even cannot explore. They believed that the sun rises from the see, and falls into a valley, they cannot meet the sun because they cannot go into the see or explore in the valley. We can find how ancient people consider the law of the nature and the geography of the land they live. The last thing I can learn from this story is the characteristic of Kuafu, which could reflect how people consider “good characteristic” is. Kuafu, as a leader of a tribe, he is responsibility at first. When his people has trouble, he stood out to fight for them. Also, he is so strong, which could reflect the thing that ancient people adored: strength. Strong people are easily to be the leader of a group of people in ancient time, because people at that time need a lot of manual labors, and strong people could do more jobs, and got more preys, so they could get more admiration. Also, Kuafu is kind and selfness. At the last time of his life, he still thought of his clansman, and he still used his cane to benefit other people, and this is the thing that people think should be respected.

This time I mostly do some research of how ancient Chinese people think, how the image of gods in the mythology changed, and what can we know from the mythology. Next time I want to do some more research of western mythology, and make some comparison between Chinese mythology and Western mythology. I will continue doing this research topic.