P'an-ku
P'an-ku East AsiaIn Chinese mythology he is the primeval man, born of the cosmic egg. At the outset of the universe, ‘the ten thousand things’, was an egg. One day the egg split open. The top half became the sky and the bottom half the earth. P'an-ku, who emerged from the broken egg, grew ten feet taller every day, just as the sky became ten feet higher and the earth ten feet thicker. After 18,000 years P'an-ku died. Then, like the cosmic egg, he split into a number of parts. His head formed the sun and moon, his blood the rivers and seas, his hair the forests, his sweat the rain, his breath the wind, his voice thunder and, last of all, his fleas became the ancestors of mankind.
This myth was probably added to Taoist cosmology in the fourth century BC. It is not a creation story so much as an explanation of the Yin-Yang theory. From P'an-ku were derived the Yin and the Yang, the interacting forces within all phenomena. Striking is the lowly...
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