J O H N S.

M A J O R

MYTH, COSMOLOGY, AND T H E ORIGINS

OF CHINESE SCIENCE

This paper will explore the proposition that the principal features of early
Chinese science existed as a system of beliefs that long predated the supposed
invention of that science by Tsou Yen and his school during the Warring
States Period, and that those beliefs were expressed i n a coherent body of
myths of great antiquity. Furthermore it is proposed that the cosmology ex-
pressed in those myths was of a kind widely shared by the ancient civilizations
of the Eurasian continent, but that it contained in addition certain unique
features, and that in the shift from the language of myth to the language of
philosophy that took place in China during the Chou Period the cosmology
was modified in certain ways that produced a unique Chinese science. The
theoretical framework of that science was completed by the early Han Period,
and, with later modifications and additions, formed the basis for scientific
thought in China down to early modern times.
The study of Chinese mythology has been a somewhat neglected field in
modern Sinology.’ The main thrust of Sinology has, in fact, been strongly
influenced by notions of both Confucian and Christian rationalism that are
inimical to the study of myths as an important part of the Chinese heritage.
When Ku Chieh-kang and other progressive Chinese historians of the May
Fourth generation identified the tales of the sage-kings in the early Ounese
histories as myths, in one respect they performed a great service, liberating us
from the spurious historicism that had characterized both traditional Chinese
scholarship and early Western Sinology; vide the acceptance by Legge and his
contemporaries of Yao, Shun, Yii, and the Yellow Emperor as historical per-
sonages. But in removing the tales of the sages from the realm of h s t o r y later
Western scholars tended to dismiss them as mere myths, not worthy of scho-
larly attention. The problem was in some ways compounded by Karlgren, who
proposed the excessively rigid standard of “free” and “bound” texts, accord-
ing to which no text written after 221 B.C. could be held to contain valid
sources of myth. As it happens, many of the myth-containing texts that we
have date from after that cutoff point; in the view of Karlgren and his school,

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 5 (1978) 1-20. AN Rights Reserved.

Copyright 0 1978 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland.
2 JOHN S . MAJOR

all such “myths” are to be regarded as folklore of the “little tradition” or the
inventions of late writers seeking to lend prestige to their works.
To be sure, the study of Chinese mythology is a difficult business, and as
Sinology has been overwhelrmngly dedicated to the study of the Confucian
“great tradition”, most Sinologists have found it easy to ignore mythology
altogether. No early coherent account of Chinese myths exists: even the Han
texts are very confusing and incomplete, and accounts of myths in genuine
Chou texts (Karlgren’s “free” texts) are extremely fragmentary; moreover all
of the written accounts extant have been passed many times through the filters
of Confucian orthodoxy. Nevertheless some scholars accepted the challenge.
The iconoclastic studies of Ku Chieh-kang himself paved the way for such
scholars as Maspero, Granet, Erkes, and Hentze; whle their attempts to recon-
struct the mythology of ancient Cl-una were sometimes too speculative, their
overall contribution must still be highly regarded. Eberhard, in many works,
showed clearly that Chinese mythology could be approached if one went be-
yond the single method of rigid philology. Thus a foundation of modern
scholarship does exist on which one can build further studies of Chinese
mythology, but the foundation is small and uncertain.
While the study of Chinese mythology remained rather torpid, in other
contexts great creative strides were being taken in the theory and methodolo-
gy of the study of myth. Since the Second World War, such scholars as Le’vi-
Strauss, Eliade, and Pettazzoni, whle by no means always agreeing among
themselves, have collectively given to the scholarly world a new and fruitful
approach to the study of myths, symbols, and early systems of belief. Recent-
ly a few scholars have begun to use this approach to re-open the neglected
study of Chinese mythology. Careful tracing of mythic themes, renewed study
of relevant texts, and the recent great progress of archaeology in China are
combining t o change dramatically our understanding of ancient Chinese civil-
ization and its beliefs.
In 1969 desantillana and von Dechend published a study2 of comparative
mythology that drew heavily on structuralist methodology and synthesized
the work of scholars on the myths of many different civilizations. Their the-
sis was that myths (in addition to their-value as literature, dynastic legends,
sources for early religion, etc.) can be read, and were from the beginning in-
tended t o be understood by initiates, as compendia of cosmological teach-
ings. They showed with a high degree of probability that a single Grand
Origin Myth was shared (in terms of structure, though not of course in
 M Y T H A N D ORIGINS O F C H I N E S E S C I E N C E 3

literary details) by nearly all of the great ancient civilizations of Eurasia, and
that it served as a technical language for recording all of the essential features
of the first of the ancient exact sciences, astronomy. Their study prompted
the present author to examine in greater detail whether, and to what extent,
the thesis held true in the case of Cluna, and thus whether the origins of
Chinese science are to be found in a body of myths structurally identical to
and shared with the myths of other great ancient civilizations.
The Grand Origin Myth described by deSantillana and von Dechend exists
in many local versions, of course, but all share the following essential points:
(a) a concept of a time before heaven and earth were separated, when men
and gods communicated without hindrance; (b) an axis mundi - described
variously as a mountain, a tree, or an axle - associated with streams or a whirl-
pool draining and recirculating the waters; (c) an account of the destructive
drawing apart of heaven and earth, usually associated with (d) the breaking of
communication between gods and men, expressed in an expulsion myth. The
same cosmic separation produces (e) a catastrophx, world-engulfing flood,
finally conquered by a hero who renders the earth fit for renewed habitation,
opening the era of human history. That Chi'nese mythology is characterized
by all of these essential features will be demonstrated shortly. First it will be
well, however, to face certain objections that might be raised to the theory as
a whole. To the extent that these myths are interpreted as referring to the
visible characteristics of the heavens, one might object, they need not be re-
garded as shared in any meaningful sense, for the heavens are visible to every-
one, and might well have been described independently in similar terms by
many ancient peoples. By the same argument, portions of the myths can be
accounted for by various legends of tribal dispersals and wanderings, and by
the great floods, global in extent, that might actually have occurred within the
span of preliterate human r n e m ~ r y .Tlus
~ is answered by the methodological
principle that if the essential structure of a myth (or, in other contexts, a phy-
sical object or invention) is shared by two cultures, the burden of proof must
be on one who argues for independent invention; coincidence is an unconvinc-
ing argument, and multiple coincidence least convincing of all. Second, one
might argue that even if the Grand Origin Myth was shared by the peoples of
the ancient Near East, say, China is too far removed to have participated in it.
The degree to which various features of the ancient civilization of China are
accounted for by transmission or diffusion is still in dispute. However, it is
clear that Chinese civilization did not develop in complete isolation. Wheat
4 JOHN S. MAJOR

and the horse chariot were undoubtedly imported into China during the
Shang, for example; moreover, recent advances in archaeology have shown
that many features of late Neolithic high civilization were widely distributed
in East Asia, making the notion of a ‘North China nuclear area’ untenable
and showing that opportunities for cultural transmission and diffusion in
Asia were greater than has sometimes been believed? Further, Pulleyblank
has recently presented evidence t o support an hypothesis that Shang script
significantly influenced the development of some alphabets in Western Asia
during the second millenium B.C.’ Just as Neolithic Homo supiens was on
the whole smarter than we modems usually wish to admit, there seems to
have been a great deal more travel and communication in the ancient world
than modem scholarship sometimes wishes to believe possible.
Thus there is no insuperable barrier to believing that the ancient Chinese
shared and held in common with other ancient peoples the cosmological con-
cepts embodied in the Grand Origin myth. Did they in fact do so?
Although it will not be possible here to present a complete reconstruction
of a Chinese version of the Grand origin Myth, we can briefly give sufficient
evidence to show that the main structure of Chinese mythology fits comfort-
ably into that pattern, and that like all versions of the myth, its reference is
primarily cosmological.6 To take first the case of the Urzeit, when gods and
humans communicated without hmdrance: The early gods of the Chinese are
familiar to most scholars, but they are usually thought of in their late, euhe-
merized forms as the “sage-emperors” and their associates. In fact, of course,
they were gods, with none of the worldly characteristics of real emperors. Fu
Hsi and NU Kua, gods of earth and heaven whom we will encounter again be-
low, are represented in Han iconography as serpent-bodied figures with
human torsos and heads. K‘uei, described in late Confucian texts as the court
musician of the “emperor” Shun, was a thunder-god, a green one-legged ox.
The names of K’una, the would-be subduer of the great flood, and his suc-
cessful son Yub the Great, are written with characters that seem to indicate
that they were originally thought of as scaly insect-like or serpent-bodied
creatures. In addition Yii was able to transform himself into a bear. Clearly
these were no ordinary emperors. Rather they were celestial beings, whose
symbolic activities took place in the heavens even when the myths assign them
a conventional terrestrial location. Their mythic roles as the providers of the
elements of civilization to mankind show that in the time before the begin-
ning of human time, communication between humans and these gods was
unhindered.
 MYTH AND ORIGINS OF CHINESE SCIENCE 5

The second part of the Grand Origin Myth is also central to Chinese myth-
ology. The magical mountain K’un-lun is a clear representation of the axis
mundi. The myths of different cultures represent the axis mundi variously as
a mountain, a tree, or a mill.de, but in structural terms they are the same.
In fact all of those images are found in Chinese accounts. Huai-nan-tzuChap-
ter Four, the “Treatise on Topography”, describes a mountain associated with
K’un-lun which “reaches up to Heaven itself. It is called the abode of the
Grand [Celestial] Emperor”.’ The same passage describes a magical tree, the
Chien tree, on Mt. Tu-kuang on the (celestial) equator “by which the gods
ascend and descend (to and from Heaven)”. The image of the axis mundi most
commonly found in Norse mythology is that of an axle of a hand-mill; the
same image is found in Wang Chung’s Lun Heng Chapter 3 2 , and repeated cen-
turies later in a poem by Su Tung-po. Wang Chung’s use of the quern-axle as
an analogy may well reflect a much older tradition.* Moreover, in China as in
other ancient cultures, the axis rnundi is associated with rivers or a maelstrom
draining and re-circulating the waters of the cosmos; HNT 4 describes rivers
circulating around and draining from Mt. K’un-lun, and the wei-lii’ maelstrom
(later identified with the Kuroshio Current in the North Pacific) is found de-
scribed in cosmic terms in Chuang-fzu17. Finally, the central axis is intimate-
ly connected with one of the most potent of the ancient gods, Huang Ti, the
Yellow Emperor, who corresponds to Saturn in Western versions of the myth.
He was a smith and teacher of metallurgy, hence one of his claims later, as a
euhemerized Confucian sage, to being a founder of civilization. Most impor-
tant, he is the god of the center; not only of the earth, but of the universe it-
self. Schlegel remarks, “In China Saturn has the title ‘Gdnie du pivot’ as the
god who presides over the center, the same title which is given to the pole
star”.’ The identification of Huang Ti and the planet Saturn can be establish-
ed only from relatively late texts, but his function in myth indicates a long
tradition of Saturn-like attributes and perhaps an identification with the plan-
et itself.
K’un-lun, or more specifically Mt. Pu-chou, one peak of K’un-lun, was
knocked aslant in a Chinese version of the third essential feature of the Grand
Origin Myth. “In ancient times Kung Kung strove with Chuan HsU for the
Empire. Angered, he unloosed Mt. Pu-chou. Heaven was forced to break, the
bonds with earth were ruptured. Heaven leaned over to the northwest. Hence
the sun, :he moon, the stars and planets were shlfted. Earth became empty in
the southeast. Hence the water poured away and dry land appeared.”” This
6 JOHNS.MAJOR

Chinese myth is a particularly clear statement of the structural meaning of all

such myths, whether one cites the destruction of Amlodhi’s quern in Icelandic
sagas or the drawing apart of heaven and earth in Genesis: such myths cannot
properly be understood except as descriptions of the tilting of the ecliptic re-
lative to the celestial equator, the non-coincidence of the paths of the sun and
the planets with the rotation of the f i e d stars around the plane of the celest-
ial equator. Here the celestial significance of myths that describe an apparent-
ly terrestrial event can be seen clearly.
In Genesis the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is ex-
plicitly connected t o their violation of the axis mundi, the Tree of Knowledge.
The Chinese version of the expulsion myth is not so explicit; yet we d o find
an account of the severing of ties between gods and men, in the myth of the
driving out from the inhabited world of the San Mia0 tribes by the “sage-
emperor” god Shun, because of their transgressions.
The final element of the Grand Origin Myth is the F e a t flood, a theme of
great prominence in Chinese mythology. In some Chinese accounts the flood
is made a specific consequence of the disaster caused by Kung Kung; when
the bonds of heaven and earth were ruptured, the old earth was washed away
and destroyed, and a new earth had t o be brought into being. The flood in
Chlna was conquered by Yu the Great, a figure of great magical powers, who
used magical earth to dam the waters and scooped out the courses of rivers
to drain them. Having conquered the flood he laid out and surveyed the nine
provinces of the earth which once more was made fit for human habitation.
Human time dates from Yu’s achievement; in later accounts he is made the
founder of the Hsia, putatively the first of China’s dynastic periods.
What evidence do we have for the antiquity that I have by implication
been ascribing t o these Chinese myths? First, there is physical evidence from
the Shang Period t o support the early appearance of the theme of myth per-
taining to the axis mundi: the pid and tsungeritual jades. A’ symbols of heaven
are jade discs with holes (an axis) in the center; tsung symbols of earth are
squared jade tubes. In other words, heaven was thought of as round, measure-
able in degrees, while earth was thought of as square, measureable with refer-
ence to the four directions. The “square” earth was actually an idealized plant?,
projected into the heavens beyond the boundaries of the physical earth, with
“comers” at the nodes of the equinoxes and the solistices on the ecliptic (or
projected onto the celestial equator).” The “round heaven - square earth”
formula makes no sense whatever unless it is seen to refer to the relationship
 M Y T H ANDORICINSOFCHINESESClENCE 7

between the f u e d stars and the ecliptic and the annual motion of the sun de-
termining the four seasons; thus the physical evidence of ritual jades mention-
ed above shows that accounts of this relationship between heaven and earth -
some form of the axis mundi myth - were extant in the Shang. The corrobora-
tion is more finnly established by the hsiian-chiyii-heng‘. or “star-template
pi”, notched jade discs meant to be fitted over tsung sighting-tubes and used
to locate the celestial north pole, i.e. to establish the exact location of the
axis mundi and its correlate, the celestial equator.
Second, the great antiquity of the Chinese dragon motif, as seen on many
Shang bronzes, and the large number of dragons and serpents on the “Huai
Style” bronzes and wooden artifacts from the Yangtze region suggest a paral-
lel with the tendency of the Chinese, mentioned earlier, to describe their
gods and mythical personages as scaly-bodied unipeds or demi-serpents.
Third, it can be noted in general that the ability of myths to survive for
many centuries as an oral tradition in preliterate cultures or in societies in
which literacy is highly restricted, has been established in many cases through-
out the world. Thus the relatively late appearance of the Ounese myths in
written texts by no means establishes that the myths were created a t the time
the texts were written. This is a negative proof; it does not mean that the
myths are necessarily earlier than the texts, but that they might be. Indeed,
one could suppose that the shamans who were the custodians of the myths
had a vested interest in restricting their circulation by keeping them from be-
ing written down; moreover the writing down of sacred myths might per se
have been viewed as a sacreligious act. If that is true the most esoteric myths
would have been the last t o be written down, which might account for the
greater magical/symbolic detail in versions of the myths in late texts. So for
example we find that in the earliest layer of the Shu ching or Book of Docu-
ments (6th century B.C. or earlier) a fairly straightforward account is given
of Yii the Great conquering the flood and laying out and surveying the nine
provinces of the earth. That probably represents a mythic tradition many
centuries older, but its first written appearance comes in a political document
used for propagandistic purposes by the House of Chou. Later accounts, in
such texts as the Huoi-nan-rzu that were written for other purposes and are
relatively devoid of political content, include many more magical details of
the same myth. Moreover, the versions of myths given in such texts (which
also include the Shan-hai ching and the “T’ien wen” chapter of Ch ’u tz ’u) are
often written in a style that strongly suggests oral antecedents.
8 JOHNS. MAJOR

Thus it is clear that all of the elements of the Grand Origin Myth described
by deSantillana and von Dechend are present in Chinese mythology, and that
it is probably more reasonable to accept than to reject the unproven (and per-
haps unproveable) hypothesis that those Chinese myths greatly predate their
first appearances in texts and indeed describe a cosmological view that goes
back to the earliest levels of Chinese culture. This is to say that the ancient
Chnese shared a coherent and well-articulated protoscientific world-view that
was the common property of Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age peoples
throughout the ancient civilized world. If we were to conclude our analysis
at that point, however, the strong implication would be that there was no rea-
son for Chinese science to develop along lines other than those along which it
developed in the West. Since that obviously was not the case, we must account
for clear differences in development from a shared basis.
Around the middle of the Chou Period, in the sixth century B.C. or so,
two complementary tlungs of great importance were taking place. First, the
various nuclei of civilization in the eastern mainland of Asia - the area that
was to become the country called China - were coalescing into a single civiliza-
tion that can properly be called Chinese.” For example, the previously auto-
nomous civilizations of Shang/Chou along the Yellow River and the civilization
that later became the state of Ch’u in the Huai/Yangtze region increased their
contacts and interpenetrated one another to such an extent that they could
be regarded as parts of a single culture. Many other such cultural mergers
were taking place at the same time. Second, the world-views of those cultures,
which had been articulated in myths kept in the custody and memory of
shamans and diviners, were being harmonized and reconciled; the shared world-
view that emerged was couched in a newly invented vocabulary and rhetoric
of philosophy by a rising new group of scholars and teachers. Religion being
a conservative force, the myths themselves survived this change, sometimes
for many centuries; they continued to influence religious practice into and
beyond the Han; many of them were written down in one context or another
and can be retrieved today. But the arena of progress in cosmology had moved
from that of religion t o that of philosophy. That philosophy was being articu-
lated in the context of an increasingly unified, powerful, self-confident nat-
ional culture during the Warring States Period. The relatively localized and
weak culture areas of Late Neolithic and early Bronze Age Eurasia were, given
a sufficient expanse of time, conducive to the wide sharing of concepts and
modes of expression; the more powerful and self-conscious civilizations and
 M Y T H A N D ORIGINSOF C H I N E S E S C I E N C E 9

empires of the first millenium B.C. tended conversely to foster the separate
development of philosophies differentiated along national/cultural lines. Thus
whde the common world-view created in previous millenia was the foundation
on which the Warring States philosophers built, the edifice they created was
quite different from those built on similar foundations elsewhere in the Old
World.
The distinguishing features of Chinese cosmology in its developed (i.e.
late Warring States and early Han) form can be divided into descriptive char-
acteristics and operational characteristics. The former include a cosmography
describing heaven as round and earth as square, with heaven and earth as par-
allel planes or curves, a polar axis/equatorial plane orientation, and a schema-
tic division of the earth into a 3 x 3 grid or a multiple network of 3 x 3 grids.
The operational characteristics include an organic conception of cosmic pro-
cess, expressed in a cosmogony without a first cause or creator,yin-ymgg*h
complementary dualism, the theory of wu hsing’ or the Five Phases, other
theories of categories, and resonant action at a distance through the medium
of ch ‘ij.
It will readily be seen that the descriptive characteristics of the cosmology
are embodied in the myths mentioned earlier - Kung Kung and the tilting of
the axis, the great flood and its draining, etc. The schematic cosmography of
nine super-continents, each divided into nine continents each of which is fur-
ther divided into nine provinces, the most characteristic feature of the cosmo-
graphy of Tsou Yen, derives directly from the myth of Yu the Great dividing
the earth into nine provinces after the conquest of the flood. The further ela-
boration of that mythic element by Tsou Yen is related directly to the Five
Phases and the numerology of the magic square of three, as wdl be seen below.
It remains to be shown here that the operational elements of Chinese cosmol-
ogy also derive from early notions of the pre-philosophical era.
It is often stated that the Chinese are the only major civilization without a
~ Chinese have no
creation myth. That assertion is not strictly ~ 0 r r e c t . lThe
myth of an external Creator, and in that respect they differ from the charac-
teristic tradition of the Western cultures. But the Chinese did have an impor-
tant cosmogonic myth (the locus classicus for which is Chuung-tzu 7), namely
the differentiation of the phenomenal world from primordial chaos, hun-funk.
For our purposes the importance of that myth (which is closely related to the
cosmogonic myth of P a n Ku.that appears in late Han texts and may be of
“southwestern barbarian” origin) is that it shows the world to have come to be
10 JOHN S. MAJOR

without the intervention of an external creator; rather the evolution of the

world from hun-run takes place because of the operation of an internal, uni-
tary world-principle, the Tao. The Tao can be neither apprehended nor named,
for to do so would imply the existence of other-than-Tao, a contradiction.
Everything manifests Tao and operates according to Tao. One operational
principle characteristic of Tao is change. Thus the most typical expression of
cosmogony in the Chinese tradition is a statement to the effect that “one pro-
duces two, which produces multiplicity”.”
Since change is characteristic of the Tao, and produces duality and multi-
plicity, the operational principles of Chinese cosmology, i.e. the manifesta-
tions of Tao, are to be found in the interactions of things, which are arranged
in numerical categories. The most important of those categories are those of
two and five.’6
Duality - male and female, heaven and earth, light and dark, good and evil -
is such a natural part of human experience that it might seem futile to enquire
into the basis of Chinese dualistic philosophy. Nevertheless, in keeping with
our interpretation of myth as cosmology, there is evidence that for the early
Chinese the primary dualism, the one that mattered above all others, was that
of heaven and earth. The abundant Shang jade ritual implements mentioned
earlier are one indication of this. The gods Fu Hsi and NU Kua are assigne,d
both great antiquity and great power in Chinese myths; Fu Hsi represents
earth, NU Kua heaven. Portrayals of them with linked serpent tails, Fu Hsi
holding a square, NU Kua holding a compass or disc, were a favorite element
of Han religious art.” While we now have no examples of that iconography
that greatly predate the Han, the mythic tradition of which the two gods, in
that guise, are a part is very old. From some time during the Spring and
Autumn Period, the technical termsyin andyang began to be used to denote
the same dualistic concept. The terms seem originally to have meant “a hill-
side in shade” and “a hillside in sunlight”; later they may also have taken on
the meanings of “cool” and “warm’’.18 It is of great importance that the con-
cept of dualism in China was always one of complementary dualism; note the
intertwined tails of Fu Hsi and NU Kua. The Chinese concept was quite dif-
ferent from the Zoroastrian struggle of light to overcome darkness, good to
overcome evil; yin and yang were equally manifestations of Tao, and thus
free from ethical values. In philosophical cosmology, yin and yang became
the basis for dualistic categories, so that yin embraced earth, femaleness, cool-
ness, darkness, moistness, and many other qualities; yang embraced their
 M Y T H AND ORIGINSOFCHINESE SCIENCE 11

opposites. The dualism of earth and heaven remained paramount, and second-
ary dualisms in the phenomenal world were related to that one.
Equal in importance to the category of dualism was the category of five:
wu-hsing, the Five Phases.” As is well known, the five - denoted by the sym-
bols wood, fire, earth, metal, and water - are paradigms of types of activity
and change, rather than types of constituent matter. In keeping with the gen-
eral principle that change is a manifestation of Tao, great attention was paid
to transformations from each phase to the next. Various enumeration orders
of the five were developed and used as explanatory devices for different types
of change; for example, the “mutual production order” (given above) was
used to describe the cycle of the seasons. A “mutual overcoming order” (fire
overcomes metal, which overcomes wood, which overcomes earth, which
overcomes water, wwch overcomes fire) was used most often to describe and
explain cyclical changes resulting in death or extinction at each change in the
cycle, such as the life cycle of crops. Later, when cosmology was brought to
the service of political philosophy during the Han, it was used to explain the
periodic overthrow of dynasties by their successors. Many other such enum-
eration orders existed, some with specialized applications in music, metallur-
gical alchemy, etc.*’ As was the case with yin and yang, long lists of correla-
tions of different types of things with the Five Phases were made.” Thus for
example there were five musical notes, five directions (including the center),
five tastes, five colors, etc. In some cases a certain amount of forcing was re-
quired, as with seasons; an artificial season of “midsummer” was created in
order to produce a symmetry with other groups of five. Once the correlations
and the enumeration orders were known by the natural philosopher, they
could be used to predict, for example, the best annual planting sequence for
grains and legumes, or the successive characteristics of cyclically transformed
alchemical substances. The system of categories was made more flexible and
useful when the Five Phases were combined with yin and yang - at a given
time a thing might be correlated with one of the Five Phases and have either
a yin or a yang aspect - to increase their explanatory framework.
Various explanations have been attempted for why the Chinese counted
five sueh Phases rather than some other number. Some of the explanations
verge on casuistry: five is a ‘‘useful number numerologically”, or “there are
five fingers on a hand”. I believe that the most plausible hypothesis is that the
five are derived from the five visible planets. DeSantillana and von Dechend
show that in all of the cultures that possessed some version of the Grand
12 JOHNSMAJOR

Origin Myth, the five planets were regarded as important gods; by analogy we
would expect that to be the case in China also. In fact, enumerations of cor-
relates of the Five Phases prominently include five planets and five sage-em-
perors (gods); so for example the planet Saturn and the god Huang Ti are
linked with Phase earth, and thus also with the center - the axis mundi.22
From that example it will be clear that the assignment of the planets/gods to
their Five Phases correlates was by no means arbitrary. To take another ex-
ample, Jupiter, with its nearly 12-year orbit (corresponding to the 12 branches
of the Chinese sexagenary cycle) was regarded as an important determinant of
time ;23 Jupiter was correlated with Fu Hsi and the Phase wood (thus also with
the direction east, the direction of the vernal equinox), so in Five Phase theory
Fu Hsi becomes a god-regulator of earthly time as well as the god of earth it-
self in yin-yang dualism.
The term wu hsing itself provides a clue to the origin of the Five Phases in
the five planets. Hsing’ has two meanings: “to move” and “a row or column”.
The five planets answer both of those definitions: they are the only “stars”
that move, hence they are conspicuous by their movement; and it was believed
that the five planets lined up in a row at the beginning of an epoch of time,
which then lasted until the planets came around into a row again. (In Han ast-
ronomy much attention was paid to calculating concordance cycles of orbital
times to determine the length of such epochs.24) Moreover, in the Chou the
five planets were commonly called the “five walkers”, wu pum ;hsing (as a
verb) and pu are near-synonyms. Finally, in Karlgren’s reconstruction of the
pronunciation of archaic Chinese, there is a close pun between wu hsing
(*g’?hg) and wu hangn (*g’wing), “five sovereigns”, the five sage-emperors
or gods.25
.The hypothesis suggested here, then, is that for the early (i.e. Spring and
Autumn Period or earlier) Chinese the five visible planets were gods, and that
each god had sovereignty over certain types of activity and natural change.
During the Warring States Period t h s function of the gods as cosmic paradi-
gms was abstracted into a philosophcal principle, for which the term wu hsing
was invented; the origin of the concept suggested the choice of the term.
It must be noted that the above reasoning cannot be regarded as a proof of
the origin of the Five Phases, but only as a plausible hypothesis. Because of
the lack of textual evidence predating the Warring States Period, it is very
difficult to establish the influence of planet-gods and their characteristics on
early Chinese thought; one’s only recourse is to draw inferences about early
 M Y T H A N D 0 RIG LN S 0 F C H I N E S E S C I E N C E 13

thought from later evidence, and that is full of uncertainties. Furthermore,

other influences on the origin of the term and concept of wu hsing must be
considered, for example the term wu fang”, five directions (later an important
correlate group of the Five Phases), a term found in Shang oracle bone inscrip-
tions.” Nevertheless, it does seem reasonable to believe that something like
the Five Phases existed as a cosmological principle in the pre-phlosophical
state of Chinese thought, expressed in myths about the characteristics of the
gods of the five planets. So again we see that a key concept of Chinese science
probably can be traced back to Chinese versions of widespread cosmological
myths.
As the philosophical concepts of Chinese cosmology developed during the
Warring States Period, other theories of categories came into use: categories
of three (including the triad of heaven, earth, and man, which became impor-
t a n t in Han thought after Tung Chung-shu); of eight, based on the trigrams of
the Book of Changes; of ten and twelve, based on the stems and branches of
the sexagenery cycle, etc. Some categories, such as four and six, are found
occasionally in the texts but seem not to have been widely used; they were
mostly discarded by the time of the Han. All of these categories could be used
in combination with yin-yang and the Five Phases as classificatory and explan-
atory devices. It should be noted in passing that the categories of eight, ten,
and twelve all obviously derive from concepts that greatly predate the Warring
States Period.
Essential to the theory of categories that characterized Chinese science as
it was developed during the Warring States Period is the concept of resonance,
i.e. simultaneous, spontaneous action at a distance between or among things
in the same category. (The standard Chinese illustration of the concept is the
“spontaneous” vibration of a lute string when a similarly tuned string on an-
other lute nearby is plucked.) The Chinese universe, which was uncreated and
which came into being through the spontaneous action of the Tao, was in ef-
fect a gigantic organism, in whch every part could in theory affect the whole
and every other part, as an infection in one’s toe can cause a fever to spread
throughout the entire body. The categories of yin and yang, the Five Phases,
etc., and their archaic antecedents, were a way of bringing some intellectual
order to that organic, wholistic concept of the universe. The theory of cate-
gories simply says that while everything in the universe can and does affect
everything else, things in the same category or sub-category affect, resonate
with, one another most strongly, regularly, and predictably. Resonance within
14 JOHNS. MAJOR

a category took place through the medium of ch ’i.Ch ’ioriginally had the mea-
ning “breath”, but as a technical term it came to mean “specific activity””:
“All things resemble their ch ‘i,all things repond to their own class.”” Since
the uncreated, organic nature of the universe was one of the earliest distin-
guishing features of Chinese cosmology, as we noted earlier, the concept of re-
sonance must have been implicit in the system from its origins. Nevertheless,
one cannot with certainty isolate the concept in the mythology as we now
have it, and it would appear that the invention of the technical term ch ’i was
one of the more important achievements of Tsou Yen and his school in their
transformation of archaic mythology into natural philosophy.
Thus the Warring States philosophers who were responsible for the creation
of the language of natural philosophy were far more than translaters of con-
cepts from one system of expression to another. While it is true that “mytho-
logical thought is not necessarily in essence (or in terms of ‘structure’) any
less intellectual or ‘logical’ than philosophical or scientific thought”?9 it is
true at the same time that the language of myth is less precise than the lang-
uage of phdosophy. To speak of yin-yang and the Five Phases, and their inter-
actions through the medium of ch ’i,allows much greater precision than to
speak in allegories of heaven and earth and the five gods. Once a precise lang-
uage of science came into practical use, a satisfyingly exact description of the
cosmos and its nature could be attempted. Perhaps a single example will suf-
fice to show how tightly woven the cloth of Tsou Yen’s natural philosophy
could be. It was mentioned earlier that Tsou Yen described the world as being
divided into nine great continents, each further divided and subdivided by
nines. The basic cosmography obtained was a 3 x 3 grid system, an abstraction
of the nine provinces of Yii the Great. A 3 x 3 grid is also the form of the
magic square of three, which was invented in China around the time of Tsou
Yen. Among the correlations of the Five Phases are numbers themselves; each
Phase was correlated with two numbers between 1 and 10. If the numbers of
the magic square of three are replaced by their wu hsing categories and read
anti-clockwise, the “mutual overcoming” sequence of the Five Phases is ob-
tained: See Figures 1 and 2.
It is an open question whether the invention of the magic square led to the
assignment of the numerical correlates of the Five Phases or whether manipu-
lation of grid arrangements of the Five Phases together with their numerical
correlates led to the invention of the magic square. In any case it is clear that
natural philosophers in the late Chou and early Han were involved in some
 MYTHANDORIGINOFCHINESESCIENCE 15

4 9 2 M M F
3 5 7 wo F

8 1 6 wo / i a Wa
Fig. 1. The magic square of three; add- Fig. 2. The Five Phase correlates of
ing any straight line produces a sum of 15. the magic square, read anticlockwise,
form the mutual overcoming sequence
of the Five Phases.

very complex and abstract correlative speculation linking schematic cosmo-

graphy, numerology, and the operations of Tao as expressed in the cyclical
transformation of the Five Phases.m
At the same time that such developments were taking place in natural phi-
losophy, the myths in which the antecedents of the phdosophcal concepts
had been conserved were being written down. They would no doubt have
been intelligible as cosmological myths to educated men of the Warring States,
but the frontier of scientific activity had long since moved elsewhere; the
myths were understood increasingly in a religious sense only. Finally the sci-
entific meaning of the language of myth was lost almost beyond retrieval; by
the Latter Han skeptics could comment that if heaven were round and earth
square, the corners would not fit.
The depletion of the original meaning of the myths was hastened during
the Han by the rise of state Confucianism. As the myth-bearing texts were ed-
ited by the increasingly powerful Confucian scholars surrounding the throne,
gods became sage-emperors, cosmic events were transplanted onto the ferru
j i m a of China, and the newly secularized, human sage-emperors became para-
gons of Confucian virtue, in order to bolster the ideology of the recently cre-
ated imperial state. After the sage emperors had been firmly fixed in human
roles, cosmic time tended to yield to historical time when the Chinese thought
about their origins. The secularization of myth had begun as a part of the PO-
litically-oriented philosophy of the followers of Confucius during the Warring
States Period; it was effectively completed during the Former Han by Tung
Chung-shu, the great synthesizer who united Confucianism and cosmology,
erasing the distinction between ethics and natural philosophy. The effect was
to enlist cosmology in the service of state ideology and to make natural philo-
sophy subject to the political wishes of the ruling elite. Predictably a dead
hand was laid on scientific creativity; the result of this “early over-investment
16 JOHNS.MAJOR

in untenable metaphysical as~umptions”~’ was that working scientists tended

to operate outside the official mainstream, using the concepts and termino-
logy embalmed in ideology by Tung Chung-shu only when lip service required
it. So for example official astronomers after the Han worked with a mathema-
tical astronomy that changed and developed to meet new scientific demands
placed on it, but for centuries they continued to write official documents in
terms of phdosophical theories that they no longer used in their Still,
not all of natural philosophy was fossilized during the Han, and many sc‘ien-
tists, often characterized as Taoists and working in such fields as alchemy and
medicine outside the official philosophical establishment, developed to im-
pressive lengths the basically cosmological principles of great antiquity that
had been established as the foundation of Chinese science before the Han.
Much time and many words have been spent (and in this writer’s opinion,
wasted) in trying to deal with China’s “failure” to develop modern science.
A useful answer will not be possible until we greatly increase our understand-
ing of Chinese science and the society that produced it, and even then the
question will have to be asked differently. But inasmuch as this article has em-
phasized the antiquity and commonality of the myths that expressed an arch-
aic cosmology widely shared throughout the ancient world, it will be useful
to summarize and conclude our discussion with a brief consideration of how
philosophers working at opposite ends of Asia around the 4th century B.C.
wrought great changes on the shared archaic cosmology, changes that perman-
ently set their cultures’ sciences on divergent tracks.
In his Timaeus, Plato lays down three principles that, he says, must define
and limit any discussion of physics. These, as summarized by Cornford, are
as follows:33
(1) The eternal is the intelligible; what comes to be is the sensible. Since the world is
sensible, it must be a thing that comes to be. (2) Whatever comes to be must have a
cause. Therefore the world has a cause - a maker and father, but he is hard to find. (3)
The work of any maker wiU be good only if he fashions it after an eternal model. The
world is good, so its model must have been eternal.

A point-by-point comparison of this view with the basic tenets of Chinese

cosmology reveals clearly how widely the two views diverged, once the shift
had been made from myth to philosophy; in fact the divergence was virtually
required because of the lack of a creator-god in the Chinese version of the
Grand Origin Myth. We have no Chinese text comparable to the Timaeus, but
if one were to summarize the general principles of Clunese cosmology as
 MYTH A N D O R I G I N O F C H I N E S E S C I E N C E 17

Cornford summarized Plato’s, we would have something like the following:

(1) The eternal, which is the Tao, is beyond both intellection and the senses; it can be
approached but not reached. The Tao manifests itself in change, which is both intelligible
and sensible. (2) Since change is a manifestation of the eternal Tao, change is eternal;
there is no external fust cause or creator. Coming-tebe and ceasing-to-be, accretion and
dissolution, are manifestations of cyclical transformation having neither first cause nor
fmal end. (3) Since t h e world has no fust cause it can have no external model. The world
is neither good nor bad, and cannot appropriately be described in terms of such human
values.

While the myths of ancient Greece and ancient China were both examples
of the pan-Eurasian Grand Origin Myth and thus embody common cosmolog-
ical concepts, the radically different cosmogonic myths of the two cultures re-
sulted in natural sciences founded on different principles, once the shift was
made from mythology to natural philosophy in the two greatest civilizations
of the first millenium B.C. The Greek view was characterized above all by an
eternal first cause or creator external to the cosmos itself; thus the main thrust
of Greek natural philosophy was to discover the laws laid down by the creator
for the ordering of the cosmos. The Chinese organic world had a cosmogony
but no first cause or creator, and the only eternal principle, Tao, was function-
ally equivalent to change itself. Thus the maia thrust of Chinese natural philo-
sophy was to look for organic relationships within the system, as anything ex-
ternal was inconceivable. This led the Chinese to a profound philosophical
apprehension of natural harmony and natural change; but unfortunately for
the future of Chinese science, man was perhaps integrated too completely into
the cosmic organism. For once political principles and ethical values began to
be seen as integral to the world-system the idea of Tao was compromised, and
cosmology tended to serve the interests of the ruling class rather than forming
the basis for scientific enquiry. (The somewhat special relationship between
man and the creator in the Greek perception perhaps allowed their intellectual
heirs to view the natural world with greater detachment and clarity.) For t h s
and doubtless many other reasons there was in post-Han China a wide and
widening gap between technological achievement and scientific theory ; that
gap was never bridged, despite mighty achievements during the Sung, as it was
to be during the Western Renaissance. The scientific breakthrough of the
Renaissance came about in part because the study of mechanics occupied a
central place in Western thought that it could not occupy for the Chinese. The
principles inherited and transformed by Tsou Yen and his followers led the
Chinese to a science of organism and an ideal of harmony like that of an
18 J O H N S. M A J O R

ecosystem; the principles of their Western counterparts led the West to a sci-
ence of mechanism and the harmony of a perfectly created universe. The
Western view, having resulted in the creation of modern science, would seem
to have the greater claim on our attention; but meanwhile modern science has
begun to consider cosmological ideas that are philosophically, if not scientific-
ally, reminiscent of early Chinese notions of organism and eternal, uncreated
change. The search for understanding has not ended with ourselves, and mean-
while to neglect the views of cosmology and natural phdosophy that informed
Chinese civilization for so long would be to neglect a part of the richness of
human experience that belongs to us all.
Dartmouth College

NOTES

For a fuller treatment of this issue see John S. Major, “Topography and Cosmology in
Early Han Thought: Chapter Four of the Huai-nun-tzu”, doctoral dissertation, Harvard
University, 1973, pp. 20-21; and N.J. Girardot, “The Problem of Creation Mythology in
the Study of Chinese Religion”, History of Religion 15, 4: 289-318 (May, 1976),
pp. 294-297.
Giorgio DeSantillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill. Boston, Gambit Press,
1969. The nature of this book’s argument is such that it will be difficult to give specific
page references to it below, but the book taken as a whole is an important part of the
background of this article.
Cesare Emiliani e t aL, in “Paleoclimatological Analysis of Late Quaternary Cores from
the Northeastern Gulf of Mexico”, Science 189:1083-88 (September 1975) show that
a great flood caused by receding glaciation, and capable of flooding inhabited coastal
areas throughout the world, occurred about 11,600 years ago. They postulate that this
“gave rise to the deluge stones common to many traditions” (p. 1087) and note that the
date given coincides precisely with Plato’s date for the great flood and the sinking of
Atlantis [ T i m e u s , 23e.j Plato’s date, being based on irrelevant criteria, is surely a coinci-
dence, but the suggestion that the actual event produced the common mythic structure
of the flood is highly plausible. Nevertheless, the symbolism of that structure more pro-
bably refers to cosmology (i.e. the consequences of the splitting apart of heaven and
earth) than to a single event preserved in the collective human memory.
See Judith Treistman, The Prehistory of China. New York, American Museum of Nat-
ural History/Doubleday and Co., 1970, passim; Ping-ti Ho, The Cradle of rhe East.
Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1975; K.C. Chang, Early Chinese
Civilization. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1976. See also John S. Major, review
of Ho and Chang, Isis, December 1977. For an hypothesis on the transmission of the
Eurasian Grand Origin Myth to Shang China through the ancestors of the Ch’u people,
see John S. Major, ‘Research Priorities in the Study of Ch’u Religion’, Hisrory of
Religion, February 1978.
 MYTH AND O R I G I N S O F C H I N E S E SCIENCE 19

E.G. Pulleyblank, ‘‘The Chinese Cyclical Signs and the Origins of the Alphabet”, paper
presented t o the Western Branch of the American Oriental Society, Stanford University,
(California, March 23,1975).
The best general account of Chinese mythology is given in Derk Bodde, “Myths of
Ancient China”, in Samuel N. Kramer, ed., Mythologies of rhe Ancient World. New Y ork,
Doubleday and Co., 1961, pp369-406. Bodde also deals with the differences between
Karlgren’s and Eberhard’s approaches to Chinese mythology.
’ Huai-nan hung-lieh chi-chieh’, ed. Liu Shu-ya‘. Shang-hai, Commercial Press, 1926,
4:4b. Hereafter HNT.
* Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China. Seven vols. projected; Cambridge,
at the University Press, 1965. III:214. Hereafter Needham, SCC.
G. Schlegel, Uranographie Chinoise. (Leiden, 1875), p.525. Quoted in translation in
desantillana and von Dechend, p. 135.
lo HNT 3:lb-2.
l 1 See deSantillana and von Dechend, p.62, for a discussion of the occurrence of the
“round heaven-square earth” formula in the myths of many other cultures.
Needham, SCC III:333-9.
l3 Treistman, passim.
l4 For a fuller treatment of this question see Girardot, pp. 298-304.
lS See for example Lao-tzu 42, HNT 1, HNT 7.
l6 Derk Bodde, ‘Types of Chinese Categorical Thinking”, Journal ofrhe American Or-
iental Sociery 59.2:200-19 (1939), and Needham, SCC 11, passim, but especially pp.
2 32-26 a.
l7 Compare the intertwined bodies and tails of the two dragons - y h and yang?- on the
Changsha Silk Painting discovered at Ma-wang-tui. See An Chih-minr, “Ch’angsha hsin
fa-hsien-ti Hsi-Han po-hua shih-t’ an”’, Kaokut 124:43-53 (1973, no. 1).
’* Jordan Paper, “The Early Development of Chinese Cosmology”, paper presented at
the 29th International Congress of Orientalists, (Paris, July 16-22, 1973).
l9 Because the term wu hsing has none of the connotations of “basic matter” of the
Greek “elements”, sroicheion, this translation, suggested by Prof. N. Sivin, is pre-
ferable to the conventional “five elements”.
HNT4:llab.
’* See the table of correlations in Needham, SCC II:262-3.
Needham, SCC III:398.
Cf. HNT 4:la: “Everything that is upon the earth lies within the six cardinal points
and the outer limits of the four directions. The sun and moon illumine it, the stars and
planets rule it. The four seasons regulate it, r’ai-suiu [invisible counter-orbital correlate
of Jupiter] controls it.”
Nathan Sivin, “Cosmos and Computation in Early Chinese Mathematical Astronomy”,
T’oungPao 55:l-73 (1969), pp.9,64-67.
25 Bernhard Karlgren, “Grammatica Serica Recensa”, Bulletin of rhe Museum of Fur
Eastern Antiquities 29:l-332 (1957).
26 Yang Hsiang-k’uei”, “Wu hsing shuo ti ch’i-yuan chi ch’i yen-pienw”, Chung-kuo
ku-tai che-hsueh lun-ts’ungX,(Peking, 1957), pp. 13-31.
27 For a discussion of the term ch ’isee Nathan Sivin, Chinese Alchemy : Preliminary
Studies, Cambridge (Harvard University Press, 1968). Preface, p. xvii.
za HNT4:7b.
29 T h e position of Ltvi-Straws, summarized by Girardot, p. 3 11.
20 JOHN S. MAJOR

Major, ‘Topography and Cosmology’, pp. 103-107. See also John S. Major, ’The
Five Phases, Magic Squares, and Schematic Cosmography’, paper presented at the Work-
shop on Classical Chinese Thought, Harvard University, August 1976.
31 Nathan Sivin, “Copemicus in China”, Colloquia Copemica II:63-122. Ossolineum,
1973. P. 70 n. 6.
Ibid p. 71 ;also Nathan Sivin, “Cosmos and Computation in Early Chinese Mathemat-
ical Astronomy”, passim.
33 Plato, Timaeus, tr. F. M. Cornford. Library of Liberal Arts 106,(New York, Bobbs-
Merrill, 1959). p. 15.
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