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Chinese Mythology: Difference between revisions
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=== Creation Stories ===
* Everything began as formless chaos. The world was created when this chaos coalesced into the form of Pan Gu, the first being, in equal measures of Yin and Yang. Pan Gu then used his great axe to split the Yin and Yang into Earth and Heaven respectively, then kept them seperated by pushing up the sky. This took 18,000 years, after which Pan Gu died. His breath became the wind, his voice the thunder. His left eye became the Sun and his right the Moon, his hair the Stars and Milky Way. His body became the mountains, his blood the rivers, his muscles the fertile soil, his fur the plants, his bones the valuable minerals, his bone marrows the sacred diamonds. His sweat fell as rain, and the fleas on his fur became the fish and animals of the land. This is more or less the [[
* Alternately, the world was created and run by Shang-Di, variously understood either as [[God]], a [[God of Gods]], or Heaven itself, and literally meaning "High Sovereign". Shang-Di is a monotheistic or semi-monotheistic concept which predates Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, and works through the other various gods and spirits, who were regarded as either intermediaries (and thus comparable to [[Our Angels Are Different|angels]], and/or lesser deities in their own right. Worship of Shang-Di faded out around the Zhou dynasty, in favour of ''Tian'', which means 'sky' or 'heaven'.
* [[Take a Third Option|Or]]: the world as it is now began when the Emperor of the Southern Sea and the Emperor of the Northern Sea found Chaos, an enormous sapient [[Eldritch Abomination|lump of flesh]]. Being obliging sorts, they drilled seven holes in it (because people have seven holes: nostril, nostril, mouth, ear, ear, anus, the other one), but it died shortly thereafter, and the world was formed from Chaos' corpse.
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