Chinese Origin Story: Pan Gu
This origin story comes from Chinese culture. It was first written down about 1,775 years ago, around 220–265 CE, yet it must have been told orally long before that.
Pan Gu
In the beginning, there was a huge egg that contained chaos, a mixture of yin and yang—opposite forces like female/male, aggressive/passive, cold/hot, dark/light, and wet/dry. Within this yin and yang was Pan Gu. When Pan Gu came out of the egg, he separated the chaos inside the egg into many opposites, including Earth and sky.
Pan Gu stood in the middle of these opposites, with his head touching the sky and his feet planted on Earth.
The heavens and the Earth began to grow at a rate of 10 feet a day, and Pan Gu grew along with them. After another 18,000 years, the sky was higher, and Earth was thicker. Pan Gu stood between them like a 30,000-mile-high pillar so they would never again join.
When Pan Gu died, his skull became the top of the sky, his breath became the wind and clouds, and his voice became the rolling thunder. One eye became the Sun and the other the Moon. His body and limbs turned into five big mountains, and his blood formed the roaring water. His veins became roads, and his muscles turned into fertile land. The countless stars in the sky came from his hair and beard, and flowers and trees came from his skin. His bone marrow turned to jade and pearls. His sweat flowed like the good rain and the sweet dew that nurtures all things on Earth. Even the fleas and the lice on his body had a purpose: they became the ancestors of humanity.
Image credits
This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0 except for the following:
An imagined portrait of Pan Gu, from the Sancai Tuhui—a seventeenth-century Chinese encyclopedia. Public domain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pangu.jpg
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