Hundun - Interpretations

Interpretations

Hundun myths have a complex history, with many variations on the "primordial chaos" theme and associations with other legends.

The sociologist and historian Wolfram Eberhard analyzed the range of various hundun myths in his book (1968:438-446) on local cultures in South and East China. He treated it as a World egg mythic "chain" from the southern Liao culture, which originated in the Sichuan and Hubei region.

1. Hundun creation myths involving humanity being born from a "thunder-egg" or lump of flesh, the son of an emperor, the Thunder god represented as a dog with bat wings, localized with the Miao people and Thai people.
2. The animal Lei (the rare character combines the "dog radical" 犭with a lei 雷 "thunder" phonetic) "is a creature like a lump, without head, eyes, hands, or feet. At midnight it produces noises like thunder." (1968:440)
3. The hundun dumplings, etymologically connected with "round", "unorganized; chaotic", and perhaps the "round mountain" Kunlun.
4. The world-system huntian 渾天 in ancient Chinese astronomy conceptualized the universe as a round egg and the earth as a yolk swimming within it.
5. The sack and the shooting of the god connects sack-like descriptions of hundun, perhaps with "sack" denoting "testicles", legends about Shang Dynasty king Wu Yi who lost a game of chess with the god Heaven and suspended a sack filled with blood and shot arrows at it, and later traditions of shooting at human dolls.
6. Pangu 盤古 is the mythological creator of the universe, also supposedly shaped like a sack, connected with dog mythologies, and who grew into a giant in order to separate Heaven and Earth.
7. Heaven and earth as marital partners within the world-egg refers to the theme of Sky father and Earth Mother goddess.
8. Zhongli 重黎 or 融黎 is identified with Zhu Rong 祝融 "god of fire", which is a mythology from the southern state Chu, with variations appearing as two gods Zhong and Li.
9. Zhongli 重黎 clan, which has variant writings, originated in the Ba (state), near present-day Anhui.
10. The brother-sister marriage is a complex of myths explaining the origins or mankind (or certain families), and their first child is usually a lump of flesh, which falls into pieces and populates the world. In later mythology, the brother Fu Xi and sister Nüwa, who lived on Mt. Kunlun, exemplify this marriage.

Norman J. Girardot, professor of Chinese religion at Lehigh University, has written articles and a definitive book on hundun. He summarizes this mythology as follows.

1. The hun-tun theme in early Taoism represents an ensemble of mythic elements coming from different cultural and religious situations.
2. The symbolic coherence of the hun-tun theme in the Taoist texts basically reflects a creative reworking of a limited set of interrelated mythological typologies: especially the cosmic egg-gourd, the animal ancestor-cosmic giant, and primordial couple mythologies. The last two of these typologies are especially, although not exclusively, linked to what may be called the deluge cycle of mythology found primarily in southern local cultures.
3. While there may also be a cultural connection between the southern deluge cycle and the cosmogonic scenario of the cosmic egg (i.e., via the "thunder-egg," "origin of ancestors from egg or gourd," and "origin of agriculture and mankind from gourd" myths), the fundamental linkage for all these typologies is the early Taoist, innovative perception of a shared symbolic intention that accounts for, and supports, a particular cosmogonic, metaphysical, and mystical vision of creation and life. (1983:209)

Interpretations of Hundun have expanded from "primordial chaos" into other realms. For instance, it is a keyword in Neidan "Chinese internal alchemy". Robinet (2007:525) explains, "Alchemists begin their work by "opening" or "boring" hundun; in other words, they begin from the Origin, infusing its transcendent element of precosmic light into the cosmos in order to reshape it."