Bøger af Hong Yuan

Shan Hai Jing (The Legends of Mountains and Seas), commonly titled The Classic of Mountains and Seas or Guideways Through Mountains and Seas per Richard Strassberg, was a book that was juxtaposed to the later book Shui Jing (classic or canons on 137 rivers) written by Sang Qin of the Cao-Wei dynasty (220-265 A.D.). For the absurdities and strange things in the book, such as folklore monsters, weird animals, ancient clan genealogies and strange lands (i.e., terra incognita), scholars of different dynasties felt troublesome to determine the genre in the imperial bibliography. In the Manchu Qing dynasty, Ji Xiaolan treated the book as fiction; during the Republic of China, Lu Xun treated the book as sorcery; and subsequently, Yuan Ke treated the book as mythology. Anne Birrell, author of The Classic of Mountains and Seas, pointed out that the book was taken to be of different genre in history, such as geomancy, geography and cosmology, etc., with the Westerners and Japanese going astray in different directions as well, including the claims of cosmography per M. Nazin (1839), geography per Léon de Risny (1890s), tribal peoples per Gustav Schlegel (1892), deities per Edward T. C. Werner (1923), materia medica per Bernard E. Read (1928-39), religious and medical per Ito Seiji (1969), ethnographic per Rémi Mathieu, folk medicine per John William Schiffeler (1977, 1980), and gendered motif per Riccardo Francasso (1988), etc. Richard Strassberg treated the book as bestiary (2018). Today, in the context of China's assertion of the grandiose imperial past, the book was wrongly treated by the Chinese to be about ancient geological exploration records, a theme also seen in Henriette Mertz's Pale Ink (1958). The Legends of Mountains and Seas, which would be expounded in this book to be about two different kinds of fortune-telling, sorcery and divination, should not be taken as a Han-dynasty equivalent philosophical 'jing' [canons or classic, i.e., longitude/28 lodges' asterism] learning edited by Confucius and his disciples, nor the nature of the derivative sets of interpretation and commentary books that were known as the Han dynasty 'wei' ['latitude' or "five planets' divination"] series, nor the 'chen-wei' (ch'an wei) prophecy and argot books (i.e., implicit prophecy or cryptology that Jacques Gernet called by esoteric commentaries). While the mountain part of the book could be termed 'guideways' as proposed by Yuan Ke and Richard Strassberg, the 'jing'-suffixed seas' components could not be qualified with this tag. The mountains' part was actually the ancient Shi-fa stalk divination. The Legends of Mountains and Seas was compiled by Liu Xin (53 BC - 23 AD). The book, totaling 18 chapters nowadays, apparently developed the different contents throughout the Zhou, Qin, Han and Jinn dynasties. It was deduced that Liu Xin combined the five chapters of the book on the "mountains" (Wu Zang San Jing) with the chapters on the "[over-]seas" contents to become a consolidated mountains and seas' book. The seas or overseas' components could be further separated into two groups, i.e., the "inner seas" and the "outer seas" sections that were compiled by Liu Xin and the "within-seas" and the "overseas wilderness" sections that were possibly collected by Guo Pu (A.D. 276-324), with the former two sections possibly synchronizing with the Han empire's military expansion, and the latter two sharing similar contents as Lian-shan Yi (divination on concatenated [undulating] mountain ranges), Gui-cang Yi (returning-to-earth hoarding divination), A.D. 279 Ji-zhong tomb divination texts, and the 1993 Wangjiatai excavated divination texts.

Zhou King Muwang's Travels, which appeared to be about the Zhou king's travel to the West and his rendezvous with the Queen Mother of the West, i.e., daughter of the lord on high per se, was taken by the Western historians to be about some prehistoric East-West exchange, with Charles Hucker equating the queen mother to Queen Sheba. However, this mythopoeic book was about divination and in fact a pure fiction on the same par as the Shanghai Museum bamboo slips called Jian-da-wang Po Han (Chu King Jianwang's suffering from drought [or dispelling drought]). The repetitiveness of narratives related to the Zhou king's visits with the western desert tribal chieftains in the former, which was highly artificially crafted, was run in the same groove as the repetitiveness of the Chu king's drought auguries with close to a dozen of his ministers and diviners in the latter.Zhou King Muwang's Travels was among the bamboo slips retrieved from the Ji-zhong tomb in A.D. 279, that included the materials that came to be known as The Bamboo Annals, plus Ji-zhong Suo-yu (trivial statements from the Ji-jun commandery tomb, a collection of mysterious novels rampant in the Warring States period, covering monsters, weird words, anecdotes, court secrets, sorcery, dreams, and stories related to the Yellow Thearch and the three saints Yao, Shun and Yu, et al.), etc. The hoard of divinatory materials from the Ji-zhong tomb shed light on the rampant epidemic of sophistry, divination and fables in the late Warring States time period. Calling both Zhou King Muwang's travels and Chu King Jianwang (r. 427-405 B.C. per Xi Nian; 431-408 B.C. per Shi-ji)'s prayer for rain by divination and pure fiction could be somewhat hubristic in light of the whole Sinologist world's obsession with those topics. But the truth was that the former was not about the Zhou king's travels of the 11th-10th centuries B.C. and the latter not about the Chu king's rain praying of the 5th century B.C., other than divination and fiction similar to what the Western Jinn historians concluded for the materials in Ji-zhong Suo-yu.Zhou King Muwang's Travels contained six travelogues that covered three discrete stories of no successive bearing to one another. The first four travelogues, i.e., visit with Count of the Yellow River at today's northeastern Yellow River Bend, travel to mount Kunlun [where the Yellow Thearch's palaces and Feng-long's tomb were], rendezvous with Queen Mother of the West and three months' hunting at the northern feather wilderness, were about longevity, immortality and divination; the 5th travelogue was about hunting and divination around the Eastern Zhou capital district area on the false assumption that the Western Zhou kings had already relocated eastward, a symptom of retrograde amnesia; and the last travelogue was about the Zhou dynasty mourning customs.The first four travelogues, with the stories centered on the western territories that had the rumored Kunlun mountain, had the intrinsic value in ascertaining the geographical knowledge of ancient Chinese. Note Kunlun and Xuanpu (hanging garden) were not seen in The Spring & Autumn Annals and Zhou Yi. The fifth travelogue was actually the very materials that could debunk the forgery nature of the contemporary version of The Bamboo Annals as the king's travel itineraries were inadvertently aligned in the wrong and inverted order in the said annals. Before the ancient Chinese looked beyond the Pamirs for Kunlun and the western queen mother, the western queen mother appeared to have her temple right on the outskirts of the capital city Chang'an from the time of Han Emperor Wudi, with the western queen mother being a state-sanctioned Taoist goddess. There was beyond reasonable doubt about the forgery bamboo annals' entry on the queen mother's visiting the Zhou king and staying a guest at the Z

Heavenly Questions was a rhythmic poem that inherited the ancient tetrasyllabic characteristic of Shi-jing (book of poems) of four line stanzas. Ancient historians called the poem by the "heavenly questions" to revere the heaven as a high lord that could not be challenged with direct questioning. The poem has more than 170 questions, i.e., a hybrid of questions about the riddles and enigma of the ancient history concerning the universe, the Genesis, the Nature, myths and legends, and the rise and fall of dynasties. The poem had a question asking who was the creator of Nv-wa: "Nv-wa you [possessing] ti [body], shu [who] zhi-jiang [prototype-develop] zhi [it]?" The Nv-wa question was the earliest recorded agnosticism in the ancient Chinese literature that expressed the doubts about the existence of unknown or unknowable god or gods and the divine and supernatural beings, much earlier than the theories proposed by Thomas Henry Huxley.Heavenly Questions could serve as a watershed line to timestamp the creation time of the ancient legends and myths and separate the writings into the Waring States time period (475-221 B.C.) versus the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-A.D. 220). Whatever legends and myths carried in the poem should be treated as earlier, or otherwise should be treated as invention of the Han dynasty. In the case of Xia King Qi's five sons versus the 5th son as seen in the Warring States sophistry writings, Heavenly Questions stated that the Xia king for several times rose to the sky to be the high lord's guest and received the award of 'jiu-bian' (nine encore [elegies]) and 'jiu-ge' (nine songs), and in the counter-theme in the latter part of stanza of the quatrain, the poem questioned why the king caused the sons to agitate around, i.e., the rebellion of five sons and the crackdown by Count Peng-shou in Chang Mai (surrendering the wheat as sacrifice) of Yi Zhou Shu (extant Zhou dynasty book), and his mother to have the caesarean birth, and why after the king's death, the Xia kingdom disintegrated. In Heavenly Questions, there was the ancient concept of 'ba zhu', namely, eight pillars or struts that propped up the heaven from the earth, a much earlier concept that was not the same as 'si ji' (four polars) in Lv-shi Chun-qiu (master Lv Buwei's spring & autumn) or 'ba ji' (eight polars) in Huai Nan Zi (King Huainan's discourse) -a term David Pankenier translated as 'culmen'. The value of Heavenly Questions could also be substantiated by the excavated stelle Zu Chu Wen (cursing Chu) timestamped Qin King Huiwenwang's 26th year or 312 B.C., on which the Chu king was cursed as 'kang-hui', i.e., the legendary water god Gong-gong who broke the heaven's pillar. Heavenly Questions was taken by the Soong dynasty scholars to be the source feed for the other ancient divination, cosmology and mythogeography books. The artificial marks were detectable about the cause and effect of Shan Hai Jing (Legends of Mountains & Seas) and Heavenly Questions, with some paragraphs of the seas' section of Shan Hai Jing being written as the extended interpretation of the latter, such as Shang ancestor-king Wang-hai. Shan Hai Jing, in randomly calling Wang-hai as someone from the Gou-surnamed Kun-min state, could have switched on the unbridled fantasy by extrapolating on the 'kun' (trapped/entrenched) hexagram in Zhou Yi (Zhou dynasty divination) or Gui-cang Yi (returning-to-earth storage divination). In "great northern wilderness" of Shan Hai Jing, there was a similar story about the Yi1-surnamed Xiu-ge person, a purported great grandson of Lord Yu, who was let go to become the famed Mao-min hairy people over the 'manslaughter' crime of killing the Chuo-ren people. The poem deserves to be called epic for the all-encompassing coverage of mu

Yu Gong (Lord Yu's Tributes; Tribute of Yu), which talked about Lord Yu's flood control and zoning of the nine prefectures, was the cornerstone on which the Sinitic nation, with the three successive dynasties of Xia, Shang and Zhou from the same big family, was founded, and the blueprint according to which the imperial administrative layout was mapped throughout the past millennia. Yu Gong was purportedly a chapter among Xia Shu (book of the Xia dynasty) in the post-Confucius Confucian Classic Shang-shu (remotely ancient history; book of documents), that was seen in Sima Qian's Shi-ji (historian's records; historic records). It was taken to be a pseudepigrapha, i.e., written by Lord Yu (r. ? 2207-2198 BC per Lu Jinggui; ? 1989-1982 per the forgery bamboo annals) and his assistant Bo-yi during the era of flood-control, i.e., about 2200-2300 B.C.E.The book, however, could not have been written earlier than the Warring States time period (475-221 B.C.), and might not be part of Confucius' abridged Shang-shu commandments, oaths, mottos and promulgations from the three dynasties of Xia, Shang and Zhou. Yu Gong neither belonged to the forgery set of the ancient version Shang-shu that was submitted to the Eastern Jinn dynasty court by Mei Yi, a series of books written by Huangfu Mi but pretentiously attributed to the long-lost Kong An'guo-collected version from the double-walls of Confucius' mansion. Lord Yu's flood quelling activity, which was touted in Shi-jing (Book of Poems), is corroborated by the Sui4-gong Xu bronzeware on which Yu's flood quelling activity was inscribed with words similar to Yu Gong (Lord Yu's Tributes). Zuo Zhuan, in Lu Lord Zhaogong's 12th year or 530 B.C., claimed that absent Lord Yu everybody would become fish in the water. Numerous ancient classics, such as Li Zheng of Shang-shu, repeatedly talked about 'Yu ji', i.e., Lord Yu's footprints. Some Shang bronzeware called Xiang3ru2 (offer to Ru2/Yu) was recently discovered in Hejin of Shanxi, talking about the Shang king's making sacrifice to Lord Yu. Namely, the oldest artifact proving Lord Yu and Xia dynasty's existence. Additionally, there are numerous pieces of bronzeware that specifically talked about Lord Yu's footsteps, such as Qin-gong Gui (Qin Lord Xianggong's 'gui' vessel), and the high lord's overlooking the Xia land (i.e., 'nao'), such as Shi-qiang Pan bronzeware that was dated to Zhou King Gongwang's reign. The caveat is that the original Xia people's land could be very much restricted to the You-Xia-zhi-ju land near today's Luoyang of Henan and on the southern bank of the Yellow River and that the famed nine prefectures could be actually the mountain area to the south of Luoyang and to the west of the Nanyang basin. This is an area eulogized by poem Song Gao as at least three fiefs of the four ordained ministers for the four tall mountains of China, i.e., Shen-guo, Fuguo (i.e., Lv-guo), Qi and Xu3-guo states. The book could be used to debunk myths in mythogeography. While Kunlun, or Ji-shi (piled-up rocks), was not seen in The Spring & Autumn Annals, Sinitic China long ago talked about Lord Yu's footsteps across the land and the accomplishments of flood control that averted the fate of people becoming fish on a grand scale, and on a micro scale talked about the nine ancient prefectures that were the mountain area south of the West-to-East flowing Yellow River -which implied that the Xia people had origin there before embarking on a nation-wide flood control work. The central place of Mount Kunlun, i.e., what Richard E. Strassberg claimed as axis mundi or pillar of the sky, had a much older denotation in Yu Gong as a tribe, not a mountain, and was not taken to be the center of world or the paramount sky-propping pillar of the earth till the Han-Jin