Scientific Enlightenment, Div. One
Book 1: A Thermodynamic Genealogy of Primitive Religions
1.5. Chapter 13: The congruence between creation myths, philosophy, and the science of origin
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Copyright © 2004, 2005, 2006 by Lawrence C. Chin. All rights reserved.



In the next book we will see that philosophy, by virtue of its being anamnesis of the conservational truth of existence, recapitulates the diachronic stages of the evolution of the Universe on the synchronic axis of logic. The Presocratic philosophy (hupokeimenon, phusis, apeiron), the Daoist philosophy (Dao), and the Upanishads (Brahman) are all on the same level, of the same depth in their anamnesis, usually called "immanent philosophy" and here designated as "immature" philosophic reflection, and they -- with their undifferentiated conserved substratum as the source of all beings existent -- roughly capture the stage of the "hot soup" of the beginning radiation era immediately after the Big Bang. The structure of the "depth" of reflection, from (cosmogonic) myths to the most "mature" philosophic reflection on the origin and nature of existence (usually called "transcendental philosophy": e.g. Parmenides, Plato, Advaita Vedanta philosophy of Sankara, the description of Lord Krishna by Arjuna as param brahma param dhama in the 10th chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, and the various Buddhist philosophers), in their ability to correspondingly and progressively get to the bottom of the genesis of the Universe and the truth of existence, can be preliminarily diagrammed thusly:

                (up to First Axial)                        (modern cosmology)
          PURE MYTHIC: Pangu, Enuma Elish,
                 Hawaiian cosmogony,
  Egpytian cosmogonic myths (Helio- & Hermopolis)          
    (i.e. of the tribal and the beginning cosmo-
              logical civilizations)
                         |                                      energetic /
                         |                                     thermodynamic
      speculative mythic: Hesiod's Theogony;                    constraints 
   Shah-nameh's cosmogony, Old Testament creation myth                    
   Orphic cosmogony, Nihonshuki/ Kojiki cosmogony
             Egyptian Memphite theology
                         |
                         |                
         immature PHILOSOPHIC: Huai-nan-zi, 
      Dao of Laozi & Yijing metaphysics; apeiron of            "HOT SOUP"
        Anaximander; arche of Thales & Anaximenes;             of Big Bang
                Upanishads Brahman                                model  
                         |          
                         |       
 mature PHILOSOPHIC: Parmenides; Sankara's Brahman            "Singularity"
                         |                   
                         |      
                       Plato
                         |
                         |
 completed PHILOSOPHIC: Buddha, Chi-Tsang,                 "Creation ex nihilo" 
                Sunyavada Buddhism                  (e.g. of inflationary model)

Simple cosmogonic myths. At the most premature stage of the symbolization of the creation of the cosmos are the cosmogonic myths that concern us in this Book I. We are now coming to the second theme of creation myths: where did order come from at all? Three types of "answer" have been envisaged: (1) the creation of the cosmos is symbolized by its components sprouting forth from the body-parts of the primordial deity after the "sacrifice" of the latter (the "transmythological theme"); (2) through a drama of the differentiating and ordering work of this primordial deity to produce these components (order) of the cosmos; (3) or simply through a straight-forward differentiation of the orderly many from an undifferentiated orderless one (substratum). Remember that the principal preoccupation of the ancients as expressed in their cosmogonic myth is with the problem of how, given that the natural state of things is maximal entropy (the downhill way, undifferentiation, lack of any order: the second law), the low entropic state of the cosmos -- the uphill way producing its differentiation between heaven and earth, river and land, animals and plants -- could have arisen. The primitive humans then envisage in their cosmogonic myths these three types of answer to this problem. But very few myths are "pure" in incorporating the answers; most are mixture of any of these three types. We see the first type in the Chinese Pangu myth, the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, the Indic Purusha, the Aztec mass-sacrifice of a whole pantheon of gods to power the sun, the Germanic Yimir (the primeval giant which the primordial trinity of gods -- Othinn, Vili, and Vé -- sacrifice in order to create the world from his body parts),1 and somewhat in the Egyptian Heliopolitan cycle. We see the second type in the Hawaiian and the Australian Dreaming cosmogonies. An example of the third type would be the simple "separation of earth and sky from each other" without further explanation, such as this one from Euripides (fr. 484):

And the tale is not mine but from my mother, how sky and earth were one form (morfh mia); and when they had been separated apart from each other they bring forth all things, and gave them up into the light: trees, birds, beasts, the creatures nourished by the salt sea, and the race of mortals. (In Kirk and Raven, ibid., p. 32)

These constitute the bottommost layer or substratum of human cosmogonic reflection. We have already dismissed such complicated genealogy of this sort of myth as the psychological type of Girard's, that the myth codifies the role of a primordial murder (sacrifice) in the creation and maintenance of social order which somehow requires the victimization of a scapegoat. Rather we see firstly the "transmythological theme" as recapitulating the thermodynamics of energy-transformation involved in order-formation and -maintenance and which requires the destruction of a primordial order (e.g. the sun) in order for the order of the cosmos (e.g. the biospheric order) to arise; while the second type similarly reflects the understanding that order cannot emerge (nor be maintained) unless some work is done (energy input) to create (and maintain) it. The second law dictates that the natural state of a system (such as the cosmos) is high entropy, such as when after tossing a series of coins one most likely obtains the state of random, even distribution of coins in all spots:

  o  o oo   oo  o 
o    o  o    oo o  o
  o oo  oo   oo oo  o
o o   o   o  o     o
 oo o     o     o
     o  o      o 

The cosmos in the beginning must be of such equilibrium state, amorphous and without differentiation of structures (without differentiation between heaven and earth, river and land, etc.). If we want the coins to be distributed in an orderly fashion, we must intervene and spend energy to order them:

o     o     o
o     o     o 
o     o     o
o     o     o
o     o     o
o     o     o

Similarly the cosmos cannot automatically arrive at the non-random, ordered state that it is today, river being river and differentiated from land, and heaven being heaven and differentiated from earth, etc., unless some primordial beings intervene and spend energy to order it, to "line things up." The first ordered state of the cosmos must have emerged through such intervening mechanism from an original undifferentiated maximal entropic state devoid of information and structure. Thus for the primitive mind the animae must have in the beginning of time gone about separating heaven from earth and making land from sea, etc. (Below we'll touch on the flaw in this primitive thinking.) And, the second law always in effect, and entropy always increasing in a closed system, this cosmogonic work of course has to be periodically repeated during the annual cosmogonic rituals or sacrifices in order to keep the cosmos in its ordered state, just as the coins, once lined up, will lose their low entropy state in time and become more and more random in distribution unless we periodically come in and re-order them. In the case of biospheric order an organism maintains its low entropic state because it is an open system that takes in energy with which it continually re-builds order within itself during biosynthesis (the "ordering work" done by its enzymatic-metabolic system). (Many myths such as Pangu, Enuma Elish, the Egyptian, and the Aztec seem to be mixtures of both kinds.) The anthropomorphism of these "thermodynamic metaphors", so to speak, is necessitated by the animistic conception of the cosmos. The most "primitive" cosmogonic myths summarize the understanding, the intuition of the thermodynamic structure of the Universe, that a predominance of order over disorder is necessary for creation (like rolling the stone up the hill, a difficult local decrease of entropy at the expense, of course, of greater entropy-increase outside the locale), with the (anthropomorphic) symbolization of this in terms of the "effort" of the good god in either spending energy to sustain order or in warding off an evil god symbolizing disorder. All these myths reflect an anamnesis of the first law as well, that varieties of existence must all have been differentiated out of a common substratum: in the animistic worldview it is the ancestral anima; today, the varieties of matter are reducible to "energy". It is, after all, the intuition of the first law which prompts us to see a mystery in the problem of the origin ("if nothing can come from nothing, ex nihilo nil sit, then where did everything come from?"), and it is the understanding of the second law which makes necessary a scenario for the formation of order out of chaos ("if disorder is the more natural state [the downhill process], then how can order [a uphill process] have arisen?").

Examples. As Veronica Seton-Williams and Peter Stocks summarize the Egyptian case (Egypt, 3rd ed., 1993, p. 38 - 9): "In the earliest times there were three important cosmogonies, those of Heliopolis, Hermopolis, and Memphis, the most important of which was the Heliopolitan Cycle which eventually became almost universally accepted, parts of the other systems being incorporated within it. Heliopolis was the centre of the various aspects of sun worship. The theory developed by the priests there of the creation of the world was that originally there was nothing but a watery waste or abyss of Chaos known as Nun, personified as a god. From this chaos rose a mound, as an island of sand emerged from the river as the inundation receded. On this mound appeared Atum, the original sun-god always portrayed in human form and later identified with Re. From Atum [through spitting] came the dual deities of the sky, Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture, clouds and dew). [It was Shu which lifted heaven apart from the earth; ANET, p. 4, footnote.] They in turn created Geb (the earth god) and Nut (the sky goddess), who produced Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys. Sometimes included was Horus the Elder (so-called to distinguish him from Horus son of Isis), but if he is excluded, the reminder were known as the Divine Ennead (Nine)... Hermopolis Magna, the City of Thoth, capital of the XVth nome of Upper Egypt, independently developed another cycle of creation gods known as the Hermopolitan Ogdoad (company of eight) which consisted of deities grouped in pairs of gods and goddesses; Nun and Nunet (primordial water), Heh and Hehet (space), Kek and Keket (darkness), and Amun and Amunet (invisibility). Again the watery waste produced a mound on which appeared an egg, and from this came forth the sun-god Re." (The far more speculative Memphite theology, considered in connection with the Israelite Yahweh religiousness, no longer belongs in this primitive level.) Here consciousness expresses the thermodynamic intuition about genesis through the metaphor of the Nile river but it is typically thermodynamic nonetheless. From the primordial, undifferentiated substratum (first Nun, and then Shu and Tefnut, all, as water and air, undifferentiated substrate, and so are the Ogdoad) order and individualities emerge through the input of energy (Shu's lifting of heaven).

As Betty Fullard-Leo summarizes the Hawaiian cosmogony: "In the beginning... Po was a vast, empty land, a dark abyss where only one life form dwelled. This was the spirit of Keawe [the ancestral, atmospheric anima]. A single light shone through the darkness of Po - a flame holding the energy of creation. In this chaotic vortex, Keawe evolved order. He opened his great calabash and flung the lid into the air. As it unfolded, it became the huge canopy of blue sky. From his calabash, Keawe drew an orange disk, hanging it from the sky to become the sun." Such is the "ordering work" of the primordial deity. "Next Keawe manifested himself as Na Wahine, a female divinity considered his daughter. In addition, he became Kane, his own son, also known as Eli or Eli-Eli, who was the male generative force of creation." Similar to the splitting of Atum into Shu (air) and Tefnut. "In the Kumulipo, the best known of the Hawaiian creation chants, the feats of Eli-Eli are detailed in rhythmic litany. Na Wahine and Kane mated spiritually to produce a royal family, who became additional primary gods worshipped by the Hawaiian people. In ancient chants and rituals, three sons: Ku, Lono, and Kanaloa, along with Kane are the four major Hawaiian gods. Keawe made Kane the ruler of natural phenomena, such as the earth, stones, fresh water. Most importantly, Ku as Kukailimoku was god of war, but he also reigned over woodlands and crops... Kanaloa was responsible for the southern Pacific Ocean and as such was god of seamen and lord of fishermen. Lono, as lord of the sun and of wisdom, caused the earth to grow green [he is the god of fertility]. As [also] a god of medicine, he had a particular interest in keeping herbs and medicinal plants flourishing... Kane and Na Wahine also had daughters. Among them, Laka was the goddess of hula; Hina was the mother of Maui who pulled the Hawaiian Islands from the ocean; and Kapo was the goddess of the South Pacific and was largely worshipped on Maui. Among the major divinities was the goddess Papa, queen of nature, and the man she married, called Wakea. In legend, Papa and Wakea's first child was born deformed like a taro root. From the child's grave, the first taro plant grew to furnish sustenance to the rest of the human race, which had its origins in this first couple. The twelfth deity was Milu, lord of the spirit world and lord of Ka-pa'a-he'o, where souls who had departed their sleeping or unconscious mortal body might end up if they were not pardoned by their 'aumakua (personal gods) during their wanderings. One of several entrances to the barren, arid land of Milu was thought to be through a pit situated in the mouth of Waipi'o Valley on the Big Island."

Speculative cosmogonic myth. At the second stage, apparently consciousness, reminded by and wrestling with the conservational truth that nothing can come out of nothing and that something always comes out of something else, sees a problem in the primordial god, i.e. where does this god come from? The beginning speculative mythopoetic mode thus invents theogony or cosmogony out of nothing. Hesiod's theogony discussed earlier is the ideal example. Here consciousness is already reflective, speculative, or philosophical, although it still symbolizes by anthropomorphic imageries or in terms of interpersonal relationship. The cosmogony in Ferdowsi's Shah Nameh (ca. 11th century) is another example, but somewhat intermediate between mythopoesis and the Presocratic "physicists" in that god (Hormazd, Ahuramazda) creates through the 4 elements (for the following prose translation is consulted Reuben Levy, The Epic of the Kings):

Discourse regarding the Description of the Work of Creation
Of the beginning it is necessary that you know correctly, what the essence [māyeh] of the elements [guhar-ān] are in origin [lit. from the first, az nokhost].
That God [yazdān] created something [the world] out of nothing, in order that his power might be manifested.
From him came the essence [māyeh] of the four elements [guhar], he brought them forth without effort [ranj] and without expenditure of time [rouzgār].
One of them, fire, rose shining [tābnāk], then from among them wind and water [came] over the dark earth [tireh khālk].
First when fire was stirred [damid: blew, inflated] into motion [jonbesh: agitation], from its heat [garmish: its warmth] dryness appeared.
After that it was still again [from its stillness (ārām)], coldness came again, out of coldness moisture grew.
When these four elements came to place, on their account the fleeting world [sepanji sarāye] came [into being].
The elements were thus compounded [made: sākhtand] one with [lit. inside] the other, and they made up every genus of the proudest phenomena [digar gune gerdan].
Thus appeared this swift-moving dome [i.e. the sky: gonbad tizrou], [displaying] ever-new wonderful marvels [shegefty-ye namāyande-ye: "wonderful representatives"].
Thus appeared in it the twelve constellations, so that the knower may be deserving of such things.
It was master [kodakhodā-ye] of the twelve [Signs] and the seven [Planets], each [of which] took up its due [sazāvār: "deserving"] place.
The orbiting firmaments of heaven [falak-hā] were bound up one within the other, they were set in motion ["started oscillating", bejonbid] when the structure [lit. "work"] was completed ["connected"].
With the sea and plain and mountain and meadow, the earth became like a shining lamp.
The mountain rose high and waters coalesced, the heads of growing plants [rostani] reared upwards.
But to the earth itself no place on high was allotted; it was a center-point [markezi], dark and black.
Overhead the stars displayed their wonders, to the earth in the interior [of the cosmos, evidently] they cast their brightness.
Thus fire ascended and water poured down [the variant reading of abru in the text, as the footnote notes, is ātesh, "fire"], thus the sun revolved around the earth [the cosmos: the geocentric view proper to the functional perspective].
Grass rose together with several kinds of trees, whose tops grew upwards happily [az bakht, "from luck"].
They grew upward, except this power they have no other; they ran not, unlike the animals running [paviyandegān: "running things"] in every direction.

Levy finishes the section on creation: "These moving creatures brought the growing things into subjection. They seek food, sleep and repose and find all their satisfaction in being alive; with neither tongue for utterance nor wisdom to make investigation they nurture their bodies on thorn and stubble. They do not know if the outcome of what they do is good or ill; the Lord demands no service of them." (p. 2) The creation of man follows.


(Text from Shahnameh, ed. Djalal Khalequi-Motlaqh; vol. 1, Bibliotheca Persica, New York, 1988)

This Persian episode of course immediately reminds one of the Old Testament creation myth. I want to emphasize its structural sameness with Hesiod's Theogony in that God here, specifically said, created the world from nothing (nāchiz); with Hesiod, and also the Old Testament, it is implied that gods came from nothing and that God created the world from nothing. On the other hand, then, Shahnameh has more in common with the Old Testament, as both are bit more speculative than Hesiod's Theogony in that, may it be said (?), they are of the monotheistic type -- monotheism is not always by virtue of its being such of superior speculation than polytheism; it has to be judged case by case. But Shahnameh itself seems to be a bit more advanced in speculative power than the Old Testament creation myth, as the "four element" thinking and much of the process afterwards reflect a richer philosophical content. That is, the empiricistic observation of matter in general and extrapolation from it of its general "states" (liquidity, gaseousness, solidity) which, being the surface effects of the underlying intensity of molecular mobility, are accompanied by warmth and coldness, dryness and wetness, and which, objectified into independent existence by the functional perspective, thus form the guiding thread in the description of the formation of things in the empirical world -- this sort of empiricistic, de-personalized mechanical "reasoning" or rationality represents the budding of philosophical speculation which is more advanced than symbolization of the formation and working of the world based on analogy of anthropomorphism ("God makes the natural phenomena" like human beings make a bridge) or interpersonal relationship. The description of "creation" that follows is naturalistic, and so on the same part as the Milesians' (Anaximenes, Thales, Anaximander). Morever, the prefatory stanzas Ferdowsi inserted before the cosmogonic episodes contain reflections on God that seem derived from the anamnesis of conservation and approach the Chinese articulation of Dao and the Milesian one of the apeiron.

In the name of God of soul and wisdom, than whom thought cannot reach higher.
God of name and God of space [jā-ye: place], God [who is] sustenance-granting and our guide.
The God of Saturn [kevān; Levy has "universe"] and of the revolving sky, the kindler of Moon, Venus, and Sun.
Than name, indication [neshān: pointing], and opinion is [He] higher, [who] is the element [guhar] of the production of the present author [Levy has "the essence of anything a limner may design"].

In the rest "the poet repeats his asseveration that the mind of man has no means of attaining to a knowledge of God by any power of reason." (Levy, p. 1) Ferdowsi thus repeats Laozi's dictum that the Source of the namable cannot be named, pointed to, or articulated about like just another thing in the world. But the experiential flavor is different. Laozi's Dao is immanent within, or rather, with the cosmos, and ineffable because it is undifferentiated or before differentiation. Ferdowsi's God is transcendental, beyond the cosmos, but on this account ineffable because He is not an empirical "thing" or a being in this world, nor a being or thing like things or beings in this world except that this one being happens to lie beyond the world, but rather He is not a being: transcendental pure and simple. (If only the Evangelical Protestants can grasp their God not as a being like Ferdowsi could.)

In the case of Japan, our exposition is based on Inoue Mitsusada's The History of Japan (井上光貞, 日本の歴史: 中央公論社). Japanese creation myths are found in their two examples of historiogenesis, Kojiki and Nihonshuki. The author is of the opinion that the creation myth of Kojiki is too much a product of Chinese influence, but that the one in Nihonshuki is of native Japanese origin, and is probably already present in the "Old Phrases" (旧辞), although expressed in Chinese philosophic terms (p. 18 - 22). Focus here is then on that in Nihonshuki. The myth here is not particularly about the problem of creation or genesis from nothing, but rather is a mixture between philosophical anamnesis of conservation ("substratum thinking") and mythic anthropomorphic deities (loosely speaking).

(a) 大昔, 天地がいまだわかれず, 陰陽が分かれなかったころ, 世界は雏子のように浑沌としていた. しかし, 澄んだ気が天となり, 重く濁った気が地となり, 天と地の二つになったとき, 神聖がそのなかに生まれでた (p. 21).

(a) "Long ago, the time when heaven and earth had not yet been split apart, ying and yang not yet separated, the world was undifferentiated in the manner of a chicken egg. But, then, the lighter part of air became heaven, and the heavy and obscure part became earth." This is almost exactly the same scenario as seen in the Yijing metaphysics (c.f. its cosmogony) which is itself the same as the Presocratic philosophizing, especially Anaximenes. It of course occurs also in Pangu, where the upper part of the egg became heaven and the lower part the earth. In this way it is "philosophic": "things" came into being by being differentiated from a primal substratum, here a primordial cosmic pneuma which is undifferentiatedly compact like an egg (the "egg" image again already seen in Pangu, in Orphic cosmogonic myth, and in the late Vedic: the Prajapati as the golden egg, Hiranyagarbha): this corresponds to the crystallization of subatomic particles from the hot soup (after inflation) of the traditional Big Bang model. The ascendance of the "lighter" part of the cosmic pneuma (yang) and the sinking of the heavier part (ying), just as in the Yijing metaphysics or everywhere else, are the "four element" thinking again: the effects of fast, more energetic molecular mobility within matter -- lightness, transparency, thinness, warmth, gaseousness -- and those of slow, less energetic molecular mobility -- heaviness, thickness, denseness, coldness, solidity -- are, as mentioned in connection with the Light (faoV) and Night (nux) of Parmenides' cosmogony, extrapolated from the "states" of matter, objectified into independent qualities of the condensation and rarefaction of the cosmic pneuma (like the atomic crystallization in the "hot-soup"), and taken as the guiding thread in the description of the formation of the empirical world. But while the insight is there, just before it reaches the (immature) philosophical depth, this scenario reverts back to mythic deism. "At the time when heaven and earth became two [i.e. separated], gods were born in their midst [between them]." What have crystallized from the cosmic pnuema, in other words, are not the elements or (physical) components of the cosmos as with Yijing metaphysics or Anaximenes, but gods: mythic theogony is appended to the philosophic cosmogony.

(b) 、開闢の初め, 州壤が, あたかも游魚が水上に浮かぶように漂っていたとき,  天地のなかにあし芽のようにもえだすものが生じた. これが化して国常立尊となり, 国狭槌尊, 豐くみね尊の三柱の独り身の神が生じた (Ibid.)

(b) "... During the beginning of the separation [between heaven and earth], the continents were drifting in the manner of fishes floating on waters, and things which were sprouting forth in the manner of buds were born in between heaven and earth. These things, transforming, became the trinity of the individual gods Kuninotokotachinomikoto, Kuninosazuchinomikoto, and Toyokuminenomikoto who were thus born." The "cosmogony" finishes with the theogony of 8 other primordial gods, which we'll go into later in the discussion of Japanese historiogenesis. Thus the Japanese creation myth is really on the same par as Hesiod's theogony (but lacking the theme of moral admonition of the latter) with cosmogonic reflection in accordance with the anamnesis of conservation imposed on it. That theogony starts from the sprouting of gods from an undifferentiated substratum (the earth, the gap between heaven and earth) can be interpreted either as a function of anamnesis of conservation or of analogic thinking based on agricultural processes.

The author emphasizes the native Japanese origin of this myth, even though Chinese influence in it is unmistakable.2 Its "original form", for instance, is found among the indigenous people in Okinawa, who have well preserved the ancient customs of Japan (p. 22).

(c) 大昔, 天地が近く接していた時代には, 人は蛙のように這(は)って步いていた. 太始祖神が, ある日, 岩に足をふんばり, 兩手で高々と天をおし上げてから, 空は高くなり, 人は立って步くようになった. (Ibid.)

(c) "Long ago, during the time when heaven and earth were in close contact, human beings, in the manner of frogs, moved by creeping. The Most Primordial Ancestral God, one day, leaning his feet on rocks, raised the heaven with his hands to high; thusly heaven became on high, and humans became walking in the upright fashion."

This myth is of the exact same structure as the Chinese Pangu myth: heaven and earth differentiate out from a undifferentiated substratum (due to anamnesis of conservation), but this differentiation of order out of chaos runs counter to the equally standing memory of the second law, that order in time always disintegrates into chaos -- unless energy is in-put; thus here the god spends energy creating this order; there Pangu after raising the heaven has had to continuously spend energy for 18,000 years in order to prevent the newly emergent order from collapsing back into chaos; and Marduk has had to spend energy defeating Tiamat representing disorder so as to derive from her the order of the cosmos. Still, as the second law dictates entropy- (disorder-)increase in proportion to time elapsed, periodic cosmogonic rituals re-creating the cosmos annually are acts of energy-input to maintain the precarious cosmic order -- like eating.

The similarity between this Okinawan myth and the Chinese one can of course be the result not simply of structural or (or in other words) motivational convergence (memory of the thermodynamic structure of the Universe prompting both peoples to articulate the same type of myth), but also of their actually descending from the common ancestral stock, since a large portion of Chinese mythology may have derived from the Austroasiatic and/or Austronesian substratum formerly spreading across the entire east and southeast Asia (and so ancestral to the Okinawan);3 much of Japanese mythology, as will be seen later, seems also to have derived from the Austronesian inhabitants original to Japan (and not the Ainus) before the coming of the Yayoi people via Korea around the era of Christ. The author notes, "the myth of such type as the separation of heaven from earth [etc.] was something widespread in the world of pre-civilized agriculturalists and frequent in southeast Asia; this seems to have relationship with Japanese mythology." (Ibid.; my translation.)

The Orphic cosmogonic myths, which are fundamentally primitive but taken up in an advanced framework of a salvational tradition, belong here as well. (C.f. Orphism).

Philosophy. At the immature stage of philosophic reflection ("immanent philosophy") the anamnesis of conservation is expressed clearly, without being tainted by anthropomorphico-theogonic analogies or imageries of processes of things like agricultural metaphors. Only with the philosophical anamnesis of Conservation are we going to see the Big Bang scenario of modern cosmology being "captured" in some vague, unhistorical but logical manner. Among the Chinese, the idea of Dao remains the most expressive symbolism for this, and persists not just among the Daoists but everywhere else, e.g. the description of Dao as the source of being in Huai-nan-zi in early Han (commentaries by Kao Shuo, Han):

淮南子 (卷第一原道訓)

夫道者,覆天載地,廓四方,柝八極,高不可際,深不可測,包裹天地,稟授無形。原流泉浡,沖而徐盈;混混滑滑,濁而徐清。故植之而塞于天地,橫之而彌于四海,施之無窮而無 所朝夕。舒之幎於六合,卷之不盈於一握。約而能張,幽而能明,弱而能強,柔而能剛。橫四維而含陰陽,紘宇宙而章三光。甚淖而滒,甚纖而微。山以之高,淵以之深,獸以之走,鳥以之飛,日月以之明 ,星歷以之行,麟以之游,鳳以之翔。

"What is called Dao covers the heaven and bears the earth, is wider than the four corners and extends to the eight extremities; its height cannot be measured, its depth cannot be fathomed. It envelops heaven and earth, but provides no [definite] form [commentary: "'no form' [means] that the ten thousand things have not yet form"; that is, prior to the differentiation of the as yet undifferentiated substratum into individual forms; "all these originate in Dao [as the substratum]]. The fountain-source flowing profusely [out of itself, the commentary says]; [thin, diluted] emptiness but also streaming to fullness [commentary: "beginning to gush out from emptiness, the streaming-forth does not stop and can gradually fill up; this a metaphor of Dao", that is, a metaphor of the generative power of Dao, or its ability to differentiate some-things out of no-thing-ness]. Indistinct and slippery, it is densely confused [because undifferentiated] but yet transparently clear. Hence if we plant it vertically it fills up all between heaven and earth; if we place it horizontally it covers up all four seas. We can use it [continuously, forever] without ever exhausting it, and without morning and night ["without morning and night and without peak and decline" refers, the commentary says, to its inexhaustibility]. If we flatten it out it blankets over all six he [commentary: "it means filling all between heaven and earth and filling them as one. The four cardinal directions (east, west, etc.) plus up and down are the six he."] If we roll it up it doesn't fill up a single fist. If it is constrained it can be expansive [at the same time]; if it darkens it can shine [at the same time]. If it weakens it can be strong; if it softens it can be sturdy... Mountain is high by virtue of it, valley is deep by virtue of it; beasts run by virtue of it; birds fly by virtue of it. Sun and moon shine by virtue of it; stars and galaxies move by virtue of it; sea animals swim by virtue of it; phoenix glide by virtue of it." These last statements are describing Dao as Being (roughly) in the sense of Plato and Heidegger, that by virtue of which something is what it is; that which makes everything be the way in which they are. Dao is thus not just the source (progenitor) of all things but determines also the way they are. Of course, if Ferdowsi could read this description/ articulation of Dao, he would say that it is just the description of his God (yazdān, khodāvan).

The imagery here of Dao, as among the Daoists, and like Anaximander's apeiron, as the dimensionless (bigger than the biggest, yet smaller than the smallest) infinite source, is already reaching beyond the imagery of the hot soup of the Big Bang and toward the singularity, and in this way can be said to be intermediate between Anaximenes/ Thales and Parmenides, for example. But the breakthrough does not occur.

In fact, if we brush aside Chinese Buddhists, the Chinese philosophic tradition is pretty much stuck at this stage, as the symbolism of creation and of the source of being remains, until the end of the imperial period or of its cosmological mode of civilization, that of an original, undifferentiated cosmic pneuma shuffling itself here and there and now and then to produce the multivarious ("ten thousand") things in the cosmos. The recapitulation of modern cosmology thus does not reach before the hot soup of the Big Bang model. This is mainly due to the predominance of Neo-Confucianism -- the champion of this immature anamnesis against Daoism and the mature anamnesis of Buddhism -- since the Sung dynasty. Here a brief introduction first.

The origin of Neo-Confucianism is tied up with the gradual emergence of the tradition of Yijing metaphysics. Zhang Zai (1020 - 1077 A.D., 張載) may be considered the decisive beginning of Neo-Confucianism. "He too, though from yet another point of view [than Zhou Dun-yi and Shao Yung], developed a cosmological theory based on the "Appendices" of the Book of Changes. In this he especially emphasized the idea of qi", "air", "breath", here the universal pneuma as the substratum (like the pool of energy-radiation, the hot soup of Big Bang) reshuffling here and there to coalesce into this and that, "a concept which became more and more important in the cosmological and metaphysical theories of the later Neo-Confucianists... When its meaning is more abstract, it approaches the concept of matter, as found in the philosophy of Plato [presumably the reference is to Timaeus] and Aristotle, in contrast to... the Aristotelian form." (Fung Yu-lan, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, p. 278) That is, here this universal pneuma corresponds roughly to Aristotle's material cause. "In this sense, it means the primary undifferentiated material out of which all individual things are formed. When, however, its meaning is concrete, it means the physical matter that makes up all existing individual things. It is in this concrete sense that Zhang Zai speaks of qi." (Ibid.) The two meanings are in fact just slight shades of the universal pneuma which, as the originally undifferentiated substratum, is the source of everything.

"Zhang Zai, like his predecessors, bases his cosmological theory on the passage in "Appendix III" of the Book of Change that states: 'In the Yi there is the Supreme Ultimate which produces the Two Forms [i.e. the ying ang yang]' [易有太極, 而生二儀] For him, however, the Supreme Ultimate is nothing other than qi." (p. 278 - 9) An un-surprising identification of one symbolism of the substratum with another. "In his main work, the Zheng Meng [正蒙] or Correct [Initiation], he writes: 'The [Supreme] Harmony [meaning Supreme Ultimate, Tai-ji] is known as the Dao... Because in it there are interacting qualities of floating and sinking, rising and falling, movement and quiescence, therefore there appear in it the beginnings of the emanating forces which [harmonize one another,] agitate one another, overcome or are overcome by one another, and contract and expand, one with regard to the other.'" [Ibid.; 太和所謂道,中涵浮沈 、升降、動靜、相感之 性,是生絪縕、相盪、 勝負、屈伸之始。] "The [Supreme] Harmony is a name for the qi in its entirety, which Zhang Zai also describes as 'wandering air' [游氣]. The qualities of floating, rising, and movement are those of the yang, while those of sinking, falling, and quiescence are those of the ying. The qi, when influenced by the yang qualities, floats and rises, while when influenced by the ying qualities, it sinks and falls. As a result the qi is constantly either condensing or dispersing. Its condensation results in the formation of concrete things; its dispersion results in the dissolution of these same things." (Ibid.) Thus the conserved substratum, the cosmic pneuma, like the hot soup of radiation of the Big Bang scenario, has here two mechanisms added in it, attraction and repulsion, or the various creative and rising qualities in opposition to the various deconstructive and falling ones, like the same attractive and repulsive forces among the atoms eventually crystallized out of the hot soup and generated by the four forces and the thermodynamic flux of entropy-increase (equally, not exclusively, by any one of these, since some force, e.g. electromagnetic, can both attract and repulse) -- attraction (such as gravitational and electromagnetic) which creates structures, from galaxies to molecules, and dissolution (such as thermodynamic, entropic) which dissolves these structures. This is the Chinese equivalent to Empedocles' addition of Love and Strife (again the attracting, formative force and the repulsive, deconstructive force) to the original Ionian mixture of the four elements. The aforementioned intuition of the binary formative processes of nature, rarefaction and condensation (or rising and falling, etc.), based on the "states" of matter, are now in the functional perspective expanded to incorporate the other binary processes, attraction and repulsion, themselves converging surface effects of diverse forces underneath as revealed by modern physics and chemistry but which here could be taken as the causes for rarefaction (repulsion) and condensation (attraction). (But if so, consistency would mean that the rarefaction of yang is the dissolutive force and the condensation of ying the constructive force.) Thus by a simple intuition of the thermodynamic flux of nature the Neo-Confucian philosopher (and Empedocles as well) was able to arrive at a close approximation of the discoveries of modern cosmology (or modern theory for the genesis of life; below).

Even further similarity between Zhang Zai and Empedocles is found: "To know [our] quality [or personality: hsin] is to know the Heaven [i.e. the structure of the cosmos], hence ying and yang, ghosts and spirits, are all parts within me. The quality [personality] of the Heaven presides in human beings just as the quality of water presides in ice; although condensation [freezing] and dispersion [i.e. melting] differ [i.e. by appearance], they are of the same thing. The reception of light causes smallness and largeness, darkness and brightness, but its shining does not produce two [different] things." [知性知天,則陰陽、鬼神皆吾分內爾。天性在人,正猶水性之在冰,凝釋雖異,偽物一也;受光有小大、昏明,其照納不二也。] Just as Empedocles claims that Love and Strife in the cosmic substratum mixture are the same forces that we name in ourselves by the same names, so Zhang sees the presidence of ying and yang (repulsive-sinking and attractive-rising) forces of the cosmos within us also since we are no more than the local and temporary manifestation ("condensation") of the same cosmic pneuma.

Thus Zhang writes: "When qi condenses, its visibility becomes apparent so that there are then the shapes [of individual things]. When it disperses, its visibility is no longer apparent [due to the thinning of air, presumably] and there are no shapes. [Again, a speculation on the formative processes in the empirical world based on the observation -- taken for granted -- of the states of matter and their transition into one another.] At the time of its condensation, can one not call it being [existent; yu. Fung's translation '...can one say otherwise than that this is but temporary?' evidently follows the version that has 'guest' 客 and is surely what is meant here]? At the time of its dispersing, can one hastily say that it is then non-existent? Hence when the sage looks upward and observes downward, he claims to understand the reason of 'invisibility' and 'visibility', but not of 'being' and 'non-being'." (Ibid.; 氣聚則離明得施而有形,氣不聚則離明不得施而無形。方其聚也,安得不謂之客(有)?方其散也,安得遽謂之無?故聖人仰觀俯察,但云「知幽明之故」,不云「知有無之故」) This last statement (visibility vs. invisibility instead of being vs. non-being) is directed, as criticism, against the Buddhists and the Daoists, and at the same time meant to express the enlightened state of mind for the Neo-Confucian. Let's look at it one at a time.

The sort of enlightened state of mind that this Anaxminean, immanentist type of anamnesis of conservation leads to is: "The condensation and dispersion of qi occur in the Supreme Void, just like ice condenses from or melts into water. Know that this Void is just qi [the air, pneuma], there is then no wu [no non-existent]. Hence the speech and personal qualities of the sage and the extreme [manifestations] of the Dao of Heaven, are no more than the transformations of the participating shen ["spirit", meaning principles or laws of nature here]." (氣之聚散於太虛,猶冰凝釋於水,知太虛即氣,則無無。故聖人語性與天道之極,盡於參伍之神變易而已。諸子淺妄,有有無之分,非窮理之學也。)

On the one hand, this is the Confucian objection against the Buddhist and Daoist enlightened state of mind, against the thinking of reality as consisting in nothingness. All is qi, and the Void is simply the thinning of qi before its condensation into things, hence wu or "nothingness" is either really "no-thing [yet]" or "qi too thin to be visible", not the absolute emptiness as the Buddhists claim (and the Daoist is going in this direction): such is basically Zhang's objection, that the Buddhists are, basically, not perceiving it right, fooled by the "invisibility" and "no-thing-yet-ness" of the primordial, rare qi. "Thus Zhang Zai tries to get away from the Daoist and Buddhist idea of wu (non-being)" when saying, "... this Void is just qi, there is then no wu [no non-being]..." (Ibid., p. 279) As Suu-ming (蘇昺) says in his preface to Zheng Meng: "Buddha takes the mind as [the source of] laws [fa] [of nature, reality], and nothingness [wu] as real, hence Zheng Meng rejects this with the greatness of the laws [li] of Heaven, and says furthermore, 'Know that the Void and Emptiness is just qi, so that being and non-being ["there is" and "there is not"], manifestness and hiddenness, transformation, genesis, are all run through by the One and no other.' Laozi takes 'do nothing' as Dao, hence Zheng Meng rejects it with: 'if there are not two and then there is not one'. When discussing the case of life and death, [the Daoist] says, 'the cycle [of genesis and destruction] does not rest, s/he who can extricate himself [or herself] from this then does not experience living and demise.' Or else he says: 'live long and no demise.' Hence Zheng Meng rejects this by saying, 'the [Supreme] Void [i.e. the [Supreme] Harmony, the Dao] cannot but consist of qi; this qi cannot but condense to form all [ten thousand] things; and these [ten thousand] things cannot but [disperse] so as to form [once more] the [Supreme] Void.' [c.f. below] S/he who follows this, can [the matter of life and death] obtain!" [浮屠以心為法,以空為真,故正蒙闢之以天理之大,又曰:「知虛空即氣,則有無、隱顯、神化、性命通一無二。」老子以無為為道,故正蒙闢之曰:「不有兩則無一。」至於談死生之際,曰「輪轉不息,能脫是者則無生滅」,或曰「久生不死」,故正蒙闢之曰:「太虛不能無氣,氣不能不聚而為萬物,萬物不能不散而為太虛。」夫為是言者,豈得已哉!] As already intimated, the Neo-Confucian differing metaphysical view toward the meaning of nothingness as the truth of existence thus also leads to the rejection of the tendency of the Buddhists and Daoists to withdraw from participation in society.

That is: On the other hand, this enlightened state of mind has the same effect of non-attachment and all-accepting attitude: "When air condenses it is my body; when it disperses it is still my body. The person who knows that death is not [really] demise can be told about hsin [quality, personality]." (聚亦吾體,散亦吾體,知死之不亡者,可與言性矣。) This compares with Zhuangzi's:

18. Ultimate Joy
Zhuangzi's wife died. When Huizi went to offer his condolence, Zhuangzi [is found] lolling on the floor with his legs sprawled out, beating a basin and singing. Huizi said: "She lived together with you, raised your children, grew old, and died. It's enough that you do not wail, but isn't it excessive for you to be beating on a basin and singing?" Zhuangzi said, "Not so. When she first died, how could I of all the people not be melancholy? But I reflected on her beginning and realized that originally she was unborn. Not only was she unborn, originally she had no form. Not only did she have no form, originally she had no vital breath [qi]. Confusedly within the nebulousness and blurriness, a transformation occured and there was vital breath; the vital breath was transformed and there was form; the form was transformed and there was birth; now there has been another transformation and she is dead. This is like the progression of the four seasons - from spring to autumn, from winter to summer. There she sleeps blissfully in an enormous chamber. If I were to have followed her weeping and wailing, I think it would have been out of step with destiny, so I stopped."

18.<至樂>
莊子妻死,惠子吊之,莊子則方箕踞鼓盆而歌。惠子曰:「與人居,長子、老、身死,不哭亦足矣,又鼓盆而歌,不亦甚乎?」莊子曰:「不然。是其始死也,我獨何能無概然?察其始,而本無生。非徙無生也,而本無形。非徙無形也,而本無氣。雜乎芒芴之間,變而有氣,氣變而有形,形變而有生,今又變而之死,是相與為春秋東夏四時行也。人且偃然寢於巨室,而我噭噭然隨而哭之,自以為不通乎命,故止也。」

The Daoist, as said, is really pretty much on the same stage of immanentism as the Presocrates (Anaximenes, Anaximander, Thales, Empedocles) and so also as the Neo-Confucianists, and their "nothingness" as undifferentiatedness of the source has not yet fully differentiated into the Buddhist sunyata against which Zhang Zai objects. So here with both Zhuangzi and Zhang Zai the cosmogony is the same: cosmic pneuma reshuffling itself in the Anaximenean and Empedoclean manner. With both the recognition of conservation leads to the cessation of attachment to (and so of misery and pleasures over) life and death. But whereas with the Buddhist and the Daoist this means the withdrawal from and non-participation in society, with the Neo-Confucian it means just the opposite: an "immanentization of spirituality or the spirit of enlightenment." (Below.) "One particular famous passage of the Zheng Meng has become known as the Hsi Ming or 'Western Inscription', because it was separately inscribed on the western wall of Zhang Zai's study. In this passage Zhang maintains that since all things in the universe are constituted of one and the same qi [anamnesis of conservation: Being is One, like all things are from the same pool of 'energy'], therefore men and all other things are but part of one great body. We should serve Qian and Kun (by which Zhang means Heaven and Earth) as we do our own parents, and regard all men as we do our brothers. We should extend the virtue of filial piety and practice it through service to the universal parents. Yet, no extraordinary acts are needed for this service. Every moral activity, if one can understand it, is an activity that serves the universal parents. If for instance, one loves other men simply because they are members of the same society as one's own, then one is doing his social duty and is serving society. But if one loves them not merely because they are members of the same society, but also because they are children of the universal parents, then by loving them one not only serves society, but at the same time serves the parents of the universe as a whole. The passage concludes with the saying: 'In life I follow and serve [the universe, or rather, the cosmos]; when dead, I rest.'" (p. 279 - 80; 生, 吾順事; 沒, 吾寧也。)

"This essay has been greatly admired by later Neo-Confucianists, because it clearly distinguishes the Confucian attitude towards life from that of Buddhism and of Daoist philosophy and religion. Zhang Zai writes elsewhere: 'The [Supreme] Void [i.e. the [Supreme] Harmony, the Dao] cannot but consist of qi; this qi cannot but condense to form all [ten thousand] things; and these [ten thousand] things cannot but [disperse] so as to form [once more] the [Supreme] Void. The perpetuation of these movements in a cycle [lit. following its entering and departing] is inevitable and thus spontaneous.' [太虛不能無氣,氣不能不聚而為萬物,萬物不能不散而為太虛。循是出入,是皆不得已而然也。] The sage is one who fully understands this course. Therefore, he neither tries to be outside it, as do the Buddhists, who seek to break the chain of causation and thus bring life to an end; nor does he try to prolong his life, as do the religious Daoists, who seek to nurture their body and thus remain as long as possible within the human nature. [This religious Daoism is the degeneration of philosophic Daoism to the pre-salvational search of immortality in the sense of indefinite prolongation of this (i.e. thermodynamically delimited) life.] The [Confucian] sage, because he understands the nature of the universe, therefore knows that 'life [is not a] gain nor death any loss.' [生無所得, 死無所喪: 誠明篇 *p. 311] Hence he simply tries to live a normal life. In life he does what his duty as a member of society and as a member of the universe requires him to do, and when death comes, he 'rest'." (Ibid.)

It has been remarked that the Ch'an Buddhist, once he has reached the enlightened state of mind (i.e. completed the spiritual meaning of life) and ceased attachment to the material meaning of life, the meaning of life for him reverts back to the simplest stratum of this material meaning (sleeping, waking, making food, eating, defecating) except that he now practices it without attachment. "There is yet another common saying [among the Ch'an Buddhists]: 'In carrying water and chopping firewood: therein lies the wonderful Dao.' (Record of the Transmission of the Light, 8. [傳燈錄]) One may ask: If this is so, does not the wonderful Dao also lie in serving one's family and the state? If we were to draw the logical conclusion from the Ch'an doctrines that have been analyzed above, we should be forced to answer yes." (Ibid., p. 265) And this was precisely, as Fung analyzes the matter, the step that the Neo-Confucianists took, reacting against the otherworldly and withdrawal tendencies of Buddhism. "The Ch'an Masters themselves, however, did not give this logical answer." (Ibid.) "[The Neo-Confucian sage] does what every man should do, but because of his understanding, what he does acquires new significance. The Neo-Confucianists developed a point of view from which all the moral activies valued by the Confucianists acquire a further value that is super-moral. They all have in them that quality that the Ch'anists called the wonderful Dao [妙道]. It is in this sense that Neo-Confucianism is actually a further development of Ch'anism." (Ibid., p. 280) And it is in this sense that Neo-Confucianism, as Confucianism has always been, is the most classic instance of immanentization of spirituality in the East so that, as indicated in "The Feminist Work Ethic and the Spirit of Consumerism", it is the ideal place to seek the Weberian "innerworldly asceticism" in the Eastern cosmological society that was, however, in contrast to the Western historical Christiantum, not progressively oriented.

This immature anamnesis, pantheism par excellence, can easily become the most rational type of materialism and the basis for the structural perspective, especially with respect to the problem of consciousness or "soul": Wang Chung of Han and Fan Zhen following him are the classic instances of such transition. Note the same tendency toward the structural perspective here in Zhang Zai: "The Supreme Void has no shape; this is the original condition of qi; its condensation and dispersion is [the cause for]the appearance of shapes in the process of transformation; at its most quiescence there is no 'sensitivity' [i.e. consciousness]; but such is the deep root of hsin [quality of the air], the acquisition of the ability to distinguish and to know is [the result of] the appearance of 'sensitivity' in the mutual interactions of things [wu]. [This is essentially the modern view, that consciousness is the emergent property of neurons interacting with each other through neuro-transmitters, there being no separate 'soul' or 'mind'.] Having sensitivity and having shape and not having sensitivity and not having shape, they both are expressions of hsin [quality] of one and the same [qi]." (太虛無形,氣之本體,其聚其散,變化之客形爾;至靜無感,性之淵源,有識有知,物交之客感爾。客感客形與無感無形,惟盡性者一之。)

The Chinese case of the "budding" structural perspective of course remains within the functional perspective: "Floating upward is the clear/ transparent yang; sinking downward is the thick and confused ying. [Qi] running through, becoming 'sensitive', and condensing and coalescing, becomes wind and rain, snow and hail, the fleeting shapes of the ten thousand types, the melting together and joining together of mountains and rivers." (浮而上者陽之清,降而下者陰之濁,其感〈通〉聚〈結〉,為風雨,為雪霜,萬品之流形,山川之融結,) The same intuition of the "states" of matter guiding the description and experience of the formation of the empirical world.

From Zhang Zai Neo-Confucianism was to diverge into two lineages, one the "School of Laws" (Li hsueh) and the other the "School of Mind" (Hsin hsueh) (Fung, ibid., p. 281). This shall be covered later.

The immature anamnesis (Presocratic immanentism) of the Neo-Confucians persists to the very end of the Chinese imperial history. For example, Wong Fuzhi (1619 - 92; 王夫之) of late Ming and early Ching, the last of the Neo-Confucians before the collision of the Chinese functional and cosmological world-view with the positivistic and progressive Western world-view: 陰陽二氣充滿太虛, 此外更无他物, 亦无間隙, 天之象, 地之形, 皆其所范圍也。 "The pneuma (qi) of ying and yang fills up the Supreme Void [in other words, the pneuma of ying and that of yang coincide completely with space, or rather is space itself, like the unity of energy-matter-spacetime continuum of modern cosmology]; outside this there is nothing, neither is there any gap [within the pneuma-substratum, that is]. All heavenly phenomena (hsiang) and earthly shapes are within its boundaries." (Ancient Chinese Historical Materials [in Chinese], Beijing Uni. Pr. 1991, 张传宝, p. 509)

This roughly immature stage of anamnesis, exemplified by the "air" of Anaximenes and the universal pneuma of the Yijing metaphysicians and all these Neo-confucians, is the simplest philosophic reflection on the source of existence and human spiritual expression, and its criticism of the mature stage, such as Zhang Zai's objection to Buddhist nothingness, is simply based on misunderstanding. Zhang Zai assumes that the Buddhist sunyata refers to intra-worldly emptiness, which, as he rightly points out, is just the thinning of air, not its non-existence, just as in modern physics even the vacuum is not complete nothingness because space itself is "something." But that's not what the Buddhists mean by "nothingness." From the Buddhist point of view the air itself is simply illusion, and later we'll see that it's quite possible to find such insight concerning the utterly illusory nature of existence in modern physics as well, although the final stage of the Buddhist insight -- that the very question of whether things exist or do not exist or both exist and do not exist or neither is meaningless and a misleading question to ask -- seems capable of escaping even this "final parallel between modern physics and ancient philosophy". But as an immature expression this sort of immanent philosophic insight recurs again and again, even after the appearance of the mature philosophy (or anamnesis) of transcendentalism, which is supposed to have transcended this immature insight. After Plato, for example, the Hellenistic age witnessed a resurgence of immanent pantheism such as found among the Milesian Presocratics: the pantheism of the Stoics, according to which the divine interpenetrated All; for example, Cornutus, in his Compendium of Greek Theology, writes: "just as we ourselves are controlled by a soul, so the world possesses a soul holding it together, and this soul is designated God, primordially and ever living and the source of all life" (cited by S. Angus, The Mystery Religions, p. 48). This is the same thing as the watery universal soul of Thales and the cosmic pneuma of Anaximenes. Virgil was possessed of the same spirituality as found in Presocratic pantheism (Georgics IV. 221):

Deum namque ire per omnis
Terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum;
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne et ferarum,
Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas,
Scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri
Omnia, nec morti esse locum, sed viva volare
Sideris in numerum atque alto succedere caelo.

For God permeates all
Earth, and wide ocean, and the vault of heaven;
From whom flocks, herds, men, beasts of every kind,
Draw each at birth the fine [flame of] life;
Yea, and that all things hence to Him return,
Brought back by dissolution, nor can death
Find place: but, each into his starry rank,
Alive they soar, and mount the heights of heaven. (Cited, ibid.)

In the present this immature philosophy of pantheism appears most notably among the New Age movement, where the universal pneuma (qi) is, under the influence of modern physics, re-symbolized as "energy". A typical New Ager's spiritual expression: "Remember the source... we all came from that same source, that pool of energy, by which we are all, with everything else, One... and to which we will return..." Such a statement is basically correct both diachronically -- everything in the Universe today came from that hot-soup of Big Bang -- and synchronically -- all matter existent is fundamentally just energy, E = mc2, so that theoretically at this and every instant we, or every individual "thing" in the Universe, can all be reduced back to a pure energy which constitutes together one undifferentiated pool of energy -- the substratum, the Dao, the universal pneuma. In fact, the above parable of Zhuangzi may as well be repeated with the word qi replaced by "energy": "Confusedly within the nebulousness and blurriness [the complete vacuum, zero-dimensional space-time before the creation of the Universe], a transformation occurred [say, vacuum (quantum) fluctuation] and there was "energy" [created out of inflation, and subsisting as the radiation pool, the "hot soup" of the Big Bang cosmology]; the energy was transformed and there was form [from atoms to galaxies]; the form was transformed and there was birth [atoms assembling into organisms]; now there has been another transformation and she is dead. This is like the progression of the four seasons - from spring to autumn, from winter to summer." Or "when energy condenses it becomes my body; when it disperses it is still my body." In this case it is of course more correct to say "when energy condenses it becomes the 'matter' (the chemical elements) that then coalesces into my body...": although we know that matter is just the more concentrated form of energy, what condenses into my body and what my body then disperses into is the chemicals carbon, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc. into which, when a living organism is dead, the decomposers decompose its corpse and from which the biosynthetic activities of plants and animals then re-compose a new organism, all this in accordance with the chemical (re-)cycling of the ecosystem of the biosphere (c.f. Socrates' argument about "the living coming from the dead..."). All the same, such pantheistic reflection ("enlightened state of mind") of Zhang Zai's is essentially scientifically correct. The correctness of this New Age expression illustrates how in-extraordinarily correct -- since it is really just common sense, the simple logical conclusion of the obvious intuition of conservation, that nothing can come from nothing -- is the spirituality of the Presocratics, Daoists, the Hellenists, and the Upanishads, that feeling of openness and expanded consciousness where one feels oneself melted into, and as part of, a larger, all-encompassing stream in which all individualities dissolve and which is consequently truer than one's everyday conception of oneself as an individual and separate from all others: that feeling of openness that gets reborn repeatedly among countless spiritual persons in every epoch of history because it is an unavoidable conclusion about reality given the fact of conservation. Today, for example, some speak of "scientific pantheism": "SCIENTIFIC PANTHEISM is proud to recognize the Greek and Roman materialism of the Miletians, Heraklitus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius as its predecessors. We believe that everything is made up of matter <=> energy, and that there is no separate and distinct substance of spirit [meaning 'consciousness'! The Neo-Confucian, early Daoist, Presocratic and Hellenistic cosmic pneuma pantheism easily leads to the structural perspective such as that of Wang Chung, whose qi, once replaced with "energy", is precisely this 'scientific pantheism'!] But we also have a deep reverence for the cosmos and for nature, which the early materialists shared. Scientific pantheism reveres the universe as the only real divinity." This is the most usual, most common sense, and so the most beginning stage of true spirituality.

What should also be pointed out is that this mythic image of the formation of individual structures from an originally undifferentiated substratum also holds for the origin and the first formation of life on earth, which we now know is akin to the situation of, e.g. the "physical annealing system": "a system of atoms at a temperature so high that no stable structures can form. The system then cools down slowly. During this cooling, some structures form, dissociate, and reform. Some of them may be stable enough to crystallize. As the temperature continues to drop, less stable structures start to form. The more stable structures grow [and] become even more complex." (Nigel Goldenfeld, "The Root of the Tree of Life: The Universal Ancestor") This sounds much like the early situation of the "hot soup" of Big Bang cosmology. The formation of life is something like this, the "genetic annealing model", which "started from a community of primitive cells called the 'Progenotes' which consisted of short mobile genes and other basic chemicals necessary to sustain life. The communal ancestor is nothing like modern cells. It is very simple in every respect. It probably had no cell walls. Its subsystems were less complex. Each cell was more like a bag containing small genes." In other words, a "soup" of primitive life wherein the cells were not very differentiated from each other. This made possible the fact that "[a]t the early stage the universal ancestor had 'High Lateral Gene Transfer and Mutation Rate...' among the cells. So no individual cell possesses its own history as new innovative genes can easily be shared and rapidly exchanged among the cells resulting in an enormous evolutionary potential. These cells evolved and survived as a single unit." (Ibid.) Only gradually did "subsystems" form which eventually became the three domains, Eukarya, Bacteria, and Archaea, within which cells became more differentiated from each other so as to become the "units of life" as we know them today. This demonstrates again that the reason for the correctness of the mythic image lies in the "logic" governing the formation of structures universally valid given the laws of thermodynamics and the four forces of nature and which consciousness, since the very beginning, has "intuited" (common-sense, if one will).

So what about this "hot soup" of Big Bang so reminded of in "pantheism"? We know that the Universe is and has been expanding, and that it consists today of a random distribution of lumpy structures of matter (galaxies: high concentration of energy) across an uniform background radiation at 3K (low concentration of energy). "The energy of this radiation is about 1/4,000 of the energy of the visible matter in the Universe, given by E = mc2." (John Gribbin, In Search of the Big Bang, p. 197) Turning the clock backward, the Universe gets smaller and its density and temperature increases, and, at 4,000K, "the energy in each photon was [or reached] 1 billionth of the energy in each proton and neutron, and since there are a billion times more photons in the Universe, the total energy in the radiation matched the total energy in the matter." (Ibid.) This is the end of the radiation era.

Then going back to 1012K, or 0.0001 second after creation, when "the density of matter was about the same as the density of matter in an atomic nucleus today, or perhaps a little lower." (p. 198) Since, unlike matter, radiation (the background radiation at 3K today) has always filled up the whole Universe, the contraction of the Universe means that "by the time stars are at last squeezed closely enough together for individual atomic nuclei to begin to feel the effects, the density of radiation at every point in space has increased to the point where it carries far more energy than the energy stored up in particles. It is no longer 'background' radiation but very much at the forefront of physical processes going on in the hot, dense universe." (p. 199)

So between 10-4 and 10-1 second this dominance of radiation means that "the density of radiation (the amount of energy it contained in each small volume) was so great that there was an energy equivalent to a positron-electron pair [which always come together, one never without the other, remember]... in each volume of space corresponding to the size of a positron-electron pair. So the energy could happily switch from electromagnetic energy into electrons and positrons [the condensation of qi!] and back again [its dispersion again]." (p. 200) Then: "The proton and the neutron have similar mass to one another... a bit less than 2,000 times the mass of the electron. So to make proton-antiproton pairs [again, one never coming into being without the other], you need correspondingly greater energy density of radiation [more concentration of qi]." (Ibid.) That is, earlier than 10-4 second and during even smaller size of the Universe, a time when particle physics and cosmology converge, the "quark soup" of pure energy left over after inflation came to an end in this particular region and which, as the undifferentiated pool or substratum, produced the first quarks (the first condensation of qi!). This GUT era after inflation and from which matter (so ultimately "things") came will be covered later; for now it suffices to note how remarkably this "cosmogonic" scenario of modern Big Bang cosmology -- a process of differentiation: the Universe from 10-2 second, and even since the end of inflation, to the 4th minute witnessed a transformation "from a uniform, very dense soup of radiation and matter into a mixture of about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium [nucleosynthesis], with the radiation decoupled from the matter and left to fade away into the weak background we know today" (p. 203) -- is "reminded of" by all the earlier speculations from Zhang Zai's condensation-dispersion and rising-sinking of qi through the differentiation from the undifferentiated egg in the Japanese Nihonshuki to the condensation of the mound with Atum on it from the primordial, undifferentiated Nun. The only difference is that while in the philosophic and mythic speculations the "primordial" substratum is expansive, in modern cosmology it is contracted into a dense, microscopic size. The similarity is due to the fact that the law of Conservation really (logically) does not allow genesis of individual, delimited things except through being differentiated out from an undifferentiated substrate.

The primitives' intuition of the thermodynamic structure of the Universe is however not necessarily comprehensive. The modern picture of entropy: "All physical systems tend to operate so that heat flows from a hotter object to a cooler object. In the process, the systems become more disordered, and the ultimate stable state for any such system to be in is one in which there is a uniform temperature and all the particles in the system are moving about in random. It doesn't matter whether the temperature is high, as it was in the fireball of the Big Bang, or whether it is low, like the temperature of the background radiation today. What matters is that it should be uniform and that the system should contain no structure -- no 'information' of any kind. Such a smooth, featureless system at a uniform temperature [equilibrium] is said to have the greatest possible entropy, and it is a fundamental law of nature, revealed by experiment and derived by theory [but intuited as well by the primitive humans], that entropy -- disorder -- must always increase. The law can be bent, but not broken, in circumstances like these on the surface of the Earth today, where living things are able to feed off energy from sunlight and create structured local pockets of order, with decreased entropy. But this is always at the cost of increasing entropy elsewhere by an amount greater than it has been reduced locally. The Sun's nuclear burning represents a vast increase in entropy against which the growth of living things on Earth is producing an almost totally insignificant little decrease in entropy. If engineers on Earth build a bridge, or an aircraft, or a house, they are creating order and decreasing entropy locally, but only at the cost of creating disorder and increasing entropy where the raw materials are produced and in conveying them to the manufacturing plant. Work can be done only if, somewhere along the line, heat is flowing from a hotter body to a cooler one. Entropy measures the availability of heat to do work -- more entropy means less available heat, which means that there is less in the way of temperature differences to drive the flow of heat from a hotter body to a cooler body, which is the ultimate source of all work and power... If the temperature is the same everywhere, even if it is very high, no heat can flow and no work can be done... But the Universe is in a state of low entropy and disequilibrium, demonstrated by the lavish way in which stars pour out energy into the void. It is far from being 'worn out' yet, and the analogy is made sometimes with a great clock, wound up and set ticking long ago, and slowly winding down today. So how was the clock wound up -- how was the Universe engineered in the first place to have so little entropy, and so much order, that 15 billion years after the Big Bang we still see bright stars in a dark sky?" (p. 366 - 7) The answer, of course, lies in the quantum perturbations in the original energy-pool magnified by inflation and then drawn into galaxies by gravity. The creation myths are also the primitives' answers to this question of initial engineering -- initial winding up. But both the necessity of the local decrease of entropy only at the expense of even greater increased entropy outside the locale (non-linear dissipation) and the reason for the initial "winding up" are overlooked by the primitives. They produce mythic cosmogonies in accordance with the experiences of the thermodynamic flux constituting the process of reality all around (the huts break without repair, heat flows from hotter to cooler places, eating and defecating, and order disintegrates without input of energy). Because, in accordance with their functional perspective, they take the immediate data of the senses for granted -- so the "cosmos", the whole world, is just the earth with the sky above containing some shining stars -- they apply only to this "cosmos" the correct intuition of genesis as a process of differentiation from an undifferentiated substratum so that they get the (transmythological) scenario of the "separation between heaven and earth" (in contrast with the condensation, under the influence of gravity, of the original lumpy perturbations of the otherwise uniform pool of energy into galactic structures: the initial winding up). There is then among the primitives a confusions between the order first created (the initial winding-up) and the subsequent orders generated through un-winding of the initial winding-up (the appearance of life on Earth) which is caused by the primitives' confusion between the Universe and the Earth: such confusion is the essence of the meaning of "cosmos." Thus, in the same way, they take the local decrease of entropy through energy-input for granted and overlook its increase outside the locale (which ensures the energy-input in the first place), so that while recognizing that order is created out of chaos through energy-input (such as the formation of life on earth), they do not question where this energy could have come from to support this formation of order and where it has to go afterwards -- thus there is no mention of where Pangu or Keawe or the Dreaming beings first get the energy to support the sky or to do the "ordering work" in order to make recognizable order out of amorphous chaos; well, they themselves are the energy. But then this hinges on the second problem: whence the primordial deity -- this primordial concentration of energy (anima-mana) -- came whose destruction (sacrifice) produced all the (biospheric) orders around. Consequently the whole cosmos is the order created without the vast field of disorder outside which always contains this order as is necessary given the second law of thermodynamics: order can only be a local phenomenon within the larger background of disintegration into disorder. That is, the "ordering work" of the primordial deities is a compact symbolism for both the initial winding up and the order-formation due to its subsequent (non-linear) unwinding; but this symbolism is based entirely on analogy with some of the subsequent order-formation through un-winding of the initial winding-up (especially the engineers' building, e.g. a bridge) so that the myth seems invalid from the perspective of the second law of thermodynamics (no mention of the even more increase in entropy elsewhere than the primordial "ordering work").

One thing, however, is certain here: myth and modern science serve, in a sense, the same function: they are both about the process and nature of "origin", although the former in the manner of "exemplary origin"4 and the latter, "empirical origin". The difference, in other words, is associated with the shift in the function of language, from symbolic mythopoesis to empirical referencing.

Postscript. There have been many who consider the modern scientific cosmogonic model (the Big Bang) to be like a "myth" (c.f. Luc Brisson), but not any who consider cosmogonic myths to be like a scientific model. One is trendy and the other not. But if science is just religion-myth, then religion-myth is just science. The latest example is Gabriel Lefebvre's "Le big bang : modèle scientifique ou cosmogonie religieuse", in Religiologique (publication of the University of Québec at Montréal), 25, spring 2002, 221 - 241. Here he finds present in the Big Bang model all five essential characteristics of the traditional creation myths: (1) It is a story about origin (2) that is passed on, and (3) moreover describes how the elements that make up our scientific "Weltanschauung" (like protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, etc. and the four forces) came one by one out of a drama of gradual differentiation from an original chaos. (Thus has it been the goal here to find out the reason for such coincidence; but also, the modern Big Bang model would be an example of the third type mentioned earlier.) (4) The Big Bang gives meaning to the universe in that: (a) from the fact that the universe is not random but ordered, "il est légitime de rechercher les règles qui y prévalent" (p. 233); (b) the Big Bang model also shows complexification to be the direction of the universe, whose end would then be "to create a part of itself capable of looking at its totality" (ibid.; "de créer une partie de lui-même capable du regard sur sa totalité"): the anthropic principle. Scientific activity thus becomes justified. (5) The Big Bang model thus "legitimizes" our scientific, structural perspective (in the sense of Peter Beger and Thomas Luckmann).

The author in the end expresses the common sense that "it is proper for a world structured by science as the mode of knowing to ask science to respond to questions which, in other contexts, humans pose to the instituted religion." ("Un monde structuré par la science comme mode de savoir semble donc bel et bien demander à la science de répondre aux questions que, dans d'autres contextes, l'humain pose à la religion instituée", P. 237.) This is basically the problem of the "milieu" and the goal of "scientific enlightenment." The modern scientific scenarios of origin indeed are just myths, except that they are getting much better at telling the origin: the criteria are stricter, evidences needed, and conclusions empirically verified. Modern "myths" are more precise, and come closer to the truth.

Footnotes:

1. "When the three divine brothers kill the giant Ymir.... [they] set about building the earth. The body of Ymir is carried into the middle of the great void [the primeval condition before the creation of order]; his blood forms the sea and the lakes, his flesh the earth, and his skull the sky (with a dwarf at each corner, as if to uphold it [the "effort" of the deities in spending energy to sustain the differentiated order of the cosmos, which would otherwise collapse back into equilibrium given the second law]), his hair the trees, his brain the clouds, his bones the mountains, and so on", as reported by Snorri Sturluson in the Prose Edda. (Edgar Polomé, "Germanic Religion", Encycl. of Rel., vol. 5, p. 522 - 3)

2. (a) の話が, もとから旧辞にあったのに, それが中國的な天地剖判思想であらわされているということは矛盾しているといわなくてはならないが, これはつぎのように解釈すれば矛盾でなくなる. すなわち, これに似た思想は日本にもあったのだが, それを中国思想で說明しなおした, という考え方である. 古事記研究の指導的学者の一人, 倉野憲司氏もこの解釈をとっている.

倉野氏は, 日本にもこれに似た思想があったと述べている. たとえば日本書記の天照大御神降誕の話のなかに「この時, 天地相去ること未だ遠からず. 故れ,  天柱をもちて, 天上に举ぐ」という一節がある. 「天地相去る」云々は, 例によって「三五暦記」にある表現のようだが, 「天柱をもちて」云々はそうではないから, 「太古には天地は分かれていなかったが, 天が徐々に上昇して今日の高さになった」という考え方は, 古くからあったという一つの証拠になろう.

"It must be admitted that the fact that the story of (a), although it was in the 'Old Phrase', has also figured in the Chinese [cosmogonic] thinking of 'the separation of heaven and earth' is contradicting [to our assertion here]. But if this be explained in the following manner then there should not be this contradiction. For example, there is the argument that the thinking that is similar to this [the Chinese version] has also existed in Japan but was explicated by way of the Chinese thinking. [Actually, the existence of such common sense thinking as the separation of sky and earth in Japan as well is really not something so extraordinary as to need special argument in its favor; it is so widespread after all.] One of the leading scholars in the study of Kojiki, Kurano Kenji, has thus used this type of explanation.

He explains that a thinking similar to this is also found in Japan. For example, in the story of the 'birth-descent of Amaterasu-o-o-mikami' in Nihonshuki there is the episode: 'At the time, the separation between heaven and earth has not yet been carried through. He, carrying the "column of heaven" [amenomihashira], raises it toward the heaven.' [Like, on the Chinese side, Pangu serving as the column supporting the heaven, or the breaking of the column supporting heaven during the battle between the god of water and god of fire, which requires the goddess' (Nuwo) effort to repair it.] Although the saying of 'separation between heaven and earth' is the way of expression that is in [the Chinese] Three-Five Calendrical Records, 'carrying the 'column of heaven' etc. is not there. This is one piece of evidence for the fact that the manner of thinking that 'in the most ancient time heaven and earth had not yet separated, and heaven, gradually ascending, reached today's height' has been around since antiquity." (Translation mine.) Two points: first, the articulation of the "four element thinking" (formation of the world based on the "states" of matter) in ying-yang symbolism is the most conspicuous part of Chinese influence in this Japanese cosmogonic myth; second, both the Chinese and Japanese myths may have originated from the same Austronesian substratum (c.f. below).

3. For the origin of Japanese people, c.f. "The Japanese Interaction Sphere and Japanese Historiogenesis".

4. The term is borrowed from D. Guerrière.


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