Page 113 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols 106
Earth

tu; di

‘The earth bears and the heavens cover’ say ancient Chinese texts. Heaven and earth were
regarded as a generative pair, and the Yi-jing, the ‘Book of Changes’, speaks of earth’s
condition as ‘receptive abandon’ (2nd Trigram: kun = the receptive one). And earth is
given the square (fang) as symbol, while heaven is symbolised by the circle.
According to early cosmologies, the world resembles a chariot with its canopy.
This canopy is round and symbolises heaven: the rectangular box in which the travellers
are seated – or rather its floor – corresponds to earth. Then again the flat earth is said to
be connected to the circular contour of heaven by the eight pillars, which are in their
turn correlated by means of the eight winds with the trigrams arranged in an octagon.
The expression ‘heaven and earth’ means ‘the whole world’ (tian di). The cosmological
view of the whole earth as a square extends to earthly divisions – square fields, houses,
villages, town enclosures. The basic principle of the square persists semantically in
such expressions as fang-wu = the produce of an area, fang-bo = the governor of a
province, and fang-yan = a dialect. The earth is also one of the five elements, or
‘generative powers’. To the earth are allotted the middle position, the colour
yellow, the number two, the taste ‘sweet’, white millet as product, the ox as
domestic animal, and finally, since man is bare-skinned, earth is correlated with ‘naked’
in the five-animal series.
In astronomy and astrology, the ‘earthly branches’ (di-zhi) play an important part.
They are to be distinguished from the ‘heavenly stems’ (tian-gan), which are the signs of
the decimal cycle arranged in a coordinate system. The di-zhi are the signs of the
duodecimal series arranged in circular form. This meaningful inversion of the two series
of symbols emphasises their mutual interdependence and also that of the two elemental
forces, heaven and earth (according to Marcel Granet, Chinese Thought).

Eel

shan

According to one Chinese legend of the Flood, Xiang-liu, a ‘minister’ of the
mythical Emperor Gong-gong, who called up the Flood, was an eel. According to
another myth which has been preserved only in part, Jiang-Shen, the god of the Yangtse
river, stopped up a leak in a boat with an eel: an episode which calls to mind certain
variants of the biblical legend of the Flood. If a snake is eating an eel, you should
wait till only the head is still visible and cut it off; if you then carry this head about with
you, your income will be assured and you will always win at games.