Page 340 - A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols BIG Book

A-Z 333
the child to be born, but then has her confined to a pagoda which stood until recently on
the West Lake, near Hangzhou. When the son has grown up to be a celebrated
scholar, he visits his snake-mother, and duly venerates her.
Sneezing Sneezing

pen-ti

We say ‘Bless you!’ to someone who has just sneezed; and in the same way, in China,
when a child sneezes they say ‘Thousand years (i.e. may you live!).’ In Han times there
was a booklet on the meaning of sneezing and of buzzing in the ears, but unfortunately
this has been lost. If a Chinese can’t stop sneezing, he says: ‘Someone is saying (bad)
things about me.’ He should then spit and repeat a stock phrase which runs in translation
something like this: ‘Good people like me: if bad people are gossiping about me may
their teeth fall out!’ Conversely one might say: ‘If you think about someone he’ll sneeze.’
SnowSnow

xue

Snow is connected with old age and with the god of transitoriness (the ‘Old Man of the
Northern Dipper’). A short poem by Liu Zong-yuan (773–819) is entitled jiang xue, i.e.
‘the snowy river’: its last line runs:

Only the old man in the straw mantle sits alone in the boat
and fishes alone in the cold water of the river.

Other lyricists of the Tang period compared driving snow-flakes with falling pear-
blossom.
When Chinese children make snowmen they have someone quite specific in mind –
Mi-lo, the Buddha of the future, who is also known as Fat-belly Buddha.

Softness

wen rou