telophase | (no subject)

Mostly posting this here so I'll remember it.

If you read Qwan, you'll remember that Qwan has a companion that's a small, headless, six-legged, flying pig/dog thing. I just ran across an ebook in my library called Chinese Bestiary that's a translation of and commentary on a Chinese compendium of pictures of and text about supernatural creatures, and the headless, six-legged, flying pig/dog thing is in it (in fact, on the cover). Here's the translation of the commentary from the book, plus the scholarly commentary on it. I've corrected the OCR errors that I could figure out.

(This is also way more commentary than most of the other entries get.)

73. DIJIANG Five hundred forty li farther west stands Celestial Mountain. It contains an abundance of metal and jade, and there is green realgar. The Eminent River emanates from it and flows southwest into Hot Valley. There is a god here whose form resembles a yellow sack with a red aura like cinnabar. He has six legs and four wings and exists in a state of confusion with no face or eyes. He knows how to sing and dance for he is, in fact, Dijiang.

Several other versions of this passage classify Dijiang as a divine bird, which may be explained by his ability to sing and dance like the Luan- and Feng-Birds. Through various lines of associative reasoning and linguistic connections, Dijiang has been seen by commentators as related or identical to a personification of cosmogonic chaos known as Hundun. This conclusion is largely based on reading the line "[ he] exists in a state of confusion (hundun)" as the proper name Hundun. Hundun most notably appears in a fable in the Master Zhuang, though there his name is written with a variant graph:

The thearch of the Southern Sea was named "Sudden," the thearch of the Northern Sea was named "Hasty," and the thearch of the Center was named "Hundun." Once Sudden and Hasty together paid a visit to Hundun's domain and were treated most courteously by him. They discussed among themselves how to repay his generosity saying, "All men have seven orifices to see, hear, eat, and breathe. Only he does not. Why not drill them for him?" Every day, they drilled one hole, but after seven days, Hundun died.

Here Hundun can be read as a figure of primordial chaos who is a victim of purposeful activity, destroyed by the well-intentioned though dangerously misguided e orts [sic] of humanizing civilization. The fable thus reflects the philosopher's nostalgia for a golden age of primitive society when all life was believed to be in accord with the simple patterns of the natural Way (Dao). It is tempting to see the image of Dijiang as that of the undifferentiated cosmos. His four wings, six legs, and lack of face and eyes indicate directionless movement. His sacklike physique encompassing emptiness suggests creation myths in which the universe comes into existence from the body of a god. There is another historiographical tradition in Zuo's Narratives to the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu zuozhuan, c. late 4th cent. b. c. e.) in which Hundun is the evil son of Thearch Hong (Dihong). He is called Hundun, that is, Confusion, because of his lack of moral consciousness. As one of four evil ffspring of thearchs, Hundun is finally banished along with the rest by Shun, who sends them all to the periphery to quell demons. Following another line of linguistic reasoning, Yuan Ke (1916 ?) conflated both traditions by identifying Dijiang with Thearch Hong and also with the Yellow Thearch, the latter considered the Thearch of the Center in Five Agents cosmology. Hundun continued as a personified form into the Han and early Six Dynasties period, when he was canonized as part of various sets of gods; thereafter his image seems to have disappeared from religious pantheons. However, Hundun survived in later Chinese thought as an abstract term denoting an impersonal state of universal chaos before the birth of the bipolar forces yin and yang. It is in this sense that Guo Pu understands him in his encomium by stating that the figure Dijiang is, in substance, cosmic confusion. Despite all these ingenious and suggestive readings, the textual basis in this passage of the Guideways for identifying Dijiang (literally, Thearch Long River) with the mythical figure Hundun is slim, and he can simply be regarded as a strange creature in his own right.

Strassberg, Richard E. Chinese Bestiary.
Ewing, NJ, USA: University of California Press, 2002. p 113.
http://site.ebrary.com/lib/tculibrary/Doc?id=10051181&ppg=136

Copyright © 2002. University of California Press. All rights reserved.

Man, I need a Qwan icon.

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> Google google google ... <

Cripes, that's some serious crack!

But there's lots of cover art available. I won't have anything clever to write on any such icon, though (unless it's Qwan: What's Aki-sensei on, anyway?). And I really wanted to find a pic of Teikou (the headless critter) ... .

(I'm like Pavlov's dog ... say "icon" and I jump up and bark ... .)

XD I had a couple of pages scanned as examples of toning rocks and cliffs, but unfortunately no Teikou. And Qwan is wearing a fetching little mustache in one of them for Deep Plot Reasons.

They're about 500K each, and the scan is not of the best, because I wasn't taking care. :D (and, er, Photobucket's compression isn't doing it any good - you need to click on the 'Full size' thing in the menu to get it.)

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v280/telophase14/test/?action=view¤t=qwan-1.jpg
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v280/telophase14/test/?action=view¤t=qwan-2.jpg

I've got some Mushishi scans of the same filesize and quality, too:

http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v280/telophase14/test/?action=view¤t=mushishi-1.jpg
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v280/telophase14/test/?action=view¤t=mushishi-2.jpg
http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v280/telophase14/test/?action=view¤t=mushishi-3.jpg

Durn firewall! They don't actually block Photobucket, but they do something like stick it at the bottom of the requests priority list, so I can almost never get anything from there to load. I'll have to pull them down at home tonight sometime.

OK, I'll see what I can find from Mushishi also (in addition towhat you've got here). sanada was also telling me about that one.

Well, we can see if they block magatsu.net yet. :)

http://www.magatsu.net/stuff

Ha! That worked!

Let's see what I can do. I can't do my Jenny-on-the-Spot almost-instant icon trick quite as well with B&W line art, but I'll have something in a day or two.

And Mushishi is extra awesome with a huge heaping of awesome sauce. :)

Oh, the Mushishi art is so pretty! I found some color pix online. Up 'til now, I've felt that if I made a person an icon, it was just for that person, but these came out so pretty, I want to reserve my options on using them myself, once I get around to Mushishi (it won't be right away, because I'm reading so many series now - I'm way behind in my manga blogging ... I've started Full Metal Alchemist, for example).

Anyway, here are 3 from Mushishi:

They're all poetical rather than wiseass, because I don't know the series well enough to make funny cracks (unlike the Qwan, they didn't inspire anything very goofy ... although in the first one Ginko could be thinking things like "Did I lock my car?" or "Hmmm, should have hit the head").

And a silly one for Qwan, from the scan you posted:

I'm not so happy with that one ... ahhh well, experiments with B&W scans continue.

Enjoy!

Thank you! :D Most of my icons are wiseass anyway, so a few poetical ones will come in handy for those comments when the wiseass ones aren't really appropriate. XD (Mello staring upward in horror usually isn't quite right when, say, consoling someone for something. XD)

Mushishi is gorgeous - the manga (book 2 due out in a week!) and the anime (DVD1 released this week!). I haven't seen the live-action film - I'm not sure if there's a fansub yet or not. When I got the anime fansubs, I ended up mainlining all 26 episodes in about three days (and then downloaded the OST - gorgeous and evocative).