Fu Xi, inventor of the i-Pad?
Friday August 13, 2010
Right, folks. Let’s get one thing straight. Fu Xi (伏羲) – the leaf-clad inventor of fishing nets, writing, sericulture and the eight trigrams (that when doubled up become the 64 hexagrams of the Yi Jing) is not a historical figure. He is a story. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It never did Anna Karenina any harm. Take him as a story, and he just about hangs together. Take him as historical fact, and none of it makes much sense.
OK? Happy with that. Now we can move on. I’m writing this from Tianshui in an internet cafe filled with game-playing chain-smoking teenagers. I’m here mainly to visit the Fu Xi temple, which is just on the edge of town. Tianshui is a small and relatively relaxed place, made up of two towns about ten miles apart; and I’m staying in the somewhat faded and shabby hotel in the centre of Qinzhuo, the Western part of town. It’s comfortable enough, although decidedly down-at-heel. Once, perhaps twenty years ago, it may have aspired to a degree of elegance; but somewhere on the way, it got distracted, and so it remains an echoing and cavernous shell of a place. It is cheap, if not exactly cheerful; if I want to get access to my room, I need to track down the woman with a key and get her to let me in; and it lacks a functioning wireless connection, hence the internet cafe. But it’s fine for a couple of nights, and yesterday I had a good evening hanging out eating some of the very good local food with some interesting and chatty French travellers. Because I’m in town for a few more days, and because of the limited charms of the Qinzhou place, I’m planning to move down the road to Beidao to see if I can find anywhere slightly more congenial to stay there.
But on to Fu Xi. The mythical figure is said to have lived in 2800 BCE or thereabouts, and to have lived for a goodly one hundred and sixty years or so. He is treated, in several places, as the originator of all human culture, and his temple here in Tianshui has been worth the trip. Outside were rows of small kids practising martial arts, and inside it was relativly peaceful, a courtyard filled with ancient trees and the smell of burning incense. The main hall, as well as having an imposing staring figure of Fu Xi himself, complete with leaf-clading, contained a slightly demented looking life-size sculpture of the dragon horse that was said to have risen from the river with the “river diagram” (hetu) on its back – a symbol that is repeated on the painted temple ceiling, and that is related to the Yijing in ways too complicated to go into here. I’d love to give you a picture of the horse, as it was fabulous; but as I’m not on my laptop but on an internet bar machine, I’ll have to give it a miss. The paintings on the walls were interesting too – contemporary or near contemporary images of a rugged looking Fu Xi going about his business of inventing everything there was to be invented, short of the i-Pad – and on the ceiling were the original paintings of the sixty four hexagrams.
I’m interested by the way in which Fu Xi is talked about here in China, and indeed by the whole mystique around the Yijing. So in the wildly popular “Mystery of the Yijing” (易经的奥秘) broadcast on China’s TV channel CCTV10, the presenter repeats the stories of Fu Xi as if they are historical fact, without any consideration of the implications of this claim. There are, and never were, dragon horses. Fishing, writing and so on were simply not invented by a single person. People don’t live to one hundred and sixty something years old. But when I’ve tried to point all this out to people here, my objections have often been dismissed or brushed aside. (The presenter of “Mystery”, incidentally, makes the claim that Westerners cannot understand these particular mysteries – note the “cannot” rather than “do not”, as if there is something constitutionally different about Western folk that forever bars the possibility of understanding these things; and were I to meet with him, I suspect he too would respond with similar impatience to my petty-minded questions such as that of historical evidence and the like.)
After wrestling with questions of historical accuracy and admiring dragon horses in the Fu Xi temple, I headed up to the out of town Jade Spring taoist temple for a brisk stroll around. It was quiet and rather beautiful in a run-down kind of way, and a place of active Daoist practice. Heading back into town, I paid a visit to the Xinhua bookstore, and then installed myself here in the internet cafe. For the rest of the evening, I’m planning to do a bit more writing, and to sample more of the local food. I also want to make plans for the next few days. It’s hard to find out exactly what is happening in terms of the weather – I am not far from Zhouqu which had the terrible mudslide a few days back, and some other routes are washed away or not traversable – so I’m going to ask around to see what I can find out. Tomorrow I’m going to the Buddhist caves at Maiji Shan, and if it is both possible and safe to do so with the rains and everything, I’d like to get down to Moon Canyon, which is apparently beautiful.
At the Shaanxi First Demonstration Model in Adolescent Moral Education Skincare, Maiji Shan - and a few snapshots.
#1 · kathz
Friday August 13, 2010
Being fictional was not at all good for Anna Karenina. She might have had a lot more fun had she escaped from Tolstoy’s clutches. (I’m with Anna Akhmatova on that.)