the popular mind for any such solution or illustration. The ordinary
mind would seem to have been either indifferent to or satisfied
with the abstruse cosmogonical and cosmological theories of the
early sages for at least a thousand years. The cosmogonies of the _I
ching_, of Lao Tzu, Confucius (such as it was), Kuan Tzu, Mencius,
Chuang Tzu, were impersonal. P'an Ku and his myth must be regarded
rather as an accident than as a creation resulting from any sudden
flow of psychological forces or wind of discontent ruffling the
placid Chinese mind. If the Chinese brought with them from Babylon
or anywhere else the elements of a cosmogony, whether of a more or
less abstruse scientific nature or a personal mythological narrative,
it must have been subsequently forgotten or at least has not survived
in China. But for Ko Hung's eccentricity and his wish to experiment
with cinnabar from Cochin-China in order to find the elixir of life,
P'an Ku would probably never have been invented, and the Chinese mind
would have been content to go on ignoring the problem or would have
quietly acquiesced in the abstract philosophical explanations of the
learned which it did not understand. Chinese cosmogony would then
have consisted exclusively of the recondite impersonal metaphysics
which the Chinese mind had entertained or been fed on for the nine
hundred or more years preceding the invention of the P'an Ku myth.


Nü Kua Shih, the Repairer of the Heavens

It is true that there exist one or two other explanations of the
origin of things which introduce a personal creator. There is,
for instance, the legend--first mentioned by Lieh Tzu (to whom we
shall revert later)--which represents Nü Kua Shih (also called Nü
Wa and Nü Hsi), said to have been the sister and successor of Fu