Water War (Chinese myth)

Author: Traditional

Time Period: 999 BCE–1 BCE

Country or Culture: China

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

The water god Gong Gong (Kung Kung) unleashes torrential rains and floods that devastate the earth and cause great loss of human and animal life. The other gods are afraid of Gong Gong. The exception is Zhu Rong (Zurong or Chu Jung), the fire god.

Zhu Rong opposes Gong Gong’s plan to make the earth a water-dominated world and challenges Gong Gong to a celestial battle. The two gods rise into the sky to wrestle with each other for days. The sky shakes with thunder; lightning flickers across it. Finally, the two combatants end up “crack[ing] the dome of heaven” itself (Collier 44).

With the battle a draw, Gong Gong challenges Zhu Rong to resume their fight on earth. Gong Gong places his best soldiers on a huge raft constructed from bamboo stalks. Zhu Rong attacks with a pillar of fire. The fire surges inside the hollow bamboo reeds, burning the raft and thus drowning Gong Gong’s soldiers.

Gong Gong summons his sea monsters. These include turtles, crabs, and lobsters that have “huge horns and wings like bats” (45). They are protected by armor and raise a wall of water to drown the fire god. In retaliation, Zhu Rong exhales a fierce blast of fire, burning Gong Gong’s sea monsters to death inside their armor.

Gong Gong flees west amid the rejoicing of all other gods. Enraged, Gong Gong rams his head into the top of Mount Buzhou (Buzhow or Puchou). This splinters off the mountain peak, which flies upward and tears a big hole in the sky.

This rends open the dome of heaven. Through the fissures and the hole, “deadly creatures from beyond the heavens” sweep down upon the earth (47), where Gong Gong’s impact has also torn open the earth’s crust. Mountains explode, and fire and smoke emerge from the earth. The land is hit by earthquakes, forest fires, and breaking dams. The gods, including Zhu Rong, look helplessly at this great destruction.

The goddess Nüwa angrily intervenes. She gathers rocks of the “five sacred colors” (47) and melts them down together. With this mixture, Nüwa patches up the sky. Next, Nüwa gathers river rushes to put into the fiery cracks on the earth. Their ashes plug up the cracks, and the earth settles down. With more rushes Nüwa dams the raging rivers. Finally, Nüwa cuts off the legs of a deceased giant turtle of Gong Gong’s defeated army. She uses the legs as pillars to hold up the sky. As she puts up the northwestern pillar, the earth tilts from west to east.

To calm humanity, Nüwa creates a flute. It has twelve bamboo reeds tied together to look like the tail of a phoenix. Nüwa teaches humanity to play this instrument, which brings forth “clear, soothing notes” (47).

It is because of the war that the earth is still unstable. Its new tilt causes the moon and the stars to move across the sky in a northwesterly direction, and Chinese rivers to flow from the west down to the east.

SIGNIFICANCE

“Water War,” by Irene Dea Collier, is an English rendition of a Chinese myth. The story draws on classic Chinese sources to present the myth of the earth’s near-destruction by a divine war and its rescue by the goddess Nüwa. The oldest surviving written reference to this myth is found in the section “Tianwen” (“Heavenly Questions”) of the classic Chinese anthology Chu Ci (Ch’u Tz’u), written in the third century BCE by Qu Yuan (Ch’ü Yüan).

The second Chinese classic reference to the myth is found in the sixth chapter of the book Huainanzi (Huai-nan Tzu), by Prince Liu An of the second century BCE. The two versions by Qu Yuan and Liu An differ in detail. Collier has formed a successful synthesis of the myth into English.

The key themes of “Water War” are the near-fatal consequences for all life on earth that result from an epic battle between two gods and the world’s rescue by Nüwa. Here, the personification of strong natural forces—water and fire—into deities is a classic global mythological element. The capricious quest for dominance by Gong Gong, the water god, threatens the world. Its only counterpart is provided by Zhu Rong, the god of fire. This represents the Chinese Daoist (Taoist) philosophical emphasis on balance in life, here between water and fire. This theme of balance is especially prominent in Liu An’s story.

“Water War” expresses the classic theme in Chinese mythology that humanity is endangered by the capriciousness and excesses of the various deities. Storms and floods threatened traditional Chinese life. In Chinese mythology, these phenomena were attributed to violent deities.

The idea that the sky itself gets damaged in the myth points at an apocalyptic cataclysm threatening all of humanity and the natural environment. Large natural disasters, including earthquakes and huge floods, have been common in the areas populated by Chinese people since ancient times. The starkly envisioned consequences of the gods’ careless struggle, and Gong Gong’s willful ramming of Mount Buzhou, represent a powerful image of natural disaster dwarfing even the might of most gods.

Collier’s text stresses the idea of a gender struggle. While male gods are violent, unrestrained, and careless, and damage the very fabric of the universe, the goddess Nüwa is the only one able to restore order. Nüwa uses traditional Daoist magic—five sacred colors of rocks—to plug the hole in the heavens. She employs techniques in quenching fires and restoring dams that relate both to real ancient methods to deal with these calamities and to Daoism. As Sinologist Anthony Christie points out, the reeds represent the element of water and the ashes that quench the fires relate to the element of earth. The balance of water and earth is restored by Nüwa.

“Water War” contains elements of an origin myth to explain the course of the stars and the shape of the earth. As indeed two of China’s largest rivers, the Yangzi (Yangtze) and the Yellow River (Huang He), flow west to east, the myth provides a supernatural rationale for geographic reality. Finally, Nüwa’s flute, the sheng, is a real traditional Chinese musical instrument.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birrell, Anne. Chinese Mythology: An Introduction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. 97–98. Print.

Christie, Anthony. Chinese Mythology. 1968. Rev. ed. New York: Bedrick, 1987. 86–87. Print.

Collier, Irene Dea. “Water War.” Chinese Mythology Rocks! Berkeley Heights: Enslow, 2012. 42–51. Print.

Hawkes, David, trans. and ed. The Songs of the South: An Anthology of Ancient Chinese Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets. 1959. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012. Print.

Le Blanc, Charles. Huai-nan Tzu. Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 1985. Print.

Lianshan, Chen. “War between Zhuanxu and Gonggong.” Chinese Myths and Legends. Trans. Zhang Fengru and Chen Shanshan. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. 79–81. Print.

---. “Nüwa Mending the Heaven.” Chinese Myths and Legends. Trans. Zhang Fengru and Chen Shanshan. New York: Cambridge UP, 2011. 11–16. Print.

Yang, Lihui, Deming An, and Jessica Anderson Turner. Handbook of Chinese Mythology. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.