Mirrors (8 page)

HORROR OF WAR

On the back of a blue ox rode Lao Tse.

He was traveling the paths of contradiction, which led to the secret place where water and fire fuse.

In contradiction all meets nil, life meets death, near meets far, before meets after.

Lao Tse, village philosopher, believed that the richer a nation is, the poorer it becomes. He believed that knowing war teaches peace, because suffering inhabits glory:

Every action provokes reactions.
Violence always returns.
Only thistles and thorns grow where armies encamp.
War summons hunger.
He who delights in conquest, delights in human pain.
Every victory should be celebrated with a funeral.

YELLOW

The most fearful river in China is called Yellow, thanks either to a dragon’s recklessness or to human folly.

Before China was China, the dragon Kau Fu tried to cross the sky mounted on one of the ten suns.

By noon he could no longer bear the heat.

Set ablaze by the sun, crazed by thirst, the dragon dropped into the first river he saw. From the heights he plummeted to the depths and drank the water down to the last drop, leaving nothing but a long bed of yellow clay where the river had been.

Some say this version is not scientific. They say it is a historical fact that the Yellow River has been called as such for about two thousand years, since the forests on its banks were felled and could no longer afford protection from avalanches of snow, mud, and garbage. Then the river, formerly jade green, lost its color and gained its name. With the passing of time, things got worse until the river became one huge sewer. In 1980, four hundred river dolphins lived there. In 2004, only one was left. It didn’t last long.

YI AND THE DROUGHT

All ten suns had gone haywire and were spinning about the sky.

The gods summoned Yi, the unbeatable bowman, master of masters in the art of the arrow.

“The earth is roasting,” they told him. “People are dying, and animals and plants are dying too.”

As night came to an end, Yi the archer lay in wait. At dawn he let fly.

One after another the suns were snuffed out.

Only the sun that now lights our days survived.

The gods mourned the deaths of their glowing sons. And though the gods themselves had called on Yi, they expelled him from heaven.

“If you love the earthlings so, go live with them.”

Forced into exile, Yi became mortal.

YU AND THE FLOOD

After drought came flood.

The rocks groaned, the trees howled. The Yellow River, nameless still, swallowed people and crops, drowned valleys and mountains.

Yu, the lame god, came to rescue the world.

Hobbling along, Yu ventured into the flood and with his shovel opened canals and tunnels to drain the furious waters.

Yu was assisted by a fish that knew the river’s secrets, by a dragon that went first and deflected the current with his tail, and by a tortoise that went last and carried away all the mud.

ORIGIN OF THE CHINESE BOOK

Cang Jie had four eyes.

He earned his living reading stars and telling fortunes.

After much study of the design of constellations, the profile of mountains, and the plumage of birds, he created the symbols that spell words.

In one of the oldest of books, made of bamboo tablets, the ideograms invented by Cang Jie tell the story of a kingdom where men lived longer than eight centuries and women were the color of light because they ate sunshine.

The Lord of Fire, who ate stones, challenged royal authority and sent his troops to march on the throne. His magic powers wrapped the palace in a dense curtain of fog, leaving the king’s guard dumbstruck. Soldiers teetered in the darkness, blind, aimless, when the Black Woman with bird feathers flew down from the heights, invented the compass, and presented it to the desperate king.

The fog was defeated, and the enemy too.

FAMILY PORTRAIT IN CHINA

In ancient times, Shun, Lord Hibiscus, reigned over China. Hou Ji, Lord Millet, was his minister of agriculture.

The two had faced a number of difficulties in childhood.

Right from birth, Shun’s father and his older brother detested him. They set fire to the house when he was a baby, but he was not even singed. So they put him in a hole in the ground and threw in enough dirt to bury him completely, but he was not bothered in the least.

His minister, Hou Ji, also managed to survive his family’s tenderness. His mother, convinced that the newborn would give her bad luck, abandoned him in the countryside, hoping that hunger would kill him. And when it did not, she ditched him in the woods for the tigers to eat. When the tigers paid no heed, she tossed him into a snowdrift so the cold would put an end to him. A few days later she found him in good humor and slightly overheated.

SILK THAT WAS SPITTLE

Queen Lei Zu, wife of Huang Di, founded the Chinese art of silk making.

As memory’s storytellers would have it, Lei Zu reared the first worm. She gave it white mulberry leaves to eat, and soon threads of the worm’s spittle were weaving a cocoon around its body. Bit by tiny bit, Lei Zu’s delicate fingers unraveled that mile-long thread. Thus the cocoon that was to become a butterfly became silk instead.

And silk became transparent gauze, muslin, tulle, and taffeta. It dressed ladies and lords in plush velvets and sumptuous brocades embroidered with pearls.

Outside the kingdom, silk was a forbidden luxury. Its trade routes passed over snow-capped mountains, fiery deserts, and seas populated by mermaids and pirates.

FLIGHT OF THE CHINESE WORM

Much later on, scores of fearsome enemies no longer lay in wait along the silk routes. Yet those who attempted to take mulberry seeds or the eggs of the thread-making worm out of China still lost their heads.

In the year 420, Xuan Zang, the king of Yutian, asked for the hand of a Chinese princess. He had spied her just once, but from then on he saw her wherever he looked.

The princess, Lu Shi was her name, was given to him.

An ambassador traveled on the king’s behalf to retrieve her.

There was an exchange of gifts and interminable banquets and ceremonies.