The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Read Online Free Page A

Oneness. All things issued from this oneness but all became different, being divided into the various species of fish, birds, and beasts.… But he who can return to that from which he was born and become as though formless is called a “true man.” The true man is he who has never become separated from the Great Oneness.
    The origin of this simple division of natural forces is hidden in antiquity.
    The yin and the yang reached out across Asia to Japan, Vietnam, and Korea, where the yin-yang symbol was adopted for the national flag. This Huai-nan Tzu version of the yin-yang works of creation prefaced the
Nihon shoki
(720), the oldest official Japanese history. Astrology, astronomy, medicine, government, and the arts elaborate the yin-yang distinction and notions that were supposed to follow from it.
    In time the Taoist ways of thinking about man and nature were assimilated into the renewed Confucian theorizing by the great synthesizer Chu Hsi (1130–1200):
    In the beginning of the universe there was only material-force consisting of yin and yang. This force moved and circulated, turning this way and that. As this movement gained speed, a mass of sediment was pushed together and, since there was no outlet for this, it consolidated to form the earth in the center of the universe.…
    Further Question:
Can the universe be destroyed?
    Answer:
It is indestructible. But in time man will lose all moral principles and everything will be thrown together in a chaos. Man and things will all die out, and then there will be a new beginning.
    Further Question:
How was the first man created?
    Answer:
Through the transformation of material-force. When the essence of yin and yang and the five agents are united, man’s corporeal form is established. This is what the Buddhists call production by transformation. There are many such productions today, such as lice.
    Question:
With reference to the mind of Heaven and earth and the principle of Heaven and earth, Principle is moral principle. Is mind the will of a master?
    Answer:
The mind is the will of a master, it is true, but what is called “master” is precisely principle itself. It is not true that outside of the mind there is principle, or that outside of principle there is mind.
    The way of thought that brought together Confucian morality and Taoist sympathy with nature saw time as a series of cycles, without beginning or end. And, as Chu Hsi suggests, Buddhism, too, would be transformed as it entered this Confucian world. Yet, somehow the Chinese also saw history as lineal in its smaller dimensions. Unwilling to fix a time for the beginning of the world or of their nation, they marked their sixty-year cyclical calendar with the years of the reigning monarch, to date human events precisely in historical time.
    Just as yin and yang explained regularity and balance in nature, so the five agents were a key to the cycles of history. Wood produced fire; fire produced earth; earth produced metal; metal produced water, and so on and on. Still it was possible instead to rearrange the agents by which one element overcame another. This resulted in a different order, since fire was “overcome” by water, water by earth, earth by wood, and wood by metal. Every dynasty had to be associated with one of the five elements, and to be legitimate had to appear at the predestined point for its “element” in the cyclical series. Dynasties, usually after the fact, claimed their right to seize the throne to preserve the proper order of agents.
    Thus the Chinese emperor Wang Mang (33 B.C. – A.D . 23; ruled A.D . 2–23), commonly known as the Usurper, justified his coup, which ended the Early Han dynasty, by the fact that he was a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, whose agent was Earth. So he was qualified to fill the place in the cyclical series which required another dynasty of the agent earth. Apparent irregularities in the series were explained away by conveniently inserting into the calendar an