China Has No Creation Myth Summary

Based on Womack (2005), the creation myth is a “symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it”. In the article, “The Myth That China Has No Creation Myth,” Goldin claims that the statement that China has no myths of creation is a myth itself. In order to strengthen his argument, he uses primary and secondary sources of Chinese literature to both support his idea and oppose the ideas of other scholars who believe that China has no creation myth. In particular, after analyzing and comparing seven different cosmogonies in ancient China, Goldin concludes that China has its own unique cosmogony and creation story. As a professor in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of

Mote and A.C. Graham, claim that one of the main differences between Chinese and Western culture is that China lacks the myths of cosmogony. Specifically, Derk Bodde (1981) argues that ancient Chinese philosophers have little interest in the origin of the cosmos. Instead, typical Chinese philosophers focused more on the relationships between people and between physical environments. Also, Frederik E.Mote (1972) states that normal Chinese people believe that the world and humans are uncreated but self-generating. This indicates that they believe there is no creator external to the cosmos itself. In addition, A. C. Graham (1989) claims that China did not have its own cosmogonic myth until the Han Dynasty. Besides directly arguing that China has no myth of cosmogony, Goldin also points out that, in recent years, scholars such as David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, arrive at the same conclusion indirectly by comparing ancient China and ancient Western countries. From their points of views, China is the opposite of the West. Therefore, China should not have its own cosmogony or creation story based on the fact that ancient Western countries do have their own cosmogony and creation stories. Hall and Ames (1995) conclude that traditional Chinese philosophers are “acosmotic” in the sense that “they do not depend their speculations upon the belief that ‘the totality of things constitutes a single-ordered