Wind
After heaven and earth separate, the space between them begins to move. Wind crosses landscapes, drives clouds and rain, and carries changes of warmth and cold, turning a static cosmos into an active natural world.
Textual and Narrative Context
Pangu transformation material often turns breath into wind and clouds and voice into thunder. Other sources describe winds of eight directions, directional wind deities or bird-like beings associated with wind.
How to Read This Entry
Breath becoming wind projects bodily life onto the cosmos. The world seems to inhale and exhale, so wind carries both physical motion and a sign of vitality.
Relation to Other Creation Accounts
Wind moves clouds, clouds release rain, and rain enters rivers. This sequence connects bodily transformation, weather and waterways across the newly formed world.
Comparative Reading
Read the term in its sentence, relation and period before comparing later interpretations. Modern meaning cannot replace early context.
Bodily transformation links celestial bodies, landscapes, weather and vegetation into a living world, while the Classic of Mountains and Seas provides other mythic geographies. Related natural features need not share one creator.
What the Sources Establish
Directional wind names and deities belong to several textual systems and should not all be assigned to Pangu. Myth records cultural imagination, while meteorology explains pressure and circulation.
Related Reading
References
- Pangu transformation material transmitted in Shuyi Ji
- Wind and direction passages in the Classic of Mountains and Seas
- Huainanzi discussions of the eight winds