The Four Extremities
Once heaven and earth separate, the world needs edges as well as above and below. The four extremities extend the cardinal directions to their furthest points and give the ground a supported range.
Textual and Narrative Context
The Huainanzi preserves accounts of Nuwa setting up the four extremities with the legs of a giant turtle and of cosmic imbalance after Gonggong strikes a mountain. The Classic of Mountains and Seas also organizes remote space by direction.
How to Read This Entry
An extremity can be a limit or a support. The concept explains why heaven does not fall, why earth has a range, and why catastrophe can tilt the balance of directions.
Relation to Other Creation Accounts
The four extremities belong to cosmic structure rather than four fixed modern locations. Together with Mount Buzhou, the directions and the center, they form a spatial framework.
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
Nuwa’s repair of heaven belongs later in the timeline. This entry defines the extremities without merging every pillar, mountain and direction from different texts into one map.
Related Reading
References
- Huainanzi, “Surveying Obscurities”
- Huainanzi, “Treatise on the Patterns of Heaven”
- Directional and remote regions in the Classic of Mountains and Seas