If you pay little attention to the myth system, you will find that in Greek mythology the relationship between each god and goddess is pretty clear. It has an explicit system. All the gods and goddess in Greece were multiplied from generation to generation whereas Chinese myth mentioned very little information about the god couples and there are no clear connections between ordinary gods and major gods. In one word Greek myth has a clear system but Chinese myth does not.
Why is there such an obvious difference between Chinese and Greek myth's system? What is it that made Chinese myth's system so vague? There are many possible reasons.
The first possible reason is about the different region. Ancient Chinese lived by the Yellow River Basin. They lived a hard life mainly based on agriculture, therefore they paid more attention to the practice rather than fantasy. The Greek peninsula, however, were surrounded by ocean. Obviously the view of the vast ocean brought ancient Greece unlimited imagination and this unlimited imagination made them more active in creating imaginative myth stories, so there is no doubt that ancient Greece have more myth works than Chinese. What made things worse is that Greese is just a small island on the Aegean Sea but China is known as a vast land country. Of course the broad land led the Chinese myth to a very embarrassed situation--because of the difficulties in communicating with each other through the vast land at that time an abundant statements of myth system which are totally different from each other sprang up there and made it a really hard work to unite an authoritative system from all. The birthplace of Greek mythology was much smaller than that of China that it is absolutely easier to unite an authoritative system and then to popularize the works after the myth stories were completed.
compared to the Greek mythology Chinese mythology seemed lost at the very beginning.
The second reason that made Chinese myth so vague is a inevitable one. That is the trend of the development of character. The ancient myth were spread by words of mouth, however, the character appeared gradually. The ancient people have to replace the flexible spoken words of the myth with rigid character to save the stories. As you know the limitation of the character made the written myth stories lost their fun and some part of the truth of their own. Needless to say that it is impossible to bring the half-human beast image in the ancient stories
into historical pedigree completely. On solving this difficult task ancient Greece obviously showed much more talent than ancient Chinese for Greece has evidently more famous painters than China at that time.
This all result the first loss of Chinese myth.
The last one, also the most important one, is about the Chinese social institution. Central Plains Civilization before the Warring States Period was the dominate culture in ancient China. Before that was the 800 years domination of Chou Dynasty. People in Chou Dynasty created very little myth themselves but they tried their best to abandon the spread of myth of every ethnic which ruled by them. That made the ancient Chinese heavily destroyed. After Chinese entered the feudal system they paid more and more attention to the real world rather than the supernatural beings. The ancient sages especially Confucian equaled myth to the ghosts an superstition.
They not only did not attach any importance to collect the myth stories but also demoted them. We all know that all the Greek gods or goddess are related to Zeus in some way just because Zeus is a famous merry god. He has many lovers except his legal wife so that he has many legitimate children and illegitimate children. All his children are different gods or god-men or supermen. Greek myth system could be so clear apparently depended on the merry god Zeus. Compared with Greek myth Chinese myth could be described as a purest shy girl because you can not even find any single hair of a merry god. It can not be proved but it seems quiet possible that because of the thought of Confucian and their high requirement for the morality that they bowdlerized the merry stories of the Chinese gods. What is quiet certain is that the actions that the sages took did lead to the annihilation of a large number of myth and made the ancient absurd fantasy story not inherited by orthodox literator for future generations.(BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINESE FICTION BY LUXUN)
Otherwise, for the needs of themselves the governing class also took many actions to bowdlerize the myth at will. Such as the revise of the book IMPERIAL COLLECTION OF FOUR of Qing Dynasty. They ruined a horrible number of books. In addition to intentional damage the damage caused by wars such the YongJia Rebelion and the Wu Dai Shi Guo is also very serious. After suffering so many misfortune the Chinese myth only can be seen in very small number of books which are ShanHai Classic, HuaiNan Tzu and ShiBen.
Compared to China the fate of Greek mythology is much more lucky.
I have been wondering that how the Chinese myth would develope if there were not so many misfortune. I even have wept for its imperfect. But after i finishing finding out all the reasons i realized in a flash that incomplete is also an appealing beauty. The incomplete myth developed together with China, witnessed the hardships that Chinese had been through from ancient times to modern times and saw the growth of China. Even if it does not have a completed system i still love the Chinese myth because it has its own characteristic. Every time i read it i feel my country .
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