Legends and Politics of China

What the Rams Brought

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So the gods took measures. They sent down five magical beasts, who are commonly painted as goats and described as 'rams'. Indeed, they seem to have become divinities themselves, and are known as the Five Rams. Sometimes these rams carry five angels, the usual young ladies with beads in their hair and flowing skirts; sometimes the rams manage to steer themselves. Everyone agrees, however, that each celestial mouth carried a single head of grain.

What kind of grain? There are at least two different opinions. You see, the Chinese word 'rice' has the same meaning as the old English term, 'corn'. That is, 'rice' means 'grain', grain of any type; so some people say the Five Rams brought rice, while other folk insist that the rams brought a variety of grains, including wheat, rice, beans, and 'two kinds of millet', one of which may have been sorghum. Either way, the Five Rams guaranteed that their gift had the power to feed the human race, and banish hunger forever. No one, they said, need ever be hungry again.

This resolution inspired most of my students. In the early nineteen-nineties I was teaching English in a military school in Canton, and I kept looking for topics which could get my students to enjoy writing. I had seen statues of the rams in the park and in front of the department store, so I asked each member of my composition class to tell me the story. They did so with enthusiasm, relating the story to their ancient history and their sense of national destiny. Indeed, only one student had a misgiving of any kind. She wrote 'that the goats were very kind, but has it come true yet? Perhaps it will later.'

We can hope. In the classroom, however, I read over the the compositions as they came to the front, and I worried over more basic questions. Each student had told the same story, but the details were different in each one. For instance, what about those celestials? Were they goats, or were they rams? Did they carry angels, or did they come alone? And exactly which seeds did they bring?

It all goes back to Confucius. You see, Confucious lived in the fifth century BC, at a time when the state was deteriorating but hardly dead. Eager to hold society together, he emphasized family and prosperity, so he wrote that "Gods and ghosts are real, and should be respected with the appropriate rites; however, the wise man avoids speculation," particularily about divinities. Keeping this world alive, Confucious said, was more important than any kind of theology .

Confucious was not the first nor the last scholar to resist a flood. In fact, anarchy and famine did come, for a time, and when China reassembled itself, three hundred years later, the new leaders of the Han Dynasty needed a legal and moral code to keep their people out of trouble. Therefore they ordered their scholars to study and teach the works of Confucious, making his philosophy into the state religion. Consequently, every line in his brief book, 'The Analects', would creat or abort entire philosophies and lines of thought. This meant that no decent Chinese scholar would do what Homer had done for Greece, and write a standard version of the ancient myths. After thousands of years, the gods of the Chinese pantheon, from the woman who created mankind to the Five Rams, were still known only from folktales, told from parents to children and changing a little in every ear. Goats or rams? Alone, or with angels? It depends on who is doing the telling.

That should have been the end of the story, and yet for me, somehow, it was not. You see, that year I met another English teacher, an American named Scott Tang. Scott's parents had come from Canton, back in the thirties, a generation before the Communists had taken over China. We got to talking, and I asked him about the different details of the story. "Oh, you don't know the half of it, Dan!" he told me. He explained that he had heard an older version of this same story. It seems that "At the end, you see, the farmers wad the rice into these little balls in order to save it for later. The thing is, that shows no faith, so the rice jumps off the table and escapes, saying that every year they'll have to work hard before they can eat..."

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