The intensive study of a country’s beliefs and ideas, as revealed in its myths and legends, is greatly facilitated by the adoption of the comparative method. It may not always be found possible to identify areas in which certain beliefs had origin, but when we detect, as we do in China, myths similar to those found in other lands, and especially highly complex myths, that had origin in one particular country and received additions in another, the imported elements may be sifted out from a local religious system without much difficulty.
The Chinese dragon has distinct and outstanding Chinese characteristics, but it is obviously not entirely a Chinese creation. Attached to the “composite wonder beast” are complex ideas that have a history outside China, as well as those ideas that reflect Chinese natural phenomena and Chinese experiences and habits of life and thought. The fused beliefs, as symbolized by the dragon, [[67]]have passed through a prolonged process of local development, but those that were imported have not, it is found, been entirely divested of their distinctive characteristics, and remain preserved as flies are in amber.
Interesting and important evidence that throws light on the history of the Chinese dragon is found in Polynesia, India, and Babylonia, and even in Egypt and Europe. The cultural influence of Babylonia, which radiated over a wide area for a score of centuries or longer, is traceable in India, and, as is well known, Buddhist India exercised a strong cultural influence on China. But, as will be shown, Babylonian influence reached the Shensi province of China long before the Aryans entered India. Buddhist ideas regarding the pearl-protecting dragon-god of water and fire were evidently superimposed in China upon earlier Babylonian ideas regarding the water-dragon, which had no particular connection with pearls. At any rate, there is no mention of pearls in the Babylonian myth.
When it is found that many of the ideas connected with the Chinese dragon were prevalent in Polynesia, what conclusion is to be drawn? There is no evidence that Chinese culture was an active force in New Zealand or Hawaii, for instance. It cannot have been from China that the Polynesians derived their dragon, or their beliefs connected with the serpent, a reptile unknown to the islanders at first hand. The only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn is that the Chinese and the Polynesians were influenced at an early period by intruders from other lands. The Polynesian intruders must necessarily have been sea-traders. Of course, the Polynesians may themselves have imported their dragon beliefs from their homeland. That homeland, however, was certainly not China. [[68]]
The Polynesian Mo-o or Mo-ko (dragon) had, as was shown in the last chapter, a connection with pearls. “On Maui”, writes W. D. Westervelt,[1] “the greatest dragon of the island was Kiha-wahine. The natives had the saying, ‘Kiha has mana, or miraculous power, like Mo-o-inanea’. She lived in a large, deep pool on the edge of the village Lahaina, and was worshipped by the royal family of Maui as their special guardian.” Royal families were invariably the descendants of intruding conquerors. It is of special interest, therefore, to find the Polynesian dragon-god connected with a military aristocracy.
The Rev. George Brown, missionary and explorer, refers to similar dragon beliefs among the people of New Britain. He tells of a spring connected with the woman (goddess) who caused the deluge. The natives “say that an immense fish lives in it, which will come out when they call it”. The belief obtains among the Melanesians “that the creator of all things was a woman”. She “made all lands” and “the natives prayed” to her “when an eclipse of the sun or the moon took place”.[2] The king of Samoan gods was a dragon. “This god”, Brown tells, “had the body of a man to the breast only, and the body of an eel (muræna) below. This eel’s body lies down in the ocean, and from the chest to the head lies down in the house. This is the god to whom all things are reported. The inferior gods are his attendants.”[3]
Gods half human and half reptile, or half human and half fish, are found in various countries. In the British Museum are bronze reliefs of the King of Benin (as the representative of his chief deity) half shark and half man. The kings of Dahomey were depicted as sharks with bodies [[69]]covered with scales; their statues are in the Trocadero, Paris.[4]
That the Polynesian reptile deities were imported there can be no doubt. As early as 1825 Mr. Bloxam, the English naval chaplain, drew this necessary conclusion. In his The Voyage of the Blonde he says: “At the bottom of the Parre (pali) there are two large stones, on which even now offerings of fruit and flowers are laid to propitiate the Aku-wahines, or goddesses, who are supposed to have the power of granting a safe passage”. Referring to the female mo-o, or reptile deities, Mr. Bloxam says it was difficult for him to get an explanation of their name, the Hawaiians having “nothing of the shape of serpents or large reptiles in their islands”.[5]
But the closest analogy to the Chinese dragon is found in India. The Nagas (serpent-gods), which were taken over by the Buddhists, and the Chinese dragons have much in common. “Cobras in their ordinary shape,” writes Dr. Rhys Davids of the Nagas, “they lived beneath the waters like mermen and mermaids, in great luxury and wealth, more especially of gems.” Sometimes the tree-spirits (dryads) are called Nagas. “They could at will, and often did, adopt the human form; and though terrible if angered, were kindly and mild by nature.”[6] Kerns says “that the Nagas are water-spirits represented, as a rule, in human shapes, with a crown of serpents on their heads”, and also as “snake-like beings resembling clouds”.[7] They are “demi-gods”. Like the Chinese dragons, the Nagas are guardians of the four quarters of the universe. There are withal Nagas in the sea who control winds and tides, and one of the Naga kings is Sagara, who is a Neptune in [[70]]Japan. The Nagas are also “Lords of the Earth”, and send drought and disease when offended or neglected. Ea, the sea-god of the early Babylonians, was known also as Enki, “The Lord of the Earth”.
In Buddhist art the Naga is shown in three forms: (1) as a human being with a snake on or poised over the head, reminding one of the Egyptian kings or queens who wear the uræus symbol on their foreheads; (2) as half human and half snake (the “mermaid form”); and (3) as ordinary snakes. The first form is found not only in India, but in Tibet, China, and Japan. Human-shaped Nagas are depicted worshipping Buddha, as they stand in water.