836 religion and cosmology: Asia and the Pacific Cosmology As early Asian societies formed into hunting and gathering cultures, they composed oral myths to honor their legendary ancestral heroes and the spirits of nature, to whom they believed they owed their livelihood Myths provided practical explanations and solutions to everyday needs Commonly Asian myths became the basis of medieval-era cosmologies, which explained that humans came into existence by the actions of a god, gods, or a divine source that established a continuing bond between the earthbound world of humanity and the supernatural world of the divine This outlook established a hierarchy in which humans existed below the gods and other supernatural beings, but above animals and plants The realm of the spirits was acknowledged in regular private and public rituals These local spirit cults might be formalized into a universal animistic rural tradition as in Japanese Shinto; more commonly they were incorporated into Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism as subordinates of the universal celestial divine What had begun as oral traditions were eventually compiled and written down by clerics associated with the medieval-era courts, but these were continually supplemented by new folktales As with other Asian societies, early Japanese rural populations associated their folk deities with the forces of nature, which could either help or harm human beings Japanese cosmology began with the divine brother and sister Izanagi and Izanami, who created the Japanese islands and gave birth to the sun goddess Amaterasu, the guardian deity of the Japanese people (which is why Japan is the “Land of the Rising Sun”) The sun goddess hid in a cave to escape early human violence Her withdrawal temporarily stopped the sunlight and jeopardized human civilization until she was lured out of hiding The cave’s entrance was covered with a jeweled necklace and a mirror to reflect her image, and its doors were held open by a large rope to prevent her from returning to her cave The necklace and the mirror became the sacred objects of her worship in the Shinto tradition, and a Shinto shrine is built around an altar that is framed by a large rope, which symbolically holds the altar’s doors open to prevent the local guardian spirits (kami) from returning to their “cave.” Chinese cosmology highlighted the Jade Emperor, the ruler of heaven and earth and of the other high divinities in Chinese folk religion The legendary exploits of the Three August Ones and the Five Emperors were associated with events that made Chinese society and culture possible The Three August Ones included the creator of humankind and the inventors of fire and farming The Five Emperors were wise and morally perfect sages who continued this evolution One of them was the legendary Duke of Yu, who dredged the rivers to control the flooding of the Yellow River and thus made possible not only the settlement and cultivation of the north China floodplain but also the rise of dynastic government Asian creation myths told how humanity came to be In one Chinese tale Pan Gu was the first living thing He emerged from a giant cosmic egg that contained the opposite forces of yin and yang Yin (energy that supposedly is soft, dark, receptive, and “female”) and yang (energy that supposedly is hard, bright, active, and “male”) fell from the egg Yin formed the earth and yang the sky Pan Gu himself became the source of the third element of the trinity of earth, sky, and humankind In Japan’s origin cosmology, as related above, earth and sky were deities of different sexes, male being sky and female being earth, who together eventually produced human offspring Also, the Japanese creative energy source that allowed human existence was not celestial, but the sea: The god Izanagi and goddess Izanami stirred the waters of the sea to produce land that they later made into the Japanese islands, which they populated them with their many children, including the sun goddess Amaterasu, from whom descended the emperors of Japan In the original Indian creation myth contained in the Vedas, which in their original oral form dated to roughly 1400 b.c.e., the celestial divine force Varuna’s sacrificed body parts were the source of human existence By medieval times Hindu and Buddhist clerics based their teachings on the Indian Upanishads (oral origins ca 800 b.c.e.) They attributed creativity to a force contained within a cosmic egg, Brahman, which continued to exist as the source of cycles of rebirth in the Hindu and Buddhist religious traditions Transculturalism, Creation, and Gender Asia’s major medieval-era faiths, Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, were notable for their transcultural appeal As they spread to new locations, they took with them aspects of their Indian and Chinese homelands, including these cultures’ preconceptions of how society should function Although these creeds claimed to be universal and inclusive, the medieval-era states that adopted them were generally tolerant of preexisting local religious beliefs Most Hindu, Confucian, and Buddhist rulers allowed the practice of other faiths as long as all their subjects acknowledged the supremacy of the state’s chief divinity Each of these religions, as well as Japanese Shinto and Chinese Daoism, acknowledged that both good and evil play important roles in the universe These faiths sought to neutralize the negative rather than totally isolating or eliminating it Asian religions universally taught that humans were born and remained basically good, not with a tendency toward evil At the same time, they held that humankind was