龍は実在するのかDoes the Dragon Exist?
Generally the dragon is a figure of legend, spoken of as an imaginary creature. Even today, though, many people have no doubt that dragons exist, and in Japan there are people who have seen or caught one. I myself once saw a young dragon, deep in a mountain where dragons live. To see the dragon as mere legend or invention is only a matter of our own dimension, and we must start from the premise that people in ancient times lived in a world entirely different from ours. At its root lay the primal pain that humans first experienced: alienation from natural existence. As that alienation gradually advanced in human history, people created ritual and began to worship gods, trying to close the hole in existence that alienation had torn open. What matters here is that this is a problem of the mind.
A momentous emergence of consciousness is deeply involved in this, and unless we take this view as our premise, we cannot discuss the dragon, or any of the various living beings said to have existed in ancient times in places around the world. What truly matters is not to judge them by whether they existed within the category of objects as we now grasp them. It is, rather, to set aside a way of thinking that is strongly limited to our own age. Only then can we ask how living beings such as the dragon were born, and how they were bound up with the problems of the human mind and affected them.
My standpoint is to inquire into the discomfort and pain of the mind, caused by the tearing of human existence itself through alienation from natural existence. I think the dragon took on its early life in the many unbounded intentions to hold that tear closed, to fill it, or to meet what lay beyond it. That is, the dragon does not exist except for humans who have experienced, in the mind, the primal alienation from natural existence. Put the other way, any insight into the dragon's existence is always intertwined with the originating event of the emergence of consciousness. To know the origin of consciousness answers to knowing beings such as the dragon, and it is also a very interesting theme that touches many events, from humanity's primal anxiety and pain to the existence of gods and the birth of faith.
The dragon is known to have a very long history, but in Japan the dragon is actually depicted mainly from the Yayoi period onward. This is because many artifacts such as Yayoi pottery have been excavated with dragons engraved or painted on them. This tendency has a different context from the Jomon period, but it does not mean that the dragon did not exist for the Jomon people. The dragon in its Eastern form was brought by migrants, but for the Jomon people the native dragon was symbolized by the snake, and engravings that could be called the Yayoi people's dragon are widely used on their pottery too. It is a fact that the Jomon people either had little custom of drawing pictures or did not value it, so with the Yayoi period it looks as if pictures suddenly began to appear on pottery.
The origin of the Eastern dragon can be sought in China. In China, images of the dragon have been confirmed from at least about 7,000 years ago. At the burial site M45 at the Xishuipo site in Puyang, Henan Province, an image of a dragon on the left and a tiger on the right, as seen from the person buried, was made in shells and excavated.
This is decisive evidence that the idea of shijin soo (四神相応), the accord of the four guardian gods, was already at work in funerary rites in this age. In feng shui, shijin soo is basically expressed by the arrangement of the blue dragon (青龍) in the east, the vermilion bird (朱雀) in the south, the white tiger (白虎) in the west, and the black tortoise (玄武) in the north. The idea appears in the M45 burial too. As the photographs show, the dragon lies to the left and the tiger to the right of the buried person, but the dragon and tiger face in opposite directions relative to the person. This arrangement is thought to reproduce the star map of the night sky seen from the ground, which is also understandable from the origin of the four gods as representations of celestial bodies. The buried person lies with the head to the south and the feet to the north, so looking up at the night sky from this posture, the left hand corresponds to the east and the right hand to the west. This points directly to the blue dragon of the east and the white tiger of the west, and here the division of constellations known as the twenty-eight lunar mansions in ancient Chinese astronomy is used.
The moon takes about 27.3 days to circle the Earth. Ancient China divided the stars along the moon's path into twenty-eight areas, and from observing in which area the moon lodged on a given night, it calculated and judged dates, fortunes, and seasons. The blue dragon, for example, stands for the "Seven Mansions of the East," the constellations of spring, and joining the seven mansions in the eastern sky was seen as forming the figure of a huge dragon. In the same way, the west stands for the "Seven Mansions of the West," the constellations of autumn, and these were seen as forming the figure of a tiger. Simply put, they divided the night sky into areas and joined the stars there to see a dragon and a tiger.
In ancient Chinese astronomy, the center of the universe was thought to lie at the celestial north pole. All the stars turn around it, so the dragon and tiger of M45 facing north are thought to bow their heads toward the center of the universe, the celestial pole, or to express a movement circling the pole. In fact, a shape imitating the Big Dipper, made of shells, has also been found at the feet of the buried person, on the north side. There are many other claims, but as a major premise we can understand that China had established this way of thinking to a quite advanced degree by around 5000 BC. Moreover, the fact that the dragon and tiger of M45 are clearly given form in shells tells us that the originating being that became the dragon had already been grasped long before 5000 BC. In this sense the M45 dragon is already complete. It is the oldest image of a dragon, yet too recent to tell us the dragon's origin.
In the Yin and Zhou periods, from around the sixteenth to the eighth century BC, the form of the dragon came to be worked into the bronzes used as ritual implements, and the character for dragon appears in oracle bone script: an important movement in which the dragon was being built into civilization. After this went on for a long time, the image of the dragon took on a settled form in the Han period, from 202 BC to AD 220. The dragon, now able to be deified in many directions, is depicted on many things of that time, such as bronze mirrors and roof-end tiles. In the Shuowen Jiezi (説文解字), the oldest Chinese character dictionary, produced around the Later Han (25-220), when the deification of the dragon was being realized in many directions, it is written that the dragon "ascends to heaven at the spring equinox and sinks into the abyss at the autumn equinox." This is the Chinese expression of the image of a dragon flying in the sky, and what matters is that the three layers of heaven (天), earth (地), and abyss (淵) are already seen in the Chinese view of the world. This differs from Japan, and it is an important point at which the worldview in which the dragon exists differs between China and Japan.
The dragon developed further when the theory of yin and yang and the five elements, widespread from about 403 to 221 BC through the Han period, joined with the idea of the four gods. Yin and yang express paired combinations, and the five elements express attributes and colors: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, or blue, red, yellow, white, and black. It is an advanced system of thought that interprets every phenomenon of the natural world by combining these in complex ways, and within it the blue dragon is assigned east as its direction, wood as its attribute, blue as its color, and water as its nature. We see that by this point the dragon was already thought of by the ancient Chinese as a quite substantial being.
What deserves attention is what came afterward. In the Later Han, there was a movement in which, among the four gods placed on bronze mirrors, the black tortoise of the north and the vermilion bird of the south increasingly retreated and dropped out. In their place came the Queen Mother of the West (西王母), the highest goddess of ancient Chinese myth and belief, and the King Father of the East (東王父), a male god. Faith in the Queen Mother of the West, symbol of the woman who is yin in yin and yang, and in the King Father of the East, symbol of the man who is yang, had risen. From the standpoint of a mother goddess the Queen Mother of the West has the older origin, and the King Father of the East is a new being created after the thought of yin and yang developed. What is interesting is that in the characters, the 西 of 西王母 points to the west and the 東 of 東王父 points to the east, yet in the arrangement of the four gods it was not the blue dragon of the east and the white tiger of the west that were replaced, but the black tortoise of the north and the vermilion bird of the south. Many mirrors with this replacement have been excavated in Japan too, which suggests that the faith spread widely. Seen from another angle, on the bronze mirror that compressed the world, the blue dragon and white tiger, tied to the movement of the heavenly bodies, crossed with the Queen Mother of the West and the King Father of the East, tied to the life of human existence, and a new set of values was established on the Chinese side.
The ideas of the dragon and the tiger, digested in China over thousands of years, eventually reached Japan. Bronze mirrors with dragons arrived in Japan around the end of the middle Yayoi period. Interestingly, what was depicted on the pottery of the time was limited to the dragon, with no tiger. Pottery with dragons engraved or painted on it has been found, but no tiger has been found. Why did Japan accept only the dragon as a motif for pottery? In China, incidentally, the tiger was depicted as often as the dragon, and the pair held an importance that could not be left out of faith.
Last year too I traveled to many places to see pictures drawn in the Yayoi period. Typical of what was drawn or engraved on Yayoi pottery are deer, human figures, buildings, boats, and birds. These carry ancient memories that mark the origin of their groups, and they pass on the memory of ancestors who crossed the sea from the continent to the Japanese archipelago. It was birds that led the ancient boats, and since birds were deified, Yayoi rites often used bird costumes, and rituals were performed in which a shaman became a bird. For such Yayoi people, the dragon also appears as one of the important motifs.
Its distribution, however, is relatively limited. The dragon motif is distributed mainly around Osaka and Okayama, with Kagoshima as its western limit and Shizuoka as its eastern. From the state of excavations, we know that dragon faith spread very widely, mainly along the Pacific side, and about seventy pieces of pottery depicting dragons have been confirmed nationwide. Roughly, the picture is this: some group that had absorbed on the continent the beliefs developed in China, as described above, combined them with its own beliefs and metabolized them in its own way, so that in the end only the dragon, which mattered to them, remained. They crossed the sea carrying that image, so the tiger widely seen in China was not taken up in Japan, and dragon faith remained strong. How much the native thinking of the Yayoi people, whose main roots lie in Northeast Asia, is mixed in here is uncertain, but it may be deeply connected with the place they came from. But why was only the dragon worshipped to this extent in Japan?
In China, the dragon has been thought since antiquity to be a god who governs rain, and was a very important god for farming people. Old texts such as the Shanhaijing (山海経) and the Huainanzi (淮南子) record that in times of drought people made the shape of a dragon from mud and prayed for rain, and the Chunqiu Fanlu (春秋繁露) records that magic to call rain was performed using the same thing. In the Yayoi period in Japan, the ritual skills of shrine maidens became more sophisticated and active across the country, and the custom of painting or engraving pictures on the ritual tools of the day, pottery, bronze bells, and wooden implements, arose. It is also important that pottery with dragons is characteristically found in places deeply tied to water, such as wells and ditches. The possibility that comes into view is that Yayoi pottery with painted dragons was used in Japan in place of the mud dragons of China, painted on pottery and used in rituals to pray for rain.
The people who formed the main axis of the Yayoi period were people with farming technology. Farming existed in the Jomon period too, but from the remains I have seen, it feels quite different from farming after the Yayoi period. A major feature of Yayoi farming is that it centered on the cultivation of millet and other grains and of tubers. It is often said that the Yayoi people practiced wet-rice cultivation, but that came later, after new East Asian migrants with wet-rice technology flowed in and mixed with them. For the Yayoi people rice was upland rice, grown in dry fields. Yayoi farming was formed by combining slash-and-burn farming, rooted mainly in the Jomon period, with Yayoi-style cultivation technology, and grains and tubers were widely grown.
Compared with the Jomon people, who put weight on hunting and gathering and could live in balance with limited farming, for the Yayoi people, who preferred basins and lived chiefly on the food they grew themselves, rain was a grave matter that divided life from death. The layout of Jomon settlement sites and of Yayoi sites differ in many marked ways, and one is that the Yayoi people tended strongly to live along rivers. Securing water was the first premise of life for the Jomon people too, so the tendency existed there as well, but the reason it was stronger among the Yayoi is thought to be that cultivation needed far more water than it did for the Jomon.
Droughts and floods also occurred often, so the Yayoi people may have refined the dragon faith they brought from the continent in order to secure, in their own way, a technique of living with nature by controlling water. There are likely several reasons the tiger was not valued in Japan, but the fact that tigers did not live in Japan does not explain it, because the Chinese idea of the four gods was not made by thinking of real animals. As M45 itself suggests, they did not shape the tiger as an animal that actually lives in the land.
One possibility I personally see is this. When the four gods came to be interpreted through the theory of yin and yang and the five elements, the tiger was worshipped as a god governing wind, set against the dragon who governs water, and in Japan the tiger, with its nature of wind, was reduced into the dragon. I am considering the possibility that, in an event not yet clarified by history, the blue dragon of the east and the white tiger of the west were fused by some group, and that this may be related to the main force of the Yayoi people who flowed into Japan as migrants. At that stage someone folded the wind nature of the tiger into the dragon of water. So in Japan the dragon is a god of water and also a god of wind. I do not know whether this is a matter of the Japanese climate and land, but at least there is no trace of the tiger having been worshipped in Japan. The dragon in China also has an aspect that governs the nature of wind, so perhaps these distinctions were drawn in the course of the countless groups that mingled in Chinese history.
Thus, of the four gods, the black tortoise and the vermilion bird were gradually cut away in China, then the white tiger was cut away as well on entering Japan, and the blue dragon alone came to be valued above all. The dragon is an interesting subject of thought for me as well, and the fact that dragons in the broad sense are shared as legend all over the world seems to suggest a deep link with the primal problems of the heart of ancient human existence.