Who was Chiu?

It is the symbolic character of Chiu that makes his existence doubtful.  In other words, it's the fact that he's a "trope," an icon that stands for something, that makes him prominent, not whether or not he featured in historically verifiable sources.

Hey Hansioux,

    I have some doubts about Shi Ji, especially when it discusses about things that who knows when they actually happened.  Sima Qian wrote it in circa 200 BC, so how sure could he be about things that supposed to happened more than a thousand years before him?  And symbolic character: I mean what he stood for.  For similar reasons existence such people as Huangdi and Moses is also doubtful.  Excessively skeptical as this might seem, the very hero I honor, Kong Tzu, might also be legendary.  The problem is that just because some records are supposed to be official and discussed widely public figures do not mean that they were accurate.  It's hard to be wrong about things that happened in public nowadays, but it's not difficult to be wrong about things that happened centuries ago, and at a time when communication was more difficult.

    Many people try to come up with a compromise and say that historical figures had been distorted by myths.  This is a viable possibility, but it's merely that, a possibility.  The fact remains that it wasn't logically necessary that these figures actually existed.  Furthermore, this theory also poses a faulty historical formula: that the myths are only myths if they are exaggerated.  The most important thing about myths, in fact, is not their exaggerations, but their symbolism.  Ancient Chinese accounts such as Shang Shu are very plain and not exaggerated; its accounts of wars is very dull and rarely mentions heroes of great valor, like other myths would.  But this cannot prove that they were therefore accurate, because myths are popular when they sell to popular appeal; if, at the time, the popular appeal is not supernatural strenght but human wisdom, then the Zhou Gong who reformed the rituals would have greater appeal than the Zhou Gong who went against the Shang Dynasty leading a group of superheroes who became gods and immortals.

    Recommended reading: Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religion.  It gives a good theory that explains the fact that even figures who are viewed as fundamentally important to a culture did not have to be actual figures in order to be celebrated.

Peace,

Michael

9-2-2004