Feng Shui people talk a lot about dragon-- chasing the dragon, looking for dragon veins, green dragon and etc. Many Feng Shui classics use titles like "xxxx Dragon Classic this and that".
Is the Chinese dragon just a mythical beast or did it exist?
Is the Chinese dragon just a mythical beast or did it exist?
We Chinese call ourselves the "descendants of the dragon". Most of us know only Dragon represents China and do not really know why.
We know that dragon represents mountains, male, the Chinese emperor, and the likes, but what is the origin of the Chinese dragon?
We have to travel back in history to find out.
5000 years ago, China was still in Neo-Stone Age with many primitive tribes fighting each other (kind of like today's Afghanistan). Yellow Emperor had unified or conquered these tribes and become the first emperor of China.
Each of these tribes had its own totem objects like deer, shrimp, tiger, centipede, snake, eagle, horse, ram....
Yellow Emperor wanted to design a totem or symbol that would represent the country. He became China's first Dr. Frankenstein.
Yellow Emperor was probably the first real politician in history.
He had picked and chosen body parts from totems of different tribes. Of course, the bigger the tribe, the bigger would be the body part represented in the totem-- first instance of representative democracy in history.
The resulting totem is called a "dragon"-- horns from deer, eyes from shrimp, body from snake, legs from eagle, tail from centipede, head from tiger, teeth from horse and beards from ram. So the Chinese dragon is a composite of numerous totem objects from the original tribes of China.
Dragon becomes a symbol of China.
BTW, Yellow Emperor had developed the 10 heavenly stems and 12 earthly branches and the 60 years cycle of the Chinese calendar. His tomb still exists today and had followed Feng Shui principles. So now we can claim with certainty that Feng Shui has been practiced for over 5000 years.
Ken Lai
http://www.kenlaifengshui.com
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10429370@N05/
