Formerly, regarding the dragon, the sage Confucius sought advice from another sage, Laozi (Lao Tsu), the founder of Taoism twenty years his senior.
“Beyond appearances and behavior, which are far from friendly, there often lies a noble soul,”
Laozi told Confucius, who was probably in his twenties or thirties when the two men met in the first half of the sixth century BCE.
“Get rid of your arrogance and your desires, control your vanity and your illusions, none of these temptations will be of good service to you. That's all I have to tell you. »
Laozi is known for having composed in one go the
Tao Te Ching
(
Dao De Jing
, the founding work of Taoism), and his single meeting with Confucius was apparently enough to dazzle the latter's equally brilliant mind.
“I know that birds can fly, that fish can swim, and that beasts can run
,” Confucius would later tell his disciples.
“To capture them, you need arrows, fishing line and nets.
But I had never imagined a dragon carried by the wind and clouds soaring towards the heavens – until I met Laozi
.
In short, a dragon cannot be defined or confined.
Gilt bronze dragon dating from the Tang dynasty (618-907).
PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY
Four centuries after this meeting, Confucianism was sanctified by a powerful Chinese emperor who made it the ideological guide of his society.
However, Taoism continued to exert its influence, both cultural and artistic.
Soon both thoughts incorporated the image of a dragon into their visual expressions.
Chinese dragons moved freely between the worlds of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.
Through the hold of their powerful claws on the imagination of generations of Chinese, they have carved their furrow in the cultural and artistic history of the country to become an immutable phenomenon exerting a profound impact on the consciousness of the nation.
The answer to the question about the origin of the Chinese dragon is as elusive as the creature itself.
Given the dragon's scales and sinuous body, many researchers suggest a connection to either the crocodile or the snake, or both.
If the first seems endowed with the power to inspire amazement and fear, if it served as a totem in many ancient cultures throughout human history, the second would have existed in relatively large numbers in the river basin Yellow, one of the cradles of Chinese civilization.
Other experts go further.
After studying the writing engraved on an oracular bone by ancient Chinese, somewhere between the 17th and 11th centuries BCE, some suggest that the image of the dragon may have come from that of a seahorse.
Other scholars refer to the colossal column of air of a tornado falling from a stormy sky, and indicate that this is what the
Yi Jing
, an ancient Chinese divinatory text, meant by describing a dragon who
“fought in the desert, his blood colored dark red (the sky) and yellow (the earth)”
.
Dragon-themed porcelain plate dating from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).
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Still others propose, not without hesitation, that the dragon borrowed its crenellated form from lightning and its sound – the Chinese word for dragon is pronounced
loong
– from the rumble of thunder that follows.
All these natural phenomena are linked to a single element: water.
On the one hand, ancient Chinese texts are full of descriptions of enraged dragons announcing their arrival with a howl, before unleashing their fury in a torrential flood, blurring the perception of the outside world.
On the other hand, dragon worship, much of which would later evolve, centered on its meteorological power which it manifested either by starting rain on cracked ground or by stopping it once the earth was flooded.
Throughout the country, many temples dedicated to the dragon king, built entirely by those who prayed for a good harvest, still exist today.
When it comes to habits or character traits, the Chinese dragon, which lived either in the clouds or at the bottom of lakes, seems to have little in common with its Western counterpart, which occupied dens or caves.
While Western flame-spitting dragons are depicted as a destructive force in classical literature, the water-spitting Chinese dragon is primarily revered as a savior, a facilitator capable of producing a bountiful harvest or simply good fortune.
Bronze mirror depicting a dragon dating from the period between the eighth and ninth centuries.
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Hence the dragon's well-deserved place in the Chinese zodiac, which attributes an animal and its recognized characteristics to each year according to a cycle that repeats every 12 years, with 2024 being the Year of the Dragon.
The dragon has its place with the tiger, the ox, the horse and eight other animals, but it is the only one missing from the list in real life.
And yet, he seems to have turned this absence to his advantage by stimulating the creative imagination of Chinese artists and artisans since time immemorial.
Since the concept of
“rule by virtue”
is deeply embedded in Confucianism, it seems natural that the dragon, a symbol of moral force, gradually evolved to become an emblem of royal power.
Cao Cao, a warlord and poet who lived between the second and third centuries, said:
“A dragon can be both large and small;
it can also be upright or curled up.
Large, its size announces its presence;
small, it conceals its existence.
When he is high up, he wanders in the cosmos;
curled up, he hides in the flow of colossal waves
.
In a sense, Cao Cao was echoing Confucius who, seven centuries earlier, had discussed with a disciple the transformative nature of a dragon:
“A piece of cloud, a snake, a fish, a bird, a worm – a dragon can change himself into anything he wants without becoming anything other than himself...a manifestation of power and dignity, honor and integrity, strength and perseverance
.