Abstract
The theme “cosmos and hearth” has many resonances in Chinese culture and history. It is captured, for a start. in the terms T’ien (heaven) and ti (earth), a polarized pair that is also a common-place of other cultures, often anthropomorphized as Sky Father and Earth Mother. The two powers—heaven and earth—are not quite equal by historic times. Heaven has a slight edge, to the extent that it is seen as masculine, in contrast to earth, which is feminine. It may be that in an earlier time, before the emergence of writing and cities, greater emphasis was placed on the fertile earth—on chthonian deities that governed all living things rather than on a distant sky god whose role in human life was less clear. In China, by the time the words T’ien and ti came into use, there was little doubt that heaven mattered more: it was heaven that provided the mandate, not the earth. Ti (earth) represented something more localized. But the Chinese have another term for earth, tu, the meaning of which is even more localized. Tu means soil, a specific locality on earth. T’ien and ti are thus not just a dialectical pair but also components of a hierarchy—t’ien, ti, tu—which in human-social terms translates into emperor (Son of Heaven), the magistrates and other members of the governing class, and the people.
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Tuan, YF. (1999). Cosmos and Hearth in China. In: Buttimer, A., Wallin, L. (eds) Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective. The GeoJournal Library, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2392-3_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2392-3_8
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