For the ancients, because nine is the largest single digit, the world composed of many countries is called "Kyushu"; the universe has the "Nine Heavens"; and all relatives are also collectively called "Nine Tribes".
The dragon is a fictional animal that symbolizes auspiciousness. Because the more pleasing things are always better, decorations carved with nine dragons are particularly common.
Opposite the Imperial Gate of the Forbidden City in Beijing, there is a glass shadow wall surrounded by nine dragons, known as the "Nine Dragon Wall". Not only that, but the Nine Dragon Wall in Beijing's Beihai Park is also famous. Datong City also has Nine Dragon Wall, located on the land of the ancient capital of northern Wei. Designs decorated with nine dragons like these can be seen everywhere in the land of the powerful.
Now if we hear the word "Kowloon", the first thing that comes to mind should be Kowloon across Hong Kong Island. The name of Kowloon is based on the nine dragons that are there. Many rivers and springs in particular have dragons as their names, because dragons are mythical beasts that have a deep relationship with water.
When I was a child, I didn't know Hong Kong and Kowloon, and when I mentioned nine dragons, I immediately thought of Haojie Shijin, who was tattooed on his back in "Water Margin". Because his tattoo was nine dragons, he was nicknamed "Nine Dragons".
"Water Margin" tells the story of the hero Hao Jie based on Liangshan Po. There are a total of 108 Haojie who appear in the story. The 108 are made up of 36 members of the Celestial Star and 72 members of the Celestial Star. It can be said that the former is the main general and the latter is the deputy general.
Of these 108 heroes, each has their own nickname, which is a "nickname".
If you try to explore the nickname of Haojie in Water Margin, you will find that about one-third adopts the name of the animal.
Ukiyo-e master Utagawa Kuniyoshi painting "Water Margin"
At first, Haojie of Water Margin was a demon who was sealed in the "Temple of Voldemort". At the beginning of the "Water Margin", you can see the story of the abbot of the Qing Palace on the Dragon tiger mountain who sealed the demon. Lieutenant Hong mistakenly released these demons, and as a result, a corner of the Black Qi of the Voldemort Hall rushed straight up into the sky, scattering a hundred and ten golden rays in the air, and 108 demon kings soared and landed everywhere.
Thus became "the tiger and leopard hidden in Wanzi City, and the god Jiao jiao" in the Inner Cohesion of the Lotus Valley". The gods mentioned here are dragons.
Legend has it that at the beginning of Dragon Tiger Mountain, the demon kings were originally dragon tigers, so it is natural that most of the nicknames that incarnated as 108 Haojie were related to dragons and tigers.
Probably laughed at by everyone, I tried to look up Haojie's nickname in Water Margin, and it turned out that, as mentioned earlier, animal-related nicknames accounted for about a third of all. And in the midst of this, the dragon and tiger are indeed double-bi. There are 11 tigers, and dragons are less than half of the tigers, and there are 5 people.
Listed below are the tiger-related nicknames of Haojie, and in parentheses is the real name of Haojie.
Winged Tiger (Thunder Horizontal)
Jinmao Tiger (Yanshun)
Short-legged tiger (Wang Ying)
Jumping Tiger (Chen Da)
Zhongjian Tiger (Ding Desun)
Hua Xianghu (Gong Wang)
Fighting Tiger General (Li Zhong)
Smiling Tiger (Zhu Fu)
Blue-Eyed Tiger (Li Yun)
Sick Worm (Xue Yong)
Mother worm (Gu Dajie)
The "big worm" here is the tiger. In Water Margin, tigers are nicknamed big bugs. Not only Hao Jie of Liangshan Po, but also an evil person like Niu Er, who was killed by Yang Zhi in Hao Jie, his nickname is also "Hairless Worm", referring to the hairless tiger.
Winged tiger Lei Yoko, Utagawa Kuniyoshi painted
The Kanji for this plant is written "knotweed", and sometimes also "big worm staff". Fan Xun, the king of Funan, was a tiger breeder in the mountains, and he threw criminals into the mountains and forests to feed the tigers, and if they were not eaten by the tigers, they were treated as delicacies. Although the King of Funan called the tiger a large insect, this nickname originated from the Book of Searching for Gods.
Among the 11 people with the nickname of Tiger, tiangangxing as the leader was only one winged tiger Lei Heng, and the remaining ten people were all deputy generals. The ratio of the former to the latter should be one to two, and the number of lower and lower levels of the tiger is overwhelmingly large.
Among the five people who represented the dragon, those who belonged to the Tiangang Star were Gongsun Sheng, the Nine-Veined Dragon Shi Jin, and the Mixed River Dragon Li Jun, and the only two people who belonged to the Earth Star were Chu Lin Long Zou Yuan and the One-Horned Dragon Zou Run.
Izumo Ryūnō Tsuneyoshi, Utagawa Kuniyoshi
Although it is also called a dragon tiger, for the dragon that has always been called a divine beast, the tiger is a real animal, so it always appears under the nickname of a particularly secular bad guy. And the gap in image, I think is in the form of Haojie nickname to show.
In addition, there is a Haojie Shien nicknamed "Golden-Eyed Biao" in the Planet of Hell. "Biao" originally only denoted the fine lines of tiger skin, and derived from the meaning "little tiger". Shi En is nicknamed after the little tiger whose eyes shine with golden light. From this point of view, there are a total of 12 tigers.
Biao and leopard are often mistaken for the same animals. In fact, the leopard is located after the dragon and tiger, and occupies the third place in the nickname of Hao Jie in "Water Margin". Leopard head Lin Chong, Jin leopard Yang Lin, and Golden Leopard Tang Long, a total of three people.
Leopard head Lin Chong, Utagawa Kuniyoshi
Leopards are considered inferior to tigers. The "I Ching" has clouds, "adult tiger changes, gentleman leopard changes, villain leather face".
In the I Ching, the hierarchy of people is divided into three levels: adults, gentlemen and villains. The adult here has the meaning of being close to the saint. "Gentleman's leopard change" is often mistaken for a pejorative meaning in Japan, as mentioned earlier, as if returning to the palm of the hand, and the word is used to rebuke verbal behavior such as clouds and rain.
But what it originally meant was that man would never stop improving at any time, and must continue to improve as things change every day. Becoming very glamorous, this is the third stage of life.
Animals change their fur in the fall, and people like animals whose patterns become beautiful are also amazing.
The tiger is the most amazing animal with changes, so the saint has the reputation of the adult tiger change, followed by the gentleman leopard change. Leopards are not as beautiful as tigers are from the beginning. And the villain is just a leather face (change of expression).
From this, it is natural to understand why the position of the leopard is below that of the tiger. Lin Chong of Liangshan po was the sixth among the generals, and his head looked like a leopard. There is no doubt that people like the Golden Leopard and the Golden Leopard are nicknames for the vice generals.
The fourth is the snake. There are two snakes Xie Zhen in the Tiangang Star and Yang Chun, the white flower snake in the Earth Fire Star. In fact, the animals in the back each have only one person, and more than two are up to the snake.
Two-headed snake Xie Zhen, Utagawa Kuniyoshi painting
People who are named after the snake are afraid that their obsession with nagging is very deep. The story of "Water Margin" is set in the late Northern Song Dynasty in the early 12th century, when it seems that snakes are not very popular animals. But in ancient times, snakes were feared and respected.
As mentioned earlier, the alias of the tiger is "big worm", but the term "worm" means snake in ancient times. Like the relationship between the Great Snake of Yagi and the Tuchuan River, in China, the snake has a deep relationship with the river. The Yellow River is the birthplace of Chinese civilization, so it seems that snakes must be the highest object worthy of awe for Chinese.
In Chinese mythology, Zhu Rong is the body of a human head and a snake, and Fuxi and Nüwa are the same posture. Zhu Rong's "Rong" character has the word "worm", which is called the "Yu" character of Dayu, the founder of the ancestors of the Xia Dynasty, and the word "worm" can also be seen emerging.
The fictional mythical beast, the dragon, was born based on the ancient sacred serpent and added many elements. If this is the case, then the two "snakes" in "Water Margin" can be said to have increased the dragon part.
In addition, in the Planet of Hell, there is a character who is the Cave Jiao Tong Wei. "Jiao" is a kind of water spirit in the Shuowen Jiezi, that is, a dragon without horns. Therefore, a closer look at the dragons in Water Margin has a total of eight.
"Water Margin" refers to the water's edge, so it takes Liangshan Po as the background of the story, and many Haojie use the names of water-related animals as nicknames, in addition to snakes and dragons, there are turtles, silver carp, mirages and so on.
A mirage is a large oyster. It is recorded in the Book of Narratives that the yellow finch became a clam in the autumn, and then a yellow finch in the spring, and it took five hundred years to become a mirage. These mirages have cultivated their divine power over the years, can swallow cloud qi, and mirages on the side of the sea resemble a platform, which is a "mirage". Just mentioned out of the cave Jiao Tong Wei, his brother Tong Meng nicknamed "Flipping River Mirage".
Li Shizhen, author of the Compendium of Materia Medica, believes that mirages are a type of dragon. Regarding what a mirage is, there are two kinds of oyster theory and water spirit theory, from the nickname of the brother of the cave jiao in "Water Margin", the author of "Water Margin" took the water spirit theory as a reference.
Lang li bai jump Zhang Shun, Utagawa Kuniyoshi painted
Speaking of white carp, Zhang Shun in the Tiangang Star of "Water Margin" is called "White Jump in the Waves". 鲢 and jump are homophonous (both pronounced in Japanese as ちょう). Silver carp swimming freely in the water are fish that feed on plankton, also known as water carp, silver carp, silver carp, etc., and are a freshwater fish of the teleostidae. Silver carp, also known as minnow, is long and white in shape and is very beautiful.
The minnow language comes out of "Zhuangzi". Looking at the fish swimming in the water, Zhuangzi said that leisurely and self-reliant is the happiness of fish. And Keiko is puzzled, thinking that Zhuangzi is obviously not a fish, how can she know the happiness of fish? Thus began a philosophical discussion about the joy of fish.
Tao Zongwang in the Earth Fire Star, nicknamed the Nine-tailed Turtle. The turtle is known as one of the four divine beasts. The Green Dragon, White Tiger, Suzaku and Xuanwu are called the gods of the four directions in China, representing the four directions of east, west, south and north respectively. Among them, Xuanwu, which represents the north, is a black god turtle.
In addition, Hao Jie's nickname in "Water Margin" also includes dogs, apes, rats, horses, scorpions, etc., as well as birds, such as Li Ying, the eagle of the sky, and Moyun Golden-winged (a golden-winged bird directly into the clouds).
Moyun Gold-winged Ou Peng, Utagawa Kuniyoshi
The golden wing is a legendary bird that came from India with Buddhism and feeds on dragons. In addition to the Za'ahan Sutra, other Buddhist scriptures also mention this bird, which is "Garuda" in Sanskrit, and the Chinese character is written as Garoula, which is one of the eight Heavenly Dragons that support the Buddha. In Kofuku-ji Temple there is a statue of Karou luo, a bird-headed man, clad in armor, like a crow tengu in Kurama Mountain.
The golden wing is often active at the foot of Mount Meru, because there is a sacred beast dragon that it often eats, and it is a very fierce and strange bird. It can be said that it is a pity to use it as the nickname of the deputy commander.
The wings of the golden wings are said to extend for 3.36 million miles, and the legend says that the back of the Peng in "Zhuangzi" is thousands of miles, and there is a world of difference between the two. If they are all imaginary gods, the golden wings are particularly interesting.
Among the many haojie nicknames of Liangshan Po, in addition to dragons and golden wings, the names of other animals that do not exist are also used. Lu Junyi, who ranked second after Song Jiang, was nicknamed "Jade Qilin".
Jade Kirin Lu Junyi, Utagawa Kuniyoshi
In China, it is said that because there will be a unicorn before the appearance of the saint, the unicorn is used as a sacred beast to symbolize auspiciousness. Mu Yue Qi, Mu Yue Lin. There is a cloud in the Spring and Autumn Book compiled by Confucius: "(The Duke of Lai) had four years of spring in the tenth year, and the Western Hunt captured Lin. The Spring and Autumn Chronicles are recorded up to the sixteenth year of the Duke of Lai, which was supplemented by Confucius's disciples.
The metaphor of "getting lin" in this refers to the end of a work, or is used at the end of a description. Because the appearance of the unicorn is the auspicious aura of the saint's coming, suggesting a bright future, and the "harvest of the unicorn" indicates that things are dying.
Deputy Commander Deng Fei's nickname "Fire-Eyed Fox" refers to a lion. Although lions are not fictional animals, they are not common in China, so they were mostly imaginary animals in ancient China. Lions are a Western species, and sometimes Western envoys pay tribute to the emperor, so the average people have never seen it. In the ancient books, it is recorded that "the master does not go out of the western region", and the word "division" is "lion" and the word "lion" is removed from the anti-dog side.
The Book of The Eastern Han Dynasty records that during the YangJia period (132-135), Shule Guo once sacrificed a lion. Shule is now Kashgar, Xinjiang, China, and I have visited there. At that time, the flag of Iran had a lion motif, and there must have been a mythical beast concept where the lion was regarded as the king of the hundred beasts.
There is also a record in the Book of the Continuation of the Han Dynasty that the envoy of the First Year (87) paid tribute to a lion. The Sabbath is a country located in what is now Afghanistan and Iran. The book describes its "shape like a hornless unicorn," which is interesting in comparing the lion to the fictional animal unicorn.
The content of this article is excerpted from Chen Shunchen's collection of essays: "Nine Points of Smoke", the original title is "Water Margin Nickname Examination", which has been partially deleted due to its long length
Nine Points of Smoke
[Japanese] by Chen Shunchen
Pricing: $48.00
China Pictorial Publishing House
Publication date: 2019.6.1