Pangu's Axe- Chinese ArtifactArtifact · Weapon"The World-Splitting Axe"
Also known as: Kaitian Fu, Kāitiān Fǔ, 开天斧, and 開天斧
Titles & Epithets
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Description
The axe Pangu swung to crack the cosmic egg and separate heaven from earth at the dawn of creation. With a single stroke, light rose to become the sky and heavy matter sank to form the ground. Before the swing there was only chaos; after it, there was a world.
Mythology & Lore
The First Stroke
Before the axe fell, there was hundun, primordial chaos with no up or down, no light or dark. Chinese creation myth imagines this chaos as a cosmic egg in which all potential existence lay compressed. Within it, Pangu grew for eighteen thousand years until he filled the space entirely. When he awoke, he found an axe at hand.
Xu Zheng's Sanwu liji of the third century CE describes what followed: Pangu swung the axe and cracked the egg open. The light, pure elements rose upward to become heaven. The heavy, dark elements sank to become earth. Before the swing there had been formless unity; after it, there was above and below.
Eighteen Thousand Years
Pangu stood between the newly separated realms and held them apart, growing ten feet taller each day to keep heaven and earth from collapsing back together. Some traditions hold that he used the axe throughout this labor, carving mountains and river valleys from the raw material of creation. For eighteen thousand years the giant worked, and when his strength was spent, his body became the world itself: his eyes became the sun and moon, his blood the rivers.
The axe survived as a relic of the world's first age. Later texts call it the Kaitian Fu, the Heaven-Opening Axe. In the Xiyou Ji, it stands alongside the Ruyi Jingu Bang among the primordial weapons of creation.
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