Daoism Analysis: The Yellow Dragon

The Yellow Dragon (黃龍 Huánglóng) is the zoomorphic incarnation of the Yellow Deity—the center of the universe in Chinese religion and mythology. Ancient Chinese lore tells of Five August Emperors whose reigns date back to before 2500 BCE. They are sometimes called “culture heroes,” in which tradition credits them with providing humankind with a host of skills and essential practical wisdom. As guardians of the five sacred mountains, the divine quintet ruled the cardinal directions and the center. Each was associated with a color: green with the east, red with the south, white with the west, black (or “dark”) with the north, and yellow with the center. By far the most famous and popular of them is Huang Di, the Yellow Emperor, giver of such

The dates of his lifetime very from 2697-2597 to 2674-2575 BCE, he was evidently a patron of the ancient fang shi, or shamans. But the Yellow Emperor went on to become one of the two patrons of an early Daoist school called Huang Lao, perhaps a combination of the first names of Huang Di and Lao Zi. Huang Lao Daoism may have begun as a religious movement as early as third century BCE. In any case, though the figure of Lao Zi seems to have upstaged that of Huang Di for some centuries, the Yellow Emperor made a comeback in popularity. “Like many heroes, the Yellow Emperor was conceived miraculously. His mother, Fubao, received the energy of lightning as she walked in the countryside [and became pregnant with Huang Di]. Yellow perhaps signifies a connection with the sun [which would both give explanation to his color association and his association with the center]. At the end of his life, Huang Di and his entourage were carried up to the gods on a dragon,” (Leeming 2001,

Although later tradition made the Yellow Emperor the supreme deity of the Taoist pantheon and traditional histories have presented this god as the pacific culture bearer, the early tradition clearly shows that the Yellow Emperor is first and foremost a warrior-god who successfully fought against a series of enemies – the Flame Emperor, Ch’ih Yu the god of war, the four emperors, the hero Hsing T’ien, and the one-legged god K’uei, besides many other lesser known mythical figures. This was when philosophical Taoism had acquired a more religious coloration and was backed by imperial rulers. When the warrior function of the Yellow Emperor is compared with gods in mythology worldwide, his battles are violent but not frenzied, purposeful but not mindless, pacific in motive but not anarchic in the way that Thōrr, Indra, and Odin are in their warrior function. In addition to his functions as a warrior and a peacemaker, this god also had the function of a culture bearer in later local traditions. For the Han historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien, the Yellow Emperor symbolizes the fountainhead of Chinese culture and civilization (Birrell