Canine Conundrums: Eurasian Dog Ancestor Myths in Historical and Ethnic Perspective
by Victor H. Mair
A cynic may be pardoned for thinking that this is a dog's life. The Greek word kunikos, from which cynic comes, was originally an adjective meaning "doglike," from kuōn, "dog." The word was most likely applied to the Cynic philosophers because of the nickname kuōn given to Diogenes of Sinope, the prototypical Cynic. He is said to have performed such actions as barking in public, urinating on the leg of a table, and masturbating on the street.
The American Heritage Dictionary (1992), p. 466a; bold emphasis added.
ch'üan-ju hsüeh-p'ai {1}, approximate Early Middle Sinitic reconstruction: k'wän-nyuh ghœwk-p'äy (Chinese translation of "Cynics").
Preface
When Donald Sutton first invited me to write this paper, he gently gibed at me by saying that I would probably bring in Egypt and India. My ready reply was that I had no such intention. Before I embarked on the research for this paper, I thought that the subject was restricted wholly to the South of China, thus writing about it would be short, sweet, and simple. Little did I expect that following up all the loose ends would take me not only to India and Egypt, but to almost everywhere else in between!
Introduction
Bottle gourd (calabash) symbolism is ubiquitous in Chinese popular religion. It may be traced back to southern, originally non-Sinitic, cosmogonic and anthropogonic myths having to do with chaos, creation, the flood, and the peopling of the world. In particular, Tai and Tibeto-Burman peoples such as the Dai and the Ne (Modern Standard Mandarin Yi{2} ; traditional designation Lolo [currently considered to be pejorative by many authorities]) regard the bottle gourd as central to the genesis of the universe and themselves. Thus, the pervasive cucurbitic symbolism of Chinese culture is testimony to the gradual absorption by the Ran people of southern, essentially, non-Ran myths.
On the other hand, there is a widespread myth that many southern peoples were the descendants of a dog named P'an-hu{3} , It is curious that the second graph of the most common form of this name is that for bottle gourd. The source of this dog-ancestor myth is obscure, but it appears initially to have been perpetuated largely among the Ran people and only gradually did it become adopted by some of the southern peoples themselves.
It is well known, of course, that the dog is a common device throughout Eurasia for ascribing lowly, bestial origins to the "other", Thus, the conjunction of the dog-ancestor and the calabash in the context of the southern encounter between Ran and non-Ran attests a curious inversion in which the Ran exchange "other" for "self' and the non-Ran exchange "self' for "other".