The Kunlun And The Sumeru:A Comparative Study Of The Mythology Of Chinese And Indian Cosmology Myth

Since the beginning of human thinking,the ancestors of mankind began to conceive the structure and appearance of the world.These ideas and imagination did not dissipate as cloud or smog,which retained in their myths and still can find traces.Many civilizations have such a myth that the universe was originally chaotic.Then the whole world was born from its center and the center generally had a high passable mountain or pillar as a sign.The cosmology myth is about how the world distributed and how it was constructed.The Chinese cosmology myth is about the world centered on the Kunlun Mountains.Because it has the cosmic center,babel road,river birthplace and other characteristics,the myth has a very high status in the eyes of the Chinese nation.In ancient times,the Kunlun Mountains cosmology myth was recorded in the "Shan Hai Jing","Huai Nan Zi" and other documents.India’s Sumeru Mountains cosmology myth was brought in Chinese with Buddhism introduced at the Eastern Han Dynasty.Because of the similar characteristics of the cosmic mountain,the Sumeru Mountains cosmology myth combined with Chinese Kunlun Mountains myth slowly,which led to a series of misunderstanding in geography and religious.The research of this paper focuses on combing the origins of the two myths,revealing their respective cultural origins and cultural connotations and the evolution of culture spread and blend into one.It is found that these two myths were integrated initially in the Wei,Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties.The integration was appearing in the Chinese translated Buddhist scriptures at the beginning.And then many Chinese documents were affected such as ghost novels and the geographical works,which also makes people’s view about these two myths transferred from the mythology to geography gradually.Until Qing dynasty,people’s concern and research of the two myths were completely transferred from the mythological level to the geographical level.People pursued to find a geographic correspondence that was far more than the relationship between the two myths.The sacred of the Kunlun Mountains was greatly lost.