The theory of the sphere says that heaven and earth are like a hen’s egg. While the yolk and the white are still undivided, that is the primal chaos; once they are divided, that is the opening of the world. And a man cannot travel outside the shell of the egg. Which means the Daoist talk of thirty-three heavens remains, in the end, a vagueness.
In Shaanxi the ground is very thick, and it often splits and collapses, and whole villages go down with it. Sometimes black water spurts up, sometimes fire and smoke, sometimes it cracks and closes again. But of the people and houses that go down, not one has ever come back up out of the earth. Nobody knows where they go.
In the third year of the Shunzhi reign the ground collapsed at Wuwei.
There was a man named Dong Yu who had studied the art of shaping the body, and could sink into the sea holding his breath and not die. His whole family went down in the catastrophe. Nine days later he came up out of the ground by himself, and this is what he said:
“At the moment of the collapse everything went dark and heavy. For a day and a night I fell, down to the spring. The falling was neither flying nor fainting — it was quite comfortable, and I could still talk with my family. But once we reached the spring they were all drowned.
“I held my breath and went down more than a thousand fathoms to the bottom of the water, and there it was dry again, and all about me was a pure yellow.
“Then it began to brighten. I looked down, and there was a blue emptiness below me — and a sky down there. I listened, and the sounds of people and chickens and dogs came up on the wind.
“I thought: this is the sky outside the shell of heaven. To land on the second tier of heavens would be excellent, but even to land on somebody’s roof tiles — would they not revere me as a man from heaven? So I strained to drop further.
“But the high wind caught me and rolled me over and over in the air, and I could not get down.
“Presently there was a man in ancient dress and cap, over twenty feet tall, who shouted at me:
“‘This is the boundary between the two skies. For ten thousand ages no sage has broken this barrier. Who are you, to imagine such a thing? Go back at once, while the earth is still open. Otherwise, when the great earth closes, it will be a million fathoms deep. You can pass through water; you cannot pass through earth. You would die.’
“Before he had finished, there came ten thousand shafts of golden light from far off, and the heat was unbearable. The man in ancient dress laid a hand on my back.
“‘Go now, go now! The wheel of the sun is coming. I am getting out of its way myself. You are flesh and blood. If you do not run you will be burnt to flying ash.’”
Dong Yu heard this in terror, gathered his breath, and lifted himself up and away.
His face was eaten by water and earth, black as charcoal. His clothes and his skin were stuck together in one piece. It was over a month before he looked like a person again. He called himself the Old Man Outside the Cataclysm.
I note that the Huainanzi says: below the temperate zone there are no creatures of blood and breath. And where the wheel of the sun comes close — that is the temperate zone.
