Teng (mythology)

Teng () or Tengshe (; lit. "soaring snake") is a flying dragon in Chinese mythology. This legendary creature's names include teng 螣 "a flying dragon" (or te 螣 "a plant pest") and tengshe 螣蛇 "flying-dragon snake" or 騰蛇 "soaring snake". The Chinese character for teng or te graphically combines a phonetic element of zhen "I, we (only used by emperors)" with the "insect radical" . This radical is typically used in characters for insects, worms, reptiles, and dragons (e.g., shen "a sea-monster dragon" or jiao "an aquatic dragon"). The earliest written form of teng 螣 is a (ca. 3rd century BCE) Seal script character written with the same radical and phonetic. Teng 螣 has two etymologically cognate Chinese words written with this zhen 朕 phonetic and different radicals: teng (with the "water radical" ) "gush up; inundate; Teng (state); a surname" and teng (with the "horse radical" ) "jump; gallop; prance; mount; ascend; fly swiftly upward; soar; rise". This latter teng, which is used to write the 騰蛇 tengshe flying dragon, occurs in draconic 4-character idioms such as longtenghuyue 龍騰虎躍 (lit. "dragon rising tiger leaping") "scene of bustling activity" and tengjiaoqifeng 騰蛟起鳳 ("rising dragon soaring phoenix", also reversible) "a rapidly rising talent; an exceptional literary/artistic talent; a genius". The (3rd–2nd centuries BCE) Erya dictionary (16) defines teng 螣 as tengshe 螣蛇 "teng-snake", and Guo Pu's commentary glosses it as a "[feilong 飛龍] flying dragon that drifts in the clouds and mist". Some bilingual Chinese dictionaries translate teng as "wingless dragon", but this apparent ghost meaning is not found in monolingual Chinese sources. For instance, the Wiktionary and the Unihan Database translation equivalent for teng 螣 is "mythological wingless dragon of" . This dangling "of" appears to be copied from Robert Henry Mathews's dictionary "A wingless dragon of the clouds", which adapted Herbert Giles's dictionary "A wingless dragon which inhabits the clouds and is regarded as a creature of evil omen.