TianTiān (天) is one of the oldest Chinese terms for heaven and a key concept in Chinese mythology, philosophy, and religion. During the Shang dynasty (17th―11th century BCE), the Chinese referred to their supreme god as Shàngdì (上帝, "Lord on High") or Dì (帝, "Lord"). During the following Zhou dynasty, Tiān became synonymous with this figure. Before the 20th century, worship of Tiān was an orthodox state religion of China.
HundunHundun () is both a "legendary faceless being" in Chinese mythology and the "primordial and central chaos" in Chinese cosmogony, comparable with the world egg. Hundun was semantically extended from a mythic "primordial chaos; nebulous state of the universe before heaven and earth separated" to mean "unintelligible; chaotic; messy; mentally dense; innocent as a child". While hùndùn "primordial chaos" is usually written as in contemporary vernacular, it is also written as —as in the Daoist classic Zhuangzi—or —as in the Zuozhuan.
FuxiFuxi or Fu Hsi (伏羲 ~ 伏犧 ~ 伏戲) is a culture hero in Chinese mythology, credited along with his sister and wife Nüwa with creating humanity and the invention of music, hunting, fishing, domestication, and cooking as well as the Cangjie system of writing Chinese characters around 2000 BC. Fuxi was counted as the first mythical emperor of China, "a divine being with a serpent’s body" who was miraculously born, a Taoist deity, and/or a member of the Three Sovereigns at the beginning of the Chinese dynastic period.
PanguPangu (, ) is a primordial being and creation figure in Chinese mythology who separated heaven and earth, and his body later became geographic features such as mountains and rivers. The first writer to record the myth of Pangu was thought to be Xu Zheng during the Three Kingdoms period. However, his name was found in a tomb predating the Three Kingdoms period. In the beginning, there was nothing and the universe was in a featureless, formless primordial state. This primordial state coalesced into a cosmic egg for about 18,000 years.
Records of the Grand HistorianRecords of the Grand Historian, also known by its Chinese name Shiji, is a monumental history of China that is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories. The Records was written in the late 2nd century to early 1st century by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian, whose father Sima Tan had begun it several decades earlier. The work covers a 2,500-year period from the age of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han in the author's own time, and describes the world as it was known to the Chinese of the Western Han dynasty.
XiantiandaoThe Xiantiandao (, or "Way of the Primordial"; Vietnamese: Tiên Thiên Đạo, Japanese: Sentendō), also simply Tiandao (; Vietnamese: Thiên Đạo, Japanese: Tendō) is one of the most productive currents of Chinese folk religious sects such as the White Lotus Sect, characterised by representing the principle of divinity as feminine and by a concern for salvation (moral completion) of mankind.
