Hundun

Hundun () 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. Hùn "chaos; muddled; confused" is written either hùn () or hún (). These two are interchangeable graphic variants read as hún ( ) and hùn "nebulous; stupid" (hùndùn ). Dùn ("dull; confused") is written as either dùn () or dūn (). Isabelle Robinet outlines the etymological origins of hundun. Semantically, the term hundun is related to several expressions, hardly translatable in Western languages, that indicate the void or a barren and primal immensity – for instance, hunlun , hundong , kongdong , menghong , or hongyuan . It is also akin to the expression "something confused and yet complete" (huncheng ) found in the Daode jing 25, which denotes the state prior to the formation of the world where nothing is perceptible, but which nevertheless contains a cosmic seed. Similarly, the state of hundun is likened to an egg; in this usage, the term alludes to a complete world round and closed in itself, which is a receptacle like a cavern (dong ) or a gourd (hu or hulu ). Most Chinese characters are written using "radicals" or "semantic elements" and "phonetic elements". Hùndùn is written with the "water radical" or and phonetics of kūn and tún . Hùndùn "primordial chaos" is cognate with Wonton (húntun, ) "wonton; dumpling soup" written with the "eat radical" . Note that the English loanword wonton is borrowed from the Cantonese pronunciation wan4tan1. Mair suggests a fundamental connection between hundun and wonton: "The undifferentiated soup of primordial chaos. As it begins to differentiate, dumpling-blobs of matter coalesce.