Chinese mythology

Chinese mythology has no single scripture. It accumulated: Shang diviners cracking oracle bones in the second millennium BC, the strange geography of the Shanhaijing, Han philosophers in the Huainanzi explaining how the sky came to be broken, Sima Qian folding legendary sovereigns into dynastic history, and — much later — the Ming novel Journey to the West, which gave the pantheon its most famous troublemaker. What holds it together is an administrative habit of mind. Heaven is a court with departments and paperwork; gods hold rank, are promoted, demoted, and petitioned; even death is a matter of names entered in a register. The recurring drama is what happens when something refuses to be filed.