Jiaolong
Jiaolong[] or jiao is a dragon in Chinese mythology, often defined as a "scaled dragon"; it is hornless according to certain scholars and said to be aquatic or river-dwelling. It may have referred to a species of crocodile.
A number of scholars point to non- southern origins for the legendary creature and ancient texts chronicle that the Yue people once tattooed their bodies to ward against these monsters.
In English translations, jiao has been variously rendered as "jiao-dragon", "crocodile", "flood dragon", "scaly dragon", or even "kraken".
Name
The jiao character combines the "insect radical", to provide general sense of insects, reptiles or dragons, etc., and the right radical jiao "cross; mix", etc. which supplies the phonetic element "jiao". The original 交 pictograph represented a person with crossed legs.The Japanese equivalent term is kōryō or kōryū. The Vietnamese equivalent is giao long, considered synonymous to Vietnamese Thuồng luồng.
Synonyms
The Piya dictionary claims that its common name was maban.The jiao is also claimed to be equivalent to Sanskrit 宮毗羅 in the 7th-century Buddhist dictionary Yiqiejing yinyi. The same Sanskrit equivalent is repeated in the widely used Bencao Gangmu or Compendium of Materia Medica. In Buddhist texts this word occurs as names of divine beings, and the Sanskrit term in question is actually kumbhīra. As a common noun kumbhīra means "crocodile".
Phonology
Schuessler reconstructs Later Han Chinese kau and Old Chinese *krâu for modern jiao 蛟. Pulleyblank provides Early Middle Chinese kaɨw/kɛːw and Late Middle Chinese kjaːw.The form kău is used as the Tang period pronunciation by American sinologist Edward H. Schafer. The transliteration kiao lung was given by Dutch orientalist 's book on dragons.
Etymology
Jiao's etymology is obscure. Michael Carr, using Bernhard Karlgren's reconstruction of Old Chinese *kǒg 蛟, explains.Most etymologies for jiao < *kǒg 蛟 are unsupported speculations upon meanings of its phonetic *kǒg 交 'cross; mix with; contact', e.g., the *kǒg 蛟 dragon can *kǒg 交 'join' its head and tail in order to capture prey, or moves in a *kǒg 交 'twisting' manner, or has *kǒg 交 'continuous' eyebrows. The only corroborated hypothesis takes *kǒg 交 'breed with' to mean *kǒg 蛟 indicates a dragon 'crossbreed; mixture'.
The word has "mermaid" as one possible gloss, and Schuessler suggests possible etymological connections with Burmese khruB or khyuB "scaly, furry beast" and Tibetan klu "nāga; water spirits", albeit the Tibeto-Burman are phonologically distant from OC.
;Crossed eyebrows
The explanation that its name comes from eyebrows that "cross over" is given in the ancient text "Records of Strange Things".
;Early sense as mating dragons
It has been suggested that jiaolong might have referred to a pair of dragons mating, with their long bodies coiled around each other
Thus in the legend around the jiaolong 蛟龍 hovering above the mother giving birth to a future emperor i.e., Liu Bang, the founding emperor of Han, r. 202-195 BCE , the alternative conjectural interpretation is that it was a pair of mating dragons.
The same legend occurs in nearly verbatim copy in the Book of Han, except that the dragons are given as 交龍 "crossed dragons". Wen noted that in early use jiaolong 交龍 "crossed dragons" was emblematic of the mythological creators Fuxi and Nüwa, who are represented as having a human's upper body and a dragon's tail.
Semantics
In textual usage, it may be ambiguous whether jiaolong 蛟龍 should be parsed as two kinds of dragons or one, as Prof. Zhang Jing comments: "It is difficult to determine whether jiaolong is the name of a type of dragon, or "jiao" and "long" juxtaposed 蛟龍はそもそも龍の一種の名称なのか、それとも「蛟」と「龍」からなる複合なのかは判断しにくい。.Zhang cites as one example of jiaolong used in the poem Li Sao, in which the poet is instructed by supernatural beings to beckon the jialong and bid them build a bridge. Visser translated this as one type of dragon, the jiaolong or kiao-lung. However, it was the verdict of Wang Yi, an early commentator of this poem that these were two kinds, the smaller jiao and the larger long.
Translations
Since the Chinese word for the generic dragon is long, translating jiao as "dragon" is problematic as it would make it impossible to distinguish which of the two is being referred to. The term jiao has thus been translated as "flood dragon" or "scaly dragon", with some qualifier to indicate it as a subtype. But on this matter, Schafer has suggested using a name for various dragon-like beings such as "kraken" to stand for jiao:The word "dragon" has already been appropriated to render the broader term lung. "Kraken" is good since it suggests a powerful oceanic monster.... We might name the kău a "basilisk" or a "wyvern" or a "cockatrice." Or perhaps we should call it by the name of its close kin, the double-headed crocodile-jawed Indian makara, which, in ninth-century Java at least, took on some of the attributes of the rain-bringing lung of China.
Some translators have in fact adopted "kraken" as the translated term, as Schafer has suggested.
In some contexts, jiao has also been translated as "crocodile".
Attestations
Classification and life cycle
The Shuowen Jiezi dictionary glosses the jiao as "a type of dragon, as does the Piya dictionary, which adds that the jiao are oviparous. The Bencao Gangmu states this also, but also notes this is generally true of most scaled creatures.Jiao eggs are about the size of a jar of 1 or 2 capacity in Chinese volume measurement, according to Guo Pu's commentary; a variant text states that the hatchlings are of this size. It was considered that while the adult jiao lies in pools of water, their eggs hatched on dry land, more specifically on mounds of earth.
The jiao did eventually metamorphose into a form built to fly, according to 's , which said that "a water snake after 500 years transforms into a jiao ; a jiao after a millennium into a dragon, a long after 500 years a horned dragon, a horned dragon after a millennium into a yinglong ".
General descriptions
The hujiao 虎蛟 or "tiger jiao" are described as creatures with a body like a fish and a tail like a snake, which made noise like mandarin ducks. Although this might be considered a subtype of the jiao dragon, a later commentator thought this referred to a type of fish.The foregoing account occurs in the early Chinese bestiary Shanhaijing "Classic of Mountains and Seas", in its first book "Classic of the Southern Mountains".
The bestiary's fifth book, "Classic of the Central Mountains" records the presence of jiao in the Kuang River and Lun River. Guo Pu 's commentary to Part XI glosses jiao as "a type of [long 龍] dragon that resembles a four-legged snake". Guo adds that the jiao possesses a "small head and a narrow neck with a white goiter" and that it is oviparous, and "large ones were more than ten arm spans in width and could swallow a person whole".
A description similar to this is found in the Piya dictionary, but instead of a white "goiter " being found on its neck, a homophone noun of a different meaning is described, rendered "white necklace" around its neck by Visser. Other sources concurs with the latter word meaning white "necklace", namely, the Bencao Gangmu quoting at length from Guangzhou Ji by Pei Yuan :
A later text described jiao "looks like a snake with a tiger head, is several fathoms long, lives in brooks and rivers, and bellows like a bull; when it sees a human being it traps him with its stinking saliva, then pulls him into the water and sucks his blood from his armpits". This description, in the Moke huixi 墨客揮犀 , was considered the "best definition" of a jiao by Wolfram Eberhard.
Scales
The description as "scaly" or "scaled dragon" is found in some medieval texts, and quoted in several near-modern references and dictionaries.The Guangya defines jiaolong as "scaly dragon; scaled dragon", using the word lin "scales". The paragraph, which goes on to list other types of dragons, was quoted in the Kangxi Dictionary compiled during the Manchurian Qing dynasty. A similar paragraph occurs in the and quoted in the Bencao Gangmu aka Compendium of Materia Medica:
Aquatic nature
Several texts allude to the jiao being the lord of aquatic beings. The jiaolong is called the "god of the water animals". The Shuowen jieji dictionary states that if the number of fish in a pond reaches 3600, a jiao will come as their leader, and enable them to follow him and fly away". However, "if you place a fish trap in the water, the jiao will leave". A similar statement occurs in the farming almanac Qimin Yaoshu that quotes the Yangyu-jing "Classic on Raising Fish", a manual on pisciculture ascribed to Lord Tao Zhu. According to this Yangyu-jing version, when the fish count reaches 360, the jiao will lead them away, but this could be prevented by keeping bie .Jiao and jiaolong were names for a legendary river dragon. Jiao 蛟 is sometimes translated as "flood dragon". The Yuhu qinghua 玉壺清話 Carr says people in the southern state of Wu called it fahong 發洪 "swell into a flood" because they believed flooding resulted when jiao hatched. The poem Qijian in the Chu Ci uses the term shuijiao 水蛟 or water jiao.