Rhapsodies

One of my favorite concepts in Chinese Mythology is the celestial bureaucracy. What the gist of it is is that Heaven is an even bigger mess of red tape than anything that we have down here. This can best be seen in Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West. To me this was a cosmology that reflected the society of the time (In this case the late Ming Dynasty) and I always wondered why this concept never caught on I mean for all the west’s societal progress our view of religion doesn’t stray far from the original Hellenic template that the writers of the gospels had been raised with. So anyway I thought it would be fun to look at it again… or at least at one of the smaller departments in the Department of Minor Nuisances a Subdivision of Fate.