Another Impromptu Post But I Do Think It’s Worth Addressing Here As Well.

Another impromptu post but I do think it’s worth addressing here as well.

These kinds of comments, and particularly those demanding others to read Journey to the West, are very common in this discourse. However there is a massive glaring issue if your only basis of understanding Nezha is solely from Journey to the West.

Wu Cheng’en had, intentionally or not, severely diminished the strength of Nezha and seems to lack any real understanding of Nezha to begin with. I must also say Nezha’s age is never explicitly mentioned once in the book aside from when Sun Wukong was mocking him in their first encounter if you choose to see that as confirmation. It’s additionally strange to posture the book, written very late in the scope of how long Nezha has existed, as the only Acceptable Canon. There are other problems with this narrative that must be addressed too.

Nezha, and by extension the whole of the Daoist pantheon, does not and has never existed within a vacuum. Deities and religious figures are not static but instead fluid, subject to many changes through history, and it is unreasonable to expect any deity to adhere closely to a singular interpretation of them. Such as choosing Nezha in Journey to the West as the only acceptable form.

In doing so you are actively ignoring centuries of literature and art history in the thousands of years these deities have existed and have been worshipped in favor of pushing your own misinformed narrative.

Can you imagine if someone was going around demanding that how the Greco-Roman gods appear in Homer’s “Iliad” was the only true acceptable canon of them? It sounds silly doesn’t it. So why is it acceptable to push this mentality onto Chinese deities?

It’s extremely tiring to witness so many people treat deities as if they are common fiction characters, and I hope I do not need to make another longer form post addressing this mentality in the near future.