The Sky Pillar God

There was no morning yet. There was no sky and no ground. There was no above and no below, no near and no far. There was only a dense mass of chaos, dark and silent and heavy beyond measure. Heaven and earth were still mixed together as one thing, with no shape, no edge and no light.

The old book Lĩnh Nam chích quái records this tale, and the ancestors told it from one generation to the next. In that chaos, something stirred. And out of that stirring, a god appeared.

He was Thần Trụ Trời, the Sky Pillar God. He was so huge that he is hard to picture. His feet stood on the earth and his head touched the sky. Heaven and earth lay so close together then that his height was the height of the whole dark, crowded space. His shadow covered everything. His breath mingled with the chaos of the beginning.

The god knew there was a task to do. No one told him, and no order was given. In the great stillness he simply knew that the sky had to be raised, the earth spread out, and the light let in.

He began to dig.

His enormous hands scooped up great slabs of earth and stacked them one on another, then set stones on top. Again he dug, again he piled, again he laid stone on stone. Each time he added a layer, the pillar of earth and rock rose a little higher. And each time it rose, the sky above was pushed up with it.

So it went, for no one knows how long. Darkness cannot be measured in time. The pillar grew taller and taller. The sky was pushed farther and farther away. The space between heaven and earth widened, and little by little, light began to creep into it. Heaven and earth started to become two separate things.

When the pillar was tall enough, heaven and earth were truly apart. The sky was vast above, wide and very high. The earth lay flat below, stretching in every direction. The gap between them was so great that nothing could join earth to sky anymore, except the giant pillar of the Sky Pillar God.

Then the god did something few would expect.

He broke the pillar.

The old book does not say why. Perhaps, once heaven and earth were far enough apart, they would never collapse into each other again. The sky had found its place, and the earth had found its own. The pillar had finished its work.

He smashed it to pieces. This is the most wonderful part of the tale.

Earth and stone flew from the broken pillar in every direction, like countless stars suddenly appearing in the first night. Stones as big as elephants sailed out and fell as towering mountains. Smaller stones flew all the way to the coast and plunged into the water, becoming islands and hidden reefs. Tiny fragments scattered over the plains and became the mounds in the middle of the fields, where children climb and play in the afternoon. In his Treasury of Vietnamese Folktales, the researcher Nguyễn Đổng Chi wrote that this very image was how the ancestors explained the origin of mountains, islands, and all the rolling shapes of the land.

The base of the pillar was the one part that would not break and flew nowhere. Tradition says it still stands there today. It is a tall mountain rising from low land, the trace of the pillar that once held up the whole sky.

With the pillar gone, the Sky Pillar God stood between the newly parted heaven and earth. Above him was a wide blue sky, with light for the first time. Below him was the flat earth, spreading far away, with a shape of its own for the first time. Around him were the mountains, islands and mounds, born from the stone of the very pillar he had raised and then destroyed.

The work was done. The scholar Nguyễn Văn Huyên noted this in his work Vietnamese Civilization. He wrote that the Vietnamese of old looked at the world around them and saw, in every mountain and every far island, the mark of a hand that had dug and piled since the dawn of things.

The sky is still high and the earth is still flat. And the mountains still stand there like pieces of that ancient pillar, silent and steady, telling the story of the very first day of heaven and earth.