Aesthetic Research on “The Great Sage Prince Nazha Chased and Killed Dragon King Vasuki”

- -From the Viewpoint of the Dragon Culture in Liao, India and the Central Plains

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-378-8_28How to use a DOI?

Keywords

“Naga King and his Consort”; “The dragon was formed by stacking stones”; “The equestrian statue of Yelu Abaoji”; “The great sage Prince Nazha chased and killed the Dragon King Vasuki”; sign

Abstract

“The great sage Prince Nazha chased and killed the Dragon King Vasuki” refers to the mythological motif of “the hero slaying the dragon”. Dragons have different sources of biological images, and the myth of “the hero slaying the dragon” also have different story cultural context. In different cultures, continuously they can be seen that the legendary creatures resembling dragons, and continuously they appear repeatedly in various signs (including graphics, totems, symbols, and meanings). The myth of “the hero slaying the dragon” has also been constantly occurring displacement, encounter, translation and rebirth in the long process of history. In brief, the sign of dragon is an experiential activity, that is composed of perceptual objects (words, pictures, sounds) in the “external” field, and perceptual activities (thinking, imagination, memory) in the “internal” field. In other words, sign does not have “pure” appearance; rather, it is as the perceptible object, and as the cognitive subject, to show its “being”. If we could say that the sign of “dragon” is a kind of cultural imagination; and the sign of “the hero slaying the dragon” is the result of experience in the processes of human. Then, we could say that maybe it come from communication and translation, or maybe it come from the local culture itself. In brief, besides the research in the archetypes, there are other ways of generating signs. From the viewpoint of semiotics, this article interprets and studies the ‘being’ of the signs in ‘chased and killed the Dragon King Vasuki’. To understand the experiential activities of signs, the social values produced, and the ways of constructing knowledge.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ren-Ying Wang
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/03/31
TI  - Aesthetic Research on “The Great Sage Prince Nazha Chased and Killed Dragon King Vasuki”
BT  - Proceedings of the 2024 4th International Conference on Public Art and Human Development (ICPAHD 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 231
EP  - 245
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-378-8_28
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-378-8_28
ID  - Wang2025
ER  -