The Seba library treats Mud in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Watson, Burton, Wang Bi, Richard John Lynn, Kohn, Livia).
“would this tortoise rather be dead and have its bones left behind and honored? Or would it rather be alive and dragging its tail in the mud?” … “Go away! I’ll drag my tail in the mud!”
Zhuangzi deploys mud as the supreme symbol of living, unencumbered freedom, contrasting the vital indignity of the mud-dragging tortoise with the honored but lifeless bones preserved in a box—a direct argument for instinctual existence over institutional prestige.
, The Complete Works of Zhuangzi, 2013thesis
As the Well here is fouled with mud, one should not partake of it. At such an old Well there are no birds.
Wang Bi’s commentary interprets the mud-choked well as an image of blocked virtue and social inaccessibility, where sediment renders what should nourish the community utterly useless.
, The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi, 1994thesis
The compound is known as Mud of the Six-and-One (liuyi ni) or, to underline its importance in the alchemical process, Divine Mud (shenni). The figures one and six are related to Heaven and Earth.
In Daoist inner alchemy, mud is elevated to a sacred operative substance whose cosmogonic numerology links Heaven and Earth, sealing the crucible in which transformation occurs.
, Daoism Handbook, 2000thesis
It had filled its feet and the cracks along its sides with mud. When it reached Nixant all the mud had been washed away, and it was nearly dead.
In the earth-diver cosmogony recorded by Radin, mud retrieved from the cosmic deep is the primordial creative substance, and the heroic animal’s near-fatal effort to bring it to the surface enacts the mythological drama of matter’s emergence from the abyss.
, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, 1956thesis
he created a cart to delight the heart, drawn by pure white lung oxen, the wheels smeared with mud, and came down the road from the opposite direction … carrying in their hands clusters of lotus flowers … streaming with drops of water and mud.
Campbell presents mud as a deceptive element in the ogre’s disguise, coating the apparatus of illusion that lures a rational caravan leader into abandoning his provisions—mud here marks the border between apparent abundance and demonic trickery.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
sons of (Mud and Moisture)
Zimmer identifies Mud and Moisture as the twin offspring of the Lotus Goddess Lakshmi-Shri, situating mud within a fertile, cosmogonic pairing that underlies vegetative and agricultural abundance in Hindu symbolic thought.
, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946supporting
tAlc; [f.] ‘mud’ (pap. IV-IIIc, LXX, EM) … Frisk suggests that DALe; might have arisen from lAUe; ‘mud, slime’ by way of contamination with UA«W, UAfl ‘mud’
Beekes’s etymological note traces the Greek lexical field of ‘mud’ and ‘slime,’ revealing terminological ambiguity and cross-contamination in the ancient semantic cluster surrounding earthly, wet matter.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside