The Inner Seas revisit Kunlun (昆仑), describing its base surrounded by the Weak Water - a river so insubstantial that not even a feather can float upon it. This is the boundary between the sacred mountain and the ordinary world. The divine being Erfu (贰负) appears here in a murder myth, reminding us that even near the sacred center, moral order prevails and transgressions have cosmic consequences.
One of China's most beloved myths appears in the Inner Seas: the hero Yi shot down nine of the ten suns to save the earth from scorching. He obtained the elixir of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West, but his wife Chang'e consumed it and floated to the moon. Yi symbolizes the wood element's yang courage; Chang'e represents the moon's yin mystery. Their story is a meditation on ambition, loss and the eternal dance of yin and yang.
People so large they cannot fit in ordinary boats. They represent inflated ego and grandiosity - the spiritual danger of expanding without grounding. On the opposite extreme, the Country of the Small People (Xiaoren Guo 小人国) represents self-diminishment. The Inner Seas teach that wisdom lies in the middle way between these poles.
The Inner Seas occupy the liminal space between the known mountains and the utterly strange Outer Seas. They represent the psychological realm just outside immediate identity - the near-unconscious, the ancestral patterns, the cultural myths that shape perception. Meditating on the Inner Seas helps explore the boundary between personal memory and collective heritage.