Tagalog cosmology as recorded across the Philippine archipelago holds that before humanity existed, only the sky and the sea existed, along with a bird flying between them with nowhere to land. To give the bird somewhere to rest, the sky god Bathala, or in some versions the sky and the sea themselves acting without a named creator, throws down islands to separate the two realms. On one such island, a stalk of bamboo floats in the water, and the bird, landing on it repeatedly and pecking at its surface out of curiosity or in search of food, finally splits the bamboo open along one of its joints.
From the two halves of the split bamboo emerge the first man, Malakas, whose name means Strong One, and the first woman, Maganda, whose name means Beautiful One, stepping out together rather than one before the other, an emphasis several recorded versions of the tale make explicit. Some tellings have Bathala himself split the bamboo directly with his own hand rather than through the bird's mediation, and others introduce a third figure, an earthquake or a turtle, as the immediate cause of the split, variation Damiana Eugenio's collected volume of Philippine myths documents extensively across different island and language groups.