Taiwan Today

As Alfred Whitehead said, knowledge of China leads inevitably to respect for the great achievements of the Chinese people

It is common knowledge that China led the world in science and technology up to, say, the time of Industrial Revolution in the West. Since then she has gradually lost ground and now lags far behind the West. Yet today the West is manifesting a mounting interest in Chinese civilization. Obviously it is the spirit behind the latter that is engaging the attention of Western intelligentsia.

Whether the relevance and validity of Chinese civilization is determined by its practical value or idealism is a provocative question. Thomas F. Ryan said:

"It has been often declared that the Chinese are too matter-of-fact to be much given to any form of abstract speculation. Matter-of-fact they certainly are, but not in a crude materialistic sense; and it would be difficult to find any literature which is inspired by such a consistently idealistic spirit as theirs. (The Chinese Through Catholic Eyes.)

Though an integral part of the land mass of Eurasia, China enjoyed almost complete isolation from other ancient civilizations until about the beginning of the Christian era. Desert solitudes and frozen plateaus reduced overland traveling to and from China to a minimum. The Pacific was even more forbidding. Consequently, pre-Christian Chinese civilization was almost as autochthonous as pre-Columbian American. Perhaps this was one of the most powerful factors responsible for the remarkable cohesion and tenacity of the Chinese as a nation - there was sufficient time for ancient China to develop an enduring civilization of exceeding purity and indignity.

History records and archaeological evidences tend to confirm that Chinese civilization originated largely in the northwestern parts of China. Classical statements such as that which describes our legendary Emperor Shun (23rd century B. C.) as hailing from among the eastern tribes suggest another center of origin in perhaps Manchuria. However that may be, Chinese civilization first became distinctly and characteristically Chinese - as we find it today - in the vast expanse of the almost featureless North China plain during the Chou dynasty (1122 - 221 B. C.).

If we were asked to name a single factor more potent than any other in its molding influence upon Chinese civilization, we would venture the suggestion of loess, a wind born dust of microscopic fineness which has leveled up the original terrain of North China east of the Tai-hang Mountains into a practically featureless plain. The loess blanket in many places measures hundreds of yards thick.

This simple fact destined the North China plain to be an ideal setting for both peace and war. The patient farmer finds it richly rewarding in harvests, while the nomad finds it equally so in plunder. Its lack of natural lines of defense along the northern border has condemned China to the unfortunate fate of suffering from one foreign invasion after another.

Self-defense has taught us the necessity of nationwide unification, intertribal cooperation and mutual confidence. The scope of this unification often has to include our erstwhile conquerors. And so the Chinese early discovered the importance of social mores conducive to mass reconciliation and tolerance, which in turn tend to foster moral excellence in personal conduct.

Successive foreign invasions inflicted untold suffering. But they also taught us the meaning of sympathy as well as the immorality of aggression. The weight of the entire body of Chinese literature, without exception, condemns unprovoked aggression. It is not by accident that the Chinese have never tried to seize power, in Southeast Asia, for example, or found independent nations of their own, though there were times when they could easily have attempted it.

We abhor aggression. Nevertheless, our experience of it at the receiving end has set a premium on wise and heroic national defense. Moreover, our repeated revival and re-emergence as an honorable and honored nation has induced in us a basic self-confidence. In the long run, right is stronger than might. Hence as a nation there is never need for the righteous to be downhearted.

This inherent faith in righteousness is additionally traceable to the perversity of the Yellow River. When that river leaves the highlands of Northwest China and tumbles onto the North China plain, the tremendous amount of silt carried in suspension begins to sink and settle on the riverbed. This process having gone on since perhaps long before the Ice Age, the Yellow River now flows for hundreds of miles in an aqueduct of its own creation high above the ground.

Whenever the Yellow River breaches its dikes, damage to life and property attain astronomical proportions, and each time the dikes have to be repaired by human effort. In 25 centuries - from about 600 B.C. - the river has breached its dikes some 400 times. But we also managed to regain control over the floods an equal number of times. In this manner we have been trained to be tenacious in our hopes. There a silver lining behind the darkest of clouds. Nowhere is the proverb truer than in China. Therefore, why be downhearted?

The necessity of unification and cooperation by all in the nation, and the dependence on human effort and sustained will-power to cope with calamities (whether man-made or otherwise), combine to characterize Chinese civilization with pragmatic humanism. It is therefore not surprising to find that compared with other major civilizations, the Chinese civilization is relatively less speculative.

But we are not irreligious. Numerous classical references to the will of Heaven, to sacrificial rituals, to divination practices, etc., testify to this. But the overall features to note are faith in the universality of Heaven's Way (tao) on the one hand, and in the communion of mankind's ethical order with Nature's cosmic order on the other. It follows, therefore, that to please Heaven it is only necessary to live up to the ideals of the truly human.

Chinese tolerance, however, permits other forms of religious or superstitious persuasions to thrive side by side. It is quite common for the same person to be a Confucianist, a Taoist and a Buddhist at one and the same time. Our Western friends may wonder how that can be. The answer is found in the Confucian classic Chung Yung (Doctrine of the Mean).

"All things are nourished together without their injuring one another. The courses of the seasons, and of the sun and moon, are pursued without any collision among them. The smaller energies are like river currents; the greater energies are seen in mighty transformations. It is this which makes heaven and earth so great." - Doctrine of the Mean, ch. xxx, trans. by James Legge. Italics Legge's.

Tolerance is recognized the world over to be one of the foundation stones of democracy. Despite the monarchical form of government in pre-Republican China, there was a great deal of actual democracy in practice. Says the Canon of History - "Heaven hears as we the people hear; Heaven perceives as we the people perceive." According to Mencius, though a monarch rules by divine right, Heaven confers that right in accordance with the will of the people. Evidence of democracy in action may be seen in the existence of imperial institutions of civil service examination, and in that of the Board of Censors (whose duty and privilege it was to criticize the government and the crown). These institutions have been retained substantively in the Republic today.

The Chinese type of central government has never been (except when for a short period under alien occupation) as authoritarian as, say, the Roman. The empire for thousands of years was held together more by voluntary allegiance than by force. It grows by the same principle. In fact, for an aggressor to capture China's apparatus of central government only means a change of dynasty. The real China as expressed in the life and ethical values of her people carries on without serious interruption. The usurper will sooner or later either be ousted or be obliged to surrender and conform.

We mentioned the Chinese idea of mankind's ethical order being in communion with Nature's cosmic order. This integration of the practical with the ideal, the finite with the infinite, presupposes a universality of the logos (or tao) which creates, sustains and transmutes everything, whether celestial, terrestrial or human. Therefore Confucianism, for example, aims at human perfection - which is itself a phase of cosmic perfection - and both manifest the same logos. Chinese philosophy nowhere forgets the practical.

How the universal diversifies itself into specialties, and how the specialties reinforce, cooperate, check and balance one another vastly interested Chinese philosophers. How did actualities come about from primordial nothingness? The simplest answer is by polarization. Everything has its equal but opposite counterpart. When separated, both exist. When they meet and coalesce, mutual annihilation results. In other words, polarization conforms to the formula:
O=(+A)+(-A)
in which the +A we designate as the Yang or masculine principle, and the -A as the Yin or feminine principle. A good modern illustration of this concept is seen in double entry bookkeeping, in which the credit side and the debit side coexist, balance each other, but do not coalesce.

At the risk of oversimplification, we may consider the Yang principle as that which activates, and Yin principle as that which conserves. But to be active is costly, and the cost has to be made up. Hence we may regard the Yang as the spending principle, and the Yin as the replenishing principle. Their coordination is the essence of feasibility.

A more complicated concept of check and balance may be schematically represented as follows:

In the above diagrams, each capital letter represents an "elemental" virtue or power. The "elements" are listed below:
1) W=water or fluidity
2) F=fire
3) V=vegetation or wood
4) M=metal
5) E=earth or soil

In Diagram I each element is said to generate or reinforce the one it points at. In Diagram II each curbs or overpowers the one it points at.

As an example of the practical use of this concept, Chinese herbalist medical art envisages the internal organs in human anatomy as functioning under separate elements, e. g., the heart under Fire, the lungs under Metal, the digestive system under Earth, the kidneys under Water, etc. Now if someone develops a lung disease, it could be: (a) that his cardiac Fire is too strong for his pulmonary Metal; or (b) that his pulmonary Metal is not receiving sufficient reinforcement from his gastric Earth, or (c) his renal Water amounts to too heavy a drain on the lung Metal. The treatment will therefore be directed towards his heart or stomach or kidneys rather than his lungs, even though he is suffering from a lung complaint. It is this kind of working philosophy that may make Chinese ways of doing things appear devious to Western observers.

Each Elemental Principle (or potency, or virtue, or power) considered in isolation may be thought of as a vector that obeys Newton's Laws of Motion. If allowed to act alone, it will produce motion forever and ever along a straight line and with unchanging speed. In every useful machine its various vectors must be so correlated as to achieve some state of equilibrium (either stable or transient). Similarly no single moral principle should be pushed to its logical extreme. This is why Chinese morality gravitates towards what our classics call chung yung (literally, centralistic constancy) which reminds one of the Greek idea of golden mean, and which is no other than a dynamic equilibrium of moral virtues.

The avoidance of "going to the extreme" powerfully contributes toward the Chinese national trait of tolerance. Throughout our very long history, there has never been sustained religious persecution comparable in brutality or scope to those in, say, Europe. China is the only nation which managed to assimilate Jewish communities wholesale. Tolerance disarms resistance.

Intimate frank fellowship, stemming from interracial and intercultural reconciliation - as necessities by demands of national defense and rendered feasible by tolerance - opened our mind's eye to one another's innate goodness. Hence Confucianism holds that man is born good in the moral sense of the word. Good government is not the one under which man is afraid to do evil, but the one under which man is provided with an environment in which what Christians term the divine spark is given free play and practical implementation. Ritualistic convention by common consent largely replaces the policeman in historic China.

Of course, ritual is no talisman. In itself, it is but a collection of formalities. But behind ritual, there pulsates a living protest against arbitration by force. In other words, Chinese ritualism embodies cultural respect for man's freedom of conscience. Voluntary conformity guarantees individual flexibility on the one hand and social conformity on the other.

We all know how the climate and soil of North China have conditioned its inhabitants to work hard, to rely on human effort, and to struggle onward with tenacious fixity of purpose: all of which are moral qualities enabling China to survive numerous political or cultural crises. Now let us have a glimpse at ancient "South China," which we now call Central China.

Dame Nature is more lenient in what she demands of the people who live in the Yangtze Basin - the South China of old. Life there is far easier. Listen to what a bard had to sing a millennium ago:
All men speak
Well of the South.
Travelers should all
Stay in the South,
Till they are aged.
Lakes and streams
Vie in blueness
With the sky.
On the gay
Painted barges
Raindrops make
Music for you
As you sleep.
One there is,
Like a moon fairy,
By the wine stove.
Frozen snow-white
Are her wrists.
Travelers say
"Till old age,
Stay in the South."
Stay in the South,
While you're young,
Or you'll be
Broken-hearted.
-"South of the Yangtze" by Wei Chuang (855-920), tr. by Clara M. Candlin.

It was the spirit of "South China" that effloresced into Taoism. Leisurely speculation made it possible.

The difference between Confucianism and Taoism may be summed up lamely thus: If the Ways of Heaven or Nature (the tao) be likened to an ocean, the fellow who exerts himself and makes wise use of his knowledge of hydrodynamics to swim in a beeline to his chosen destination - is a Confucianist. The other fellow, who holds that the most idealic spot for him is where the winds and currents will of themselves carry him to - is a Taoist. The more man lets science have free play, the more science can be made to serve man. Tao behaves much in the same way as science.

In the realm of politics, for instance, to the Confucianist, good government is the result of wise, righteous, cooperative effort; to the Taoist, it is the one that governs least.

The supremacy of the concrete and the practical in North China's ethical estimation, and that of the speculative and abstract in "South China's," jointly prepared the stage for various roles to be played by Buddhism, which reached China about the beginning of the Christian Era. The sect that, despite its Indian origin, is practically a brain child of pure Chinese parentage is what is known as the Ch'an tsung or the Zen School. The Zenist devotee prepares his mind (or, to be more exact, his soul in Christian terminology) through meditation for the sudden flash of Illumination (Total Awakening) that illuminates Reality. And he will find that Reality is, paradoxically, no other than the All-embracing Void. Other sects ranging from pantheism to idolatry need not detain us here.

Having traversed all the way up from the lowly loess to the lofty concepts of tao, we begin to understand what prompted Confucius to quote the ancient ode below:
That great and noble Prince displayed
The sense of right in all he wrought;
Adjusting justly, grade by grade,
The spirit of his wisdom swayed
Peasant and poor, the crowd, the court.
So Heaven, that crowned his sires, restored.
The countless honours they had known;
For Heaven, aye, keepeth watch and ward,
And through the son renews the throne.
- Chung Yung, chap. xvii; tr. by Ku Hung-ming.

It is interesting to note that if we capitalize the word "son ," one might mistake it to be a quotation from the Bible. Confucius and Jesus are nearer to each other than one might think. If Christianity as developed in the atmosphere of Graeco-Roman culture means the coming of the supernatural into the natural, in that of the Chinese it means the coming of practicality into spirituality. It is a case of
A+B=B+A.

Anyhow, Chinese civilization is worthy of serious notice and study, for -

"The more we know of Chinese art, of Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy of life, the more we admire the heights to which that civilization attained." - Science and the Modern World by Alfred North Whitehead, p. 8.