Chinese Thought

Buddhism arrived in China around the 1st century AD when Chinese culture was more than 2,000 years old.

Chinese philosophy had reached its culmination during the late Chou period (c. 500-221 B.C.), the golden age of Chinese philosophy, and from then on had always been held in the highest esteem.

From the beginning, this philosophy had two complementary aspects. The Chinese being practical people with a highly developed social consciousness, all their philosophical schools were concerned, in one way or the other, with life in society, with human relations, moral values and government. This, however, is only one aspect of Chinese thought. Complementary to it is that corresponding to the mystical side of the Chinese character, which demanded that the highest aim of philosophy should be to transcend the world of society and everyday life and to reach a higher plane of consciousness. This is the plane of the sage, the Chinese ideal of the enlightened man who has achieved mystical union with the universe.

The Chinese sage, however, does not dwell exclusively on this high spiritual plane, but is equally concerned with worldly affairs. He unifies in himself the two complementary sides of human nature-intuitive wisdom and practical knowledge, contemplation and social action-which the Chinese have associated with the images of the sage and of the king. Fully realized human beings, in the words of Chuang Tzu, ‘by their stillness become sages, by their movement kings’.’ During the sixth century B.C., the two sides of Chinese philosophy developed into two distinct philosophical schools,

Confucianism and Taoism. Confucianism was the philosophy of social organization, of common sense and practical know’- ledge. It provided Chinese society with a system of education and with strict conventions of social etiquette. One of its main purposes was to form an ethical basis for the traditional Chinese family system with its complex structure and its rituals of ancestor worship. Taoism, on the other hand, was concerned primarily with the observation of nature and the discovery of its Way, or Tao. Human happiness, according to the Taoists, is achieved when men follow the natural order, acting spon- taneously and trusting their intuitive knowledge. These two trends of thought represent opposite poles in Chinese philosophy, but in China they were always seen as poles of one and the same human nature, and thus as com- plementary. Confucianism was generally emphasized in the education of children who had to learn the rules and con- ventions necessary for life in society, whereas Taoism used to be pursued by older people in order to regain and develop the original spontaneity which had been destroyed by social conventions. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Neo- Confucian school attempted a synthesis of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, which culminated in the philosophy of Chu Hsi, one of the greatest of all Chinese thinkers. Chu Hsi was an outstanding philosopher who combined Confucian scholarship with a deep understanding of Buddhism and Taoism, and incorporated elements of all three traditions in his philosophical synthesis.

Confucianism derives its name from Kung Fu Tzu, or Confucius, a highly influential teacher with a large number of students who saw his main function as transmitting the ancient cultural heritage to his disciples. In doing so, however, he went beyond a simple transmission of knowledge for he interpreted the traditional ideas according to his own moral concepts. His teachings were based on the so-called Six Classics, ancient books of philosophical thought, rituals, poetry, music and history, which represented the spiritual and cultural heritage of the ‘holy sages’ of China’s past. Chinese tradition has associated Confucius with all of these works, either as author

commentator or editor; but according to modern scholarship he was neither the author, commentator, nor even the editor of any of the Classics. His own ideas became known through the Lun Yij, or Confucian Analects, a collection of aphorisms which was compiled by some of his disciples. The originator of Taoism was Lao Tzu, whose name literally means the ‘Old Master’ and who was, according to tradition, an older contemporary of Confucius. He is said to have been the author of a short book of aphorisms which is considered as the main Taoist scripture.

In China, it is generally just called the Lao-tzu and in the West it is usually known as the Tao Te Ching, the ‘Classic of the Way and Power’, a name which was given to it in later times. I have already mentioned the para- doxical style and the powerful and poetic language of this book which Joseph Needham considers to be ‘without exception the most profound and beautiful work in the Chinese language’.* The second important Taoist book is the Chuang-tzu, a much larger book than the Tao Te Ching, whose author, Chuang Tzu, is said to have lived about two hundred years after Lao Tzu. According to modern scholarship, however, the Chuang-tzu, and probably also the Lao-tzu, cannot be seen as the work of a single author, but rather constitute a collection of Taoist writings compiled by different authors at different times.

Both the Confucian Analects and the Tao Te Ching are written in the compact suggestive style which is typical of the Chinese way of thinking. The Chinese mind was not given to abstract logical thinking and developed a language which is very different from that which evolved in the West. Many of its words could be used as nouns, adjectives or verbs, and their sequence was determined not so much by grammatical rules as by the emotional content of the sentence. The classical Chinese word was very different from an abstract sign repre- senting a clearly delineated concept. It was rather a sound symbol which had strong suggestive powers, bringing to mind an indeterminate complex of pictoriai images and emotions. The intention of the speaker was not so much to express an intellectual idea, but rather to affect and influence the listener.

Correspondingly, the written character was not just an abstract sign, butLvas an organic pattern-a ‘gestalt’-which preserved the full complex of images and the suggestive power of the word. Since the Chinese philosophers expressed themselves in a language which was so well suited for their way of thinking, their writings and sayings could be short and inarticulate, and yet rich in suggestive images. It is clear that much of this imagery must be lost in an English translation. A translation of a sentence from the Tao Te Ching, for example, can only render a small part of the rich complex of ideas contained in the original, which is why different translations from this controversial book often look like totally different texts. As Fung Yu-Lan has said, ‘It needs a combination of all the trans- lations already made and many others not yet made, to reveal the richness of the Lao-&u and the Confucian Analects in their original form.‘3

The Chinese, like the Indians, believed that there is an ultimate reality which underlies and unifies the multiple things and events we observe:

There are the three terms-‘complete’, ‘all-embracing’, ‘the whole’. These names are different, but the reality sought in them is the same: referring to the One thing.4 They called this reality the Tao, which originally meant ‘the Way’. It is the way, or process, of the universe, the order of nature. In later times, the Confucianists gave it a different interpretation. They talked about the Tao of man, or the Tao of human society, and ‘understood it as the right way of life in a inoral sense.

In its original cosmic sense, the Tao is the ultimate, undeftn- able reality and as such it is the equivalent of the Hinduist Brahman and the Buddhist Dharmakaya. It differs from these Indian concepts, however, by its intrinsically dynamic quality which, in the Chinese view, is the essence of the universe. The Tao is the cosmic process in which all things are involved; the world is seen as a continuous flow and change.

Indian Buddhism, with its doctrine of impermanence, had quite a similar view, but it took this view merely as the basic premise of the, human situation and went on to elaborate its psychological consequences. The Chinese, on the other hand, not only believed that flow and change were the essential features of nature, but also that there are constant patterns in these changes, to be observed- by man. The sage recognizes these patterns and directs his actions according to them. In this way, he becomes ‘one with the fao’, living in harmony with nature and succeeding in everything he undertakes. In the words of Huai Nan Tzu, a philosopher of the second century B.C. :

He who conforms to the course of the Tao, following the natural processes of Heaven and Earth, finds it easy to manage the whole world.5