The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

  Taoism developed on two levels: a philosophy of spontaneity and naturalism and a folk religion that sought the (quite unnatural) means of immortality in its own rituals and techniques. These included a diet that did not feed the “three worms”—disease, old age, and death—but nourished the body. Yet there were links between these levels. Breath control gave a hint of immortality and nourished a mysterious “embryonic body” within. And sexual discipline that avoided ejaculation preserved the semen to mix with breath and nourish the body and the brain. Taoist alchemy, too, sought an elixir of immortality, while meditation gave visions of the countless spirits in the body and in the universe.

  If the West justified man’s creative powers by the godlike sharing of the powers of an original Creator, the Chinese sought to act in harmony with the order of nature. After Confucius, a technique of “correlative thinking” found correspondences between human conduct and the whole cosmos well expressed in the classic statement of Tung Chung-shu (c.179–104? B.C.):

  The vital forces of Heaven and earth join to form a unity, divide to become the yin and yang, separate into the four seasons, and range themselves into the five agents.… In the order of their succession they give birth to one another, while in a different order they overcome each other. Therefore in ruling, if one violates this order, there will be chaos, but if one follows it, all will be well governed.

  Each of the five agents was related to one of the five traditional departments of the Chou government of his time. For example, wood was the agent of the minister of agriculture, while metal was the agent of the minister of the interior. If the minister of agriculture was corrupt, played partisan politics and forced worthy men to retire, “teaching the people wild and prodigal ways,” then peasants would neglect the work of the fields “amusing themselves with gambling, cock-fighting, dog racing, and horsemanship; old and young will be without respect, great and small will trespass upon each other; thieves and brigands will arise … then the minister of the interior is ordered to punish the leaders of the rebellion and set things right. Therefore we say metal overcomes wood.” And similarly fire was the agent of the minister of war, water the agent of the minister of justice, and earth the agent of the minister of works.

  The meaning of the five agents in daily experience was explained in the book the Tso Chuan in the early Han era:

  Men follow the laws revealed in the celestial signs, living in accord with the nature of terrestrial things. Heaven and earth give rise to the Si Ch’i [yin and yang, wind and rain, dark and light], and from these are born the Five Elements [Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth]. Out of man’s use of these come the Five Flavors [sour, salty, acrid, bitter, sweet], the Five Colors [green, yellow, scarlet, white, black], and the Five Modes [in music]. But when these are indulged to excess, confusion arises and in the end man loses sight of his original nature.

  So the pervasive five agents held all the world, all nature, and all society together.

  Confucius himself, so far as we know, was not much interested in cosmogony, metaphysics, or the origins of the universe. And his successors turned neither to creating gods nor to one Creator-God. Instead they described creation as a process of natural forces. A key idea was their notion of the yin and the yang, which expressed their belief in the shaping, creative power of natural forces at work everywhere. It remains a constant reminder of the this-worldly emphasis of Chinese thought. The Chinese would not seek refuge in the frolics, passions, and intrigues of gods and goddesses. An eloquent Taoist statement of yin-yang comes from Huai-nan Tzu’s synthesis (c.122 B.C.): Creation without a Creator, a mystic parable for gentlemen-rulers in all times and places.

  Before heaven and earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous. Therefore it was called the Great Beginning. The Great Beginning produced emptiness and emptiness produced the universe. The universe produced material-force which had limits. That which was clear and light drifted up to become heaven, while that which was heavy and turbid solidified to become earth. It was very easy for the pure, fine material to come together but extremely difficult for the heavy, turbid material to solidify. Therefore heaven was completed first and earth assumed shape after. The combined essences of heaven and earth became the yin and yang, the concentrated essences of the yin and yang became the four seasons. And the scattered essences of the four seasons became the myriad creatures of the world. After a long time the hot force of the accumulated yang produced fire and the essence of the fire force became the sun; the water force became the moon. The essence of the excess force of the sun and moon became the stars and planets. Heaven received the sun, moon, and stars while earth received water and soil.…

  When heaven and earth were joined in emptiness and all was unwrought simplicity, then without having been created, things came into being. This was the Great Oneness. All things issued from this oneness but all became different, being divided into the various species of fish, birds, and beasts.… But he who can return to that from which he was born and become as though formless is called a “true man.” The true man is he who has never become separated from the Great Oneness.

  The origin of this simple division of natural forces is hidden in antiquity.

  The yin and the yang reached out across Asia to Japan, Vietnam, and Korea, where the yin-yang symbol was adopted for the national flag. This Huai-nan Tzu version of the yin-yang works of creation prefaced the Nihon shoki (720), the oldest official Japanese history. Astrology, astronomy, medicine, government, and the arts elaborate the yin-yang distinction and notions that were supposed to follow from it.

  In time the Taoist ways of thinking about man and nature were assimilated into the renewed Confucian theorizing by the great synthesizer Chu Hsi (1130–1200):

  In the beginning of the universe there was only material-force consisting of yin and yang. This force moved and circulated, turning this way and that. As this movement gained speed, a mass of sediment was pushed together and, since there was no outlet for this, it consolidated to form the earth in the center of the universe.…

  Further Question: Can the universe be destroyed?

  Answer: It is indestructible. But in time man will lose all moral principles and everything will be thrown together in a chaos. Man and things will all die out, and then there will be a new beginning.

  Further Question: How was the first man created?

  Answer: Through the transformation of material-force. When the essence of yin and yang and the five agents are united, man’s corporeal form is established. This is what the Buddhists call production by transformation. There are many such productions today, such as lice.

  Question: With reference to the mind of Heaven and earth and the principle of Heaven and earth, Principle is moral principle. Is mind the will of a master?

  Answer: The mind is the will of a master, it is true, but what is called “master” is precisely principle itself. It is not true that outside of the mind there is principle, or that outside of principle there is mind.

  The way of thought that brought together Confucian morality and Taoist sympathy with nature saw time as a series of cycles, without beginning or end. And, as Chu Hsi suggests, Buddhism, too, would be transformed as it entered this Confucian world. Yet, somehow the Chinese also saw history as lineal in its smaller dimensions. Unwilling to fix a time for the beginning of the world or of their nation, they marked their sixty-year cyclical calendar with the years of the reigning monarch, to date human events precisely in historical time.

  Just as yin and yang explained regularity and balance in nature, so the five agents were a key to the cycles of history. Wood produced fire; fire produced earth; earth produced metal; metal produced water, and so on and on. Still it was possible instead to rearrange the agents by which one element overcame another. This resulted in a different order, since fire was “overcome” by water, water by earth, earth by wood, and wood by metal. Every dynasty had to be associated with one of the five elements, and to be legitimate had to appear at the pr
edestined point for its “element” in the cyclical series. Dynasties, usually after the fact, claimed their right to seize the throne to preserve the proper order of agents.

  Thus the Chinese emperor Wang Mang (33 B.C.–A.D. 23; ruled A.D. 2–23), commonly known as the Usurper, justified his coup, which ended the Early Han dynasty, by the fact that he was a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, whose agent was Earth. So he was qualified to fill the place in the cyclical series which required another dynasty of the agent earth. Apparent irregularities in the series were explained away by conveniently inserting into the calendar an “intercalary” reign—a kind of leap year—of the fluid agent water. For centuries, debates over dynastic legitimacy were translated into the language of the five elements.

  Eternal harmony, with everything properly proceeding from its procreating ch’i of material forces, made novelty seem alien. The idea of the creation of something ex nihilo (from nothing) had no place in a universe of the yin and yang and the five elements, always in order, always in proper series. Unlike the Western world of a surprising Creation, of man at war with nature, the world of Confucius transformed by Taoist and Buddhist currents saw man at home among transformations, procreations, and re-creations.

  A vivid symptom of this contrast between West and East is the difference between two ways of thinking about man’s place in the landscape. Landscape painting is a late arrival in Western art. Ancient writers tell us of Greek murals that were landscapes, including some scenes from the Odyssey. Roman villas were decorated with idealized landscapes, and we can still see some in Pompeii. The frescoes (c.1338) of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c.1300?–1348) in the Palazzo Publico in Siena are the earliest surviving Western paintings showing us a scene painted direct from nature. A series called Good and Bad Government, they reveal the emphasis of the West, for here it is the human figure of statesman or lover, hunter or soldier, saint or savior that dominates. Leonardo’s familiar Mona Lisa (c.1503–1505) offers the landscape as a background. Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538) in the early sixteenth century begins experimenting with landscapes of the Danube. The outdoor settings for the Brueghels’ paintings in the seventeenth century are not raw nature but a countryside where man plays, carouses, and hunts, and where the Blind lead the Blind. Not until the Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century—Rembrandt, Jacob van Ruisdael, Meindert Hobbema—does landscape become a subject all its own. Finally in the nineteenth century landscape becomes the painters’ grand laboratory.

  But in China, by the fourth century the landscape had already become an endlessly fertile subject. There nature is no mere setting for the human drama. In the earliest Western depictions of landscape, the viewer stands outside looking at the spectacle of man’s work, his battles, his follies, or his worship. Man is the foreground. But the Chinese landscape was a scene of harmony and rhythmic life, where man fits inconspicuously, even obscurely.

  In the Chinese landscapes we must seek out man. When we do find him he is a speck, whether a fisherman, a hermit, or a sage in contemplation. Even “empty” space is not the vacuum that the West so abhorred but an untapped resource of the universal ch’i, one with mountains and streams, as they said, “because there is a principle of organization connecting all things.” A philosopher of the Yuan era, T’ang Hou (flourished 1320–1330), observed the incorporation of man in nature and nature in man:

  Landscape painting is the essence of the shaping powers of Nature. Thus through the vicissitudes of yin and yang—weather, time, and climate—the charm of inexhaustible transformation is unfailingly visible. If you yourself do not possess that grand wavelike vastness of mountain and valley within your heart and mind, you will be unable to capture it with ease in your painting.

  3

  The Silence of the Buddha

  THE Buddha had no answer to the riddle of creation. Much of his appeal to millions around the world for twenty-five hundred years came from his commonsense refusal to try to answer unanswerable questions. “Is the universe eternal or not eternal, or both?” “Is the universe infinite in space or not infinite, or both or neither?” The Buddha listed these among the fourteen questions to which he allowed no reply.

  “Have I ever said to you,” the Buddha asked, “come, be my disciple and I will reveal to you the beginning of things?” “Sir, you have not.” “Or, have you ever said to me I will become your pupil for you will reveal to me the beginning of things?” “Sir, I have not.” His only object, the Buddha reminded his disciple, was “the thorough destruction of ill for the doer thereof.” “If then,” the Buddha went on, “it matters not to that object whether the beginning of things be revealed … what use would it be to have the beginning of things revealed?”

  This hardheaded approach may surprise us in the West, where we commonly think of Buddhism as a mystic way of thought. But a wholesome reticence entered the mainstream of Buddhism, and came to be called the Silence of the Buddha. Confucius, too, had his own list of things “about which the master never spoke”—“weird things, physical exploits, disorders, and spirits.” Inquiry for its own sake, merely to know more, philosophy on the Greek model, had no place either in the Buddhist tradition. Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales, were men of speculative temperament. What is the world made of? What are the elements and the processes by which the world is transformed? Greek philosophy and science were born together, of the passion to know.

  The Buddha’s aim was not to know the world or to improve it but to escape its suffering. His whole concern was salvation. It is not easy for us in the West to understand or even name this Buddhist concern. To say that the Buddhists had a “philosophy” would be misleading. Not only did the Buddha remain silent when asked about the first creation. He despised “speculations about the creation of the land or sea” as “low conversation,” which was like tales of kings, of robbers, of ministers of state, talk about women and about heroes, gossip at street corners, and ghost stories. He urged disciples to follow his example and not fritter away their energy on such trifles.

  He offered an original, if slightly malicious, explanation of how the idea of a single Creator had ever got started. He said it began as only a rumor, invented by the conceit of a well-known figure inherited from the prolific Hindu mythology. The culprit was none other than Brahma, of wondrous and various genealogy. Originally associated with the primeval Prajapati, whom we have met, Brahma was said to have been born from a golden egg. Some credited him with creating the earth, others said that he had sprung from a lotus that issued from the protector-god Vishnu’s navel. In the Buddha’s lifetime Hindus still worshiped Brahma as a creator god.

  The Lord Buddha explained how, at one stage in the endless cycles of the universe, this character had cast himself in the role of Creator:

  Now there comes a time when this world begins to evolve, and then the World of Brahma appears, but it is empty. And some being, whether because his allotted span is past or because his merit is exhausted, quits his body in the world of Radiance and is born in the empty World of Brahma, where he dwells for a long, long time. Now, because he has been so long alone he begins to feel dissatisfaction and longing, and wishes that other beings might come and live with him. And indeed soon other beings quit their bodies in the World of Radiance and come to keep him company in the World of Brahma.

  Then the being who was first born there thinks: “I am Brahma, the mighty Brahma, the Conqueror, the Unconquered, the All-seeing, the Lord, the Maker, the Creator, the Supreme Chief, the Disposer, the Controller, the Father of all that is or is to be. I have created all these beings, for I merely wished that they might be and they have come here!” And the other beings … think the same, because he was born first and they later. And the being who was born first lived longer and was more handsome and powerful than the others.…

  That is how your traditional doctrine comes about that the beginning of things was the work of the god Brahma.

  Following the Buddha, the Buddhist scriptures repeatedly boasted th
eir freedom from such silly personal conceits as belief in a Creator.

  The indifference of the Buddha to the tantalizing questions of creation had a source in the experience of the Gautama Buddha himself. His career was quite the opposite of that which led Confucius to his own kind of indifference. Confucius was uninterested in the origin of the world because it had no current bearing on the reformation of man or of government. The Buddha was interested in escaping the world and so aimed to make life on earth irrelevant. Both men were teachers. While Confucius offered maxims for the politician, the Buddha’s life was raw material for legends, folklore, and fairy tales.

  The obscure Confucius was frustrated in his unsuccessful search for the power to reform society. The Gautama Buddha (561?–483? B.C.) willfully abandoned power and glory. Confucius lived among sordid intrigues of bedroom and palace. The Buddha’s life was overcast with sublime mysteries.

  Prince Siddhartha, later to be the Gautama Buddha, was born in Kapilavastu in northeastern India on the border of present-day Nepal. A prince of the Kingdom of the Bakyas, he was raised in fabled Oriental luxury. The legend of his life reveals the archetype of the Buddha, the essence of Buddhism, which grew over the centuries after his death. But the early Buddhists, like the Hindu Brahmins, believed that religious knowledge was too sacred to be written down. For four centuries after his death, facts and legends about the Buddha, his dialogues and sayings were preserved only in the memories of monks. The surviving accounts of his life are the accumulated product of disciples over generations.