by Ying-shih Yü
tance even of a shaman clearly implies that access to Heaven is no longer a royal
mono poly. Since, as we shall see, the beginning of an individualistic version of
tian ren heyi can be traced to no earlier than the sixth century b.c.e., we may
assume that it was developed, at least partly, as a conscious response to the an-
cient myth of “separation” that had dominated the Chinese mind for many cen-
turies. It is to this impor tant development of Chinese spirituality that I must
now turn.
The author of the last chapter of the Zhuangzi— perhaps a latter- day follower
of the Master— describes with a profound sense of sadness the “breakup” of
the primeval oneness of Dao
. He linked this “breakup” to the rise of the
“Hundred Schools” of philosophy in China. Each of the schools, he said, com-
prehended but a singular aspect of the original whole. It is like the case of the
ear, eye, nose, and mouth, each having a par tic u lar sense, without being able to
function interchangeably. As a result, the purity of Heaven and Earth and the
wholeness of Dao have been forever lost.4 In this earliest account of the fi rst
philosophical movement in Chinese classical antiquity, our writer historicizes
an original allegory suggested by Zhuangzi
himself. It runs as follows:
The God of the South Sea was called Shu
[Swift], the God of the North
Sea was called Hu
[Sudden], and the God of the central region was
called Hundun
[Chaos]. Shu and Hu from time to time came to-
gether for a meeting in the territory of Hundun, and Hundun treated
them very generously. Shu and Hu discussed how they could repay his
kindness. “All men,” they said, “have seven openings so they can see,
hear, eat, and breathe. But Hundun alone doesn’t have any. Let’s try bor-
ing him some.”
Every day they bored another hole, and on the seventh day Hundun
died. (97)
I am quite convinced that the latter- day follower’s historical account is a truth-
ful reading of the Master’s original allegory. The analogy of sensory apertures
in both cases makes it clear that Zhuangzi’s Chaos (Hundun) is the symbol of
the primordial wholeness of Dao. In making use of this famous allegory about
the death of Chaos, Zhuangzi must have had in mind what historians today see
as a “swift” (Shu) and “sudden” (Hu) beginning of spiritual enlightenment in
ancient China. Laozi
, Confucius, and Mo Di (or Mozi)
—to mention
only three of the greatest names in the history of Chinese philosophy— all ap-
peared in the sixth and fi fth centuries b.c.e.
Now the question is, how are we to understand this sudden spiritual enlight-
enment and relate it to the distinction between the heavenly and the human? In
this connection, I would like to begin by placing the question in a comparative
perspective, because China was not the only civilization in the ancient world
b e t w e e n t h e h e av e n l y a nd t h e h u m a n 5
that experienced this enlightenment. It took place in other civilizations as well.
Some four de cades ago, Karl Jaspers called our attention to the most fascinat-
ing fact that in the fi rst millennium b.c.e., which he called the Axial Period, a
spiritual “breakthrough” occurred in several high cultures, including China,
India, Persia, Israel, and Greece. It took the form of either philosophical reason-
ing or postmythical religious imagination, or a mixed type of moral- philosophic-
religious consciousness, as in the case of China. Apparently, the breakthroughs
in the Axial Period all took place in de pen dently of one another and no mutual
infl uences can be established. The most we can say about them is prob ably that
when civilizations or cultures developed to a certain stage, they would undergo
a common experience of spiritual awakening of some kind. Jaspers further
suggested that the ultimate importance of this Axial breakthrough lies in the
fact that it tended to exert a defi ning and formative infl uence on the character
of the civilizations involved.5 In the past de cades, much has been discussed
about Jaspers’s concept of “breakthrough,” and there is a general consensus
that the great transformation of the Chinese mind in the time of Confucius can
be more sensibly understood as one of the major breakthroughs during the
Axial Period. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Zhuangzi and his fol-
lowers had already grasped the historical signifi cance of the very intellectual
movement that they themselves were promoting. “Death of Chaos” or “breakup
of the primeval Dao” has indeed captured the essential meaning of the idea of
“Axial breakthrough.”
There are many ways of characterizing the Axial breakthrough. For the pur-
pose of my discussion here, I prefer to see it as China’s fi rst spiritual awaken-
ing, involving centrally an original transcendence. It is “transcendence” in the
sense of, as Benjamin I. Schwartz has suggested, “a kind of critical, refl ective
questioning of the actual and a new vision of what lies beyond.” 6 The transcen-
dence is “original” in the sense that it has ever since remained, by and large, a
central defi ning feature of the Chinese mentality throughout the traditional
period.
Scholars are also in basic agreement that the Axial breakthrough led directly
to the emergence of the dichotomy between the actual world and the world be-
yond. This is essentially what transcendence is all about: the actual world is
transcended but not negated. On the other hand, however, the exact shape, em-
pirical content, and historical pro cess of transcendence varied from civilization
to civilization as each had taken place on a pre- breakthrough foundation uniquely
its own. In what immediately follows, I shall try to say something about the
uniqueness of Chinese transcendence. Some Western scholars have already no-
ticed that in contrast to other Axial breakthroughs, China’s appears to have
been a “least radical”7 or “most conservative” 8 one. I think this judgment is well
grounded and reasonable. There are many diff er ent ways to argue for the case.
One would be the Chinese emphasis on historical continuity during and since
the Axial Period. The “breakthrough” did occur, but it was not a complete break
6 b e t w e e n t h e h e av e n l y a nd t h e h u m a n
with the pre- breakthrough tradition. Another way is to look into the relation-
ship between the actual world and the world beyond.
In the Chinese breakthrough, the two worlds, actual and transcendental, do
not appear to have been sharply divided. There is nothing in the early Chinese
philosophical visions that suggests Plato’s conception of an unseen eternal
world of which the actual world is only a pale copy. In the religious tradition,
the sharp dichotomy of a Christian type between the world of God and the
world of humans is also absent. Nor do we fi nd in classical Chinese thought in
all its va ri e ties anything that closely resembles the radical negativity of early
Buddhism, with its insistence on the unrealness and worthlessness of this<
br />
world. In the case of China during the Axial Period, the idea of Dao emerged as
a symbol of the transcendental world in contrast to the actual world of everyday
life. This was equally true of the Confucians and the Daoists. In either case,
however, Dao was never perceived as very far from everyday life. Confucius
said: “The Dao is not far from man. When a man pursues the Dao and remains
away from man, his course cannot be considered the Dao. ”9 “Zhongyong”
(Doctrine of the Mean) also stressed the point that the Dao functions every-
where and yet is hidden. Men and women of simple intelligence can share its
knowledge or practice it, and yet in its utmost reaches, there is something that
even the sage does not know or is unable to put into practice. Both Laozi and
Zhuangzi took Dao to be a “higher realm” of existence as opposed to the actual
world. Generally speaking, the distinction between “this world” and “other
world” is more sharply drawn in Daoism than in Confucianism. Nevertheless,
the Daoists’ two worlds are not neatly separate either. Thus, when Zhuangzi
was asked, “This thing called the Dao— where does it exist?” The Master’s an-
swer is, “ There is no place it doesn’t exist.” As he further explained to the ques-
tioner, “You must not expect to fi nd the Dao in any par tic u lar place— there is
no thing that escapes its presence!” (240–241). Zhuangzi’s admirer once de-
scribed him in the following way: “He came and went alone with the pure spirit
of Heaven and earth, yet he did not view the ten thousand things with arrogant
eyes. He did not scold over “right” and “wrong,” but lived with the age and its
vulgarity. . . . Above, he wandered with the Creator; below, he made friends
with those who have gotten outside of life and death, who know nothing of be-
ginning or end” (373). In other words, Zhuangzi lived in “this world,” but at the
same time, his spirit wandered in the “other world.”
Up to this point, what I have been trying to show is that as a result of the
Axial breakthrough, China also developed its own duality of the transcendental
and actual worlds. However, this Chinese duality diff ered from that in other
civilizations by being not as sharply diff erentiated. The typical Chinese de-
scription of the relationship between these two worlds is “neither identical nor
separate” ( buji buli
). This description may be hard to comprehend for
those who are accustomed to dichotomist thinking, but it does constitute a cen-
tral feature of Chinese transcendence. The title of this chapter, “Between the
b e t w e e n t h e h e av e n l y a nd t h e h u m a n 7
Heavenly and the Human,” is also chosen to convey this unique Chinese imag-
ination. To take a step further, I now propose to interpret the Chinese case as
“inward transcendence” ( neixiang chaoyue
).
The inwardness of Chinese transcendence cannot be understood without a
brief discussion of the historical pro cess of the Axial breakthrough in early
China. It has been suggested that the Axial breakthrough took place in Greece
against the background of the world of Homeric gods, in Israel against the back-
ground of the early books of the Bible and the story of Moses, and in India
against the background of the long Vedic tradition. What, then, was the Chinese
background against which the breakthrough occurred? My straightforward an-
swer is: the long ritual tradition of the Three Dynasties (Xia- Shang- Zhou). By
“ritual tradition,” I refer to both li
(rites) and yue
( music), which had been
embodied in the way of life of the ruling elite since the Xia dynasty. Confu-
cius’s famous characterization of the Xia- Shang- Zhou ritual tradition as a con-
tinuous but ever- renovating system ( Lunyu [Analects], 11.23) seems to have been
validated by every major advance in archaeology as far as the last two dynasties
are concerned. By the time of Confucius, however, this ritual order was already
on the brink of total breakdown, due largely to the widespread transgressions
and violations of rites by the ruling elite. Here we have a classic example of
breakdowns preceding breakthroughs in history.
Next, we must try to establish the historical link between the Axial break-
through and the ritual breakdown in terms of transcendence. In the interest of
brevity, it suffi
ces to point out that the ritual tradition was indeed the point of
departure of Chinese transcendence resulting directly from the Axial break-
through. One of Confucius’s central visions consisted in transcending the exist-
ing ritual practice by searching for the “basis of rites.” His new search ended, as
we all know, in the reinterpretation of ren (in this case, “ human- heartedness”)
as the spiritual kernel of li. Thus, he departed from the traditional view that li
originated in human imitation of the divine models provided by Heaven and
Earth ( Zuozhuan
, or Zuo Commentary to the Spring and Autumn Annals,
Duke Zhao, twenty- fi fth year). Instead of looking outwardly toward Heaven and
Earth, he now turned inwardly toward the human heart, for the “basis of rites.”
Similarly, both the Mohist and the Daoist breakthroughs, which came after
Confucius’s, also took the ritual tradition to serious task. Mozi not only viewed
the ever- growing complexity and elaborateness of li through the ages as steadily
but irreversibly falling into decay but also severely criticized Confucius’s re-
form for its failure to eradicate all the existing ritual practices developed during
the Zhou Period— hence, his advocacy of a return to the simplicity of the origi-
nal Xia ritual system. As for the Daoists, theirs may be described as the most
radical of all the breakthroughs among the pre- Qin schools of thought. This is
the case because it alone drew a distinction between the actual world and the
world beyond, one that was sharper than in any other school. Zhuangzi, in par-
tic u lar, has been the main source of the strain of otherworldliness in the Chinese
8 b e t w e e n t h e h e av e n l y a nd t h e h u m a n
spiritual tradition. It must be emphatically pointed out, however, that the Dao-
ists also took the ritual tradition as the starting point of their transcendence. As
clearly stated in the Daodejing
(or the Laozi, chapter 38), “rites” are “the
beginning of disorder,” meaning that the spirit of original Dao has degenerated,
step by step, to its lowest point. On the other hand, Zhuangzi tried to show us
how to return to Dao by transcending the actual world, also step by step, begin-
ning with the “rites” (90).10 Thus, the pro cess of “fall,” so to speak, in the Daode-
jing is reversed to become the pro cess of “salvation” in the Zhuangzi. Rejecting
all the current ritual practices as artifi cial nonsense, Zhuangzi nevertheless
did not go so far as to propose discarding the very notion of li itself; he contin-
ued to speak of the “meaning of rites” ( liyi
) . In his conception, obviously,
“pounding on a tub and singing” in the presence of his wife’s corpse is a more
&
nbsp; meaningful funeral rite than weeping (191–192).
In the above three cases, it is signifi cant that the found ers of Confucianism,
Mohism, and Daoism all “philosophically reinterpreted the existing religious
practice rather than directly withdrawing themselves from it,” a fact Max Weber
considered to be “of fundamental importance.”11 I would venture to suggest that
reinterpretation instead of withdrawal may help explain to a large extent why, of
all the Axial breakthroughs, China’s turned out to be the “least radical” or “most
conservative.”
Lastly, let us examine “inward transcendence” in relation to the changing
conception of the “unity of Heaven and man.” It may be recalled that during the
time when the myth of the “Separation of Heaven and Earth” was generally ac-
cepted, only the king could directly communicate with Heaven with the assis-
tance of wu- shamans. As a result, the “unity of Heaven and man” became a
prerogative exclusively reserved for the king, who, theoretically, was decreed by
Heaven as the sole representative of all the humans on earth as a collectivity. In
an impor tant sense, it was against this royal mono poly of the access to Heaven
that the Chinese Axial breakthrough began as a spiritual revolt.
In his further characterizations of the Axial breakthrough, Jaspers particu-
larly called our attention to two of its distinguishing features. First, the break-
through is the spiritual awakening and liberation of humans as individuals; for
the fi rst time, they “dared to rely on themselves as individuals,” to embark on a
spiritual journey beyond not only their own selves but the actual world as well.
Second, with the breakthrough, the spiritually awakened and liberated indi-
vidual appears to have been in need of relating his or her own existence in this
world meaningfully to “the whole of Being.”
This general characterization, it seems to me, throws a comparativist light on
the individualistic turn of the tian ren heyi thesis during China’s Axial break-
through. Take the idea of tianming
(“Mandate or Decree of Heaven”), for
example. Confucius said, “at fi fty, I understood the Decree of Heaven” ( Ana-
lects, 2.4) and the gentleman “is in awe of the Decree of Heaven” (16.8). As D. C.
Lau rightly points out in his translator’s introduction to the Analects, “The only
