Miss Buddha
Page 74
However, many scholars today believe that there was no single person who wrote the Tao Te Ching, but rather that it is an anthology of sayings by different authors and was composed as late as the 3rd century BCE.
A common thread throughout the Tao Te Ching is the Tao (“Way”), an entity, or a concept, that both creates the world and determines how things should live. The Tao Te Ching suggests that what Confucius and his followers celebrate as virtues and culture are in reality but artificial corruptions of the original simplicity of the Tao. Were humans to follow the Tao instead, they would live in peace and contentment in simple agrarian communities.
When the School of Taoism first began to look for its roots, sometime around 100 BCE, it identified three great founder teachers. These were, and still are, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu.
Taoism is the search for the Tao, the Way of Nature which, if you could become part of it, would take you to the edge of reality and beyond. One of the core teachings of Taoism is that:
The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
In the light of this, perhaps it should not come as a surprise that, of these three founder-figures, only one can be definitely rooted in a given time and place. For the truth is that Lao Tzu may well never have existed, and even if he did, he most likely did not write the Tao Te Ching, the book usually ascribed to him as author (at least not by himself).
Lieh Tzu may also be a fictional figure. Again, even if he did exist, the book which bears his name contains few of his actual words and was probably composed some six hundred or more years after his supposed lifetime.
Which leave us with Chuang Tzu.
While the Tao Te Ching is one of the most widely translated and admired texts in the world, many scholars believe that another Taoist text, the Chuang Tzu, is a greater work of philosophy and literature. The Chuang Tzu is named after its author, the scholar Chuang Tzu, who wrote in the 4th century BCE.
His work agrees with the Tao Te Ching that human civilization is an artificial creation that does not correspond to reality. But Chuang Tzu then goes on to say that one can see through this artificiality and be freed from concerns over profit and loss, and life and death, while still participating in ordinary society.
Other Classical Schools
Among the other important schools of the classical period we find Mohism and Naturalism.
Mohism, founded by Mozi (Mo-tzu) during the 5th century BCE, taught strict utilitarianism and mutual love among all people regardless of family or social relationships.
During the 4th century BCE Naturalism offered an analysis of the workings of the universe based upon certain cosmic principles. The best known of these principles were Yin and Yang, which represented the interacting dualities of nature, such as female and male, shadow and light, and winter and summer.
Legalism
During the chaotic years of the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, Legalism emerged as the dominant philosophy in the state of Qin (Ch’in). Two disciples of Xunzi, Han Fei (Han Fei-tzu) and Li Si (Li Ssu), were, respectively, the leading philosopher and the leading practitioner of this almost uber-utilitarian philosophy.
The Legalists based their ideas on Xunzi’s teachings that human nature was evil, but took things one step further by rejecting his optimism that humans could be ethically perfected. Rather, they claimed that strict controls were needed to regulate human conduct (read: police state).
Based on this philosophy, the Legalists then proceeded to develop the model for the Chinese bureaucratic government with a view that officials must be assigned precise responsibilities and rewarded if they met those responsibilities, but punished if they failed to meet them.
Not surprisingly, Legalism proved an effective instrument in creating a powerful military and economic system in the state of Qin—totalitarian though it might have been. And like any state based on might and sword, by 221 BCE, Qin had succeeded in conquering the other feudal states and establishing a unified, centrally administered empire (the Qin dynasty).
Qin rule was characterized by strict laws, harsh punishment, rigid thought control (for example, the burning of all non-Legalist books in 213 BCE—again, about as totalitarian, about as 1984ish as you could possibly wish), government control of the economy, and enormous public works projects, such as an early version of the Great Wall, accomplished with forced labor and at great cost in human life.
However, it was not long before the oppressive rule of the Qin dynasty drove its subjects to rebellion. In 206 BCE a rebel leader of plebeian origin proclaimed the Han dynasty. He did however retain the Legalist-inspired centralized administration which, in some form or another, stayed in place until 1912.
Medieval Age—Han Confucianism
The philosophers of the Han dynasty weaved their own philosophy from strands that included the yin-yang cosmology of the naturalists, the Taoist concern for perceiving and harmonizing with the order of nature, Confucian teachings on benevolent government, rule by virtuous leaders, and respect for learning, as well as the Legalist principles of administration and economic development.
This philosophy, eventually termed Han Confucianism, was officially patronized by the government from 136 BCE and subsequently became the required learning for government service.
During the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, a variety of social and economic causes saw the downfall of the Han dynasty, leading to renewed political disunity and foreign invasion.
The philosophical void created by the collapse of Han Confucianism was filled by both Taoism and later by Buddhism, a philosophy then new to China. While one faction of Taoist philosophers attempted to reconcile the Confucian teachings of social responsibility with the naturalness and mysticism of Taoism, another faction sought to escape the issue altogether by donning blinders and proclaim that pleasure—and its pursuit—is the only good in the world.
Buddhism
In the 1st century CE, Buddhism began to filter into China from India, a flow that kept up well through the 6th century. These new teachings offered escape from the sufferings of life and from the endless reincarnation through Samsara caused by human desires.
During this time, the Chinese Buddhist philosophers of the Tiantai sect formulated the doctrine of the “Perfectly Harmonious Threefold Truth” to explain the nature of existence. This view held that things are fundamentally empty because everything depends on something else to cause it to exist; however, things do have a temporary—if brief—existence, and so the everyday world is not a complete illusion.
Neo-Confucian Period
During the Tang dynasty (618-907) Buddhism and Taoism remained dominant philosophies, but Confucianism alone among the three prevailing schools offered a political and social philosophy suited to the needs of a large centralized empire.
Consequently, it was almost inevitable that there would be a revival of Confucian cultural and philosophical thought. This revival became known as Daoxue (The Study of the Way), today thought of as neo-Confucianism.
The newfound hold of Confucianism, along with first a healthy respect and then fear on the part of the government regarding the growing power of Buddhist monasteries, culminated in persecutions of Buddhists and Taoists during the Tang dynasty. However, both Taoism and Buddhism had found the hearts of many educated Chinese and lived on in their personal lives and in their relationships with nature.
Neo-Confucianism reached intellectual maturity during the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE); and neo-Confucians of this period held that the universe and everything in it has two aspects: li and qi. Li, usually translated as “principle,” can be understood as the structure or organizing principle of everything in the universe. It is fully present in each thing that exists. The li determines why things are the way they are, and how they ought to be.
Qi, for which there is no standard English translation, is a spontaneously moving and self-generating physical substance that comes in varying degrees
of clarity or murkiness.
While li is the same in everything, qi is what gives things their distinctive qualities. As an example, the qi of a dog is seen as murkier than the qi of a human, and that is what makes humans more intelligent than dogs.
The qi of a plant, on the other hand, is murkier than the qi of a dog, so dogs can think and perceive, whereas plants cannot (at least not as far as we know). The qi of a rock is murkier still, so a plant is alive, while a rock is not.
The qi also distinguishes different individuals within kinds. Thus, your qi is different from my qi even though we are both humans. And if you are more virtuous than I, your qi is less turbid murky mine, ethics and virtue being what brings clarity to human qi.
The neo-Confucians also believed that these ideas made explicit what earlier sages such as Confucius and Mencius had meant, but they—unwittingly or unconsciously—borrowed heavily from both Buddhism and Taoism. In fact, the very term li first gained prominence in Taoist texts, and was then adopted by Huayan Buddhists well before the Confucians put it to their use.
At the same time, many neo-Confucians accused the Buddhists of selfishly escaping this world rather than trying to improve it, even though most Buddhists stressed compassion for the suffering of this world and some Buddhists even maintained that Nirvana was not a state separate from this world but rather a way of viewing this world.
It should be stressed that both neo-Confucians and Buddhists aimed at self-cultivation by discovering truths about themselves and the world through reason, observation, or meditation.
However, this emphasis on discovery contrasted with the views of Mencius, who, instead, advocated developing our inclinations toward virtue, and those of Xunzi, who encouraged us to reform our evil nature.
As neo-Confucianism developed further, it found expression through three different schools: The School of Principle, the School of Mind, and the School of Evidential Learning.
School of Principle
The 12th-century Neo-Confucian Chu Hsi, who is credited with perfecting the doctrines of the School of Principle, was the most influential Chinese philosopher since Mencius. Chu Hsi identified the Sishu (Four Books) as the core of a Confucian education: the Daxue (Great Learning), the Lunyu (Analects), the Mengzi (Book of Mencius), and the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean). These books comprise compilations of the sayings of Confucius and Mencius and commentaries by their followers. The Four Books, along with Chu Hsi’s detailed commentary on them, became the basis of the civil service examinations in China and remained so until these examinations were finally eliminated in the early 20th century.
What is distinctive about Chu Hsi’s neo-Confucianism is the view that our qi is so turbid initially that we cannot discover or own li. His view was that in order to clarify our personal qi and so achieve enlightenment, we must carefully study the Four Books under the guidance of a wise teacher.
School of Mind
The neo-Confucian School of Mind was founded by Lu Xiangshan, a contemporary of Chu Hsi, but its greatest advocate was Wang Yangming, a philosopher, statesman, and general who wrote in the early 16th century.
Lu and Wang criticized Chu His and his followers for promoting a dangerous division between li and qi, and between knowledge and action.
They charged that Chu Hsi’s followers, because they stressed the need to clarify the qi in order to see the li, would become obsessed with studying how to be virtuous instead of actually being virtuous. They further stressed that knowledge and virtue are both within us. Every person can, they claimed, perceive what li means for them to do, if they would just use their minds in an effort to do so.
School of Evidential Learning
During the Qing dynasty (mid-17th century), Confucian philosophers reexamined the preceding Ming dynasty in order to discover what led to its downfall. This approach was to become known as the School of Evidential Learning, and it rejected both the School of Principle’s speculation on li and qi and what it saw as subjectivism—an emphasis on the individual mind—among Wang Yangming’s followers.
Instead, the School of Evidential Learning called for renewed study of the classical texts in order to rediscover Confucianism’s true ethical (and sociopolitical) doctrines. This approach produced a highly critical spirit and precise scientific methods of textual verification.
The greatest philosopher of this school was Tai Chen. During the 18th century he provided precise textual arguments to demonstrate that the Neo-Confucians were in fact projecting Buddhist concepts onto the Confucian Classics—concepts alien to these works, and concluded that this had resulted in Neo-Confucians identifying truth or principle with their own subjective judgment.
He then went on to assert that li could be found only in things and that it could only be studied objectively through the collection and analysis of factual data.
As this school concentrated on the study of human affairs it produced distinguished scholarship in philology, phonology, and historical geography, but very little of worth in the natural sciences.
Chinese Philosophy from the 19th Century to the Present
During the 19th century, the shortcomings of Neo-Confucianism became quite clear. Speculation on the nature of reality provided no workable explanation for the changes that the now encroaching West necessitated in China, and its traditional ethics seemed only to impede, if not outright frustrate, Chinese attempts to modernize.
In the 1890s, however, a brilliant young philosopher named Kang Yuwei made a radical attempt to adapt Confucianism to the intruding modern world. In his revolutionary treatise “Confucius as a Reformer,” Kang claimed to have discovered Confucian authority for a sweeping reform of Chinese political and social institutions, reforms that were vital if China were to resist the force of Western imperialism.
However, Kang’s Confucian reform program, although implemented briefly in 1898, was impeded by the entrenched power of Cixi, China’s conservative empress dowager, and other advocates of the status quo in the imperial government. As a result, Kang was exiled.
A new (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to revive Confucian ethics was later made by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek in his New Life Movement of the 1930s.
Beginning in the 1890s, and over the next several decades, many Western philosophical ideas were brought to China by students returning from North America and Europe. The two most influential of these philosophies were pragmatism and Marxism.
Chinese pragmatism, illustrated in the writings of Hu Shi—a student of American philosopher John Dewey—conceived of ideas as instruments to cope with actual situations and emphasized results. This made it well suited as a philosophy of reform, and so played an important role in the New Culture Movement (begun in 1917), which sought to modernize Chinese social and intellectual life.
By 1924, however, pragmatism had begun to decline in popularity, and the social and political philosophy of Karl Marx, whose works had become widely known in China as early as 1919, now became the philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party and went on to dominate Chinese thought for decades after the Communists gained control of the country in 1949.
The best known of the 20th-century Confucian philosophers is Fung Youlan, who reconstructed the Neo-Confucian School of Principle using Western philosophical concepts, especially those of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato.
In the 1960s Fung, under intense pressure from supporters of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, adopted the historical materialism of Marx and revised his 1931 work, The History of Chinese Philosophy, according to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism.
In recent decades, the Chinese government, although officially still Communist, has moved away from rigid intellectual orthodoxy and allowed more discussion of other philosophies. This relaxation led to the so-called high-culture fever of the 1980s, during which intellectuals passionately debated the merits of a wide variety of native and foreign philosophies, including Confucianism, rationalism, hermeneutics (interpretation of texts), European versions of Marxism, a
nd postmodernism.
Intellectual discussion in China cooled somewhat after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, but the intellectual scene remains diverse and vibrant, with no one philosophical position dominating discussion.
That said, some of the most serious discussions of Chinese philosophy actually occurred in the West during the late 1990s and early 2000s; and there has since been keen Western interest in Chinese thought, especially in Taoism (which found its way to the modern Western philosopher as early as the 1960s), and Chinese philosophy has slowly gained increased acceptance and recognition among Western philosophers.
Indian Philosophy
It should surprise no one that Indian Philosophy is only rivaled by Chinese philosophy when it comes to Eastern traditions of abstract inquiry.
Indian philosophy, normally recorded in Sanskrit, comprises many diverse schools of thought and perspectives and includes a substantial body of intellectual debate and argumentation among these various views.
Among the main classical schools of Indian thought we find: (1) the so-called orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy—including Exegesis (Mimamsa), Vedanta and its numerous sub-schools, Atomism (Vaisheshika), Logic (Nyaya), Analysis (Samkhya), and Yoga; and (2) the Buddhist (so-called nonorthodox) schools of Madhyamika, Buddhist Idealism (Yogacara), and AbhiDhamma (which also includes numerous sub-schools).
Indian philosophy also comprises the materialist and skeptical philosophies of Carvaka and the religious schools of Jainism.