Author: Silicon-Based
Reviewer: Xian’e

  I wrote this lecture while my school was under a pandemic lockdown. I had already reached the library’s borrowing limit, and the books in which I had taken notes were far away at my home in southern China. Almost everything here was written from my rather unreliable memory, so this account of traditional Chinese philosophy will inevitably contain major omissions and errors. Please read it with appropriate caution and a critical eye.

  Traditional Chinese philosophy generally refers to the Chinese philosophical systems—or “Eastern philosophy”—that occupied a dominant ideological position in East Asia from the Hundred Schools of Thought in pre-Qin China until Marxism entered China. Compared with its counterpart, “Western philosophy,” traditional Chinese philosophy displays many distinctive traits: it emphasizes moral injunctions and social forms while giving less weight to the systems and methods of natural science; stresses unity more than particularity; values people more than things; accepts the actual existence of a supreme order and seeks harmony and unity between human beings and the external world; and has a strong strain of rudimentary dialectical thinking. Over more than a thousand years of practice in feudal society, this philosophy shaped what is now called the “spirit of the Chinese nation” and left modern China with enormous cultural inertia. Studying traditional Chinese philosophy can help readers understand China’s current intellectual landscape and trace contemporary Chinese social and cultural phenomena back to their roots.

  Traditional Chinese philosophy first began to emerge during the pre-Qin Hundred Schools of Thought. Before that period, ancient China had a primitive philosophy composed of early beliefs and morality: the seed of traditional Chinese philosophy. As the productive forces developed, the slaveholding relations of production under the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties, together with their political and cultural superstructure, reached the limits imposed by those forces. More advanced feudal relations of production demanded more centralized authority. The result was the long and frequent warfare of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, which destabilized society and severely damaged production. In this turbulent age, advanced thinkers reflected on, systematized, and developed the sparse philosophy of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou, giving rise to many outstanding schools of thought;

  For the landowning ruling class, perceptive rulers in different regions recognized that the unsystematized primitive ideas of the past could no longer meet the needs of governance, development, and the struggle for supremacy. The political philosophies represented by Confucianism, Legalism, the School of Military Strategy, and the School of Diplomacy consequently formed communities of shared interests with this ruling class. At this stage, each side supported and advanced the other.

  For the broad civilian population, social upheaval severely damaged both production and daily life. The people’s simple wish for solidarity combined with their advanced productive forces. Under the leadership of the brilliant Mozi, it produced an organized, disciplined, and united proto-political collective: the Mohist school. Meanwhile, the desire of both the peasantry and the ruling class to restore production, together with advances in agricultural production, gave rise to the technical philosophy of the Agriculturalist school.

  Because Mohism and Agriculturalism responded to concrete needs in the development of the productive forces, they developed early forms of technology and science. Daoism, meanwhile… The childlike ideals inherited from primitive morality collided with the harsh reality of the period’s social turmoil, leaving Laozi, a member of the lower bureaucracy, with a profound spiritual void. This gave him both a desire to “withdraw from the world” and an ideal of “engaging with the world.” From that great contradiction emerged a precocious philosophy of extraordinary transcendence. From the standpoint of the supreme rule, the “Dao,” it constructed new moral and cognitive systems. By adopting a position beyond its own age, it escaped the immediate moment and found spiritual grounding in the eternal and the vast (“Heaven and earth are not humane; they treat the myriad things as straw dogs”). Zhuangzi later inherited these moral and cognitive systems and used them to construct a philosophy of self-exploration and a free spiritual world. Other schools—including the School of Names, the Yin-Yang School, the School of Minor Talks, and the Miscellaneous School—served different classes and groups. Their independence was relatively weak: some were assimilated through continuing conflict and exchange with larger schools, while others later declined into purely technical bodies of knowledge. Even so, their independent thinking and defiant stance in struggle greatly advanced the maturation and development of early Chinese philosophy and made a major historical contribution.

  By the late Warring States period, the hard-line philosophies of governance represented chiefly by Qin Legalism and military thought had achieved enormous success in maintaining stability and competing for hegemony through force and violence. This success gave the ruling class, Legalists, and military strategists the mistaken impression that the philosophy and methods of intense struggle could be applied directly to governance and construction after the struggle for rule had ended. The Qin dynasty consequently collapsed after only two emperors. This was a severe blow to the School of Military Strategy, which declined into an independent and abstract body of technical knowledge rather than remaining an autonomous philosophical school. The clearest sign of this change was that later periods had many “generals” but very few “military thinkers.” Legalism, unable to meet the ruling class’s growing demand for centralization, was reshaped and absorbed by Han Confucianism. Most of the other schools met a similar fate, epitomized by the call to “suppress the Hundred Schools and exalt Confucianism alone.” Only Daoism, grounded in a more profound and expansive supreme order, retained a degree of independence. Political and academic pressure nevertheless drove it to merge with ancestral religious worship and develop into a singular phenomenon in the world of religion: religious Daoism.

  The turmoil on which the Hundred Schools of Thought depended did not disappear until Qin unified the country. Qin Shi Huang’s burning of books and burying of scholars produced a tool of centralized rule that represented the new relations of production: “unified thought.” After the Qin fell, Liu Bang won popular support by opposing its harsh Legalism through his “Three Rules of Law.” He did not, however, abandon the basic principles of “unified thought” and “centralized authority.” Stable rule over a country as vast and populous as China made them inevitable. Qin’s failure also made the ruling class aware of the disastrous consequences of mistaken ideas and helped prompt Dong Zhongshu’s “suppression of the Hundred Schools” during the reign of Emperor Jing of Han. In practice, this meant critically absorbing the various schools and recombining them into a more complete “New Confucianism.” Confucianism already served the ruling class, and this new synthesis better satisfied its need for centralized authority. New Confucianism inherited the basic framework of moral education, benevolent rulers, and mutual love between ruler and people. It also integrated into that framework the insights from Legalism and Daoism that helped stabilize rule, constructing a social order that served the long-term interests shared by the ruling class and Confucian scholars. This successful intellectual transformation sustained the exceptionally long rule of three Han reigns and established Confucianism at the center of Chinese philosophy for the next thousand years.

  Confucianism called for monarchy. The ruler of the state was always the focus of Confucian reform: the ruler was expected to practice “benevolent government,” while the system cultivated an ethical model and ideal, the junzi or “exemplary person.” This model was used to teach the people to follow a system of social morality in which “the ruler is a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, and the son a son.” The original logic of Confucian political governance ran as follows: “The ruler practices benevolent government and loves the people; the people will in turn love a benevolent ruler. Moral education and ritual music teach the people, while family ethics arrange social relations and organize production. Initiated from above, this creates a stable top-down society in which everyone occupies the proper place.”

  Under Dong Zhongshu’s reforms, Confucianism retained morality as its core principle while incorporating effective methods and ideas from many other schools. It adopted, for example, the Legalist use of written law to limit a ruler’s power and regulate social customs, as well as the Daoist policy of rest and recuperation when production had suffered severe damage. This more complete form of Confucianism protected the rule of the ruling class more effectively.

  Confucianism sought to maintain the stability of feudal society primarily through moral instruction, emotional norms, and ties of blood. In its understanding of the productive forces and relations of production, however, it remained at the reactionary and passive level of “emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce.” This limitation was inevitable.

  Because Confucianism made “emphasizing agriculture and suppressing commerce” an important principle of rule, China’s bourgeoisie developed extremely slowly. The overall structure of philosophical thought remained at the level of feudal society for a long period, without major breakthroughs. During the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern dynasties, scholar-officials confronted political darkness and social turmoil by turning to Daoism for spiritual support, thereby developing the Wei-Jin school of xuanxue, or “arcane learning.” More generally, the pattern was roughly Confucianism in orderly times and Daoism in troubled ones.

  By the Tang dynasty, rulers continued to value the Buddhist thought that had developed since the Northern and Southern dynasties, allowing it to flourish and introducing a distinctive and powerful new current into the earlier contest between Confucianism and Daoism. The Tang’s commercial economy also grew, politics remained stable, and its rulers were clear-minded; governance and culture consequently prospered. China was then a global center of culture, where innumerable ideas and religions met in the East. Chang’an even had a Zoroastrian, or fire-worshipping, temple, which gives some sense of the cultural splendor of the time.

  In this age of cultural exchange, Chinese philosophy reached a turning point. Material resources were becoming richer, and a bourgeoisie was beginning to emerge; propelled by the age, new ideas collided and took shape. After several periods of turmoil from the Southern dynasties through the Sui and into the early Tang, the transcendent Buddhist worldview of rebirth, reincarnation, and the convergence and dispersal of karmic conditions offered comfort amid real hardship. Its beautiful vision of a future life won followers tormented by suffering in the present. Different rulers nevertheless held different attitudes toward Buddhism. Some believed in it, so it expanded dramatically, at times producing the spectacle of “one temple, one cooking pot, a hundred monks.” Yet an excessively large religious community did not engage in production. This held society back and created a corrupt community in which religion and politics merged. Other rulers recognized Buddhism’s drawbacks or embraced a traditional reverence for antiquity and rejection of foreign influences. They launched movements to “eradicate” or “ban” Buddhism, repeatedly forcing it to submit to political power. Before the Tang, Buddhism’s uneven development gave it a broad popular base while also compelling it to become localized in China. During Wu Zetian’s reign, the appearance of Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chan, definitively marked the completion of Buddhism’s Sinicization. Buddhism as a religion also became “Buddhist philosophy.”

  Daoism transformed from an intellectual and political force into a religious one. Buddhism followed the opposite path in China: it arrived as a purely religious form, then gradually moved beyond religious influence through its difficult process of localization and became an intellectual force within Chinese philosophy. The clearest evidence is that one can read Buddhist scriptures without being a Buddhist, accept and apply their knowledge and wisdom, and find in them ideas unavailable in the Confucianism and Daoism of the time.

  Buddhism initially brought the Chinese an alien otherworld. There was no register of gods decreed by Jiang Ziya; instead, anyone could practice and become a Buddha. Nothing in this life was accidental, only the necessity of reincarnation. Most importantly, Buddhism placed human suffering and its solution at the center of its thought. Everything, including suffering, was an empty phenomenal form. Material things gathered and dispersed according to causes and conditions, while the spirit moved through cycles of reincarnation. Material needs, or desire, were described as the source of all suffering and as meaningless attachments. Buddhist philosophy therefore pursued “the emptiness of the four elements” as its highest end, while practice meant “breaking attachments” and “breaking through appearances.” Once even “attachment to the self” had been broken, the self itself could cease to exist. One could then enter a transformed state of pure spirit and return to the most innocent, lucid, compassionate, and benevolent condition: “Originally there was not a single thing; where could dust alight?”

  The various Buddhist schools are distinguished mainly by how they interpret the scriptures and how they practice. Their overall values are consistent.

  Buddhism and Daoism have similar temperaments, but essential differences remain. No matter how much Daoism withdraws from society and seeks purity and stillness, its central concern is solving problems in this world. What matters most is how to live freely here and now. It neither postpones happiness and prosperity to an illusory otherworld nor denies the existence of the self. Before Buddhism was Sinicized, its faith in the otherworld and in attaining Buddhahood was extremely firm. Records even describe groups of monks sitting in meditation on high mountains until they died of hunger and cold. This was wholly incompatible with China’s secular traditions.

  In the process of Sinicization, Buddhism therefore became less religious and more secular. One famous story about Wang Yangming, “persuading an old monk to return to lay life,” also reflects this process. We may find the existence of “Buddhist extremists” in India today difficult to understand precisely because the Buddhism familiar to us has long been Sinicized and secularized. A comparison with the Esoteric tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, which was relatively isolated from the culture of the Central Plains, supports the same judgment.

  Traditional Chinese Confucian and Daoist philosophy ultimately centers on this world. “The Master did not speak of strange phenomena, feats of strength, disorder, or spirits,” and not one sentence in the Dao De Jing discusses another world, the underworld, or where life and death come from. These philosophical systems are not inherently religious. Superstition and ancestral worship created later religious concepts such as the “underworld,” “Lingxiao Palace,” “Supreme Lord Lao,” and the “Jade Emperor.” Even these concepts developed from earlier forms of worldly moral instruction. Like heaven and hell in the West, they were intended to regulate conduct in this life. As a result, Confucian and Daoist philosophy ultimately could not explain certain basic questions scientifically, such as the “origin of the spirit” or the “essence of human beings.” They either avoided such questions entirely or appealed to mystery. A proper understanding of Chinese philosophy requires us both to separate out its religious elements when discussing its actual ideas and to consider those elements when discussing the limits of its thought.

  The introduction and Sinicization of Buddhist philosophy therefore addressed transcendent questions that Confucianism and Daoism lacked or neglected, while also bringing an entirely new set of values. Even Laozi’s Dao De Jing never left behind the “ruler,” “people,” “water,” and “infant” of real life. Like Confucianism, it could not escape politics. From their origins, both Confucianism and Daoism were closely tied to the ruling class’s needs in governance. The philosophical systems they formed could not in practice be separated from politics. For the ruling class, both were ultimately forms of learning directed toward political ends, which is why they endured throughout feudal society. For the broad civilian population, such learning was unnecessary. If ordinary people studied it, they did so to sit examinations and become officials, which still amounted to the ruling class maintaining itself.

  Buddhist philosophy, by contrast, could genuinely break away from politics and spread among ordinary people. It addressed their spiritual needs regardless of class and used religious means to comfort the population as a whole. Chan Buddhism in particular taught that one could “see one’s nature and become a Buddha” and relied on “no written words,” greatly lowering the threshold for ordinary people to study Buddhist thought. Once Sinicized, Buddhism could also provide the social and moral education needed by the ruling class. By the Tang, a Chinese philosophical system centered on “Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism” had therefore begun to take shape. After this round of conflict and integration, and propelled by the developmental needs of the bourgeoisie, Chinese philosophy was poised to enter a new stage.

  In the Song and Ming dynasties, Zhou Dunyi, Zhu Xi, the Cheng brothers, and the Lu-Wang school advanced Confucian-centered Chinese philosophy by a major step. Confucianism developed in two broad directions during this period. One was a further extension of the highly systematized union of scholarship and politics: Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism. The other combined Buddhist and Daoist ideas and returned philosophy to the people: the Lu-Wang School of Mind.

  Traditional Chinese philosophy was essentially mature by this stage. The philosophy developed by Huang Zongxi and others who represented new bourgeois currents had acquired certain modern features, including political ideas such as “democratic demands” and the “free market.” Its basic methods did not leave the category of traditional Chinese philosophy, an inevitable limitation, although the thought itself did move beyond the ordinary system of traditional Chinese philosophy. My knowledge is too limited to offer a sound conclusion, so I will leave the subject there.

  The central figures of Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism were the Cheng brothers and Zhu Xi. They continued earlier Confucian learning and emphasized “orthodoxy.” Academic assessments of the school are relatively low today, but for the ruling class it was an almost ideal tool of ideological control. It represented a nearly perfected final form produced as intellectuals and the ruling class adapted to each other within a community of shared interests. The Neo-Confucianism reshaped by the three thinkers began to advocate “preserving heavenly principle and extinguishing human desires,” intensifying moral discipline to its extreme. The result included forms of oppression against women such as the so-called “chaste martyrs” and “chastity arches,” along with horrifying stories such as “Guo Ju Buries His Son” from The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars. Zhu Xi’s Collected Commentaries on the Four Classics also allowed “revering the ancient and rejecting the new” and strained interpretations to flourish in later ages. This was probably why Li Zongwu once concluded: “Western learning was simple at first and then grew increasingly rigorous and complete; Chinese learning began at an extremely high level and then became progressively worse.” Although Neo-Confucian scholars controlled moral judgment, the scholar-official class itself was often highly dissolute, until its halls eventually became filled with hypocrites. The three Cheng-Zhu thinkers possessed high levels of moral and scholarly learning. Yet the survival and development of their intellectual synthesis ultimately depended on its community of interests with the ruling bloc, and an autocratic feudal monarchy was ultimately bound to become corrupt. No number of great Cheng-Zhu scholars could rescue it.

  The Lu-Wang School of Mind, especially Wang Yangming’s thought, can be described as Confucianism’s final peak. It genuinely absorbed the finest ideas of Buddhist philosophy and Daoism, although Wang himself denied doing so, and brought a Confucianism that appealed to the “Way of Heaven” back to human beings and the human mind—to subjective agency. “Human beings” here did not mean only the scholar-official class, but every person in the fullest sense. Emperors, kings, generals, and ministers had to study Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, yet they found it tiresome. It was a body of learning alienated by the community of interests between Neo-Confucianism and imperial power. It alienated people by extracting human value and assigning it to an elusive “Way of Heaven”: beside that Way, one’s life counted for nothing. Wang Yangming, however, proposed that “the mind is principle.” Heavenly principle was not an abstract, external, eternal object beyond the world that only a handful of sages could master. It existed in the “mind” of every person, from emperors and generals to porters and common laborers. Morality arose from the human mind. It was neither external nor dictated by sages; it belonged to each person. This was a Confucian philosophy for the people. It continued to revolve around the central ideas of “morality” and “benevolence,” but its character changed fundamentally. First, “the mind is principle,” like “seeing one’s nature and becoming a Buddha,” greatly lowered the threshold. It genuinely addressed the people’s need to learn, rather than being locked away and serving only the ruling class. This explains the popular esteem and welcome Wang received at the time. Second, “the mind is principle” dissolved the existence of an external and abstract “Way of Heaven.” Only morality arising from within remained. There was no “Way of Heaven” apart from concrete human beings and no external Other that could impose such a Way upon you; the “Way of Heaven” was in your own mind. This returned to human beings the meaning that the Way had taken from them. It emphasized subjective agency and the effect of individual will on collective will. In this sense, Wang Yangming’s breakthrough somewhat resembled Marx’s dialectical transcendence of Feuerbach. Yet traditional Chinese philosophy, centered on Confucianism, had long depended on a scholar-official class that did not engage in production. It was not expressed with precision through practice and scientific methods and never formed a rigorous scientific methodology. What separated it from Marx, in the end, was scientific rigor.

  During the Qing dynasty that followed, the highest degree of centralization brought even stricter central control. Literary inquisitions and restrictions on thought almost halted the development of Chinese philosophy, while selecting officials through the “eight-legged essay” severed the roots from which traditional philosophy might have developed under the Qing. Only when the thunder of modern artillery approached and Western ideas gradually entered China did the country’s intellectual world begin another round of breakthroughs. By then, however, it had left the domain of traditional philosophy.

  The seeds of primitive ancient morality were scattered across the land of China. As the climate warmed and rain became plentiful, the Hundred Schools of Thought sprouted in profusion. After a long and fierce struggle, only two trees—Confucianism and Daoism—grew tall. Confucianism occupied the richest soil and water. It flourished, growing tall and luxuriant, although its wood was soft. Defiant Daoism grew from bare rock beside a cliff. It was neither tall nor thick, and its leaves were sparse, but it was hard and resilient. The seasons turned for thousands of years. When the climate was favorable, birds gathered in the Confucian tree. When it became harsh, they sheltered in the Daoist one. During a particularly delightful spring, a bird from far away brought a seed called Buddhism. Unlike the other short-lived, stunted seeds, Buddhism began growing wildly as soon as it took root in the Central Plains. Botanists explained that a metabolic waste product, which neither the Confucian nor Daoist tree could recycle, had accumulated in the soil and happened to be ideal fertilizer for Buddhism. To stop Buddhism from overgrowing and seizing its ecological niche, Confucianism repeatedly crowded it until its growth was finally checked. Through conflicts large and small, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism became the collective name for the three great local trees. As the soil grew richer and the climate improved, all three continued to grow and compete. They discovered that each could learn from the others and take what it needed. Through competition and cooperation, the three trees grew strong and formed a harmonious ecological relationship. This, in broad outline, was the evolution of the community called “traditional Chinese philosophy.”

  [End of Part One: An Overview of the History of Traditional Philosophy]