Of Chinese Civilization?—— Historical Operation of “Chindia” in Mining the Spiritual and Material Cultures of China
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Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 2 (2010) 7098–7119 Selected Papers of Beijing Forum2006 Where from the “secret of expression” of Chinese civilization?—— Historical operation of “chindia” in mining the spiritual and material cultures of China Tan Chung Retired Professor Many international observers like to describe Chinese developments as “quizzical”ˈwhich is somewhat tongue- in-cheek. The Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, had another kind of puzzling feeling for China which was genuinely friendly as he inaugurated the Visva-Bharati Cheena-Bhavana in 1937: “It is not what is old or what is modern that we should love and cherish but what has truly a permanent human value. And can anything be more worthy of being cherished than the beautiful spirit of Chinese culture that has made the people love material things without the strain of greed, that has made them love the things of this earth, clothe them with tender grace without turning them materialistic? They have instinctively grasped the secret of the rhythm of things, —not the secret of power that is in science, but the secret of expression. This is a great gift, for God alone knows this secret. I envy them this gift and wish our people could share it with them.” (Tan Chung, 1998(2), 179) What Tagore described here was a sort of mythical quality in Chinese culture—a gift only comprehensible by God which Tagore designated as “the secret of expression” or “the secret of the rhythm of things”. In order to gain an in- depth insight of Tagore’s vision, we have to refresh our memory about what he said on May 1st, 1924 in his talk at the Tsing-hua College in Beijing: “You are not individualists in China. Your society is itself the creation of your communal soul. It is not the outcome of a materialistic, of an egoistic mind, —a medley of unrestricted competition, which refused to recognize its obligations to others .It is true that you love this world and the material things about you with an intense attachment, but not by enclosing your possessions within the walls of exclusiveness. You share your wealth, you make your distant relatives your guests, and you are not inordinately rich. This is only possible because you are not materialistic.” (Das, 63-64) Tagore continued: “Let us develop the instinct that can grasp the secret of the rhythm of things—not merely secret of power which is in science, but the secret of expression. This is a great gift, for God alone knows this secret. Look at the miracle of expression in all the things of creation, the flowers, the stars, the blade of grass. You cannot analyse the secret of this exclusive beauty in your laboratory. How fortunate you are! —you who possess it by instinct. It cannot be taught, but you can allow us to share its fruits with you.” (Das, 65-6) These words of Tagore remind us the Chinese saying: “Pangguanzhe qing/The bystander sees clearly”. The combined force of Western civilizations is the destroyer, not bystander of the Eastern civilizations, hence many Western scholars stubbornly cling to both extremes vis—vis the Eastern civilizations: One extreme being arrogantly 1877-0428 © 2010 Beijing Forum. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.05.063 Tan Chung / Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 2 (2010) 7098–7119 7099 and tyrannically disparaging them, and the other extreme treating them as curios and museum pieces—patronizingly appreciative but not wanting the East to modernize. Tagore stood as a fellow-sufferer of such Western repression to observe and comment on China. He was calm without prejudices, discovering that Chinese were neither ruthlessly covetous in the Western style, nor idealistically ascetic in the Indian traditional mode, rejecting the way of life in the material culture that was worthy of commendation. In other words, the Chinese civilization combined the good points of both the spiritual and material worlds. Since Tagore thought it rather difficult to accomplish, hence he designated it “a great gift” that “God alone knows”. Jawaharlal Nehru, the founder Prime Minister of the Republic of India also had an in-depth understanding of China. He observed in The Discovery of India: “...each country ˷of India and China˹ learned something from the other, not only in the regions of thought and philosophy, but also in the arts and sciences of life. Probably China was more influenced by India than India by China, which is a pity, for India could well have received, with profit to herself, some of the sound common sense of the Chinese, and with its aid checked her own extravagant fancies. China took much from India, but she was always strong and self-confident enough to take it in her own way and fit it somewhere in her own texture of life.” (Nehru, 193) Mr. Jairam Ramesh, an intellectual elite (currently the Commerce Minister of the Government of India), was inspired by Nehru to invent the word “CHINDIA” at a time when the international opinion thought it a miracle that China and India which together had one third of humanity were rising simultaneously, hence there was a worry that the Chindian hegemon could eclipse all other countries which are now in the limelight. I know that this was not what Mr. Ramesh had conceived. By coining “CHINDIA”, he wished that the two countries would unite as they had done in the past when Buddhism was prevailing. I have rendered “CHINDIA” into “Zhong-Yin datong” in Chinese to help us discuss the import of “the secret of expression” in Chinese civilization, avoiding the narrow-minded designation of Chinese civilization as “Confucian humanism”. We could, in fact, assert that the theoretical foundation of “CHINDIA” had already been laid by Prof. Ji Xianlin, doyen of India studies among Chinese scholars. He observed that the Sino-Indian neighbourhood was “tian she di zao/created by Heaven and Earth”, that the two great civilizations of China and India made up one half of the world’s ancient civilizations. He further said: “Had there not been cultural interactions between China and India—of course impossible and unthinkable—there would not have been the cultural development of the two countries as there are today.” (Ji Xianlin, 2) The most important period of Sino-Indian cultural interaction was from the Han Dynasty to the Song Dynasty (the 1st to the 12th century) when the “Mahayana” (great carrier) of Buddhism transported the ancient Indian civilization to China and resulted in the convergence, duplication, clash, intercourse, and vibration between the two great civilizations. The spiritual and material culture of China got a facelift. We can compare the situation then with the contemporary scene today. During the inception of reforms and opening up, it was felt that the cake of China was too small. After courageously experimenting the marriage between capitalism and socialism for a quarter century, the size of cake has increased so incredibly. Similarly, it was the operation of “CHINDIA” that created the enviably large cake of China’s spiritual and material culture centuries ago. It was also this facelift of Chinese culture which stood China in good stead when she was challenged by the Western imperialist powers in modern times. In this paper, I shall spell out this historical operation of “CHINDIA” from six aspects: (1) “CHINDIA” helping China develop its unique ideographic stroke-script and accompanying fathomless sea of literature into a “study” culture and “study” industry hence building up a gigantic material infrastructure for a spiritual civilization; (2) helping China explore the thought potential of its language and literature thus enriching the spiritual contents of Chinese civilization; (3) establishing in China the “temple culture” to neutralize the harm of “palace culture”; (4) helping enhance the quality of Chinese peasants and create the rhythm of China’s social progress revolving on periodical peasant revolutionary wars; (5) helping Chinese promote physical and mental health and creating a civilization for health care and longevity; and (6) promoting the spirit of “wuhu sihai/universal brotherhood” and establishing in China a unified civilization of plurality and a joint family of multiple nationalities. I shall spell out these six ramifications below. 1. The booming “study” culture and industry 7100 Tan Chung / Procedia Social and Behavioral Sciences 2 (2010) 7098–7119 If I am allowed to oversimplify but hitting the nail on the head, I would describe Chinese civilization as of, by and for the intellectual elite. Mencius observed that “laoxinzhe/brain workers” (intellectual elites) not only ruled over the “laolizhe/brawn workers” (massive labouring people), but also were fed by the latter. Language and script are the basic tools of culture. In ancient India, people laid greater emphasis on the spoken language than the written script. In China, however, from ancient times till today, there has been great emphasis on the written script to communicate between a great many languages. The Chinese script has had its refreshing feature from its inception. Xu Shen, the compiler of the first ever dictionary of the world, Shuowen jiezi (Anatomy of the script), described that when the legendary inventor of Chinese script, Cangjie, started working, “the demons wept at night”, meaning that the birth of the script as the symbol of Chinese civilization would forever stop the demons to keep humanity in uncouthness. The aim of the creation of the Han (Chinese) script went far beyond the provision of a visual symbol for language, but to make bricks and stones for the building up of the mansion of civilization. The Han script was simultaneously the visual symbols of thousands of spoken language systems in ancient China, hence the Han script and the Chinese literature built on this Han script (particularly poetry) could develop and recreate independently of the language traditions of various localities in China.