Translation from Chinese (including quotations from classics) by Sherwin Lu
EDITOR’S NOTE: Traditional Chinese academic learning has been characterized by the unity of form (language, abstractions) and content (understanding and presentation of reality), that of theory (static reasoning) and practice (solving problems from live dynamic situations), and that of parts (study of partial details) and whole (integration), with the former in each binary opposites hinging on the latter, not vice versa as typical of mainstream Western tradition. While the West and China have both contributed to the development of human civilization and both experienced longer or shorter historical periods of successes and setbacks, the strengths and weaknesses of a culture are not to be judged by short-term material power only but by the whole historical practice, of the past, the present and future, of all humanity.
THE TEXT
Since the 19th century, especially since May the 4th Movement, 1919, with the abolition of the Imperial Examination System and establishment of Western-style educational system, classical Chinese learning has been deprived of its systemic foundation, rudely labeled as “feudalistic”, “backward”, “outdated”, etc., and attracting little interest from scholars, so as to be hanging by a thread, so to speak, today. It is so saddening to see China’s national cultural heritage becoming a vast wasteland.
Nowadays, what can be apparently seen of traditional China are only facial makeup in Beijing opera, calligraphy, Chinese painting, Taiji and martial arts, etc., which in the eyes of common people are but a kind of art form different from that of primitive tribal black Africa, or at best a highly refined kind. As a matter of fact, art has been only a small part of Chinese culture, while the whole system of classical Chinese learning has been one more sophisticated than that of the modern West, covering all realms ranging from philosophy to political economy to science. It is not at all simple, but too complicated to be understood by ordinary folks.
Compared with modern Western academic attainments as a whole, Chinese learning is characterized by profoundness, vibrancy, and systemic unity: profoundness in its preference for more use of symbolic-imagery (意象) than abstraction in the way of thinking, vibrancy in its emphasis on studying ever-changing live situations rather than on empty verbal reasoning, and systemic unity in guarding against fragmentization.
I. Symbolic-Imagery Thinking Rather Than Abstraction
Scholars in different fields of Chinese culture have found that the Chinese tend to understand and describe reality from a holistic and dynamic point of view, favoring the use of imagery and showing profoundness of thought in their selection of images, as is typical of symbolic-imagery thinking (意象思维). In contrast, Western-style abstract thinking would single out a certain property or aspect from the target of study in disregard of other ones before conceptualizing or axiomatizing it and then deducing from it more conclusions as theorems.
As to the distinction between abstract thinking and symbolic-imagery thinking, Prof. Liu Changlin of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Philosophy Division, incisively pointed out:
“The abstract way of thinking is to break up a complex and changeable phenomenon and extract from it some aspect, according to the purpose of study, while disregarding the rest, whereas the symbolic-imagery approach preserves the original wholeness of the target object of thought and looks for its essential nature and inner pattern in its naturally unfolding and unreduced manifestation – such a nature and inner pattern as directly correspond to the ‘imagery’, i.e., the objective process in reality -- retaining the features of the ‘imagery’ and keeping them associated with the appearance of its natural wholeness. It is worth special note here that the so-called ‘natural wholeness’ covers the various naturally formed connections and relations between the knowing subject and object. ” ( 刘长林：《中国象科学观：易、道与兵、医（修订版）》上，社会科学文献出版社，2008, P.56.)
Hence his definition:
“The way of thinking that tries to obtain an overview of things, i.e., to find laws or inner patterns that relate to things as wholes, without disrupting the natural wholeness of the appearances they present, which being the only specified condition – this pattern of thinking is called symbolic-imagery thinking.” (Ibid.)
The two ways of thinking, symbolic-imagery and abstraction, however, are not mutually incompatible. The Chinese tradition also incorporates abstract thinking, such as in the formation of Chinese characters, which are based on imagery, while their strokes are highly abstract, not direct copies of real things. Westerners, while depending heavily on abstract thinking, are not totally detached from symbolic-imagery thinking, either. Especially with the rise of system science in the 20th century, Western science has begun to pay attention to the dynamic wholeness of things and, furthermore, become aware of such resources in the Eastern tradition.
From a broad historical perspective, the great achievements in modern science and technology are inseparable from the abstract thinking tradition. It was the inquiry into the essence of things that has triggered the rise of modern science. In spite of this, however, we still should not ignore the intrinsic inadequacies of this way of thinking, which Prof. Liu Changlin has summarized into the following six points:
1. Its basic approach reduces complex things into oversimplified ones, whole things into parts, and state of affairs into substantial entities, using dividing, dissecting and extracting as the basic means of cognition and the foundation for establishing systems of knowledge. Therefore, cognitions along this line of thought could hardly grasp the original complexity, richness and wholeness of things.
2. Things in a natural, i.e., not man-induced, state of development would be influenced by an innumerable and unpredictable multiplicity of factors and, so, show uncertainty with multiple possibilities, but the essence and inner pattern of things looked for in abstract thinking could be found out only when other many uncertain possibilities are excluded, as they would present themselves straightforwardly and entirely only under certain restricted conditions, such as in laboratories.
3. Abstract thinking invariably tries to find out the general from the particular and, therefore, cannot grasp the specificity in things.
4. Abstract thinking is based on the diametrical opposition between the subject and the object, whereas the infiniteness of the universe necessitates inclusion of the subject, and the complete wholeness of a specific object should also include its relatedness with the subject. Abstract thinking can in no way overcome the above contradiction but has to presume the existence of a purely objective world.
5. A thinking pattern bent on subject-object dichotomy, in the process of freezing, slicing, decomposing, extracting from and reshaping things, would inevitably result in the distortion of their primordial states. This is the deep-structure root cause of ecological destruction in modern times.
6. Abstract thinking, which tacitly sees the subject and the object as standing against each other, mainly in space, and the sciences that are based on controlled experiments and closely related to this mode of thinking would unwittingly ingrain mankind with a sense of conquest and control in dealing with objects for the satisfaction of subjective needs. And the frequent occurrence of wars all over the world since the 15th century has something to do with this thinking pattern. (Ibid. PP. 53-55.)
From Prof. Liu’s discussion, it can be easily seen that Western-style abstract thinking can be valid only when the object being studied allows being reduced to simpler entities. However, with the natural and social conditions confronting mankind becoming ever increasingly complicated, this mode of thinking and the Western academic approach based on it immediately revealed their limitations (producing negative effects oftentimes), first of all in what is called “failure of expertise” and then in Western science’s impotence in tackling earthquakes and other natural disasters and in finding solutions to many medical problems.
Meanwhile, what has been achieved by Chinese scholars in earthquake prediction and Chinese medicine tells us that classical Chinese learning based on symbolic-imagery thinking is not fuzzy but more profound. That is because this way of thinking makes it possible to analyze and intervene in the objective world through a study of the relations between multiple phenomena when the essence of things (e.g., earthquake center and cause of a disease) is difficult to find, control or verbalize. There is a sort of similarity between this and Chinese painting in that, if being viewed at a range too close (to the substance), the overall picture is lost.
Besides, we can also see from Chinese characters, the tool for expression of ideas, that symbolic-imagery thinking can help understand and represent reality more profoundly and accurately.
Chinese characters were created on the basis of symbolic-imagery thinking like Chinese medicine. It seemed to our ancestors that pictographic characters could express ideas more thoroughly than alphabetic scripts. Being abstract pictures themselves oftentimes, Chinese characters can convey human thoughts more accurately, succinctly and consistantly than a phonetic language. For instance, if we want to describe a horse to an American Indian who has never seen a horse, it would be better to just draw a horse than say a lot of words for him to have a better understanding. So, Chinese characters constitute a sort of code system, which represents the world of reality in tangible images.
Zhu Xi, the famous Confucian scholar of the Southern Song dynasty said,
“What is conveyed by words is shallower, whereas what is represented by images more profound.” (朱熹《周易本义·卷三》)
As Western phonetic languages denote things in words while Chinese pictographic characters in images, therefore, what the former can convey is shallower while the latter deeper.
In the history of human civilization, Chinese characters (and classical Chinese writing using such characters) may have even more far-reaching historical significance than the four world-famous inventions of old China. Under the influence of Western linguistics, many contemporary scholars take everything from the West as the model and compare Chinese characters almost to primitive hieroglyph, in spite of the fact that characters can better express than a phonetic language and need to be doubly cherished. It is really very tragic.
The Chinese have always preferred symbolic imagery to abstraction, ranging from the use of characters as a tool for expression to the pattern of thinking in academic work, because with the former people can more profoundly comprehend and represent reality. In this sense, it is an understatement to say that classical Chinese learning was not backward; it is more proper to say that classical Chinese academic culture has been more advanced.
II. Focus on Live Situations Rather Than Empty Reasoning
Fei Mi (费密, 1623－1699), a famous Qing dynasty scholar, who advocated practicable learning and opposed empty talk, more often than not criticized Song and Ming dynasty neo-Confucianism. For instance, he sharply pointed out the harm of flowery but empty reasoning:
“Since Song dynasty, a major drawback under heaven is that practice has not been on a par with discourse, so that empty talk has been flourishing with little applicability. Confucian scholars love to make comments, but their book-reading being divorced from practical government affairs, they tend to rest satisfied with empty discussions and stop short of applying to ever-changing live situations; they dogmatically analogize current events to ancient ones and blame others for thinking otherwise. ” (《先王传道述》)
Fei Mi’s criticism of Song and Ming dynasty academic ethos characterized by “resting satisfied with empty discussions and stopping short of applying to ever-changing live situations” suits very well to the distinction between Chinese and Western learning, the former being geared to live, changing situations while the latter to pure, static reasoning. This has also been the major reason why Chinese scholars have long since been opposing learning fragmentary hearsay knowledge by rote and laying stress on practice, or “action”.
Western learning’s losing touch with live reality is related to its abstract thinking. That is because this kind of thinking, when making generalizations of phenomena, tends to look for static “essence” instead of grasping their dynamic wholeness and, after defining some concepts and setting up some postulations, to do logical reasoning without consideration of possible changes in their “essence”. This kind of academic approach is very likely to lead to scholasticism, producing theoretically self-consistent but futile knowledge systems, i.e., playthings for scholars in ivory tower; the most typical is modern Western economics.
This has not been the case with Chinese learning, which prefers grasping of live situations to verbal reasoning. Definitions of concepts were basically done with the formation of pictographic characters and of the names of things in such characters. Hence
“When the sages assigned names to things, their meanings were already known.” (《说苑·修文》)
Also,
“When Cang Jie (苍颉, legendary originator of Chinese characters) designed the characters, they were closely linked up with things.” (《论衡·奇怪篇》)
Explanations of such “linking” in specific characters were provided in classical dictionaries (e.g., 《说文解字》).
Because of its emphasis on grasping live situations, Chinese learning did not provide “standard answers” to questions, nor did mass production-style teaching in universities. Ancient Chinese sages advocated finding solutions for practical problems in consideration of varying circumstances and different people involved. Take Confucius for instance. His different answers to questions about “benevolent government” once perplexed Zi Gong, one of his famous students. If this happened in modern universities, Confucius might not be able to keep a teaching position for failing to give standard answers, but this has been the fundamental reason for Chinese learning to have survived for thousands of years. Here is the story from classics:
One day Zi Gong said to Confucius: “When Duke Ye asked you how to govern a state, you answered ‘Good government lies in endearing yourself to people living close by and attracting those living afar to your protection. When Duke Ai of Lu asked you the same question, you replied ‘Good government lies in choosing the right ministers.’ And when Duke Jing of Qi asked, you said ‘Good government lies in practicing economy ’. The three dukes asked the same question, but your answers were different. Does that mean there are different ways to run a state?”
Confucius replied: “Jing is a vast area with small cities and an incohesive population and, therefore, good government lies in attracting people from far and near. Duke Ai has three ministers, who formed a gang to keep the Duke in the dark about domestic affairs and reject visits from other dukes and princes to keep the Duke from knowing about foreign affairs, and, so, good government lies in choosing the right ministers. And Duke Jing of Qi spent huge sums of money on building tower pavilions and plenty of time on hunting in the royal garden, indulged himself in sensual pleasures day and night, and gave away subordinate households each with a hundred chariots to other lords as rewards on three occasions. Hence, in this case, good government lies in practicing economy. All the above three are ways of running a state. The Book of Poetry says: ‘People displaced by war are suffering; where are their homes?’ This is lamenting the chaos resulting from people’s homelessness. ‘They failed to do their job, which was their lord’s fault.’ This is lamenting the chaos resulting from vicious ministers deceiving their lord. ‘The state is in a mess and its coffers empty, leaving nothing to relieve the people.’ This is lamenting the chaos resulting from extravagance. Considering what are needed in the above three cases, should there be one same way of running a state?” (《说苑·政理》)
In Chinese academic system, there are no ready answers not only for questions arising from practical situations but also for questions regarding interpretation of classics, which have been providing guidance for thousands of years of practice. Our ancestors opposed rigidly repeating what others say, as sometimes two statements that seem to be contrary to each other in literal meaning might both fit practical situations. Take for instance:
“In the Spring and Autumn Annals (《春秋》), there are four statements contrary to each other in meaning: It says that officials should not arrogate all powers to themselves and do anything without authorization, but it also says that when abroad officials have all the power to do whatever promotes the stability and safety of the state; It says that, when on a diplomatic mission under the sovereign’s order, officials can make decisions for themselves, but it also says that, when on a diplomatic mission under the sovereign’s order, officials should not turn back but should still move on slowly even if hearing of death at home. Why? It means that the four statements each suit a limited situation, not to be mismatched. ‘Not to do anything without authorization’ is a principle for normal situations, but to allow exertion of one’s power without approval from higher authority applies only to circumstances involving emergent threats of danger to the state. Officials’ power to make decisions for themselves applies to army commanders in combat, while sticking to the diplomatic mission was when hearing of the death of the sovereign’s parent. In the book Spring and Autumn Annals, Prince Jie is not censured for changing his course of action without approval from higher authority because his own decision rescued Duke Zhuang from danger; while Prince Sui is mocked for unauthorized change of action because there was no threat of danger to Duke Xi. This is to say that not taking the initiative to rescue the sovereign from danger shows lack of loyalty while following one’s own decision to change action when there was no threat to the sovereign is betrayal of one’s duty as a subject. Hence the saying, which well describes the above: ‘There should be no rigid explanations of the Book of Poetry, nor uniformly auspicious divinations in the Book of Change, nor universally applicable principles in the Spring and Autumn Annals.’” (《说苑·奉使》)
The Chinese tradition of laying due stress on practice finds expression in advocating the unity between knowledge and action in practical operations. The following classical story is a vivid illustration of this principle:
“Zi Gong questioned Zi Shi: ‘Don’t you learn from the Book of Poetry?’ The latter replied: ‘How can I find time for that? I have to carry out my filial duties to my parents, take care of my younger brothers, and fulfill my promises to my friends.’ Zi Gong responded then: ‘I’ll put aside the Book of Poetry and learn from you.’” (《说苑·反质》)
Classical Chinese academic system is dynamic in nature: It has advanced in line with the development of actual reality and in step with the change of times. About its subtlety and profoundness Confucius once exclaimed:
“All those who can do the study together are not able to approach the Dao together; All those who approach the Dao together are not able to abide by it together; All those who can abide by the Dao together are not able to adjust to changing conditions together.” (《论语·子罕篇第九》)
If we compare Western static academic system of reasoning to a traditional traffic map, then classical Chinese system of learning is like contemporary GPS navigation aid, which can provide an individual with directions for driving wherever his car is at any and every moment. Such being the difference, it is obvious which is less, and which is more, advanced.
III. Integration Rather than Division
To be a generalist with a coherent understanding of all major schools of thought or multiple branches of learning has been a goal assiduously strived for by scholars in Chinese tradition. In the context of traditional Chinese learning, “fragmentation”, i.e., division without integration was a derogatory term. No exception with that of Qing dynasty. For instance, Liang Qichao used this word to describe Han school of philology (梁启超：《近三百年学术史》，东方出版社，2003，PP. 27~28。) For another instance, Lu Jiuyuan of Southern Song, who believed in moral cultivation of one’s own soul as the simplest approach to true learning, criticized Zhu Xi’s advocating extensive reading without self-cultivation as “fragmentizing business” . (“简易工夫终久大，支离事业竟沉浮。”— See翟玉忠：《中国拯救世界：应对人类危机的中国文化》，中央编译出版社，2010, PP. 160~162。)
In contrast, under the influence of ever finer division of labor in industry, Western academic work has long become fragmentized, so much so that the names of some special fields of study in Western universities are beyond comprehension and the conceptual and theoretical systems of different disciplines almost totally independent of each other. But this has not been the case with Chinese learning. Although there were so many different schools of thought and branches of learning before Qin dynasty, they shared the same conceptual system in formal expression while in the content of thought all attached special importance to the Supreme Dao as the unifying principle.
Take Chinese medicine for example. Its classic Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon: Suwen, or Basic Questions (《黄帝内经·素问》) discusses medicine from various angles, including that of political economy, on which this author wrote a special essay before (翟玉忠：《中国拯救世界：应对人类危机的中国文化》，中央编译出版社，2010，PP.160~162。)
Professor Liu Lihong also pointed out that Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon: Basic Questions discusses medicine from the various angles of different academic disciplines:
“Suwen contains many medical models: biological, cosmic, psychological, and social as well. This section (灵兰秘典论) discusses medicine from the social angle. What does “facing south” or the “mind/heart” signify when seen from this angle? In the section it is said ‘The mind’ is the function of the sovereign, from which issues forth divine wisdom. What is the ‘function of the sovereign’, then? Take a nation-state for instance: It would be the president as in the U.S. or in China, who, needless to say, plays a pivotal or decisive role for the nation. After stating the respective functions of the twelve organs, the section concludes ‘None of the twelve organs can do without the others. If the mind/sovereign is wise, all other functionaries under its/his command will be at ease. When this principle is applied to health preservation, the person will live long with no threat of danger all his life; when applied to government, the whole land will be prosperous. If the commanding entity is disoriented, then the twelve organs will face danger – all the passageways be blocked and whole body messed up. If this happens either to health preservation efforts or to government, it would spell serious disaster. This must be avoided.’ ” (刘力红:《思考中医》)
History has proved the above. Whenever the sovereign, of whichever dynasty, was sagacious, peace reigned all over and all the people benefitted from it; whenever a fatuous pretender was holding power, that would mean tragedy, chaos and suffering to people.
Further, in Chinese learning, the system of medical concepts and that of political ones are mutually compatible and interchangeable. Just because of the importance of the commanding element, Chinese medicine is supposed to help “cultivate character on the spiritual level while curing illness on the physical plane”, and the “character” here involves an awareness of the Supreme Dao, which has been a guiding topic shared by all traditional Chinese schools of thought, just as the saying goes:
“The world reaches the same goal by different routes and embraces one shared vision from a hundred viewing angles.” (“天下同归而殊途，一致而百虑。”-- 《周易·系辞下》)
During China’s Warring States period, there seemed to be a tendency toward fragmentization in the academic field, something similar to that of the modern West, which raised alarms among scholars of that time. Take for instance:
“What is written on bamboo slips and silk scrolls and inscribed on bronzes and stone tablets to be passed on to later generations is only an approximation of the supreme truth with marks of human artificiality. From the legendary three sovereigns and five emperors through the three great kings [i.e., founders of Xia , Shang and Zhou dynasties], all adopted the same supreme principle in dealing with varying situations and accomplished the same remarkable feat in different approaches. Later scholars were not aware of the oneness of varying embodiments of the Dao, or the general principle guiding all morals, but picked fragments of past achievements and prattled about them, seated in isolation from reality, so that, very learned and well-informed as are such scholars, they cannot but get lost in confusion.” (《文子·精诚篇》)
Fortunately, during Western Han dynasty Chinese academic thoughts were re-integrated in the Huang-Lao school. Although Confucianism was assigned a dominant position later, Chinese learning was not fragmentized, being founded on unified Western Zhou court-sponsored academic achievements such as the Five Classics. The integration of thoughts from all schools was a major principle consciously adhered to by Chinese scholars from Sima Qian of Western Han through the contemporary Qian Mu (钱穆, 1895-1990).
Traditional Chinese learning has been a holistic whole rooted in the Supreme Dao and having a close bearing on ever-changing live situations in worldly affairs, a feature incomparable to any other system of learning in the history of human civilization. In the last hundreds of years, Western academia has been for long trying to accomplish a unification of all academic disciplines from mathematics to science, but so far it seems that there is still a long way to go, and Godel’s theorem has even denied the possibility of unifying Western mathematics.
Obviously, from the above it can be concluded that the classical Chinese system of learning has been advanced, not backward at all. However, though the goal assiduously attempted by Western academia was achieved long ago in Chinese learning by adopting a totally different approach, contemporary Chinese scholars still generally believe that traditional Chinese learning has been backward whereas the modern Western one is advanced. How absurd this belief is!
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