EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an exerpt from the author’s book in Chinese on philosophy and social theories published in 2013. The book partially summarizes the results of the author’s decades-long exploration in the realm of ideology and is rich in ideas both old and new at the same time – new expositions in modern terminology of traditional Chinese thought as applied to social issues and ideologies of the world today. Any comment and criticism and any offer to help improve the English translation of the whole book will be welcome and appreciated. For a list of contents of the book, please see:

Where is the Mankind Heading for: Contests and realignments between ideologies in the new century: List of content

THE TEXT

      The philosophical view of the world as a “dynamically-balanced multi-dimensional whole”, which is based on “relative reality” theory, and its application to social life were most typically represented by ancient China’s Daoist-Legelist school. This of course does not mean that its theory and practice were perfect in every way. As said at the beginning of the book, human cognition is always limited and no discourse can exhaust the truth but leave room for futher improvement. Moreover, Any popular and lasting schools of thought would inevitably differentiate into sub-schools.

      Take the Daoist school for instance. It was not monolithic, either. The positive sub-school would act non-assertively, or act in compliance with the Dao, that is, to apply the Supreme principle of Yin-Yang balance and Heaven-men harmony to social life and derive from it a whole system of Daoist-Legalist theories on statecraft. But if one interprets Heaven-men unity in a passive way and only aspires to become a carefree spirit, not aware that following the Supreme Way does involve the human individual’s initiativeness and creativeness, then he would become one of the negative sub-school and actually associate himself with the laissez-faire advocates, who have been trying to misrepresent the Daoist non-assertiveness as inactiveness.

      Buddhism, the late comer in Chinese tradition, also diverged into two tendencies: One devoted to doing good in this secular world without concern about one’s own interests in the secular society, that is, a positive attitude, and one pitting the secular world against the Buddhist transcendental vision and trying to escape from the former into the latter, that is, a negative approach. The awareness and practice of Buddhists in self character cultivation, just like that of the Daoists, has been helpful and indispensable in pushing and encouraging people to get rid of self-centeredness, greediness, selfishness, and bigotry and in uplifting general social mentality to a transcendental height.

      However, Buddhists with either the positive or negative tendency stop at freeing oneself or at best helping other individuals free themselves from mental pains, which is a kind of “minor good”, so to speak. They usually would not bother about how to reform the outside macro society as a whole, because the Buddhists, if they are positive, believe that doing good by piecemeal can bring about fundamental changes to the world. Therefore, while presenting “84 thousand approaches” to self-cultivation, Buddhism does not have one single systematic approach to recommend to the reformation of the society. As far as the methodology for social reform is concerned, like the Confucianists, who believe that, if each and every family member is well-cultivated in character, then the whole family would be well managed, that, if each and every family is well managed, then the whole state would be well-governed, and that, if each and every state is well-governed, then the whole world would be peaceful, all ultimately depending on the self-cultivation of all individual human beings, i.e., simplistically comparing the relationship between a monarch and his ministers and subjects to that between father and son, -- like the Confucianists, Buddhists does not go beyond the atomistic-indidualist way of thinking in believing that the mechanic piecing together of parts amounts to the whole; which belief, by the way, is typical of Western thought tradition but not shared by traditional Chinese Daolist-Legalists. That is why Buddhism, while serving as a source of spiritual comfort for people having a hard time and tolerated by some rulers with good intention, has also often been utilized by other rulers with not so good intentions to divert people’s attention from social evils in the secular world, evils mostly related to themselves.

      The Chinese Legalists have been following the Dao of Yin-Yang balance in many aspects of social governance and brought about the brilliancy of Chinese Daolist-Legalist civilization in the Qin-Han and Tang dynasties. The Legalist school was neither monolithic, nor totally self-consistent either. The long-time patriarchal tradition typical of an agricultural society historically limited Legalists’ scope of vision, which hindered them from following the Dao of balance to the very end. That was why they failed to apply their innovations of “all-society supervision” and “social meritocracy” mechnisms to the top ruler and top leader selection and became helpless when a corrupted and/or otherwise incompetent heir inherited the throne, thus leaving loopholes for some anti-Daoist-Legalist late rulers to usurp the top position for selfish purposes and throw the society into cyclically repeated chaos.

      The Confucianists paid special attention to self-character cultivation and advocated benevolence, which was totally opposed to later Western “economic man” driven solely by self-serving “reason”. They laid emphasis on extending kindred ethics of filial piety and brotherly love to the Heavenly virtue of universal benevolence. This, while simplistic in a way as mentioned above, fits the natural course of awareness development from what is within sight to beyond and from what can be directly sensed to what can be understood only through consciencious reasoning. In contrast, Western individualistic liberalism and superficial collectivism are both neglectful of or even hostile to family ethical values. Therefore, Confucianism can still play a big positive role in pushing for a new spiritual revolution in human society.

      However, later Confucian disciples, motived by a desire to maintain their own or their political patrons’ special interests, have wittingly or unwittingly neglected or blurred out or deliberately hushed up the apparent truth that family ethics cannot spontaneously develop into a prevailing social ethics of universal benevolence unless the society is under the rule of Dao-abiding law. That is to say, the Confucianist ideological approach is on the whole contrary to that of the Legalists. In dealing with a series of bipolar social relations, Confucianists generally have sticked to one extreme in disregard of a necessary balance between Yin and Yang through dynamic interactions or conscientious adjustments. Unsurprisingly, history has downgraded Confucianism from the 2000 years long unjustifiably dominating position.

      On the philosophical level, the Buddhist concept of “intangibility” (conventionally but perhaps misleadingly translated as “emptiness”, “great void”, “immateriality”, etc.), and the Daoist one of “Dao” actually constitute the two aspects, Yin and Yang (or ultimately unreal and relatively real) of existence, just like the two inseparable sides of a piece of paper, based on a shared but tacit understanding of mind-matter oneness. (And the label “Dao” itself has also been used to denote both and/or either of the ultimately unreal and the relatively real aspects of all existence as a whole.) The “Dao” is omnipresent; so, accordingly, the Yin-Yang opposition with a tendency towards balance through mutual interaction, penetration and transformation also exists between and withinin all schools of thought, not excluding the Daoists. Therefore, whether to have one privileged school or a synthetical integration of all the major ones represent traditional Chinese thought is an instance of whether or not following the Dao.

      The same principle also applies to foreign schools of thought. Human culture as a whole should also include what is beneficial to all humanity in the traditions of all different kinds of civilizations. This, of course, does not mean to blur the line between what is really beneficial and what is harmful to human community life. Every culture and every idea should be examined against the broad backgroud of the whole human history in a seek-truth-from-facts manner to decide what should be carried on and what discarded. Consequently, modern Western culture should neither be copied by wholesale nor totally dismissed.

      The author believes that none of the thought traditions that have lasted for ages or can spread far and wide over the globe in contemporary times, no matter whether they can each hold water as a system, can be without a single good point -- they must respectively contain some, more or less, valuable ideas. The reason why we are now focusing our criticism on Western mainstream ideology is because its world domination with the backing of globally strongest military power is playing the wicked role in serving the interests of international monopoly capital, the very root cause of all present-day crises threatening the survival of the human race.

      From the Daoist perspective of Yin-Yang balance, the two different ways of thinking, the Eastern and the Western, represent the two aspects, the Yin and the Yang, of human thought. After the above analysis of the falsehood in the general Western thought system and its extensions in the major branches of thought (referring to the part III-1 of the book – the editor), it should be noted that, while the Eastern tradition has attached great importance to the integration of all academic thoughts, the Western one has been focusing its attention in an ever increasing degree on the dissection and analysis of parts in ever-diverging branch disciplines, failing to achieve an integration. Simply speaking, the West is good at analyzing whereas the East at integrating. This situation, however, is changing.

      In the West, the newest achievements in modern physics are now guiding people to reflect on its tendency in thinking characterized by mind-matter split, one-way linearity and dissection of parts without integration (i.e., overly strong Yang at the expense of Ying). This reflection helps the restoration of mind-matter unity in the academic perspective, as represented by the Chinese concept of “Dao”.

      Meanwhile in the East, efforts at further refining expositions of the monist Dao (The proposal in this book of the world view of a “dynamically balanced multi-dimensional whole” is just such an effort) might balance out a bit the tendency developed by dominating Confucianist disciples in the past 2000 years, a tendency characterized by laying more emphasis on treading old routes than on blazing new trails and more on abstract and dogmatic preaching than on detailed and practical analysis, i.e., balance out the tendency of overly strong Yin at the expense of Yang, so as to assimilate into Eastern culture the merits in Western tradition of a pioneering spirit, initiativeness, practicality and meticulousness in analysis and, by developing the new from the old, push human thought and civilization to a new height. Hence, the Chinese and Western cultures can learn from and complement each other so as to help make human culture an integrated whole.