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The Chinese Mind
Hieromonk Seraphim Rose
The following is a tape transcript of an informal class which Fr. Seraphim gave to young men at the St. Herman Monastery in 1981, a year or so before his death.(1) Because he was speaking to young people who had little or no prior knowledge of Chinese culture, he kept his talk on a practical level and did not go deeply into the more subtle aspects of Chinese thought. Nevertheless, this talk is valuable in that it gives an overview of Fr. Seraphim's later views on the world of ancient China, whose wholesome values of tradition, orthodoxy, honesty, respect and love helped him to return to Jesus Christ in the Orthodox faith.
Chinese civilization developed independently from Western civilization. There are certain things which are unique to it, and certain other things which are surprisingly like things in the West. In fact, in the history of China there are some moments when it is absolutely incredible how the same things happened in Chinese life as happened in the West, although there was no connection between the two civilizations. It is as though there really is a spirit of the times – which hits Rome, China, India, all at the same time even with no outward connection. According to the Chinese texts themselves, Chinese civilization as an independent reality goes back to about 2300 B.C., to their 1st dynasty. Before that there are only vague records – back to perhaps 2900 B.C. – but no one knows when the people suddenly appeared there. According to universal chronology, it was most likely not long after the Flood.
I.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CHINESE MIND
1. The first characteristic of the Chinese mind is that it is extremely history-conscious. That is why they have historical annals going back all the way to 2300 B.C. Every dynasty has its annals, and begins to write down its history from its very inception. This, then, is an outstanding characteristic of the Chinese mind, that they are very much oriented towards chronicling what is going on – they were always writing history. Later on we will see that historical annals are one of the basic forms of literature in China, because the people are so sensitive to chronology. When modern scholars first began going to China to look at the recorded chronology, they began to question it. They saw that there was recorded a certain dynasty, the Shang dynasty, which was dated precisely from 1766 B.C. to 1180 B.C. The scholars began to criticize, saying that it can't be that ancient and that it probably never existed. At the turn of the century, however, they discovered so-called dragon bones, which were used as oracles, to call on heaven and the gods. Scholars got hold of this archeological find and deciphered the old form of script on the bones, and they dated them back to 1500-1700 B.C. On the bones was written a complete list of the kings of that dynasty which supposedly did not exist according to modern scholars.
My Chinese professor [Gi-ming Shien] told me that whenever there is a conflict between archeology and written texts, human beings must believe the written texts, because archeology is only ground and your opinions and interpretations, while the written texts are other human beings – whom you have to trust. This is the basic Chinese attitude.
2. The second characteristic of the Chinese mind is its down-to-earth orientation. My Chinese professor once told me that the Indian mind is quite different, because the Indians are up in the heavens, seeking Brahman, spiritual experiences, and so on, while the Chinese are always right down to earth. That is why I liked them from the beginning. Although the Chinese mind is also very spiritual in a way, it never loses track of the present reality. The people do sometimes, but the basic Chinese culture doesn't.
3. The third thing which is very basic to the Chinese mind is tradition. The Chinese are one of the most tradition-conscious peoples, and therefore they keep the traditions of the past. Up until the coming of communism, the Chinese were doing things which they had been doing all the way back to Confucius; and Confucius said they were doing these things all the way back to the third millennium B.C. Their veneration for their ancestors and graveyards, and their sacrifices: this is the way they lived. The whole outlook on life remained basically the same, and whenever there was a dispute, they would appeal to antiquity. "This is the way it was done in ancient times; we can't change it." If Christianity could have managed to get inside this tradition somehow and become a part of it, it would have worked, for the soul of the Chinese people would have been very well disposed to it.
4. There is another basic aspect of the Chinese tradition which is shared by many other traditions. That's the fact that the whole Chinese tradition is one. There is a oneness of tradition, whether it is expressed in different forms. Scholars, of course, like to take things apart, and therefore they say that in China there are all kinds of different philosophies: Confucianism, Taoism, ancestor worship, worship of gods and spirits, as well as other various philosophies. My teacher [Gi-ming], however, was very insistent that it is all one. In fact, there is a very strong idea in the Chinese mind of orthodoxy, with a small "o": that there is a right teaching, and that the whole of society depends upon that right teaching. This right teaching is expressed in different forms. My teacher made it quite clear that Taoism is the esoteric side, and Confucianism is the more social side. Taoism has to do with spiritual life, and Confucianism with social, public life.
5. The fifth point is that in the center of this one orthodox tradition is the Emperor. China without an emperor is like an animal with its head cut off. From the very beginning there was always the Emperor. He was the upholder of the orthodoxy, of the tradition. In fact, the Chinese had the idea that the Emperor was a cosmic figure around whom the world revolved. According to tradition, the Emperor faces south; he is to the north of everything, and the whole world revolves around him. (In the Old Testament there is a similar idea: Isaiah 14:31 mentions that God is from the north.) The Emperor doesn't have to move himself, he only points and everyone does things for him; and thus the whole world is put in order.
In Chinese piety, then, the Emperor occupies a unique place. In Russia and Byzantium, the name of the Emperor was always written in upper case letters. You can see this in the service books of pre-revolutionary Russia. The same thing was in China. Whenever the Emperor is mentioned, you have to begin a line with his name. When you come to the middle of a line and come to name of the Emperor, you have to go back to the beginning, even above the margin, to begin with him because he is the central human figure. Such was the intense respect with which he was regarded.
At one time I was thinking that if I ever got my doctor's degree in Chinese literature, I was going to write a paper comparing the Byzantine Emperor with the Chinese Emperor. There are many similarities. In both Byzantine and Chinese society, the Emperor is to be the guardian of orthodoxy.
Because of the central place of the Emperor in Chinese society, a big clash occurred in the 17th century, when the Empetor Kang-shi was presented with Jesuit missionaries. The Jesuits had become trusted in China because they knew science. At that time the Chinese calendar, which had been based on poor mathematics, was all in pieces, so the Chinese had to have the Jesuits calculate when the year would begin and so forth. In this way they rose to a high position in the court.
The dispute arose when the Jesuits began to go to the cemeteries of the ancestors. In these cemeteries, each family had a chapel where their ancestors were buried, and in the chapels they had little tablets. The Jesuits censed these tablets and said some kind of prayers in front of them, saying that this was only a social rite and not a religious rite, and the Emperor agreed. Then someone sent complaints to Rome, and the Pope proclaimed that these were religious rites and could not be performed. When the Chinese Emperor heard this, he was enraged that a foreign devil would dare to dictate what was what, when he had already declared that they were not religious rites and that the Jesuits could perform them. That was the beginning of the end for the Jesuits; they were kicked out and lost their chance. That all occurred in the 17th century, up to the middle of it.
6. There is one more basic aspect of the Chinese mind, and that is their intense awareness of social relationships. In the West during the time of Confucius, there were Plato and Socrates, who could talk about abstract things like beaury and love and so forth without particularly referring to the human relationships. But in the philosophy of Confucius, these things are never spoken of in the abstract; they are bound up with how you relate to your father, mother, older brother, younger brother, elders, youngers, etc. There is a whole hierarchy, and everyone exists in this hierarchy. If you want to order society well, you begin with your father, with your son, with your brothers and your family, with your less immediate family, with the village and the province, with the prince (in the time of Confucius the people were divided into princedoms), and finally to the Emperor over them all, and thereby to Heaven itself. These, then, are the basic qualities of the Chinese mind.
II.
THE LANGUAGE
Chinese language is interesting in that it seems to be totally distinct from the Western languages. Scholars are trying to find common word groups; they study Slavonic, Greek, Sanskrit and all the Western languages of Germanic and Latin origin, and they find that they all have common roots. Sometimes one can see that very distinct Sanskrit words are used today in Russian or English. But in China the roots seem to be totally different. They seem to be related to Tibetan and that's about all. Japanese seems to be totally different, also. It's closer to Turkish than to Chinese. So as far as the linguistics are concerned, the pronunciation of the Chinese language also has a totally different basis. Therefore, if one could trace back to common roots, one would have to go back far beyond the earliest age we know.
The Chinese written language is a system which was originally like Egyptian hieroglyphics: a picture language. Since many words cannot be depicted in pictures, however, the Chinese from the very beginning had to develop a way of expressing concepts through pictures, and they had an ingenious way of doing this. A certain picture usually became associated with a certain sound. For example, the word for tree was emu; if you had some other word which had a similar pronunciation, you might use that same picture of a tree to express that sound. Later on, towards the time of Confucius and even later, they developed a whole system wherein there are two elements to a word: one is the way it is pronounced and the other is what it means.
The word for "man" is just a man with two legs (that is how it looks in modern times). If you put a stroke at the top of it, you get a man with his full arms outstretched: that means "big." And if you put a stroke on top of that, that means what is above man, which is "Heaven." All these words are all pronounced different ways, but when you try to find them in the dictionary, you've got to look under "man" each time.
The word for "harmony," tom, is a picture of a box with no bottom, and inside there is a little square. That little square is the word for mouth (if you look at ancient pictures it looks just like a little mouth). From this we know that the meaning of the word has something to do with a mouth – that is, with people speaking in harmony. The outer box has to do with the way it is pronounced, because the word for "mouth" has a totally different pronunciation.
Of course you are supposed to write these Chinese characters with a brush, which makes the strokes of different thicknesses. There is a whole elegant system.
The Chinese also developed dictionaries very early. Here is a dictionary from 100 A.D. It is arranged according to a system of so-called radicals. The first word in the dictionary has one stroke: it's the word "one." Every other word that has to do with oneness or has that stroke in it will be found under that. Then the second radical, and so on. You increase the number of strokes until you finally come to the biggest words, like "dragon," "horse," "fish," "scorpion" and "tortoise," which have twenty or thirty strokes. It's just as fast as an alphabet once you get used to it.
Because of their poetry, the Chinese very early developed a whole system of rhymes. That is how we can reconstruct the ancient pronunciation of Chinese: because they had a library with tables and rhymes and initial letters. There are rhyming dictionaries which date from about 500-600 A.D.
The earliest Chinese language that has come down to us is a very concise language, which expresses a great deal in a few words. In fact one of my Chinese professors said that Chinese is the most advanced language because it has no grammar whatsoever. That is, there are no declensions, conjugations, or tenses. There are not different forms of the same word, with one or two little exceptions (for example, there is a word for "I" and another for "me" in the ancient language). There is not even any difference between verbs and nouns. Often you tell if it is a verb or noun by the way it is used in the sentence, because everything depends upon word order. The first word would be the subject, the second word the verb, and the third word the object. Often the subject does not have to be used, nor the object, and thus often you have just one word: you have to get the whole meaning from that one word. Of course, there is a context from which you can tell what it means.
III.
THE ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY
The Chinese written texts that have been preserved to this day go back to the time of Confucius(2) or a little before. All the great philosophers were in that period, the 5th century B.C. We will speak about the greatest of them: Lao Tzu and Confucius.
First we will look at the book of Lao Tzu, called the Tao Teh Ching. This is a deep philosophy. It is a tiny book which is very profound – so profound you can get lost. The first line of that book begins with the word Tao, which means "Path." Lao Tzu used this as the central part of his philosophy, as in the West they used Logos. The center of the universe is Tao, the path of life.
The book begins by saying:
Tao, which could either mean "path" or the verb "to path";
Kuh, which means "can";
Tao
Fe, which means "not";
Ch'ang, which means "constant";
Tao
This comes out to read: "Tao can Tao no constant Tao." How do you interpret it? It is a baffling thing because you can interpret it all kinds of different ways. We have a basic verb here, kuh ("can"), and the verb "can" must take a verb after it. Therefore the word that comes after kuh, which is tao, must be a verb; and the word that comes before kuh, which is also Tao, must be a noun, the subject of the sentence. Thus the sentence says something like: "The Tao that can be Taoed is not a constant Tao." Usually it is translated: "The Tao that can be travelled on, or the Tao that can be expressed as a Tao, or the Tao that is taoable, is not a constant." Or else: "The Tao (path) upon which you can walk is not a constant path." This is something that you just let yourself go into, and you do not define it.
Here, of course, Lao Tzu is using a paradox. He does this in many other places, such as: "He that knows does not speak; he that speaks does not know," and: "How do I know this? by this!" In another place he writes: "Thirty spokes join in a single hub; it is the center hole that makes the wheel useful." Is it the spokes that make the wheel turn? No, it's the empty place in the middle. Without that there won't be any going – there will be spokes lying on the ground doing nothing. It is due to the empty space that they go. Although some people think Lao Tzu's philosophy is very mystical, I think it is more on a natural level. The language is not vague; it is actually very precise. He deliberately uses these images and appears vague because he wants to convey something that is not a precise, defined teaching. In interpreting texts like the Tao Teh Ching, the Chinese say you must first of all go to the commentaries, then you must have a teacher who is supposed to teach you these things. They are very intent on this: you have to have it personally given to you by your teacher. They do not accept the idea of just reading in books; you have books, but only the teacher can give you the teachings in the books.
Now let us look at the teachings of Confucius:(3)
"The Master said, 'Father is present, look at his will'" What Confucius is referring to here is not the father but the son. When the father is alive, look at how the son obeys him and puts his will to him, how the bent of his will is. Therefore, this line can be translated as: "When a man's father is alive, look at the bent of the man's will."
The next line reads: "Father dead, look at his conduct." This means that when the father is dead, look at the conduct of his son.
"Three years, no change in Father's tao can be called filial period." In other words, if for three years the man shows no change from the way of his father, he can be called filial. That means he is faithful to his father. To Confucius, filial piety is a basic thing: you must be faithful to your father.
Here is another saying, a famous one:
"Master said, 'Ten and five, and will on learning.''' This means, "When I was fifteen years old I had my will set on learning."
"Three, ten, and stand." In other words, "Having come to the age of thirty, I stood firm." That means he's set for life. He has his basic position at thirty years old.
"Four, ten, and no doubt." That is, "At the age of forty I didn't doubt, I had no more doubts."
"Fifty, and know heaven decree." That is, "At the age of fifty, I knew the will of heaven."
"Sixty, and ear obedient." It is implied here that his ear is obedient to listen to what heaven says to him.
"Seventy, and follow heart what desires, not transgressing the right." That is, "When I was seventy, I followed the desire of my heart, not transgressing what is right." In other words, he reached perfection. Whatever he desired was already the will of heaven.
Someone asked Confucius, "What is filial piety?" And his answer was: "Parents are anxious lest their children should be sick." Apparently what this means is that since your parents take care of you and love you so much when you are sick, you must pay respect to them. That's the implication.
Someone else asked about filial piety, and the master said, ''The filial piety of today means the support of one's parents, but dogs and horses are likewise able to do something in the way of support." In other words, just offering support is not necessarily human. Without reverence, what is there to distinguish the one support from the other? So there must not just be supporting the parents, but also reverence.
Here Confucius is teaching basic love.
"The master said, 'If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge so as continually to be acquiring new, he may be a teacher of others.''' This is the sign of a person who really loves knowledge: he is constantly getting something new, not just peddling what is old; and thus he can teach others.
Confucius also has the concept of the princely man. Someone asked him, "What is the princely man?" The master said, "He acts before he speaks and afterwards speaks according to his actions." That is, he acts already knowing. He doesn't stop to think, to calculate.
"The master said, 'Learning without thought is labor lost. Thought without learning is perilous.''' That is, if you learn lots of things without any particular point of view, it is a waste of time. "Learning without thought" means learning without reflecting on and absorbing what you learn. "Thought without learning is perilous": this means you have to have solid discipline, solid teaching.
"The master said, 'The study of strange doctrines is injurious indeed.''' That is, just learn orthodox doctrines.
Someone asked him, "What is knowledge?" and the master said, "Shall I teach you what knowledge is? When you know a thing, hold that you know it. When you do not know a thing, allow that you do not know it. This is knowledge" – i.e., the basis of knowledge.
There are four books of Confucius' teachings, about telling the truth, being honest, loving your relatives, being obedient, and so on. In giving his teachings, Confucius was constantly quoting from the ancient books, the basic texts of ancient times. One of these was a book of poetry, like the Psalms, expressing the people's feelings – it dated back to about the time of King David the Prophet [ca. 1000 B.C.]. Another was a book of history which contained all the annals of the dynasties; another was a book of rituals; and there were a few others.
(QUESTION) Was there anything in his teaching that was really contrary to Christianity?
(ANSWER) Well, he took part, I think, in sacrifices, which were part of the Chinese system right up to the end. But he was against even the remnants of human sacrifices. In his day, there was the custom of putting little clay figures in a tomb whenever a prince died.(4) This was the remnant of the ancient human sacrifices that had totally died out by Confucius' time, but Confucius was against continuing even that practice. He was against it because it was contrary to "human-heartedness," which is one of the basic Chinese concepts. (The word is made with the characters for "man" and "heart" together.)
So, apart from the fact that he took part in the sacrifices of his times, I don't think there is anything that would not be acceptable in Christianity. His teaching is basic morality. It is very similar to Socrates. Just be upright, honest, doing what is right, following your conscience, dying for the truth if you have to.
Confucius himself was a minor official, in charge of the grain in a little province. Once someone came to him and offered him a bribe, saying, "No one will know." But Confucius said, "I know, you know, heaven knows. Who doesn't know?"
So, his is basically a very human teaching. He talked about the sacrifices but he did not have much of a religious outlook. He never talked about any gods; he only talked about heaven. For him it was a very personal kind of thing. One of his disciples wished to do away with the offering of a sheep, which was connected with the inauguration of the first day of each month. (In the Greek Church, every month they have the blessing of water; in China, every month they sacrificed a sheep.) And the master said, "Sir, you love the sheep; I love the ceremony. Let the sheep be slaughtered."
In Confucius, there is also the concept of propriety, doing what is proper in every situation in society. Of course, later on this became very stereotyped in China: you always had to know exactly when to bow down and offer your hand and so forth. In that respect, it turned into a system in which emotion was not outwardly expressed much; emotions were considered very personal. But that was in the later epochs; earlier it was not like that. Confucius says that from music you can tell what the people are thinking. You can listen to the music and tell whether it is a corrupt people or a virtuous people.
(QUESTION) What about Chinese music?
(ANSWER) I don't know much about Chinese music. It sounds very profound. Just a few sounds are supposed to express some deep emotion. You have to get really used to it before you can understand it. Back in the time of Confucius, there was a whole classical tradition of music, usually with dance, connected with the royal court.
Confucius had a successor in the 4th century B.C., Mencius; and Lao Tzu also had a successor, Chuang Tzu, who lived at the same time as Mencius. These men continued the same teachings.
IV.
THE HISTORY
Chinese history is divided into dynasties. The most ancient dynasty goes back to 2300 B.C. It is called the Hsia dynasty. That was the time when there were supposed to be actual philosopher kings. It was one of the dynasties to which Confucius looked as having ideal rulers. With the Hsia dynasty begins the hereditary succession, and from that time there came the various dynasties. Before that there were just virtuous men ruling, supposedly: one would be picked by the previous one to rule.
There were only three dynasties in the B.C. era: the Hsia (ca. 2300-1700 B.C.), the Shang (ca. 1700-1100 B.C.), and the Chou (pronounced "Jo," ca. 1100-200 B.C.).
We do not know much about the early period: the Hsia and Shang dynasties. The people of that time had no connection with outside people, and the annals are very sparse. There was not much central authority; there was one king in charge, but he was a kind of figurehead. Today, this age is noted mainly for its sacrificial art: its bronzes used in sacrifices. Many of these are preserved today in the Grundage collection in the de Young Museum in San Francisco, which is one of the best collections of Chinese art. There are several basic kinds of vessels, used to hold grain, wine, etc.
With the next dynasty, the Chou dynasty, the age of philosophy and literature begins: Confucius, Lao Tzu. During this time the whole state fell to pieces. It ended up that there was no king at all, just petty princes; and these princes were constantly fighting each other in the last period of the dynasty, around Confucius' time.
At the end of this period, 200 B.C., there came a famous man called Shih Huang Ti, otherwise known as the First Emperor. With him came the Ch'in dynasty, which only lasted for about fifteen years. He was the one who unified the countty: he went about and killed off all the other princes and took over the whole land. Then he began to worship himself, and to seek for the elixir of life. (This was a constant theme among superstitious emperors in China-they were always looking for a sorcerer who could give them a potion that would make them live forever.) He finally died because of this, when he was poisoned in trying to drink something that would make him live forever. He had figured that he would live forever and that his kingdom would last 10,000 years. He felt jealous of Confucius, because Confucius had been dead for over two hundred years and was still accepted as an authority. It was
generally believed then that from Confucius comes the ancient tradition: if you are faithful to Confucius you will be in harmony with ancient times. Shih Huang Ti could not stand this because he wanted himself to be the authority. Therefore he ordered that all texts be burned. This was the famous "bookburning," in which all the Confucian texts and all the ancient documents were taken out to a big bonfire and burned. There would be nothing left of ancient culture: only he would survive, and he would dictate the future of China. (That's where the name China comes from, from his dynasty-the Ch'in.) Together with all the texts, he burned the scholars or buried them alive in order to get rid of the old tradition. If his dynasty had survived, we might not have those old texts; but he died in a very short time and left no successor. A very vicious eunuch of his court tried to take over but he had no support, and finally the Han dynasty came in.
The Han dynastery lasted from 200 B.C. to 200 A.D., and is famous for its art. It is divided into two periods: the early Han and the late Han. Then came the period from 200 to 600 A.D., which was a time of petty kingdoms or warring states, just like in the West: barbarian kingdoms, all divided up, with no central government. Then from about 600 to 900 A.D. was the T'ang dynasty-another dynasty famous for its art; and from about 900 to 1200 A.D. was the Sung dynasty. After that there was an interlude from 1200 to 1300 A.D.: the Mongol dynasty. Then from 1300 to 1600 A.D. was the Ming dynasty, known for its porcelain. The last emperor of this dynasty was called Constantine. By the time he became baptized Catholic, the dynasty was lost. The last dynasty was the Manchu dynasty, from 1600 to 1900 A.D.
Almost all the dynasties lasted about 300 years-that is the normal age for a dynasty. A new person comes in fresh, reorganizes everything, and then it becomes decadent and is conquered by someone else.
(QUESTION) Were there any philosophers before the time of Confucius and Lao Tzu?
(ANSWER) There were no philosophers, but just the ancient texts we mentioned earlier: the book of poetry, the book of ancient rituals, the book of history, etc. It was the same in Greece. This is an interesting fact, because Greece was a country totally independent of China, but philosophy began there at about the same time as in China. The first of the Greek philosophers – Thales and so forth-lived about the 6th century B.C., just about the time Confucius was in China and Buddha in India.
(QUESTION) What were the differences between ancient Chinese and ancient Greek philosophy?
(ANSWER) The early Greek philosophers were all trying to find out what the universe was made of, what was the ultimate element. They were asking abstract questions like that back then, whereas the Chinese philosophers were simply giving a teaching on life. That's one little difference. The Chinese did not speculate about where everything came from, whether fire or water was the original element. They were concerned with how we are to behave towards each other. They accepted the tradition, which went back to the remotest antiquity; and they did not ask too much about where it all comes from.
End Notes
1) For more about these classes which Fr. Seraphim gave to youth, see the chapter "Forming Young Souls" in Not of This World, pp. 894-909.-ED.
2) "Confucius" is the Latin form. His name is actually pronounced Con-ft-dze. Likewise, "Mencius" is pronounced Mung-dze.
3) In the first passages he quotes from Confucius, as in the passage from the Tao Teh Ching quoted above, Fr. Seraphim is translating directly and extemporaneously from the ancient Chinese characters.
4) In fact, they just discovered such tombs in China. After Confucius' time there was a famous emperor: the "First Emperor of China" he was called. He had buried with him a whole army of life-sized ceramic figures, with horses, weapons and warriors in all their costumes.
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