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The
Chinese
by
Wilfred Cantwell Smith
Chapter
Five, pp 63-74
In these inquiries into the religious life of the world, we have in each
case been singling out one symbol of a community’s belief, and exploring
it—hoping that it might serve as a rewarding clue to the religious orientation
of that group. For China I have
chosen the ancient yin-yang
circle.
Unlike the symbols we have considered in our other talks, this is not a
ceremony or a phrase but a pictorial design, a visual image.
In some ways this facilitates our task, since we in the West are quite
accustomed to the use of visual images in religious symbolism, and indeed think
of this as altogether standard and appropriate.
Moreover, we see perhaps more clearly with visual images than in the case
of any other type of religious symbols that the item is indeed a symbol, a
representation pointing beyond itself, and capable of meaning different things
to different people, depending on their capacity and insight and the quality of
their personal life. We know that an
image means more to a believer than to an outsider; much more to a profound and
devout believer than the same image does or can to a lukewarm or superficial
one; and indeed, that the meaning lies not in the image itself but in what the
man of faith brings to it. We are
not quite so trained to recognize that this sort of thing is true also of a
theological system, for instance, though it, too, I personally take as a symbol,
an intellectual one this time, something whose meaning lies beyond the immediate
sense of its statements; the phrases in themselves mean something, but symbolize
something more—as in poetry.
On the other hand, we are at a certain disadvantage in considering a
visual image, since I am going simply to write about it, and of course such an
image is meant not to be written about but to be looked at.
It would be much more effective if all of us could have the actual yin-yang circle in front
of our eyes throughout our discussion. Not
only is it extremely simple, like any good religious symbol, whereas my verbal
comments upon its meaning may become complex and elaborate.
Also it is graceful, and serenely quiet.
This, indeed, is part of its point; and I am afraid that my endeavours to
interpret it, even if they succeed in catching something of the import, may yet
lack, certainly, the simplicity and the charm.
I imagine that most of you have seen the image.
Take a circle, and divide it in two equal and congruent parts by drawing
an S-shaped curve from top to bottom, so that you have two as it were curved
tear-drops nestling one against the other. One
should be black and the other white, or, if you have color, one red and the
other black. You may if you like put
a dot of white in the middle of the largest bulbous part of the black, and a
black dot in the white; suggesting that each half of the circle lightly touches
or invades the other. You are left
with a perfectly symmetrical figure, such that you cannot say whether it is a
black circle with a graceful white tear-drop in it, or a white circle with a
graceful black tear-drop; or two contrasting tear-drops so interposed as to
constitute together a perfect whole, flawlessly circular, or a perfect circle
divided into two equal, contrasting, interpenetrating, and lovely parts.
With its total balance, and its endless, sinuous curves, it is a superb
synthesis of rest and movement, of contrast and concord, of immediacy and
ultimacy.
Before we go on to probe the symbolism, may I comment on a prior point?
It is a Western convention to talk of the religions of the world,
imagining these as so many distinct entities, each a system of its own.
Within such a framework, Westerners have learned to speak of three
religions in China, and to label these Confucianist, Taoist, and Buddhist.
Having set up this pattern, we then break it down again by saying
that a Chinese may belong to all three at once, which leaves us just a trifle
perplexed. As you see, I am not
following this custom. I have
deliberately entitled this essay, ‘The Chinese’, rather than using any one
of the specific names of religious traditions there.
Further, in order to represent the religious life of that people as
typically and as faithfully as any one item could, I have chosen a symbol that
is not specifically Confucian, or Taoist, or Buddhist.
It has been used by all three groups, more copiously in Taoist lore
perhaps than in the teaching of the other two traditions, but certainly not
exclusively; and actually it is considerably more ancient in China than any of
these. Its use can be traced far
back into the dim past, before the rise or introduction of any one of the three
great traditions, thought it is now part of them all.
By choosing it, then, we illustrate the essential catholicity of the
religious orientation of the Chinese. And
indeed, as we shall see presently, the symbol itself represents and affirms the
harmonious holding together of contrasts in a balanced synthesis, the
integrating of divergence into a rounded whole.
But this is to anticipate. Originally,
and most immediately, the image represents yang
and yin, the two fundamental
principles in Chinese cosmology. Yang is hot, dry, active, light, and masculine; yin
is cold, moist, passive, dark, and feminine.
Yang is movement, yin is
rest. The interplay of these two
principles produces the five elements of fire, metal, earth, wood, and water;
and these in turn in varying
proportions combine to produce everything that is.
Fire is almost pure yang, water is almost pure yin—almost,
but not quite; for nothing exists that does not combine something of both.
I have called them principles, but they have also been termed modes.
And not only every substance, but also every event, is a combination of
the two. Heaven is more yang, earth more yin.
Man is more yang, woman more yin.
Victory is more yang, peace more yin. They
may also be regarded as phases, ever succeeding one another in endless
revolution and in infinite variety. Night
and day, summer and winter, male and female, stability and change—the universe
as a whole and in all its parts, its being and its becoming, all is an
expression of the underlying yin
and yang in eternal interplay. There
is nothing in which yin and yang
do not participate.
Now this theory of yang-yin has been widely
used in all sorts of contexts in China; as a hocus-pocus in elaborate
superstitions, as a basic notion in systematic scientific thought, as an
intellectual framework for brilliant and profound philosophy.
It would be out of place for us here to follow up the superstition side,
in line with my general policy of trying
to consider religious life at its best, not at its most ordinary.
So far as science is concerned, of course early Chinese thought in this
realm, though historically of major world importance,
has long since been superseded; but it is perhaps worth mentioning that
some observers hold that twentieth-century science in the West is moving closer
to a fundamental yin-yang
type of interpretation of the natural universe than traditional Western
views-— shall be returning to this, briefly, in a few minutes.
So far as Chinese philosophy goes, I shall do no more than mention the
name of Chu His, the twelfth-century thinker at the time of the Sung Renacence
who reformulated the classical tradition of learning in China into what is now
called Neo-Confucianism. His power-ful
and lucid system of thought lasted until our own day as the chief formulation of
China’s more or less national ideology. He
constructed it on a basis in which the yin-yang
idea was prominent.
But our concern is with the yang-yin
circle as a religious symbol. And as
with symbols in other traditions that we have considered, I shall not try to
exhaust or even to systematize all the things that it can mean or has meant to
diverse groups that have cherished it. Rather
I shall simply explore some avenues that it opens up, so as to get some insight
into the faith and some sympathy with the attitude of persons whose outlook has
been different from that traditional with us.
Indeed, we shall concentrate on one significance, since I find this basic
and deeply illuminating. It is the
notion of what I call complement dualism.
We in the West are familiar with another type of dualism, which we may
call conflict dualism. In this, two
basic forces are in collision, as opposites that struggle and clash:
good and evil, right and wrong, black and white, true and false.
This type of dualism seems to have its origin about the middle of the
first millenium B.C. in the Tigris-Euphrates valley or in Iran.
There the traditions from Zarathustra (or ‘Soroaster”) formulated it
into a metaphysics, a dichotomy which split the cosmos into two opposing forces
led by Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu—or God and the Devil.
In other forms, sometimes considerably modified, it found its way into
the Jewish, Christian, and the Islamic traditions, and has been vigorously
resuscitated in recent times on a world scale by Marxism.
In our religious traditions a Devil, over against God, was long accepted;
Heaven and Hell are postulated; and the saved and the damned, the sheep and the
goats. In the Marxist case there is
a variation on this kind of outlook; Marxism rejects metaphysics, and yet
interprets this world in terms of dualist conflict; the class struggle,
bourgeoisie and proletariat, capitalism and communism, exploiters and exploited,
thesis and antithesis. In the
religious and in the Marxist
version, a final unity, whether synthesis or ultimate triumph of one side, is
envisaged; but mean-while the world is analysed in bi-polar terms.
For two and a half thousand years the Near East and the Western world
have either postulated or sympathized with a cosmic conflict dualism; or, in a
dichotomy of less antagonism, with a dualism of opposition.
If not God and the Devil, at least God and the world, man and nature,
matter and spirit, either/or.
India has never quite understood this, and its basic orientation has been
monistic. For Indians, reality is
not two, but one; and even religious assertions are thought of not as true or
false, but as more or less approximate: the
world is not black and white, but a panorama, not of grey but of reds and greens
and yellows. The difference is much
more radical and more pervasive than we usually allow, between India on this
matter and the West with its yes-or-no approach to life.
The yin-yang
circle of China which we are at present considering symbolized another view,
dualist, but of a dualism of a different type; one that is, I think, radically
different from both India and the West, and is worth our trying to understand.
Let us look at that circle once again.
The light and the dark are
distinct, are in contrast; but not in conflict.
They combine to form a rounded whole.
The form of each presupposes the other.
The direction of each is towards the area of the other, but as it moves
both move, in a rhythmic cycle of phased and balanced symmetry.
Let us take one example of the question of man and nature.
If you do not see what I mean by looking at this yang-yin
image of the circle, look instead at any typical Chinese painting, perhaps of a
quiet fisherman by a waterfall where with subtle restrained suggestion and in a
few incredibly delicate touches the person merges into the landscape, and the
beauty lies in a sense of utter
peace found in a union of man with nature. In
the Western tradition there are, of course, exceptions; but certainly one of the
dominant motifs has been, in contrast, that of man against nature—out of which
has grown our ruthlessly applied technology.
We regard nature if not as something against which to struggle, at least
as something to subordinate and to control and to use.
This is expressed in the first chapters of Genesis, where God is pictured
as creating man and woman and setting them on earth and saying,
‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have
dominion…’. The yin-yang
circle symbolized a different mood.
Similarly, in the West the concept God is of course one of ultimate
importance; whereas in China this kind of concept has not been particularly
significant or much developed. This
does not mean that the Chinese have been less religious than we; rather that
they have been religious in a different way, and have conceptualized their faith
in a different way. With us, God
creates the world, out of nothing. It
stands over against him; and even man, though created in God’s image, is yet a
creature, with God sometimes conceived as the ‘wholly other’.
In the yang-yin
circle before us you might say that there is nothing to correspond to our
concept of God; or alternatively, you might say that in so far as this concept
signifies perfection, what corresponds is the circle itself, the whole, the
symmetry and balance, the perfection of the various parts.
Again, if we take the concept Tao, which is in a sense ultimate reality
or ultimate value for many Chinese (and not only Taoists), one thing to say
about it is that it signifies the way (Tao means ‘way’) in which the yin-yang
process operates. It has been
remarked that the Chinese have always felt that the universe was quite capable
of looking after itself, of functioning on its own.
In so far as this signifies that it does not need a power or person
outside itself to look after it and to run it, the point is valid.
But the way in which the functioning dependably and beautifully proceeds
is profoundly significant for the Chinese, is a final truth.
It is, if you like, for them an object of faith.
The yang-yin circle at which
we are looking is after all a circle—not a jagged or chaotic mess, as the
modern atheist without a faith is beginning to suspect the world is.
To represent totality as an harmonious perfection in movement is no mean
affirmation.
Or let us take the question of good or evil.
It is not unknown in China that yang
in this dualism has represented or been associated with good, or the good
spirits, and yin with evil, or the demons. More
basis and more representative, however, has been the view that in this symbol
good is represented by the harmony of the contrasting parts.
Evil would be an absence of that harmony.
In this sense, and it is the dominant one, the symbol is what we might
call idealist, representing the universe as it ought to be; the actual state of
human affairs, things as they are, would them be represented presumably by such
a circle in which the S-curve were out of proportion, or all askew or jagged.
Man’s immorality—of which you may be sure the Chinese have not bee
unaware!—is that which introduces distortion into the natural harmony of the
world. The two halves of our symbol, then, are not good and evil; both are good,
and a further good lies in their due proportion.
Evil then is not the opposite of good, it is the absence of good.
Our image, then, symbolizes, for instance, male or female; and to one who
has meditated upon it and seen truth through it, it is meaningless to ask
whether man is better than woman, or vice versa, and wrong to think in terms of
a conflict between them. Both are
necessary; each is defined in terms of the other; each is fulfilled in a
totality that both constitute. And
evil in this realm occurs if the integrity of either part, or the integrity of
the two together, is infringed. Similar
considerations apply to problems of the individual and society; of stability and
change; abiding truth and ceaseless flux.
In area after area of life, both moral and intellectual, this image
symbolizes a faith in a dualism of complement rather than of conflict.
By faith I mean in part a way of looking at the world.
A few minutes ago we spoke of this on the intellectual side in science,
and remarked that there seemed perhaps some justification for thinking, as some
have suggested that the yin-yang
symbol serves to represent an intellectual outlook that makes some sense in the
scientific field. I do not know
enough science to speak here more than very tentatively, but it does seem that
in several areas scientists have been moving away from a sharp
opposition-dichotomy outlook toward one rather of the complementary of
opposites. I suppose the most
obvious example is the positive and negative electric charge, each of which is
defined in terms of the other, and of which the yang-yin
symbol would be perhaps a fairly reasonable presentation.
Another instance might be the wave theory and the quantum theory of
light, each of which is valid though partial, while a unified view embraces
both. Even the distinction between
true and false is not nearly so sharp in science as it used to be in our
pre-scientific tradition: scientific
measurements, for instance, are regarded, rather, as correct to a certain degree
of accuracy. Other subtler
dichotomies that have been losing their sharpness are those between organism and
environment, which we now see as together constituting a reality; or in
philosophy, take traditional issues such as freedom and determinism.
This problem used to be put in such a way as to presume than an
intelligent man must choose: either
this or that. Nowadays one has to
hold the two notion, if they are valid at all, in some different sort of mutual
relation, not as clear-cut alternatives; freedom and determinism together in
constant interplay constitute our life. Similarly
in psychosomatic medicine and psychology: mind
and body (our traditional terms) are seen as referring not to two distinct
entities opposed to each other, but as two interacting components dynamically
constituting a total circle. Again,
science and religion themselves a century ago seemed to many people to be
alternative in bitter conflict; whereas today many feel that a truer view would
see them as two different but complementary elements revolving in a larger, and
dynamic, whole. It is an interesting
affirmation, symbolically imaged, that of the universe as a whole or any part of
it there are always two contrasting facets or modes, of which neither is
complete without the other, and of which both taken together in due balance
constitute the truth.
However, this may be, the more interesting and immediately relevant
aspects of the matter for our purposes are the moral ones; and among these, not
least significant are the political,. I
think that we must not underestimate the significance of the outlook that is
here involved, even for practical and immediate affairs.
There are many, many people who have no idea that their actions are
influenced by metaphysical traditions which they certainly could not themselves
state, and in which they probably do not suppose themselves to be interested,
and yet such people often react to events and behave on most major issues in
ways that in fact are related to inherited presuppositions such as those at
stake here. John Foster Dulles, it
seems to me, is simply one example of a statesman whose spontaneous and
sustained attitude to the world presupposed conflict dualism; and many lesser
men respond surprisingly readily and constantly to analyses of affairs and to
proposed programmes of action in such terms, just because they have been brought
up to see the world in terms of black and white in conflict or opposition.
I personally would be much happier if I felt that our political leaders
were sitting down to ponder such problems as Berlin, after having spent half an
hour contemplating with some sort of religious faith the yin-yang circle of balance contrast; or (having been brought up on such
a symbol since childhood) took it for granted that ultimate truth lies in
harmony. And certainly it is a
significant matter that China has passed into the hands of rulers who, being
Marxist, would reject this internal tradition in favour of an Armageddon-type
ideology that is either/or, and read history and plans policy in terms of clash
and struggle. For them, not
co-existence but conflict.
I should like to close this essay with reference to the point at which we
began, that of religious diversity. The
Chinese have not been unaware of contrasts between the teachings of, let us say,
K’ung Fu-tse and Lao-tse, from whom the Confucianist and Taoist traditions
respectively stem. As our circle
symbolizes, however, they usually comprehend both within the compass of a larger
whole. In the modern world some
voices are suggesting that all mankind must learn to see religious diversity in
this way, so that we may construct on earth an englobing concord and fellowship
that recognizes differences and even contrasts in the religious realm as parts
within an harmonious circle of world-wide human community—the truth lying
not with one element in the complex but in the adjustment of each to the others.
This is a question that we must face in our next essay.
In the meantime I may remark that of course this view is opposed by those
that see such a solution as a betrayal of one’s own loyalties. They
assert that truth is truth, and must be upheld, it must not be dissolved in
camaraderie. The debate between
these two could become quite sharp: between
the universalist and the particularist. As
I have said, we shall be returning to this problem in another connection.
For the moment, however, let me relate it to our present concern, our
Chinese symbol. What I myself see in
the yang-yin
symbol with regard to this matter, if I may be allowed this personal note, is
not the first solution only, not merely an image that would reduce Christian
truth to a part of some larger whole. Rather,
I find it a circle embracing, for Christian truth itself, both this liberal
universlism and at the same time the absolutist interpretation—the two in
constant interplay. Its point is to
deny that one has to choose between orthodoxy and liberalism, between loyalty to
one’s own faith in all its fullness, and loyalty to other men’s faith in all
its variety. An effete and
watered-down eclecticism that is substituted for Christian orthodoxy and for
other men’s orthodoxy is no final solution.
A truly Christian attitude to outsiders must involve both the validity of
Christian orthodoxy and an acceptance of men of other orthodoxies as one’s
brothers—in one’s own eyes, and in the eyes of God.
In this, the image says to me, as in all ultimate matters, truth lies not
in an either/or, but in a both/and.
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