Miss Buddha (99 page)

Qi, for which there is no standard English
translation, is a spontaneously moving and self-generating physical
substance that comes in varying degrees of clarity or
murkiness.

While li is the same in everything, qi is
what gives things their distinctive qualities. As an example, the
qi of a dog is seen as murkier than the qi of a human, and that is
what makes humans more intelligent than dogs.

The qi of a plant, on the other hand, is
murkier than the qi of a dog, so dogs can think and perceive,
whereas plants cannot (at least not as far as we know). The qi of a
rock is murkier still, so a plant is alive, while a rock is
not.

The qi also distinguishes different
individuals within kinds. Thus, your qi is different from my qi
even though we are both humans. And if you are more virtuous than
I, your qi is less turbid murky mine, ethics and virtue being what
brings clarity to human qi.

The neo-Confucians also believed that these
ideas made explicit what earlier sages such as Confucius and
Mencius had meant, but they—unwittingly or unconsciously—borrowed
heavily from both Buddhism and Taoism. In fact, the very term li
first gained prominence in Taoist texts, and was then adopted by
Huayan Buddhists well before the Confucians put it to their
use.

At the same time, many neo-Confucians
accused the Buddhists of selfishly escaping this world rather than
trying to improve it, even though most Buddhists stressed
compassion for the suffering of this world and some Buddhists even
maintained that Nirvana was not a state separate from this world
but rather a way of viewing this world.

It should be stressed that both
neo-Confucians and Buddhists aimed at self-cultivation by
discovering truths about themselves and the world through reason,
observation, or meditation.

However, this emphasis on discovery
contrasted with the views of Mencius, who, instead, advocated
developing our inclinations toward virtue, and those of Xunzi, who
encouraged us to reform our evil nature.

As neo-Confucianism developed further, it
found expression through three different schools: The School of
Principle, the School of Mind, and the School of Evidential
Learning.

School of Principle

The 12th-century
Neo-Confucian Chu Hsi, who is credited with perfecting the
doctrines of the School of Principle, was the most influential
Chinese philosopher since Mencius. Chu Hsi identified the Sishu
(Four Books) as the core of a Confucian education: the Daxue (Great
Learning), the Lunyu (Analects), the Mengzi (Book of Mencius), and
the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean). These books comprise
compilations of the sayings of Confucius and Mencius and
commentaries by their followers. The Four Books, along with Chu
Hsi’s detailed commentary on them, became the basis of the civil
service examinations in China and remained so until these
examinations were finally eliminated in the early
20
^th
century.

What is distinctive about Chu Hsi’s
neo-Confucianism is the view that our qi is so turbid initially
that we cannot discover or own li. His view was that in order to
clarify our personal qi and so achieve enlightenment, we must
carefully study the Four Books under the guidance of a wise
teacher.

School of Mind

The neo-Confucian School of
Mind was founded by Lu Xiangshan, a contemporary of Chu Hsi, but
its greatest advocate was Wang Yangming, a philosopher, statesman,
and general who wrote in the early 16
^th
century.

Lu and Wang criticized Chu His and his
followers for promoting a dangerous division between li and qi, and
between knowledge and action.

They charged that Chu Hsi’s
followers, because they stressed the need to clarify the qi in
order to see the li, would become obsessed with studying
how
to be virtuous
instead of actually
being
virtuous. They further stressed that knowledge and
virtue are both within us. Every person can, they claimed, perceive
what li means for them to do, if they would just use their minds in
an effort to do so.

School of Evidential Learning

During the Qing dynasty
(mid-17
^th
century), Confucian philosophers reexamined the preceding Ming
dynasty in order to discover what led to its downfall. This
approach was to become known as the School of Evidential Learning,
and it rejected both the School of Principle’s speculation on li
and qi and what it saw as subjectivism—an emphasis on the
individual mind—among Wang Yangming’s followers.

Instead, the School of Evidential Learning
called for renewed study of the classical texts in order to
rediscover Confucianism’s true ethical (and sociopolitical)
doctrines. This approach produced a highly critical spirit and
precise scientific methods of textual verification.

The greatest philosopher of
this school was Tai Chen. During the 18
^th
century he provided precise
textual arguments to demonstrate that the Neo-Confucians were in
fact projecting Buddhist concepts onto the Confucian
Classics—concepts alien to these works, and concluded that this had
resulted in Neo-Confucians identifying truth or principle with
their own subjective judgment.

He then went on to assert that li could be
found only in things and that it could only be studied objectively
through the collection and analysis of factual data.

As this school concentrated on the study of
human affairs it produced distinguished scholarship in philology,
phonology, and historical geography, but very little of worth in
the natural sciences.

Chinese Philosophy from the 19th Century to
the Present

During the
19
^th
century, the shortcomings of Neo-Confucianism became quite
clear. Speculation on the nature of reality provided no workable
explanation for the changes that the now encroaching West
necessitated in China, and its traditional ethics seemed only to
impede, if not outright frustrate, Chinese attempts to
modernize.

In the 1890s, however, a
brilliant young philosopher named Kang Yuwei made a radical attempt
to adapt Confucianism to the intruding modern world. In his
revolutionary treatise “
Confucius as a
Reformer
,” Kang claimed to have discovered
Confucian authority for a sweeping reform of Chinese political and
social institutions, reforms that were vital if China were to
resist the force of Western imperialism.

However, Kang’s Confucian reform program,
although implemented briefly in 1898, was impeded by the entrenched
power of Cixi, China’s conservative empress dowager, and other
advocates of the status quo in the imperial government. As a
result, Kang was exiled.

A new (and ultimately unsuccessful) attempt
to revive Confucian ethics was later made by Nationalist leader
Chiang Kai-shek in his New Life Movement of the 1930s.

Beginning in the 1890s, and over the next
several decades, many Western philosophical ideas were brought to
China by students returning from North America and Europe. The two
most influential of these philosophies were pragmatism and
Marxism.

Chinese pragmatism, illustrated in the
writings of Hu Shi—a student of American philosopher John
Dewey—conceived of ideas as instruments to cope with actual
situations and emphasized results. This made it well suited as a
philosophy of reform, and so played an important role in the New
Culture Movement (begun in 1917), which sought to modernize Chinese
social and intellectual life.

By 1924, however, pragmatism had begun to
decline in popularity, and the social and political philosophy of
Karl Marx, whose works had become widely known in China as early as
1919, now became the philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party and
went on to dominate Chinese thought for decades after the
Communists gained control of the country in 1949.

The best known of the
20
^th
-century Confucian philosophers is Fung Youlan, who
reconstructed the Neo-Confucian School of Principle using Western
philosophical concepts, especially those of the ancient Greek
philosopher Plato.

In the 1960s Fung, under
intense pressure from supporters of Chinese leader Mao Zedong,
adopted the historical materialism of Marx and revised his 1931
work,
The History of Chinese
Philosophy
, according to the ideas of
Marxism-Leninism.

In recent decades, the Chinese government,
although officially still Communist, has moved away from rigid
intellectual orthodoxy and allowed more discussion of other
philosophies. This relaxation led to the so-called high-culture
fever of the 1980s, during which intellectuals passionately debated
the merits of a wide variety of native and foreign philosophies,
including Confucianism, rationalism, hermeneutics (interpretation
of texts), European versions of Marxism, and postmodernism.

Intellectual discussion in China cooled
somewhat after the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989, but the
intellectual scene remains diverse and vibrant, with no one
philosophical position dominating discussion.

That said, some of the most serious
discussions of Chinese philosophy actually occurred in the West
during the late 1990s and early 2000s; and there has since been
keen Western interest in Chinese thought, especially in Taoism
(which found its way to the modern Western philosopher as early as
the 1960s), and Chinese philosophy has slowly gained increased
acceptance and recognition among Western philosophers.

Indian Philosophy

It should surprise no one that Indian
Philosophy is only rivaled by Chinese philosophy when it comes to
Eastern traditions of abstract inquiry.

Indian philosophy, normally recorded in
Sanskrit, comprises many diverse schools of thought and
perspectives and includes a substantial body of intellectual debate
and argumentation among these various views.

Among the main classical schools of Indian
thought we find: (1) the so-called orthodox schools of Hindu
philosophy—including Exegesis (Mimamsa), Vedanta and its numerous
sub-schools, Atomism (Vaisheshika), Logic (Nyaya), Analysis
(Samkhya), and Yoga; and (2) the Buddhist (so-called nonorthodox)
schools of Madhyamika, Buddhist Idealism (Yogacara), and AbhiDhamma
(which also includes numerous sub-schools).

Indian philosophy also comprises the
materialist and skeptical philosophies of Carvaka and the religious
schools of Jainism.

What is known as Classical (as different
from Ancient) Indian philosophy extends from approximately 100 BCE
to 1800 CE, marking the beginning of the modern period.

Ancient Indian thought, which is also
philosophic in a broader sense, originated as early as 1500 BCE and
appears in scriptures known as the Vedas.

Ancient Indian philosophy also includes the
mystical explanations and elaborations on the Vedas known as
Upanishads (700 BCE to 400 BCE), as well as early Buddhist writings
(300 BCE to 500 CE), and the Sanskrit poem Bhagavad-Gita (Song of
the Lord, 200 BCE to 200 CE).

Classical Indian philosophy is less
concerned with spirituality than is its Ancient antecedent; rather,
it concentrates on practical aspects of how people can know and
communicate about everyday affairs. This practical Indian
philosophy of the later classical and modern periods is
distinguished from most other Indian religious and spiritual
thought; there are, however, some exceptions.

Among them are philosophies
represented by famous advocates of ancient Indian spiritual views,
such as mystic philosopher Sri Aurobindo Ghose—a nationalist
revolutionary who opposed British rule of India in the early
20
^th
century—and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who was president of
India from 1962 to 1967, i.e., in the period immediately following
the country’s struggle for independence.

Indian philosophy (as distinguished from
Indian Religious Mysticism) is extensive, rich, and complex.
Scholars analyze not only its significance and its insights, but
also its classical teachings about knowledge and language.
Meanwhile, the majority of Western students of Indian thought have
been drawn to its religious and mystical teachings.

Relationship with Western Philosophy

It is well established that
Indian and Western civilizations have maintained some form of
contact for the better part of 3,000 years. In the
4
^th
century BCE, for example, the Greek emperor Alexander took
troops across the Indus River, which borders the western edge of
the Indian subcontinent.

Even so, while trade
subsequently continued, political contact between India and the
West was largely insignificant until the 16
^th
century.

While some scholars have
argued that Platonism (the philosophy of ancient Greek thinker
Plato) and neo-Platonism (a 3
^rd
-century movement based on
Platonism) were greatly influenced by Indian thought, it is now
thought that the traditions of Indian and Western philosophy
developed largely in ignorance of one another, and, until modern
times, showed few signs of influencing one another.

Influence of Religion

Indian philosophy before 100
BCE cannot be meaningfully separated from religion, primarily
because of the cultural integration of religious
practices
and mystical
pursuits.