On China and Chinese Wisdom

They are fifty million human beings, unevenly scattered over an immense territory the size of Europe. They constitute the most paradoxical of all nations, a nation which has been equal to itself for four thousand years, an inspiring, coherent, unique civilization.

They are the last survivors of the great ancient agrarian civilizations. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Central Amercian empires, all of them have disappeared in the whirlpool of time, while China has remained, upholding its identity and culture, its customs and popular traditions, its poetry and its history.

Like the Egyptians, the Chinese have invented a complex form of writing which uses pictugraphic and ideographic symbols. However, while the hierogliphs of the Pharaoes' times are now museum relics, the Chinese characters are still nowadays the most astonishing representation of a language. That language is also the fundamental agglutinative element in the Chinese cultural monolith.

The population of China grows at an annual rate of twelve million people, as much as the total number of the inhabitants of Australia. The Chinese outnumber the North-Americans, the Soviets, and the Europeans put together; however, their gross national product is inferior to that of France. One hundred and eighty years ago, Napoleon cast the warning: 'When China wakes up, the world shall tremble!'. In 1974, Alain Peyrefitte used the expression as a title for a book, a best-seller in the western hemisphere. But China, the great China, in spite of all the commotions, sufferings and vigils, drowsily pursues her way through History.

It is a paradoxical country, I repeat. With a national income of US$450 per capita, less than of many countries which are considered poor, it launches and recuperates artificial satellites, has its own atomic bombs since 1961, and owns intercontinental balistic missiles.

China prides itself on having the vastest and the greatest literature which has ever been written by any people. However, it has produced only one admirable great writer in the 20th century, Lu Xun. The Complete Works of Poetry of the Tang Dinasty (The Quan Tang Shi) -the golden age of Chinese Poetry, from 618 to 907 of our era - is an anthology of 48900 poems written by 2300 different authors. However, 30% of the Chinese population are, still nowadays, illiterate.

The Chinese, who have never been a religious people - despite the twenty five centuries of Confucionism as the official State doctrine - have deified Mao Zedong during the ten years of the catastrophic Proletarian Cultural Revolution, only to withdraw, soon after and without much sorrow, from the majestic figure of the old leader.

The Chinese, who have always been lovers of peace and quiet, of personal comfort, good food, and the general pleasures of life, are still able to endure the most arduous toils, the most painful hardships. 'They smile while they suffer', observed Ferreira de Castro forty years ago in his A Volta ao Mundo.

China, which has some of the most beautiful women in the world, has until very recently and through a radical communist morality, deliberately tried to present them as the plainest ones.

China is an ocean of contradictions in which we, the westerners, sail, always running the risk of a shipwreck. That is why it is so difficult to travel inside that country and that people, and it is also why tremendous errors are so common in the analysis of Chinese realities.

In China, they say: 'The foreigner who comes to our country for fifteen days will write a book, he who comes for some months will write some articles for the newspapers, and he who stays longer will break his pen and will not write another line anymore.'

I know by experience that the fact of having known China for many years produces a drowsiness of will, a soft torpidity which martyrizes and gives one pain. China, the land of a people different from all other peoples, comes into us, invades us, and it then becomes hard to talk, or write, about the Chinese. Maybe because we know them better, or ignore much more about them.

Goethe, who was a lover of Chinese civilization, glossing the old socratic principle 'The more I know, the better I know that I know nought', wrote: 'man knows only when he knows that he knows little. Doubt grows with knowledge.' And Confucius, who also knew much about the things of life and about his people, said, six centuries before the birth of Christ: 'If you know, act like a man who knows. If you do not know, admit that you do not know; that is knowledge.'

The old Chinese are wise, a wisdom founded in five thousand years of History and of stories. The old Chinese are intelligent, an intelligence acquired during many, many centuries which they have lived in hardship and with intensity.

The amazing Lie Zi (450-376 b. c.) who, according to the taoist tradition, could ride winds and clouds, says:

"Two little boys lived by the sea and loved seagulls. Every morning they would play among the birds and many other seagulls came near them. One day, their father said:

- I know that you play with the seagulls. Catch some of them and bring them to me. I want to enjoy myself too.

The following day, the two little boys went to the seashore. The seagulls hovered in the sky, but did not come down to them.

As a conclusion, the best of all discourses is the one which does not use words, the perfect action is to act without taking action, the wisdom of the wisest is always not very profound."

Another of Liu Zi's stories:

"A farmer did not know where his axe was. He then suspected that the son of a neighbour had stolen it from him and he started to watch the boy. He had exactly the very ways of an axe-thief, the words he said sounded exactly like axe-thieves' words; his ways and behaviour were those of someone who had stolen an axe.

But suddenly, while digging the earth, the farmer did find his lost axe.

The following day, the man watched the neighbour's son again. He then noticed that the ways, the words, the behaviour, and the attitudes of the boy were not at all those of an axe-thief."

Chinese wisdom has almost always eluded western intelligence. The West and the East can hardly interpenetrate; they look at each other sometimes with disdain, sometimes with suspicion, and, mostly, they ignore each other.

I am now going to give you a curious recent example:

In 1970, in his Last Will, Nikita Kruchtchev wrote the following about Mao Zedong:" I was never quite sure of understanding his meaning. I thought, at the time, that it has to do with certain aspects of Chinese mentality and their way of thinking. Some of Mao's statements used to shock me by their simplicity, others, by their complexity. I was never quite sure of Mao's position. With the Chinese, it is impossible to know by which law one lives."

It is true that the Russian mind and the Chinese mind have never been able to understand each other. The Sino-Soviet conflict, which started in the beginning of the 50's, was, apart from the political differences, a confrontation of cultures, and although it might sound strange regarding, as it does, two communist countries, a conflict between two different conceptions of the world.

Some years ago, in Peking, a Chinese friend of mine told me of a small dialogue exchanged between Kruchtchev and Zhou Enlai, who was then the Chinese Prime-Minister (1961). The relations between the two countries were already very tense and, after a very sour discussion about some political questions, Kruchtchev decided to be 'nice' to Zhou Enlai and told him: 'In spite of our differences, we do have a lot in common. We both believe in marxism, you are a Prime-Minister, I am a Prime-Minister too, we are both responsible for the governments of two of the greatest nations in the world. But there is a big difference between us - I am the son of peasants and you are the son of mandarins.' Zhou Enlai, who was in fact not a son but a grandson of mandarins, smiled and answered: 'I beg your pardon, but that is not a difference, it is yet another likeness. It means that we are both of us traitors.' 'Traitors?!... How is that?...', Kruchtchev asked. "Well, you have betrayed the peasants, and I have betrayed the mandarins.'

Speaking of politics and politicians, Han Feizi, the philosopher, wrote, 240 years before the birth of Christ:

"You can, in general, expect to find about ten honest men in each country, which is an excellent average. But the State must have one hundred posts. Thus it is that there are more official posts than good men to occupy them, which amounts to ten honest men and ninety villains to occupy all the places. Therefore one can expect the result to be generalized disorder, rather than a well-organized government. And that is why the wise sovereign believes in a system and not in individual capacities, has faith in a method and is distrustful of personal probity."

Han Feizi was the greatest theoretician of the Fa Jia school, better known in the West as 'Legism'. He would die, poisoned, in prison, maybe because he had forgotten one of the exemplary statements by Confucius: 'The honest man tells the truth, only a fool tells the whole truth.' In any case, his principles would exert a great influence upon modern China and Mao Zedong himself.

Zhuang Zi (369-286 b. c.), the greatest of all taoist thinkers and one of the great poets of freedom, tells the following story:

"Zhuang Zi was fishing by a river, when he was approached by two mandarins who had been sent by the Prince of Zhou:

- Our Prince wishes to see you and appoint you Prime-Minister of the kingdom of Zhou. Zhuang Zi went on with his fishing and, without even turning his head, answered:

- I have heard that there is in the Kingdom of Zhou a sacred turtle which died many, many years ago. The Prince keeps that turtle locked in his ancestors' temple. Well, would the turtle prefer to be dead and have its mortal remains worshipped, or would it rather be alive, shaking its tail in the mud of the swamps?

- It would prefer to be alive, shaking its tail in the mud of the swamps - the mandarins answered.

- You can go back - said Zhuang Zi - I myself also prefer to shake my tail in the mud of the swamps."

In China, better than in any other country, can one see how the continuity of ideas, traditions, ways and customs manifests itself century after century.

Mao Zedong, who knew the cultural foundations of his motherland extremely well, used to quote the old philosophers and the old traditional folk tales to illustrate his ideology. This is how, in 1945, Mao spoke about one of those tales:

"In old China there was a fable called 'How Yukong Removed the Mountains'. That fable tells about a man named Yukong who, in times gone by, lived in the North of China. South of his house, there were two big mountains, Taihang and Wangwu, which barred his way. Leading his sons, Yukong decided to pull the mountains down with his pickaxe. Seing them thus engaged, another old man, called Chezou, burst into laughing and said: 'That is silly of you! Alone, you will never be able to pull those two mountains down.' Yukong answered: 'When I die, my children will remain after me; when they die, there will be my grandchildren, and thus will generations of my family succeed one another without interruption. As for those two mountains, however high they may be, they cannot grow any higher, but shall become lower each time the pickaxe blows. Why then should we not be able to pull them down?' And Yukong went on excavating, day after day, which moved the god of heaven and he had two angels come down to Earth to carry the two mountains away. Nowadays, the Chinese people also has two mountains: imperialism and feudalism. The Communist Party of China has decided a long time ago to pull them down. We must persevere and work hard, for we too can move the god of heaven. For us, the god of heaven is no other but the mass of the Chinese people."

One of the characteristic features of the Chinese mind is the unity of opposites, their complementarity and their permanent change, movement and dialectics, the resolution of contradictions, the immediate emergence of new contradictions which are always insoluble for, upon being solved, they give rise to new contradictions.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, Chen Lifu, the philosopher, wrote: "As men are not alike, their analogies are characterized by seven stages. In the first, the strong one tolerates the weak one; in the second, the strong one despises the weak one; in the third, the strong one pities the weak one; in the fourth, the strong one enslaves the weak one; in the fifth, the strong one becomes weak; in the sixth, the weak one protects the strong one; in the seventh, the strong one and the weak one are the same.

Going back to Zhuang Zi and to his building of taoist wisdom, we can read: 'The universe as such is not the expression of the absolute. All things change in time, with evolution, according to that which begins and to that which ends. Science teaches us that things change their aspect and that what is absolute becomes relative. That is why the distance shades away between big and small, what comes before and what comes after, in a never-ending Chain.'

And, further on, in his Book of Zhuang Zi:

'Those who affirm that the fair and the just can exist without their correlatives, the unfair and the unjust, or that good government can exist without bad government, understand neither the great principles of the universe, nor the essence of creation. How can one speak of the existence of Heaven without referring the existence of Earth, or of the negative principle without referring the positive one? However, there are still people who continue to hold those endless discussions. Those people are either naive or insane.'

The static quality of the Western civilizations has much to do with the cyclic character of their way of thinking. Also with their wisdom, so different from ours, so closely linked to the old Greek Logic and to the apparent Christian dynamism.

This is yet another very old story of Chinese taoism:

"An old and poor peasant had a horse, but one day the animal ran away. In the evening, the neighbours came to manifest their sorrow, saying that he had been very unlucky. The peasant only said: "Maybe." The following day, the horse came back with six wild mares. In the evening, the neighbours came to congratulate him, saying that he had been very lucky. The man only answered: "Maybe." The following day, the peasant's son fell down and broke a leg while riding one of the wild mares. In the evening, the neighbours came to say that they were sorry that he had such bad-luck - and he simply said: "Maybe." Then the next day there came to the village the government officers who were responsible for the conscription of young men. But the peasant's son did not go to the battle-field because he had a broken leg. In the evening, the neighbours came to congratulate him again and the old man simply answered: "Maybe."

And, to conclude, Bei Yujing's apologue, which is fourteen centuries old:

"Once upon a time, a monk, a bandit, a painter, a miser, and a wise man were travelling together. When the night fell they took shelter in a cave.

- A better place could not be found for an hermitage. - the monk exclaimed.

- What a good refuge for a highwayman. - the bandit said.

- The torch-lights, the play of shades, what extraordinary themes for the brush! - the painter whispered by his turn.

- But this is the most excellent place to hide a treasure! - the miser observed.

The wise man, who was silently listening to all this, finally said:

- What a wonderful cave! "•