Chinese Culture: Tradition

Confucianism is widely considered to be the earliest school of thought of ancient China. It is recognized by its endeavors to restore the rites of Zhou or Zhou Li. Therefore, it would be important to have some understanding of what the Rites of Zhou are about.
The economic and political system during the Zhou dynasty (circa 1100 to 256 BC) was feudalism. It was a hierarchical system with the King of Zhou who was also known as the son of heaven occupying the top position.
At the beginning of the Zhou dynasty, the King of Zhou established fiefdoms for the nobles that supported his reign. Most of these nobles belong to the King’s clan. Each of these feudal lords further divided his land to establish fiefdoms for his immediate clan members. Therefore, the Zhou’s system is also known as the clan system. That means basically the whole ruling class of China at that period was of one clan. The stability of the system was supposed to be maintained by the natural bond between the clan members. Of course, in reality this bond was not sufficient for keeping peace among the states.
Therefore, as legend has it, the regent of the second king of the Zhou dynasty known as Zhou Gong contrived a code of conduct known as Zhou Li or the rites of Zhou. The rites of Zhou prescribed the governing structure of the kingdom. They clearly stated each and every responsibility and right of the nobles and officials. There was also a code which prescribes how people should act according to his rank in just about every situation and event in a very meticulous fashion. Such a code reflects a social order or hierarchy that permeates the society, and such an order is originally based upon natural kinship. This is intended to secure the stability of a loosely and newly unified kingdom through kinship and respect.
And it did work for a long period of time, not because the King had overwhelming economic and military power. The stability of the system was due to the respect of the participating states to the code of conduct, that is Zhou Li.
There were three major reasons for them to maintain such respect:
First, at the beginning, most of the feudal lords were close family members. Natural kinship still had strong bearing. The primogenitary system of succession helped in prolonging the effect.
Second, the rites of Zhou did bring relative social and political stability to the kingdom in general while most of the feudal lords respected them. So, it is to everyone’s advantage to hold them in high regard.
The third reason is, the rites of Zhou were basically moral instead of legal in nature. It placed a very strong moral constraint on the aristocrats. In short, the rites of Zhou were not a set of rules that were backed by threats of penalty from the king but were mainly a moral code shared by the aristocrats.
As time went by, this strength in holding the kingdom together deteriorated for the following reasons:
First of all, the kinship between the feudal lords and the King of Zhou diminished over time.
Second is, the Kings of Zhou failed to respect the system themselves.
Third, the system was unfair to the peasants and the lower class and was therefore not supported by the common people.
The fourth reason is, when the King lost his power, no state could rely on him for their security. Therefore, each state would have to protect herself through strengthening her own power. That means no more respectful submission to the King of Zhou.

The deterioration of the rites of Zhou seems to be inevitable as history progressed and population grew.
At the times of Kongzi, the founder of Confucianism, political instabilities permeated the kingdom. Political and economic reform was urgently needed.
Kongzi put forward the idea of restoring the rites of Zhou as the solution.
Holding little to no political power, Kongzi would need to persuade the political elites at the time to support his idea through cogent reasoning. We may lay out his reasons as the followings:
The first reason was, as a social structure, the rites of Zhou worked. When a student asked Kongzi if the Duke of Wei offered him the job of governor, what would be the first policy that Kongzi would implement, Kongzi answered his student by saying that, it would be to make sure that everyone (who held political power) in the state observes the limit of his power. Only then could the rites of Zhou be truly established and through which the state could be properly governed. We can see that Kongzi believes that the political turmoil of the time was not caused by the rites of Zhou but was rather caused by the fact that powerful people did not respect those rites. If the problem is not the system, then political reform should not be directed at changing the system but educating the people to respect the system.
The second reason, as a form of education, the rites were what the society needed and through which an individual became truly noble. Since the key to successful political reform was to educate the powerful political elite to respect the rites of Zhou, it would require a “curriculum”. The rites of Zhou would serve that function. As mentioned earlier, the rites of Zhou contain a set of rules of conduct that prescribe what people should do in a lot of situations such as meeting with your equals, hiring a foreigner as an official, funerals, weddings, drinking parties, and archery contest. Participants of the rites of Zhou were told to observe these rules not just because they are the rules but because it is proper, moral, and just to act accordingly. With enough practice of the rites of Zhou one would become a “connoisseur” in moral actions. Just like learning to appreciate art. One needs not to see all the paintings in the world and be told of the value of each of them in order to be able to judge every possible painting one might encounter. One only needs to learn to appreciate a limited number of paintings to acquire the ability to discern the artistic values of painting in general. By the same token, with enough practice of moral actions, one would acquire an ability to discern the moral values of action in general. With such an ability, one could then act confidently and independently without making moral mistakes. Such confidence and the sense of independence make one mature and noble. In this way, the rites of Zhou provided the education that every individual who aspired to become noble needs. And only when enough of the political elites become noble would the rites of Zhou receive their due respect, and would social order then be stable. Therefore, the rites of Zhou provided the very education that society needs.
Now the third reason of restoring the rites of Zhou. The rites of Zhou are a manifestation of righteousness. The previous two reasons are consequential. Kongzi also believes that there is a deontological reason to restore the rites of Zhou. It is that those rites reflect righteousness. What is prescribed in the rite is morally required. So, it would be a duty for us to act accordingly whether or not they would stabilize society and restore political harmony. This is why even if there is another political system that seems more promising in restoring social order in a more efficient way, as long as it does not coincide with righteousness, the rites of Zhou should still be preferred.
Now the fourth reason for restoring the rites of Zhou. Righteousness is a demand from human nature. Now, the problem is “Why be righteous?” especially when being righteous would probably lead to the loss of one’s power and life. Kongzi’s answer to that would simply be that it is required by our nature as human. Kongzi calls this nature “Ren”. The concept of Ren is the core idea of Confucianism. Although usually translated as “commiseration” or “compassion”, its meaning is very difficult to grasp. We may understand Ren as the moral intuitions one would have in any given situation. Kongzi believes that it is what one cares about most as a human. It is one’s natural ultimate concern. Such intuition is innate, born with, not a result of education or socialization, and it is very difficult or even impossible to erase, but it is very easy to neglect. If one chooses to neglect Ren, one would not respond to what he truly cares about as a human being. The regular disregard of Ren would therefore means deserting what is truly meaningful to one as a human being. One thereby creates a void of meaninglessness for oneself. A person may try to numb the unbearable pain of the void by pursuing self-interests, but nothing will fill the void. He would become insatiable in material pursuit. In order to get out of such a predicament in life, one has to aware of Ren and start to respond to it appropriately, which one can only do by refusing to submerge oneself in fulfilling his daily pursuit namely his own interest. This is why the Chinese character for Ren literately means “two people”. This is why one needed to be righteous and practice the rites of Zhou Li, and why they should be restored.

Kongzi’s teaching is significant to us in shedding light on our quest for meaning.
First of all, Ren as a continuous moral response to our environment, never ceases to operate. And it is not the self that is socially constructed; but the true self that demands to be actualized in every second of our life. To act according to Ren’s demand means to actualize the deepest potentials as a human being, not as an individual, and actualizing one’s potentials is believed to be essential in leading a meaningful life.
There are two types of potentials of the self.
There is the self as a socially constructed individual and also the self as a human being. Actualizing the potential as a socially constructed individual is important and the major source of meaning (a point on which Nietzsche and Kongzi would agree). However, when the potential as an individual are in conflict with the potential as a human being, Kongzi would suggest denying the actualizations of the potential as an individual and give way to the potentials as a human.
There are two reasons for this.
First of all, only by doing so could one be in peace with oneself. The potentials as an individual (constructed or innate) are usually contingent. For instance, one may have the potentials to win the Olympic game in a very short period of his life. What seems to be very rewarding at a particular moment might not be so in a year or two, but the remorse over the violations of the demand of one’s nature will always be there. The usual solution that we employ is to pretend that it was over and no longer important, and that is what the famous 20th Century existentialist J.P. Sartre means by “bad faith”. It is an inauthentic mode of existence. You just pretend that you do not have the guilt.
The second reason: Fail to fully actualize one’s human nature would lead to an unfulfillable void in one’s life. This void manifested itself as boredom in our everyday life which one cannot eliminate through focusing on fulfilling one’s interest as an individual. Have you ever been so bored that nothing seems interesting, nothing matters, and the problem is that you have a gut feeling that there should be interesting, and something should matter. This is not a psychological need which could be filled with some sort of “meaningful” activities you may find interesting as a socially constructed individual for this is a deprivation of human nature.
The unbearable lightness of the void may only be settled through the actualization of the potentials of the self as human.

In Unit 1, Dr David Wan delivers 3 mini-lectures on the origin of Confucianism.
In Unit 1b, Dr Wan explains the development of the proprieties or “li” in the Zhou dynasty. Such proprieties are called Zhou li (in the Wade-Giles romanization it’s also spelt as Chou li). In the beginning of the Zhou dynasty, the nobles faithfully followed Zhou li. This helped maintain a strong political and social order. However, they changed their attitudes and gradually held Zhou li in disdain when the military power of Kings of the Zhou weakened in the second half of the dynasty. The society fell into chaos and people’s moral sense severely degenerated. This was the background when Kongzi constructed his philosophy, Confucianism.
Confucianism remains the foundation of the dominant traditional values of Chinese culture. Countries like Vietnam, Korea, Japan and Singapore are also deeply influenced by it in their traditional values.
In Unit 1c, Dr Wan articulates Kongzi’s attempts to address the social and political turmoil in the Zhou dynasty. Kongzi argues for the return to Zhou li. Dr Wan focuses on four rationales for Kongzi to restore people’s respect for Zhou li. First, it had worked well to maintain the social and political structure of the Zhou. Second, through the practice of Zhou li, people learn how to discern the moral values of their action. That is, they know what is right and what is wrong through following the proprieties. Third, Zhou li manifests righteousness.
Finally, if you ask why righteousness is so important, Kongzi’s answer is that it is bound up with human nature, of which the foundation is ren. Ren is sometimes translated as compassion or commiseration, though Dr Wan cautions that translating it in this way has yet to fully capture the meanings of ren. Now, if you neglected the importance of ren, you would disregard the meaning of your existence as a human being at large. Because, Kongzi argues, ren makes you a human.
In Unit 1d, Dr Wan emphasizes that, to follow Kongzi’s idea of ren, you can actualize your deepest potentials as a human being. And that would make your life meaningful and fulfilled. On the other hand, if you ignored the importance of ren, you would find your life devoid of meaning. Some people might pretend that they wouldn’t care about this. But Dr Wan compares this pretence to an important idea of the modern existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s, that is, bad faith. You would find yourself unhappy and empty if you keep ignoring what makes you a human, that is, ren.
I invite you to think about this question: Do you sometimes feel that your life is boring and devoid of meaning, even if you have tried to fill up the void by material satisfaction? If your answer is positive, you may consider Confucianism as a solution to the problem. That is, try to unleash your potentials as a human being through the moral cultivation of ren (or your compassion), manifesting righteousness and acting by observing the proprieties of your culture in the modern context. As such, you apply three key components of Confucianism.
They are compassion, righteousness and proprieties, or in Chinese terms, ren, yi and li.

1. What was the origin of ancient Confucianism?
2. Can you describe the status of the King of the Chou Zhou dynasty in the hierarchical system at that time?
3. Why did Kongzi think that Zhou li should be adopted?
4. What is the Confucian explanation of the inner emptiness of modern people?
5. How does ancient Confucian wisdom help us address the modern human predicament?

1. Dietz, Adam Matthew. 2010. Original Confucianism: An Introduction to the Superior Person.lulu.com.
2. Gardner, Daniel K. 2014. Confucianism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Littlejohn, Ronnie L. 2011. Confucianism: An Introduction. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.
4. Paramore, Kiri. 2016. Japanese Confucianism: A Cultural History. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
5. Van Norden, Bryan W. 2011. Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Let me start out by telling you a story. Although it is a very short one, it may well be one of the most well-known and enduring stories within Chinese culture. Even today, all educated Chinese will know it. It is told by one of the most famous classical thinkers of China, called Zhuangzi, who supposedly lived almost two and a half thousand years ago. He tells us a very short story about a happy butterfly.
“Once I, Zhuangzi, dreamt that I was a butterfly; a butterfly fluttering about happily, so utterly fulfilling its purpose! It was innocent of knowledge about Zhuangzi. Yet, suddenly I awoke and started to realize that I still was Zhuangzi. Now I don’t know whether it has been me dreaming that I was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that it was me. Yet there must be a difference — we will call this the ‘Transformation of Things.’”
Nowadays people have largely forgotten what this story really reveals. Most will say that it shows the impossibility of separating dream from reality, or something vague like that. Really, something completely different is at stake here. Several layers of meaning are relevant for our understanding. It is necessary to realize that what we are made witness to in this story: the human capacity to viscerally relate to other realities that we cannot directly access—neither physically nor through reasoning.
Assuming that the starting point of the reader is the conventional human reality of differentiating between different things (mommy, daddy, house, food, cloud) and distinguishing them in a variety of ways (angry daddy, sweet mommy, warm house, yummy food, dark cloud), the story first plays along by contrasting these two realities: the complex human reality and the simple butterfly reality. Or, more precisely, it shows Zhuangzi’s difficult condition as resulting from the deeply ingrained human tendency to question and analyze – only leaving him to have his question unanswered. This is juxtaposed to the butterfly’s happy self-contentment, naturally being a butterfly that is just itself. Implied is the reason for the butterfly’s joy: its sense of being in tune with its own nature. Being a butterfly, its nature is pervaded by an emptiness of language; it does not ask questions, it is entirely absorbed in its doing (fluttering) and its being.
Another implication is that of identity, and by extension, individuality. Not only is the butterfly innocent of knowledge about Zhuangzi, it is so taken up by the act of flying around that it does not inquire after its own identity. Indeed, this is what Zhuangzi experiences in his dream: the butterfly’s liberation from Zhuangzi’s own identity, and the subsequent irrelevance of his human concerns, purpose, and existential uncertainty.
When the dream ends and human reality has returned, Zhuangzi’s individual self is what resurfaces immediately upon awakening: he self-consciously wonders who he is, and how he is different from the butterfly—both vexing, existential questions.
It is in the above senses that the butterfly embodies a challenge to human subjectivity – that is, the human self-perception as an individual being – and thereby reveals a split between the “language-driven” human individuality and the “being-driven” fullness of experience that can exist only for as long as differential tools like language have not shattered it into fragments of differentiation.
Other stories in Zhuangzi elaborate on this theme as well, such as that of the minnows under the bridge where Zhuangzi strolls with his friend Hui Shi. In short, the story narrates that whereas Zhuangzi intuits the “joy of the fishes” as he and his friend are silently strolling on the bridge (which is of course an emblem of crossing gaps) over the River Hao, he inadvertently destroys their intuitive connection by verbalizing it – that is, by doing what a fish or a butterfly cannot do, and therefore necessarily will always be at odds with it. Even worse, Zhuangzi’s words draw a dialectic response from Hui Shi, whose logical analysis prevents him from perceiving the same joy. Poor Zhuangzi – and poor Hui Shi for having his heart obstructed by his words!
At the end, however, Zhuangzi literally “goes back to the beginning,” before words had been uttered, in an attempt to reveal his natural affinity with the fish. Wordless, both the butterfly and the fish serve as evidence that humans contain within themselves true knowledge of being an entirely different entity — insect or aquatic animal, or any other living thing.
Zhuangzi’s intuitive understanding of the butterfly and the minnows points to another aspect of being that is relevant here. It is not just a matter of humans having the inherently visceral capacity to know what an inaccessible reality such as that of the butterfly may be like, it is the suggestion that humans and butterflies share common ground: a “real” cosmic connection.

Even though I will introduce to you the main ideas of Zhuangzi and of course, Laozi , two classical\thinkers who are generally seen as Daoists, the\best way to understand their ideas is actually by contrasting them with that of the other great thinker of Chinese antiquity: Kongzi, better known in English as “Confucius.” Most people see him as the founder of Confucianism.
Before explaining the traditions of thought and practice each of them represents, let us start with that contrast, and let us do that by comparing two famous paintings: one of Laozi, and one of Kongzi. Although both are from the fifteenth century, roughly two millenniums after they lived, the paintings allow us to observe how Laozi and Kongzi were seen, and how their paintings represent these two men in very specific and enlightening ways.

On one side we see Laozi, riding leisurely on an ox. We notice that he is looking upwards to the sky, not paying attention to where his ox is going. Laozi is carried forward by it, but he seems not to guide it – it’s not just that he’s not paying attention, if we look closely we see that he is a bit cross-eyed, making him seem a bit silly, and perhaps absent-minded. And the ox, in turn, is not too concentrated on his trajectory either, as we see the animal looking backwards. It is not clear where they are going, who guides whom, or what guides either of them… neither of them are looking forward, apparently not intending to reach any goal.
On the other side, we see Kongzi. Solemnly he stands, his hands clasped in a ceremonial gesture. He looks friendly and courteous, and is staring into our world firmly and knowingly. He is dressed well, for a formal occasion. If we consider his whole posture, it is as if he is waiting for a guest to arrive, ready to greet, to bow, and to have a good conversation. One senses that Kongzi is a man of the world, someone who knows the guidelines for ceremony, who does stand on ritual.
Indeed, much of what Kongzi wanted to achieve was the proper performance of ritual, and, so his thinking went, if everybody would perform ritual correctly, society would be peaceful and the world well ordered. Kongzi’s models of ritual propriety were laid out by the founders of the golden era in Chinese history known as the Zhou dynasty: the legendary King Wen and King Wu, and the Duke of Zhou. Kongzi referred to their models of statecraft with the term “way of the ancient kings” (xianwang zhi dao). According to Kongzi, it should be the ritual practice of the Zhou founders – their “way” (dao) – that can “guide” (dao) a state and its people towards order.
Laozi, on the other hand, did not believe that order could be imposed through ritual. In fact, he believed that no order at all could ever be imposed by any human guideline whatsoever. This was of course to some extent because he saw human action as limited in its scope, always only representing some individual’s preoccupations. But more important than that was his insight that the world did not require anybody to impose any human order because, in fact, it had its own order – the natural order. The text that is attributed to Laozi, nowadays best known as the Dao De Jing, revolves around this notion of natural order. The word used for it is “Dao,” literally the highest “Way,” or the sacred “Guide.” It refers to the abstract and impersonal force that engenders the cosmos and all being in it. The Dao constitutes a sacred, natural order that eternally structures the dynamics of birth, life, and death. In the Daoist view, humans cannot impose order and must not try to do so, as their manufactured order will only cause a disturbance of the natural order; humans must follow the natural order and cultivate their innermost self towards proximity with the great ordering principle of the Dao. And this natural order was the highest order imaginable, no human would be able to do better.

The problem with the miracle of natural order, however, was (and still is) that it cannot be taught in words.
We’ve already witnessed the happiness of the butterfly and the fish who do not know language. This is why in Daoism there is much emphasis on NOT teaching, on NOT believing in guidelines, NOT issuing rules and regulations, NOT governing by laws, and NOT believing in dogmas. As the Dao De Jing says in its opening statement: “The Way that can be spoken of is NOT the eternal Way.”
Such a negatively phrased start, certainly, is not a good form of self-promotion: if the first sentence of a book says that its main topic can and will NOT be elaborately explained in words, then… why read on?
One thing that these early Daoist writings suggest is that, as the universal “Way” of growth, this natural order is always already present in every being in the form of some knowledge that cannot be taught in words. It is an inner, bodily knowledge, often very clearly structured along a rhythm or a sequence of distinct stages: Our heart “knows” how to beat (pump-pump-pump), our lungs how to breathe (in-out-in-out), and no tree needs to be told when to grow leaves or shed them at the appropriate time (autumn-spring-autumn-spring). This is the Dao of Laozi – a “Way” of being that cannot be taught, because natural beings already “know” a natural order. And it really is a Way of growth and decay, of life and death, of being and non-being.
Even more complex processes can be seen at work in these, namely, those of creative “transformation” (hua): a woman’s body “knows” how to grow a little human being inside her womb (even though she cannot actively create one by herself, nor can any man of course – ultimately it is up to the invisible forces at work inside the human body – all they can do is engage in a rhythmically structured act (in-out-in-out) of coupling two bodies into one). And again, even the invisible forces inside the human body are predictably structured in different stages along a timeline of 9 months.
Needless to say, perhaps, the eternal cycle of nature is itself also a rhythm in a fixed sequence (life-death-life-death).
Nonetheless, despite the human impossibility of wilfully creating a child (or perhaps because of it), we will see later that Daoists have worked hard to emulate it. In later Daoist traditions, the concept of growing a new human being is used as a paradigm for self-transformation, when accomplished practitioners may give birth to a new self – called the “True Person” (zhenren).
But let us first return to the process of becoming, and the way it is structured in similar ways across living beings. This, too, is illustrated in the Dao De Jing. The relevant passage is strangely numerical, and although it’s the Dao De Jing’s verbal form of illustration, it’s best read together with another picture – a picture of a seed sprouting and transforming into a plant.
The passage goes as follows:
“The Way (Dao) begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad creatures.
The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two.”
The picture painted with words – or rather with numbers – is one of genesis, of birth, of creation. The Daoist theory here is that, no being exists until it exists. This may seems obvious, but it’s important to say it because in the Daoist thinking, everything begins (always) with non-being. Every-thing emerges from no-thing.
In the beginning there is nothingness – also referred to as Emptiness, or The Void. This nothingness can transform into some-thing, and here it comes, only because of the effect of the Dao. And this is exactly what happens with every living being in our universe – and even with the universe itself. It is the silent force of the Dao that shapes every-thing.
Looking back to the picture, a plant (but, of course also a living being) is non-existent until, somehow, some force kicks off a process of becoming. This force is in Chinese called Dao, and translated into English as the “Way.” It is a powerful structure that gives shape and content to everything produced in the natural world. Not just living beings, but also the oceans, mountains, stars, sun, and even time and space.
Indeed, the whole cosmos and everything in it exists on the basis of the Dao.

From a happily fluttering butterfly we have now arrived at the vast expanses of time-space. For the sake of keeping things grounded, literally to remain standing with two feet on the ground, we need to investigate the very important connection between these two – that is, between living creatures like butterflies and humans on one hand, and the universe and its time-space on the other. This connection is actually very simple, although as soon as I say it, it will sound impossible.
So, to announce it in all its impossibility first: living beings like humans have a body that is in itself a cosmos, a whole universe. And, from a reverse perspective, the universe is itself also a human body.
Let’s first consider that in a metaphorical sense to facilitate understanding of the more literal sense later. Because if we first take it as a metaphor, we can say that, indeed, and of course, everybody has a whole world within oneself. A world of thoughts, fantasies, knowledge, experiences, images, etc. Or, still somewhat metaphorically, given the fact that we can hold a picture of the world within ourselves, in that sense we carry the world with us. And it is our world, because my image of the world is different from yours. And either way, in this time of self-centered individualism, we are all the center of the world – albeit, indeed, OUR world.
We can move one step closer to a less metaphorical and more material interpretation if we consider what we are made of. Then we will realize that there is no component inside our bodies that is not also present in the components that make up the universe. Both our body and the universe are made of the same stuff.
These analogies are just that: analogies. Yet, in the Daoist worldview, the analogy is very real. According to Daoist thinking, the equivalence between body and universe is quite literal.
Let us look again at a picture. What we see is two feet forming a square and a head forming a circle. It corresponds to a slogan that you often encounter in classical writings, namely that Heaven is round like the human head, and Earth is square like two human feet standing next to each other. This is how some of the classical texts phrase it literally:
“The roundness of the head is in the image of Heaven;
The squareness of the human feet is in the image of earth.”
And the classical texts take this analogy into more detailed analogies. The above passage continues like this:
“Heaven has four seasons, five phases, nine regions, and 365 days.
Humans have four limbs, five organs, nine apertures, and 365 joints.
Heaven has wind, rain, cold, and heat;
Humans have taking, giving, joy, and anger.”
Descriptions like these are quite common in classical texts, and although neither Laozi nor Zhuangzi use the exact same wording, it is clear that they, too, shared this understanding of equivalence between human and universe. In a nutshell, this is what we refer to nowadays as the human micro-cosmos and its similarity to the universal macro-cosmos.
So, there we go: now we understand one way in which Daoism provides a theoretical basis for our similarity to other creatures, like butterflies. Even though each creature can only see its own world, at the same time we are made from the same stuff as the big world, structured according to the same principles of time and space, and just like the world holds us within it, we hold the world within us.
In the next and last segment, I will try to offer some thoughts about why all this would matter to us, nowadays.

One consequence of this sort of thinking should be easy to see immediately: As soon as you understand that any other person is like yourself, the focus can be more easily on similarities and connections instead of differences. Naturally, such an insight leads to empathy. And the step from empathy to compassion is not very big. Anyone who understands that other people are like herself or himself will be much more likely to treat them better, with less disinterest and perhaps less harshly.
In an individualistic world like ours, which has made the mistake of associating individual freedom with the right to fully be whoever we think we are, a world where parents push their children to become the best, the trap of narcissism is looming large. We do develop ourselves as we think we see fit – or at least we try to – but we appear to do so at the cost of others. Should we care about others if they happen to claim their right to individual freedom with less force than you? Isn’t it their responsibility? Why should we care?
Once we take for granted that others are like us, we should feel more connected. We can extend this form of empathy and compassion even further, beyond human beings, because the same goes for animals, plants, or the environment as a whole. It reminds us that things are interconnected. We are, each of us, the nodes in the connective tissue of the world. If we forget this interconnection, our existence becomes an obstacle to others, to the environment, to the world.
It is, then, also with this simpler and more ecological view that we may look one ast time at both the butterfly and the fish, and realize that what the Daoists try to tell us is not some romantic story about “harmony.” That would make the Daoist message irrelevant. What is at stake is the way that it FIRST elevates these tiny creatures to a position of equality in the discourse of human beings. So, they remind us, if we want to achieve freedom and justice for all, we should include those who have no voice of their own, and not single out ourselves as more important. What, after all, if others could do with you whatever they wanted, simply because you (and your life) were as irrelevant as a chicken in a slaughterhouse? It is really as urgent as that: equality.
Second, once we have elevated the butterfly and the fish to our level of relevance, it turns out we can actually learn something from them – there’s something at which they are much better than we are. I don’t mean just flying or swimming, although that’s true too. What they are better at is being themselves, fulfilling their purpose, and living their lives according to their specific potential. Nobody asks them to do anything else.
It should give us some pause to think about modesty: We have grown up thinking that hard work will lead to success, yet apparently it doesn’t work like that for everybody because the gap between rich and poor has only grown, and it is harder and harder to rise from the lower levels to the higher ones. Or consider this: our lives are facilitated by all kinds of modern devices, and we have achieved unbelievable medical success – yet at the same time we are at the verge of complete ecological collapse, with unprecedented pollution of air, lakes, rivers, and oceans, causing changes in climate that lead to humanitarian crises on a massive scale. Of course, you can say: well, I’m lucky and those who suffer are not… But in the end, it may turn out that the key really was “interconnection”: save others, and you will save yourself.

In Unit 2, Dr Mark Meulenbeld delivers 5 mini-lectures on Daoism.
In Unit 2b, Dr Meulenbeld retells two interesting stories from Zhuangzi.
The first story is about Zhuangzi who finds that he has turned into a butterfly in a dream. When he wakes up from his dream, he wonders if he is now part of the dream of the butterfly. Who, he asks, has been dreaming, Zhuangzi or the butterfly? Dr Meulenbeld explains that the story has more layers of meanings than that simple question. First, it concerns the distinction between the complex human reality and the simple butterfly reality. Second, it is about identity. The butterfly challenges the subjectivity of human reality, which is “language-driven.” The butterfly’s identity is “being-driven” without differentiation.
Dr Meulenbeld also discusses another famous story - the “joy of the fish.” Zhuangzi intuits the fish’s joy while his friend Hui Shi fails to do so because of the obstacle of language.
These two stories underscore Zhuangzi’s further insight: that is, the being-driven existence is what humans can achieve when they relinquish the use of linguistic distinctions.
The final Daoist moral is that humans and butterflies can share a real cosmic connection.
In Unit 2c, Dr Meulenbeld compares two paintings that symbolize the thoughts of Kongzi and Laozi. Kongzi believes that the social and political order can be imposed through the performance of ritual. On the other hand, Laozi does not believe in any manufactured or artificial order. He holds that the human order belongs to the natural order, which is based on the Dao. Dr Meulenbeld explains that the Dao constitutes a sacred, natural order that eternally structures the dynamics of birth, life and death.
In Unit 2d, Dr Meulenbeld elaborates on the manifestation of the Dao in the natural order. It is about the existence of rhythmic patterns in all sorts of transformations in the cosmos, from the growth of a human foetus to that of a seed sprout. This is the silent force of the Dao. The Dao is characterized with the principle that everything begins with nothing. That is, every-thing emerges from no-thing. Yet, the Dao shapes and structures everything: from living beings to oceans, mountains, stars, sun and even time and space.
In Unit 2e, Dr Meulenbeld further explains the connection between the cosmos and living beings like humans. If you think that you are distinct, you consider only your individuality. But when you consider the fact that our body and the universe are made of the same stuff, you will understand that the universe and humans are from the same order. According to Daoism, everything is unified into one natural order. In this sense, we are part of the cosmos and the cosmos is part of us.
In Unit 2f, Dr Meulenbeld concludes with the insights of Daoism. When you grasp the similarities and connections of everything in the cosmos, you’ll foster your empathy and avoid the trap of narcissism. When you see everything as interconnected, you’ll respect the equality of all living creatures. Instead of thinking that you are more important, you’ll nurture your sense of modesty and recognize the importance of protecting the environment.
Dr Muelenbeld makes a profound remark for your reflection in his mini-lecture: Save others and you will save yourself!

1. How does Daoism enlighten us with a butterfly and fish?
2. What is the difference between Laozi and Kongzi in evaluating the use of rituals?
3. Why is unspeakable knowledge so important for Daoism?
4. According to Daoism, what is our relationship with the universe?
5. What is the connection between Daoism and the equality of all living organisms?

1. Lau, D.C. (trans.). 2000. Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching. Penguin.
2. Mair, Victor (trans.). 2000. Wandering on the Way: Early Taoist Tales and Parables of Chuang Tzu. University of Hawai’i Press.
3. Puett, Michael & Christine Gross-Loh. 2017. The Path: A New Way to Think About Everything. Viking.
4. Schipper, Kristofer. 1994 [1983]. The Taoist Body. Trans. Karen Duval. University of California Press.
5. Slingerland, Edward. 2014. Trying Not to Try: Ancient China, Modern Science and the Power of Spontaneity. Crown.

We all know that Buddhism is a religion originated in ancient India. But whereas Buddhism claims only less than 1% of the Republic of India’s population today as believers, it is more influential in areas to which it later spread, and one of these areas is China.
In China today, you can see beautiful and sometimes gigantic Buddhist statues, temples packed with worshippers on special days, lay people chanting the name of Amitabha, pop stars singing Buddhist sutras, Buddhist organizations engaging in charity works, and so on.
This lecture of mine offers a short introduction to Chinese Buddhism. But as Buddhism originated in India about 500 years before it arrived in China, we have to begin with Indian Buddhism. What does Buddhism think is the problem of this world? How can one be liberated from suffering? When I introduce these Indian Buddhist doctrines, I’ll highlight the interesting twists they underwent and the impacts they had produced as they took root in China.
Ever since Buddhism came to China in the 1st century CE, both Chinese culture and Buddhism have been transformed through this culture exchange which lasted for centuries. New deities, new words, new material objects, and new ideas, including the most fundamental ones such as the Indian understandings of time and space, were introduced to China. In this encounter with another civilization, the Chinese had to ask themselves questions that had never occurred to them: Such as, are we really the center of the world? How is our language different from theirs?
China spent centuries to digest the rich cultural inputs from India that came with Buddhism. But as Buddhism declined gradually in India since the 7th century, Chinese Buddhism became highly indigenized - more original and creative in the Chinese way.
The most influential product out of this indigenization is Zen Buddhism. A product of China, where it is called Chan, Zen Buddhism spread to Korea, Japan, and, in the 20th century, Europe and North America. The term “Zen” is in fact the Japanese pronunciation of “Chan.”
Today I will use the frame of the “four noble truths” to go over the basic history and fundamental ideas of Chinese Buddhism.

According to Buddhist legends, all the Buddhist teachings we know today began with a prince in Ancient India. His name is Siddhartha Gautama, also known as Shaakya-muni, the sage of the Shaakya Clan. We don’t know when exactly he lived, but his sojourn in our world seems to fall upon a period which scholars call “the axial age.” The axial age covers hundreds of years from the 9th to 3rd century BCE, when from each important civilization emerged thinkers who provided the foundation of this civilization.
For example, in China there are Confucius and Laozi, in Greece there are Plato and Aristotle, and in India there are Siddhartha Gautama as well as founder of Jainism -- Mahavira.
Although we don’t even know in which century the Siddhartha was born, his birthday was celebrated in many Asian countries every spring on slightly different days. In China, on the 8th of the fourth month in lunar calendar every year, people shower the statue of the baby Buddha with water. The celebration may be mixed with some local custom and became something of a carnival. This is how people on Cheung Chau Island, a small island in Hong Kong, celebrate the Buddha’s Birthday every year. Steamed buns are piled up into towers and people race up the tower to snatch the buns.
Buddhist legends tell us that the Buddha’s conception and birth are full of miracles – though none of them involves steamed buns. The queen dreamed of a white elephant entering the right side of her torso and then after she woke up, she found herself pregnant. The baby was born from her right torso, without bringing any pain to his mom. He was able to walk and talk immediately, declaring “I am the chief of the world.”
The reason why I mentioned these details is that the birth story of the Buddha would later influence the narrative on the birth of Laozi, the mythical founder of Daoism. In some Daoist texts dated to the 2nd century CE, Laozi was said to be born out the left torso of his mother and to have white hair even when he was just born. He was also said to transform himself as a white elephant to enter the womb of an Indian queen. So apparently, it says, the Buddha was nothing but a reincarnation of the Chinese sage Laozi. This is just one of several examples of how Buddhism shaped Daoism’s narrative about itself.
According to the legends, the Prince Siddhartha Gautama is a very compassionate and sensitive person. His father loved him so much that he, like many parents today, got overprotective of him, and prevented him from experiencing or even seeing any suffering by keeping him in the luxurious palace. But one day, the legend goes, the Prince went out of his palace for an excursion.
What he would experience constitutes the fundamental allegory of Buddhist doctrines: he saw an old man on the roadside; never having seen an old man, he asked his charioteer, “Why does that man look different from me? Will I become like him?” The honest answers from his charioteer made him so upset that he returned home immediately. He pulled himself together for another outing, where he saw a sick man; on his third trip, a dead man. Completely depressed, on his fourth trip, he encountered a renunciant who left his family to pursue spiritual liberation. Here, the prince saw the possible way out of this world of suffering.

I call this story the fundamental allegory of Buddhism, because we see here Buddhism is not a religion based on God’s revelation or a certain myth about the creation of the universe. Rather, it is based on an ordinary human being’s experience of the world, which is suffering. Of course all religions, from a non-religious perspective, were created by humans who are not completely satisfied with this world. But Buddhism is especially candid about it.
This prince, who would be the Buddha, is no different from us; the only difference may be that he is more timid and sensitive than most of us. What he perceived – old age, disease, and death, in other words, suffering - is the first of the famous four noble truths of Buddhism.
Buddhism considers suffering the perpetual situation of our world, from which even death is unable to relieve us – because we will be reborn.
According to the cosmology Buddhism inherited from pre-Buddhism Indian belief, one could be reborn into any of the six realms: the realm of gods, anti-gods, humans, animals, hungry-ghosts, and hell. If one is kind and virtuous, he or she may have a good rebirth as a god or a rich and healthy human; if one is not, then reborn as a miserable being. But no matter which realm one is reborn into, there is suffering in various forms and degrees. Notice that being reborn in heaven is not the Buddhist goal. Gods in Heavens are not secure. They are just like Hollywood stars; though having a pleasant life that may be millions of years long, they will fall from heavens in despair once the merits of their good karma are all “cashed.”
This idea of rebirth and the related idea of karma came to China with Buddhism. In China, from very early on to the present day, people conduct Buddhist rituals for their deceased parents, hoping that they would have a good rebirth. This is done not only as part of the funeral but also on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month every summer. On this day, the Chinese celebrate the “ghost festival.” It is a festival that can be traced to both Buddhist and Daoist customs. On the Buddhist side, it says to be the final day of the three-month monsoon-season retreat of Buddhist monks that was originated in India. However, the 15th day of the 7th month in the ancient Indian calendar is not the same day as in the Lunar calendar. But it does not really matter for ordinary Chinese; just as people love to have bunnies and eggs for the Easter even though the passion of Jesus has nothing to do with them.
On the ghost festival, people make ritual offerings not only to their late parents but also to all roaming ghosts: putting food and incense at the crossroads, burning paper replicas of all things imaginable: money, cars, houses, ipads, etc. Drama performances could be considered as offerings too. With these, suffering may somehow be reduced, even though they do not really tackle the ultimate causes of suffering.

To end suffering, one needs to figure out the cause of suffering and eliminate that cause. According to Buddhism, the cause is the illusion that I have a self, that I as an entity really exist. Because we think we have an unchanging self which is the most important thing for us, we always want to get more for ourselves, more money, more accomplishments, more love, etc. If we can’t get them, we hate those who prevent us from getting them.
The ignorance which makes us think the self exists as an entity, and the greed and hatred that develop out of this illusion of self are called the three poisons, the most fundamental causes of our suffering. This knowledge constitutes the second noble truth: the cause of suffering.

If we remove our ignorance, greed and hatred, what would happen? Originally Buddhism didn't say that if we do so, we will have a perfect world, for death, disease and aging would still exist. On the contrary, it says if one removes the three poisons completely, he is said to have reached Nirvana; and after he dies, will no longer be reborn again. Note that not only will he not be reborn into this world as a human or animal, but not even in heavens as gods, either.
You may wonder why I use the male pronoun alone instead of saying “he or she.” It is because with a few exceptions, traditionally Buddhism believes that women, in order to reach Nirvana, have to be reborn as men first.
An enlightened man, in contrast, won’t be reborn into anything. e will be absolutely free, forever leaving this world of suffering behind.
This ideal of terminating one’s own rebirth, however, was challenged later for being selfish in many texts that are dated to around the beginning of the common era. These detractors called themselves the Mahayana, which means the greater vehicle, for they claimed that they would not leave this world behind but postpone their departure till every being in this world is liberated or embarks onto their “greater vehicle.”
The figures who follow this path – that is, those who choose to stay in this world to help others even though they are able to escape the fate of being reborn – are called Bodhisattva, Pusa in Chinese. This is crucial, for it is this kind of Buddhism, the Mahayana, that is embraced by the Chinese. This explains why the idea and images of Pusa – Bodhisattva – are so important and ubiquitous in Chinese: as statues in monasteries, pendants that people wear, characters in cosplay and TV dramas and so forth.
The most important Pusa in China is Guanyin, Avalokiteshvara in Sanskrit, who turned from male to female in China and is believed to be extremely compassionate and responsive to every troubled being.
The Chinese embrace of the Mahayana was caused by multiple factors. One is timing: texts of mainstream Buddhism and the Mahayana were translated into Chinese around the same time in the second century. Chinese people did not know then – and most of them still don’t know now, if they don’t have special interests in the history of Buddhism – that the Mahayana – the greater vehicle – was in fact small, constituting only a small portion of Buddhist population in ancient India. Without knowing the historical context in ancient India, they trust the claim written in Mahayana scriptures that the Mahayana is the true, superior kind of Buddhism.
Other factors include the Mahayana affinities with Confucianism, Daoism, and other Chinese religious beliefs and practices that had existed before Buddhism arrived. Confucianism considers virtuous men should engage themselves with this world and make this world a better place to live, and Daoism encourages its practitioners to pursue immortality and freedom that transcend but does not leave this world. They must have found the Mahayana resonate more with their ideals than the mainstream Buddhism does.
When a Chinese eminent monk dies, people would usually say that he will “come back again by the power of his vow.” The vow refers to the Bodhisattva vow that he will not abandon the sentient beings of this world. Or, people may say that the master will “be reborn in the Pure Land,” which is another crucial idea in Chinese Buddhism. What is the Pure Land? If you only read the description of it in the scriptures, look at the murals in Chinese monasteries, or watch animation videos on YouTube about it, you would think the Pure Land is just a paradise, where beings enjoy longevity, heavenly music, food, etc. But does it not contradict what I just said – that being reborn in Heaven is not the ultimate goal for Buddhism? For many Buddhists, especially those who are less educated, this question may not even come up. Those who know more about the doctrines would explain to you in the following manner:
First, the Pure Land was originated from a Mahayana vow of a monk named Fazang. Fazang vowed that he would not become a Buddha until he was able to establish a Buddha Land with no suffering at all, and until everyone who was able to call his name would be reborn in that land. His vows, since it perfectly embodies the Mahayana idea of compassion, was approved by the Buddha and Fazang became a buddha called Amitabha, Amituofo in Chinese, residing in that Buddha Land called the Land of Bliss in the West. Reciting the phrase “nanwu Amituofo” – Salute the Amitabha - has been the most common Buddhist practice in China, which is said to be able to bring the reciter to the Pure Land. The other explanation that the Pure Land is no ordinary heaven or paradise is that it is a place where people keep cultivating themselves, a place in which they obtain the nirvana more easily. It is based on the very common belief among Buddhists that our world is already too corrupt for us to focus on pursuing Enlightenment.
Being reborn in the Pure Land is like a “study aboard program,” as some contemporary master vividly suggests. Although suffering is eliminated on the Pure Land, it’s not the ultimate destination, but a transitional accommodation founded by Amitabha’s compassion.
How to eliminate suffering? What are the paths we should take? This is the content of the Fourth noble truth.

Buddhism offers multiple ways to articulate the paths leading to Enlightenment. Basically one must be moral: being moral in body, speech and mind. If you are a monastic, observe all the monastic precepts. If you are a lay Buddhist, do not take an occupation that involves killing, like working as a butcher, and be a generous donor to the monastics. The Sanskrit term for monks, Bhiksu, means beggars. Donating to the monastics has been considered the most important way to making good karma, which will bring benefit to the donor. Traditionally, only very few lay Buddhists meditate but all of them make donations, though the amounts vary.
This is very different from Buddhists in the West, who assume meditation as the activity every Buddhist should do. Today the greatest patrons of Buddhism are still Asian entrepreneurs.
Nonetheless, the role of the monastics has been changing. Today, monasteries use the money they receive to sponsor research programs, hospitals, and other charity work, more actively than they did in traditional societies. They also provide free public events to spread the dharma all around the world.
These are part of the “Humanistic Buddhism” movement originated in China in the early 20th century, pushing the Mahayana worldly engagement to a higher level.
Above the level of morality is religious cultivation, which in China mainly includes the approaches of the Pure Land and Chan. Respectively, they represent the two indispensable and interdependent sides of Buddhism: devotion and meditation. As I mentioned, recitation of the Amitabha’s name is extremely popular in China, more popular than sitting meditation. People believe that if you recite “nanwu Amituofo” sincerely enough, when you are dying you won’t feel any fear, for you will see the Amitabha Buddha and his retinues, all shining with golden rays and beautifully adorned, coming to pick you up from your deathbed to the Pure Land. There has long been a misunderstanding that only the uneducated practice this kind of recitation. On the contrary, eminent monks and highly cultured lay Buddhists have also been practicing this, and some of them even wrote commentaries on the Pure Land scriptures. Buddhists across different Buddhist schools in China have been practicing this Pure Land approach; so that unlike in Japan, there is no clearly demarcated School of Pure Land in China.
The other major approach is meditation. If we have to divide mediation into different levels, on the first stage of meditation, one should be able to calm down by focusing one’s mind at a single place. Then one should be able to generate insights regarding the suchness, the true essence, of the world – this essence is that there is no essence but Emptiness. Once you realize this, you achieve Enlightenment.
The famous Zen Buddhism, which we call Chan Buddhism in Chinese, emphasizes this sudden realization of the Emptiness, the ultimate emptiness of the world and the self. The word Chan is from the Sanskrit word Dhyana, meaning meditation. Neither the idea of emptiness nor that of meditation was invented by Chan Buddhism. They had existed in Buddhism long before Chan Buddhism appeared in the 7th to 8th century China. But Chan Buddhism created a very powerful rhetoric, claiming that the realization from within is what Buddhism is all about, whereas scriptures, philosophy, rituals, even clerics are not important. Because of this, every being, even the illiterate or a butcher, can achieve enlightenment, as long as he or she realizes the inherent Buddha Nature within him or herself.
This iconoclastic rhetoric became very popular, because it is simple, straightforward, and in many ways fits Chinese literati’s spiritual taste and life style. In reality, however, don’t be surprised that monks and nuns from the monastery of the Chan school still study scriptures and participate in devotional and even repentant rituals.
For centuries, many masters in China have advocated an approach combining the Pure Land and Chan. A famous saying is that if one is adept in both the Pure Land and Chan approaches, he or she is as powerful as a tiger with horns.
After the Prince Siddhartha Gautama fled from his palace, he underwent years of struggles and search for liberation. He then sat under a Bodhi tree and meditated, where he is said to realize the four Noble truths: first, suffering and impermanence as the intrinsic features of the world; second, ignorance - the illusory idea of self in particular - is the fundamental cause of the suffering; third, the goal of religious practice is to eliminate suffering and eventually reach Nirvana; fourth, the paths to reach Nirvana includes moral, devotional and meditative cultivations. This realization rendered the Prince the Buddha, which means the awakened one.
Around the 1st century CE, the Mahayanists in India and Central Asian reinterpreted and adapted these basic doctrines; and in China they were adjusted again: Avalokiteshvara became the female Guanyin, Amitabha stood out as one of the most popular Buddhist deities, and new schools, such as Chan, were founded, each claiming that it preserved the most authentic teachings passed from the Shaakyamuni Buddha.
But what is the most authentic Buddhism? We don’t know.
The earliest Buddhist texts we have now in the world are dated to about 500 years after the time of the Buddha. No one in the world knows what Siddharta Gautama really taught. Therefore, Buddhism is not singular but plural. People in different times, places, and cultures use it to express their different concerns and yearnings, leaving us an ocean of wisdom. Although there are also limitations and bigotry, let us hope that our Buddha Nature, if it does exist as most of Chinese Buddhists believe, may help us make sound judgment and get closer to Enlightenment or Liberation.

In Unit 3, Dr Lang Chen delivers 6 mini-lectures on Buddhism in China.
In Unit 3b, Dr Chen introduces the origin of Chinese Buddhism. Buddhism came from India to China in the 1st century AD during the Han dynasty. It took China centuries to absorb and indigenize it. The most influential Chinese indigenization was Zen Buddhism that appeared in the 8th century during the Tang dynasty. Zen Buddhism is called Chan in Chinese.
In Unit 3c, Dr Chen tells the story of the founder of Buddhism in India. He was a prince called Siddhartha Gautama. This prince made a vow to pursue spiritual liberation after witnessing people’s suffering. Eventually, he founded Buddhism in India as a way to free people from suffering. The Four Noble Truths cover the gist of Buddhist philosophy.
In Unit 3d, Dr Chen explains the First Noble Truth. It concerns suffering. Suffering is considered perpetual in Buddhism because, through the continuous cycle of rebirths, we keep suffering in different forms. In Chinese culture, some Buddhist disciples hope to alleviate the suffering of the deceased by celebrating the “ghost festival.” They make ritual offerings not only to their late parents but also to all roaming ghosts.
In Unit 3e, Dr Chen briefly discusses the Second Noble Truth. It concerns the cause of suffering. According to Buddhism, the cause of our suffering comes from our illusion that we have a self that exists as an entity. Because of this illusion, people develop three poisons: that is, ignorance, greed and hatred. They are the fundamental causes of our suffering.
In Unit 3f, Dr Chen elaborates on the Third Noble Truth. It is about the state under which suffering is removed. The key is to remove three poisons, so that one can terminate the cycle of rebirths and reach the Buddhist goal, Nirvana. However, this liberation from personal suffering was challenged for its selfishness. Dr Chen notes two related development in response to this challenge. First, Mahayana Buddhism emerged in India in the 1st century. It advocates that those who could escape the fate of being reborn should stay in this world to help others. The Mahayana was quickly adopted by the Chinese as the main school of Buddhism. It's ideal of saving others is akin to the Confucian engagement in helping others in this world. It also echoes the Daoist idea of transcendence without completely leaving this world. A further response is the development of the concept of Pure Land, which is a transitional accommodation in freeing people from their suffering, before they reach Nirvana.
In Unit 3g, Dr Chen further discusses the Fourth Noble Truth, which concerns the way to eliminate suffering. The way consists in being moral and religious. In the moral dimension, one should be moral in body, speech and mind. For example, one may help other people in various ways, including making donations. In the religious dimension, one should manifest devotion and engage in meditation. For one’s devotion, one may display one’s faith by adopting the Pure Land approach, that is, to recite the name of a Buddha, called Amitabha. In addition, through meditation, one can reach the enlightened state, where one sees the true essence of the world, which is Emptiness. Chan Buddhism considers this sort of internal enlightenment as the most important aspect of Buddhism.

1. What happened to Siddhartha Gautama as an Indian prince before he established Buddhism?
2. Why does Chinese culture favor the adoption of Mahayana Buddhism, instead of Hinayana Buddhism?
3. Why does Chinese Buddhism see our present lifetime to be nothing but suffering?
4. What is the idea of Pure Land in Chinese Buddhism?
5. How do the Four Noble Truths help liberate us from suffering?

1. Chun-Fang Yu. 2020. Chinese Buddhism : A Thematic History, Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press.
2. Pure Land Sutras and the Platform Sutra (the founding text of Chan Buddhism): English Translation of Important Buddhist Texts: https://www.bdk.or.jp/bdk/digital/
3. Chinese Buddhist Canon: https://cbetaonline.dila.edu.tw/zh/
4. An Online Dictionary: http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/
5. English Translation of the Pali Canon: https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/

Like other civilizations, the beginning of that of China came hand in hand with warfare.
According to archaeological evidence, such as the remnants of defensive constructions and remains of war victims, there was already organized violence in the form of warfare, though in small scale, scattered along the Yellow River valley no later than the third millennium B.C. With the emergence of the early states, warfare as a tool of defense and resource exploitation gradually became extensive in North and Central China. Leaving traces in the collective memory, it constituted an essential part of the storytelling of the rise of the early Chinese states.
For example, when Sima Qian, acclaimed as the “Father of History in China”, wrote at the turn of the second century B.C. the first comprehensive historical record of China from the dawn of civilization to his times, he attributed the birth of the Chinese state to a legendary sage ruler, namely, Yellow Emperor, who employed military means to quell the evil villains, thereby restoring stability and prosperity to the known world. Sima’s depiction of the mythic age reveals that at least he and some of his contemporaries took the rise of early civilization and states to be inseparable from warfare.
War was a major determining factor of the rise and fall of the early states. Between the eighth and third centuries B.C., the number of polities in North and Central China had been dwindling because of the escalated and intensified inter-state conflicts. The incessant warfare wreaked an unprecedented scale of casualty and devastation in the period from 400s to 221 B.C., notoriously known as the Warring States Period, when seven regional kingdoms dominating the core area of China waged large-scale brutal wars against each other for the purpose of territorial expansion and survival. All of these concluded in 221 B.C. when Qin, the westernmost state of the seven powers, conquered its rivals and established the first unified empire in Chinese history. The birth of the first empire was the cumulative outcome of centuries-long warfare.
It was also during this period of intensive warfare that reflections on military affairs and studies of tactics and strategy flourished, which consequently led to the burgeoning production of military treatises and tactical manuals. Although a great number of those texts had been lost, the surviving writings—in full or fragments—still provide us with a key to understanding the development of ancient Chinese military thoughts and practices of warfare.
This lecture will first sketch some principal features of early Chinese warfare so as to provide a backdrop for the latter half, when The Art of War by Sunzi is introduced. Arguably the most well-known Chinese military treatise, The Art of War is a product of warfare in pre-imperial China. Although it was composed over two thousand years ago, The Art of War is still widely read today as a strategic handbook on various fronts.

Early Chinese state rulers accorded the core function of war a high position in state affairs. As the Zuozhuan, a chronicle of two hundred and fifty four years (722-468 B.C.) of politics, diplomacy, and warfare of various states in North and Central China puts it, “the great affairs of a state are sacrifice and war.” It was commonly believed that warfare, along with religious rituals, was a pillar on which a state stands.
Such a belief in fact had a long history. The earliest extant literary evidence about Chinese warfare is found in the oracle-bone inscriptions from the late Shang period of the late twelfth and mid-eleventh centuries B.C. Oracle-bone inscriptions are the royal records of prognostication, in which the kings of the Shang state, a dominating power in North and Central China, always sought divine hints on dealing with the various matters that they would encounter. Among them was the subject of military operations. By formulating the plans of military actions and predicting their results through auguries, sacrifice and war were combined to a certain extent.
Besides the oracle-bone documents, a large number of war relics such as hand-held weapons and remains of chariots have been unearthed since the early twentieth century.
These new sources provide us with a new picture, though still not fully clear, of the Shang history that would not be possible in the past. It is now generally believed that the Shang state commanded an efficient war machine, which enabled it to raise armies of about 3000 to 5000 men, in addition to supplying them with weapons, food, chariots, horses, and fodder. The mainstay of the Shang army was infantry, but the military leaders probably rode in chariots and used them as mobile command and firing platforms. This is only a reasonable conjecture since the available evidence is not adequate for us to understand fully the real usage of chariots on the battlefield.
The dominant position of Shang was challenged and finally replaced by the Zhou people in the middle decades of the eleventh century B.C. The Zhou developed at the western extremity of the Shang sphere of influence and had served as a subordinate to the Shang power. The Shang-Zhou transition reached the climax in an epic battle at Muye. Beneath the dramatized accounts given in the classics, what really happened on the battlefield is not clear. It is generally believed that the Zhou troops and their allies were greatly outnumbered. But the Zhou forces fought in strict discipline and, as some scholars suggest, also employed newly efficient chariots as crack forces to defeat the Shang soldiers who, ill prepared for the conflict as they were, hit rock bottom in their morale.
To govern the former Shang domain, the triumphant Zhou leaders reapportioned fiefs among royal clansmen and allies in the form of city-states in various sizes in North and Central China under the Zhou court’s authority. With the passing of the years, the Zhou states turned against each other and the stronger ones expanded themselves at the expense of their smaller counterparts. The number of states kept going down between the eight and fifth centuries B.C., also known as the Period of Spring and Autumn, a name after the annals of the time.
By the end of the fifth century B.C., only a handful states survived. Among them were seven large regional kingdoms. Their military confrontations were so fierce that they gave the era its name, “Warring States,” and as mentioned earlier, would end only with Qin’s victory in 221 B.C.
It was during the Spring and Autumn Period that chariot warfare reached its peak in Chinese history. The belligerent states fielded chariots for decisive battles and measured their strengths in the number of chariots they possessed. The chariot battles were always short, with the vehicles of both sides engaged on a selected flat plain and charged at each other headlong once or twice. The battle usually ended with one side retreating and the other side pursuing for a limited distance — to keep the formation and to avoid ambush. Partly due to the time and resource that had to be expended on preparing charioteering, the charioteers were of noble background. Commoners served only as infantry to accompany the vehicles.
The chariot was of little use in siege warfare, which gradually became a common phenomenon in the Spring and Autumn Period. To climb over the walled city, infantry once again became the mainstay of military force. The able-bodied adult commoners, usually farmers, were conscripted into the army and trained to use weapons and fight on foot.
Along with the rise of large infantry was the employment of cavalry around the third century B.C. when the war between the Warring States grew fiercer than ever before.
The escalation of war in both scale and frequency sped up in the late Spring and Autumn Period, resulting in the huge cost of preparing and fighting war. How to do battle in efficient and cost-saving ways therefore became a critical concern to the rulers of the days.
It was against this backdrop that Sunzi’s The Art of War took the centre stage.

Sunzi’s The Art of War, or conventionally called The Sunzi, is the earliest extant and arguably the most important ancient Chinese writing that deals exclusively with military affairs. It incorporates military principles and theories that circulated in the late sixth century to early fourth century B.C., covering the late Spring and Autumn and early Warring States periods in Chinese history.
In the old days, the text was attributed to a strategist named Sun Wu, or known respectfully as Sunzi, that is, Master Sun, but little was known of his life. With the advancement of research on the text, it is now generally accepted that The Art of War was not completed by one single writer, whether it was Sun Wu or some other person, but a product of the collective efforts of several hands and the text probably had gone through several generations before its contents were finalized in the early imperial age.
What made The Art of War the most popular Chinese military treatise in the past and the present was its vital nature of concentrating on grand strategy and general military principles rather than on issues on tactical level and usage of weapons or the routine training of soldiers, which would be outdated with the flow of time. In other words, The Art of War provides a timeless reference for the military and by extension offers insights on other fronts of human experience. That is why people still read the book today and try to make use of its wisdom in other highly competitive fields such as business and sports.
The essence of The Art of War is pragmatism, and its prime concern is simple and straightforward — how to win a war with limited resources and the least cost?
Since warfare in the late Spring and Autumn period already incurred a heavy toll of human life and various kinds of resources, how to win a military conflict without inflicting serious harm on oneself became essential.
War is indeed expensive and is crucial to the life and death of the state. As The Sunzi points out in the very beginning, “War is a matter of vital importance to the State; the province of life and death; the road to survival or ruin. It is mandatory that it be thoroughly studied.” Therefore, the thirteen chapters of the conventionally articulated version of the book since the first century B.C. focus on this very question and proceed to give practical solutions from various aspects.

So, what does Sunzi’s The Art of War really talk about? Below, we will go through the main arguments of the thirteen chapters.
Chapter One emphasizes calculations. The first lesson that The Sunzi gives to its intended audience, supposedly made up of political and military leaders, is to do calculations and assessments before going to war. The chapter further lists three clusters of elements that are essential in the process of doing strategic calculations. The first cluster contains five basic factors that are crucial to the domestic base of military power. If the leaders of a state could balance the five factors in a favorable way, it would “bring the people in harmony with their leaders.” Once solidarity within a state between the ruler and the ruled is achieved, it can be translated into military power.
The chapter also points out that morality, commandership, and discipline can be manipulated by human efforts while the weather and the terrain, which the text refers to as Heaven and Earth, cannot. Although the natural factors cannot be controlled, decision makers must not forget to include them in their war plans.
The second cluster is made up of seven elements that should be assessed while planning any military operations. To summarize the use of the seven elements, a famous dictum in The Art of War goes: “All warfare is based on deception.” In fact, by talking about deception, the book emphasizes the importance of flexibility in any military actions.
The third cluster refers to a couple of situations which an army would encounter during marching, camping, and fighting. After considering all those elements, The Sunzi concludes that “if estimates made in the temple before hostilities indicate victory, it is because calculations show one’s strength to be superior to that of his enemy; if they indicate defeat, it is because calculations show that one’s strength is inferior. With many calculations, one can win; with few, one cannot.” Its logic of war planning is that victory could be attained by precise calculations; in other words, victory could be foreseen on a reasonable base.
After the pre-war calculations, the book then moves to the next step of waging war in Chapter Two. This chapter is about mobilization of human, material, and financial resources. It gives economic considerations a significant role in making war, concerning itself, moreover with the wartime economy. The lesson here is, if war cannot be avoided, to keep the combat short by using military force effectively and efficiently. The longer the war, the heavier the cost to both sides. Thus, one has to win a war as fast as possible. In order to end a war in a quick manner, one might need to take the initiative, and offensive strategy is thus a practical option.
Chapter Three therefore focuses on planning offensive operations and examines the means to attain victory. It also classifies different levels of victory. Among them, winning without fighting is the most excellent approach. In order to achieve victory, The Sunzi places high importance on the role of the military general and argues that the generals on the battlefield should have full authority of making decisions and giving orders without any intervention from the king, the court or other spheres.
Chapters Four to Seven can be put together as a group, as their contents all point to some practical principles and methods of doing battle. They give particular considerations on how to exploit the enemy’s weakness and maximize one’s own strength through conventional and unconventional means. The essence of these chapters is to manipulate one’s enemy and not to be manipulated by them.
Speaking about conventional and unconventional means, The Art of War introduces a dualist perspective of examining a set of pairs of strategic vocabulary, including Qi (extraordinary or indirect) and Zheng (normal or direct), Xu (void) and Shi (solid), Zhi (order) and Luan (disorder), Yong (courage) and Que (cowardice), and Qiang (strength) and Ruo (weakness). These pairs are all fluid and relative in nature. Consequently, everything will change, and one term will turn to its strategic opposite in the pair. Strategic flexibility is thus emphasized, decision makers should not rely on one strategy or approach. There is no one way or a constant way of winning. One must use military force by imitating the nature of water, which has no constant shape, and so there should be no constant way of making war and achieving victory. The essential tip given by Sunzi is to take the initiative in waging war and find an appropriate time and place for delivering a decisive battle.

Chapters Eight to Eleven are closely linked and focus on military geography or topography. They deals with topics such as the deployment of troops in different terrains, the methods for observing enemy forces, the relationship between civil and military components of a state, the importance of speed in military operations, and the psychological means of commanding soldiers. These are more practical, and trivial, contents comparing with the preceding chapters.
So are Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, with the former introducing the tactical means of launching incendiary attack and the latter those of using spies. Since Chapter One emphasizes the functions of calculations and assessments, it raises a critical question of how to obtain information about the enemy so that one can calculate and assess the relative advantages between the two sides. The answer is in Chapter Thirteen: use spies! This chapter describes the crucial function of spy in acquiring intelligence, which Sunzi calls foreknowledge. With the intelligence that the spy collected, one could do strategic calculation in a more comprehensive way.
Beginning from Chapter One and ending with Chapter Thirteen, therefore, the text completes a full circle of military planning. To sum up the principal instructions given by Sunzi’s The Art of War, attaining victory without fighting is the top priority and doing calculations and assessmenst before going to war is the utmost important thing. One should also carefully consider what sorts of resources to be mobilized and employed in war and to use them effectively. Before going to war, one should try one’s best to understand oneself and the enemy and use whatever means to manipulate the foes. When war has started, one needs to attain decisive victory in a quick manner. All in all, since war is so devastating, Sunzi repeatedly reminds the reader to be cautious about going to war, saying, “A state that has perished cannot be restored, nor can the dead be brought back to life. Therefore, the enlightened ruler is prudent and the good general is warned against rash action. Thus the state is kept secure and the army preserved.”
Although Sunzi’s The Art of War was a product of the warfare in pre-imperial China, it is the general principles, but not the tactical details, that it lists that makes it an essential military reference over time. Always regarded as the most profound military classic ever in Chinese history, it interests even the laymen who could extract whatever they find fit for their purposes from the book.

Dr Wicky Tse delivers 5 mini-lectures on ancient Chinese Warfare and Sunzi’s The Art of War.
In Unit 4b, Dr Tse notes that the beginning of Chinese civilization came hand in hand with warfare. During the Warring States Period in the late Zhou dynasty, brutal wars between seven regional kingdoms were rampant. Against this background, Sunzi’s The Art of War, a military treatise and strategic handbook, was written.
In Unit 4c, Dr Tse notes that important relics from the late Shang period of around 1200 BC were uncovered. They include oracle-bone inscriptions for the prognostication of military operations, hand-held weapons and remains of chariots. The Shang state is believed to be able to raise armies of about 3000 to 5000 men. The mainstay of the Shang army was infantry while the military leaders rode in chariots. The Shang was defeated by the Zhou in the epic battle at Muye in the middle of 1100 BC. To govern the former Shang domain, the Zhou reapportioned fiefs among royal clansmen. The Zhou states later turned against each other and ushered in the Periods of Spring and Autumn and the Warring States. The chariot warfare reached its peak, and gradually the use of infantry and cavalry assumed a greater important role. One major concern of the states is how to do battle in efficient and cost-saving ways. This was the background against which Sunzi completed his The Art of War.
In Unit 4d, Dr Tse introduces The Art of War. Traditionally, the authorship of the book was attributed to Sun Wu. Nowadays, however, it is believed that there are more than one author and the book is a collection of the wisdom of several generations. The book is arguably the most popular military treatise, and it is widely read not only by military strategists but also businesspeople and others. The essence of Art of War is pragmatism. Its prime concern is how to win a war with the least cost. It is composed of thirteen chapters.
In Unit 4e, Dr Tse highlights the key points of the first half of the Art of War. Chapter One emphasizes the use of calculations. It examines three clusters of factors, that is, the five ways: the Dao, Heaven, Earth, Commandership and Discipline. The second cluster concerns seven calculations such as whether the weather is suitable for one’s own strategy and whether the army is well trained. The third cluster refers to the different uses of the deceptive strategies. Sunzi concludes that pre-war estimation is decisive. Chapter Two is about the mobilization of human, material and financial resources. Chapter Three focuses on planning offensive operations and examines the way to win a war. Chapters Four to Seven go into the specific practical principles and methods to fight a battle, such as how to exploit the enemy’s weaknesses. Sunzi stresses the dualistic dynamism of wars and concludes that to win, one should not rely only on one type of strategy or approach.
In Unit 4f, Dr Tse points out that Chapters Eight to Eleven are closely linked and focus on military geography and topography. Chapter Twelve discusses the tactical means of launching incendiary attack and Chapter Thirteen explores the use of spies.

1. With reference to this Unit, can you describe anything special about the development of Chinese ancient warfare?
2. Who was Sunzi?
3. What are Chapters 1 and 13 of The Art of War about?
4. On the basis of your personal knowledge, to what extent do you agree that war is about deception?
5. What is the deepest lesson you think you have learnt from The Art of War?

1. Cosmo, Nicola Di (ed.) 2009. Military Culture in Imperial China. Harvard University Press.
2. Graff, David A. and Robin Higham (eds.), 2012. A Military History of China. University Press of Kentucky.
3. Samuel B Griffith (trans). 2016. Sun Tzu: The Art of War. Second edition. Nabla.
4. Sawyer, Ralph D. (trans). 2007. The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China. Basic Book.
5. Rand, Christopher C., 2018. Military Thought in Early China. State University of New York Press.

Chinese landscape painting is not just one of the great arts of China; it is one of the greatest products of world civilization. It has the power to transport us to another time and place and encourages us to re-think our notions of the natural world and our relationship to it. This lecture will discuss in particular the landscape painting of the Song dynasty (Northern Song 960-1127, Southern Song 1127-1279).
Xie He (active c. 479-502), a portrait painter and an art critic of the 6th century China, is most famous for "The Six Principles of Chinese painting" (Huihua Liufa) (c. 550), taken from the preface to his book Classification of Ancient Painters (Guhua Pinlu).
The six principles are:
First, Qiyun shengdong, spirit resonance which means vitality;
second, Gufa yongbi, bone method which is [a way of] using the brush;
third, Yingwu xiangxing, correspondence to the object which means the depiction of forms;
fourth, Suilei fucai, suitability to type which has to do with the laying on colors;
fifth, Jingying weizhi, division and planning, that is, placing and arrangement;
sixth, Chuanyi muxie, transmission by copying of models.
As the earliest standards for the appretciation of Chinese paintings both for painters and critics, Xie He’s six principles are timeless.
The Tang dynasty (618-960) was the springtime of Chinese landscape painting as Emperor Minghuang was an enthusiastic collector and patron of the arts.
Zhang Yanyuan (c. 815- after 875)’s Record of Famous Painters of All the Dynasties (Lidai Minghua Ji), published in 847, lists more than 370 painters active over the previous 500 or so years, giving biological anecdotes about them, characterizations of their subject-matter and style, and ranking them according to their talents.

Chinese landscape painting became a major art during the early Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). Monumental composition is the major characteristic of landscape painting in the Northern Song Dynasty.
Li Cheng (919-967) was considered as ‘the greatest [landscape] painter of all time’ in the catalogue of the Northern Song imperial collection. Active in the north during the late Five Dynasties and early Song period, Li Cheng was famous for “depicting winter scenes and was regarded by his contemporaries as superhuman, sharing the creative forces of nature.” His Buddhist Temple in Mountain (c. 960) depicts a solitary temple in the mountain in a highly naturalistic manner that exemplifies the Northern Song painting style: monumental realism. The grandeur of Northern Song landscape, representing the supreme achievement of Chinese painting, probably owes more to him than to any other single figure. Many landscape artists such as Guo Xi and Fan Kuan acknowledged Li Cheng as their master.
Guo Xi (c.1000-1090) theorized the “Three Types of Distance” (sanyuanfa), including high distance (gaoyuan), deep distance (shenyuan), and level distance (pingyuan). “From the bottom of the mountain looking up toward the top is the high distance. From the front of the mountain peering into the back of the mountain is the deep distance. From a nearby mountain looking past distant mountains is the level distance.” Guo Xi’s greatest surviving work Early Spring (1072) combines the three types of distance in one painting. Guo Xi derived his handling of ink wash from Li Cheng, and painted his mountains “as if they were clouds”. It is a landscape of imagination, depicting the wildly twisting, turning peaks. The brush technique and the use of ink are complicated, with a dramatic interpenetration of solids and voids. The landscape elements merge from and recede behind the dense mists. As a great decorator, he was a master of monumental design, depicting details of buildings, boats, and fishermen, and dramatic contrasts of light and dark.
As Michael Sullivan has discussed, Song dynasty landscape painting reflects “a search for absolute truth to nature that reached its climax in the eleventh century.” It is best seen from the surviving work titled Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan (active c. 990-1030) who was a recluse of the early years of the Song Dynasty. Recent research has discovered his signature hidden among one of the trees in the lower right corner. Fan Kuan is considered as one of the northern realists. In Travelers among Mountains and Streams, a cliff rises at the centre while its base is lost in the mist. A waterfall hovers over its feet. From the dense wood, two tiny figures drive a train of donkeys bearing firewood. The roof of a temple rises above the trees behind. Based on Guo Xi’s definition, Fan Kuan’s Travelers among Mountains and Streams displays a high-distance view in the rocky landscape mode. The composition of the painting is simple and serene. Details of thick, jagged contours of trees and rocks show the quality of the brushwork. Mountain and rock forms are portrayed by brush patterns known as cun or “textured methods”. The surface of the boulders and cliffs are rendered with ‘raindrop cun’: innumerable small, pale-toned brushstrokes are applied to give a tactile sense of the rock. It captures the rocky landscape of Fan Kuan’s native Shaanxi region in the north-west of China.
“These technical devices, and such motifs as the scrubby foliage surmounting the bluff, were all to be imitated by later landscapists working ‘in the Fan Kuan manner’.” Fan Kuan’s aim is to make the viewers feel that they are not looking at a picture, but standing on the rocks beneath that grand cliff, gazing on the scenery, forgetting our own world, until we hear the wind of the trees, sounds of the waterfall, and movement of the travellers. Fan Kuan’s work shows monumental realism northern Song painters had gradually developed. This became the official court style of the north.

Li Tang (c. 1049 - c.1130, or c. 1070s - c.1150s) was a doyen of the imperial academy under Emperor Huizong (1082-1135), who was a renowned painter and the imperial patron who controlled the artistic style and techniques at court. Li Tang followed the artistic tradition of Fan Kuan, depicting “weathered rock cliffs surmounted by scrubby vegetation, and somber shadowed gorges.” His severe, tactile treatment of the surface of the mountain is reminiscent of Fan Kuan’s Travelers among Mountains and Streams.
Fan Kuan’s intense yet sensitive brushwork has turned out to be a formula that became an impersonal official style. Painters could imitate it with practice. Li Tang portrayed the facets of cliffs with disciplined brushstrokes, the so called the “small-ax-cut cun” (xiao fupi cun), specifically on a short, chopping texture-stroke (cun) executed with the side of the brush.
Li Tang’s Whispering Pines in the Mountain (1142) is a cold monumental work. Li Tang portrayed “a cool, aloof view of the mountains in mist, a segment of a vast and imposing prospect.”
Li Tang was an old man when the Song capital was sacked by the Jurchen in 1129, marking the end of the Northern Song dynasty. While the former emperor Huizong and 3,000 members of the court were taken into the desert as prisoners, Li Tang fled to the south, joining what remained of the Song court and eventually took refuge in the temporary capital in Hangzhou, where an attempt was made to preserve the old court culture and art.
Li Tang led the change in landscape painting in the Academy from the Northern Song monumental style to the intimate style of Southern Song.

The painting style of the Southern Song Dynasty, lasting from 1127 to the Mongol conquest of 1279, presents a new style in contrast to the monumental realism of the Northern Song Dynasty. The monumental strength, marking the passion for truth and acceptance of things as they are, is gone.The new lyrical style of the Southern Song is characterized by the narrowly focused intimate vision style practiced by a new generation of academy painters. Notable court artists include Ma Yuan (active 1190-1225), and Xia Gui (active c. 1195-1230).
Both Ma and Xia were active at the end of the twelfth century and in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. They were classified as followers of Li Tang but were unlikely to have studied under him directly. They derived their style from Li Tang, converting his tight “small ax-cut cun” into the broader “big ax-cut cun”, emphasizing on the silhouettes of the rocks. The broad angular stroke effectively depicts the rugged chipped-off facets of the rock surface.
Ma Yuan even pushed the foreground over to one corner to open up an unlimited view into the mist, in which the distant mountains seem to float like clouds in the air. He is famous for his most typical composition, which earned him the nickname ‘One-corner Ma’ from his contemporaries.” Ma Yuan’s father, grandfather and great-grandfather were court painters. Compared with the monumental realism of Li Tang’s Whispering Pines in the Mountain (1142), Ma Yuan’s Scholar by a Waterfall (dated about 1220) is a signed album leaf depicting a lyrical landscape. It depicts a scholar leaning against a balustrade under a pine tree watching the swirling waters at the foot of the waterfall and his boy-attendant holds his cane and waits behind him. Ma Yuan has selected several motifs: the dark pine is contrasted with the lighter deciduous tree with autumnal foliage; behind the large boulder are the bamboo leaves against the mist and clouds; the scholar gazes at the waters, seeking enlightenment through meditating the wondrous nature. Both the brushwork and composition are harmonized in style and meaning. Compared with the detailed rendering of nature of the Northern Song Dynasty, Ma Yuan portrays “his subject in an aura of feeling with an extreme economy of means, relying upon the emotional associations of his images and the evocative power of the emptiness surrounding them.”
Xia Gui (active c. 1195-1230) is a slightly later contemporary of Ma Yuan. He derived his ax-cut brush idiom and compositional motifs from Li Tang. While Ma put emphasis on human figures in his landscape paintings, Xia Gui put emphasis on pure landscape in which only tiny figures are portrayed. In the unsigned handscroll Remote View of Streams and Mountains, Xia Gui creates a monumental horizontal composition depicting pines, deciduous trees and ax-cut rocks, all typical motifs found in Li Tang’s painting. The three types of distance – level, deep, high – formulated in the Northern Song Dynasty are composed in the horizontal format. The first section on the right depicts bare boulders with contrasting trees, the spindly pine and the deciduous hardwood. The next section portrays a level-distance vista with a monastery surrounded by oaks and pines. After a blank space comes a great high-distance over-hanging cliff. Then a deep-distance view of icicle-like mountain peaks standing silent in the mist, ending with a mountain village with a similar vantage point to the opening scene.
Xia Gui’s landscape painting shows further simplification and elimination of solid form. The massive boulder set against the mists in Xia Gui’s Remote View of Streams and Mountains exemplifies the characteristic of the Ma-Xia school. “The fact that it is painted on paper instead of silk allows the brilliance of the brushwork to be appreciated: dry strokes applied with a slanting brush for the rock surface, the foliage done with a split brush (the fibre of the tip divided), the frail bridge and solitary traveller drawn in line that is firm but not stiff.”
The Ma-Xia school/style became popular in and around the court. It even travelled to Japan, giving birth to the Kano school of landscape painting of Japan.

The great poet, prose writer, statesman, calligrapher and painter Su Shi (better known as Su Dongpo) (1036-1101) and his scholar-gentlemen friends put forward a revolutionary idea concerning the purpose of painting, that is, not to depict things (which could be left to the professionals), but to express the painter’s own feelings. “Su quotes a painter friend as saying, ‘I write to express my mind and paint to set forth my ideas, and that is all.’ Another painter of this time said, ‘I make paintings as a poet composes poems, simply to recite my feelings and nature.’ Painting and poetry were two ways of saying the same thing.”
The school they founded became known as literati painting (wenrenhua).
These scholar-gentlemen thought that good literati painting was the expression of the painter’s thoughts and feelings that could not be imitated. A strong personal attitude and a detachment from ‘things’ were treasured. Su explained that the forms of rocks, mountains and trees are borrowed to ‘give lodging’ to the feeling of that moment. Therefore, audience might find their paintings much harder to appreciate than those of the Ma-Xia School. These painters preferred to paint only in ink and on paper with amateurish-looking techniques and to circulate their modest paintings only among their friends, giving the pictures as presents, angrily refusing any offers to buy them. As a result, very few paintings attributed to the Song literati have survived. Some of their works might be lost by their descendants.
The sketchy depiction of a bare tree with rocks and young bamboo attributed to Su Dongpo bears witness to this style. Bamboo as a symbol of the pliant but unbreakable spirit of the scholar-official was a favourite among scholars. They loved landscape painting. It is possible that many scholars living in and around Hangzhou were inspired by the same ideals.
Mi Fu (1052-1109) was a scholar-artist, antiquarian and collector familiar with old paintings. His work incorporated elements from the literati painting. Clues of his achievements could be found in the landscape paintings of his scholar-artist son Mi Youren (1074-1151). Without any reliable paintings by Mi Fu, it is helpful for us to learn about the literati painting through Mi Youren’s works.
The 1130s was a time of continual political instability and hardship. Thus, Mi Youren’s Cloudy Mountains (before 1200) was meant to be a metaphor for life as well as an image of the mind. The strangely shadowed peaks and drifting mists are depicted. Mi’s floating clouds may “symbolize the recluse’s detachment from both social and political upheavals and from the mundane of daily life.” The fairly sparse scattering of dian, or dots, the standard ‘Mi style’ established by Mi Fu and his son Mi Youren, was employed by imitators of later centuries, in which landscape forms are built up in a pointillist manner with clusters of such dots.

The influence of Mahayana Buddhism that “all appearance is illusion, Maya, a mere outward and ever-changing manifestation of transcendent reality” on the scholars of the eleventh century is evidently shown in the Chan/Zen Painting. “The idea that the world of the senses is illusory must have had great appeal to men of a sensitive, inward turn of mind, who increasingly sought refuge from the decay around them with Chan/Zen monks in their quiet monasteries across the lake.”
There is a slight difference between the literati painter’s emphasis on one’s intuition expressed in the highly personal manner and the Chan/Zen painter’s emphasis on “a reality that denied the self, by his arbitrary choice of subject matter and his technique of broken washes to reveal the underlying unity of all things, and by the flash and daring of his brushwork, to suggest, by analogy, what the sudden, irrational experience of Chan/Zen illumination was like.”
In Sunset Glow on a Fishing Village, one of the Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers, the Buddhist monk Mu Qi (c. 1200-1270) depicts the “mountains hang before us as though they would melt away at any moment into the all-enveloping mist.” The dark accents of the tree trunks and the distant roofs create a visual rhythm in a very lively manner. The ultimate goal of the dots and accents is to highlight how meditation can help the Chan/Zen painter to achieve a state of unutterable peace.
The style of Mu Qi seems to follow the stylistic tradition of Mi Youren in that the Chan painter’s work conveys “a stronger sense of swiftness and vigour, working chiefly in simple washes and broad, scratchy strokes made with a straw brush.” Mu Qi reduces the line drawing to a minimal portrayal of trunks of trees, roofs of houses and a few fishermen in boats, highlighting light and shade, mist and space. The Chan painter depicts “his subject only at a few key points, leaving the rest ambiguous, suggestive rather than descriptive.”
The Song Dynasty is the golden age for the development of landscape painting. Monumental realism of the Northern Song, lyrical representation of the Southern Song, literati painting and Chan painting have become models for later generations to follow.

In Unit 5, Dr Silvia Fok delivers 6 mini-lectures on Chinese painting in the Song dynasty.
In Unit 5b, Dr Fok introduces the Six Principles of Chinese Painting by Xie He in the sixth century AD. This helps set the stage for the appreciation of the painting in the Northern Song dynasty from 960 to 1127 AD and the Southern Song dynasty from 1127 to 1279 AD.
In Unit 5c, Dr Fok points out that Chinese landscape painting became a major art during the early Northern Song dynasty. Monumental composition is the major characteristic of landscape painting in this period. Dr Fok discusses three important landscape painters. First, Li Cheng is famous for “depicting winter scenes and was regarded by his contemporaries as superhuman, sharing the creative forces of nature.” Second, Guo Xi theorizes three types of distance: high, deep and level distances. Guo’s greatest surviving work was Early Spring. Third, Fan Kuan is considered one of the northern realists. Fan Kuan’s painting Travelers among Mountains and Streams displays a high-distance view in the rocky landscape mode. These three early Song painters signified a golden beginning of Song landscape painting.
In Unit 5d, Dr Fok focuses on the doyen of the imperial academy, Li Tang, who followed the artistic tradition of Fan Kuan. Li also led the change in landscape painting in the Academy from the Northern Song monumental style to the intimate style of the Southern Song.
In Unit 5e, Dr Fok introduces the intimate style of the Southern Song dynasty. Two painters are noted in this unit. First, Ma Yuan’s painting, Scholar by a Waterfall, depicts a lyrical landscape where a scholar with his boy-attendant gazes at the waters, seeking enlightenment through meditating the wondrous nature. Second, Xia Gui is a slightly later contemporary of Ma Yuan. While Ma Yuan stresses human figures in his landscape paintings, Xia Gui concentrates on pure landscape in which only tiny figures are portrayed. Both painters’ styles influenced Japanese painting, giving birth to a new school of landscape painting in Japan.
In Unit 5f, Dr Fok notes the emergence of the so-called school of literati painting, which integrate poems and paintings. For instance, the great Song poet and painter Su Shi advocates that expressing feelings are more important than depicting things. This school prefers the use of amateurish-looking techniques. Two famous literati painters were Mi Fu and Mi Youren.
In Unit 5g, Dr Fok notes the influence of Mahayana Buddhism in the Chan/Zen Painting during the Song dynasty. Mu Qi was a famous monk painter. In his painting Sunset Glow on a Fishing Village, for instance, he pursues a state of unutterable peace typical of the ideal state of Buddhism.

1. In this Unit, Dr Fok introduces the Six Principles of Chinese Painting by Xie He. If you were to select one principle that you consider the most important for your appreciating Chinese painting, which principle would you choose? Why?
2. What are the main styles and themes of the paintings in the Song dynasty?
3. Can you name one famous painter from the Northern and one from the Southern Song dynasty?
4. What is the theme of literati painting in the Song dynasty?
5. What is the central motif of Chan or Zen painting in the Song dynasty?

1. Cahill, James. 1977. Chinese Painting. London: Macmillan.
2. Clunas, Craig. 2009. Art in China. New York: Oxford University Press.
3. Fong, Wen C. 1992. Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th-14th Century. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of New York; New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
4. Sullivan, Michael. 1979. Symbols of Eternity: The Art of Landscape Painting in China. Oxford: Stanford University Press.
5. Sullivan, Michael. 2018. The Arts of China. Sixth ed. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press.