The vinegar tasters: at a vat of vinegar, Confucius finds it sour, Buddha bitter and Laozi sweet. Wikicommons. Public domain.In his great overview of the high imperial era of Chinese history, the late FW Mote wrote of how, with the clash between Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism, the Chinese world was one which necessarily had to have hybrid values. Like the imperium of Rome before its Christianisation by Constantine the Great in the early 4th century, imperial China recognised no supreme religion. There was a market place of belief systems. More remarkably, as Mote elegantly states, the idea of an all commanding transcendent truth was simply not part of the Tang and Song vision of the world. Truth was malleable, flexible, adaptable. It changed from day to day.
That stood in stark contrast to the European worldview, with its commitment to one overarching, all-commanding vision of a single, jealous deity, presiding over a world ordered by uniform rules and principles. In essence this remains the historic difference between the Chinese view of the world, and that of the Europeans and Americans.
This is testified to in a useful new book by Harvard historian Michael Puett and journalist Christine Gross-Loh, which introduces the elements of ancient Chinese philosophers to a western audience. The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life argues that the broadly western view of the world is still haunted by this commitment to a sovereign self within a world where there is a grand Truth we are all searching for. God might be dead, or dying, but another big idea is standing in the wings to replace him – scientific rationality, humanism, or some other new universal dogma.
