Religion in China-Lecture

chinese society

emphasis on being in harmony with nature and bringing things into harmoney through poltical control in society, and on the collective versus the individual

religion in China

Popular or folk religion-honouring dead ancestors, various deities forming spirutal hierachy, beliefs re afterlife, emphasis on being harmony with natural forces

Confucianism-strong social/cultural influence

Daoism-over 86 daoist sects emerge

Buddhism-strong influence, introduces reincarnation, heavens/hells

Early Histroy

Legendary 5 emperors:

Yellow emperior-the father of the Chinese people

-rest are responsible for birthing Chinese Civilazation

5th-founding the first dynasty, the Xia (which help to be more legend than histroy)

Shang dynasty-is the first histrocal one with 100k orcale bones found in the palace, the focus on divination, these writting will evolve into the 1 Ching

Zhou dynasty-overthrows the Shang, claiming to have the Mandate of Heaven. They gradually collapse, leading to the Warning states period

-decline is the contexr for laozi who wrote the Dao de Jing

-Confuscious and Zhuangzi

-Qin dynasty unified China, overtake by Han

Popular Key elements

Spirtual bureacuracy-Jade emperor (Shang-ti/Lord on high, Ti’en/heaven), local earth god, Tudi Gong, and the stove god in the kitchen

Divination, orcale bones of Shang Dyn, evolves into 1 Ching (Ye Jing)

-Geomancy, Feng Shi-to be in harmony with the energies

-afterlife different parts of soul go different places in the temple (tablet) can becoe a god, cemetary (can become hungry ghost), in the yellow spirngs (later with Buddhism, idea of reincernation)

-Mandate of Heaven, divine backing of rulers

Shang dynasty

foretell future using tortosie shells or shoulder blades, ask question and get the answer, evolved into the Yi Jing (I ching)

Confucius

-Govzerment official disillusioned with the corruption in the goverment, sought reform, to restore moral virtue among the ruling class

Humane Goodness (ren)

-reciprocity (shu) golden rule
-Princely Gentleman (junzi)

-rectification of names (zhengming)

-5 relationships: ruler-ruled, husband-wife, parent child, elder-younger sibling, friend to friend

Daoist Philosophy

Philosophical Daoism is based on the two books/thinkers:

Laozi ca 600 BCE, legend, custodian of royal library, left China, headed West, disgusted with the corruption and decay of gov’t. Gatekeeper begged nim to leave his wisdom behind, wrote: Daodejing (Book of the Way and Its Power)

Zhuangzi 369-286 BCE, book named after him, also gov’t official, Withdrew into the forest to be in harmony with the Dao.

the dao-the way

The Dao is the Mother of the Universe, a-moral, non-purposive, unknowable, in constant flow, movement, spontaneous, impersonal. It is Reality Itself, both What Is and What Is Not.

Reality flows constantly from Non-being (wu) to Being (yu) and back to Non-being to Being….

It goes from undifferentiated chaos, formless cosmic soup, where everything is in a state of potentiality (non-being)...

...to differentiation, order, and actualization (being), from formless to form, in constant process and movement.

Yin and Yang

The Dao moves through and works with the dual principles of yin and yang, these direct the flow, the movement of the various forms of life, of Nature, of the Universe at large.
Life is about a balance of yin/yang, not a polarization and judgment that one (yang) is good and another (yin) is bad. It’s the dance of duality that is the nature of life, it’s the “natural” way

the relatively of opposites and human problem

Since the Dao encompasses all that is, opposites don’t remain opposite but flow one to the other.

The Dao is night and day, life and death, being and non-being. The problem we humans create is to polarize and absolutize things as being good vs bad. Then through social conditioning we program ourselves to be resistant, to fight the Dao, and coerce what we think we need/want upon life/others. We think the duck’s legs are too short and the crane’s too long and want to change/fix that.

We judge something as being poor, old, weak, ugly and then seek what we judge as good, eg., to be rich, powerful, young, beautiful...the result is we act/go against the Dao and create suffering and conflict. We take a baby w/o ambition/greed and implant that in people who then become warlords seeking power and wealth.

solution-return to our orginal nature

We need to “uncarve the woodblock” and return to our natural state of being in harmony with the Dao in the following ways:

1. Return to a simple life in nature; withdraw from society/urban life.

2. Practice “sitting-in-forgetfulness” meditation to uncarve woodblock, clear out all of that social conditioning that alienates us from the Dao.

3. Embrace the “Doctrine of No-Knowledge” unlearn traditional rationalizations that interferes with the wisdom within that comes from the Dao.

4. Practice “Wu-Wei” actionless-action, no striving/controlling, ego-less, the Dao moves through you w/o obstruction of the ego/mind.