Chinese Philosophers Quotes

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.

He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.

Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.

Civilize The Mind, But Make Savage The Body.

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; his two-fold security.

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it.

Happiness for me is largely a matter of digestion.

Laozi was an ancient Chinese philosopher. According to Chinese tradition, Laozi lived in the 6th century BC, however many historians contend that Laozi

The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good.

To quote Shirley Polanski, head waitress at the Humdinger Diner: "Beware of a big man whose stomach doesn't move when he laughs." I think a Chinese philosopher said it first, but these things trickle down to the food service community.

There are no endings, only beginnings that have been reborn.

The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu once said that being loved deeply by someone gives you strength, and loving someone deeply gives you courage.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu advised, “To attain knowledge add things every day. To attain wisdom subtract things every day.

Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn." Benjamin Franklin never said those words, he was falsely attributed on a respected quotation website and it spread from there. The quote comes from the Xunzi. Xun Kuang was a Chinese Confucian philosopher that lived from 312-230 BC. His works were collected into a set of 32 books called the Xunzi, by Liu Xiang in about 818 AD. There are woodblock copies of these books that are almost 1100 years old. Book 8 is titled Ruxiao ("The Teachings of the Ru"). The quotation in question comes from Chapter 11 of that book. In Chinese the quote is: 不闻不若闻之, 闻之不若见之, 见之不若知之, 知之不若行之 It is derived from this paragraph: Not having heard something is not as good as having heard it; having heard it is not as good as having seen it; having seen it is not as good as knowing it; knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. (From the John Knoblock translation, which is viewable in Google Books) The first English translation of the Xunzi was done by H.H. Dubs, in 1928, one-hundred and thirty-eight years after Benjamin Franklin died.

There is a certain proper and luxurious way of lying in bed. Confucius, that great artist of life, "never lay straight" in bed, "like a corpse", but always curled up on one side. I believe one of the greatest pleasures of life is to curl up one's legs in bed. The posture of the arms is also very important, in order to reach the greatest degree of aesthetic pleasure and mental power. I believe the best posture is not lying flat on the bed, but being upholstered with big soft pillows at an angle of thirty degrees with either one arm or both arms placed behind the back of one's head.

The situations depicted in the Book of Changes are the primary data of life -- what happens to everybody, every day, and what is simple and easy to understand.

In the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote, “Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.

We tend to believe that to change the world, we have to think big. Confucius wouldn't dispute this, but he would likely also say. Don't ignore the small. Don't forget the "pleases" and "thank yous." Change doesn't happen until people alter their behavior, and they don't alter their behavior unless they start with the small.

Development of Western science is based on two great achievements: the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers, and the discovery of the possibility to find out causal relationships by systematic experiment (during the Renaissance). In my opinion, one has not to be astonished that the Chinese sages have not made these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

The philosopher Zeng said, "I daily examine myself on three points: whether, in transacting business for others, I may have been not faithful; whether, in intercourse with friends, I may have been not sincere; whether I may have not mastered and practiced the instructions of my teacher.

When you hold too tightly to a plan, you risk missing out on these things. And when you wake up one day in that future, you will feel boxed in by a life that, at best, reflects only a piece of who you thought you were at one moment in time.

Come over,’ he said. ‘I’ll order in Chinese.’ ‘You speak Chinese now?’ ‘Funny guy, Libor. Be here at eight.’ ‘You sure you’re up for it?’ ‘I’m a philosopher, I’m not sure about anything.’..

The outstanding characteristic of Western scholarship is its specialization and cutting up of knowledge into different departments. The over-development of logical thinking and specialization, with its technical phraseology, has brought about the curious fact of modern civilization, that philosophy has been so far relegated to the background, far behind politics and economics, that the average man can pass it by without a twinge of conscience. The feeling of the average man, even of the educated person, is that philosophy is a "subject" which he can best afford to go without. This is certainly a strange anomaly of modern culture, for philosophy, which should lie closest to men's bosom and business, has become most remote from life. It was not so in the classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans, and it was not so in China, where the study of wisdom of life formed the scholars' chief occupation. Either the modern man is not interested in the problems of living, which are the proper subject of philosophy, or we have gone a long way from the original conception of philosophy.

Our lives begin in the everyday and stay in the everyday. Only in the everyday can we begin to create truly great worlds.

To use violence is to already be defeated.

I think about Lao Tzu, a Chinese philosopher who said, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

inspired by an idea from Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

True peace of mind," said this Chinese philosopher, "comes from accepting the worst. Psychologically, I think, it means a release of energy.

The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu conjectured that you cannot grow until you confront the void within.

The psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) once wrote, “A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him”—a surprisingly Confucian sentiment.

Laozi was an ancient Chinese philosopher. According to Chinese tradition, Laozi lived in the 6th century BC, however many historians contend that Laozi actually lived in the 4th century BC, which was the period of Hundred Schools of Thought and Warring States Period, while others contend he was a mythical figure. Laozi was credited with writing the seminal Taoist work, the Tao Te Ching, which was originally known as the Laozi. Taishang Laojun was a title for Laozi in the Taoist religion. It refers to One of the Three Pure Ones. Source: Wikipedia

Chinese philosophers quite explicitly favored the most concrete sense impressions in understanding the world. In fact, the Chinese language itself is remarkably concrete. There is no word for “size,” for example. If you want to fit someone for shoes, you ask them for the “big-small” of their feet. There is no suffix equivalent to “ness” in Chinese. So there is no “whiteness”—only the white of the swan and the white of the snow. The Chinese are disinclined to use precisely defined terms or categories in any arena, but instead use expressive, metaphoric language.

time can bring about eventually supplants human justice. Chinese philosophers have an expression for this: bu de liao—knowing when to leave the past behind, instead of endlessly seeking revenge. On

I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true.

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that “when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped.” For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for purposeless behavior—that is, for actions not directly aimed at survival, which fulfill themselves in being done in the present and do not necessarily imply some future reward. But indirectly and unintentionally, such behavior is useful for survival because it gives a point to surviving—not, however, when pursued for that reason. To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then—like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth—our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong.

Heaven and Earth are large, yet in the whole of space they are but as a small grain of rice. . . . How unreasonable it would be to suppose that, besides the heaven and Earth which we can see, there are no other heavens and no other Earths.” TENG MU, CHINESE PHILOSOPHER OF THE 1200S

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, wrote the now classic The Art of War nearly twenty-five hundred years ago. This book has become the classic on how to achieve victory in the battlefield. He said this about the enemy: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the

The ancient Chinese philosophers saw the world as consisting of continuous substances and the ancient Greek philosophers tended to see the world as being composed of discrete objects or separate atoms. A piece of wood to the Chinese would have been a seamless, uniform material; to the Greeks it would have been seen as composed of particles. A novel item, such as a seashell, might have been seen as a substance by the Chinese and as an object by the Greeks. Remarkably, there is evidence that modern Asians also tend to see the world as consisting of continuous substances, whereas modern Westerners are more prone to see objects.

Ακόμη δε συνάντησα κανέναν που να αγαπούσε την αρετή περισσότερο από την ηδονή.

You do not yet understand life - how could you understand death?" - Confucius

Our habits limit what we can see, access, sense, and know.

What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists. What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard? There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet. For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical. Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.

True imagination and creativity don’t come from thinking outside the box or letting ourselves go wild, just as true spontaneity does not come from dancing on a table on the weekend while you remain in your tedious job. They don’t come out of great disruptive moments that break forth from an otherwise ordinary, drab life. They are part and parcel of how we live our every day; all moments can be creative and spontaneous when we experience the entire world as an open and expansive place. We get there by constantly cultivating our ability to imagine transcending our own experience.

Confucius's disciples frequently asked him to define goodness. He would give each of them a different answer each time, depending on the situation. That's because Confucian goodness is not something you can define in the abstract. It's the ability to respond well to others; the development of a sensibility that enables you to behave in ways that are good for those around you and to draw out their own better sides.

Consider the parable of the Chinese farmer. One day, the farmer’s horse ran away. That evening, the neighbors stopped by to offer their sympathies. “So sorry to hear your horse ran away,” they said. “That’s too bad.” “Maybe,” the farmer said. “Maybe not.” The next day the horse returned, bringing seven wild horses with it. “Oh, isn’t that lucky,” said the neighbors. “Now you have eight horses. What a great turn of events.” “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” The next day the farmer’s son was training one of these horses when he was thrown and broke his leg. “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” said the neighbors. “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” The following day, conscription officers came to the village to recruit young men for the army, but they rejected the farmer’s son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors said, “Isn’t that great!” “Maybe,” said the farmer. “Maybe not.” We lead telephoto lives in a wide-angle world. We never see the big picture. The only sane response is, like the Chinese farmer, to adopt a philosophy of maybe-ism.

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up.

The news filled me with such euphoria that for an instant I was numb. My ingrained self-censorship immediately started working: I registered the fact that there was an orgy of weeping going on around me, and that I had to come up with some suitable performance. There seemed nowhere to hide my lack of correct emotion except the shoulder of the woman in front of me, one of the student officials, who was apparently heartbroken. I swiftly buried my head in her shoulder and heaved appropriately. As so often in China, a bit of ritual did the trick. Sniveling heartily she made a movement as though she was going to turn around and embrace me I pressed my whole weight on her from behind to keep her in her place, hoping to give the impression that I was in a state of abandoned grief. In the days after Mao's death, I did a lot of thinking. I knew he was considered a philosopher, and I tried to think what his 'philosophy' really was. It seemed to me that its central principle was the need or the desire? for perpetual conflict. The core of his thinking seemed to be that human struggles were the motivating force of history and that in order to make history 'class enemies' had to be continuously created en masse. I wondered whether there were any other philosophers whose theories had led to the suffering and death of so many. I thought of the terror and misery to which the Chinese population had been subjected. For what? But Mao's theory might just be the extension of his personality. He was, it seemed to me, really a restless fight promoter by nature, and good at it. He understood ugly human instincts such as envy and resentment, and knew how to mobilize them for his ends. He ruled by getting people to hate each other. In doing so, he got ordinary Chinese to carry out many of the tasks undertaken in other dictatorships by professional elites. Mao had managed to turn the people into the ultimate weapon of dictatorship. That was why under him there was no real equivalent of the KGB in China. There was no need. In bringing out and nourishing the worst in people, Mao had created a moral wasteland and a land of hatred. But how much individual responsibility ordinary people should share, I could not decide. The other hallmark of Maoism, it seemed to me, was the reign of ignorance. Because of his calculation that the cultured class were an easy target for a population that was largely illiterate, because of his own deep resentment of formal education and the educated, because of his megalomania, which led to his scorn for the great figures of Chinese culture, and because of his contempt for the areas of Chinese civilization that he did not understand, such as architecture, art, and music, Mao destroyed much of the country's cultural heritage. He left behind not only a brutalized nation, but also an ugly land with little of its past glory remaining or appreciated. The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings. Weeping for Mao was perhaps just another programmed act in their programmed lives. Yet the mood of the nation was unmistakably against continuing Mao's policies. Less than a month after his death, on 6 October, Mme Mao was arrested, along with the other members of the Gang of Four. They had no support from anyone not the army, not the police, not even their own guards. They had had only Mao. The Gang of Four had held power only because it was really a Gang of Five. When I heard about the ease with which the Four had been removed, I felt a wave of sadness. How could such a small group of second-rate tyrants ravage 900 million people for so long? But my main feeling was joy. The last tyrants of the Cultural Revolution were finally gone.

Ming is not just about the tragedies that befall us. It’s about the good things, too; the unexpected opportunities, unforeseen chances to do something we love, the chance encounter with someone who will change the trajectory of our whole life. When you hold too tightly to a plan, you risk missing out on these things. And when you wake up one day in that future, you will feel boxed in by a life that, at best, reflects only a piece of who you thought you were at one moment in time.

Just as I do not see how anyone can expect really to understand Kant and Hegel without knowing the German language and without such an understanding of the German mind as can only be acquired in the society of living Germans, so a fortiori I do not see how anyone can understand Confucius without some knowledge of Chinese and a long frequentation of the best Chinese society. I have the highest respect for the Chinese mind and for Chinese civilisation; and I am willing to believe that Chinese civilisation at its highest has graces and excellences which may make Europe seem crude. But I do not believe that I, for one, could ever come to understand it well enough to make Confucius a mainstay. I am led to this conclusion partly by an analogous experience. Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schoolboys lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And I came to the conclusion seeing also that the 'influence' of Brahmin and Buddhist thought upon Europe, as in Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Deussen, had largely been through romantic misunderstanding that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do

You can dam and direct the water, and you can force it to remain on the top of a mountain without flowing down. But is this what water's nature really is? It is what you have done to it that makes it so. Humans can also be made to be not good in the same way. " - Mencius

Some technologies have made it possible for one to travel to the other side of the world in order to see something, whereas some technologies have made that unnecessary: if it were not for things such as the camera and the internet, some African boys would have never seen a Chinese woman’s vagina.

The Chinese say that "the longest journey begins with the first step", and in many philosophical systems "endings and beginnings" are connected; as in the concept of yin and yang, two concentric circles joined together, forever united, forever opposed. If you can find a way to illustrate this in your screenplay, it is to your advantage.

Chinese philosopher Tsang Lap-Chuen is a leading modern exponent of the idea that the sublime involves this kind of experience. In The Sublime: Groundwork towards a Theory, published in 1998, he wrote that the sublime "evokes our awareness of our being on the threshold from the human to that which transcends the human; which borders on the possible and the impossible; the knowable and the unknowable; the meaningful and the fortuitous; the finite and the infinite." In his view, there is no single essential common property possessed by sublime works or sublime natural objects, nor is there a single emotional state evoked by all of them. But he argues that there's a common thread in experiences of the sublime, which is that they take us "to the limit of some human possibility.

There is no ethical or moral framework that transcends context and the complexity of human life. All we have is the messy world within which to work and better ourselves. These ordinary as-if rituals are the means by which we imagine new realities over time construct new worlds. Our lives begin in the everyday and stay in the everyday. Only in the everyday can we begin to create truly great worlds.

Our own thesis was sketched in the Introduction: the classical written Chinese language—the language in which the Analects was composed—is unique, being sharply distinct not only from all non-Sinitic languages but from spoken Chinese as well (ancient and modern), and that the differences between the two Chinese languages are of greater linguistic and philosophical significance than has been generally noticed.

But the truth is that I don’t want to simply offer others a fleeting moment of “inspiration.” I want my story to spark real change. An aha moment becomes most meaningful when it leads us to do more. Dream bigger. Move past our so-called limitations. Defy expectations. Bounce back with the resilience that every single one of us was born with. I didn’t write this book because I want you to say, “Wow, look at what that girl overcame—good for her.” I’m sharing my story because I want you to see what’s possible in your own life. Right here. Right now. Starting the second you pick up your pen and create your own amazing narrative. The words of the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu have always resonated with me: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” What follows is my first step. My first stumble. My first dance. My first dream.

A quote attributed to the Chinese Taoist philosopher Lao-Tzu sums this up: The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.

...there is the fable, Chinese I think, literary I am sure: of a period on earth when the dominant creatures were cats: who after ages of trying to cope with the anguishes of mortality---famine, plague, war, injustice, folly, greed---in a word, civilized government---convened a congress of the wisest cat philosophers to see if anything could be done: who after long deliberation agreed that the dilemma, the problems themselves were insoluble and the only practical solution was to give it up, relinquish, abdicate, by selecting from among the lesser creatures a species, race optimistic enough to believe that the mortal predicament could be solved and ignorant enough never to learn better. Which is why the cat lives with you, is completely dependent on you for food and shelter but lifts no paw for you and loves you not; in a word, why your cat looks at you the way it does.

Insight is not a quality that comes naturally, rather it is a characteristic that is nurtured through intelligent decision-making. It was through the process of applying his intelligence that Bruce developed deep insights into living the Tao of gung fu. He made passionate inquiry into every aspect of living the martial way, he respected traditional beliefs, but was not bound by unexamined tradition, he created his own philosophical outlook on life, and lived it and breathed it every moment of every day—

The palliative of the primitive hut. The place where you are stripped back to essentials, to which you return—even if it happens not to be where you came from—to decontaminate and absolve yourself of the striving. The place where you disrobe, molt it all, the uniforms you’ve worn and the costumes you’ve gotten into, where you shed your batteredness and your resentment, your appeasement of the world and your defiance of the world, your manipulation of the world and its manhandling of you. The aging man leaves and goes into the woods—Eastern philosophical thought abounds with that motif, Taoist thought, Hindu thought, Chinese thought. The “forest dweller,” the last stage on life’s way. Think of those Chinese paintings of the old man under the mountain, the old Chinese man all alone under the mountain, receding from the agitation of the autobiographical. He has entered vigorously into competition with life; now, becalmed, he enters into competition with death, drawn down into austerity, the final business.

The heartland is the political, cultural, demographic and – crucially – the agricultural centre of gravity. About a billion people live in this part of China, despite it being just half the size of the United States, which has a population of 327 million. Because the terrain of the heartland lent itself to settlement and an agrarian lifestyle, the early dynasties felt threatened by the non-Han regions which surrounded them, especially Mongolia with its nomadic bands of violent warriors. China chose the same strategy as Russia: attack as defence, leading to power. As we shall see, there were natural barriers which – if the Han could reach them and establish control – would protect them. It was a struggle over millennia, only fully realised with the annexation of Tibet in 1951. By the time of the famous Chinese philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) there was a strong feeling of Chinese identity and of a divide between civilised China and the ‘barbarous’ regions which surrounded it. This was a sense of identity shared by 60 million or so people.

There is one general point that we would make in our interpretation of this classical Chinese language. Above we have argued for a processual understanding of classical Daoist cosmology. If this account is persuasive, it means that the vocabulary that expresses the worldview and the common sense in which the Daodejing is to be located is first and foremost gerundive. Because “things” in the Daodejing are in fact active “processes” and ongoing “events,” nouns that would “objectify” this world are derived from and revert to a verbal sensibility.

By making concrete, defined plans, you are actually being abstract, because you are making these plans for a self that is abstract: a future self that you imagine based on who you think you are now, even though you, the world, and your circumstances will change. You cut yourself off from the real, messy complexities that are the basis from which you can develop as a human being. You eliminate your ability to grow as a person because you are limiting that growth to what is in the best interests of the person you happen to be right now, and not the person you will become.

My take on the various components of Maoist politics varies, depending on the philosophical, theoretical, strategic, or methodological element in question. In general, I consider Maoism to be an internal critique of Stalinism that fails to break with Stalinism. Over many years, Mao developed a critical understanding of Soviet society, and of the negative symptoms it displayed. But at the same time, he failed to locate the cause of these symptoms in the capitalist social relations of the USSR and so retained many shared assumptions with the Stalinist model in his own thinking.

Once there was and once there was not a devout, God-fearing man who lived his entire life according to stoic principles. He died on his fortieth birthday and woke up floating in nothing. Now, mind you, floating in nothing was comforting, light-less, airless, like a mother’s womb. This man was grateful. But then he decided he would love to have sturdy ground beneath his feet, so he would feel more solid himself. Lo and behold, he was standing on earth. He knew it to be earth, for he knew the feel of it. Yet he wanted to see. I desire light, he thought, and light appeared. I want sunlight, not any light, and at night it shall be moonlight. His desires were granted. Let there be grass. I love the feel of grass beneath my feet. And so it was. I no longer wish to be naked. Only robes of the finest silk must touch my skin. And shelter, I need a grand palace whose entrance has double-sided stairs, and the floors must be marble and the carpets Persian. And food, the finest of food. His breakfast was English; his midmorning snack French. His lunch was Chinese. His afternoon tea was Indian. His supper was Italian, and his late-night snack was Lebanese. Libation? He had the best of wines, of course, and champagne. And company, the finest of company. He demanded poets and writers, thinkers and philosophers, hakawatis and musicians, fools and clowns. And then he desired sex. He asked for light-skinned women and dark-skinned, blondes and brunettes, Chinese, South Asian, African, Scandinavian. He asked for them singly and two at a time, and in the evenings he had orgies. He asked for younger girls, after which he asked for older women, just to try. The he tried men, muscular men, skinny men. Then boys. Then boys and girls together. Then he got bored. He tried sex with food. Boys with Chinese, girls with Indian. Redheads with ice cream. Then he tried sex with company. He fucked the poet. Everybody fucked the poet. But again he got bored. The days were endless. Coming up with new ideas became tiring and tiresome. Every desire he could ever think of was satisfied. He had had enough. He walked out of his house, looked up at the glorious sky, and said, “Dear God. I thank You for Your abundance, but I cannot stand it here anymore. I would rather be anywhere else. I would rather be in hell.” And the booming voice from above replied, “And where do you think you are?

The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.

Metaphysically astigmatic, perhaps, the early Chinese thinkers never seem to have perceived any substances that remained the same through time; rather in our interpretation they saw “things” relationally, and related differently, at different periods of time. Dao, the totality of all things (wanwu ), is a process that requires the language of both “change (bian )” and “persistence (tong )” to capture its dynamic disposition. This processional nature of experience is captured in the Analects 9.17: The Master was standing on the riverbank, and observed, “Isn’t life’s passing just like this, never ceasing day or night!

The common cause of the massive blindness of the Chinese officials in the nineteenth century was a huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world. That painful century of humiliation finally led to China opening up. Deng made the decision on pragmatic grounds. And the opening up worked: China’s economy soared. Yet, do the Chinese view this opening up as a temporary measure until China becomes strong again? Do they have a desire to return eventually to their Middle Kingdom mentality, trading with the world while remaining culturally detached from it? When China built walls and cut off communication with the rest of the world, it fell behind. When China opened up to the world, it thrived. To guarantee its continued long-term success, China should completely abandon its two-thousand-year-old Middle Kingdom mentality and decide to become the most open society in terms of economic engagement with the rest of the world. Only such a major change of mind would enable the Chinese officials to lay out the red carpet for foreign businesses, including American businesses.

But his study of Western philosophy had only served in the end to satisfy him that wisdom after all was to be found within the limits of the Confucian canon. He accepted its philosophy with conviction. It answered the needs of his spirit with a completeness which made all foreign learning seem vain. I was interested in this because it bore out an opinion of mine that philosophy is an affair of character rather than of logic: the philosopher believes not according to evidence, but according to his own temperament; and his thinking merely serves to make reasonable what his instinct regards as true. If Confucianism gained so firm a hold on the Chinese it is because it explained and expressed them as no other system of thought could do.

Indira was surrounded by people who had given up hope, who blamed their own misery on the influence of Christianity and western cultures, and yet, literally in the midst of squalor, her family had created a place of real beauty. It really makes you stop and think. Uncle Google should be spitting out eight hundred million things American schools have done right. The fact things are so screwed up makes no sense. If you believe Uncle Google, then we’ve done the exact opposite from Indira’s family—in the land of hope and plenty we’ve created a place that’s ugly. We have so much. Can things really be so bad? Maybe we can’t fix our schools because as individuals we’ve never truly been broken. Or maybe Chinese lanterns make everyone wax philosophical.

Base two especially impressed the seventeenth-century religious philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He observed that in this base all numbers were written in terms of the symbols 0 and 1 only. Thus eleven, which equals 1 · 23 + 0 · 22 + 1 · 2 + 1, would be written 1011 in base two. Leibniz saw in this binary arithmetic the image and proof of creation. Unity was God and zero was the void. God drew all objects from the void just as the unity applied to the zero creates all numbers. This conception, over which the reader would do well not to ponder too long, delighted Leibniz so much that he sent it to Grimaldi, the Jesuit president of the Chinese tribunal for mathematics, to be used as an argument for the conversion of the Chinese emperor to Christianity.

300 years seems like a very long time ago to Americans, but for the Chinese, it isn’t long at all. While the prospect of a revolution or a war that will overturn the US system is unimaginable to most Americans, both seem inevitable to the Chinese because they have seen those things happen again and again and have studied the patterns that inevitably precede them. While most Americans focus on particular events, especially those that are happening now, most Chinese leaders view current events in the context of larger, more evolutionary patterns. Americans are impulsive and tactical; they fight for what they want in the present. Most Chinese are strategic; they plan for how they can get what they want in the future. I have also found Chinese leaders to be much more philosophical (literally, readers of philosophy) than American leaders.

Of course, this isn’t usually the way historians of ideas tell this story. Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

A parallel comparison helps to capture the similarities between existentialism (especially Nietzsche's) and Daoism (especially Zhuangzi's). Both discover the practical pointlessness of universal or absolute meaning (purpose). Nietzsche, from his perspective as a disappointed Christian yearning for absolute, transcendent, dependence on God, experiences this awareness with existentialist angst, a sensation of looking off a cliff into a bottomless abyss. The angst is caused by the vertigo impulse, the fear we will jump or drop off our perch into that nothingness. Zhuangzi, from his Daoist sense of the constraint of conventional authority, does not think of any cliff as a reference point. If the abyss is bottomless, then there is no such thing as falling. The cliff and Zhuangzi are both floating free. Leaving the cliff and entering the abyss is weightlessness―free flight―not falling. From his relativistic perspective, the cliff is floating away. Zhuangzi's reaction is not "Oh no!" but "Whee!

The dominant philosophical preoccupations of cultures are often a function of tacit assumptions made early in their narratives that are often reflected in their languages. Greek metaphysical presuppositions melded with Judeo-Christian beliefs to produce a “God-model,” where an independent and superordinate principle determines order and value in the world while remaining aloof from it, making human freedom, autonomy, creativity, and individuality at once problematic and of key philosophical interest. On the Chinese side, the commitment to the processional, transformative, and always provisional nature of experience renders the “ten thousand things [or, perhaps better, ‘events’] (wanwu )” which make up the world, including the human world, at once continuous one with another, and at the same time, unique. Thus the primary philosophical problem that emerges from these assumptions is ars contextualis: how do we correlate these unique particulars to achieve their most productive continuities? (This is the underlying general form of “questions” posed to the Book of Changes when casting the stalks.)

). In fact, in the absence of some claim to objectivity that “objectifies” and thus makes “objects” of phenomena, the Chinese tradition does not have the separation between time and entities that would allow for either time without entities, or entities without time—there is no possibility of either an empty temporal corridor or an eternal anything (in the sense of being timeless). What encourages us within a Western metaphysical tradition to separate time and space is our inclination, inherited from the Greeks, to see things in the world as fixed in their formal aspect, and thus as bounded and limited. If instead of giving ontological privilege to the formal aspect of phenomena, we were to regard them as having parity in their formal and changing aspects, we might be more like classical China in temporalizing them in light of their ceaseless transformation, and conceive of them more as “events” than as “things.” In this processual worldview, each phenomenon is some unique current or impulse within a temporal flow. In fact, it is the pervasive and collective capacity of the events of the world to transform continuously that is the actual meaning of time. A

But you, do you know what you are doing?" he exclaimed. "What is the reason for which you deem yourselves our betters? Have you excelled us in arts or letters? Have our thinkers been less profound than yours? Has our civilisation been less elaborate, less complicated, less refined than yours? Why, when you lived in caves and clothed yourselves with skins we were a cultured people. Do you know that we tried an experiment which is unique in the history of the world? We sought to rule this great country not by force, but by wisdom. And for centuries we succeeded. Then why does the white man despise the yellow? Shall I tell you? Because he has invented the machine gun. That is your superiority. We are a defenceless horde and you can blow us into eternity. You have shattered the dream of our philosophers that the world could be governed by the power of law and order. And now you are teaching our young men your secret. You have thrust your hideous inventions upon us. Do you not know that we have a genius for mechanics? Do you not know that there are in this country four hundred millions of the most practical and industrious people in the world? Do you think it will take us long to learn? And what will become of your superiority when the yellow man can make as good guns as the white and fire them as straight? You have appealed to the machine gun and by the machine gun shall you be judged.

Immediate experience requires that the concrete particulars themselves are the objects of knowledge. Such particulars are not mediated but are grasped immediately in the sense that the experience of them is simply had. The structures that permit the having of experience and that determine its significance are the cultivated habits that dispose one toward that experience. The language of taste and of appreciation is relevant. The notion of Being that implies a contrast between essence and existence privileges mediation and, therefore, conceptual, generic, and essential knowledge. An aesthetic perspective, as opposed to a rational or logical one, involves experiencing the world in a relatively unmediated fashion. Mediated experience requires one to grasp or comprehend the essence of a thing, while the unmediated aesthetic experience is simply had as lived experience. A comparison with the analytical epistemic language of “getting,” “grasping,” “comprehending” is important here. Rather than a language of mediation in which the essences of things are abstracted through concepts, the Chinese language tends to be dispositional in that it promotes the “having” of the unmediated experience through a correlating and focusing of the affairs of the day. The important contrast here is between a cognitive and discursive knowing that abstracts from experience and felt experience as the concrete content of knowledge.

Military analysis is not an exact science. To return to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, and paraphrase the great Chinese political philosopher, it is at least as close to art. But many logical methods offer insight into military problems-even if solutions to those problems ultimately require the use of judgement and of broader political and strategic considerations as well. Military affairs may not be as amenable to quantification and formal methodological treatment as economics, for example. However, even if our main goal in analysis is generally to illuminate choices, bound problems, and rule out bad options - rather than arrive unambiguously at clear policy choices-the discipline of military analysis has a great deal to offer. Moreover, simple back-of-the envelope methodologies often provide substantial insight without requiring the churning of giant computer models or access to the classified data of official Pentagon studies, allowing generalities and outsiders to play important roles in defense analytical debates. We have seen all too often (in the broad course of history as well as in modern times) what happens when we make key defense policy decisions based solely on instinct, ideology, and impression. To avoid cavalier, careless, and agenda-driven decision-making, we therefore need to study the science of war as well-even as we also remember the cautions of Clausewitz and avoid hubris in our predictions about how any war or other major military endeavor will ultimately unfold.

Yet why should Chinese, Indians, Muslims and Spaniards – who belonged to very different cultures that failed to agree about much of anything – nevertheless share the belief in gold? Why didn’t it happen that Spaniards believed in gold, while Muslims believed in barley, Indians in cowry shells, and Chinese in rolls of silk? Economists have a ready answer. Once trade connects two areas, the forces of supply and demand tend to equalise the prices of transportable goods. In order to understand why, consider a hypothetical case. Assume that when regular trade opened between India and the Mediterranean, Indians were uninterested in gold, so it was almost worthless. But in the Mediterranean, gold was a coveted status symbol, hence its value was high. What would happen next? Merchants travelling between India and the Mediterranean would notice the difference in the value of gold. In order to make a profit, they would buy gold cheaply in India and sell it dearly in the Mediterranean. Consequently, the demand for gold in India would skyrocket, as would its value. At the same time the Mediterranean would experience an influx of gold, whose value would consequently drop. Within a short time the value of gold in India and the Mediterranean would be quite similar. The mere fact that Mediterranean people believed in gold would cause Indians to start believing in it as well. Even if Indians still had no real use for gold, the fact that Mediterranean people wanted it would be enough to make the Indians value it. Similarly, the fact that another person believes in cowry shells, or dollars, or electronic data, is enough to strengthen our own belief in them, even if that person is otherwise hated, despised or ridiculed by us. Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.

Some technologies have made it possible for one to travel to the other side of the world in order to see something, whereas some have made that unnecessary: if it were not for things such as the camera and the Internet, some African boys would have never seen a Chinese woman’s vagina.

To me, this sounds like a real-life version of a story—the title of which is often translated as “The Useless Tree”—from the Zhuangzi, a collection of writings attributed Zhuang Zhou, a fourth-century Chinese philosopher. The story is about a carpenter who sees a tree (in one version, a serrate oak, a similar-looking relative to our coast live oak) of impressive size and age. But the carpenter passes it right by, declaring it a “worthless tree” that has only gotten to be this old because its gnarled branches would not be good for timber. Soon afterward, the tree appears to him in a dream and asks, “Are you comparing me with those useful trees?” The tree points out to him that fruit trees and timber trees are regularly ravaged. Meanwhile, uselessness has been this tree’s strategy: “This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large?” The tree balks at the distinction between usefulness and worth, made by a man who only sees trees as potential timber: “What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”5 It’s easy for me to imagine these words being spoken by Old Survivor to the nineteenth-century loggers who casually passed it over, less than a century before

Chinese philosophers say, in the presence of these thoughts, we must act ‘as if’ – even in the moments we are struggling.

Although the eighteenth-century European rationalists attacked the Society of Jesus and its proselytism in China, they remained entirely dependent on the Jesuits' information on China, mainly through the collection of Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (published until 1818) and through Jean-Baptiste du Halde's Description géographique (1735). In many ways, the Jesuits paved the way for the philosophers' description of China as a "paradisiacal universe," a model of rational government, and Chinese religion as a "heap of superstitions." The humanist tendency of the Jesuits backfired onto Christianity when Voltaire began advocating to "crush the infamous" (Ecraser l'infâme), that is, superstition, hence Catholicism, "under the weight of China and the virtue of the Chinese.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said that being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the practice of the Way, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things, until finally you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing is left undone. The first time I read these lines, from the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, they hit me like an explosion.

It was not imprisonment, supposedly, but simply that all Manchus needed special protection because they were related to the royal house and so were part of officialdom. Actually it was a luxurious imprisonment, for this was the Chinese way of conquering enemies. When the Manchu invasion of 1644 was successful in a military sense-and almost any people could invade China successfully, it seemed, in a military sense-China did not resist. The people were apparently passive, mildly curious, and even courteous to their conquerors. The real struggle came afterwards, but so subtly that the conquerors never knew they were being conquered. The technique of victory was that as soon as the invaders laid down their arms the philosophical but intensely practical Chinese persuaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy themselves. The more the new rulers ate and drink, the better pleased the Chinese were, and if they also learned to enjoy gambling and opium and many wives, so much the better. One would have thought that the Chinese were delighted to be invaded and conquered. On the pretext of increased comfort, the men shoes were persuaded to live in especially pleasant part of any city, and to be protected by special guards against rebellious citizens. This meant they were segregated and since they were encouraged to do no work, the actual and tedious details of the government were assumed performed by the chinese, ostensibly for them. The result of this life of idleness and luxury was that the Manchus generally became a fit while the Chinese administered the government. The Manchus were like pet cats and the Chinese kept them so, knowing that when the degeneration was complete, a Chinese revolutionary would overthrow the rotten structure. Revolution was in the Chinese tradition and every dynasty was overthrown, if not by foreign invasion, then by native revolution.

It was not imprisonment, supposedly, but simply that all Manchus needed special protection because they were related to the royal house and so were part of officialdom. Actually it was a luxurious imprisonment, for this was the Chinese way of conquering enemies. When the Manchu invasion of 1644 was successful in a military sense-and almost any people could invade China successfully, it seemed, in a military sense-China did not resist. The people were apparently passive, mildly curious, and even courteous to their conquerors. The real struggle came afterwards, but so subtly that the conquerors never knew they were being conquered. The technique of victory was that as soon as the invaders laid down their arms the philosophical but intensely practical Chinese persuaded them to move into palaces and begin to enjoy themselves. The more the new rulers ate and drink, the better pleased the Chinese were, and if they also learned to enjoy gambling and opium and many wives, so much the better. One would have thought that the Chinese were delighted to be invaded and conquered. On the pretext of increased comfort, the Manchus were persuaded to live in especially pleasant part of any city, and to be protected by special guards against rebellious citizens. This meant they were segregated and since they were encouraged to do no work, the actual and tedious details of the government were assumed performed by the chinese, ostensibly for them. The result of this life of idleness and luxury was that the Manchus generally became a fit while the Chinese administered the government. The Manchus were like pet cats and the Chinese kept them so, knowing that when the degeneration was complete, a Chinese revolutionary would overthrow the rotten structure. Revolution was in the Chinese tradition and every dynasty was overthrown, if not by foreign invasion, then by native revolution

PRAJNĀPĀRAMITĀ SŪTRAS The Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, or Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, are a body of self-consciously related works dealing with the subject of the new prajñā, or wisdom, taught by the Mahāyāna. Instrumental in the origins of the Mahāyāna itself, some texts from this category are among the earliest Mahāyāna sūtras, probably originating in the 1st century BCE. Four phases have been identified in the growth of this body of texts:122 (a) 100BCE–100CE: the Ratnaguṇasaṁcayagāthā and the Aṣṭasāhasrikā (8,000 lines). (b) 100–300CE: a period of elaboration that produced versions in 18,000,25,000, and 100,000 lines (and possibly the Vajracchedikā). (c) 300–500CE: a period of condensation, producing, among others, the Heart Sūtra (although there is some evidence to suggest that this particular text was originally written in Chinese and then translated back into Sanskrit.123) (d) 500–1000CE: a period producing texts showing Tantric influences. The sūtras themselves offer no elaborate philosophical argument – just the assertion of the true way of things, which is that nothing has ultimate existence, not even the purportedly real dharmas of the Abhidharma analysis. A characteristic device of these sūtras is the creation of paradoxes by switching between the conventional and the ultimate perspectives. The Perfection of Wisdom sūtras, and their dharmaśūnyatā position, were not accepted by all the adherents of the Bodhisattva Path.

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school. The musings of the tlamatinime occurred in intellectual neighborhoods frequented by philosophers from Brussels to Beijing, but the mix was entirely the Mexica’s own. Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

As a line in an old Chinese poem goes, ‘Honey melons hang on bitter vines; sweet dates grow on thistles and thorns.’ In a philosophical sense, nothing is perfect in the world. One would fail to see the full picture if one claimed something to be perfect because of its merits, or if something were viewed as useless just because of its defects. It is true that economic globalization has created new problems, but this is no justification for writing off economic globalization completely.

Care about what other people think, and you will always be their prisoner.” —Laozi, Chinese philosopher

In the past, Koreans were bound by a caste system nearly as rigid as that of India. Noblemen wore white shirts and high black horsehair hats, while slaves wore wooden tags around their necks. The old class structure drew heavily on the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who believed that humans fit strictly into a social pyramid. Kim Il-sung took the least humane elements of Confucianism and combined them with Stalinism. At the top of the pyramid, instead of an emperor, resided Kim Il-sung and his family. From there began a downward progression of fifty-one categories that were lumped into three broad classes—the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class.

As the Chinese philosopher Confucius humbly remarked, “For all Man’s supposed accomplishments, his continued existence is completely dependent upon six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains.”1

Appetite for food and sex is human nature, shi se xing ye,' as the philosopher Gaozi said. Or, as the popular saying derived from the Book of Rites puts it: 'Eat, drink, man, woman' (yin shi nan nü). We are all animals, blessed with tongues, stomachs and sexual desires, in need of comfort and affection.

Celebrate People Who Don’t Add Unnecessary Stuff in the First Place As the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu put it, “Do nothing, and everything will be done.” Smart friction fixers never forget that, if they add nothing unnecessary, excessive, or destructive, then no subtraction will be needed.

Bushido made light of knowledge as such. It was not pursued as an end in itself, but as a means to the attainment of wisdom. Hence, he who stopped short of this end was regarded no higher than a convenient machine, which could turn out poems and maxims at bidding. Thus, knowledge was conceived as identical with its practical application in life; and this Socratic doctrine found its greatest exponent in the Chinese philosopher Wan Yang Ming, who never wearies of repeating, “To know and to act are one and the same.

To put it in somewhat contradictory terms, true tea existed only before the advent of the tea ceremony. After the coming of tea, when deformation came to be consciously sought, common everyday beauty disappeared and unnatural manipulation began. This meant the demise of the beauty of tea. Every country, according to its historical and geographical conditions, has its own peculiar character. India is characterized by intellect, China by ready action and Japan by aesthetic perception - the three splendors of the East. Indians are adept at thinking, Chinese at acting and Japanese at appreciating art. In Europe, France is close to Japan, Judaism to China and Germany to India. In Germany, however, the intellect tends to be philosophical rather than religious. While there may be many intrinsic contradictions, I still think that there is probably no country like Japan whose people live in surroundings composed of specially chosen objects. Behind it all is undoubtedly some sort of educated taste or standard of beauty. In Korea, the number of monochrome pieces in white or black glaze is stupendous. there are no intricate designs featuring a multitude of colors. the same is true for Korean textiles, which are undyed. Everyone wears white clothing.

To me, this sounds like a real-life version of a story—the title of which is often translated as “The Useless Tree”—from the Zhuangzi, a collection of writings attributed Zhuang Zhou, a fourth-century Chinese philosopher. The story is about a carpenter who sees a tree (in one version, a serrate oak, a similar-looking relative to our coast live oak) of impressive size and age. But the carpenter passes it right by, declaring it a “worthless tree” that has only gotten to be this old because its gnarled branches would not be good for timber. Soon afterward, the tree appears to him in a dream and asks, “Are you comparing me with those useful trees?” The tree points out to him that fruit trees and timber trees are regularly ravaged. Meanwhile, uselessness has been this tree’s strategy: “This is of great use to me. If I had been of some use, would I ever have grown this large?” The tree balks at the distinction between usefulness and worth, made by a man who only sees trees as potential timber: “What’s the point of this—things condemning things? You a worthless man about to die—how do you know I’m a worthless tree?”5 It’s easy for me to imagine these words being spoken by Old Survivor to the nineteenth-century loggers who casually passed it over, less than a century before we began realizing what we’d lost.

I refer to a fundamental difference in the religious attitude between the East (China and India) and the West; this difference can be expressed in terms of logical concepts. Since Aristotle, the Western world has followed the logical principles of Aristotelian philosophy. This logic is based on the law of identity which states that A is A, the law of contradiction (A is not non-A) and the law of the excluded middle (A cannot be A and non-A, neither A nor non-A). Aristotle explains his position very clearly in the following sentence: 'It is impossible for the same thing at the same time to belong and not to belong to the same thing and in the same respect; and whatever other distinctions we might add to meet dialectical objections, let them be added. This, then, is the most certain of all principles...' This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be 'natural' and self-evident, while on the other hand the statement that X is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. (Of course, the statement refers to the subject X at a given time, not to X now and X later, or one aspect of X as against another aspect.) In opposition to Aristotelian logic is what one might call paradoxical logic, which assumes that A and non-A do not exclude each other as predicates of X. Paradoxical logic was predominant in Chinese and Indian thinking, in the philosophy of Heraclitus, and then again, under the name of dialectics, it became the philosophy of Hegel, and of Marx. The general principle of paradoxical logic has been clearly described by Lao-tse. 'Words that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical.' And by Chuang-tzu: 'That which is one is one. That which. is not-one, is also one.' These formulations of paradoxical logic are positive: it is and it is not. Another formulation is negative: it is neither this nor that. The former expression of thought we find in Taoistic thought, in Heraclitus and again in Hegelian dialectics; the latter formulation is frequent in Indian philosophy. Although it would transcend the scope of this book to give a more detailed description of the difference between Aristotelian and paradoxical logic, I shall mention a few illustrations in order to make the principle more understandable. Paradoxical logic in Western thought has its earliest philosophical expression in Heraclitus philosophy. He assumes the conflict between opposites is the basis of all existence. 'They do not understand', he says, 'that the all-One, conflicting in itself, is identical with itself: conflicting harmony as in the bow and in the lyre.' Or still more clearly: 'We go into the same river, and yet not in the same; it is we and it is not we.' Or 'One and the same manifests itself in things as living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old.

Knowing others is wisdom; knowing yourself is enlightenment.” —Lao Tzu, Chinese Philosopher

five virtues are goodness, propriety, ritual, knowledge, and sagacity.

I have never yet seen anyone whose desire to build up his moral power was as strong as sexual desire. Confucius (K'ung Fu-tzu) 551–479 bc Chinese philosopher: Analects ch. 9, v. 17, tr. Wing-Tsit Chan

Slingerland explains that Chinese philosophers like Confucius, Lao Tse, Zhuangzi, and a few others were concerned with accessing a state called Wu-Wei, pronounced “ooh-way.” This is a state of spontaneous flow.

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that “when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped.” For a society surviving to no purpose is one that makes no provision for purposeless behavior—that is, for actions not directly aimed at survival, which fulfill themselves in being done in the present and do not necessarily imply some future reward.

The hustle and bustle everywhere, so many carriages and cabs at a dash, Europeans, Chinese, and natives, each dressed after their own fashion, fruit pedlars, messengers, porters stripped to the waist, foodshops, inns, restaurants, shops, carts pulled by philosophical carabaos, the noise, the incessant movement, the sun itself, a certain smell, the riot of colours—he had almost forgotten what Manila was like.

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.     —Lao Tzu; ancient Chinese philosopher, founder of Taoism, could have been one guy or a mythical compilation of many, nobody really knows for sure I

To achieve these Jeffersonian ends, Alexander Hamilton—Jefferson’s philosophical rival—devised an ingenious strategy that entailed a strong manufacturing base, a national banking system, a centralized federal government, and an export-led economic scheme protected by the U.S. Navy.

The philosophic goal in China was a search for harmony and perfection, not the discovery of truth by reasoning. In China’s Confucian society, the best pathway to perfection was the development of a virtuous life.

Living in a capricious world means accepting that we do not live within a stable moral cosmos that will always reward people for what they do. We should not deny that real tragedies do happen. But at the same time, we should always expect to be surprised and learn to work with whatever befalls us. If we can continue this work, even when tragedies come our way, we can begin to accept the world as unpredictable and impossible to determine perfectly. And this is where the promise of a capricious world lies: if our world is indeed constantly fragmented and unpredictable, then it is something we can constantly work on bettering. We can go into each situation resolved to be the best human being we can be, not because of what we’ll get out of it, but simply to affect others around us for the better, regardless of the outcome. We can cultivate our better sides and face this unpredictable world, transforming it as we go.

It’s the fear of what’s in the dark that scares us, not the dark itself. Thanks, ancient Chinese philosophers. You guys are the best. And the deadest. But mostly the best. Jack’s

Confucius, the Chinese philosopher, born 551 B. C., said: "Obey Heaven, and follow the orders of Him who governs it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Do to another what you would he should do unto you; and do not unto another what you would should not be done unto you; thou only needest this law alone, it is the foundation and principle of all the rest. Acknowledge thy benefits by the return of other benefits, but never revenge injuries." [415:1]

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. —Lao Tzu; ancient Chinese philosopher,

humanity. The roots of the Turing Test in logical positivism and English philosophy is part of the problem. Turing was trying to find a way – not to decide the nature of humanity but whether machines could think. He saw no real distinction between whether the computer could fool an interrogator that it was human and whether it was actually thinking. In 1980 the English philosopher John Searle published his assault in an important philosophical article. It included with a story called ‘The Chinese Room’. Imagine a sealed room with a man who doesn’t understand Chinese inside, said Searle. Imagine he gets messages in Chinese, looks them up in a lexicon and finds them associated with other Chinese characters, which he passes back – without knowing that the messages he is getting are questions and the messages he is sending are answers. Now, the man might be able to convince the equivalent of Turing’s interrogator that he could understand Chinese, but actually he couldn’t.

Two thousand three hundred years ago, the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu dreamt he was a butterfly. Upon waking, he considered this question: how would I know if I was Chuang Tzu dreaming I’m a butterfly – or instead, if right now I’m a butterfly dreaming I’m a man named Chuang Tzu?

True influence isn't to be found in over strength or will. It comes from creating a world that feels so natural that no one questions it. This is how a Laozian safe wields enormous influence.

With all this investment in our self-definition, we risk building our future on a very narrow sense of who we are - what we see as our strengths and weaknesses, our likes and dislikes. Many Chinese thinkers might say that in doing this, we are looking at such a small part of who we are potentially. We're taking a limited number of our emotional dispositions during a certain time and place and allowing those to define us forever. By thinking of human nature as monolithic, we instantly limit our potential.

When we can let go of the idea that there are clear guidelines and a stable world, then what we are left with is the heart-mind to guide us. The heart-mind is all there is, and we develop it every day through our relationships with the people we’re with. It helps us to sense things correctly, to lay the groundwork for growth, and to work with what we have. And as you do so, all that you thought you were will begin to change. You will find parts of yourself you didn’t know existed. The world you once thought of as stable starts instead to seem like a world of infinite possibilities.

Confucius, the philosopher and politician who was born in the sixth century B.C.E. He acquired a place in Chinese history akin to that of Socrates in the West, in part because his ideology encouraged order and loyalty. “There is government,” Confucius said, “when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son.” Confucius linked morality to the strength of the state: “He who exercises government by means of virtue may be compared to the North Star, which holds its place while all other stars turn around it.

For Lao-tzu’s Taoism is the philosophical equivalent of jujitsu, or judo, which means the way of gentleness. Its basis is the principle of Tao, which may be translated the Way of Nature. But in the Chinese language the word which we render as “nature” has a special meaning not found in its English equivalent. Translated literally, it means “self-so.” For to the Chinese, nature is what works and moves by itself without having to be shoved about, wound up, or controlled by conscious effort. Your heart beats “self-so,” and, if you would give it half a chance, your mind can function “self-so”—though most of us are much too afraid of ourselves to try the experiment.

Few people realize that the Bible discourages people from studying foreign languages. They story of the tower of Babel informs us that there is one humanity (God's one), only that "our languages are confused." That has always meant that, say, any German philosopher could know exactly what the Chinese people were thinking, only that he couldn't understand them. So instead of learning the foreign language, he demanded a translation.

The key for the players is to be conscious that they are pretending; that together they have entered an alternate reality in which they imagine different sides of themselves.

This is how we tend to learn about world history: as discrete civilizations that developed on their own over time. Now imagine a different kind of museum, one organized solely by era. You could stroll through a gallery, for example, and see a Roman silver denarius coin, a bronze coin from China’s Han dynasty, and a punch-marked coin from India’s Mauryan Empire. You would see right away that three major civilizations were going through remarkably similar changes at roughly the same time, despite the vast distance between them: each had become an empire, and each was running an economy based upon coin currency.

In a Vedic text known as the Samarangana Sutradhara, there is mention of manned rockets and their means of propulsion. In the Samara Sudradhara we find mention of the use of biological weapons, each of which produced a specific effect. The Samhara debilitated its victims by attacking the motor center of the brain, Moha caused blockage of nerve impulses, resulting in complete paralysis. In the Chinese Feng Shen Veni we find similar descriptions of germ warfare, and again reference is made to specific weapons causing specific results. Indian philosopher Aulukya discussed the miniature solar system within the atom, molecular construction and transformation, and and Theory of Relativity two thousand eight hundred years before Einstein.

Those with knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.” – LAO TSE, Chinese philosopher (604-507 B.C.)

Chinese alchemy parallels European alchemy in postulating the change from watery lead (nigredo) to fiery heart (rubedo) and then to pure white (albedo) or gold (also known as the Philosopher’s Stone).22 Understandably, in ancient Greece, a “similar archetypal concept of a perfect being is that of Platonic man, round on all sides and uniting within himself the two sexes.”23

They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

The unusual difficulty in making Qi intelligible in modern Western philosophy suggests that the underlying Chinese metaphysical assumption is significantly different from the Cartesian dichotomy between spirit and matter.... (furthermore) the continuous presence in Chinese philosophy of the idea of Qi as a way of conceptualizing the base structure and function of the cosmos, despite the availability of symbolic resources to make an analytical distinction between spirit and matter as an undifferentiated whole. The loss of analytical clarity is compensated by the reward of imaginative richness. The fruitful ambiguity of Qi allows philosophers to explore realms of being which are inconceivable to people constricted to Cartesian dichotomy.

The thought turned him topsy-turvy. It seemed to summarize the whole worthless way of the world--if there was one. And versions of it began to flutter wildly through his head. You have to look round to see straight. Good enough. Useful. And the rough places plain. But all that's geometry. But it measures the earth. You have to go slow to catch up. Eat to get thin? no, but fast to grow fat, that was a fine one. Then lose to win? fail to succeed? Risky. Stop to begin. The form made noiseless music--lumly lum lum or lum-lee-lee lum--like fill to empty, every physical extreme. Die to live was a bit old hat. But default to repay. And lie to be honest. He liked the ring of that. Flack! I'm white in order to be black. Sin first and saint later. Cruel to be kind, of course, and the hurts in the hurter--that's what they say--a lot of blap. That's my name, my nomination: Saint Later. Now then: humble to be proud; poor to be rich. Enslave to make free? That moved naturally. Also multiply to subtract. Dee dee dee. Young Saint Later. A list of them, as old as Pythagoras had. Even engenders odd. How would that be? Eight is five and three. There were no middle-aged saints--they were all old men or babies. Ah, god--the wise fool. The simpleton sublime. Babe in the woods, roach in the pudding, prince in the pauper, enchanted beauty in the toad. This was the wisdom of the folk and the philosopher alike--the disorder of the lyre, or the drawn-out bow of that sane madman, the holy Heraclitus. The poet Zeno. The logician Keats. Discovery after discovery: the more the mice eat, the fatter the cats. There were tears and laughter, for instance--how they shook and ran together into one gay grief. Dumb eloquence, swift still waters, shallow deeps. Let's see: impenitent remorse, careless anxiety, heedless worry, tense repose. So true of tigers. Then there was the friendly enmity of sun and snow, and the sweet disharmony of every union, the greasy mate of cock and cunt, the cosmic poles, war that's peace, the stumble that's an everlasting poise and balance, spring and fall, love, strife, health, disease, and the cold duplicity of Number One and all its warm divisions. The sameness that's in difference. The limit that's limitless. The permanence that's change. The distance of the near at home. So--to roam, stay home. Then pursue to be caught, submit to conquer. Method--ancient--of Chinese. To pacify, inflame. Love, hate. Kiss, kill. In, out, up, down, start, stop. Ah . . . from pleasure, pain. Like circumcision of the heart. Judgement and mercy. Sin and grace. It little mattered; everything seemed to Furber to be magically right, and his heart grew fat with satisfaction. Therefore there is good in every evil; one must lower away to raise; seek what's found to mourn its loss; conceive in stone and execute in water; turn profound and obvious, miraculous and commonplace, around; sin to save; destroy in order to create; live in the sun, though underground. Yes. Doubt in order to believe--that was an old one--for this the square IS in the circle. O Phaedo, Phaedo. O endless ending. Soul is immortal after all--at last it's proved. Between dead and living there's no difference but the one has whiter bones. Furber rose, the mosquitoes swarming around him, and ran inside.

her imperative to “think dialectically”—a maxim drawn from her study of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. Because reality is constantly changing, we must constantly detect and analyze the emerging contradictions that are driving this change. And if reality is changing around us, we cannot expect good ideas to hatch within an ivory tower. They instead emerge and develop through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities, and through trial and error within multiple contexts. Grace often attributes her “having been born female and Chinese” to her sense of being an outsider to mainstream society. Over the past decade she has sharpened this analysis considerably. Reflecting on the limits of her prior encounters with radicalism, Grace fully embraces the feminist critique not only of gender discrimination and inequality but also of the masculinist tendencies that too often come to define a certain brand of movement organizing—one driven by militant posturing, a charismatic form of hierarchical leadership, and a static notion of power seen as a scarce commodity to be acquired and possessed. Grace has struck up a whole new dialogue and built relationships with Asian American activists and intellectuals since the 1998 release of her autobiography, Living for Change. Her reflections on these encounters have reinforced her repeated observation that marginalization serves as a form of liberation. Thus, she has come away impressed with the particular ability of movement-oriented Asian Americans to dissect U.S. society in new ways that transcend the mind-sets of blacks and whites, to draw on their transnational experiences to rethink the nature of the global order, and to enact new propositions free of the constraints and baggage weighing down those embedded in the status quo. Still, Grace’s practical connection to a constantly changing reality for most of her adult life has stemmed from an intimate relationship with the African American community—so much so that informants from the Cointelpro days surmised she was probably Afro-Chinese.3 This connection to black America (and to a lesser degree the pan-African world) has made her a source of intrigue for younger generations grappling with the rising complexities of race and diversity. It has been sustained through both political commitments and personal relationships. Living in Detroit for more than a half century, Grace has developed a stature as one of Motown’s most cherished citizens: penning a weekly column for the city’s largest-circulation black community newspaper; regularly profiled in the mainstream and independent media; frequently receiving awards and honors through no solicitation of her own; constantly visited by students, intellectuals, and activists from around the world; and even speaking on behalf of her friend Rosa Parks after the civil rights icon became too frail for public appearances.

It is worth mentioning here that the Western translations of traditional medical systems have always referred to the basic constituents of biological entities as the elements, however, in the tibb system they are termed the basics, origins (‘ousoul, ), or phases, and never as elements. It was the Greek-Sicilian philosopher Empedocles (ca. 450 BCE) who termed the elements the four “roots” (rhizōmata, ιζματα)—a very close term to the Arabic term for origins. Plato seems to have been the one who introduced the term element (stoicheion, στοιχεον). We are using the term elements here because it is ubiquitous in the literature and used to refer to the same concept in Chinese traditional medicine and ayurvedic medicine. Although the ancients’ concepts

As the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu pointed out 2,500 years ago, “True leaders inspire people to do great things and, when the work is done, their people proudly say, ‘We did this ourselves.

Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, said, "Know yourself. Know what is good. Know when to stop.

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. —Lao Tzu; ancient Chinese philosopher, founder of Taoism, could have been one guy or a mythical compilation of many, nobody really knows for sure

When I let go of what I am,’ said the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, ‘I become what I might be.

Cut short by Cortés, Mexica philosophy did not have the chance to reach as far as Greek or Chinese philosophy. But surviving testimony intimates that it was well on its way. The stacks of Nahuatl manuscripts in Mexican archives depict the tlamatinime meeting to exchange ideas and gossip, as did the Vienna Circle and the French philosophes and the Taisho-period Kyoto school.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said that being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. But as I step aboard the sailing vessel Silver Shadow in the cool, misty darkness before dawn, I’m wondering if he missed the point. Love’s true power isn’t in the strength or courage it gives, but in the selfishness it strips away.

Not only are we taught to think of intellectual history as something largely produced by individuals writing great books or thinking great thoughts, but these ‘great thinkers’ are assumed to perform both these activities almost exclusively with reference to each other. As a result, even in cases where Enlightenment thinkers openly insisted they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did when he urged his compatriots to adopt Chinese models of statecraft), there’s a tendency for contemporary historians to insist they weren’t really serious; or else that when they said they were embracing Chinese, or Persian, or indigenous American ideas these weren’t really Chinese, Persian or indigenous American ideas at all but ones they themselves had made up and merely attributed to exotic Others.

Silicon Valley’s and China’s internet ecosystems grew out of very different cultural soil. Entrepreneurs in the valley are often the children of successful professionals, such as computer scientists, dentists, engineers, and academics. Growing up they were constantly told that they—yes, they in particular—could change the world. Their undergraduate years were spent learning the art of coding from the world’s leading researchers but also basking in the philosophical debates of a liberal arts education. When they arrived in Silicon Valley, their commutes to and from work took them through the gently curving, tree-lined streets of suburban California. It’s an environment of abundance that lends itself to lofty thinking, to envisioning elegant technical solutions to abstract problems. Throw in the valley’s rich history of computer science breakthroughs, and you’ve set the stage for the geeky-hippie hybrid ideology that has long defined Silicon Valley. Central to that ideology is a wide-eyed techno-optimism, a belief that every person and company can truly change the world through innovative thinking. Copying ideas or product features is frowned upon as a betrayal of the zeitgeist and an act that is beneath the moral code of a true entrepreneur. It’s all about “pure” innovation, creating a totally original product that generates what Steve Jobs called a “dent in the universe.” Startups that grow up in this kind of environment tend to be mission-driven. They start with a novel idea or idealistic goal, and they build a company around that. Company mission statements are clean and lofty, detached from earthly concerns or financial motivations. In stark contrast, China’s startup culture is the yin to Silicon Valley’s yang: instead of being mission-driven, Chinese companies are first and foremost market-driven. Their ultimate goal is to make money, and they’re willing to create any product, adopt any model, or go into any business that will accomplish that objective. That mentality leads to incredible flexibility in business models and execution, a perfect distillation of the “lean startup” model often praised in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter where an idea came from or who came up with it. All that matters is whether you can execute it to make a financial profit. The core motivation for China’s market-driven entrepreneurs is not fame, glory, or changing the world. Those things are all nice side benefits, but the grand prize is getting rich, and it doesn’t matter how you get there.

As the venerable Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu stated, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Maybe so, but you still need a GPS to find your way.

To live well, it is important to cultivate a happy relationship with your thoughts. The following five ideas are a wonderful recipe for sanity and joy: 1. Your thoughts are not real. Your thinking is not reality; it is an interpretation of reality. No thought has any more authority than what you give it. 2. All thoughts are passing thoughts. Thoughts are transient. They are like leaves in the wind. The only thoughts that stay are the ones you hold on to. 3. You choose your thoughts. No one else does! You can elect to change any thought. You can also choose whether or not to act on any thought. 4. Thoughts have no power. Thoughts are literally electrical mental toys that are powered by you. They have no power of their own. 5. You do not have to take any of your thoughts seriously. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu said, “As soon as you have made a thought, laugh at it.

and this Socratic doctrine found its greatest exponent in the Chinese philosopher Wan Yang Ming, who never wearies of repeating, “To know and to act are one and the same.

The Greek philosopher Socrates once said, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Very few stories convey the profound truth of his statement better than this story of Chinese Taoist origin:

To learn and then at the appropriate time put into practice what you have learned: Is this not a pleasure? To have friends arrive from afar: Is this not a joy? To be patient even when others do not understand: Is this not the way of an accomplished person?

One who is not good can neither endure adversity nor feel enduring joy. Those who are good feel at home in goodness; those who are crafty seek profit from goodness.

Lao Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher, once said, “If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present.

Another classic case in point is the reconstructive origins of the canonical Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, which is attributed to the seventh-century Chinese Zen master Huineng but in fact seems to have first appeared around 780 ce, "over a century after the events it describes were supposed to have taken place." The earliest versions of the autobiography and teachings of Huineng included in this text were in fact composed by Shenhui and other purported successors in the Southern School in order to differentiate their teachings from, and elevate them over, those of Shenxiu and other teachers of the rival Northern School. While the teachings presented in the Platform Sutra— the only Zen text to be audaciously designated a "sutra"—are indeed a "brilliant consummation" and "wonderful mélange of early Chan [i.e., Chinese Zen] teachings," they can hardly be attributed verbatim to the historical person Huineng. However spiritually inspiring and philosophically rich such classical texts of the Zen tradition may be, we cannot read them as unbiased and unembellished historical records or as innocent of sectarian politics and other mundane motives.

I read all morning". The simple words spoke of the purest and most rewarding kind of leisure. The Buddha had placed no value on prayer or belief in a deity, he had not spoken of creation, original sin or the last judgement. The quality of all human experience depends on the mind and so the Buddha had been concerned with analyzing and transforming the individual mind. India's intellectual backwardness, her inability to deal rationally with her past, which seemed no less damaging than her economic and political underdevelopment. With its literary and philosophical traditions, China was well equipped to absorb and disseminate Buddhism. The Chinese eagerness to distribute Buddhist texts was what gave birth to both paper and printing. There are places on which history has worked for too long and neither the future nor the past can be seen clearly in their ruins or emptiness. In the agrarian society of the past, the Brahminic inspired human hierarchy had proposed itself as a complete explanation not only for what human beings did but also what they were. So, for instance, a Brahmin was not just a priest because he performed rituals; he was innately blessed with virtue, learning and wisdom. A servant wasn't just someone who performed menial tasks, his very essence was poverty and weakness. Meditation was one of the methods used to gain control over one's emotions and passions. Sitting still in a secluded place, the yogi attempted to disengage his perennially distracted mind and force it to dwell upon itself. The discipline of meditation steadily equips the individual with a new sensibility. It shows him how the craving for things that are transient, essence-less and flawed leads to suffering. Regular meditation turns this new way of looking into a habit. it detaches the individual from the temptations of the world and fixes him in a state of profound calm. Mere faith in what the guru says isn't enough and you have to realize and verify it through your own experience. The mind determines the way we experience the world, the way in which we make it our world. The ego seeks to gratify and protect itself through desires. But the desires create friction when they collide with the ever-changing larger environment. They lead only to more desires and more dissatisfaction. How human beings desiring happiness and stability were undermined slowly, over the course of their lives, by the inconstancy of their hearts and the intermittence of their emotions. Buddhism in America could be seen to meet every local need. It had begun as a rational religion which found few takers in America before being transformed again, during the heady days of the 1960s, through the mysticism of Zen, into a popular substitute for, or accessory to, psychotherapy and drugs. It was probably true that greed, hatred and delusion, the source of all suffering, are also the source of life and its pleasures, however temporary and that to vanquish them may be to face a nothingness that is more terrifying than liberating. Nevertheless, the effort to control them seemed to me worth making.

According to the Artist’s wife, his manner of talking, even in Chinese, falls somewhere between that of an eight-year-old and a philosopher.

Of, course, Chinese economic developments forms the great background for the rise of research into British political economy of the eighteenth century. Chinese policymakers and academics are increasingly interested in economic growth and the nature of international competition and tensions between the different nations. Hume and Smith discussed these questions in the eighteenth century and were a source of guidance for Great Britain in that transformative period. China has been undergoing a massive transformation from a traditional society to a modern one, from an agricultural society to a commercial one, and needs a new kind of political economy and moral philosophy to underpin this. The Scottish thinkers, Hume, Smith and Ferguson and their contemporaries debated political and economic problems and also reflected on the most appropriate ethic for the emergence of commercial society. One of the most striking features of their advice wa that it did not lead to the sort of violent revolution often associated with the French Enlightenment philosophers. On the contrary, they managed to contribute to the development and progress of Great Britain without aligning themselves with revolutionary movements. It is this aspect of their thinking that makes them attractive to many in contemporary China.

Mandelbrot's insights are reminiscent of the approach taken by the ancient formulators of the Yijing, the Chinese classic Book of Changes, who seem to be the first to arrive at an understanding of interlocking patterns of the human and natural worlds. Their insight was to imagine "a system of coordinates, a tabulation framework, a stratified matrix in which everything had its position, connected by the 'proper channels' with everything else." Chinese philosophers during the second and third centuries would also maintain that the seamless dimensionality in nature is the definitive characteristic of Dao-the way the world is formed and the way it behaves: "Way-making (dao) is the flowing together of all things (wanwu)," and "It is inherent in things that they are ties to each other, that one kind calls up another." Dao, or "way," is in many ways just life itself, the flowing of life, or even the changing world itself. "The flowing together of all things" in the quote above is wanwu, the totality of all that is happening in the world.

THE MEDICINE It is the primary role of the physician, whether the African witch doctor or the modern doctor, to entertain the patient while secretly waiting for nature to heal the disease. Albert Schweitzer, physician, philosopher

There is a very interesting dialogue between master and disciple illustrating this difference between samadhi and attachment in Denshu Roku57 written by the Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher, O Yomei (Wang Yang-ming). His disciple Riko-cho (Lu Ch’eng) once him about the meaning of the merit of primal oneness. In my opinion, this term generally alludes to samadhi.

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. —Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher

Do not listen with your ears but listen with your heart; do not listen with your heart but listen with qi. . . . You have heard of using knowing to know; you have not heard of using not knowing to know. . . . Allow your ears and your eyes to penetrate on the inside, and place the understanding of the mind on the outside.

If you use a chariot and horses, your feet have not improved one bit, but you can travel a thousand li. If you use a boat and paddle, you haven’t learned to swim, but you can still cross the rivers and seas. One who is cultivated is no different from others at birth; he is simply good at making use of

Confucius and Lao-Tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo Ti, Chuang Tse, Lieh Tzu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to materialism, scepticism and nihilism; in Iran, Zarathustra taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance from Elijah by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus and Plato,—of the tragedians, of Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West.

The neo-Confucian project, then, exactly parallels Leibniz’s own philosophical project of including the “subjectivity” of psyches within the overall pattern of nature. Consequently it should come as no surprise to find that he con- sidered the Chinese concepts of li and chi to be further confirmation that he was “on the right track” in forming his monadological system.

The art forms of the Western world arise from spiritual and philosophical traditions in which spirit is divided from nature, and comes down from heaven to work upon it as an intelligent energy upon an inert and recalcitrant stuff. Thus Malraux speaks always of the artist “conquering” his medium as our explorers and scientists also speak of conquering mountains or conquering space. To Chinese and Japanese ears these are grotesque expressions. For when you climb it is the mountain as much as your own legs which lifts you upwards, and when you paint it is the brush, ink, and paper which determine the result as much as your own hand.

If you could even find Marx outside of university classrooms (where he was increasingly presented as a humanist philosopher instead of a revolutionary firebrand), it was on Wall Street, where cheeky traders put down Sun Tzu and heralded the long-dead German as a prophet of globalization. Capitalism had certainly yielded immense progress in countries such as China and India. In 1991, when Indian finance minister Manmohan Singh announced plans to liberalize India’s economy, he quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” Over the next twenty-five years, India’s GDP grew by almost 1,000 percent. An even more impressive process unfolded in China, where Deng Xiaoping upturned Mao-era policies to deliver what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and what the rest of the world recognized as state-managed liberalization. China is now as radically unequal as Latin America, but over five hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty during the past thirty years.1

To lead people, walk beside them ... As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate ... When the best leader’s work is done the people say, “We did it ourselves!” Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their

Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching, wrote, “He who knows he has enough is rich.” Enough—it’s a slippery concept. What’s enough for one is too little for the next guy and too much for another. Most of us would agree we have enough food, enough water, enough clothing, and enough shelter to meet our basic needs. And anyone reading this book probably feels that they have enough things. So why do we still feel the urge to buy, and own, more? Let’s investigate this word “enough” a little more closely. Dictionary.com defines it as “adequate for the want or need; sufficient for the purpose or to satisfy desire.” Ah, there’s the problem: even though we’ve satisfied our needs, there’s still the matter of our wants and desires.

Living in a capricious world means accepting that we do not live within a stable moral cosmos that will always reward people for what they do. We should not deny that real tragedies happen. But at the same time, we should always expect to be surprised and learn to work with whatever befalls us. If we continue this work, even when tragedies come our way, we can begin to accept the world as unpredictable and impossible to understand perfectly. And this is where the promise of a capricious world lies; if our world is indeed constantly fragmented and unpredicatable, then it is something we can constantly work on bettering. We can go into each situation resolved to be the best human being we can be, not because of what we'll get our of it, but simply to affect others around us for the better, regardless of the outcome. We can cultivate our better sides and face this unpredicatble world, transforming as we go.

Any fanciful ambition involves an overloaded opinion of my own capability, a wrong evaluation in an upward direction. If, for example, my dream is to become one of the great philosophers of the world, then my fanciful ambition might be to solve the problem of time. Why is it dangerous to nourish such ambitions? Because the precious mirage of ‘I’m going to do’ gets in the way of ‘I do’. The fanciful ambition is thus the project that prevents you from doing. An example would be the project of reading the works of the great thinkers in the most fundamental way. This is a fanciful ambition, because there can be no definitive reading of the great philosophers. This time it is no longer a matter of personal projection: I start with myself and see myself as a great hero. This time we are dealing with a mystification at the level of action. He who nourishes fanciful ambitions is a man of action sabotaged by his own project of doing. He sets out to do in his own space something that he cannot do. He wants to catch a whale with a flimsy fishing line. It is the very grandeur of his project that puts the brakes on its achievement. This lack of adjustment to one’s own possibilities is another source of failure. In my generation there was a guy called Ştefan Teodorescu who was always making up ample tables of contents. He never even got as far as writing the introduction. However the nourisher of fanciful ambitions is not an agonized failure; his life becomes a dolce far niente, a sort of continuous waltz among a host of projects endlessly taken up and abandoned again. There is a Chinese proverb: ‘Every road starts with the fi rst step’. The nourisher of fanciful ambitions never manages to make that fi rst step. Or if he does, he leaves the road before he has trodden firmly on it.

Sometimes you have to realize that the only constant in life is change." "Wow! Very profound," Willo said with a chuckle. "Did you know Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, said that a very, very long time ago?" "No," Gordon said. "You learned a lot in college." "I guess I did," Willo said. Then she laughed. "But if knowing a dead Greek philosopher is all I know, I'm in for big trouble in the real world." "My dad says, 'Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.'" "That's a Chinese proverb," Willo said admiringly. "Sort of my family's philosophy in life and work," he said. "I tell my dad, 'If we don't catch fish, we're having a Swanson TV dinner.'" "I don't know if that proverb will catch on," Willo said.

Now, this is where the key to the modern world order lies—superiority through technology. Deprive the opponent of the latest technology and then dictate your terms in an unequal contest. When the Chinese philosopher, Sun Tzu, ruminated over 2,000 years ago that what matters in war is not decimating the enemy army physically but breaking his will so as to make him concede defeat in the mind, he seems to have visualized the domination of technology in the twentieth-century theatres of war.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said “care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.

I never pay for Chinese food." "Explain." "Because it's my favorite." "Explain better." "I started eating it all the time.....It became less special. It got old. It was my favorite, but it got old and dull, and your favorite's not supposed to do that. So I decided I'd never buy it again. It could only be a gift. And now its special again. Like Christmas." "You're a philosopher, Charlie." "Philosophy is just tricks you play on yourself to through the week.

Early Confucian (and Chinese) classics can be read philosophically, if philosophy is understood as I suggested above. This understanding of philosophy then implies certain methods of reading these texts. It requires us to clarify and enrich the argumentation in these texts by making up the missing steps, and to tease out the hidden systems in these texts, always with their contemporary relevance in mind and with a sensibility to their original contexts simultaneously. To apply these methods to traditional texts, the first thing we need to do is to discover the apparent discrepancies and even contradiction within an argument and among different arguments in the same text or by the same author. After actively making these discoveries, however, we should not do what an analytically minded thinker of classical Chinese texts tends to do, such as claiming that the author failed to see the contradictions, he didn't know logic, and so on. Rather, we should apply the principle of respect and charity to the reading of these texts, for since ancient Greece or pre-Qin China, there haven't been many great thinkers in human history (which is why we call them 'great thinkers'). If we can easily find apparent confusion and contradictions in their works, as reasonable guess is not that they didn't think clearly but that we didn't; that is, we failed to appreciate the depth of these most profound thinkers in human history due to our own limited intellectual capacity or being confined to our own context. In this sense, to respect 'authority' (great thinkers and their texts) is to think critically and to criticize and transcend the authority of today (our own prejudices and close-mindedness). Therefore, after discovering the discrepancies, we should try to see if we can make up the missing steps, or reconstruct hidden coherence between apparently contradictory arguments.

While Socrates encouraged his students to seek truth by questioning everything, ancient Chinese philosophers counseled people to follow the rituals of sages from the ancient past. Rigorous copying of perfection was seen as the route to true mastery.

A Chinese philosophical work called The Secret of the Golden Flower says that “when purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped.

Indeed, when reading classics, what is immediately makes sense to us may be of little worth, and what seems to be confusing and even contradictory at first sight may have been the most interesting part of the classics ('I study it because it is absurd,' to revise an expression attributed to the theologian Tertullian). We should give them the most attention and care, utilizing the methods from the traditional Chinese commentary tradition, or, more generally , the philosophical hermeneutics, and combining rigorous analysis with a lively imagination, in order to discover the hidden and deeper meanings of the classics.

Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing. The Chinese philosopher Chuang-Tzu stated that true empathy requires listening with the whole being: “The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another.

The goldfish theory is actually so old that the Chinese philosopher Confucius bequeathed his own version of it: “To be wronged is nothing, unless you continue to remember it.

room for a third person there. I accept that. The Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu once said that being loved deeply by someone gives you strength,

Tell me and I will listen. Show me and I will see. Let me experience and I will learn. —Laozi, Chinese philosopher

The Chinese counterpart to Greek agency was harmony. Every Chinese was first and foremost a member of a collective, or rather of several collectives—the clan, the village, and especially the family. The individual was not, as for the Greeks, an encapsulated unit who maintained a unique identity across social settings. Instead, as philosopher Henry Rosemont has written: “... For the early Confucians, there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others ... Taken collectively, they weave, for each of us, a unique pattern of personal identity, such that if some of my roles change, the others will of necessity change also, literally making me a different person.

A man is supple and weak when living, but hard and stiff when dead. Grass and trees are pliant and fragile when living, but dried and shriveled when dead. Thus the hard and the strong are the comrades of death; the supple and the weak are the comrades of life.

Samadhi is one of those terms which was used in the past in India, and is still used in the actual religious movements of the present time. But it is used with no very definite meaning. To think that these Indian concepts have a definite meaning is one of our Western mistakes; that is doing them an injustice. The Indian mind is peculiarly indefinite, and they try to make up for it by a lot of terms which are very difficult to translate, the difficulty chiefly consisting in the fact that we give them a definite meaning which does not belong to them. And their mind is extraordinarily descriptive; they want to give a picture of a thing rather than a logical definition. But in trying to give a good description, it sounds as if they were trying to give a definite concept, and that is the cause of the most baffling misunderstandings between the Indian and the Westerner; that we give a definite meaning to a concept which is not definite in itself, which only sounds definite, brings about endless misinterpretations. The terms, samadhi, dhyana, sahasrara, and so on, apparently have a definite meaning but in reality they have not. Even the Indians are absolutely at sea with these concepts. [...] When you compare the translation of the Patanjali Yogasutra made by Hauer with the one by Deussen, and with the English translation, you see at once the difficulty; they have all been put to the greatest pains to find the proper Western terms." That is due to the Eastern mentality which, despite all their efforts at terminology, remains indefinite; such painstaking terminology is always a compensatory attempt to make certain of something which is not certain at all. As I said before, if you want a blade of grass or a pebble, they give you a whole landscape; "a blade of grass" means grass and it means a meadow and it is also the green surface of the earth. Of course that conveys truth, too, and leads eventually to Chinese concepts-the peculiar way in which the Chinese mind looks at the world as a totality for instance, where everything is in connection with everything else, where everything is contained in the same stream. While we on the other hand are content to look at things when they are singled out, extracted, or selected, we have learned to detach detail from nature. If I ask a European, even a quite uneducated man, to give me a particular pebble or leaf, he is capable of doing so without bringing in the whole landscape. But the Easterner, particularly when it is a matter of a conscientious mind, is quite incapable of giving one a piece of definite information. It is somewhat the same with learned people: you ask a learned man for some bit of information and would be perfectly satisfied with yes or no, but he will say yes-under-such-conditions, and no-under-such-conditions, and finally you don't know what it is all about. Of course for other learned individuals this is excellent information: a trained mind would get very definite information in this way, but for the ordinary mind it is less than nothing. In my many conversations with Indian philosophers, I remember that their answers seemed less like yes-under-such-and-such-conditions, and more like a yea-and-nay-but-under-no-conditions. We think it is a sort-of unnecessary clumsiness, but when you look carefully at what they give you, you see really a marvelous picture; you get a vision of the whole thing. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 1372-1374). Princeton University Press.

Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire.

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable. —Sun Tzu, Chinese philosopher and military strategist

How are you living your life on a daily basis?

Nature is not in a hurry, yet everything is accomplished,” said Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu.

The tao which Lao-tzu puts before and above everything else is for Confucius the One. But Lao-tzu immerses himself in it, while Confucius lets himself be guided by his awe of the One as he moves among the things of the world. At times Confucius also shows a tendency to shun the world; at the limits he too discloses the notion of acting by inaction and so keeping the world in order. Though the two philosophers look in opposite directions, they stand on the same ground. Their unity has been embodied by great historic figures, not in a philosophy that systematically embraced both sets of teachings, but in the Chinese wisdom of a life illumined by thought.

Once Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly. A joyous butterfly, doing as he chose. He did not even know there was a Zhuangzi. Suddenly he awoke, and then he seemed to be Zhuangzi. Yet he could not tell if he was Zhuangzi dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. Still there must be a distinction between Zhuangzi and a butterfly. This is called “the transformation of things.” (Chapter 2: “Discussion on Making Things Equal” [Qiwulun])