Thoughts on China

Well, I promised a post this weekend with links to web sites in English that introduce Chinese culture. I’ve been so busy doing last minute shopping, packing and, I confess, watching American college football (i.e., not soccer), that I haven’t written this post yet. What I will do is to create another page called “Links”, which will be between the “Home” and “About” page links at the top of this page. In fact, I’ll make the page now and add to it as I get the time. If it comes together as I expect, it will have several sections, one of which will be Chinese culture, another section will be links to Chinese language learning sites, etc.

I can’t believe that the trip is almost here! It’s been about a year and three months since I decided I’d go to China. Since then, I’ve learned a lot and met a lot of kind, interesting and interested people. The dichotomy between Eastern and Western thought is a very interesting subject. I will try to write about this in some of my blog entries and hope I don’t bore you too much. Here is my first attempt:

Eastern thought is cyclical, where Western thought is more linear.

If you think about calendars, you might think that the Western calendar does celebrate the seasonal cycles of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. However, our Western way of thought about time is much more linear. We even use the words “time line” to represent a linear order of events over time. We very much like to put things in chronological order, including our lives. We are born on a date, have important events happen to us on other dates and finally die on a date, all of which are thought of as having no cycles in them other than the yearly seasonal cycles mentioned above.

Even the religion in the West is linear in thinking about time. Christianity is the example with which I’m most familiar. The Western calendar we all use is based on the time of Christ, with B.C. going back in increasing years (negative numbers, if you will) before this and A.D. increasing away from this as positive numbers. Time is mapped out in the Christian Bible in a line from the creation in Genesis, through the life of Christ, until the end of the world. Death is seen as the beginning of an eternal afterlife. The concept of eternity is, in its essence, yet another formulation of linear time. One continuous line…

I am definitely not an expert on Eastern thought; however, even looking superficially, you can see that the East is much more cyclical in their thoughts about time.

The years in the Chinese calendar are based on cycles of twelve years, represented by different animals (rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig). Further, these twelve year cycles happen within sixty year cycles, which combines the animal cycle in a cycle of elements (earth, metal, water, wood and fire).

Note that these are based on cycles of the moon, rather than the sun. While Western calendars and other conveniences are being injected into Chinese culture, the soul of China lies with the lunar calendar. The Chinese New Year (Spring Festival, 春节, or Chūnjié) is the biggest festival of the year and celebrates the first day of the first lunar month. The mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节, or Zhōngqiūjié), this year on September 25, is the 15th day (full moon) of the eighth lunar month.

Living by the lunar calendar alone makes a culture more cyclical in nature, simply because the moon cycle is so apparent. While the sun does cycle back and forth from winter to summer solstices and passes through the equinoxes as it moves over the equator on the first day of spring and fall, it is dependent on calculations rather than direct observation. The moon moves from new to full to new in an easily observable cycle. This introduces a finer degree of control for our calendar, only having to be adjusted one day every four years, but it does so at the expense of living less naturally.

Eastern religion, unlike Western religion, is highly involved in cycles. The most obvious example is the idea of reincarnation, which (I think, I’d have to research this) spread to China with Buddhism, which started in India. The Indian religion of Hinduism is very much influenced by the idea that sentient beings are recycled into other beings again and again.
Rather than look at the life cycle as a time line (birth, life, death, afterlife), as Christianity does, Buddhism is replete with the idea of rebirth, which turns the event of death into another spoke on the wheel of life that turns again. The prayer wheels that are spun in some forms of Buddhism are yet another reminder of this cyclic nature.

Another example of circular thought in Eastern religion is the Tai Chi symbol (☯) of Daoism. The interaction of yin and yang (阴阳, or yīnyáng), female and male, dark and light is seen in circular harmony. The spot of the opposite color represents that there are both yin and yang in everything and there cannot be one without the other. They are constantly interacting. In a very real sense, that act of procreation is the interaction of these two that brings forth another life to begin yet another cycle.

This type of cycle is very similar to Hegel’s dialectic idea of - thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

When I think of the completely different models that East and West use in thinking about the world around us, I am constantly drawn to a very flawed analogy - that of a wheel traveling in circles (the East’s cycles) moving along a road (the West’s time line). The reason it is flawed (or to make a terrible pun, why the rubber never meets the road) is that it does not address the psychological and cultural differences that go along with such fundamentally different ways of seeing the same thing. It may work to explain how the calendars interact, since any given day can be seen as where the cycle of the lunar calendar turns along the path of the solar calendar, but that is about all it is good for.

One other problem with this analysis is that it treats huge blocks of people as having the same mindset. Today’s world is changing in Internet time. While it is great in one way, since with the population of the earth today, we all need to think of ourselves as a “global village”, it also is a destroyer of cultural identities. But that’s an issue for a different day…

Sorry this was so long. If you’re still here, thanks for reading!