Until the twentieth century three major traditions dominated Chinese culture. These three, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, coexisted for the most part without conflict for over two and a half thousand years, often receiving intellectual and spiritual incentive from each other and sharing a range of moral and social values. At the time of the Hundred Days Reform of 1898, western influence was already strong, and by 1911, when the Ch’ing dynasty was overthrown by Sun Yat-sen and the Republic of China was founded, the three traditions were beginning to confront serious threat and disruption. Thirty-eight years later, in 1949, Mao Tse-tung established China as a communist state, the People’s Republic of China. The new regime sought to eradicate long-established values, closing down many traditional and religious institutions and persecuting those who clung to them. In the late twentieth century China is still changeful and restless. It remains to be seen just how profoundly the Chinese people’s distinctive traditional cast of mind has been altered by these latterday upheavals.
Although there are fragments of writings dating from the very early years of the Chou dynasty (c. 1122–249 BCE), the first Chinese philosophers to emerge as individuals were men of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. It was they, and in particular the best-known of them, Confucius (551–479 BCE), who formulated the thoroughly humanistic character of Chinese philosophy and established an enduring system of values that embraced ideals of harmony, wisdom, filial piety and the enactment of rites conducive to ethical conduct.
Confucius and his followers were men of considerable education but lacking in political power. They were deeply troubled by the decadence and disorder of the society in which they lived and looked back with admiration to what they knew of the early years of the Chou dynasty and a past that seemed to have been better than the present. Rulers, they maintained, had come to abuse the mandate to govern bestowed by heaven, frittering resources on their own high living and on vicious squabbles with other small powers, and showing scant concern for the communities under their rule. Confucius did not urge revolution and rebellion as a way to counter this state of affairs, but rather argued for a change of heart and mind that would make room for humane government, political stability, a generous education for all and the cultivation of inward virtue and public integrity. The concepts and values that he and his followers espoused and the kinds of debates in which they engaged were always closely related to the daily lives of people, having to do with the exact and practical detail as well as the guiding principles of social and personal conduct. In consequence, Chinese philosophical thought has informed and permeated almost every aspect of the national culture.
The origins of Taoism, the second of the great Chinese traditions, are obscure and the dates of Lao Tzu, the person traditionally acknowledged as its central figure, are uncertain. He is sometimes placed in the sixth, sometimes in the fourth century BCE. There is some evidence to suggest that he may on at least one occasion have met and instructed Confucius. What is not in doubt is that the book attributed to him, the Tao Te Ching (The Way and Its Power), is held in the highest regard, not only in China but in many parts of the world. Taoism is generally regarded as a balance to Confucianism rather than something that is in opposition to it. It seeks a harmony with the nature of things through a quiet submission to the Way (Tao) which, for Taoists, is the ultimate metaphysical principle of being. Confucianism also aspires to harmony with nature, but by means of the enactment of carefully prescribed rituals and ceremonies deemed conducive to it. It is not difficult to see how the controlled ceremonial of Confucianism acts as a balance to the intuitive wandering of Taoism. The metaphysics of Taoism became the basis of the splendid flowering of Chinese science.
The Chou dynasty (c. 1122–249 BCE), which encompasses the rise of both Confucianism and Taoism, is regarded as the Classical or Golden Age of Chinese philosophy, but as Chou political power waned, so did its intellectual and social life fragment, first into a phase known as the Hundred Schools and then into an era called the Time of the Warring States (403–222 BCE). Eventually, unity was reimposed with the founding of the shortlived Ch’in dynasty (221–206 BCE), a regime which was backed up by the philosophy of Legalism, a doctrine of ruthless control that rejected Confucian morality in favour of a form of positivism that accepted only the authority of the ruler and rigorously imposed a uniformity of conduct on the people.
Buddhism, the third great philosophico-religious movement in China, was founded in northern India through the life and work of Sidhartha Gautama. It began to take root in China around 60 BCE, its literature having been transmitted and translated by monks and scholars and its interpretation facilitated by the application to it of Chinese philosophical concepts. Buddhism steadily gained sympathy and support in China and soon became part of a cross-fertilization of ideas with Confucianism and Taoism that was to establish it as a major religious and cultural influence. The development of Ch’an Buddhism, known in the West by its Japanese name, Zen, and numerous other forms of Chinese Buddhism, as well as Neo-Confucianism, are testimony to these fertile interactions. In India, Buddhism had already divided into two main doctrinal schools, the Mahayana and the Theravada, and it was, by and large, the Mahayana movement that became the dominating influence in Chinese Buddhism. Within the metaphysical framework furnished by the Madhyamika and Yogacarin thinkers of India for the Mahayana, a number of sub-schools evolved in China and Japan. Among these are Hua-yen (J: Kegon), T’ien-t’ai (J: Tendai), and Pure Land (J: Jodo, C: Ching-t’u). Of these, it is Zen that has become most widely known in western cultures.
When the Early, or Former, Han dynasty succeeded the Ch’in in 206 BCE, a time of more settled government ensued. In the four hundred years of Han rule, an era noted for a burgeoning of intellectual endeavour, Confucianism was consolidated by state sponsorship, Taoism flourished and evolved, and Buddhism became securely established. The end of the Han dynasty in 220 CE brought with it a reaction against Confucianism and a surge of fresh ideas in Taoist thought. Thereafter, Buddhism gained in vitality, reaching a peak in the T’ang dynasty (618–907 CE) with the emergence of the Zen doctrines promulgated by the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng (638–713 CE). Subsequently, Buddhism fell into some disfavour and towards the end of the eighth century intellectual energies began to be channelled into a revival of Confucianism which culminated during the Sung dynasty (960–1279 CE) in the profoundly influential Neo-Confucianism of Chu Hsi (1130–1200). Chu Hsi brought about a remarkable synthesis of the whole gamut of Confucian ideas. His written output was prodigious, totalling about sixty-two volumes. He wrote commentaries on the Four Books, the Confucian classics, and presented them in the form in which they became the set texts for the Chinese civil service examinations which were set up in 1313 and not abolished until the early years of the twentieth century. Subsequently, various versions of Neo-Confucianism, ranging from developments of the idealism of Chu Hsi to the critical empiricism of Tai Chen (1724–1777), dominated Chinese philosophy until the end of the nineteenth century, although they never ousted either Buddhism or Taoism. As already noted, the interaction of the three great traditions, whether combative or co-operative, seemed in the long run to result only in their mutual survival, regeneration and benefit.
China underwent profound change in the latter part of the nineteenth century, experiencing political troubles that were severe enough to dominate her entire cultural and intellectual life. The Opium War of 1840–1842, in which she suffered defeat at the hands of the British, and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894, focused thought on the practicalities of national survival and generated a critical approach to entrenched and inflexible political processes and to a Confucianism which had become rigid and lifeless. The burgeoning influx of western ideas began to inject a new style of thought not only into China’s mainstream of political theorizing but into every aspect of her cultural life. In philosophy, the works of Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Nietzsche, J.S. Mill, Dewey, Bergson and many other European intellectuals began to make their impact on the Confucian tradition. With the ascent to power in 1949 of Mao Tse-tung and the thoroughgoing adoption of Marxist-Leninist principles, philosophy and politics began to interact in new ways. During this first half of the twentieth century China produced many important philosophers who drew on a wide range of western doctrines and exhibited a remarkable diversity of intellectual capabilities. But in the climate of unrelenting criticism and of the wholesale espousal of science and technology, Confucianism suffered widespread condemnation and repudiation, even while it continued to inform attitudes and assumptions at the very deepest levels. At the same time, the translation and study of western philosophy developed apace, although always within the perspective of an entrenched and dogmatic Marxism which classified and interpreted western philosophical systems according to their perceived political dispositions and evaluated them by reference to their perceived tendencies to reinforce or undermine the dominant Marxist ideology. The cry of the 1950s to ‘let a hundred flowers blossom and let a hundred schools of thought contend’ was uttered from within the framework of assumptions already securely bolted into place.
In the late twentieth century, in the aftermath of the political upheavals that culminated in the Peking Massacre of 4 June 1989, Chinese philosophy has many complexities to resolve. Its prime task is to define itself as a scholarly endeavour which is honoured and at ease not only in the international community of scholars but also in its own home, and in awareness of a tradition that has never seen philosophy as something distinct from the daily lives of people.