The Great Clod: China and Nature
You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they will be safe. But in the middle of the night a strong man shoulders them and carries them off, and in your stupidity you don’t know why it happened. You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you. But if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.
CHUANG-TZU
The Cascades of Washington, and the Olympics, are wet, rugged, densely forested mountains that are hidden in cloud and mist much of the year. As they say around Puget Sound, “If you can see Mt. Rainier it means it’s going to rain. If you can’t see Mt. Rainier, that means it’s raining.” When I was a boy of nine or ten I was taken to the Seattle Art Museum and was struck more by Chinese landscape paintings than anything I’d seen before, and maybe since. I saw first that they looked like real mountains, and mountains of an order close to my heart; second that they were different mountains of another place and true to those mountains as well; and third that they were mountains of the spirit and that these paintings pierced into another reality which both was and was not the same reality as “the mountains.”
That seed lodged in my store-house-consciousness to be watered later when I first read Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poetry and then Ezra Pound’s. I thought, here is a high civilization that has managed to keep in tune with nature. The philosophical and religious writings I later read from Chinese seemed to back this up. I even thought for a time that simply because China had not been Christian, and had been spared an ideology which separated humankind from all other living beings (with the two categories of redeemable and unredeemable) that it naturally had an organic, process-oriented view of the world. Japan and China have had indeed a uniquely appropriate view of the natural world, which has registered itself in many small, beautiful ways through history. But we find that large, civilized societies inevitably have a harsh effect on the natural environment, regardless of philosophical or religious values.
OSTRICH EGGS
The late Pleistocene was a rich time for the people of Asia. Great herds of mammals on the tundra and grasslands. The reindeer-herders of present-day Soviet Siberia come down in a direct line from the later ice age when reindeer was the major food of people across Eurasia. A few Tungusic reindeer herders are probably still there in the NW Khingan mountains of Manchuria, within China’s present borders.
The early post-glacial warming trend changed tundra to forest. The dry lake beds of Mongolia (“nors” to our North American “playas”) were wet then, and people making many microtools lived on their marshy margins. Their quarry was largely ostrich and ostrich eggs. Parts of North China which are barren now were densely forested with oaks, beeches, elms, ash, maple, catalpa, poplar, walnut, chestnut; and pines, firs, larch, cedar, spruce species—and much more.
At Lin-hsi in Jehol, Sha-kang in Hsin-min Hsien, Liaoning, and Ang-ang-hsi in Heilungchiang, cultural deposits were found in a black earth layer, which lies beneath a yellowish sandy layer of recent formation and above the loess deposits of Pleistocene origin. This black earth layer . . . probably represents an ancient forest cover. The existence of a thick forest cover in North China and on the Manchurian plains is further indicated by cultural remains from prehistoric sites, such as the abundance of charcoal and woodworking implements (axe, adze, chisel, etc.) and by the frequency of bones of wild game. Some of these bones are definitely from forest-dwelling animals such as tigers and deer.
A little farther north, at Djailai-nor, in North China, implements of stone, bone, and antler, and willow basket-work have been found in direct association with remains of woolly rhinoceros, bison, and mammoth—an association of tools and animal remains also found in southern Manchurian sites.
At other North Chinese sites animal remains have been found that indicate it was a bit warmer in early recent times; Chang’s list of species:
Bamboo rat
Elephant
Rhinoceros
Bison
Tapir
Water Buffalo
Water deer
Pere David’s deer
Menzies’ deer
Porcupine
Squirrel
Warmth-loving molluscs
Kwan-chih Chang thinks the woodland mesolithic of China is likely the forerunner of Neolithic agricultural settlements, and was in its time related to the Siberian paleolithic, the European mesolithic, and the woodland cultures of Japan and North America. This archaic internationalism has long been lost to China and civilized Japan, but for those who have eyes and ears it is still present in tiny spots in North America. The life of the Ainu on the island of Hokkaido was a continuation of that culture up until less than a century ago.
The mountains of Eastern Manchuria are still a refuge of the old forest. Dudley Stamp said (before World War II) that the forests of oak, ash, walnut, poplar, spruce, fir, and larch were largely untouched except near the railways. George Cressey, also writing in the thirties, says twenty to thirty thousand men were employed every winter logging the forest at the headwaters of the Manchurian Sungari River—floating the logs down to Kirin City—“and the forests are being rapidly destroyed with slight regard for the future.”
“MILLET”
Civilized China has its roots in the Neolithic villages along the Huang (Yellow) River Valley, especially at the place where the Huang River takes a sharp turn north, and the Wei and Lo and Fen Rivers join it. Millennia of fishing, gathering, and hunting on the forest-river-marsh margins—and here a slow steady domestication of plants and animals; the emergence of weaving and pottery. Settlements of the Yang-shou type, which are dated as being between four and six thousand years old, present us with an already accomplished painted hand-turned pottery, round and square houses, and differentiated kiln and cemetery sections of town. Yet agrarian life is still interfaced with the wild: leopard, water deer, wild cattle, deer, rhinoceros, bamboo rat, hare, marmot and antelope bones are found in the middens, along with stone and bone points. We find net-weights of pottery or stone and bone harpoons and fishhooks. Chang lists the characteristics of those autonomous, self-sufficient, flourishing communities:
cultivated millet and rice; possibly kao-liang and soybean; domesticated pigs, cattle, sheep, dogs, chickens, possibly horses; tamped-earth and wattle-and-daub construction; white plastered walls; domesticated silkworms; weaving silk and hemp; pottery with cord or mat-impressed designs; pottery with three hollow legs; pottery steamers; crescent-shaped stone knives and rectangular cleaver-axe; jade and wood-carving.
These already-sophisticated, stable villages are witness to a way of life, in place, of great attention and care that antedates their archaeological dates by several thousand years. They are already by 4000 BC fine expressions of the possibilities of the Yellow River watershed bio-region; Anderson described burial sites on the Panshan Hills, twelve hundred feet above the village-sites along the T’ao River and a six-mile trip from the houses, where people had been carried and buried for countless decades, “resting places from which they could behold in a wide circle the place where they had grown up, worked, grown grey, and at last found a grave swept by the winds and bathed by sunshine.”
To the east and along the coast, another pottery tradition, black and polished, took precedence about five thousand years ago—given the type-name Lung-shan. This culture pioneered and expanded both north and south from Shantung and the mouth of the Huang; and the mix of the several types that resulted is the full Chines Neolithic. The size and specializations of some of the later sites would seem to set the stage for an urban civilization.
WRITING AND SLAVES
The first civilization is called the “Shang,” basically the successful rule of one city-state over a number of other emerging city-states. It is dated from the middle of the second millennium BC. It is distinguished by bronze technology, writing, horse-and-chariot, a ruling class made up of several aristocratic warrior clans of luxurious ways, large numbers of apparent slaves as well as a very poor peasant class. These traits are all discontinuous with the Neolithic.
This is a great change in ways. How a free, untaxed, self-sustaining people can be made into a serf or slave populace, whose hard-earned surplus is taken by force to support a large class of non-producers, is perhaps the major question of history. It is, in fact, where “history” starts—not an auspicious beginning. We have some traces of how the people thought in that free time. There seems to have been bear worship, deer dances, festivals for mountains and rivers, festivals for the spirits of plants and great get-togethers for young lovers and musicians. We even have some songs surviving which may be close to the very songs they sang.
Part of the trick in corralling an energy supply beyond your own labor and skill is organization. Slavery is the fossil fuel of the second millennium; bronze the uranium. The invention of writing (analogous to the computer today) and a class of clerks provides the organizing pathways for re-channeling wealth away from its makers. In primitive society, surpluses are exchanged directly among groups or members of groups; peasants, however, are rural cultivators whose surpluses are transferred to a dominant group of rulers that uses the surpluses both to underwrite its own standard of living and to distribute the remainder to groups in society that do not farm but must be fed for their specific goods and services to turn. From that time, 1500 BC, the balance of man and nature, and the standard of living of the farming people of China, began to go down.
The rulers become persons who are alienated from direct contact with soil, growth, manure, sweat, craft—their own bodies’ powers. The peasants become alienated from the very land they used to assume belonged to Mother Earth herself, and not to a Duke or King. Games of social and political intrigue absorb the aristocrats—“getting by” absorbs the farmers. The old religion of gratitude, trust, and exchange with nature is eroded. The state seeks only to maximize its stance, and it begins to seem possible to get away with excessive exploitation of nature itself, as the scene of impact is moved over the hills, into the next watershed, out of sight. Gratitude is channeled toward the Rulers in a state religion, and the Mother-oriented Neolithic religion becomes “low-class” or goes underground. The Shang rulers, in the intoxication of wealth and power, became profligate and turbulent to the point that even later Chinese history frowns.
It may be that the parallel between our own fossil fuel era is apt—energy beyond imagining—“energy slaves” available—throws a whole society off keel into excess, confusion, and addiction.
The Shang made staggering use of its human energy slaves. An estimate has been made of the work it took to build the great earthen wall around the Shang city of Cheng-chou:
The wall was roughly rectangular in shape, with a total perimeter of 7195 meters and an enclosed area of 3.2 square km. The maximum height of the surviving wall is 9.1 meters and the maximum width at the base of the wall, 36 meters. The wall was built in successive compressed layers, each of which has an average thickness of 8 to 10 centimeters. On the surface of each layer are clear depressions made by the pestles used for compressing work, and the soil making up the wall is hard and compact. Chin-huai estimates the original wall to have been 10 meters in average height, with an average width of 20 meters, which, multiplied by the total length of 7195 meters, required no less than 1,439,000 meters cubed of compressed soil or (using a ratio of 1.2) 2,878,000 meters cubed of loose soil. Experiments carried out by archaeologists show that an average worker produced 0.03 meters cubed of earth by means of a bronze pick or 0.02 meters cubed by means of a stone hoe. He concludes that to build the whole city wall of Cheng-chou, including earth digging, transporting, and compressing, required no less than eighteen years, with ten thousand workers working three hundred and thirty days a year.
Civilization came to China, it seems, fifteen hundred years later than it did to the ancient near east. But the evidence shows that a neolithic economy and style begins as early in China as in the Occident. Thus China gets less civilization and more neolithic. Rather than taking that (as most do) as puzzling on the part of China, or a sign of western superiority, I think the opposite: by somehow staving off urbanization and class structure longer, Chinese culture was able to more fully incubate itself in the great strengths of Neolithic-type culture: village self-government networks, an adequate and equal material base, a round of festivals and ceremonies, and a deep grounding in the organic processes and cycles of the natural sphere. This accounts I think for the basic health and resilience of the Chinese people through all the trials of civilization since.
The Shih Ching, “Classic of Songs,” was gathered up from the oral tradition and put in writing around the fifth century BC. It reflects a much larger and older song-lore. Many songs are clearly from the feudal circles of the Shang and Chou societies; but some are from the fields and hills, and in that way echo the people’s archaic culture with its playfulness and sanity. Here’s one, a girl’s song—
Gathering fennel
gathering fennel,
on top of Sunny Point,
the stories people tell don’t
believe them at all
let it be, let it be
it’s not so at all the
stories people tell,
what could be gotten from them?
Gathering bitterleaf
gathering bitterleaf
under Sunny Point,
the stories people tell don’t
pay them any mind
let it be, let it be
it’s not so at all the
stories people tell,
what could be gotten from them?
Gathering wild carrot
gathering wild carrot
east of Sunny Point,
the stories people tell don’t
go along with them
let it be, let it be
it’s not so at all the
stories people tell,
what could be gotten from them?
THE WAY
The Shang dynasty dissipated around the beginning of the first millennium BC and was followed by the Chou. For five hundred years the Chou maintained itself as an increasingly divided federation of smaller states and then broke up completely. That next period is called “Warring States.”
Civilized China had become two widely separated cultures—a patriarchal, militaristic, pragmatic network of related rulers and ruling families (that crossed the lines of the various Warring States), and a “common people” with a folk-culture rooted in a long healthy past and a strong measure of surviving village customary government. The bronze-age rulers even had a religion of their own (saying “The Rites do not go down to the common people”), which revolved around auguries and sacrifice. Auguries because a ruling house has a stake in the longer future just like a man with money in stocks suddenly starts figuring interest rates and worries about the economic “climate.” Sacrifice, a curious perversion of food-chain sacramentalism, was offered largely to the legendary memories of the successful power-seizing clan forebears, fathers of the state, whom they thought of as “Ancestors in Heaven.”
The rulers and scholars of fourth century BC China were people obsessed by society and its problems. Out of the literate class of record-keeping scribes, clerks, astrologers, and teachers, individuals emerged with ideas for rectifying the social and political scene—or totally doing away with it.
Some of these people come to us in history as “sages.” (Members of the oppressed class who thought similar thoughts might be called “charismatic peasant prophets” or “inflammatory female faith-healers”—or sometimes they just drew back into the mountains to be woodcutter-hermits. Later Chinese sages often aspired to be taken for woodcutter-hermits.)
Actually, one philosophical set, the Legalists, were all in favor of the State and argued only that rulers should be more draconian and purge themselves of any concern for the feelings of the common people.
Confucius and his school tried to mediate between the arrogance of the aristocrats and the people they ruled by teaching a philosophy of humanitarian government conducted by virtuous professionals. Much of Confucianism is charming and sensible, but the tilt toward the State is visible in it from the first.
Followers of Mo-tzu, a school little-known now but strong in its time, seemed allied in form if not in spirit with the common people. They wore coarse clothes, ate coarse food, and labored incessantly, with a doctrine of universal love. Their feelings about the State were ambiguous—they believed in strong defensive warfare and rule by the virtuous.
And that brings us to the most striking world-view in the whole Far East and one of the world’s top two or three: Philosophical Daoism. By what standard does one dare criticize a whole society?
One can criticize a society by measuring it against a set of religiously received values—as do say, the Amish or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Or, quite common in the world today, one can subscribe to an analysis of society and history which holds that there are better alternatives of a rational, humanitarian, and utilitarian order. (A truly “scientific” critique of a society would have to draw on the information we are now gathering worldwide from anthropology, ecology, psychology, and whatnot—and that study is still in its infancy.)
The ancient mystics—artisans and thinkers now called “Daoists”—sought a base of value in the observable order of nature and its intuitable analogs in human nature. The size of Mind this gave them, and their irreverent, witty, gentle, accurate insights still crackle in the world today. The key texts are the Dao-de Jhing, and the texts called Chang-tzu and Lieh-tzu.
Dao is translated path, or way, the way things are, the way beyond a “way.” They were social visionaries, naturalists, and mystics, living in a China still rich with wildlife and upland forest.
The Daoist social position invokes a pre-civilized, Mother-oriented world which once existed, and could exist again:
I have heard that in ancient times the birds and beasts were many and the people few . . . people all nested in trees in order to escape danger, during the day gathering acorns and chestnuts, at sundown climbing back up to sleep in their trees. Hence they were called the people of the Nestbuilder. In ancient times the people knew nothing about wearing clothes. In summer they heaped up great piles of firewood, in winter they burned them to keep warm. Hence they were called ‘the people who know how to stay alive.’ In the age of Shen Nung, the people lay down peaceful and easy, woke up wide-eyed and blank. They knew their mothers but not their fathers, and lived side by side with the elk and the deer. They plowed for food, wove their clothing, and had no thought in their hearts of harming one another. This was Perfect Virtue at its height!
Following Marcel Granet and other scholars it seems the case that Neolithic Chinese society was indeed matrilineal and matrilocal, with a large share of religious life conducted by the wu, shamans—largely female.
Confucianists declined to look closely at nature. Daoists were not only good observers, but rose above human-centered utilitarianism, as in this story from Lieh-tzu:
Mr. T’ien, of the State of Ch’i, was holding an ancestral banquet in his hall, to which a thousand guests had been invited. As he sat in their midst, many came up to him with presents of fish and game. Eyeing them approvingly, he exclaimed with unction, ‘How generous is Heaven to man! Heaven makes the five kinds of grain to grow, and brings forth the finny and the feathered tribes, especially for our benefit.’ All Mr. Tien’s guests applauded this sentiment to the echo, except the twelve-year-old son of a Mr. Pao, who, regardless of seniority, came forward and said, ‘It is not as my Lord says. The ten thousand creatures in the universe and we ourselves belong to the same category, that of living things, and in this category there is nothing noble or nothing mean. It is only by reason of size, strength, or cunning, that one particular species gains the mastery over another, or that one feeds upon another. None of them are produced in order to subserve the uses of others. Man catches and eats those that are fit for his food, but how could it be said that Heaven produced them just for him? Mosquitoes and gnats suck blood through human skin, tigers and wolves devour human flesh but we do not thereby assert that Heaven produced man for the benefit of mosquitoes and gnats, or to provide food for tigers and wolves.’
In pursuing their study of nature (“nature” in Chinese is tzu-jan, self-so, self-thus, that which is self-maintaining and spontaneous) into human nature and the dark interior of phenomena, the Daoist writers stress softness, ignorance, the flow, a wise receptivity; silence. They bring forward a critical paradox; namely, thermal physical energy flows into unavailability and is lost apparently forever: entropy. Life appears to be an intricate strategy to delay and make use of this flow. But what might be called “spiritual” energy often grows in strength only when you “let go”—give up—“cast off body and mind”—become one with the process. The Lao Tzu text says,
The Valley Spirit never dies.
It is called the Mysterious Female.
The gate of the Mysterious Female
Is the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
It’s always there—
No matter how much you draw on it—
It will never be exhausted.
Dao-de Jhing, Chapter 6
This principle is the key to understanding Daoism. Do nothing against the flow, and all things are accomplished. Daoists taught that human affairs as well as the systems and sub-systems move smoothly of their own accord; and that all order comes from within, all the parts, and that the notion of a need for a centralized ruler, Divine or Political, is a snare.
How then did mankind lose the way? The Daoists can only answer, through meddling, through doubt, through some error. And, it can’t really be lost. The Ch’an (Zen) Buddhists centuries later addressed this with typical paradoxical energy: “The Perfect Way is without difficulty: strive hard!” China has been striving all these centuries.
THE HOUSE OF LIFE
Another way of seeing nature, out of the south (the old pre-Han state of Ch’u), is in a body of poems that echoes a culture open to vision and communication with the non-human realms, using a rich language of Yangtze valley vegetation. These poems—Ch’u Tz’u, “Words of Ch’u”—include the elegant “Nine Songs” of young girl—or young man—dance and spirit-calling trance. They are in Chinese official history almost by accident. Literate persons, Ch’u Yüan himself perhaps, re-wrote songs heard at folk festivals and they entered the canon as political allegories. The “Mountain Goddess” is described as
Driving tawny leopards, leading the striped lynxes; A carriage of lily-magnolia with banner of woven cassia;
Her cloak of stone-orchids, her belt of asarum:
She gathers sweet scents to give to the one she loves.
The shrines or temples or glades used for this worship were called “House of Life.”
SALT AND IRON
Government monopolies on salt and iron and alcohol for revenue; huge public works projects; the draining of marshes and thousands of miles of canals built by conscript labor. Though Daoism was granted a certain prestige that rose and fell with different periods of history, the work of an expanding civilization and its dedicated, orderly administrators, was the real line of force.
Ssu-ma Ch’ien, the great historian, writes on canals, second century BC, early Han dynasty—
. . . the emperor Wu Ti ordered Hsi Po, a water engineer from Ch’i, to plot the course of the transport canal, and called up a force of twenty or thirty thousand laborers to do the digging. After three years of labor it was opened for use in hauling grain and proved to be extremely beneficial. From this time on grain transport to the capital gradually increased, while people living along the canal were able to make considerable use of the water to irrigate their fields.
Emperor Wu’s regime employed Legalist Party advisors: the People were stretched close to breaking. Even Confucian critics, though heard, were ridiculed.
81 BC, a high official answered their debates—
See them now present us with nothingness and consider it substance, with emptiness and call it plenty! In their coarse gowns and cheap sandals they walk gravely along sunk in meditation as though they had lost something. These are not men who can do great deeds and win fame. They do not even rise above the vulgar masses!
The Han dynasty had succeeded the Ch’in—3rd century BC—brutal and short-lived—which unified the Warring States. For four hundred years Han rulers maintained a centralized, imperial nation that at its farthest reach made trading contact with Rome. It broke apart, like the Chou, into competing smaller powers and states.