China’s Religious Experience

I’ve always considered the religious forms native to China the most sophisticated—at least in comparison with religious forms in India and in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim world. The last three, of course, are closely related. The specifically Chinese forms are a belief in spirits, especially those of the ancestors, and Taoism, a much later mystical form, in which the ultimate is pictured as a transcendental All. The chief similarity of Chinese and all other religions is that it is based on a conviction that a spirit world exists beyond this one. The chief difference lies in the absence of a personified God, a God whose characteristics are based on the human model. The great benefit of the religious view for the Chinese people has been that a sophisticated view of the All High is almost impossible to exploit for political purposes. Hence China has been spared the vicious religious wars that have plagued other parts of the globe.

Of course, as many, many people have observed over time, The Chinese temperament is practical and down to earth. Indeed, calling it a “temperament” is probably wrong. It is a cultural blessing, in a way—and in China the culture has been pretty continuous for at least 4000 years. No lesser person than D.T. Suzuki has elaborated this very point. Suzuki, a Japanese, is the chief introducer of Zen Buddhism to the West, and in his Essay in Zen Buddhism, he too stresses the point. Zen, as he points out, is as much a Chinese creation as an Indian, and Zen Buddhism is practical and down to earth.

This works out well. Ancestor worship enlarges the sense of living in this dimension by extending it into the invisible. The ancestors are seen as able to influence one’s banal fortunes in this dimension—and we can please ancestors by upholding the ethical norms. So at the bottom of society. At its highest levels, the concept of Heaven, impersonal but not unaware, has been developed as the sanction of rule. Those whom Heaven favors, have the Mandate of Heaven. Those whom Heaven would depose are deprived of the mandate and, no matter what they do, they will swept away. It is the only culture on the planet in which the personal virtue of the ruler is conceived of as directly related to success in governing a realm—and in which the ruler’s chief activity is to let ordinary people live while keeping the lesser lords from exploiting them. That works for me.

And then, at the very highest levels, the mystical and philosophical, the conception of divinity is appropriately high, always reverent, never inclined to suggest that you can bribe, fool, or otherwise influence the highest. It shall prevail, through any and all contingencies at precisely the distance from us which we also feel when contemplating our own puny selves.