Древний Китай. Том 3: Период Чжаньго (V—III вв. до н.э.)

Here we have an extremely important text. For the first time, China produced a thinker who, contrary to the accepted norm and having no predecessors to lean upon, delved deeply into mysticism and created impressive metaphysi-cal-cosmogonic constructs. He has been to places that none of the Chinese has been to; he has seen that which none of them has seen. He spoke assuredly of the time when Heaven and Earth have not yet emerged and darkness prevailed; he stated that China was merely one eighty-first part of the Under-Heaven. Where Tsou Yan could have borrowed these ideas from? They were well known to Indian thinkers who wrote about the nine dvipa continents, each of which in turn consisted of nine parts. Tsou Yan discussed problems of cosmogony in earnest, though all earlier Chinese thinkers were completely indifferent to them. Besides, he spoke of the incessant circulation of certain "five te [substances]", which were obviously somehow related to the wu-hsing proto-elements. He also pondered over the rise and fall of the yang and yin forces, which corresponds so fully to the Iranian idea of the eternal struggle between the forces of Good and Evil, of Light and Darkness. The Tsou Yan phenomenon remains an enigma^[304], just like many things associated with Taoist philosophy, starting with Chuang-tzu (369–286 B.C.).

We mean here the mysterious origin of those ideas, including mythology, which appears for the first time in Chinese writings (we refrain from discussing oral tradition, as it is hard to say something definite regarding it) and is widely represented in the Chuang-tzu. The book in question is one of the most interesting in the Ancient China. In addition to profound metaphysical constructs that are entirely foreign to any earlier Chinese text, it contains a huge number of parables, anecdotes, myths and short essays on abstract topics.

Chuang-tzu's metaphysics and cosmogony proceed from the assumption that the Universe was created out of the original Chaos and that its creation is related to the Great Tao (the Tao of Taoism, which differs from the Tao of Confucius) — a certain Supreme Absolute, extrinsic to the phenomenal world and undetectable by the senses. Те is an emanation of Tao^[305]. Tao is everywhere and nowhere, it pervades everything and it lies at the bottom of the cosmogonic process. The ideas of Chuang-tzu — like those of Tsou Yan — are very unorthodox for Ancient Chinese thought. It is very hard to believe that they could have popped up out of the blue, in a country where no one took interest in such things before. Well, there is no need to believe that. One has but to pick up, for instance, an unassuming chrestomathy titled Ancient Indian Philosophy (Drev-neindiyskaya filosofiya, Moscow, 1972; in Russian) to find very similar in nature — though much more refined and elaborated — constructs of the Rigveda and Upanishads. They contain the same ideas: the Great Brahman-Absolute and its emanation Atman, the existent and non-existent, Chaos and the emergence of the One, the latter's association with thought (the Word, Logos), the original emptiness so favored by Chuang-tzu.

Here is another important detail to be added to what was said above: the Chinese term ch 7 (lit. "air") was given by Taoists a new meaning: "vital force", "energy" and the like. According to them, the universe turned out to be permeated with the vigorously circulating ch 7 proto-substance. It is this ch 7 complex that Taoists equate with life. If such a complex disintegrates, then life ends. If a new complex of this kind forms, then a new life is created. The idea of reincarnation — which was so thoroughly developed in Ancient India and totally unknown in China until the time of Chuang-tzu's publication — was first clearly set forth in the just mentioned work. In addition to ch 7 "at large", Taoist text begin to mention "the finest/subtlest cA7" (pi.; ching-ch'i), whose presence enables spiritual life in man and in all animate beings. The Chandogya Upani-shad (VI, 7–8) states that food consists of three parts. The coarsest part eventually forms excreta, the intermediate part is digested by the body and feeds it, and the finest part becomes — in humans — their breath, thoughts and words. Another version of the text present the same idea in a somewhat different context: the fine substance is that which makes salt salt, a mosquito a mosquito, and a tiger a tiger; i.e., the finest is the base of the essence (the quality of being itself) in all things and of spirituality in man.