Do you feel that the visions of China and Japan are similar enough so as to allow us to speak of an East Asian view of human identity? If so, what is that vision? If not, what are the key elements that prevent a single vision for this area, and what do those separate visions look like? Compare these vision/visions with either a view from India or one from the Near East.
This unit is my favorite so far (and that's not likely to change)- I've been a huge fan (and novice adept) of Eastern religions for decades, and this world overview in BLS-300 has really “kicked it up a notch”. (BAM!) I have to wonder- what's in the water they drink in China? Is it any surprise that the US owes them trillions of dollars? Their ancient people, in my opinion, were so far ahead of the rest of the world in their philosophies.
I had the epiphany of deciding on yin and yang as the focus of my final paper a week or so ago. The more I research it, the more I'm impressed. It's closer to something Albert Einstein might have come up with (but many centuries in advance). The Chinese invented fireworks, and a crude steam-engine, many hundreds of years before the West. I say this mostly in jest, but if there's any truth in the “Ancient Aliens” theories, the extra-terrestrials landed in China...
I have to use India as a compare/contrast area- they're the closest geographically and metaphysically to the Far East. It's here in Asia where we see a departure from the idea of “gods” the most- yes, Europe (especially Greece) had Plato, Socrates et. al. with their more scientific approach to the cosmos. But China takes it even beyond normal science. Somehow, they anticipated our modern physics.
Yin and yang define almost everything- the universe is full of opposites that depend on each other: day/night; male/female; hot/cold; etc.. still- the ancient thinkers kept probing...
As sophisticated as this line of thinking was, the Chinese continued to refine it through Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.
Lao Tzu: From the Tao Te Ching.
Lao Tzu seems to speak in nothing but riddles, especially to our more Western ways of defining the world around us. The basic idea of Taoism for me is that once you've named something, you've limited the way you can perceive it. As esoteric as that sounds, there are some practical examples where we can see the harm in naming something: earlier in our country's history, being labelled as a "red" or "black" man was definitely a negative thing. Even the distinction of male and female gave males the superiority. Lao Tzu is saying we should only think of each other in the most all-inclusive terms possible- humans.
But it goes further than that. If you make a distinction between humans and animals, or animals and plants, more negatives arise. We have exerted our power over the other flora and fauna of this planet, and nowadays we have some very cruel methods of raising animals for our food, or clearing forests for our own commercial interests. Lao-Tzu's advice would be that we should instead think of all life, including humans, as organisms.
You guessed it- it doesn't stop there. What about all the inorganic matter around us? Water, rock, oxygen, and all the elements... the moon, sun, planets, and stars. Everything is made of atoms, living or non-living. Everything is connected. What the Tao Te Ching can only hint at (because words fail) is the force/essence that keeps the entire universe together. That is the Tao. It has no name. "Tao" is the paradoxical name for the nameless.
From the Nihongi
Japan was much more remote than China, being a nation of islands, and so in this and similar Japanese creation stories we see the results of that independence, and yet a common thread with most of the myths we've encountered in all the cultures so far. It would seem that left to their own devices, most ancient societies envision a "void", where heaven and earth are not yet separated. And often the egg symbolism comes into play. Then there will be the forming of deities from that void, or the egg, and from them the subsequent other parts of the world (sun, moon, stars, oceans, earth, mountains, men, animals, plants).
Only the most ancient Chinese myths incorporate these Japanese elements. Yin and yang, Taoism, later Buddhism (from India) evolved in China and eradicated these simpler visions. So India can be seen as a catalyst in the relative sophistication of Chinese thought compared to Japanese. And I don't think we can say that China and Japan had a shared vision until much later, when Taoism and Buddhism made it to the Japanese islands.
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