A novel TiO2 nanotube arrays/MgTixOy multiphaseheterojunction film with high efficiency for photoelectrochemical cathodic protection Chang Feng & Zhuoyuan Chen & Jiangping Jing & Mengmeng Sun & Guiying Lu & Jing Tian & Jian Hou
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PART TWO TRADITIONAL EXPANSIONS
1.
Series Introduction: Guides to Sacred Texts
What is a sacred text? The Oxford English Dictionary offers a definition of “sacred” as “Set apart for or dedicated to some religious purpose, and hence entitled to veneration or religious respect.” The definition is necessarily vague. What does it mean to be “set apart?” What constitutes a “religious purpose?” How formal is “veneration?” Does minimal “religious respect” qualify? The sphere of meanings surrounding the word “sacred” will depend on the religion involved. For that reason “sacred texts” in this series is a term conceived broadly. All of the texts covered by this series have held special regard—they have been “set apart”—in a religion either ancient or modern. Such texts are generally accorded more serious attention than other religious documents. In some cases the texts may be believed to be the words of a deity. In other cases the texts may be part of an atheistic religion. This breadth of application indicates the rationale behind Guides to Sacred Texts.
This series offers brief, accessible introductions to sacred texts, written by experts on them. While allowing for the individuality of each text, the series follows a basic format of introducing the text in terms of its dates of composition, traditions of authorship and assessment of those traditions, the extent of the text, and the issues raised by the text. For scripture that continues to be utilized, those issues will likely continue to generate controversy and discussion among adherents to the text. For texts from religions no longer practiced, the issues may well continue to address concerns of the present day, despite the antiquity of the scripture. These volumes are useful for introducing sacred writings from around the world to readers wanting to learn what these sacred texts are.
Introduction
The Daode jing or Tao Te Ching is the oldest and most venerated scripture of Daoism and a classic of world philosophy. Often hailed as representing the core of ancient Chinese mysticism, it is in fact a multifaceted work that can, and has been, interpreted in many different ways: a manual of strategy, a political treatise on the recovery of the Golden Age, a guide to underlying principles, and a metalinguistic inquiry into forms of prescriptive discourse. Fundamentally it can be read in different ways: as a document of early Chinese culture or as a scripture of universal significance, cosmologically or practically, as a general statement or an expression of an esoteric teaching.
Looked at in terms of Chinese culture, concepts of statesmanship, political principles, military strategy, and royal virtues become essential—the focus is on understanding the text in the context of contemporaneous works and the social and political situation of the time. Seen as a scripture of universal significance, ideas of personal cultivation, freedom of mind, and the attainment of spontaneity and naturalness take center stage—the text’s main appeal is its timeless characterization and alleviation of the human condition. Both approaches are equally important and have been proposed by readers and scholars over the centuries; both are also evident in numerous traditional commentaries and the uses of the text throughout Chinese history and particularly the Daoist tradition.
Also known in the West as “Taoism”—using an older mode of transliterating Chinese—it is famous for its philosophy and health
practices. Its philosophy centers on the concept of “Dao” or “Way,” and presents notions of naturalness and spontaneity, nonaction and going with the flow. Its health practices often take the form of taiji quan and qigong, utilizing deep breathing, slow motion, gentle stretches, and meditation. While both philosophy and health practices constitute major aspects of Daoism, they form only a part of the entire complex, which also includes an organized, communal religion of social and political dimensions, with formal rituals and ordination hierarchies, potent talismans and magical spells, as well as visualizations and ecstatic excursions to the stars.
Daoism was not always seen as consisting of these three dimensions. When Western missionaries first encountered it, they followed the dominant Confucian perception and focused entirely on its ancient classics such as the Daode jing, ignoring its cultivation practices and condemning its popular rituals as “heathen.” The texts, on the other hand, they admired and interpreted in a Christian light, trying to find God and Western values in them. This attitude has led to the widespread adoption of the age-old distinction between daojia, the “Daoist school,” originally a bibliographical classification that goes back to the first century bce, and daojiao or the “Daoist teaching,” a term applied to organized groups in the early middle ages and found in texts from the fifth century onward. In Western terms, the two are called “philosophical” and “religious” Daoism, a cleft that has prevented a proper understanding of the tradition as a whole. Recently, a more appropriate and integrated understanding has come to the fore that sees the ancient “thinkers” as informed and infused by practices, especially meditation and other forms of self-cultivation, as well as often living in communities that presage later organizations.
Today scholars see the Daoist tradition as consisting of three major branches: literati, organized, and self-cultivation. More specifically, literati Daoists belong to the educated elite and focus on Daoist ideas as found in the ancient texts, applying them to their lives and expanding them to influence the political and social
situation of their time. Their goal is to align themselves with Dao and enhance universal harmony, legitimizing their ideas on the basis of a deep dedication to the classical texts. They are often writers, compiling interpretations, commentaries, and exegeses, and also integrating Daoist concepts into literature, poetry, and art. Working in different areas of society, in some cases retiring to their landed estates to lead a life of leisure, they derive their selfidentity from ideas centered on Dao, shaping the tradition as textual commentators, religious patriarchs, and modern intellectuals.
The second branch of the religion, what used to be “religious” Daoism, we now call “organized.” Its members similarly appear in various functions and levels of society but their distinguishing mark is that they belong to one or the other communal group that practices organized religion. These groups have priestly hierarchies and monastic orders, and they support formal ordinations, regular rituals, and prayers to the gods. Some are close-knit fraternities with esoteric practices that actively separate from the rest of society; others form part of ordinary society, often furnishing neighborhood temples that serve to create a spiritual dimension to the life cycle by celebrating weddings, graduations, business ventures, and funerals as well as offering services of healing, protection, and exorcism. These groups have extensive codices of scriptures, hagiographies, and manuals, now collected in the Daoist canon, which in its present form goes back to 1445. Historically, there are traces of early groups, notably centering on the vision of the Daode jing, but as a strong social force they appear only in the second century ce. Since then, they have vacillated between marginal, even rebellious, positions and times of great political influence, overall forming a firm part of mainstream culture since the fifth century.
The third group of Daoists focus on personal self-cultivation, practices known summarily “nurturing life” (yangsheng). From an early time linked with the personal adaptation and intentional activation of virtues and subtle states described by the ancient thinkers, these practices include breathing techniques, physical exercises,
dietary and sexual moderation, as well as—most importantly— forms of meditation described in terms of quiet sitting, concentration, and clarity and stillness. By the second century bce, detailed manuals appear in excavated manuscripts, showing that these techniques also played an important role in traditional Chinese medicine, where they constituted its preventative and healthenhancing aspects. Around the same time, stories describe semidivine figures known as immortals (xian), who use these practices to attain more than harmony in life, reaching for high spiritual states of transcendence. Rather than philosophical ideals or communal rites, the main concern of self-cultivation Daoists is the attainment of physical health, longevity, peace of mind, and mystical oneness with Dao. They tend to stay away from political involvement and complex organizations, working instead with close relationships of master and disciple.
While anyone participating in either of these dimensions may call himself a Daoist, the overarching trend for serious devotees is to engage in all three: think of life in terms of the ancient classics and their later and modern interpretations, practice some form of self-cultivation, and connect to society through communal organizations. The Daode jing as the first and most venerated classic of the tradition accordingly plays an important role in all three. Its format and outlook being on the more “philosophical” side, for most of its history it has invited literati engagement, discussions, commentaries, and interpretations. However, even from the earliest times, its teachings were associated with self-cultivation and meditation practices, and even before the inception of the Daoist religion in the second century ce, it was venerated and recited as a sacred scripture, believed to contain supernatural powers and to bring blessings and good fortune to its devotees. The text is, therefore, a multifaceted phenomenon, with both a long history and a continuing active presence in the world today.
PART
ONE THE TEXT
1
Times and Authorship
The Axial Age
The Daode jing is one of the great works that shaped human civilization and goes back to a period of pervasive change that the German thinker Karl Jaspers, in The Origin and Goal of History (1953), called the Axial Age, when “man as we know him today came into being.” At this time, in many different cultures new thinkers and religious leaders arose, who for the first time placed great emphasis on the individual as opposed to the community of the clan or tribe, creating abstractions and sophisticated forms of criticism. Examples include the Buddha and Mahavira in India, Zoroaster in Persia, Solon and Socrates in ancient Greece, and Confucius and Laozi in China.
This change was due to the increasing impact of literacy, which arose in the wake of the invention of writing. A way of keeping track of increasingly complex economical and political transactions, writing is logophonic, that is, the visible record of spoken words, and as such different from immediate pictorial representations or other forms of record-keeping, including knotted cords, arranged pebbles, carved ivory bones, or pictographic abstractions. Its first traces go back to about 3500 bce, when the Babylonians and Sumerians in the Near East developed cuneiform ideographs, soon followed by the ancient Egyptians and, about 1500 bce, by the Chinese. The Greek alphabet, more potent due to its ability of shaping words from individual letters and vowels, goes back to about 800 bce. Easier to learn and more flexible in application, it was both more democratic socially and more prone toward
abstraction philosophically than the Chinese character script, a system that, by its very difficulties, limited access and conferred great status.
By 600 bce, the time of the Axial Age, the use of writing among major world civilizations had spread widely enough among their upper classes to make a difference in thinking. The most momentous of all human technological inventions, as Walter Ong calls it (2002), writing freed language from context and standardized concepts, and created autonomous discourse, thus opening new levels of awareness in the individual. Completely artificial, it requires the use of cortical areas in the brain more related to visual input and enhanced processing in the prefrontal cortex, thus raising consciousness to a completely new level and opening the path toward the growth of an inner sense of self—characteristic of philosophies of the time.
More specifically, writing allowed backward scanning of recorded thoughts, and increased choice of words, the ability to challenge logic, and the reduction of inconsistencies. It separated the knower from the known, opening the self to introspection and society to abstract concepts, such as justice and morality. For the first time, people became aware of the complexities of their internal motivations and were able to create itemized lists and indexes, gaining a much greater control over the outside world and their inner thinking while being more and more alienated from both.
This stands in sharp contrast to orally based thinking, which has several distinct characteristics. Thus, in terms of grammatical organization, it is additive rather than subordinative, using “and” more than “because” or “after,” as well as aggregative rather than analytic, that is, it heavily uses proverbs, sayings, aphorisms, epithets, and parallel constructions. It also tends to be redundant or copious, with repetition and back-looping. In terms of content, it is close to the human life-world, homeostatic and presentoriented, deeply engaged with immediate issues, as well as focused on concrete events over general patterns. It is overall situational
rather than abstract, empathetic rather than detached. The Daode jing, as we shall see, while the product of an already literary culture, both in style and content still maintains many characteristics of oral thinking, making it a powerful document in a time of major transition.
The Warring States
This transition in China, the time when the Daode jing was first conceived, is marked by the shift from the Spring and Autumn period (770–481 bce) to the Warring States (480–221 bce) within the Eastern Zhou dynasty. Besides an increase in literacy, it also signaled major changes in economics, society, and politics. During the Western Zhou (1046–771 bce), following Shang (ca. 1550–1046 bce) models, the state had been dominated by a warrior aristocracy whose privileged status was marked by its monopoly of ritually directed violence. Sanctioned killing, as Mark Edward Lewis describes it (1990), in the forms of sacrifice, warfare, and hunting— which also served as military exercise and formed part of the king’s seasonal inspection tour—constituted the central rites of the cults of the ancestors and the state altars, and the performance of these rites set the aristocracy apart from the common people who slaved to keep them housed and fed.
This aristocracy, moreover, was organized through a close network of kinship ties that created a systematic group hierarchy, within which each lineage had its own capital, temple, and military force. In the late Spring and Autumn period, iron age technology spread, bringing with it better plowshares, wagon axles, and weapons. This caused an increase in food production and massive population growth, as well as greater mobility and wealth among the upper classes. As a result, the family-based social structure disintegrated. Lineages split into various branches of unequal status and began to pursue local power, engaging in interlineage conflicts
and interstate wars. Needing more fighters than the family had to offer, the aristocracy added comrades-in-arms by means of blood covenants and established increasingly independent states, striving for supremacy or hegemony.
To this end, lineage-based states in the late Spring and Autumn period began to tighten their organization, progressively extending military service to create universal conscription and make every adult male into a soldier. Establishing the integrated squad of five men as the lowest independent tactical unit, they unified the army into a single body. Pervasive military training changed to turn previously autonomous fighting men into standardized, predictable, functionally differentiated members of a coordinated whole, reducing troops to passive objects of manipulation. This in turn affected civil society in the Warring States, creating a brutally repressive system of sanctioned violence by organizing the entire population into units of military service as the primary means of civil control. It brought forth numerous totalitarian and tyrannical regimes that wielded extensive and comprehensive power, making each individual liable for the acts of his or her social unit and brutally punishing transgressions.
The Daode jing, therefore, arose in the context of constant warfare, when people essentially devoted all their efforts to neverceasing sacrificial and military activities, farming in the spring and summer and campaigning in the fall and winter. Equipped with new weaponry, such as the crossbow and the iron sword, and supported by mounted cavalry that replaced the war chariots of old, large infantry armies of up to 600,000 men—ten times the size of Spring and Autumn forces—fought each other to the death, creating destruction and devastation everywhere.
In response to this gruesome situation, a new social group of socalled scholar-knights or officials-in-waiting (shi) arose. Literate and intellectually aware, they were often younger or illegitimate sons of warrior lords, who developed visions of creating a more
stable and better integrated society. Philosophically inclined, they would not look for what is true as opposed to apparent or fake, as Western thinkers did, but instead strove to find ways to order or proper government (zhi) as opposed to disorder or social chaos (luan).
Their key concern was thus the proper “way” or “method” (dao) that would lead to the recovery of the harmony and social manageability of an earlier, golden age. Their works tend to be characterized by a strong backward focus and feudalistic vision. Although Western scholars usually characterize them as “philosophers,” they always placed a strong emphasis on the practical dimensions of their teachings, in regard to both social and political impact and the individual’s personal cultivation. In fact, at the core of most ancient Chinese thought are practices of social discipline and the transformation of individuals and communities.
The Han historian Sima Tan (d. 110 bce) distinguishes six major philosophical schools of the Warring States, each of which proposed one particular area as being most responsible for the state of social and cosmic disharmony and offered remedies accordingly. Thus, the Confucians (rujia) focused on social etiquette and proper ritual; the Daoists emphasized the natural flow of things. The Mohists (mojia), followers of the philosopher Mozi (470–391 bce), saw the solution to all problems in social equality, nonviolence, and concern for all; the School of Names or Dialecticians (mingjia) found the key flaw in the inaccurate use of language and the resulting confusion in people’s minds. The Legalists (fajia) thought that a set of strict laws and punishments was necessary to return order to the world; and the Yin-Yang Cosmologists understood social and personal harmony to depend on the cycles of the seasons, the movements of the stars, and other macrocosmic phenomena. Among these, the Confucians and Yin-Yang Cosmologists are most relevant for understanding the Daode jing, itself central to the Daoist school.
Confucianism
Confucianism goes back to Master Kong Qiu (551–479 bce), called Kong Fuzi in Chinese and latinized by the missionaries as Confucius. He was born as the illegitimate son of the ruler of Lu, a minor state in what is today Shandong. Being part of the lesser aristocracy, he received an education in the feudal arts, including archery, charioteering, music, and poetry, and became literate. Serving as a minor functionary in administration, he reflected on the difficulties and divisions of his time, developing a philosophical and ethical system in the hope of guiding the country back to a saner and more personally dedicated way of living. Hoping to find a ruler to put it into practice, he traveled all over the country, visiting many different feudal states, but was not hired. Eventually he went back home and began to teach his ideas to interested disciples, soon establishing a name for himself. The disciples later collected his sayings into a book known as the Lunyu (Analects), which today has twenty chapters, the first nine of which seem to be historically closest to the Master himself.
The main concept of early Confucianism as presented in this text—and variously criticized in the Daode jing—is the idea of ritual formality or etiquette (li). The graph combines the symbol for “spirit” or “divine” with the image of a basket full of beans; it is a visual representation of offerings and by extension indicates the sense of reverence and awe in the face of the numinous. The term describes the clear inner awareness of social distinctions and personal potentials, the ability to maintain moderation and exhibit an appropriate and respectful response in all kinds of situations. More specifically, li means proper behavior among people of different rank and status as defined in the five key relationships of ruler and minister, father and son, husband and wife, older and younger brother, as well as friend and friend. Each of these pairs consists of a more senior and more junior partner, even if divided only by
minutes of birth or organizational membership, defining their respective obligations.
The key factor in the system, then, is mutuality (shu). This means that the senior partner always should treat the junior with care and concern, while the junior owes the senior deference and respect. More particularly, this manifests as filial piety or obedience (xiao) toward one’s parents, and loyalty (zhong) toward the ruler or state. People should always think of how they would like to be treated themselves. As the Lunyu has it, “The Master said, Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire” (12.2; 14.15). Another way to activate li is through humaneness (ren), expressed in kindness, benevolence, goodwill, generosity, and compassion. The character shows the word for “person” combined with the numeral “two,” indicating its focus on interpersonal connection. This is closely followed by righteousness or rightness (yi), the sense of familial duty and social obligation that reaches beyond the interpersonal and takes the greater good into account. The character consists of the two words for “I” and “sheep,” suggesting the connection between the self and the flock of humanity.
Nobody, not even the ruler of the country, always occupies a senior or junior position. Rather, varying social contexts require different forms of behavior, degrees of formality, and structures of command. Complete mastery, then, guarantees the smooth function of society in all its complexity, a feature that needs to be absorbed rather than enforced. As the Lunyu says:
The Master said: Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with propriety, and they will not only have a sense of shame but also reform themselves. (2.3)
