No More Learning

When it is carved there are names. When there are names it is time to stop.
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The West is a sharpened blade. Western reason and Science have had as their goal the precise and the definitive, the form without shadow, the known and the named. The Classical aspiration was to describe and to understand, to define and to capture. The aspirations of the East were different.
Mathematics is the primary language by which the West has attempted to describe the approximate and imprecise. The formula encapsulates theory. What cannot be visualised can still be predicted with high degrees of accuracy. The predictability of outcomes and the consistency of experimental results are the core of science. The predictive capability of science is the platform for technology.
The East took an alternative path. Ancient India and China accepted the primacy of the unnameable, the imprecise, the evanescent, and
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? ? the indistinct. The essences of Taoism and Buddhism are the Vortex and the Void, respectively, that which cannot be captured, and that which cannot be described, the nameless and the featureless.
Eastern religion has strongly influenced Western religion and art, but the direction that Western society has taken has been towards exact definition framed in secular language. Society has been defined by the search for a coherent legal system, and Science by the search for truth embodied in exact descriptions and universal laws. Of the ways of thought in China Taoism in particular has prized instead the evanescent and rarified, the vacant and turbid, the indistinct and shadowy, the tentative and hesitant.
It is true that the West has valued these aspects of thought in art. In painting there are the light and shadow effects of . ? ? ,7,8. :74? for example in Leonardo Da Vincii? s and Rembrandti? s work. It has valued them in music
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? in the tonal subtleties of Beethoveni? s last quartets, or Brahmsi? s and Chopini? s solo piano pieces. It has valued them in the troubled existentialist thinking of a Kierkegaard, the mysticism of a St John of the Cross, the quietism of certain poets. It has valued moments of introspection and stillness. But insight in the West has more often meant instances of revelation than consistent durable attitude. Apollo and Dionysus have been the patrons of the arts. Apollo is the god of clear form, intense light and the bounding line. Dionysus is the god of intense energy, ecstasy and the reforming chaos. One has been the patron of Classical order and moderation, the other the patron of turbulence and Revolution. Both are fundamentally masculine, neither are quietist. Western art, religion and philosophy have tended to espouse the directed, the purposeful, the charged, and the dynamic. The quiet contemplatives are an exception rather than a
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? rule. They have rarely generated schools of thought. They have been isolated examples.
Ancient China on the other hand valued the feminine, and attempted to keep the masculine in balance, to mute it and subdue it, to restrain it and absorb it. Quietism is a marked feature of Taoism the fundamental thought pattern of ancient China, and also of Chinese Buddhism and Confucianism the other two great ethical movements. Each of the three differs in its solutions. Simplistically Buddhism is a transcending of the world of transient phenomena: Confucianism is a continuing engagement with the world in its social aspects: while Taoism is an acceptance of and conformance with the worldi? s fundamental natural energies. Nevertheless there is a common underlying approach, a search for a self- illuminating harmony that is intrinsically personal, modest and moderate.
By the time of the Ti? ang Dynasty in the eighth century AD Taoist and Buddhist thought
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? was well over a thousand years old. Buddhism imported from India was established in China by 65 AD and found in Taoism a natural forerunner. In their original forms neither way of thought is a religion in the Western sense. There are no gods, personal or otherwise. There is no sentience in the universe. There is no ostensible pre-determined purpose for existence. Human beings in Buddhist thinking are potentially caught up on an endless wheel of rebirth and the goal is an individual one, to find a way of casting off the pain and constraints of life, to achieve personal freedom and enlightenment. The Buddhist goal is the Void, 3? 7;,3,? ? where the Self vanishes. The Taoist goal is to be part of the flow of universal energies, 9? 0? %,4, that Vortex which is in its totality aimless and directionless.
Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism were the intellectual matrix of the Ti? ang period. Fully
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? developed approaches to the problems of existence, as they were, they informed and illuminated the lives of the Ti? ang poets and painters. It was in poetry, in the works of three major poets in particular, Li Po (pronounced in modern Chinese as if it were spelt Lee Baw, the first name in China being the surname), Wang Wei (Wang Way), and Tu Fu (Doo Foo) that the Ti? ang Dynasty achieved its greatest artistic flowering. Wang Wei was also a famous painter, and part of the line of development that led to the high achievements of later Chinese landscape painting imbued with the spirit of Taoism.
The lives of these three men began in the relative peace and stability of the Ti? ang Dynasty with its centralised Imperial government based on the Court of the Emperor and his ministers, wives and concubines. Chinai? s Imperial history, before and since, was turbulent and often unstable though the thread of centralised Imperial rule ran through it, and the ethical
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? systems and social rituals provided fundamental continuities.
The three poets were born within a few years of each other around the start of the eighth century AD. Wang Wei in 699AD, Li Po in 701 and Tu Fu, the youngest of the three, in 712. The Ti? ang Dynasty had achieved a period of calm and consolidation. The majority of their adult years were lived in the reign of Hs ? an-tsung who ruled from 712 to 756AD. Known as Ming- huang the Glorious Monarch, Hs ? an-tsung was a patron of poetry music and the arts. He was also a scholar of Taoism and Esoteric Buddhism. Under his reformed administration Chinese civilisation flowered. The borders of the immense Empire were garrisoned and defended, allowing almost fifty years of uninterrupted splendour. However his infatuation with a concubine Yang Kuei-fei led inexorably to the disaster of the An Lu-shan rebellion. In 756 the Emperor fled south-west to Szechwan and the period of greatness was over.
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? Wang Wei, Li Po and Tu Fu lived through the time of civil war, destruction and tragedy. Wang died in 759, Hs ? an-tsung himself in 761, Li in 762 and Tu in 770AD, so that despite the later re-instatement of the Ti? ang Dynasty, their lives broadly coincide with the flowering and fading of this period of cultural magnificence. The rebellion of General An Lu-shan was a further example of the many episodes of war and violence that punctuated Chinese Imperial history. It dismayed those with leanings to Confucianism, and confirmed for the Taoists and Buddhists the wisdom of retreat from a world of turmoil and confusion.
The lives and art of the three poets illustrate the tensions between involvement and non- involvement. Their poetry is full of humanity, delight in the natural world, and celebration of the everyday that enables it still to communicate with us across the centuries. But it is also filled with aspiration towards the greater life through Confucian integrity, Taoist retreat and Buddhist
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? non-attachment. Through it run positive feelings of affection, friendship, and appreciation of beauty and tranquility. But there is also sadness at transience, regret for what is lost, pathos, and compassion.
Each is highly individual but all three reveal their empathy, sensitivity and sincerity. They struggled with the demands of their society and also the needs of their own psyches. They aspired to peace and inner calm but found themselves also engaged in a difficult world. Nothing is easy for those who wish to live the better life. It was not straightforward for these men in the ancient East any more than for us in the modern West. Certainly there was both a high moral and mental challenge, demanding intellectual, emotional and ethical responsiveness. Confucianism requires engagement. Taoism and Buddhism are not simple escapes from reality. They require a profound change in mental attitude.
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? Resistance to the concepts of both the void and the vortex is immense in the West. One seems merely emptiness, the other chaos. Our culture has led us into different channels. All our instincts are towards form and order, purpose and direction, achievement and activity. We introspect endlessly but we find contemplation difficult. We are fascinated by Leonardoi? s drawings of water or Rembrandti? s figures lost in personal meditation. But they are exceptions within the mainstream of our culture. In literature for example there are few examples of the vortex or the contemplation of the void. Dante, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Goethe are miracles of substantial, positive, directed energy. Dantei? s contemplation of the afterlife resembles a set of scientific observations. Tolstoyi? s and Shakespearei? s characters are carved out of the air with that precision we also admire in Jane Austen, and with the fecundity of creation we admire in Dickens. Homer, Sophocles, Ovid,
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? Petrarch, Racine, Pushkin set the Western tone of clarity, brilliance, delineation, and externality. Inwardness and introspection are less evident in poetry than we might think. Quietism is rare in all the western arts. The best examples are in piano and chamber music and landscape painting, in the silence and stillness of the canvas, and the complex, muted tonalities and intimate harmonies of stringed instruments. Apollo and Dionysus are more often present in them. The void and the vortex rarely. We are able to enter Chinese art, particularly Ti? ang poetry and Sung painting, through an appreciation of natural beauty, but it can often seem understated, simplistic, muted and casual to the Western mind.
Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist ways of thought are each different. However Taoist spontaneity and sensitivity underlies the creation of almost all of Classical Chinai? s poetry, painting and three-dimensional objects. The common artistic inheritance, the means of
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? expression, and the Imperial culture blended together the three streams of thought, with the underlying Taoist concepts ever present. They are concepts that differ fundamentally from the traditional concepts of the West. Modern China as it follows Western capitalism and technology will find itself increasingly at odds with its own cultural history. The Western mind would itself need a radical change of its fundamental thought processes in order to approach the Tao. Taoism is spontaneous, non-intrusive, quiescent, empty, inactive and indifferent. It is the opposite of a scientific discipline, even though certain of its subordinate esoteric practises stimulated early technologies in China. Its essence is ? :? ? 0? the principle of non-action. Its goal is not achievable by the will. Its teachings cannot be communicated in words. It claims nothing and demands nothing.
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? The history of China, the lives of the poets and painters all demonstrate the difficulty of living in the world and aspiring to reach the Tao. The Chinese were as human and as fallible as we are. The true Taoist adept almost by definition is not a committed poet or painter, and cannot play a key role in the social order. The adept is not engaged with the world in that way. Taoism in the arts is almost a leakage from the pure Way into the impure human world. The Tao remains often only an aspiration and thereby an inspiration. The achievements of Ti? ang poetry are inevitably bound up with the external society, with the fate of the Dynasty and the lives of the poets. Wang Wei is an example of the modest official finding his solace in retreat to his country estate, in the practise of art, and in the study of Buddhist texts. Tu Fu is the humane Confucian, trying to be of service, demanding moral integrity of himself and others, accepting with sadness the vagaries of fate, exploiting the absorbing technical possibilities of poetry. Li Po
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? is the Romantic, otherworldly, careless genius who scatters brilliance, dreams of a reality beyond the real, and exemplifies the spontaneity and grace of the Taoist Way. Their lives are illuminated by the transient splendour of the Ti? ang zenith, and then darkened by the shadow of its fall. Regret, nostalgia for the vanished glories, memory of past joys, the horrors of war, the pain of shifting allegiance, the hurt of separation from those loved, the effects of time and of distance, of ageing and of loss, are all present in their poetry.
But equally present are other factors, strength of character, deep sensibility, love of nature, pity and compassion, friendship and tenderness, which emphasise the ability of the poets to see all life and see it whole. Pity is not self-pity. The indifference of nature is not evidence of its active hostility. The lack of external purpose is not a reason for lack of internal knowledge of the right goals of living. Misfortune is not a justification for narrowness or lack of
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? tenderness.
Separation enhances friendship and love. Poetry and the arts, beauty and grace shed light on life.
There are trios of related elements. There are the three poets, Wang Wei, Li Po and Tu Fu. There are the three attitudes to existence, the three ways of life, of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. There are the three main protagonists of the Imperial tragedy, Hs ? an- tsung the Emperor, Yang Kuei-fei the beloved concubine and consort, and An Lu-Shan the rebellious general. There are the three key aspects of life, the social, spiritual and artistic. It is through these triplicities we can attempt to see into the past.
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The Tao is the Vortex. The way to it lies in the recognition of the fluidity and instability of the Universe. Its deepest nature is like water or clouds. Nevertheless it encompasses the emergence of all forms. It underlies the Yang elements of existence, brightness, strength, and precise form, heat and light, jade and mountain, phoenix and dragon. Yet it is also the Yin matrix the female spirit of the valley, moon and shadow, winter and the north, mists and rivers, the containing cave and the opening flower.
The Vortex is the movement of energies and the energies themselves. It is that seething world of sub-atomic entities that the quantum universe displays and it is the structures of the macrocosm. It is both form and chaos. At its core are randomness and uncertainty. It is chaotic like the atmosphere, like the waterfall, but it reveals continuously altering form like the
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? ? cloud and the river. From its inwardness come the myriad entities. Its surface ripples and undulates. Its depths twist and coil. It is eternal and continuous. It contains infinitely nested repetitive patterns, but never repeats itself in entirety. It changes and flows through time. Its changes ,70 Time. Each reconfiguration of the Universe is the Moment. Bodies alter imperceptibly. Mountains erode. Rivers alter their course. Clouds rise and vanish.
The Tao is process, as our minds are. It is the movement of water in the mountain stream. It is the windblown cloud pouring across the dome of the sky. It is the cycle of individual birth, unique maturity and unknowable death within the pattern of the species and the type. It is the irregularity, the randomness that guarantees identity, and the form and process that reveals similarity. Thinking about the Tao breaks down our view of fixed boundaries, containing shapes, and permanent entities. It introduces the random fluctuation, the imageless particle and invisible
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? wave. The static vibrates. The isolated merges. The world is an instant, an instance of the World.
The endlessly pouring, continuously flowing, imperceptibly altering, randomly changing, richly patterned universe of the myriad creatures emerges from the seething continuum that is the uncarved block. The uncarved block is both vast and minute, macrocosm and microcosm. It cannot be grasped in its smallness and cannot be grasped in its enormity. It is the unnamed and unnameable matrix in which all names are dissolved, but out of which all nameable things come. It is the great calmly moving ocean of forms, of earths, seas, skies and stars, that also reveals itself in the unstable, shifting, elusive and transient. It is the smoke patterns in the air, the currents of the river, the flickering of light, the fluctuations of lives. Energy flows through all forms, at many levels, in veins or threads. It makes the e? dragon veinsi? of landscapes employed in geomancy (? 03? ? 8? :? , e? wind and
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? wateri? ). It creates the texture of silk, the structure of a leaf or a flower, the elements of a thought. These veins and threads are part of the nature of a thing and the essence of a process. They are like the Tao indefinite and elusive, vague and slippery, subtle and hidden. But they may also like the Tao be simple and undemanding, various and gleaming, satisfying and clear.
The aim of Taoism is to reach a harmony with this matrix, with the Tao. Its goal is to be a tranquil part of the Vortex, to live among the currents and inner vortices. The Way is to hold to the uncarved block, the universal mystery, without the urge to name and analyse, classify and dissect. It is to embrace time and change, to recognise the continuum, to cease grasping, to suppress the will, to harmonise the energies, to let go of worldly objectives. That is why the Way is straightforward but intensely difficult. That is why it cannot be reached by an act of reason but is in itself wholly reasonable. Lao
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? Tzu the author to whom the Tao Te Ching, the great classic of Taoism, is attributed says e? My words are simple and easy to use, but no one understands them or uses them. i? e? The Way is straightforward but people prefer side tracks. i? And of the nature of the Tao and therefore of the Universe itself he says, e? Without possession, without demands, without authority it is mysterious virtue. i?
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Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism were ancient ways of thought long before the Ti? ang Dynasty. The Chinese civilisation itself was already more than two thousand years old when the Ti? ang Dynasty came to power. By 5000BC Neolithic peoples were cultivating the yellow loess soils of northern China, fine fertile, wind- driven and river-borne, soils workable with primitive tools. The soil is ? :,3? ? 9:, yellow earth, ground to fine powder by the Arctic winds, and blown down from the Siberian Steppes. Loess has little structural stability and is carved into cliffs and gullies by rain, wind and rivers. The Chinese became skilled at hydraulic engineering on this immensely cultivable soil.
By 1500BC a sophisticated bronze-age civilisation, the Shang Dynasty, ruled in areas of the Yellow River valley and as far south as the Yangtze River. Around 1050BC the Shang was
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? ? defeated in battle by King Wu and the Chou Dynasty was founded. From this period to 221BC a complex civilisation developed, consolidating fifty states through warfare, to bring the whole of the Yellow River plain under Chou control. The Chou period was decentralised, with frequent periods of political fragmentation, but contains the intellectual origins of Chinese thought. From this period come the earliest Chinese poetry, the Book of Songs, and the compilation of the Classic historical and ritual texts.
Confucianism dates from around 500BC. Confucius promoted the concept of an ordered social structure governed by morally based conventions and rituals. The highest virtue is 703? the life of benevolence, humanity, and conscience. Taoism also probably dates from this period, its oldest text, the Tao Te Ching of the possibly mythical teacher Lao Tzu, establishing its concept of the Way, the matrix of energy underlying the vortex of the natural
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? world, and the life that is lived in harmony with the flows of existence.
The Chi? in Dynasty, which in turn in 206BC gave way to the great Han, was established about 250BC and by 221BC the Chi? in had consolidated the Empire to rule all of China. With Capitals at Chi? ang-an (modern Xian) and Loyang, in Central China, the Empire stretched from Korea and Vietnam in the southeast to Central Asia in the northwest. From this period dates the terracotta army at Xian, found in the vicinity of the tomb of the First Chi? in Emperor. Chi? in built the first Great Wall that the Han used as an effective military barrier against border incursions.
Through military strength, taxation, legal decree, and cultural unity the Han Emperors established the strong central government that characterised later China. They extended trade routes across Asia to Persia, India, Arabia and Rome. The unified regime based on an educated elite, Confucian in spirit with a Taoist
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? admixture, encouraged art and the civilised life. Bronze and lacquer work produced was of rare beauty. Calligraphy flourished furthering the copying and study of the Five Classics, and ceramic production was advanced. This basically agrarian society, with its emphasis on family, filial piety, the subservience of women, Confucian-educated officials, strong central Imperial control, defended borders, and a common moral and legal cultural framework set the pattern for later Dynasties.
The luxury of the Imperial Court, the presence of Imperial concubines and eunuchs, and the principle of exogamy, that is the requirement of the Emperors to marry a subject outside the line of patrilineal descent, were fatal weaknesses in successive Dynasties. Centralised dependence, coupled with the use of foreign generals to defend the borders allowing them to create distinct decentralised power bases, and the influence of Imperial consorts on the Emperor, led to the demise of the Han. The rise of
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? consortsi? families and the influence of the Court eunuchs created powerful inner threats to the throne. It guaranteed court intrigue and strife based on fear, greed and ambition. It was an inherent weakness of the system that the later Ti? ang also experienced.
Han China that existed for over four hundred years dissolved in rebellion, and was followed by a complex period of warring kingdoms and dynasties that lasted from 220 to 589AD. Taoism as a philosophy of retreat and self-cultivation flourished in this Age of Division. As did Buddhism born in India but introduced to China by 65AD. It offered a philosophy of enlightenment, based on an analysis of suffering and the renunciation of attachment to the world. It had affinities of attitude with Taoism in its quietism, disengagement, and disciplined spirituality. It involved compassion, release from
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? caste and gender distinctions, and the superiority of the private mind to the public persona.
Taoism and Buddhism with an accretion of icons, divinities, magical practices, temples, and scriptures, became popular religions. Through the latter part of this period of instability, the north and south were politically separate. Northern China laid strong emphasis on Confucian ideals and ethics, on mastery of the histories and classics, and on public service. The Southern aristocracies encouraged a literary and artistic world where the life of convivial conversation, and the practise of calligraphy, poetry and painting, led to intellectual artistic sensibility being valued highly. Throughout the period China retained a common language and culture that was enriched and developed in a more personal way, and this continuity offset the effects of continual disorder and dislocation, and preserved the desire for strong, centralised government as a means to ensure peace and stability.
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? Ti? ao Chien (also called Tao Y ? an-ming, 365- 427AD) is the great southern poet of this period. He is the fully formed individual, quitting political life to live in the quietist Taoist manner on his small tract of land. His poetry is the poetry of friendship and family, enjoyment of music, wine, and literature, withdrawal from public affairs, and immersion in the rational cultivation of art, nature and the self. He provided an archetype for later men of letters. He is the self-contained single one who finds a way to live undisturbed by external events and in harmony with nature.
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The Tao is the impersonal anonymous neutral matrix underpinning every manifestation. It is the nature of reality and the means by which the universe operates. In terms of Western science we could call it Energy. The 2,3? 1089,9? 438 of it would be the entities of the microcosmic world of particle physics, the objects and processes of the macrocosm, and the configurations of forces and forms in which those energies can appear through time. What is its 70,? ? 9? ? Well what ? 8 energy or force? What ? 8? gravity or inertia? What ? 8 a sub-atomic particle? We can only reply with ? 4? things work and move and configure and change. We can only answer with observation and theory. The e? ? ? ,9? is forever mysterious, untouchable, numinous. It is the given.