Since When Has the West Ruled the World?

1) The West’s Negative Assessment of Eastern Civilization

Historically the West held a positive view of Eastern civilization for a long time. Why, then, is this important and interesting fact so little known to us? The reason is simple. The West’s positive assessment of Eastern civilization in the early Enlightenment turned 180 degrees and became negative as the late Enlightenment arrived. The period after the Enlightenment coincides with the West’s Industrial Revolution. With the Industrial Revolution the West began to conquer the East physically, the western powers advancing on the East (西勢東漸). Before Western ships armed with steam and cannon, the wooden ships of the East fell like mice before a cat. The West’s assessment of the East, before and after the Industrial Revolution, changed into an assessment based not on civilization but on science and technology. The West’s overwhelming position naturally became the occasion for turning its assessment of Eastern civilization from positive to negative.

In the early Enlightenment, while Western monarchs wielded absolute power and meddled in every detail not only of individual thought but of economic life, Western thinkers saw in the East a way of governing in which the monarch was bound by ethics and kept interference in the people’s lives to a minimum. So they judged the Eastern monarch to be the embodiment of the role model the West of the time was seeking: “the enlightened despot.” But entering the late Enlightenment, Western thinkers, dreaming not of monarchy but of a republic, took Greek and Roman democracy as their model and began to turn their assessment of the Eastern enlightened despot negative. As Western thinkers dreamed of the republic, curiosity and goodwill toward the Chinese despot were replaced by condemnation and loathing.

Diderot (1713–1784), who led the Enlightenment as leader of the French Encyclopedists, is the representative figure among Enlightenment thinkers who changed his mind. Early on he placed Eastern civilization on an equal footing with Western civilization and viewed it positively, especially in religion and ethics. But later he disparaged things Chinese as unscientific and full of prejudice. He declared that what the West should emulate was the “noble savage,” whose name is linked with Rousseau’s, and could no longer be Chinese natural philosophy. Helvétius (1715–1771) was another thinker who changed his mind. Abandoning his favorable view of China’s enlightened despot, he criticized the Chinese emperor as an unenlightened oppressor. Rousseau (1712–1778) and Condorcet (1743–1794) also began to criticize China, holding that the absence of freedom was hindering China’s political and ethical development. Montesquieu (1689–1755) in particular defined Eastern civilization itself as having no concept of freedom. He criticized China’s polity as an oppressive regime that bred fear, and held that the concept of political freedom did not exist in the East.

In the nineteenth century the West threw itself into colonizing the East, the last goal of its conquest of the world. The East collapsed helplessly before the West’s overwhelming science and military power. The East found itself in an unprecedented situation: the occupation of the East by Western powers, the West advancing on the East. Naturally the West began to assess and perceive the East still more negatively. Riding the current of physical domination, thought and philosophical systems arose in the West to back it up intellectually. This current was systematized by Western philosophers of history.

The change in the West’s view of the East soon spread beyond thought into racial prejudice. In the early Enlightenment, when the West saw Eastern thought as superior to its own and leaned toward it, Easterners were classed as “white.” But after the late Enlightenment, and especially as the West’s conquest of the world was accomplished, Easterners were transformed into “yellow” people.³⁶⁵ It was stressed that they were not only inferior in civilization to Western whites but, for racial reasons, could not change. In the end this was to justify the West’s conquest and exploitation of the world. Here the idea developed among Westerners that conquering the world and guiding its uncivilized parts was “the white man’s burden.” On relations between East and West, too, this came to stand opposed to Leibniz’s hope and optimism for exchange between East and West. The view came into fashion that East and West have very different civilizations, and since the West is far ahead, such things as exchange are unnecessary.

This climate came to include correcting past positive assessments of the East. To take one example, the assessment of the Mongol Empire, which had had a decisive and positive influence on the West’s Renaissance and won the praise of Western thinkers, changed fundamentally. This happened in modern and contemporary times, especially in the period of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution and the conquest of the world that followed. Among Western thinkers there had been those who assessed the Mongols and Genghis Khan positively over hundreds of years: in the thirteenth century, Genghis Khan’s own time, then in the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries just after, and up to the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth. These past assessments were now corrected on a grand scale, arriving at last at racial judgment.

Nearly all the scientists of Europe accepted a scheme classifying humanity into three great races: African, Asian-Mongol and European… And compared with the most evolved European white race, the Asian Mongols began to be described as imbeciles who had stopped growing at the stage of the newborn… After that they were treated as very close to the orangutan… and the medically feeble-minded were even called by the name Mongoloid.³⁶⁶

This racial prejudice is no new tendency but has continuity in Western civilization. Go back to Greek times and it appears in the so-called “Orientalism” of the Greek era, which loathed the East. This thought was reproduced on an enlarged scale in the West in modern and contemporary times. The inferiority of the “Orient” that appeared in the fight between ancient Greece and Persia was extended to the whole world, to distinguish the other races, compared with it, from the West and to show the West’s superiority.

The tragedy The Persians, performed in 472 BC, dramatized the Persian Wars, and is a good example of what the Greeks reflected on as they dealt and clashed with the Persian Empire… It set Persian despotism and hierarchy, enormous wealth and luxury, excess in expressing emotion, disorder and cowardice against Greek democracy and equality, frugality and restraint, self-discipline and order, and courage… Herodotus, inheriting the analysis and interpretation of The Persians, developed further the dichotomies of West and East, Europe and Asia, Greek and non-Greek, despotism and democracy. So arose the ideology that the former is superior to the latter. In this tradition Orientalism began.³⁶⁷

The representative Western historian who recently spread Orientalism again is Wittfogel (1896–1988). In his work Oriental Despotism he held that in most regions except Europe there developed “civilizations based on water resources and agriculture” (hydraulic civilization), all of which gave birth to despotism. So he put forward the idea of seeing the civilizations of the Near East, the Middle East, the Far East and other regions too all as despotisms, lumping them together as Orientalism and comparing them with the West: precisely the dichotomy of “the West and the rest.” He published a book that fitted exactly the spirit of an age in which the West, having reached out across the world, enjoyed invincible standing. His book drew attention among Westerners and came to be widely cited.

The assessment of the Mongol Empire, the Mongols and the Mongol peace (Pax Mongolica) now known to us in East and West reflects not historical fact but an assessment wrapped in racial prejudice, made in modern and contemporary times. Only very recently has some correction of this distortion been made in the West. On the eve of 2000, the Third Millennium of humanity, the Washington Post named the figure who left the greatest mark on history in the Second Millennium, the thousand years from 1000 to 1999. It was Genghis Khan.

The prejudice of Orientalism encourages a situation in which eyes and ears are closed to all the true value inherent in Eastern thought. For humanity’s future we need to understand the philosophical systems of Eastern thought that differ from Western civilization: its cosmology, its relation of human beings and nature, its universal ethics, and its view of human nature. To this end we must look back at the essence of the Eastern thought that flowed into the West and was warmly welcomed and valued in the West’s Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Above all, it matters to look through this at how the political-economic thought of East and West differs.

2) East and West Before the Industrial Revolution

The image of Western superiority over the East was made mostly by Westerners. It was spread and accepted in the East almost as it was. So we readily come to see the East as having been historically behind the West all along. But historians and thinkers have described how this image differs from the facts. Wells shows a balanced historical view in comparing East and West:

For a long time China was superior to the West. The Western world may be said to have begun catching up with China again only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the discovery of America, the spread of printed books and education, and the dawn of modern science. In the flourishing Tang, in the artistic but somewhat decadent Song (960–1279), and in the cultured Ming (1368–1644), China was prosperous and happy, and its culture and art were ahead of any other country’s.³⁶⁸

Needham (1900–1995), known as one of the West’s foremost authorities on Chinese civilization, also sets out his view of relations between East and West in his book on the sciences of China and the West. He writes that we who live in the latter half of the twentieth century are still so overwhelmed by nineteenth-century thinking that we do not know that as recently as three or four centuries ago China was a better place to live than Europe.³⁶⁹ He explains that we do not know that from the first century BC to the fifteenth century AD Eastern civilization was far more efficient than Western civilization in applying knowledge of nature to practical human needs.³⁷⁰

After the end of the Second World War Needham proposed to Cambridge University Press, in 1948, a work on Chinese science and civilization; the plan was accepted, and he began full-scale research and writing on Chinese science and civilization. In this research Needham explained the Eastern invention of cast iron (the technique of melting iron and casting it into set shapes, used to make vessels and cannon), of the plowshare, and of the horse’s stirrup. The stirrup was invented in the East around the third century and reached the West in the Middle Ages. The use of the stirrup raised the mobility and fighting power of mounted men to a degree hard to imagine. The invention of the stirrup is so important that some rank its contribution to the progress of civilization with the invention of the wheel or of printing. And he proved that the inventions well known to us, paper, gunpowder, printing and the compass, were all made in China.

Yet until the mid-twentieth century, most people in the world, not to mention the West, believed that most of these inventions were made in the West.³⁷¹ After the mid-twentieth century, thanks to Needham’s research, it came to be accepted among intellectuals in the West that these important inventions originated in the East. This led at once, in the West, with Needham at the head, to the question: then why did China, with a civilization, science and technology a thousand or several hundred years ahead, fail to keep developing, and get overtaken by the West?³⁷² This important question, known as “Needham’s Question,” was a concern of many Western scientists and thinkers in the mid-twentieth century.³⁷³ Wells had already asked it before Needham:

Why did China, having achieved so much, achieve nothing more? In this period China went out to sea and carried on considerable overseas trade. Why did China not discover America or Australia?³⁷⁴

Thinkers who examined history, like Needham and Wells, knew that across a long history there had been a long period in which Eastern civilization was superior to the West. But in the last two or three centuries, when the West has overwhelmed the East in every respect, this view of the relative standing of the civilizations had no relevance. In the end, not only in the West but in the East too, almost everyone viewed the historical fact of the spread of Eastern civilization to the West as unbelievable and gave it little meaning. Even in the late twentieth century, until the historic rise of the Eastern economies exploded into reality, this view prevailed in East and West alike.

But Wells and Needham, Westerners both, would hardly have made the favorable assessment that the East was long ahead of the West in culture lightly; nor, judging by their vast historical knowledge, could it be a made-up story. In fact, looking closely at history, this view of the East held by Wells and Needham was the prevailing view in the West before the eighteenth century. Adam Smith is one example. In The Wealth of Nations, written in 1776, Adam Smith describes China’s prosperity. He describes China as one of the richest countries in the world in the eighteenth century:

China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times. It had perhaps, even long before his time, acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire.³⁷⁵

If we accept this view of Wells, Needham and Adam Smith, we arrive at a very interesting and important historical view: that the West seriously caught up with the East and took the lead only in the last two or three centuries, that is, since the eighteenth century. We then reach the conclusion that we must not shut ourselves inside the prevailing Western view confined to the past two centuries. As prisoners of the situation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we can neither understand the past nor design the future that will unfold in the twenty-first century. We need to look back over the long history before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and examine the rise and fall of East and West.

Before the Renaissance: The Spread of Eastern Culture to the West

The civilizations of East and West developed fundamentally isolated from each other for thousands of years, until the West approached the East in earnest in the nineteenth century. The basic stages that make true civilization, writing, the use of metal, social organization, revealed religion, natural philosophy, were all developed by East and West separately in isolation, not through close mutual influence or brought in from outside.³⁷⁶ Only a thin silk road, the Silk Road, joined the two civilizations. Any cultural element passed between East and West had to follow this extremely thin passage through the mountains of Central Asia, and so could not help losing all its features but the essential. The Silk Road was too thin and too long for close intellectual influence between East and West.³⁷⁷

Unlike what is often imagined, the sea was as important as the land on the Silk Road. So experts hold that the term silk route, meaning a passage, is more accurate than silk road, which expresses only the land way. The Silk Route, made up of land and sea ways linking East and West, was opened in earnest in the first century BC and became the trade passage between East and West. Until Vasco da Gama opened a direct sea route between East and West joining the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean in 1497, it served for more than 1,700 years as the only passage linking East and West.

What mainly passed along the Silk Road were light, valuable goods. For thousands of years Chinese silk and spices were sold to the West, and from the West came glassware and the precious metals to buy silk, carried to China. Silk was by far the most important trade good. So the road came to be named the Silk Road. In the first century BC, as the power of Han China and of the Roman Empire grew firm and expanded in East and West, the Silk Road came into full operation.

In this period there are records in China that call the Roman Empire Daqin (大秦國). And in the literature of the Roman era there are records of Chinese silk sold to Rome in great quantities. Rome even voiced alarm at it:

The Roman Senate several times passed laws forbidding Roman citizens to wear silk, for economic and moral reasons, but they were not obeyed. Large amounts of the Roman Empire’s gold were flowing into China to import silk. Morally, silk clothes were dismissed as luxurious and immoral.³⁷⁸

Seneca, a Roman senator of the first century AD, left the following record of the “immoral side” of silk clothes:

I do not know whether silk clothes can be called clothes at all, when they neither hide the curves of the body nor preserve the dignity of the one who wears them…… Wretched flocks of maidservants toil so that the unchaste woman’s body may show through her thin silk just as it is, so that her husband has no more knowledge of his own wife’s body than any outsider or foreigner.³⁷⁹

Trade between East and West along the Silk Road was indirect trade. That is, merchants of the many countries of Central Asia and the Middle East, which lay between the West of Europe and the East of East Asia, played the go-between. The first Westerner to visit the East directly without such go-betweens, witness it and leave a record was Marco Polo. It happened in the thirteenth century. Of course Catholic priests had visited China now and then before Marco Polo and left records, but it was Marco Polo who made the East known to the West in earnest. Marco Polo, who went to the East by the Silk Road in the thirteenth century, came back on the return by the sea route of the Silk Route.

Marco Polo left what he had seen in the East in a book, The Travels of Marco Polo, at the end of the thirteenth century. His travel account became the first book to introduce Eastern civilization to Europe. It influenced many, among them Columbus, who crossed the Atlantic and discovered America in 1492. Columbus read The Travels avidly, annotating it as he went, and resolved to open a direct sea route from the West to the East and go there.

Through The Travels Marco Polo introduced the culture of the East, and among the things he described were a tolerant attitude toward many religions, the use of paper money, printing with movable type, the use of coal, and the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. Most Westerners, not only in Marco Polo’s own time but for centuries after, did not believe him. The foundations of civilization were too different, and the differences of scale too great, to be believed. How could scraps of paper be used instead of gold or silver? How could some black stone be burned as fuel? How could books, made by copying every page by hand, be mass-produced with things called type and paper? And above all, how was a human society not centered on God possible, and how could several religions coexist in one country? Harboring such doubts, they took Marco Polo for a braggart, because all this was hard to understand or imagine. But such doubts and questions were perfectly natural for Westerners still living in the Dark Ages of the medieval period.

Especially for Westerners at the end of the thirteenth century, when everything, politics, economy, population, was on a small scale, it was unbelievable that the numbers of people or things involved in some event in the East that Marco Polo reported so often ran into the millions. Considering that even at the end of the fifteenth century England’s population was about three million, for Westerners of the time a unit of a million was thought a number possible only by mobilizing several countries. So in the West they mocked Marco Polo, calling him “Il Milione,” the man of millions. It is said that on his deathbed his friends urged him, for the peace of his soul, to repent the many lies recorded in The Travels. Marco Polo sighed that he had not described even half of the wonders he had seen in the East, and closed his eyes.

For hundreds of years after, Europeans were sure The Travels was fantasy, and so made Marco Polo a byword for braggart and liar. In the West a person who said something thought absurd was called “a Marco Polo.” This went on for about three hundred years, until Westerners came directly to the East in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the direct Atlantic–Indian Ocean route that Vasco da Gama opened in 1497, and confirmed that most of what Marco Polo described in The Travels was true.³⁸⁰

The West could not understand this new face of the East because of the medieval “Dark Ages.” While the West went through nearly a thousand years of medieval Dark Ages, the East advanced again and again in its culture. These advanced goods and ideas of the East, a thousand years apart, reached the West and influenced it in two waves: first the East’s material culture, second the East’s thought. During the “Mongol peace” (Pax Mongolica), when a great empire spanning the Eurasian continent was built and all trade was vigorously promoted for about two centuries, the East’s inventions flowed into the West in earnest and greatly influenced the Western Renaissance. After that, as Eastern thought entered the West through the first direct personal contact between East and West, it deeply influenced the Western Enlightenment.

Direct contact between East and West through a direct sea route had to wait until the sixteenth century. Before that, the Silk Road had to pass through many borders under the jurisdiction of many countries. The exception was when the Mongols built an empire spanning East and West. The Mongol Empire greatly extended roads and bridges and built new ones, actively promoting free trade and cultural exchange within the empire and between East and West. It was then that the East’s inventions reached the West in earnest, thanks to the Mongol Empire building the largest empire in human history across the Eurasian continent and establishing the Mongol peace. Before that there was only a vague awareness, through the Silk Road, that an Eastern civilization existed. Humanity, with only limited means of transport and communication, lived without feeling any need for East and West to understand each other well. Until the twelfth century, travel between East and West along the Silk Road took two or three years one way.

In the period of the Mongol peace, the flow of culture was one-way traffic from East to West. The West was then just stirring to escape some thousand years of medieval darkness, so all it had to give the East was Catholicism, a religion of revelation. But by then a system of natural philosophy centered on Daoism and Confucianism was firmly established in the East, leaving no gap for the West’s revealed religion to penetrate. So Eastern culture passed one way to the West, and the Eastern culture that came then had no small influence on the beginning and development of the Western Renaissance. In his book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Professor Jack Weatherford expresses the influence of the Mongol peace on the Renaissance this way:

In the European Renaissance, European technology, warfare, clothing, commerce, food, art, literature and even music all changed under Mongol influence…… For the first time in history Europeans wore trousers and jackets instead of long robes and skirts. Instead of plucking their instruments with their fingers, they played them with the bow the Mongols used on the steppe. And art too came to be painted in new ways.³⁸¹

Only in the Renaissance did Westerners come to wear trousers, learned from the Mongols. Before that, for thousands of years, they wore long robes, as we can see in pictures of Greeks, Roman senators and medieval monks. And for thousands of years the West’s stringed instrument was the harp, plucked by hand; only in the Renaissance did they begin to play strings by drawing a bow across them. This developed into the violin and the cello.

The West, having endured a thousand years of medieval darkness, came into contact with many wondrous Eastern goods thanks to the Mongol peace. They include what we often count as China’s four great inventions: paper, gunpowder, printing and the compass. These had a great effect on Westerners who had survived the Black Death that swept the world in the fourteenth century and had come to a new view of life: the beginning of the Renaissance. Some of these goods, paper for example, had reached the West before, through the relay of merchants of the many countries of Central Asia and the Middle East. But passing through the hands of merchants of many countries with different speech and writing, customs and cultures, the essence of the technology, culture and thought, as opposed to the trade goods themselves, could only be diluted or lost. During the Mongol peace, however, vast quantities of Eastern inventions kept flowing into the West, with a decisive effect on the development and leap of Western civilization.

It is easy to guess how much the arrival of paper and printing in the West, by multiplying the number of books, contributed to bringing on the Renaissance. Even Marco Polo’s Travels was at first limited to manuscripts copied by hand. But by Columbus’s time printed copies had spread, and Columbus could read The Travels in print. And the arrival of the compass in the West decisively eased the Portuguese and Spanish voyages across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans that began in great numbers from the end of the fifteenth century. At this time, by combining the East’s cast iron with the use of gunpowder, the West succeeded in making excellent cannon, and history shows well that cannon contributed decisively to the West’s conquest of the world.

If the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries owed itself to the Eastern culture that began flowing freely into the West thanks to the Mongol peace from the fourteenth century, then in the Western Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that followed the Renaissance, direct contact made an exchange of thought between East and West possible. This time too the flow of thought went one way, Eastern thought into the West. Because the West aimed at freeing itself from the many irrational dogmas of revealed religion, the East’s system of natural philosophy, centered on nature, flowed toward the West.

The Enlightenment: The West’s Positive Assessment of Eastern Civilization

Divided by the Himalaya–Kunlun ranges, called the roof of the world, East and West spent thousands of years without influencing each other, each building a civilization with its own character. Real intellectual exchange between these civilizations, developed in mutual isolation, became possible only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It began when Western Catholic missionaries came to live in Beijing under the Ming and the Qing, by the Atlantic–Indian Ocean route that Vasco da Gama opened.

The most important figure among the Catholic priests was Matteo Ricci (1552–1610).

Matteo Ricci also has a connection with Korea. Yi Su-gwang (李睟光), who went to Beijing as an envoy of Joseon, came across Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven and other works there, and on his return the Western civilization and Christian doctrine that Ricci had introduced first became known in Joseon. After returning home, Yi Su-gwang wrote Joseon’s first encyclopedia, the Jibong yuseol (芝峰類說), in 1614 (the sixth year of King Gwanghae), and mentioned Catholicism in it. As we saw in Part 1, Chapter 4, Ricci passed Eastern thought on to Europe by translating the Analects and other works. It was then that Kong Fuzi gained the Latinized name Confucius.

What did the East then learn and feel from the West? The East showed interest in Western portrait techniques, precision machines such as clocks, and maps of the world. But in philosophy and thought, what the West could offer was revealed religion, that is, Catholicism. Yet the East had already gained a considerable awareness of Catholicism through contacts in the Tang, Song and Yuan dynasties, so it would not have been new. And we can guess that the East, which already had a system of natural philosophy corresponding to the late Enlightenment in the West, would not have found revealed religion very interesting. So in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Western Enlightenment, the current of thought ran in the direction of Eastern natural philosophy influencing the West.

Among the first Chinese to visit the West was Shen Fuzong (沈福宗), converted to Catholicism by Couplet, a Western missionary living in China.³⁸² He took the baptismal name Michael. They left Macao for Europe in 1681. Shen Fuzong visited Italy, France and England, and with Couplet visited London, Berlin and Vienna, meeting scholars and, it is known, answering questions about the Chinese language, Eastern philosophy and more. In 1684 he was received by the French king Louis XIV, attended a royal banquet, and demonstrated the use of chopsticks and the writing of Chinese characters. From 1685 to 1688 he stayed in England. During his stay he was received by the English king James II. James II took great interest in Shen Fuzong, the first Chinese to visit England, and had his portrait painted and hung in the palace.³⁸³ He left England in 1688 for Portugal and became a Jesuit priest. He is recorded as having died near Mozambique in 1691, on the way home to China.³⁸⁴

Through Matteo Ricci, Shen Fuzong and others, Western thinkers came into direct contact with Eastern culture for the first time. Western thinkers then showed a fresh, unprejudiced curiosity about Eastern thought and assessed it. In the Western Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Eastern thought directly influenced Western thought on two fronts: political ethics, centered on Confucianism, and political economy, centered on Daoism.

Western thinkers of the time, having lived through the merciless slaughter between Protestants and Catholics that the ongoing Reformation set off, were sick of the dogma and intolerance of Western religion. In these circumstances they discovered in Eastern thought a natural cosmology and ethical system founded not on God’s revelation but on the mind, and expressed astonishment and admiration, because they had met a civilization in which what they sought had already been achieved. A thinker such as Leibniz (1646–1716) represents those who, along with a positive assessment of Eastern civilization, expressed great hopes for exchange between the civilizations of East and West:

I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in China. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement so that, as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.³⁸⁵

Enlightenment thinkers of this period assessed positively how Eastern thought worked well in Eastern society in politics, economics and ethics, without any dogma, with great tolerance, and with government interference kept to a minimum. Professors Walter Demel and David Mungello published articles and books that summarize well the views of Western thinkers of this period on Eastern civilization. Demel’s view, in brief, is as follows:

To the West the Chinese appeared kind and industrious, but in the end atheists and superstitious. Yet Western philosophers saw astonishing sides in many respects: that Eastern officials were chosen solely on the basis of their individual insight and virtue, regardless of birth or wealth; that scholars were objects of special respect; that many kinds of statistics were highly developed; and above all they found it strange that China enjoyed great abundance though it did not receive God’s blessing. The West then thought of the Chinese that, however ethical, courteous and clever they might be, they knew nothing of the Bible or of Aristotle and could make no religious judgment at all. Western thinkers were very uncomfortable that China, however they examined it, did not belong within their system of thought… They found that the East had a unique cultural pattern found nowhere else in the world. They were deeply impressed that China’s emperors took a direct interest in agriculture. They urged Western monarchs to give a demonstration of sowing in spring, as the Chinese emperor did. And so Western monarchs such as Louis XV and XVI and Joseph II gave demonstrations of sowing. Voltaire held that while every other nation was steeped in superstition, China’s ruling class alone was wise and deistic. He was astonished that China had no intermediate class, like the Western aristocracy, between the supreme ruler and the people. He marveled that everyone worked, and that there was no stratum, like the aristocracy, that did not work. The Kangxi Emperor’s Edict of Tolerance of 1692, which allowed religious freedom, astonished them, and they even criticized it as excessively tolerant. Many Western thinkers thought China was run by philosophers. They were greatly heartened that a system had been sustained and developed for so long in which there were institutions for promoting officials, officials were treated generously, and taking bribes was severely punished. The Chinese monarch governed with the help of loyal and learned advisers, and they came to think this model the exemplar of the “enlightened absolute monarch” they had in mind. They came to know that ethics was the central idea of Chinese society, and that this ethics was not only a practical aim the common people strove for, even if they were not devout Christians, but an ideal goal anyone could attain.³⁸⁶

Professor Mungello too writes about the East as Europe saw it in the Enlightenment, in his book The Great Encounter of China and the West, 1500–1800 and in the article “Confucianism in the Enlightenment.” In brief:

Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers argued that China, ruled by an emperor grounded in the spiritual values of Confucianism, could be a model of enlightened monarchy for Europe. In other words, they noted that the monarch governed in consultation with a body of scholar-officials. Quesnay’s respect for Confucius was so deep that he zealously spread Confucianism in Europe, so much so that Quesnay himself was called ‘the Confucius of Europe.’ They took extraordinary interest in the fact that the Five Classics of Confucianism were regarded as the common heritage of all Easterners rather than of any particular faction. They judged that the teachings of Confucius, focused on ethics, were not only logically consistent but of great practical value. They saw Confucianism as useful for establishing an ideal political system for humanity. They were astonished and heartened above all because it was historical proof that an ethical system was possible without religion. Some Enlightenment thinkers rejected the cosmology and metaphysics of Neo-Confucianism as materialist and atheistic. Confucian thought was introduced to England in the eighteenth century, and Samuel Johnson pointed to China’s adoption of a merit-based system of scholar-officials, in contrast to the offices then bought and sold by London’s moneyed men in England… In particular he valued highly that China’s civil service examinations linked office to individual ability and intellectual achievement. So China came to be regarded as living proof of a “learned meritocracy.”³⁸⁷

This favorable interest in China appeared also in the life and architecture of the Western aristocracy, and in the development of the English garden. At the time the palaces of France at Versailles, of the Habsburgs in Vienna and of the Prussian royal house at Sanssouci had a “Chinese room,” every ornament, wall and ceiling decorated in the Chinese manner. The Rococo style of architecture and decoration fashionable in the eighteenth-century West was modeled on Chinese examples. They spread Chinese silk, Chinese porcelain and tea as refined tastes and delighted in them. Europe at the time, following French, called this trend in culture, architecture and way of life chinoiserie, meaning “in the Chinese manner.” In art too, masters influenced by the East, such as Watteau (1684–1721), appeared.

While the dynasties of the European continent took in Chinese culture in this way, in England, under Chinese influence, the so-called English garden appeared. Until the Baroque era, well-ordered gardens reflecting geometric balance and concepts, symbols of the order of revealed religion or absolute monarchy, were fashionable in the West. Under the influence of Chinese naturalism, the geometric gardens of the European continent turned into the English garden, which may look disorderly but is natural. Perhaps England, the first to shed European feudal monarchy and succeed in establishing parliamentary democracy, preferred the natural garden as an expression in garden design of the system of natural philosophy.

3) The Western Enlightenment: Enlightenment from What?

In the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the West discussed, eagerly and seriously, many questions we can hardly imagine now. Among the foremost philosophers, scientists and thinkers of the day, debates took place, with religious zeal, cool reason and at times a sense of justice, over various propositions written in the Bible. To understand the background of why Western thinkers showed great curiosity about Eastern natural philosophy and leaned toward it, let us look at a few of these interesting episodes.

The West That Believed Hell Was Really Beneath Jerusalem

Ever since Christianity stressed the importance of the afterlife, Westerners firmly believed in heaven and hell. Medieval Westerners were sure that hell lay beneath Jerusalem. When Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, he placed hell beneath Jerusalem. The existence of this hell connects directly to the Western belief in an afterlife of heaven and hell. Far more seriously than we suppose, medieval and early modern Westerners believed the Last Judgment was coming soon. So the longing to be forgiven their sins at the Last Judgment and go to heaven ruled their lives. The Church offered various tokens of forgiveness for these sins. For example, the Pope’s declaration that taking part in the crusade to recover Jerusalem would remit all sins and win heaven played a decisive part in forming the First Crusade. It led further to the Church selling indulgences. Many sought to escape their fear of the many terrible punishments of hell.

The West That Believed the Sun Went Round the Earth and Man Was the Center of the World

Joshua’s miracle of making the sun stand still in the sky (Joshua 10:12–14) was one of the cornerstones believed as truth in Western thought for more than a thousand years. Geocentrism was an unchallengeable truth. An event that stirred up great storms here took place in the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment: the “sun-centered cosmology” (heliocentrism) put forward by Copernicus (Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473–1543), Kepler (Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630), Galileo (Galileo Galilei, 1564–1642) and others on the basis of the scientific facts of astronomical observation. For under geocentrism God had stopped the sun, but by the new heliocentric theory God would have had to stop the earth’s rotation. Either God or Joshua had erred, or a serious error had arisen in the link between God and Joshua, or there was an error in the recording of the Bible; so the question was raised that there was a problem with the Bible itself. Galileo’s famous heliocentrism is well known to us. The movements of the heavens that Galileo actually observed through his telescope clearly had the sun at the center, with the earth going round it. But the papacy had to go on asserting the word of God written in the Bible. The papacy imposed geocentrism, in which the sun goes round the earth. The medieval Church upheld the hypotheses of Aristotle and Ptolemy and held that the earth was the center of the world and that the heavenly bodies, the sun and the moon among them, revolved around it, because this hypothesis fitted well with the description of creation in Genesis, in the Pentateuch of Moses. Heliocentrism shook the “earth-centered cosmology” (geocentrism) inherent in the Bible’s dogma that God had specially created the earth and human beings. So the Roman papacy could not help suppressing their observation that the earth moves around the sun. There is a story that Galileo, while acknowledging the words of the Bible to save his life, repeated his heliocentrism: “And yet it moves.”

The Belief in Noah’s Flood Challenged by the Arrival of Eastern Culture in the West

Connected with calculating the age of the earth, there was also an episode in which Eastern culture influenced a new dating of Noah’s Flood. In the eighteenth century, the Western Enlightenment, Western thinkers came to doubt the irrational sides of Christianity and attempted rational explanations of them. One of these was the effort to find when creation and the beginning of humanity took place. At the time it was still taken for granted that the date should be calculated by following the genealogy recorded in the Bible, from Adam down through Abraham. In these circumstances, as Eastern civilization entered the West through the reports and translations of the Jesuit fathers sent to Beijing, Enlightenment thinkers found in it useful material for attacking Christian dogma. The Dutch scholar Isaac Vossius (1618–1689) took great interest not in history according to the Bible but in natural history. In his book On the True Age of the World, published in 1659, he argued that Chinese culture began at least by 2900 BC, more than five hundred years before the Flood, so the biblical method of calculation was wrong. Voltaire used this argument to attack the dogma that Judeo-Christianity was the first and oldest religion.³⁸⁸ And going further, Voltaire became a thinker who recognized Eastern civilization, along with other civilizations, as human civilizations outside Christianity. He reflected this in his Philosophical Dictionary, the first case in the West of formally recognizing and discussing Chinese and other civilizations besides Christian civilization.

Disbelief in Miracles, the Core of Revealed Religion

Voltaire, who in the Enlightenment fought the many superstitions and dogmas that borrowed the name of religion, thought that a God who works miracles was something human beings made because they needed it, never something God told or commanded them: “Why should God work miracles?… To believe in miracles is foolish, and an irreverence toward God.”³⁸⁹ Voltaire saw the East’s system of natural philosophy as founded on the mind. He judged that the Eastern philosophical system had no superstition, did not believe in miracles, and had no process of anthropomorphism, and held that ancestral rites were no more than respect for dead ancestors. Voltaire thought Confucianism very successfully established an ethical and social order in human society, and that this Eastern ethics was more effective than a Christianity that relied on the West’s superstitious beliefs, cumbersome rituals and corrupt institutions: as quoted earlier, “God has no need of our sacrifices or our prayers.”³⁹⁰ On the problem facing the founder of a miracle-working religion, Voltaire wrote: “If you want great fame and wish to be the founder of a religion, it is best to be completely mad. But do not forget that your madness must ride the current of the times. Even in your madness, your mind must guide your mad words and deeds. That is, you must make your opinions plain to the point of wearying others, and not shrink from being stubborn to the extreme. So you must be ready to be hanged. But if you can escape the gallows, a shrine will be built to you.”³⁹¹ In the end, as thinkers who denied miracles multiplied, they spread, against the miracle-believing religion of revelation, the deism in which God does not intervene in human affairs.

The Movement to Find the Language Adam and Eve Spoke, and the Value Placed on Chinese Ideographs

In the Western Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside calculating the age of the earth, went efforts to find the language Adam and Eve spoke. The language Adam used in the Garden of Eden was held to be the pure language before the Fall, the language of angels. The Western effort to find “the Adamic language” came from the record in Genesis: “Out of the ground Yahweh God formed every animal of the field, and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. Whatever the man called every living creature became its name” (Genesis 2:19). They sought Adam’s language from before the Fall because Western history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was marked by conflict between Protestants and Catholics and long slaughter between the powers that rode on it, and they held the cause to lie in differences of language and concept. This thought was made firmer still by the Bible’s record of the Tower of Babel: after creation humanity lived in harmony speaking one language, but when God saw humanity grow proud and build the Tower of Babel meaning to challenge his wisdom and authority, he broke it and scattered humanity into many tribes, making them speak different languages so they could never come together again. So to heal humanity’s division, Enlightenment thinkers put great effort into finding the original language, the language of Adam and Eve. Their aim was to overcome the conflict between Protestants and Catholics and widen the realm of human understanding. They took an interest in Chinese ideographs, seeing them as closer to nature than the phonetic scripts the Western countries used, and thinking they might help find the language of Adam and Eve.

The West That Firmly Believed the Earth Was About Six Thousand Years Old

Genesis, the first book of the Pentateuch and the beginning of the Judeo-Christian Bible, opens by describing in detail God’s creation of heaven and earth. Until at least the eighteenth century most people in the West firmly believed as fact that Moses wrote it after receiving revelation directly from God. Anyone who raised objections was seen as a heretic and apostate committing a grave crime that put his life at risk. For a very long time, until the early eighteenth century, Western civilization firmly believed that God created nature and human beings over six days. The Old Testament records in detail the process and time of creation, that the first man Adam lived 930 years, and how many years each of his descendants lived (Genesis 5). The New Testament begins by recording in detail the genealogy of kings and prophets from Abraham to Jesus. On this basis, around the fourth century, when the Roman Empire proclaimed Christianity its state religion, a habit arose of seriously calculating the date of creation and reflecting it in the calendar. At first most people believed creation had taken place some five or six thousand years before. The calendar of the Byzantine Empire took as its standard that creation had occurred 5,509 years before Christ. This rested on belief in the six days of creation described in the Old Testament, together with the record in Second Peter that “with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”³⁹² The “creation six thousand years ago” was firmly believed after the Middle Ages too. Until the eighteenth century, the late Enlightenment, the idea that the universe was created around 4000 BC was accepted as fact, and an actual date was put forward: 18 March 3952 BC. Add the years since Jesus, and creation was six thousand years ago. The reformer Calvin wrote in the Institutes of the Christian Religion (Book 3, chapter 21, section 4) that “a little more than five thousand years have passed since the creation,” and Luther too spread the six-thousand-year creation, teaching in his lectures on Genesis that “we have learned from Moses that the world is not yet six thousand years old.” So too Shakespeare, who writes in his work, “The poor world is almost six thousand years old.” Many scientists kept updating the date of creation on the basis of newly discovered facts. Newton (Isaac Newton, 1642–1727), the scientist who discovered universal gravitation and, by showing that Kepler’s laws follow from it, made heliocentrism firmer still, also firmly believed in the Bible’s many dogmas, the creation included. He calculated the date of creation as written in the Bible and announced a new date: the earth was about 5,700 years old, slightly different from what had been known until then.

Westerners Who Seriously Calculated the Time of the World’s End and Christ’s Return

The theory of the world’s end came from the religious belief, recorded in the New Testament, in the Second Coming of Jesus and the Last Judgment. In the West not only medieval people but many Westerners down to the eighteenth century firmly believed, as the Bible foretold, in the end of the world and the return of Jesus. Because the Bible explained this in great detail many times over, medieval Westerners regarded it as a core element of Christian faith. Eschatology, or the doctrine of the afterlife, was actively used by the medieval papacy as an effective way to stabilize society and maintain papal authority. Pope Leo III secured the Church’s authority over all Europe thanks to Charlemagne in 800; from the crusades at the end of the eleventh century the Church granted indulgences grounded in the doctrine of the afterlife, and in time came to sell them. In the early sixteenth century, when the sale of Catholic indulgences had run rampant, Luther at last boldly rose against it in 1517, and won the support of princes resentful that the wealth of their lands was flowing to Rome through the purchase of indulgences. It was the birth of Protestantism, opposed to Catholicism, and the beginning of the cruel wars of religion between them. In the Renaissance the predicted date of the world’s end kept being pushed back. By the calculations of fifteenth-century thinkers, the end was announced for the early eighteenth century, and it was also calculated that the end would begin in the year two thousand after Jesus’s birth. The papacy last stated its position on the end at the close of the sixteenth century: it held there would be no end before 1992. After the Reformation, as royal power grew in each country, Elizabeth I of England, Henri III of France, Cardinal Richelieu and others began strictly forbidding people to mislead the public by announcing the year of the world’s end, to prevent disorder in society.³⁹³ But the end of the world, mentioned more than a hundred times in the Bible, did not easily disappear despite government bans. In the early eighteenth century Newton too calculated the time of the world’s end and wrote that the world would not end before 2060. The calculation took as its starting point the year 800, when Charlemagne unified Europe in the West and Leo III gained power as the first true pope, and counted the 1,260 days given in connection with the end in the Old Testament book of Daniel as 1,260 years, arriving at 800 + 1260 = 2060. Newton believed that “the Gospel must be read in every nation on earth before the end of the world, and that this will come to pass before the end.”³⁹⁴ In fact the end of the world was bound up with the belief in the return of Jesus, the destruction of Satan and the raising of all good people from death to their reward, so predicting its time was one of the root dogmas of Christianity that established Catholic authority. So the question was treated as a core matter by the Roman papacy, and was just as important to the reformers. Luther, with the support of local princes, fiercely denounced the many ills of the Roman Church, the sale of indulgences, its monopoly on interpreting the Bible and more, but he too firmly believed in geocentrism and in the end of the world and the return of Jesus, and believed the end was approaching ever faster. So some Western thinkers came to voice the view that Protestantism, born of the Reformation, achieved important advances, such as stopping the sale of indulgences and valuing individual faith and the right to interpret the Bible, but that in unscientific respects such as geocentrism and the end of the world it did not differ much from Catholicism.

So, along with the problem of good and evil, the existence of heaven and hell was seen by most Westerners and thinkers, even in the Enlightenment, as unshakable fact. But as the infallibility of the Bible came under challenge and belief in geocentrism, creationism, the dating of creation, Noah’s Flood, the language of Adam and so on was shaken, these dogmas, belief in the physical existence of hell included, were shaken with them. The existence of heaven and hell means it also raises questions about the theory of good and evil, sin and punishment, and the role of the Ten Commandments and the like at the foundation of Western civilization. Here the East’s Confucian ethics of natural philosophy, and the idea of wuwei (無爲, non-action) grounded in the Dao of nature, came to appeal strongly to Western thinkers.

4) Western Enlightenment Thinkers Captivated by Eastern Natural Philosophy

Far more deeply and widely than is generally thought, Eastern thought was respected by Western thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Western interest in Eastern thought went in two directions. One is the political ethics of Confucianism, through Bayle (1647–1706), Leibniz (1646–1716), Voltaire (1694–1778) and others. The other is the political economy of Daoism, through French philosophers of Physiocracy such as Quesnay (1694–1774), de Gournay (1712–1759) and Poivre (1719–1786).

Confucianism is not a revealed religion but a natural philosophy. The aim of Confucianism lies in engagement with reality through self-cultivation, that is, in political action. Self-cultivation (修身) and love of the people (愛民) are the two cores of Confucian philosophy. This Eastern natural philosophy greatly influenced the West of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which was striving to break free of revealed religion. But this fact has been largely forgotten because of the West’s tendency after the Industrial Revolution to disparage Eastern civilization. After the Industrial Revolution, Western thinkers accepted debates in the philosophy of history that treated Eastern civilization as backward. Go back to the Western Enlightenment before the Industrial Revolution, and Western thinkers showed an attitude of respect toward Eastern civilization. The representative figure is Voltaire. He praised Confucius highly as one who “gave humanity the most useful wisdom, and the only one of all humanity’s teachers who did not seek to deceive others.”³⁹⁵ In the Enlightenment they argued for deism (Deism, 理神論) in place of revealed religion. How did Eastern thought come to appeal so strongly to Western deists? Because Western thinkers came to take an interest in the relationship of human beings and nature, and in the natural philosophy grounded in it, only in the seventeenth century. But Eastern civilization had already established natural philosophy two thousand years earlier. So many Western Enlightenment thinkers sought the model of Western deism in Eastern Confucianism and Daoism.

In the background of the world Westerners lived in just before the Enlightenment, the Reformation and the wars and slaughter between Protestants and Catholics had gone on for a long time. In France there was the “St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre” of 1572, in which Catholics fell on Protestants at dawn and slaughtered them; across Europe the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) broke out between the supporters of Protestants and Catholics; and in France the Edict of Nantes of 1598, which had allowed the Protestant Huguenots to practice their faith, was revoked in 1685, reviving the bloody conflict between Protestants and Catholics. It was a time when the intolerance of religion was doing great harm to human life, so much that one may say it had reached its extreme.

Precisely in this period East and West were able to begin an exchange of thought for the first time. That is, the Dao of the East and the God of the West began contact and dialogue through the thinkers of East and West. At the time Western ethics, Protestant and Catholic alike, was thoroughly religious: ethics was seen as coming from God and religion. Eastern ethics is natural: Eastern ethics discovers in nature its unchanging principle, the Dao, and applies it to human society. So Western deists, coming upon in Confucianism an Eastern naturalist ethics in which God played no part, expressed astonishment and respect. They also lived at a time when, under the mercantilist political-economic philosophy of the day, the state’s interference in every economic activity of the individual was taken for granted. But seeing that in the East, under the Daoist idea of wuwei, the state did not interfere in individuals’ economic activity and yet the economy succeeded, they could not help expressing astonishment and respect again.

Already in the sixteenth century there was a French philosopher who took an interest in Eastern thought: the essayist Montaigne (1533–1592). Montaigne, on humanist grounds, criticized the intolerance of Western religion of his day, often using as his reference the Eastern thought that had begun to trickle into Europe. In 1687 a book on Confucianism in Latin, Confucius Sinarum Philosophus (Confucius, Philosopher of the Chinese), was published in Paris and came to be widely read among Western intellectuals.³⁹⁶ Against this background, among the French philosophers who began in earnest to introduce Eastern thought to the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Bayle and Malebranche.

Bayle (1647–1706) concentrated on criticizing and attacking not only the intolerance of religion but every metaphysical and religious claim to have discovered absolute truth. What served Bayle very well here was the East’s natural philosophy: indifferent to metaphysics, with no religious leaning at all, and founded on the proposition “the Dao that can be named is not the Dao,” that truth cannot be attained by human beings. In fact, taking up this definition of the Dao, Bayle argued that “God lies in a realm human beings cannot understand.”³⁹⁷ For this reason Bayle became the man who began publishing the Historical and Critical Dictionary, the forerunner of the French “Encyclopedists” who led the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. He went a step further than the European thinkers of his day, who thought Eastern thought deistic. He boldly argued that Eastern thought was natural philosophy, and took it as proof that humanity could build a solid ethical system without Western-style religion.

Malebranche (1638–1715) wrote a short work, Dialogue Between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and Nature of God.³⁹⁸ In it he explained the concept of God contained in Confucian thought as the same as Spinoza’s concept of God. This explanation came from the Western thinkers of the day identifying the East’s system of natural philosophy, through Zhu Xi’s theory of li and qi, with Spinoza’s view of religion. Since the East’s system of natural philosophy rests on the concept of the Dao, the core not only of Confucius’s Confucianism but of Daoism, the Dao of the East came to be identified with the God of Spinoza. In this light the dogmatic and irrational sides of the West’s revealed religion were brought into relief. In the dialogue of East and West, a philosophy at last arose in the West that for the first time understood the Eastern concept of the Dao and identified the Dao of the East with the God of the West.

While they were active in France, a philosopher also appeared in Germany who took a deep interest in Eastern civilization and compared it with Western civilization on an equal footing: Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz’s interest in China was so deep that he wrote two works on it. One is Novissima Sinica (Latest News of China), published in 1697, based on the reports and letters of the Jesuit fathers; the other is the Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, written in 1716. In it Leibniz, explaining the Chinese Book of Changes, the theory of li and qi and more, judged that the religion of the East had established “a natural religion grounded not on revelation but on the mind.” And as we saw earlier, with the vision that “humanity’s two most brilliant civilizations” lay “at the two ends of the Eurasian continent,” and that once these two civilizations began to exchange, all the other civilizations between them would together reach a high level of civilization, he actually worked to widen exchange between the civilizations of East and West.

Many philosophers before and after the Enlightenment took an interest in Eastern thought. They include Montaigne, Malebranche, Bayle, Wolff, Leibniz, Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, Quesnay and Adam Smith…. Take Christian Wolff (1679–1754) as an example. He was a disciple of Leibniz, the philosopher who led German rationalism at the time and greatly influenced Kant. Wolff studied Confucianism zealously, and showed great respect above all for Confucian ethical philosophy. In 1721 at the University of Halle he explained that Confucian ethics, set out not as religious revelation but as a natural expression of the mind, is on a par with Christian moral sense. And he argued that Confucianism holds up in the light of rationality, which shows the importance of a naturalist moral sense. This speech enraged the Protestant faithful, and in the end the Protestants succeeded in driving Wolff out of the university. In the end Wolff was expelled from Prussia.³⁹⁹

The French Jesuit historian Du Halde (1674–1743), while a professor at Paris, introduced Eastern civilization to the West by regularly editing and publishing the reports of the Jesuit fathers sent to China, over forty years from 1703 to 1743. Western Enlightenment thinkers, such as the French Encyclopedists led by Voltaire and Diderot, could obtain much information about the East from these reports.⁴⁰⁰ In 1735 he published in French a General History of China, and the book, translated into English the following year, spread across Europe and caused a great stir. In it Du Halde introduced and assessed very positively China’s history along with every side of Eastern civilization. At the same time, comparing it with Western institutions and culture, he pointed out the West’s backwardness.

When many Enlightenment thinkers pointed out and attacked the problems of Western civilization, they published a number of books that took the strengths of Eastern civilization as their argument, and European thought was captivated by Eastern thought. The features of Eastern civilization the West noticed then were a deistic cosmology; an ethical system of government in which the emperor ruled after hearing the views of his advisers around him; civil service examinations that chose officials not by family background but by individual ability; an economic tradition of providing much infrastructure with low taxes; and the government’s non-interference in the economic activity of individuals. In particular, since the thought introduced then was that of the Chinese Confucian literati with whom the Jesuit fathers of Beijing were in contact, interest centered on Confucius. Confucius was praised as “the greatest man the world has yet produced,” and was even called “the patron saint of the Enlightenment.”⁴⁰¹ The reason is that Confucius had systematized and explained the “natural philosophy” the Western philosophers of the time were aiming at.

If we look at why the West needed the Enlightenment, that is, at what the West’s enlightenment was an enlightenment from, we can see that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Eastern civilization had in many respects already reached the West’s post-enlightenment. As we have already quoted, in the fourth century BC there was Xunzi’s philosophy, which held that “rain comes even without a rain ceremony”: “The course of Heaven has its constant laws. It does not exist for the sake of sage kings like Yao and Shun (堯舜), nor does it vanish because of tyrants like Jie and Zhou (桀紂)” (Xunzi 17:1). The West needed to break free of and be enlightened from the many dogmas and the intolerance of religion that had taken deep and wide root in Western civilization for more than two thousand years, but Eastern civilization was already free of such dogma and intolerance.

Revealed Religion, Natural Religion, Natural Philosophy

Confucianism became known in the West in the Enlightenment because the Eastern system of natural philosophy it represented appealed to Westerners surrounded by revealed religion. Natural philosophy rests on a system of thought entirely different from the West’s civilization of God, because it is based not on the words a prophet conveys but on the phenomena of nature. Against “revealed religion,” which refers to Christianity, Westerners call Confucianism a “natural religion.” But the word religion is not a familiar expression for Eastern civilization. A supernatural God, a prophet and the priestly class that represents him are the core of religion. But Eastern Confucianism and Daoism have no God, no prophet and no priestly class, and center not on God but on nature itself. The right expression for Confucianism and Daoism is not natural religion but “natural philosophy.” Natural religion is Western-centered, and a wrong name.

Eastern natural philosophy set up the relationship of human beings and nature as the concept of the Dao. Human beings meet the Dao of nature directly, without a go-between. The Dao belongs to the unmanifest, the category that cannot be expressed in human language. The West, by contrast, set up the relationship of human beings and nature through a supernatural being called God. A go-between called the prophet conveys God’s word to human beings. Then God, revealed through the prophet, belongs to the manifest, the category human beings can express. And around the prophet a thoroughgoing priestly class is established.

After the nineteenth century, as the West’s overwhelming science and technology and its institutions of democracy and the market economy flowed into the East, Western institutions and norms became the standard in thought too. Since religion played the core role in Western civilization, Western thinkers naturally assumed religion played the core role in Eastern civilization too. So instead of asking why religion came to play the central role in Western civilization, they asked what religions Eastern civilization had. Accordingly Western thinkers, seeing that the thought of Confucius, the Buddha and the immortals formed the center of Eastern civilization, regarded these as religions and gave them the names Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. And they came to explain the differences between the religions of East and West. Western religion lays down in detail not only the relationship of human beings and nature but relations among human beings. Western civilization came to have a revealed, normative ethics handed down by God, and Eastern civilization a natural, empirical ethics.

Western thinkers discovered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the Eastern civilization they met through Confucianism was grounded in nature, with no connection to God. And since Confucianism naturally used as it was the Daoist concept of the Dao, which set up the relationship of human beings and nature, they came to know that the Eastern cosmology, too, unlike the West’s, takes nature as its womb in grasping human beings and nature.⁴⁰² The idea that the universe on which Eastern natural philosophy rests has a principle different from the West’s God was a very strange concept to Western thinkers. And the idea that this principle, the Dao, neither exists for human beings nor is damaged by miracles because human beings wish it, was a very revolutionary concept for Westerners at the time. But in the East, more than two thousand years before, this concept had already been accepted as a general principle and the foundation of Eastern civilization, through the Daoist idea of the Dao and the Confucian idea of ren (仁, humaneness). For Westerners had relied on gods even in Greek and Roman times, and further had held Christianity as their state religion for almost 1,300 years or more.

The Roman emperor Constantine forbade the persecution of Christianity with the Edict of Milan in 313, and then in 380 the emperor Theodosius proclaimed Christianity the state religion of Rome. After that, the concept of God that Christianity stood for became the absolute center of human words and deeds in Western civilization. For more than a thousand years Westerners lived in a mental world in which anyone who thought even slightly differently from what was written in the Bible was branded a heretic and made a candidate for the stake.

In the Renaissance of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries this became a vast stretching awake, a movement to recover human character from the suffocating rule of religion. Western thought reached a situation in which dogma grounded in a medieval view of religion could no longer pass as it was. The West went through a period in which Renaissance humanism, the Reformation and the split of Catholic and Protestant, and deism unfolded. Then at the end of the eighteenth century the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution came to include the “Establishment Clause.” Fourteen centuries after proclaiming Christianity the state religion in the fourth century, the West changed its principle to one that no state religion may be established.

In the Western Enlightenment, questioning the dogmas of religion, examining them and putting forward new theories became the new current of Western thought. Naturally, many interesting things we can hardly imagine now happened in the West at this time. In such a period, as Eastern civilization flowed into the West, its many sides appeared to Western thinkers as rational and natural, and they expressed respect and admiration, and came to compare it with the West’s irrational and unscientific dogmas.

The West had followed a way of thinking, reflecting and living in which everything was within norms given by God’s revelation (or by human thoughts that humans claimed were God’s revelation), that is, normatively. Suppose there was another civilization on earth, and that civilization was not a normative civilization by God’s revelation but a natural or empirical civilization that observed nature and followed the principles and ethics it discovered in nature. Then that civilization would have had no need not only for the thousand years of medieval Western thought, but for the West’s process of enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This current of thought necessarily set off a movement to grasp the concept of God in Western religion through the mind rather than following the norms the Bible lays down. This is precisely the beginning of Western deism. The English word deism first appeared in print in 1682, in the preface to John Dryden’s poem Religio Laici. Its core idea is that God does not intervene in human affairs. Since before the end of the seventeenth century the West had lived under the overwhelming influence of Christianity, centered on the concept of a God who intervenes in human affairs, the philosophy deism put forward at the end of the seventeenth century was revolutionary. Before that no one had dared put forward the idea that God does not intervene in human affairs.

Deism is also expressed as a natural view of God or natural religion, holding that the creator, or God, does nothing that violates the providence of nature. And they came to think Eastern Confucianism and Daoism resembled this natural view of God, this natural religion. So in the Western Enlightenment the thought of Eastern Confucianism and Daoism appealed greatly to Western thinkers, and a good many philosophers, as far as deism was concerned, saw in Eastern thought the road Western civilization should take in the future.

In Eastern civilization a system of natural philosophy was already growing in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, two thousand years ahead of the Western Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in the West, coming to know that the ethics of deism they were aiming at was being realized in Eastern natural philosophy, were captivated by it. In particular, in relation to the state’s political-economic philosophy, they saw that “laissez-faire” had already been achieved in Eastern Daoism as the “idea of wuwei.” Naturally many Western philosophers were impressed by Eastern civilization and strove to emulate it.