History of Chinese Philosophy/Chapter 2

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History of Chinese Philosophy

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Chapter 2: Pre-Philosophical Foundations — Cosmology, Divination, and the Yijing

1. Shang Cosmology and Ancestor Worship

Chinese philosophy did not emerge from a vacuum. Long before the first philosophers of the Spring and Autumn period began their debates about virtue, governance, and the nature of reality, the civilizations of the Yellow River valley had developed a rich and complex worldview that would provide the raw materials — the concepts, the questions, the imaginative frameworks — from which Chinese philosophy would be fashioned. To understand the philosophers, we must first understand the world they inherited.

The earliest Chinese civilization for which we have substantial written evidence is the Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 BCE), whose capital at Anyang in modern Henan province has yielded tens of thousands of inscribed oracle bones — turtle plastrons and ox scapulae used for divination — that constitute the earliest known Chinese writing. These inscriptions, deciphered and systematically studied since the early twentieth century, provide an invaluable window into the cosmological and religious worldview of the Shang elite.

The Shang worldview was dominated by two interconnected concerns: the power of the ancestors and the practice of divination. The Shang king served simultaneously as political ruler, military commander, and chief ritualist, and a central function of his ritual activity was to maintain proper relations with the spirits of his deceased ancestors, who were believed to exert a powerful and ongoing influence on the affairs of the living. The ancestors could send good harvests or drought, military victory or defeat, health or disease. They could be pleased by offerings and ritual propriety, or angered by neglect and improper conduct. The king's ability to communicate with the ancestors — through divination, sacrifice, and prayer — was the foundation of his political legitimacy.

The oracle bone inscriptions reveal a world populated by a hierarchy of spiritual powers. At the apex stood Di (帝) or Shangdi (上帝), the "High God" or "Lord on High," a supreme deity who controlled the forces of nature — wind, rain, thunder — and who could command the spirits of the dead. Below Di stood the royal ancestors, arranged in a genealogical hierarchy that mirrored the living court, each with specific powers and specific ritual requirements. Below the ancestors were various nature spirits associated with rivers, mountains, the earth, and the four directions. This spiritual hierarchy was not a theological abstraction but a practical reality that governed the daily activities of the Shang court: every significant action — a military campaign, a hunting expedition, a journey, a ritual performance, even the king's toothache — required divination to determine whether the spirits were favorable.

The Shang practice of divination — bu (卜), using heat-cracked oracle bones — is of special significance for the history of Chinese philosophy, because it established a pattern of thought that would persist, in transformed and sublimated forms, throughout the Chinese intellectual tradition. The diviner's question to the spirits was typically framed as a "charge" (ming 命) — a statement that the diviner wished to verify or falsify. "It will rain today." "The king should not go on a campaign against the Qiang." "The harvest will be abundant." The crack pattern on the bone was then "read" as a response from the spirits — an affirmative or negative answer to the charge. This practice presupposed a worldview in which the natural and the spiritual were not separate realms but a single, interconnected whole, in which events in the natural world were the visible manifestations of invisible spiritual forces, and in which human beings could, through proper ritual techniques, gain access to knowledge of these forces and act accordingly.

The philosophical significance of this worldview lies in its assumption of cosmic interconnection and responsiveness — the belief that the universe is not a collection of inert, mechanistically interacting particles (as in the dominant modern Western worldview) but a living, responsive whole in which every part is connected to every other and in which human action reverberates throughout the cosmos. This assumption would be refined and systematized by later thinkers, but it was never abandoned. It forms the deep structure of Chinese philosophical thought, from the cosmological speculations of the Yijing to the "correlative cosmology" of the Han dynasty to the Neo-Confucian doctrine of the unity of humanity and Heaven (tian ren he yi 天人合一).

2. The Concept of Tian (Heaven) in Early Zhou

The transition from the Shang to the Zhou dynasty (ca. 1046–256 BCE) brought with it a transformation in cosmological and religious thought that would have profound consequences for the subsequent development of Chinese philosophy. The most important of these transformations was the emergence of Tian (天, "Heaven") as the supreme cosmic and moral power, displacing or absorbing the Shang concept of Di (帝) or Shangdi (上帝).

The character tian originally referred to the sky or firmament — the vast dome overhead — and this physical meaning persists in Chinese to this day. But already in the earliest Zhou texts, Tian had acquired a range of metaphysical and moral connotations that went far beyond the physical sky. Tian was the source of moral order, the guarantor of political legitimacy, the ultimate authority to which human rulers were accountable. It was both personal — capable of "hearing," "seeing," and "responding" to human affairs — and impersonal — an immanent principle of order and regularity that governed the movements of the stars, the succession of the seasons, and the moral structure of the human world.

The ambiguity of Tian — personal god or impersonal principle, transcendent ruler or immanent order — is one of the most consequential features of early Chinese thought. Western philosophy has typically distinguished sharply between theistic and naturalistic worldviews, between a universe governed by a personal God and one governed by impersonal laws. Chinese thought, by contrast, developed a concept of ultimate reality that was both personal and impersonal, both transcendent and immanent, both moral and natural. This conceptual ambiguity was not a failure of philosophical precision but a deliberate refusal to make the kind of ontological distinctions that Western philosophy takes for granted — and it opened up a space for philosophical creativity that later thinkers would exploit in diverse and productive ways.

The early Zhou texts — particularly the speeches and declarations preserved in the Shujing (书经, Book of Documents) and the poems of the Shijing (诗经, Book of Odes) — present Tian as a moral agent who oversees human affairs and responds to human conduct. The central theological-political concept of the early Zhou was the "Mandate of Heaven" (tianming 天命), which will be discussed more fully below. But the Shijing also contains passages that express doubt and even protest against Heaven's governance — poems that ask why Heaven permits the suffering of the innocent, why the virtuous are not rewarded, and whether Heaven truly cares for human beings at all. These poems of protest and doubt represent the earliest known Chinese expressions of what Western philosophy would call the "problem of evil," and they demonstrate that the questioning spirit that characterizes philosophy was already present in the earliest strata of the Chinese literary tradition.

3. The Yijing (Book of Changes): Origins, Structure, Hexagrams

No single text has exercised a more pervasive and enduring influence on Chinese philosophical thought than the Yijing (易经, Book of Changes). At once a divination manual, a cosmological treatise, a philosophical classic, and a guide to moral and political action, the Yijing occupies a unique position in Chinese intellectual history: it is the only text that has been claimed as a foundational scripture by all three of the major Chinese intellectual traditions — Confucianism, Daoism, and Chinese Buddhism.

The origins of the Yijing are shrouded in legend. Traditional accounts attribute the invention of the eight trigrams (bagua 八卦) to the mythical sage Fuxi (伏羲), who is said to have observed the patterns of nature — the markings on the shell of a turtle, the tracks of birds and beasts, the movements of the stars — and to have distilled them into a system of symbolic representation using solid (yang 阳, ——) and broken (yin 阴, – –) lines. The doubling of the trigrams into sixty-four hexagrams (liushisi gua 六十四卦) is traditionally attributed to King Wen of Zhou (周文王, ca. 1100 BCE), while the line statements (yaoci 爻辞) attached to each hexagram are attributed to his son, the Duke of Zhou (周公, ca. 1040 BCE). Confucius himself was traditionally credited with the philosophical commentaries known as the "Ten Wings" (Shiyi 十翼), though modern scholarship has shown that these date from the Warring States and early Han periods.

Modern scholarship has established that the core text of the Yijing — the hexagram names (guaming 卦名), the hexagram statements (guaci 卦辞), and the line statements (yaoci 爻辞) — dates from the early Zhou period (ca. 1000–800 BCE) and originated as a divination manual used for consulting the milfoil (yarrow) oracle. The divination procedure involved the manipulation of yarrow stalks through a complex numerical process that generated a series of numbers, which were then converted into a hexagram — a stack of six lines, each either solid or broken. The resulting hexagram, along with its associated statements, was then interpreted as a response to the diviner's question.

The structure of the Yijing is elegant in its simplicity and profound in its implications. The two basic elements — the solid yang line and the broken yin line — can be combined into eight trigrams of three lines each, and these eight trigrams can be paired to form sixty-four hexagrams of six lines each. Each hexagram represents a specific situation or configuration of forces, and the progression from one hexagram to another represents change — the fundamental reality that the text seeks to capture and comprehend. The very name Yijing — "Classic of Change" — announces the text's central insight: that change is the fundamental nature of reality, that all situations are in a process of transformation, and that wisdom consists in understanding the patterns of change and aligning one's actions with them.

The sixty-four hexagrams form a complete system — a "periodic table" of situations, as it were — that purports to encompass all possible configurations of the fundamental cosmic forces. The first hexagram, Qian (乾, "The Creative"), consisting of six solid yang lines, represents pure creative force, the power of Heaven. The second, Kun (坤, "The Receptive"), consisting of six broken yin lines, represents pure receptive force, the power of Earth. The remaining sixty-two hexagrams represent the various combinations and permutations of these two fundamental forces, each with its own character, its own dynamics, and its own practical implications.

4. Yin-Yang and Wuxing (Five Phases) Cosmology

The concepts of yin (阴) and yang (阳) are so deeply embedded in Chinese thought that it is easy to forget that they have a history — that they were not always the abstract cosmological principles they later became, but began as concrete, physical observations about the natural world. The original meanings of yin and yang were simply "the shady side of a hill" and "the sunny side of a hill" — a distinction rooted in the experience of landscape and climate that would have been immediately intelligible to any farmer or traveler in ancient China.

From this humble origin, yin and yang gradually developed into a comprehensive cosmological framework. By the late Warring States period (4th–3rd centuries BCE), they had become the fundamental categories of Chinese cosmology — two complementary, interdependent, and ceaselessly alternating forces whose interaction produced all the phenomena of the natural and human worlds. Yang was associated with light, heat, activity, expansion, the male principle, the sun, Heaven, and the odd numbers; yin was associated with darkness, cold, passivity, contraction, the female principle, the moon, Earth, and the even numbers. But the crucial point — often misunderstood by Western interpreters — is that yin and yang were not conceived as opposing forces locked in eternal conflict (like the Zoroastrian dualism of good and evil) but as complementary aspects of a single, dynamic whole, each containing the seed of the other and each continuously transforming into the other.

The classical locus for the yin-yang cosmology is the Xici zhuan (系辞传, "Appended Statements"), one of the "Ten Wings" of the Yijing, which contains the famous declaration: "One yin and one yang — this is called the Dao" (一阴一阳之谓道). This statement, which became one of the most frequently quoted in all of Chinese philosophy, asserts that the alternation of yin and yang is not merely a physical process but the fundamental principle of reality itself — the Dao. The Dao is not a static being or a fixed entity but the dynamic process of yin-yang alternation, the ceaseless rhythm of creation and dissolution, expansion and contraction, activity and rest that underlies all phenomena.

Closely related to the yin-yang cosmology, though historically distinct in origin, is the wuxing (五行) theory — the system of "Five Phases" or "Five Agents" (often misleadingly translated as "Five Elements"). The five phases are mu (木, wood), huo (火, fire), tu (土, earth), jin (金, metal), and shui (水, water). Unlike the four elements of Greek cosmology (earth, water, air, fire), which were conceived as static substances, the Chinese "five phases" were conceived as dynamic processes or modes of activity. Wood represents the phase of growth and expansion; fire represents the phase of maximum activity and heat; earth represents the phase of stability and centering; metal represents the phase of contraction and consolidation; water represents the phase of stillness and storage. The five phases were related to each other through two cycles: a "generation" cycle (xiangsheng 相生) in which each phase gives rise to the next (wood feeds fire, fire produces earth/ash, earth yields metal, metal generates water/condensation, water nourishes wood) and a "conquest" cycle (xiangke 相克) in which each phase overcomes another (water quenches fire, fire melts metal, metal cuts wood, wood breaks earth, earth dams water).

The yin-yang and wuxing theories were systematically combined during the Han dynasty by thinkers such as Dong Zhongshu (董仲舒, ca. 179–104 BCE) into a comprehensive "correlative cosmology" that mapped the five phases onto virtually every domain of experience — the five directions (east, south, center, west, north), the five seasons (spring, summer, late summer, autumn, winter), the five colors, the five tastes, the five organs of the body, the five musical notes, the five virtues, and the five types of government. This correlative system became the dominant cosmological framework of imperial China and exercised a profound influence on Chinese medicine, astrology, geomancy (fengshui 风水), political theory, and philosophy.

5. The Concept of Dao Before Daoism

The concept of Dao (道) is so closely associated with the Daoist philosophical tradition that it is easy to forget that it was a common term in Chinese thought long before Laozi and Zhuangzi gave it its distinctive Daoist meaning. Indeed, Dao is arguably the single most important concept in all of Chinese philosophy, shared — with different emphases and interpretations — by every major school.

The character dao originally meant "way" or "path" — a road that one walks along. From this concrete meaning, it developed two closely related abstract senses that together encompass much of what Western philosophy would distribute across several different concepts. First, dao came to mean "the way things are" — the natural order, the pattern of reality, the way the world works. In this sense, it is roughly equivalent to what Western philosophy calls "nature" or "the order of being." Second, dao came to mean "the way one should act" — the correct path, the proper course of conduct, the way of living that is in harmony with the natural order. In this sense, it is roughly equivalent to what Western philosophy calls "morality" or "the good life."

The double meaning of dao — descriptive and normative, fact and value — is of immense philosophical significance. It reflects the fundamental assumption of Chinese thought that the natural order and the moral order are not separate realms (as they tend to be in modern Western philosophy, which distinguishes sharply between "is" and "ought") but two aspects of a single reality. To understand the way things are is simultaneously to understand the way one should act; to act rightly is to be in harmony with the natural order. This assumption is common to Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, though each tradition interprets it differently.

In the earliest Chinese texts — the oracle bone inscriptions and the bronze inscriptions of the Shang and early Zhou — dao appears primarily in its concrete sense of "road" or "path." In the Shijing and Shujing, it begins to take on its abstract moral and cosmological senses, referring to "the way of the former kings" (xianwang zhi dao 先王之道), the correct path of governance and moral conduct established by the sage rulers of antiquity. In the Lunyu, Confucius speaks repeatedly of "the Dao" as the proper way of human life — a Dao that has been lost in the chaotic present and that must be restored through the cultivation of virtue and the practice of ritual. For Confucius, the Dao is fundamentally a human and social concept — "the way of man" (ren dao 人道), the way of benevolent governance and moral self-cultivation.

It was the Daoist thinkers — Laozi and Zhuangzi — who gave Dao its most radical and philosophically original meaning, identifying it not with the way of human civilization but with the mysterious, ineffable ground of all reality, prior to and beyond all human distinctions and categories. But this Daoist transformation of the concept was possible only because Dao was already a central and deeply resonant term in Chinese thought, carrying with it a rich set of associations and implications that the Daoists could exploit and subvert.

6. The Ritual-Cosmic Order of the Zhou

The early Zhou period (ca. 1046–771 BCE) established the institutional and conceptual framework within which Chinese philosophy would develop. The Zhou conquest of the Shang was not merely a political event but a cosmological one: the founders of the Zhou dynasty — King Wen, King Wu, and the Duke of Zhou — presented their victory as the execution of Heaven's will, and they established a system of governance that was simultaneously political and cosmological, institutional and ritual.

The centerpiece of the Zhou political-cosmological order was the system of li (礼, "rites" or "ritual propriety"). The Zhou li was a comprehensive code of ritual behavior that governed every aspect of elite life — from the great ceremonies of state (sacrifices to Heaven and Earth, the investiture of feudal lords, diplomatic missions, military campaigns) to the minutiae of daily conduct (how to eat, how to sit, how to greet a superior, how to mourn the dead). The li was not merely a set of social conventions or arbitrary rules of etiquette; it was understood as a reflection of the cosmic order itself — the visible, enacted expression of the same principles of hierarchy, reciprocity, and harmony that governed the movements of the stars and the succession of the seasons.

The philosophical significance of the Zhou ritual order lies in its integration of the cosmic, the political, and the moral into a single, seamless system. In the Zhou worldview, the cosmos was not a morally neutral mechanism but a moral order in which hierarchy, reciprocity, and harmony were built into the very structure of reality. The ruler's role was to maintain the alignment between the human and the cosmic orders — to ensure that human society reflected the order of Heaven. When the ruler performed the rites correctly and governed virtuously, the cosmic order was maintained, and the result was peace, prosperity, and harmony. When the ruler neglected the rites or governed unjustly, the cosmic order was disrupted, and the result was natural disasters, social chaos, and political collapse.

This integration of cosmos, politics, and morality would become one of the defining features of Chinese philosophy. Confucius, the first great Chinese philosopher, can be understood as the thinker who took the inherited Zhou ritual order and transformed it from a merely traditional practice into a philosophical program — asking not just "what are the rites?" but "why do we perform them?" and "what kind of person must one become in order to perform them authentically?" The entire subsequent history of Chinese philosophy can be read as a series of attempts to answer these questions — or to challenge their presuppositions.

7. The "Mandate of Heaven" (Tianming) as Political-Philosophical Concept

The doctrine of the Tianming (天命, "Mandate of Heaven") is the single most important political-philosophical concept of early Chinese thought, and its influence extends far beyond the political sphere into the domains of ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of history.

The doctrine emerged in the context of the Zhou conquest of the Shang (ca. 1046 BCE) and served, in the first instance, as a legitimation of dynastic change. The Zhou founders faced a profound political and theological problem: how to justify the overthrow of the Shang dynasty, which had ruled for over five centuries and which, like the Zhou, claimed divine sanction for its rule. The solution they devised was audacious and philosophically revolutionary: they argued that Heaven does not permanently favor any particular lineage or dynasty but bestows its "mandate" — its authorization to rule — on whichever ruler is most virtuous. The Shang had received the Mandate of Heaven, but they had lost it through moral corruption, cruelty, and neglect of ritual propriety. Heaven had therefore withdrawn the mandate from the Shang and conferred it upon the Zhou, whose founders had demonstrated their virtue through their benevolent governance and their faithful performance of the rites.

The revolutionary implications of this doctrine can hardly be overstated. By making moral virtue, rather than hereditary right or military force, the basis of political legitimacy, the Zhou founders introduced a principle that would shape Chinese political thought for three millennia. The Mandate of Heaven implied that the ruler's authority was conditional — that it depended on his moral conduct and could be withdrawn if he failed to govern virtuously. It implied that the people had a right — indeed, a duty — to resist and overthrow an unjust ruler, since such a ruler had lost the Mandate of Heaven and was no longer a legitimate king but a mere tyrant (du fu 独夫, "lone man"). And it implied a cyclical philosophy of history in which dynasties rise and fall in a recurring pattern: a virtuous founder receives the Mandate of Heaven, establishes a new dynasty, and governs wisely; his descendants gradually lose their virtue, neglect the rites, oppress the people; Heaven sends warnings in the form of natural disasters and omens; the dynasty collapses; and a new, virtuous leader arises to begin the cycle anew.

The Mandate of Heaven was not merely a political theory but a philosophical claim about the nature of the universe. It presupposed that the cosmos is morally ordered — that there is a connection between moral virtue and political success, between human conduct and natural events, between the quality of governance and the harmony of the cosmos. This presupposition, which Western philosophy would call a form of "moral realism" — the belief that moral truths are objective features of reality, not merely human conventions or subjective preferences — is one of the deepest and most persistent features of Chinese thought. It was shared, in different forms, by Confucians, Mohists, and Legalists alike, and it was challenged — but never entirely rejected — by the Daoists.

The concept of tianming also had a personal and existential dimension that went beyond its political application. Ming (命) means not only "mandate" or "decree" but also "fate" or "destiny" — the circumstances of one's life that are determined by forces beyond one's control. Confucius himself spoke of ming in this sense, accepting with equanimity the disappointments and failures of his political career as the workings of a fate that even the wisest person cannot alter. "If the Dao prevails in the world, it is because of ming," he is reported to have said. "If the Dao does not prevail in the world, it is also because of ming" (Lunyu 14.36). The tension between human moral effort (de 德, "virtue") and the uncontrollable workings of fate (ming 命) would become one of the central problems of Chinese philosophy, explored in different ways by Confucians, Mohists, Daoists, and Buddhists.

8. Comparison with Other Ancient Cosmologies

The pre-philosophical worldview of ancient China — with its emphasis on cosmic interconnection, ancestral power, divination, and the moral order of the cosmos — invites comparison with the pre-philosophical worldviews of other ancient civilizations, particularly those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and Greece, which developed roughly contemporaneously and which gave rise to their own distinctive philosophical traditions.

The most striking parallel is with the Vedic worldview of ancient India, which also conceived of the cosmos as a living, interconnected whole governed by a moral order — rta (ऋत) in Vedic Sanskrit, a concept closely parallel to the Chinese Dao — and which also gave rise to elaborate systems of ritual practice aimed at maintaining the cosmic order. The Vedic concept of karma — the principle that one's moral actions determine one's future fate — bears a structural resemblance to the Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, in that both posit an intrinsic connection between moral conduct and cosmic outcomes. The parallels are all the more striking because there is no evidence of direct contact between the two civilizations during this early period, suggesting that certain patterns of cosmological thought may emerge independently when civilizations reach a comparable level of social complexity.

Ancient Greek cosmology offers a contrasting case. The pre-philosophical worldview of the Greeks, as reflected in the Homeric epics and the works of Hesiod, shared certain features with the Chinese worldview — particularly the belief in a plurality of divine powers who intervene in human affairs and the assumption that the cosmos is morally ordered (the Greek concept of dike, "justice," bears some resemblance to the Chinese Dao). But the Greek tradition also developed, relatively early, a conception of nature (physis) as an autonomous realm governed by its own internal principles, independent of divine will or moral purpose. This "naturalistic" turn, which is already visible in the pre-Socratic philosophers of the sixth century BCE, led to the emergence of natural philosophy (physiologia) as a distinct mode of inquiry — an inquiry into the nature of the physical world that was independent of theology and mythology. Chinese thought, by contrast, never developed a comparable concept of "nature" as an autonomous, morally neutral realm. The cosmos remained, throughout the history of Chinese philosophy, a morally and spiritually significant whole, and "natural philosophy" in the Western sense never emerged as a distinct discipline.

The cosmological worldview of ancient Mesopotamia — the civilization of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria — also bears comparison with the Chinese. Mesopotamian civilization, like the Chinese, developed elaborate systems of divination (including hepatoscopy, the reading of the livers of sacrificial animals, and astrology), and the Mesopotamian concept of divine decrees (shimtu) bears some resemblance to the Chinese tianming. But Mesopotamian cosmology was characterized by a greater degree of what might be called "cosmological pessimism" — a sense that the divine powers were arbitrary, unpredictable, and potentially hostile, and that human beings were essentially at the mercy of forces they could neither understand nor control. Chinese cosmology, by contrast, even in its earliest forms, was characterized by a fundamental confidence in the moral intelligibility of the cosmos — the conviction that the cosmic order could be known, that it was responsive to human moral effort, and that human beings could, through proper conduct and ritual practice, align themselves with it and flourish.

These comparisons are not merely exercises in academic taxonomy. They help us to identify what is distinctive about the Chinese philosophical tradition — the features that set it apart from other traditions and that give it its unique character and value. The pre-philosophical worldview of ancient China — with its emphasis on cosmic interconnection, moral order, ritual practice, and the responsiveness of the cosmos to human conduct — established the conceptual foundations upon which the great philosophers of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods would build. To understand those philosophers, we must first understand the world they inherited — and that world is the subject of this chapter.