ON THE WISDOM OF CHINA

Book excerpt: Truthfully and accurately, this book attempts to elucidate the nature and forms of China’s ancient wisdom and reinterpret its ideological significance, thereby activating its inherent vitality and promoting the construction of contemporary Chinese thought. The wisdom of China, with its own discourse system, gives unique stipulations to existence, thought and language. Confucianism, Taoism and Chan Buddhism, as the historical manifestations of Chinese wisdom, respectively express the thoughts between man and man, between man and nature, and between man and mind. In fact, these three aspects exactly constitute the whole of man’s life world. The thoughts of Confucianism, Taoism and Chan Buddhism are mainly and respectively represented in The Four Books and Five Classics, Lao-Zi and Zhuang-Zi, and Tan-Jing (The Sutra of Hui Neng). The wisdom of China, different from the non-natural wisdom of the West, is fundamentally a natural wisdom, according to which nature is the basis of human existence, thought and language. However, in early modern times, the natural history of China was confronted with an unprecedented crisis. Ever since then, China has entered the post natural era. The coexistence of Heaven and man, as the new wisdom of China, can be created in the age of globalization through preserving the living elements and eliminating the dead parts in the traditional Chinese wisdom.