Nature (philosophy) - Eastern Civilization and The Philosophical Question of Nature

Eastern Civilization and The Philosophical Question of Nature

The discussion so far above focuses upon the Western philosophical tradition, where the word "nature" has a very specific history. But despite claims mentioned above to the contrary, it is not universally accepted that Greek philosophy was the one occasion upon which the concept of nature was discovered and emphasized in this way.

In Chinese, the term "nature" may be rendered as either ziran (自然), or xing (性). The same terms appear in the philosophical literature of nations that adopted the Chinese writing such as Japan and Korea. In the early Chinese literature, nature appears in what might be called, a "pre-Socratic" sense akin to Dao (道), or "the Way", in antiquity, similar to fa (法) or "Law". Indeed, in ancient Daoism, the Way is above all, the way of nature (自然之道 ziran zhi dao). The term "Dao" is sometimes compared to the enigmatic way Heraclitus used "Logos". In older extant Chinese texts (e.g. 黃帝四經 Huangdi Sijing, or Scripture of the Yellow Emperor), Dao (as the Dao of nature) has at once a metaphysical and legal character, strongly suggesting that the source of legislation is to be found in the nature of things. While at first, the nature of things was intended as an impulse (志 zhi or 心 xin), in later Confucianism the distinction would be stressed between mind and will, or between life and the "principle" or "mind" of life (性 xing). In Mencius, for instance, life and its principle are juxtaposed in a way that later scholars establish to be mind, as a principle, independent of human will (thus, for example, the mind of nature). Confucius articulates, a question of natural principle, or the standard of interpretation of names. When Confucius seeks beyond the plane of convention or custom—when he reaches out to the roots of names—he does not find the will of gods and spirits. What he did find remains the subject of interpretation for the scholarship of thousands of years. That subject is usually called nature or the mind thereof.

The philosophical tradition of Legalism, generally may be understood as a quest for the mind of nature, and as a struggle to preserve that quest against "heretical" (邪道 xiadao) tendencies to seek nature (or the mind thereof) outside the law. Accordingly, throughout ancient China, scholarship of the period generally remained tied to political problems, or problems of legal interpretation. Metaphysical problems were understood as eminently legal problems (and vice versa), so that the interpretation or study (學 xue) of Justice or Right (義 yi) emergeed as the philosophical activity par excellence: to ask "what is Justice?", a favorite question of Confucius, is both to probe the essential (interior) nature of names, or "to know speech" (知言 zhiyan), in principle, by virtue of the constituent names.

The rise of Buddhism in ancient China, stimulated the debate on nature once again. Now nature was unequivocally regarded as the mind of all things, or as "Buddha-nature" (佛性 foxing). This was also the mind of "the Empire" (天下 tianxia), or the monarchic principle common to all nations, (hence an identification—notably in Japan—of Buddha as the essence of the Emperor). nature, regarded as utterly beyond both imagination and speech, was that which "cannot be imagined or deliberated", (不可思議 bukesiyi) In the act of being revealed universally, that which is neither externally, nor internally, accessible to the delusional sensory capabilities of one's misappropriating ego disappears. Facing of the threat of a solar eclipse, or the depths of the problem of nature, and the consequent decay of civil life into "chaos" or (亂 luan), the Chan or Zen (禪) revival of "the Buddha Way" (佛道 fodao) emerged. This emphasized the original coincidence of the Buddha mind (the metaphysical) and the everyday mind (the political). The name Buddha, refers neither to something outside the ego (我 wo), nor to ego as a self-appropriating poetic faculty. From this approach, the Buddha was understood as "original" nature, or original mind, yet "very ordinary" because Buddha is not the constitutive principle of an order beyond the civil order, or public morality. Of "this very order", not the ego's deluded physical motion or nominal forms, the ordering principle of both speech and sensory experience "gathers" common experience under a global scope with universal names declared as "direct pointers", for example, (直指 zhi) to "the moon" (月 yue) or "the original mind". The foremost task of a student of the way was thus to recover the constitutive principle of the common experience, their original mind. When understood in this way, "original mind" was thought to conform with normative public morality. Ultimately, Chan was no less a return to "piety" (孝 xiao), than it was a return to nature as the common principle of the constitution of civil life.