by Brian Griffith.
In Chinese mythology, the legend of a lost “golden age” looms very large. The dawn of history is idealized as an original paradise, like a memory of childhood bliss. When early Daoists spoke of the Golden Age, they said it was a time of wonder, natural beauty, and real equality. With fond and likely exaggerated memory, they called it “the Great Peace,” “the Great Equality,” “the time of unspoiled nature and uncorrupted human virtue.” As Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu) explained its primitive beauties,
In that age, there were no paths over the mountains, no boats and bridges to cross rivers. The ten thousand creatures grew abundantly, each in its own sphere. Birds and animals formed herds; plants and trees shot up as they pleased. Therefore birds and animals could be led by the hand (and they did not try to run away), and one could climb to the nests of ravens and look into them (without disturbing them). Indeed, in the age of highest virtue, man had the same habitation as birds and animals and constituted a single race with the ten thousand creatures. Nothing was known of a “superior” and a “common” man. (Bauer, p. 34)
The early Daoist sages like Laozi (Lao-tzu) or Zhuangzi meant to contrast such a past with their own age of rising warlords (in the 500s to 300s BCE). Looking back in nostalgic protest, they recalled an age of autonomous villages, boundless forests, peace, and freedom. If these legends have any historical background, they would best fit the period before 2100 BCE. Confucius also spoke repeatedly of the Golden Age. He claimed that the people of that time followed natural virtues of compassion and mutual respect. As the Classic of Rites (section 9) said,
When the Great Way was practiced, the world was shared by all alike. The worthy and the able were promoted to office and men practiced good faith and lived in affection. Therefore they did not regard as parents only their own parents, or as sons only their own sons … Therefore all evil plotting was prevented and thieves and rebels did not arise, so that people could leave their outer gates unbolted. This was the age of Grand Unity. (De Bary and Chan, p. 176)
Confucius reportedly learned of that time from the records of early Zhou (Chou) dynasty princes, who lived around 1000 BCE. But according to these records, the first Zhou princes claimed to be mere students of yet wiser and more ancient “sage emperors,” who behaved as servants rather than masters of their people. The legends of these “emperors” place them prior to the Xia (Hsia) era, or sometime before 2100 BCE. It seems that both Confucian and Daoist legends of the Golden Age refer to the roughly same period. China’s Buddhists also had legends of a golden time, or a place where things remained as they were in the beginning. It’s unclear if these stories are modifications of Chinese legends, or imported from India, or both. But according to one story,
When the people of Uttarakuru bathe in one of the four miraculous rivers flowing through the country … they simply go to the banks, undress, leave their clothing on the beach, step into boats and move out onto the water. There they bathe and play in the waves for as long as they enjoy themselves. When they return to the beach, they all pick up the garments lying nearest them. … They dress and wander off without looking for their own clothes. Why? Because the people of Uttarakuru pay no attention to what does and does not belong to them. (Bauer, p. 167)
Most Daoists, Confucianists, and Buddhists, all agreed that the Golden Age had ended long ago. With the rise of military empires, the Great Equality had been destroyed. Rulers had become armed thieves rather than kindly elders. Official religion was now mainly concerned with enforcing obedience to superiors. But idealists and common people still dreamed of a return to the ancient ways. They compared their external reality with mental images of the Golden Age. These were their pictures of how life should be, which appeared like collective memories, inherited by every generation. In China’s perennial vision of the Golden Age, the land is lush and green, with hillside forests, languid ponds, and sparkling beaches. The world is a numinous, living thing. The plants and animals are fellow travelers on life’s journey. Most people would rather cooperate than compete with their neighbors. They make few distinctions of status, and feel that ambition for superiority is foolish. The community respects those who give the most—not those who possess the most, or take the most. Men and women generally regard each other with mutual admiration. They value their leisure with friends and family. Their work is unhurried, because the quality of life is more important than the scale of production. Technology either enables these values, or else people don’t want it. In this perennial dream, an almost tangible memory of original bliss fills the background of personal and collective history. Life’s glimpses of peace and joy come surrounded with a scent of deja-vu. People know what they love because they’ve tasted it before. This sense of deja-vu has been unusually strong in China.
Probably most peasant rebellions or religious movements, including the White Lotus societies, the Taiping or Boxer rebels, Sun Yat-sen’s Republicans, or Mao Zedong’s Communists, have been fired by some version of an ancient national dream called “the Great Equality.” This dream has appeared in thousands of popular legends, religious visions, festival dramas, novels, raucous peasant songs, or subversive political tracts. In the 1920s, Liu Renhang (Liu Jen-hang) wrote a book called Preliminary Studies Concerning the Great Equality of the East. In this, he classified various utopian visions animating the popular mind. There were “fantasy” paradises such as the Buddhist Pure Land, dreams of a return to Mother Nature, or mystical realizations of the great equality as a state of higher awareness. There were ideals of primitive socialism, revolutionary demands for economic justice, visions of equality for women, or notions of progress for all through sharing the fruits of technology. These dreams were variations on a theme that runs through Chinese history from the first to now. They reflect a moral common sense that seems characteristic of popular culture. Daniel Overmyer reports that from the earliest times, folk religions have shared “a common basic outlook, or ‘theology’—a belief that the living, the dead, the spirits of nature, ghosts and gods, are all connected by bonds of mutual influence and obligation, and these mutual ties form a moral universe, where respect, greed, compassion, or destruction all bring their own rewards” (p. 177).
Of course Mao’s Red Guards seemed to totally reject such superstitious traditions. But perhaps these young radicals were more traditional than they knew. They basically denounced their elders for failing to live up to their own ancient ideals of “the Great Equality.” In the past, those who defended similar dreams often claimed patronage from goddesses of antiquity, such as Lao Mu (the Old Mother), Xi Wang Mu (the Queen Mother), or Yao Chi Jinmu (the Keeper of Paradise). The values of the Golden Age were originally the values of prehistoric clan mothers. And throughout history, these were the counterculture values popular among women.
We could easily dismiss China’s legends of the Golden Age as “trivial utopianism.” But these legends have been widely believed throughout Chinese history. Mao Zedong explained it this way in 1939:
Developing along the same lines as many other nations of the world, the Chinese nation … first went through some tens of thousands of years of life in classless primitive communes. Up to now, approximately 4,000 years have passed since the collapse of the primitive communes and the transition to class society, first slave society and then feudalism. (De Bary and Chan, p. 216)
More recently, Wang Qingshu, the Secretary for the All- China Women’s Federation, said the problem was obvious: “After the decline of the matriarchal culture of ancient China, women’s status gave them no rights in public affairs” (p. 92). Both Mao and Wang believed in the legendary time of Great Equality.
Probably most people in Chinese history have recalled the age of “primitive communes” with a certain reverent nostalgia. And many believed that the legends showed an original equality between men and women. Even patriarchal authorities believed this, and criticized their ancestors for it. So, back in the 300s BCE, the philosopher Shang Yang ridiculed the ancients for giving too much respect to mothers: “During the time when heaven and earth were established and the people were produced, people knew their mothers but not their fathers” (Cai, p. 36). To his mind, nothing could be more barbaric. But most people, especially the women, took the age before patriarchy as a source of inspiration. In 1898, the feminist educator Qiu Yufang gave her own enthusiastic twist to the legend:
Prior to the period of the Three Dynasties [which started ca. 2100 BCE] … there were many rational, educated women. Women had governesses, and these governesses were female teachers. I believe that in ancient times there were also schools for girls. Later, the custom of regarding men as superior to women grew stronger as time went on, and women were not allowed to know the principles and learning of the world. (Xia, p. 7)
In teaching her girls, Qiu aimed to restore traditions of the Golden Age.
Clearly, China has been famous for nostalgia. And a lot of nostalgia involves wishful thinking. Naturally, many people have rejected reverence for the primitive past as an escapist, infantile fantasy. Back in the 300s CE, Bao Jingyan complained that in legends of the Golden Age, “men behave like children … comparable to sucklings and babes, in whom cleverness and intelligence have not yet been awakened” (Bauer, pp. 131–152). Wu Jingheng, the head of the Academia Sinica till 1953, discounted all myths of the Golden Age as gossip from foolish peasants. Countless modern nationalists have felt that China’s fixation on a supposedly golden past was just a block in the road to the future. Modern young people commonly think that the past is a nightmare they are trying to escape. And many show a certain fatalism we can probably all relate to. A factory girl in the industry boom city of Shenzhen told her English teacher,
In original society, people lived in groups. Eventually, these groups broke down into families, and now they’re breaking down again, into so many different people. Finally, it will be just one single person … If you could have some kind of perfect socialism, that would be the best. But it’s impossible. That was just a beautiful ideal. (Hessler, p. 167)
Probably all dreams of paradise are controversial, and the dreams themselves often seem to be the problem. But of course it depends on how people use them. A glance at North American religion may give some perspective on myths of an idealized past.
In modern North America, probably most people believe that their society is the best in history. By comparison, all past cultures and probably all foreign ones seem backward. Yet every Sunday morning, millions of these self-confident North Americans go to church, seeking to learn a better way to live. And their chosen teachers in this vital subject are an assortment of impoverished villagers from ancient West Asia. In this case, certain ancient people are deemed to have wisdom that the modern world both lacks and needs. And in church, we usually have a full reversal of normal workaday assumptions. Instead of believing that modern ways are superior to ancient ones, we have an assumption that certain revered ancients are to teach us, and we moderns should conform to their ways as best we can.
In both the Bible and the Quran, we have accounts of an original earthly paradise. And both these accounts of the Garden of Eden are widely believed to be historic fact. These “Western” scriptures say that our first ancestors were cast out from a garden of paradise as a punishment for their sins. In China also, the Golden Age was reportedly lost due to human failings. But the Western accounts say that the earthly paradise has been lost forever. It can never be recovered; paradise is now attainable only in another world beyond the grave. In China, however, most dreams of paradise have been set on earth. And probably most Chinese people through the centuries have believed it possible that the time of unspoiled nature and uncorrupted human virtue can be recovered in this world. This might be the ultimate pipe dream. Or it maybe it’s the greatest, bravest hope of all.
From A Galaxy of Immortal Women: The Yin Side of Chinese Civilization.
Sources:
Bauer, Wolfgang. 1976. China and the Search for Happiness. Seabury Press.
Cai Junshang. 1995. “Myth and Reality: The Projection of Gender Relations in Prehistoric China.” In The Chinese Partnership Research Group, Min Jiayin, editor. The Chalice & the Blade in Chinese Culture: Gender Relations and Social Models. China Social Sciences Publishing House.
De Bary, William Theodore, Wing-tsit Chan, Burton Watson, editors. 1960. Sources of Chinese Tradition, volume I. Columbia University Press.
Hessler, Peter. 2006. Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China. HarperCollins.
Overmyer, Daniel L. 2008. “Chinese Religious Traditions from 1900 to 2005: An Overview.” In Kam Louie, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture. Cambridge University Press.
Wang Qingshu. 2004. “The History and Current Status of Chinese Women’s Participation in Politics.” In Tao Jie, Zheng Bijan and Shirley Mow, editors. Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future. The Feminist Press.
Xia Xiaohong. 2004. “New Meanings in a Classic: Differing Interpretations of Ban Zhao and Her Admonitions for Women in the Late Qing Dynasty.” In Tao Jie, Zheng Bijan, and Shirley Mow, editors. Holding Up Half the Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present, and Future. The Feminist Press.