by Brian Griffith
The Chinese Dream of Unspoiled Nature and Uncorrupted Human Virtue
Of course China is famous for nostalgia concerning the so-called golden age, which both Confucius and Lao-tzu praised so constantly. And no doubt a lot of nostalgia for that lost age involves fantasy and wishful thinking. But fortunately there’s a growing mass of evidence about the earliest cultures, and how those traditions evolved through the course of recorded history. More fortunately yet, our learning on this subject is only partly dependant on records from the past. Because China’s civilization of the goddess is not a dead culture. It is not just an archaeological corpse to be disinterred and studied, the way we study ancient Crete.
Many Chinese archaeologists describe the cultures of pre-dynastic times (before about 2100 BCE) as “matriarchal societies”. The remains of those societies are found mainly in the Huang ho and Yangtze river valleys or along the coasts. The archaeological evidence suggests that Neolithic villages of this period were similar to the pre-militarized cultures of Europe described by Marija Gimbutas, Merlin Stone, or Riane Eisler. Many of these early villages have roughly equal-sized homes, communal baking and pottery houses, some “goddess figurines”, and a near absence of war weapons or defensive walls.There are often trenches around the villages, but these would only serve to keep animals in or out, not to deter military attack. All these material remains roughly correspond to those of Old Europe’s slightly earlier “civilization of the goddess”.
When Daoists speak of the golden age, they commonly refer to a time before emperors and armies. They recall autonomous villages, boundless forests, peace, and freedom from oppression. These images, as elaborated by Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, seem to best fit the period between about 5000 and 2000 BCE. The Daoists describe this golden age as “the time of unspoiled nature and uncorrupted human virtue”. Confucius also spoke of the golden age. But he referred to a more recent time, around 1000 BCE, when warlord princes ruled much of China. Some of them, however, still practiced the ancient virtues of servant leadership and nurturing care for the whole community. According to Confucius, these model princes attributed their virtues to examples set by far more ancient “sage emperors”, who lived between about 2800 and 2100 BCE. The Confucian and Taoist golden ages may therefore be rooted in roughly the same period, and refer to similar traditions for inspiration. They also use other phrases which have echoed through all of Chinese history—the “great harmony,” the “great togetherness.” These words represent a kind of perennial dream, which has inspired community life and popular religion in every century.
In China’s perennial golden age vision, the land is green and lush, with groves of woods and languid ponds. The people value their leisure with friends and family. Their work is unhurried, because the quality of life is more important than efficiency of production. Most people would rather cooperate than compete. The men and women generally regard each other with mutual admiration. They view the world around them as a living thing, and the plants or animals as fellow travelers on a journey of salvation. The community leaders are those who give the most, not those who have the most. Technology enables these values, or else people don’t want it. This perennial dream, in broad outline, fits the image of pre-dynastic times. An almost tangible memory of original bliss fills the background of personal and collective history. For many people, all glimpses of peace and joy come surrounded with a scent of deja-vu. We know what we love because we have tasted it before.
In China that sense of deja-vu has been unusually strong. Many other cultures seem to suppress the memory of their collective childhood. The natural emotions and intuitions of that time have been set aside as unfit for the real world. But in China, it seems as if the great mother’s love is something to carry forward, rather than be left behind. In every century, movements have risen to recapture the feel, the values, or the happiness of the golden age. These movements of religion, social renewal, or peasant protest are perhaps the most vital dimensions of Chinese history.
The values attributed to the golden age form a remarkably consistent bedrock of Chinese morality. And symbolizing those values are a galaxy of goddesses, who are queens of the most ancient feminine virtues. As in many countries, the traditional values of villagers commonly bore little resemblance to those of the central authorities. The villagers usually judged their rulers according to village standards, rather than judging themselves by what the rulers said. In an official view, the cults of the villagers often seemed unimportant. The rulers generally convinced themselves that the villagers depended on them—rather than the other way around. That is one likely reason for the seemingly low profile of goddess religion. Thomas Cleary points out another in his Immortal Sisters: Secrets of Taoist Women, where he lists a series of old sayings about the invisibility of real virtue:
“A skilled artisan leaves no traces”
“She enters the water without making a ripple”
“The skilled appear to have no abilities, the wise appear to be ignorant.”
So when a mother teaches her children, it is best done when the children believe they did everything themselves. Likewise the virtues celebrated in local goddess cults were often invisible to those who would rule, or those would glorify dominators while writing history books.
The Relevance of Golden Ages and Paradise Myths
Before going any further, we should look at an objection the modern world naturally raises to this subject. Is not all this turning to golden ages and ancient goddess realms basically a kind of regressive escapism? Does it not imply a wish for returning to humanity’s infancy? Is this not the same backward-looking fixation which long prevented China from moving boldly into the future? Of course it could be. It depends largely on what we seek, and how we seek it.
Perhaps a glance at North American religious life will give some perspective on these myths of golden ages and ancient wisdom. In modern North America, people commonly believe that their society is the best in history. Perhaps a majority would freely agree that all past societies and most foreign ones, are backward by comparison. Yet every Sunday morning, millions of these self-confident North Americans go to church, seeking to learn a better way of living. Their chosen teachers in this art of living are an assortment of poor villagers from ancient West Asia, whose words are found in the Bible. In this case, certain ancient people are deemed to have wisdom which the modern world needs. Since the usual workday attitude is that virtually all ancient learning is simply outdated, we might expect a critical stance toward this ancient wisdom as well. We might think that modern churchgoers would try to learn what is helpful and relevant from the Bible, while also noting the ways that their own society is more enlightened than biblical societies. But this is not the usual attitude in church. What we commonly have is a full reversal of normal workday assumptions. Instead of thinking that modern ways are generally superior to ancient ones, we have a reverse assumption, that the revered ancients are to teach, and modern people should conform to ancient teachings as well as they can.
With this comparison in mind, perhaps the traditional Chinese reverence for the golden age does not seem so backward. Perhaps it is just a popular folkloric memory of times past, save that in China, popular memory stretches all the way back to the goddess age. In that case, reverence for the golden age could be roughly equivalent to Europe’s new-found fascination with its own “prehistoric” civilization of the goddess.
Concerning the whole notion of “golden ages”, probably most people and communities have their own particular memories of “the golden times”. In Greece, many people feel that the golden age was roughly the 400s BCE. This was not the period of greatest military glory under Alexander, but the peak period of cultural creativity in Athens. We might expect the Italians to look back with greatest nostalgia to the Roman Empire, but this is not the most popular view. The hordes of tourists visiting Italy each year come mainly to see the arts and sites of the Renaissance. And this is probably the most valid verdict on which age or vision of Italy has been the best so far. The Dutch commonly refer to the 1500s and 1600s as their golden age. This was their time of spiritual liberation, with an explosion of practical and artistic genius. In the USA, some people feel that the conquest of the West was America’s finest hour, but this view is falling from favor. Perhaps most Americans look to their founding revolution as their greatest time of inspiration, when their guiding democratic principles were hammered out in timeless prose.
In China, the golden age is traditionally assigned to the very dawn of history. The landscape then was rich and majestic. The villagers were creative inventors, forging new ways of living for each special environment. Their leaders were independent elders and matrons, as yet unconquered by any “higher” lords. Before the Shang Dynasty (of ca. 1766–1100 BCE) rulers in China generally bore family names from their mother’s clans. The old Chinese word for “family name” (hsing or xing) is a compound of symbols for “woman” and “bear”, suggesting an early matrilineal totem-clan. Such clues to a non-patriarchal past fill China’s languages and cultures.
We may still suspect that such memories are mainly nostalgia for the good-old-days, which divert people from facing the future. We may be convinced that memory plays tricks, making the past seem better than it was. But these recollections of “the best times” are also a kind of inspiration. They tell people that they have been great in the past, and may be great again. Such memories feed an obsession with the past only if people grow convinced that their greatness is gone, and can never return. For those who have hope, the good times of the past are stepping stones towards a better future. The age of the goddess is a vision of happiness, and an image of paradise on earth. We moderns may think dreaming of paradise is a waste of time. But what future are we hoping for? In our minds we hold pictures of the world as it should be. And what are we striving towards if not those dreams? Perhaps the definition of a culture is a group of people who share a dream. The Chinese perennial vision of a restored earthly paradise is unique in form and style. But in substance is it different from the dreams of all other people?
In both the Bible and the Quran, we have accounts of an original earthly paradise. And both these accounts of the Garden of Eden have been widely believed as historic fact. We might compare this to China’s well believed legends of the golden age, but there are interesting differences. The “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 misdeeds. But the western accounts also say that the earthly paradise is lost forever. It can never be recovered, and paradise is now attainable only in another world, or beyond the grave. In China, however, perhaps most people through the centuries have believed it quite possible that the time of unspoiled nature and uncorrupted human virtue can be recovered in this world. Perhaps this is the ultimate pipe dream. Or maybe it is the greatest, bravest hope of all.
The Legend Emerges Like a Dream
After the first emperor conquered the Middle Kingdom in 221 BCE, China usually remained an empire under varying degrees of martial law. People were then ranked by their value to the rulers, and given privileges or restrictions accordingly. Women were generally regarded as existing to serve more powerful men. According to Pan Shaoping,
"…in the post-Qin [Chin] centralized autocratic society the partnership life of the male and the female … was the stuff of myths and legends, and the memory of remote antiquity was no more than a spiritual consolation in the face of reality."
So the dominators of China tried to supplant and subordinate all ancient village cultures. The villagers, however, were resilient, comparing themselves to bamboo. Their memories of a pre-military world lived on, like dreams indelibly printed inside their eyelids. Both peasants and learned people commonly idealized their vanished past. Onto the erased slate of antiquity they projected their fondest dreams. Where memory and vision combined, the legendary golden age emerged. In the chaotic decades after the fall of the Han dynasty (220 CE), Pao Chingyan claimed to clearly recall,
"In ancient times there were no Lords or officials. Men (spontaneously) dug wells for water and plowed fields for food. Man in the morning went forth to his labor (without being ordered to do so) and rested in the evening. People were free and uninhibited and at peace: they did not compete with one another, and knew neither shame nor honors. There were no paths through the mountains, and no bridges over waters, nor boats upon them .… Thus invasions and annexations were not possible, nor did soldiers gather together in large companies in order to attack one another in organized war."
Who could prove such memories false? Where did these legends come from if not inherited memory, passed on by grandparents in bed-time stories?
So the golden age became an historical memory, a living ideal, and a religious metaphor. It was the goal of psychological unity with the source of life. It was the lost tenderness between mother and child, around which the world should turn. It was a real time in the not-so-distant past, with known traditions and moral standards, by which the present age would be judged. According to popular legend, the Queen Mother of the West came to the court of Han Emperor Wu in 110 BCE to deliver her judgment against him. This emperor had launched victorious wars against the barbarians, building the might of the Chinese empire to rival Rome. He had adopted an official version of Confucianism as the state religion, in which people’s main moral obligations were to serve their social superiors. In his political and spiritual roles, Emperor Wu would be a rough equivalent to the combined figures of Roman Emperors Augustus and Constantine. And to this great figure, the goddess reportedly said,
"You were born licentious, extravagant, and violent; and you live in the midst of blood and force; no matter how many Daoists you invite here in hopes of immortality, you will only wear yourself out."
In recent times, many observers presumed that modern thought has blown away the vast cultural heritage of all previous centuries. But as the storm clouds of the Cold War parted, the land, its people, and their rich traditions remained. The communist revolution brought intensified efforts in archaeology, partly to establish China’s greatness and antiquity before the world. The scientists dug up hundreds of sites dating back to the mythical golden age. The extensive findings supported legends which the government had labeled superstitions. The discoveries, however, were probably no surprise to most Chinese people. The villagers already believed that before the age of emperors, armies, or great helmsmen, there was another kind of culture, based on another kind of power. Their folk tales and religious texts already described that pre-dynastic society in considerable detail. Now, however, many who had dismissed traditional wisdom wanted to know more. What was this “golden age” like? Why is it so fondly remembered? How has its civilization shaped China down to the present? What might it teach us?
From The Chinese Age of the Goddess, by Brian Griffith