Andite Expansion in the Orient

79:8.1While the red man suf­fered from too much war­fare, it is not al­to­gether amiss to say that the de­vel­op­ment of state­hood among the Chi­nese was de­layed by the thor­ough­ness of their con­quest of Asia. They had a great po­ten­tial of racial sol­i­dar­ity, but it failed prop­erly to de­velop be­cause the con­tin­u­ous driv­ing stim­u­lus of the ever-pres­ent dan­ger of ex­ter­nal ag­gres­sion was lack­ing.

79:8.2With the com­ple­tion of the con­quest of east­ern Asia the an­cient mil­i­tary state grad­u­ally dis­in­te­grated—past wars were for­got­ten. Of the epic strug­gle with the red race there per­sisted only the hazy tra­di­tion of an an­cient con­test with the archer peo­ples. The Chi­nese early turned to ag­ri­cul­tural pur­suits, which con­tributed fur­ther to their pa­cific ten­den­cies, while a pop­u­la­tion well be­low the land-man ra­tio for agri­cul­ture still fur­ther con­tributed to the grow­ing peace­ful­ness of the coun­try.

79:8.3Con­scious­ness of past achieve­ments (some­what di­min­ished in the pres­ent), the con­ser­vatism of an over­whelm­ingly ag­ri­cul­tural peo­ple, and a well-de­vel­oped fam­ily life equaled the birth of an­ces­tor ven­er­a­tion, cul­mi­nat­ing in the cus­tom of so hon­or­ing the men of the past as to bor­der on wor­ship. A very sim­i­lar at­ti­tude pre­vailed among the white races in Eu­rope for some five hun­dred years fol­low­ing the dis­rup­tion of Greco-Ro­man civ­i­liza­tion.

79:8.4The be­lief in, and wor­ship of, the “One Truth” as taught by Singlang­ton never en­tirely died out; but as time passed, the search for new and higher truth be­came over­shad­owed by a grow­ing ten­dency to ven­er­ate that which was al­ready es­tab­lished. Slowly the ge­nius of the yel­low race be­came di­verted from the pur­suit of the un­known to the preser­va­tion of the known. And this is the rea­son for the stag­na­tion of what had been the world’s most rapidly pro­gress­ing civ­i­liza­tion.

79:8.5Be­tween 4000 and 500 B.C. the po­lit­i­cal re­uni­fi­ca­tion of the yel­low race was con­sum­mated, but the cul­tural union of the Yangtze and Yel­low river cen­ters had al­ready been ef­fected. This po­lit­i­cal re­uni­fi­ca­tion of the later tribal groups was not with­out con­flict, but the so­ci­etal opin­ion of war re­mained low; an­ces­tor wor­ship, in­creas­ing di­alects, and no call for mil­i­tary ac­tion for thou­sands upon thou­sands of years had ren­dered this peo­ple ul­tra­peace­ful.

79:8.6De­spite fail­ure to ful­fill the prom­ise of an early de­vel­op­ment of ad­vanced state­hood, the yel­low race did pro­gres­sively move for­ward in the re­al­iza­tion of the arts of civ­i­liza­tion, es­pe­cially in the realms of agri­cul­ture and hor­ti­cul­ture. The hy­draulic prob­lems faced by the agri­cul­tur­ists in Shensi and Ho­nan de­manded group co-op­er­a­tion for so­lu­tion. Such ir­ri­ga­tion and soil-con­ser­va­tion dif­fi­cul­ties con­tributed in no small mea­sure to the de­vel­op­ment of in­ter­de­pen­dence with the con­se­quent pro­mo­tion of peace among farm­ing groups.

79:8.7Soon de­vel­op­ments in writ­ing, to­gether with the es­tab­lish­ment of schools, con­tributed to the dis­sem­i­na­tion of knowl­edge on a pre­vi­ously un­equaled scale. But the cum­ber­some na­ture of the ideo­graphic writ­ing sys­tem placed a nu­mer­i­cal limit upon the learned classes de­spite the early ap­pear­ance of print­ing. And above all else, the pro­cess of so­cial stan­dard­iza­tion and re­li­gio-philo­sophic dogma­ti­za­tion con­tin­ued apace. The re­li­gious de­vel­op­ment of an­ces­tor ven­er­a­tion be­came fur­ther com­pli­cated by a flood of su­per­sti­tions in­volv­ing na­ture wor­ship, but lin­ger­ing ves­tiges of a real con­cept of God re­mained pre­served in the im­pe­rial wor­ship of Shang-ti.

79:8.8The great weak­ness of an­ces­tor ven­er­a­tion is that it pro­motes a back­ward-look­ing phi­los­o­phy. How­ever wise it may be to glean wis­dom from the past, it is folly to re­gard the past as the ex­clu­sive source of truth. Truth is rel­a­tive and ex­pand­ing; it lives al­ways in the pres­ent, achiev­ing new ex­pres­sion in each gen­er­a­tion of men—even in each hu­man life.

79:8.9The great strength in a ven­er­a­tion of an­ces­try is the value that such an at­ti­tude places upon the fam­ily. The amaz­ing sta­bil­ity and per­sis­tence of Chi­nese cul­ture is a con­se­quence of the paramount po­si­tion ac­corded the fam­ily, for civ­i­liza­tion is di­rectly de­pen­dent on the ef­fec­tive func­tion­ing of the fam­ily; and in China the fam­ily at­tained a so­cial im­por­tance, even a re­li­gious sig­nif­i­cance, ap­proached by few other peo­ples.

79:8.10The fil­ial de­vo­tion and fam­ily loy­alty ex­acted by the grow­ing cult of an­ces­tor wor­ship in­sured the build­ing up of su­pe­rior fam­ily re­la­tion­ships and of en­dur­ing fam­ily groups, all of which fa­cil­i­tated the fol­low­ing fac­tors in the preser­va­tion of civ­i­liza­tion:

79:8.111. Con­ser­va­tion of prop­erty and wealth.

79:8.122. Pool­ing of the ex­pe­ri­ence of more than one gen­er­a­tion.

79:8.133. Ef­fi­cient ed­u­ca­tion of chil­dren in the arts and sci­ences of the past.

79:8.144. De­vel­op­ment of a strong sense of duty, the en­hance­ment of moral­ity, and the aug­men­ta­tion of eth­i­cal sen­si­tiv­ity.

79:8.15The for­ma­tive pe­riod of Chi­nese civ­i­liza­tion, open­ing with the com­ing of the And­ites, con­tin­ues on down to the great eth­i­cal, moral, and semire­li­gious awak­en­ing of the sixth cen­tury be­fore Christ. And Chi­nese tra­di­tion pre­serves the hazy rec­ord of the evo­lu­tion­ary past; the tran­si­tion from mother- to fa­ther-fam­ily, the es­tab­lish­ment of agri­cul­ture, the de­vel­op­ment of ar­chi­tec­ture, the ini­ti­a­tion of in­dus­try—all these are suc­ces­sively nar­rated. And this story pre­sents, with greater ac­cu­racy than any other sim­i­lar ac­count, the pic­ture of the mag­nif­i­cent as­cent of a su­pe­rior peo­ple from the lev­els of bar­barism. Dur­ing this time they passed from a prim­i­tive ag­ri­cul­tural so­ci­ety to a higher so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion em­brac­ing cities, man­u­fac­ture, met­al­work­ing, com­mer­cial ex­change, gov­ern­ment, writ­ing, math­e­mat­ics, art, sci­ence, and print­ing.

79:8.16And so the an­cient civ­i­liza­tion of the yel­low race has per­sisted down through the cen­turies. It is al­most forty thou­sand years since the first im­por­tant ad­vances were made in Chi­nese cul­ture, and though there have been many ret­ro­gres­sions, the civ­i­liza­tion of the sons of Han comes the near­est of all to pre­sent­ing an un­bro­ken pic­ture of con­tin­ual pro­gres­sion right on down to the times of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. The me­chan­i­cal and re­li­gious de­vel­op­ments of the white races have been of a high or­der, but they have never ex­celled the Chi­nese in fam­ily loy­alty, group ethics, or per­sonal moral­ity.

79:8.17This an­cient cul­ture has con­tributed much to hu­man hap­pi­ness; mil­lions of hu­man be­ings have lived and died, blessed by its achieve­ments. For cen­turies this great civ­i­liza­tion has rested upon the lau­rels of the past, but it is even now reawak­en­ing to en­vi­sion anew the tran­scen­dent goals of mor­tal ex­is­tence, once again to take up the un­remit­ting strug­gle for never-end­ing prog­ress.

79:8.18[Pre­sented by an Arch­an­gel of Neb­a­don.]