I would like to write a couple of articles about what I know of Chinese culture. This is the first and I will start saying that in the years gone by there was almost no mental ailments amongst the Chinese people. Mental ailments were so uncommon that persons who had them were worshipped as messengers from the Divine. Compare that with India where according to a WHO study as many as one in five people will suffer from some sort of mental ailment in their lifetime.
I am suffering from a mental ailment myself and so it is not surprising that I should interest myself in what is unique amongst the Chinese. What I am writing here and in the next article is what struck me as being relevant from the point of view of a depressed person who needs guidance and support to overcome his malady.
The English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, has had a significant impact on me through his writings. I used to read him avidly in my youth. Russell went to China in his mature years in about 1920-21. He came across a culture and a people who had had no contact with European civilization for centuries. The Chinese had a unique approach to life and a different way of looking at things. According to Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy:
…there was less mechanism (in China) and a slower pace; one could sit down and reason and life would stand still while one dissected it. In that vast sea of humanity new perspectives came to our philosopher (i.e Russell); he realized that Europe is but the tentative pseudopodium of a greater continent and an older – and perhaps profounder – culture… One sees his system loosening as he writes:
I have come to realize that the white race isn’t as important as I used to think it was. If Europe and America kill themselves off in war it will not necessarily mean the destruction of the human species, nor even an end to civilization. There will still be a considerable number of Chinese left; and in many ways China is the greatest country I have ever seen. It is not only the greatest numerically and the greatest culturally, but it seems to me the greatest intellectually. I know of no other nation where there is such open-mindedness, such realism, such a willingness to face facts as they are, instead of trying to distort them into a particular pattern.
The last sentence of the above paragraph will go a long way to curing any number of mental ailments, I should think.
Another book about China and its culture that I have been privileged to read is The Importance of Living by Lin Yu Tang. This is also a book that I read when I was a teenager or perhaps in my early 20s. This book starts off in rousing fashion – the first 75 or 100 pages are as good as anything I have ever read. It distils the very essence of Chinese philosophy and at the same time relates it to the needs of the modern world. I’ll end this article with a couple of quotations from the book:
It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great. -Confucius
Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely Chang Ch’ao
I’ll end here. Hope this helps someone. Please explore this blog for more articles on Politics, Spirituality and Self Help. If you liked this article then please share it on Facebook and Twitter and feel free to post your comments or contact me. Link to contact is below.
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