In The Geography of Thought, How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why, Richard E. Nesbitt mentions how all Western Utopias apart from those derived from the biblical ideas of the Garden of Eden and the promise of the New Jerusalem have five salient characteristics:
- there is steady, more or less linear progress towards them
- once attained, they become a permanent state
- they are reached through human effort rather than Fate or divine intervention
- they are usually egalitarian
- they are usually based on a few extreme assumptions about human nature
Utopia in the Eastern mind is very different, more attuned to reversion rather than progress.
He writes: “It is worth noting here that the ancient Hebrews were in these respects closer to the Chinese than to the Greeks. Their Utopia – the Garden of Eden – was in the past and they hoped for at most a restoration. Their notion of the nature of change was similar to that of the Chinese – they held a clear notion of the yin and yang of life.”
In the first chapter of A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, Fung Yu-Lan writes “The fact is that Chinese philosophers were accustomed to express themselves in the form of aphorisms, apothegms, or allusions and illustrations. The whole book of Lao-tzu consists of aphorisms, and most of the chapters of the Chuang-tzu are full of allusions and illustrations.”
When one considers the Old Testament Wisdom literature we can see a clear similarity here between the works of the Chinese philosophers and the Proverbs. When reading verses from Lao-tzu and Ecclesiastes in isolation, it is sometimes difficult to tell which verses belong to which writer, such is the similarity.
It seems that we can learn a lot about understanding Old Testament Jewish philosophy and writings by studying and comparing them with their Chinese counterparts.
