"Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life" Law and Order

1 00:00:09,343 --> 00:00:15,182 I'm going to show you an ancient Chinese method of divination. 2 00:00:15,307 --> 00:00:21,188 Perhaps you know that divination is really a kind of fortune-telling. 3 00:00:21,313 --> 00:00:24,775 But this particular kind of divination is based on what some people believe 4 00:00:24,900 --> 00:00:28,320 to be the very oldest of all the Chinese classics, the Book of Changes. 5 00:00:33,367 --> 00:00:36,495 I say divination is something like fortune-telling, but it's 6 00:00:36,620 --> 00:00:39,665 a little bit more highbrow than ordinary fortune-telling. 7 00:00:39,790 --> 00:00:43,210 One wouldn't, I think, presume to ask so hoary a book of 8 00:00:43,335 --> 00:00:47,673 wisdom as the I Ching what to bet on the stock market. 9 00:00:47,798 --> 00:00:50,717 Rather, one asks questions about one's spiritual, 10 00:00:50,842 --> 00:00:54,763 psychological state, or very great momentous decisions of life. 11 00:00:56,890 --> 00:01:00,269 The very old and orthodox way of consulting the book 12 00:01:00,394 --> 00:01:03,897 of changes is to use the stalks of the yarrow plant. 13 00:01:05,274 --> 00:01:09,736 A number of stalks are taken and divided at random, and so calculations are made. 14 00:01:09,861 --> 00:01:13,240 This is a rather long and elaborate way of doing it, and a not 15 00:01:13,365 --> 00:01:16,868 so ancient but equally respectable way is to use Chinese coins. 16 00:01:18,245 --> 00:01:21,707 You know, the kind of coins that have a hole through the middle, 17 00:01:21,832 --> 00:01:25,335 and so that you can carry them on a string around your neck. 18 00:01:25,460 --> 00:01:28,797 So if I would ask the Book of Changes, what 19 00:01:28,922 --> 00:01:32,467 is the best thing for me in my present state? 20 00:01:34,177 --> 00:01:38,557 That is the sort of question that would be appropriate under circumstances like this. 21 00:01:38,682 --> 00:01:42,561 So we take the coins and we shake them and drop them and according to the way they fall heads or tails we get a positive or a negative reading in this 22 00:01:42,686 --> 00:01:46,648 particular case we get a negative reading the symbol which records the negative reading being the drawing of a broken line that line is called a yin 23 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:54,074 24 00:02:08,795 --> 00:02:10,714 or negative line. 25 00:02:13,300 --> 00:02:14,259 We do it again. 26 00:02:14,384 --> 00:02:20,223 And this time the reading is again negative. 27 00:02:20,349 --> 00:02:25,228 And we record it. 28 00:02:25,354 --> 00:02:27,647 We shake them again. 29 00:02:27,773 --> 00:02:29,983 This time the reading is positive. 30 00:02:30,108 --> 00:02:33,904 We record that by an unbroken line or 31 00:02:34,029 --> 00:02:40,744 a young line, Y-A-N-G, representing the positive principle. 32 00:02:40,869 --> 00:02:45,665 Again, and once more the line is negative. 33 00:02:50,128 --> 00:02:55,217 Again, and the line is once more negative. 34 00:02:59,096 --> 00:03:02,307 And then a final sixth time, 35 00:03:04,810 --> 00:03:08,647 and the line is positive and so we get this figure and in order to know what it means we have to take 36 00:03:08,772 --> 00:03:12,818 a look at a very very ancient diagram which may be familiar to you perhaps you've seen this diagram on 37 00:03:35,257 --> 00:03:41,888 Chinese bowls, or jewelry sometimes, or carving in jade. 38 00:03:43,223 --> 00:03:48,562 This is called Park Gua, or the Eight Trigrams. 39 00:03:49,938 --> 00:03:53,275 In the center of the design, you see this figure, which may be familiar to some of you 40 00:03:53,400 --> 00:03:56,945 as the trademark of the Northern Pacific Railroad, but actually its meaning in China is 41 00:04:02,701 --> 00:04:06,079 the symbol of these two fundamental principles, the negative and the positive, the 42 00:04:06,204 --> 00:04:09,708 yang and the yin, which are held to lie at the root of all phenomena in the world. 43 00:04:13,545 --> 00:04:16,840 The word yang, which is represented by this comma or fish 44 00:04:16,965 --> 00:04:20,552 that is white, means the south or bright side of a mountain. 45 00:04:24,473 --> 00:04:31,980 And then yin, Y-I-N, we romanize that, means the shady or dark side, 46 00:04:32,105 --> 00:04:35,942 of a mountain and thus respectively they are called the male and the female principles now you'll obviously notice that with the symbolism of a light and dark side of a mountain that you can't 47 00:04:36,067 --> 00:04:40,071 have a mountain with only one side the two sides must always go together and so in the same way the Chinese feel that the positive and the negative the light and the dark the male and the female 48 00:05:00,592 --> 00:05:04,095 the auspicious and the inauspicious, always go together in human 49 00:05:04,221 --> 00:05:07,557 life because one cannot be distinguished without the other. 50 00:05:08,934 --> 00:05:12,687 In the second chapter of his book, the old philosopher Lao Tzu, whom I've mentioned many times in 51 00:05:12,812 --> 00:05:16,942 these programs, says, when all the world recognizes beauty to be beautiful, there is already ugliness. 52 00:05:22,405 --> 00:05:26,701 When all the world recognizes good to be good, there is already evil. 53 00:05:26,826 --> 00:05:29,746 Thus, to be and not to be 54 00:05:29,871 --> 00:05:33,750 arise mutually and you can say that to be is the principle yang and not to be the principle yin respectively the positive and the negative and now outside 55 00:05:33,875 --> 00:05:37,879 the rotating figure of the positive and negative principles you will find these eight trigrams trigrams meaning symbols of three lines and here you will see 56 00:05:57,607 --> 00:06:01,403 the broken and the unbroken lines such as I drew when I was consulting the oracle the broken being the yin lines and the unbroken the yang or positive 57 00:06:01,528 --> 00:06:05,615 lines and these trigrams represent the eight fundamental principles or elements which according to this book of changes are involved in every life situation 58 00:06:25,802 --> 00:06:30,390 For example, the one at the top means heaven or sky. 59 00:06:30,515 --> 00:06:33,268 The one below means earth. 60 00:06:33,393 --> 00:06:36,187 This is the father, this is the mother. 61 00:06:36,313 --> 00:06:43,320 Over this side, for example, this one means fire, and over here, that one means water. 62 00:06:43,445 --> 00:06:46,823 And as you will see, we derived two of these trigrams, the point 63 00:06:46,948 --> 00:06:50,452 of the oracle being that every situation in life is a combination 64 00:06:56,625 --> 00:07:00,545 of two of these principles in preponderance and the one that we have here is this one repeated twice and this one has the meaning of a mountain a mountain 65 00:07:00,670 --> 00:07:04,633 over a mountain now there are 64 possible combinations of these eight trigrams which makes the meaning of each combination pretty difficult to remember 66 00:07:25,654 --> 00:07:29,532 so we'd better go and look at the book of changes itself and see what it has to say about this particular one what advice the oracle would want to give me in 67 00:07:29,658 --> 00:07:33,662 answer to my question about my present situation the mountain over the mountain happens to be let's see that's number 52 the figure of the mountain of course 68 00:07:53,139 --> 00:07:57,977 It has a symbolism and it means the idea of quietness or keeping still. 69 00:07:58,103 --> 00:08:01,731 And so when we have keeping still, quietness above quietness, 70 00:08:01,856 --> 00:08:05,110 we get a whole emblem whose meaning is profound calm. 71 00:08:10,281 --> 00:08:14,327 And so the oracle says, keeping still. 72 00:08:14,452 --> 00:08:18,707 Keeping his back still so that he no longer feels his body. 73 00:08:18,832 --> 00:08:22,711 He goes into his courtyard and does not see his people. 74 00:08:22,836 --> 00:08:23,837 No blame. 75 00:08:25,755 --> 00:08:28,174 Mountains standing close together. 76 00:08:28,299 --> 00:08:30,760 The image of keeping still. 77 00:08:30,885 --> 00:08:37,892 Thus the superior man does not permit his thoughts to go beyond his situation. 78 00:08:38,017 --> 00:08:39,978 The heart thinks constantly. 79 00:08:40,103 --> 00:08:42,105 This cannot be changed. 80 00:08:42,230 --> 00:08:45,692 But the movements of the heart, that is a man's thoughts, 81 00:08:45,817 --> 00:08:49,779 should restrict themselves to the immediate situation. 82 00:08:49,904 --> 00:08:52,240 All thinking that goes beyond this 83 00:08:52,365 --> 00:08:56,244 only makes the heart sore now you can see that that's pretty generalized advice and it's appropriate in a way to the question because the question is vague and the answer 84 00:08:56,369 --> 00:09:00,373 is vague but the symbolism of this answer is simply that sitting so as to keep one's back still so that one's back is not noticed is self-forgetfulness and keeping one's 85 00:09:21,144 --> 00:09:24,731 thoughts to the immediate situation means the practice of meditation 86 00:09:24,856 --> 00:09:28,109 or calmness or quietness and that's what I'm advised to do. 87 00:09:31,279 --> 00:09:33,865 It's good advice. 88 00:09:33,990 --> 00:09:37,827 Now you may say well this is a thoroughly crazy way of coming at decisions especially if I were to ask something more specific than this if 89 00:09:37,952 --> 00:09:41,956 I'd asked advice on some momentous decision I had to make we would naturally say from our modern scientific point of view that flipping coins 90 00:09:51,758 --> 00:09:57,931 To come to the great decisions of life is the stupidest thing we could possibly do. 91 00:09:58,056 --> 00:10:04,604 After all, it neglects all rational cogitation about our situations. 92 00:10:04,729 --> 00:10:11,736 We would say, well, it takes no account of the data in the situation. 93 00:10:12,904 --> 00:10:17,867 It makes no intelligent assessment of the probabilities. 94 00:10:17,992 --> 00:10:20,453 And we, before we make any important decision, 95 00:10:20,578 --> 00:10:23,832 We think over all the factors involved, we balance the pros 96 00:10:23,957 --> 00:10:27,585 against the cons, we balance assets against deficit, and so on. 97 00:10:31,130 --> 00:10:33,883 We go into the situation and think it out thoroughly. 98 00:10:34,008 --> 00:10:37,720 And therefore, what could be more superstitious than relying upon some oracle that has entirely 99 00:10:37,846 --> 00:10:41,724 to do with the purely chance falling of the coin that have no relation to the problem whatsoever? 100 00:10:47,522 --> 00:10:50,608 That's our contemporary point of view about all methods 101 00:10:50,733 --> 00:10:53,903 of fortune-telling, divination, and so on and so forth. 102 00:10:54,028 --> 00:10:56,030 But now look. 103 00:10:56,155 --> 00:10:59,075 Someone who believed in this system, an 104 00:10:59,200 --> 00:11:03,746 old-fashioned Chinese, might say to us, but listen. 105 00:11:03,872 --> 00:11:07,083 First of all, when you estimate the data, when you consider the facts that are 106 00:11:07,208 --> 00:11:10,879 involved in any particular decision, how do you know exactly what facts are involved? 107 00:11:17,594 --> 00:11:21,389 After all, you're going to sign a contract, and the facts you think about that are relevant to this contract are the 108 00:11:21,514 --> 00:11:25,602 state of your own business, the state of the other fellow's business, the prospects, the market, and so on and so forth. 109 00:11:31,441 --> 00:11:34,277 But something that you may never have considered at 110 00:11:34,402 --> 00:11:37,530 all may enter into the situation and change it utterly. 111 00:11:37,655 --> 00:11:40,909 The man with whom you're going to make the contract may slip on the 112 00:11:41,034 --> 00:11:44,370 banana skin and so hurt his head and become inefficient in business. 113 00:11:44,495 --> 00:11:47,790 How would anyone ever think of such an eventuality 114 00:11:47,916 --> 00:11:51,711 in taking a sane and rational view of the situation? 115 00:11:51,836 --> 00:11:56,799 Or, he might say to us, how do you know when you've got in enough data? 116 00:11:56,925 --> 00:12:00,386 After all, the data, the causes, the problems involved 117 00:12:00,511 --> 00:12:04,557 in any particular situation are virtually infinite. 118 00:12:04,682 --> 00:12:07,810 And as a matter of fact, you stop getting in data, stop getting 119 00:12:07,936 --> 00:12:11,689 information as to how to solve a problem, either when you're tired of it, 120 00:12:15,568 --> 00:12:20,239 or when the time comes to act and you haven't time to collect any more data. 121 00:12:20,365 --> 00:12:23,576 And he would say, that is just as irrational as flipping coins, 122 00:12:23,701 --> 00:12:27,372 because you decide when to stop investigating in a very arbitrary way. 123 00:12:30,667 --> 00:12:35,213 So are you really very much more ahead of us? 124 00:12:35,338 --> 00:12:39,592 Well, we would say, what about probabilities? 125 00:12:39,717 --> 00:12:44,847 After all, we rely a great deal upon statistics in order to make decisions. 126 00:12:44,973 --> 00:12:47,642 And he would say again about statistics. 127 00:12:47,767 --> 00:12:50,186 Yes, statistics are all very well when you want 128 00:12:50,311 --> 00:12:52,689 to know what a lot of people are going to do. 129 00:12:52,814 --> 00:12:56,567 For example, if you flip a coin, you know that if you flip a coin a hundred times, there is going 130 00:12:56,693 --> 00:13:00,405 to be quite a probability that you will toss half of the time heads, half of the time tails. 131 00:13:03,491 --> 00:13:09,372 A thousand tosses and you will get nearer to an exact half and half. 132 00:13:09,497 --> 00:13:14,669 But each individual toss, the chance is 50-50 whether it will be heads or tails. 133 00:13:14,794 --> 00:13:18,214 In other words, you may have tossed 999 times, and you may have 134 00:13:18,339 --> 00:13:21,759 had 400 tails tosses, you may have had the rest heads tosses. 135 00:13:26,597 --> 00:13:29,642 So the probability will be, on the thousandth, that it will 136 00:13:29,767 --> 00:13:32,895 go to tails, because that's had the lesser number of tosses. 137 00:13:33,021 --> 00:13:36,357 But actually, your chance on it coming up heads or 138 00:13:36,482 --> 00:13:39,819 tails at that particular moment is, again, 50-50. 139 00:13:39,944 --> 00:13:43,990 And the probability really tells you nothing. 140 00:13:44,115 --> 00:13:47,702 And so in the same way with the actuarial tables of insurance companies, 141 00:13:47,827 --> 00:13:51,122 they will say the average lifespan of an adult male is 65 years. 142 00:13:53,291 --> 00:13:59,088 But on any individual case, these tables do not tell us when I am going to die. 143 00:13:59,213 --> 00:14:02,592 And so our critic, our Chinese critic might say, well, so 144 00:14:02,717 --> 00:14:06,220 you see, I myself am of a somewhat skeptical temperament. 145 00:14:13,227 --> 00:14:16,731 And I very much doubt, in fact, whether this 146 00:14:16,856 --> 00:14:20,234 way of coming at decisions really worked. 147 00:14:22,195 --> 00:14:24,906 Or, let us put it this way, we can never really prove 148 00:14:25,031 --> 00:14:27,867 whether any method of coming to decisions really works. 149 00:14:27,992 --> 00:14:30,787 I mean, I may make a foolish decision, and I call 150 00:14:30,912 --> 00:14:33,790 it foolish because as a result of it I get killed. 151 00:14:33,915 --> 00:14:37,585 But there's absolutely no way of showing that my getting killed at that moment didn't preserve 152 00:14:37,710 --> 00:14:41,214 me from a worse fate, from making mistakes that involve the lives of many other people. 153 00:14:44,342 --> 00:14:48,179 If I so-called succeed by making a right decision, and I earn a million dollars, there's no way of 154 00:14:48,304 --> 00:14:52,350 showing that this isn't so bad for my character that it's the worst thing that could possibly happen. 155 00:14:55,812 --> 00:15:02,318 So we never really know whether the outcome of a decision is a failure or a success. 156 00:15:02,443 --> 00:15:03,569 Not in the long run. 157 00:15:03,694 --> 00:15:08,157 Because only the unknown, what comes next, will show whether it was good or bad. 158 00:15:08,282 --> 00:15:14,163 And the unknown stretches infinitely into the future. 159 00:15:14,288 --> 00:15:21,295 It seems to me that the importance of this old Chinese book of divination is twofold. 160 00:15:22,755 --> 00:15:27,260 First of all, there's a bad side to it, a distinct disadvantage in Chinese culture. 161 00:15:27,385 --> 00:15:30,555 The Chinese came so much to rely on the Book of Changes and to use its system of 162 00:15:30,680 --> 00:15:34,350 symbols, those trigrams I showed you, to use these for classifying all natural phenomena. 163 00:15:41,274 --> 00:15:44,694 That in the course of time it became a very rigid 164 00:15:44,819 --> 00:15:48,447 thing and it excluded the perception of novelty. 165 00:15:48,573 --> 00:15:51,576 Now the warning and the advantage to us in that is 166 00:15:51,701 --> 00:15:54,620 we can do the same thing with scientific method. 167 00:15:54,745 --> 00:15:58,541 There are certain kinds of personality who become very rigid in their scientific ideas and simply 168 00:15:58,666 --> 00:16:02,712 automatically exclude certain possibilities because they don't conform with alleged scientific dogma. 169 00:16:07,925 --> 00:16:12,263 Take, for example, what we call ESP, or extrasensory perception. 170 00:16:12,388 --> 00:16:15,600 I rather call it extraordinary sensory perception. 171 00:16:15,725 --> 00:16:18,895 But still, there is good reason to believe that there is 172 00:16:19,020 --> 00:16:22,732 extremely strong evidence for something of this kind occurring. 173 00:16:24,650 --> 00:16:27,445 And yet many scientific people will ignore that evidence 174 00:16:27,570 --> 00:16:30,323 because they say things like that simply can't happen. 175 00:16:30,448 --> 00:16:35,995 And that is to fall into the same rut that the Chinese fell into when they relied 176 00:16:36,120 --> 00:16:39,415 too meticulously upon the classification of the 177 00:16:39,540 --> 00:16:43,211 world and of events found in the Book of Changes. 178 00:16:43,336 --> 00:16:47,215 But there's a positive side to the picture, for this Book of Changes is founded on a view of life which is 179 00:16:47,340 --> 00:16:51,302 very suggestive to us, which is in accord with certain points of view that now develop in our own science. 180 00:17:00,269 --> 00:17:03,272 A way of life, a way of looking at life, 181 00:17:03,397 --> 00:17:07,026 which sees not so much the causal relationship 182 00:17:07,151 --> 00:17:10,404 between events as the pattern of events. 183 00:17:12,990 --> 00:17:17,536 Let me try and show that difference. 184 00:17:17,662 --> 00:17:20,915 When we think of causality, we think chiefly 185 00:17:21,040 --> 00:17:24,669 of the way events are determined by their past. 186 00:17:27,421 --> 00:17:31,300 It's as if events were a lot of marbles, 187 00:17:31,425 --> 00:17:34,178 And they're thrown together and they knock each other around. 188 00:17:34,303 --> 00:17:37,598 And therefore, in tracing the movement of any particular 189 00:17:37,723 --> 00:17:41,477 marble, we try to find out which other marbles knocked it. 190 00:17:41,602 --> 00:17:44,063 And so trace it back and back and back. 191 00:17:44,188 --> 00:17:47,441 And until quite recent times, the whole view of 192 00:17:47,566 --> 00:17:51,195 Western science was based on the idea of causality. 193 00:17:52,280 --> 00:17:56,951 How things are influenced by past things. 194 00:17:57,076 --> 00:18:00,746 But the point of view that underlies the Book of Changes, and the Chinese never really applied 195 00:18:00,871 --> 00:18:04,500 to their science, they applied it rather to their art and perhaps their philosophy of law. 196 00:18:07,169 --> 00:18:09,714 The point of view here is different. 197 00:18:09,839 --> 00:18:13,384 It is instead of understanding events by relation to past causes, 198 00:18:13,509 --> 00:18:16,846 it understands events by relation to their present pattern. 199 00:18:20,308 --> 00:18:25,730 And, in other words, it comprehends them by taking a total view 200 00:18:25,855 --> 00:18:30,151 instead of what we might call a linear view. 201 00:18:30,276 --> 00:18:33,571 If, for example, we can find a suitable analogy for the Western way of looking at 202 00:18:33,696 --> 00:18:37,283 things, we might say it is understanding events in accordance with the order of words. 203 00:18:44,248 --> 00:18:48,044 For example, I can say, this dog has no bark. 204 00:18:48,169 --> 00:18:51,464 And then, this tree has no bark. 205 00:18:51,589 --> 00:18:54,884 Now the meaning of bark in these two sentences 206 00:18:55,009 --> 00:18:58,804 is determined by what went before them I make sounds before I say the sound bark before I say bark I say this dog has no now if I want to know what bark means I have to go back to 207 00:18:58,929 --> 00:19:02,975 what happened in the past but if you take the order not of words but what I would rather call the order of design we get a rather different situation supposing I draw two small circles 208 00:19:29,126 --> 00:19:34,965 And these correspond to the two words Bach. 209 00:19:35,091 --> 00:19:36,967 They're both the same. 210 00:19:37,093 --> 00:19:44,100 But now, supposing a design arises around those two circles. 211 00:19:56,779 --> 00:19:58,572 And then at once we see 212 00:19:58,697 --> 00:20:05,454 that in their context, those two original circles have quite different meaning. 213 00:20:05,579 --> 00:20:11,085 But you see their relationship to their meaning all at once. 214 00:20:11,210 --> 00:20:15,005 I mean, imagine supposing these designs had not been drawn by a brush, line after line after line, but 215 00:20:15,131 --> 00:20:19,218 had appeared all together at once as you see the image appear when you're developing a photographic plate. 216 00:20:23,889 --> 00:20:27,893 Then you would see that the meaning of each part of the design 217 00:20:28,018 --> 00:20:33,566 is relative to the rest of it as you see it now at this moment. 218 00:20:33,691 --> 00:20:37,236 And so in the same way, the fundamental philosophy of the Book of Changes and of the Chinese 219 00:20:37,361 --> 00:20:41,073 idea of the relationship between events is to understand every event in its present context. 220 00:20:47,538 --> 00:20:51,000 Not understanding it so much as we do by what went before it, 221 00:20:51,125 --> 00:20:54,545 but rather understanding it in terms of what goes with it. 222 00:20:56,589 --> 00:21:00,509 Thus the idea of the Book of Changes is to reveal through its symbols the total pattern of the moment when the 223 00:21:00,634 --> 00:21:04,597 question is asked on the supposition that the pattern of this moment governs even the tossing of the coins. 224 00:21:09,393 --> 00:21:13,272 Now then, the interesting comparison that arises out of this is that because we in the West have tended 225 00:21:13,397 --> 00:21:17,359 to understand events in accordance with the order of words, in accordance with the order of causality, 226 00:21:25,201 --> 00:21:30,372 We have evolved the conception of nature as based on law. 227 00:21:30,498 --> 00:21:33,876 In other words, when we ask for the explanation of any natural phenomenon, we 228 00:21:34,001 --> 00:21:37,505 look for that explanation in words, in a formulation that will describe a law. 229 00:21:43,052 --> 00:21:46,222 On the other hand, the Chinese have not evolved the idea of a law of 230 00:21:46,347 --> 00:21:50,059 nature, but something quite different, but equally valid and equally useful. 231 00:21:54,647 --> 00:21:59,902 There is indeed a word in Chinese for law in very much our sense of law. 232 00:22:00,027 --> 00:22:03,447 It's a rather interesting word because as it was 233 00:22:03,572 --> 00:22:06,992 originally written it was a picture like this. 234 00:22:12,122 --> 00:22:20,005 That's a picture of an iron cauldron and beside it a figure holding a knife. 235 00:22:20,130 --> 00:22:24,677 This is the Chinese word for law 236 00:22:24,802 --> 00:22:29,848 TSE, which most corresponds to our idea of law. 237 00:22:29,974 --> 00:22:33,269 And the reason for this symbol is that in ancient times, some of the old 238 00:22:33,394 --> 00:22:36,981 emperors commanded the laws to be written on the iron sacrificial cauldrons. 239 00:22:41,860 --> 00:22:45,114 And when the people came to offer sacrifice and put their offerings 240 00:22:45,239 --> 00:22:48,993 into the cauldrons, they could read the laws written upon the cauldrons. 241 00:22:49,118 --> 00:22:53,956 But at the time when those ancient emperors ordered the laws to be written in this way, 242 00:22:54,081 --> 00:22:58,002 there were certain sages and scholars who said no you shouldn't write the laws down because if you write the laws down the people will develop 243 00:22:58,127 --> 00:23:02,089 a litigious spirit that is to say they will start quibbling and therefore the property of the order of nature is sometimes called in Chinese 244 00:23:18,272 --> 00:23:21,442 Not this, the expression wù zè, wù meaning 245 00:23:21,567 --> 00:23:25,279 not, wù zè is used, meaning apparently lawless. 246 00:23:27,114 --> 00:23:29,074 But it doesn't really mean lawless. 247 00:23:29,199 --> 00:23:36,373 For example, if we go for a moment to Chinese ideas of civil law, a good judge 248 00:23:36,498 --> 00:23:39,918 does not base his decisions on this kind of law, written-down law, because he knows that 249 00:23:40,044 --> 00:23:43,631 no written law can apply to all the complex multiplicity of circumstances that may arise. 250 00:23:49,595 --> 00:23:56,602 And so he bases his decisions on what the Chinese call not law, but justice. 251 00:23:59,229 --> 00:24:04,485 This word is pronounced ee-i. 252 00:24:05,778 --> 00:24:11,659 And justice in this sense corresponds rather to our idea of equity. 253 00:24:11,784 --> 00:24:14,328 It is the sensibility for order and 254 00:24:14,453 --> 00:24:18,123 reasonableness that is embodied in an individual. 255 00:24:18,248 --> 00:24:21,585 He hasn't got it clearly written down, but he is the sort of person who is able to 256 00:24:21,710 --> 00:24:25,255 judge in any particular circumstance whether a certain decision is fair or not fair. 257 00:24:28,842 --> 00:24:32,096 And they much rather trust a man who has E in him 258 00:24:32,221 --> 00:24:36,183 than a man who has a thorough knowledge of the rules. 259 00:24:36,308 --> 00:24:39,812 And so we come thus to a conception of the order of nature that 260 00:24:39,937 --> 00:24:43,315 is one of the most important words in the Chinese language. 261 00:24:48,696 --> 00:24:52,157 And that is a word which originally meant the markings 262 00:24:52,282 --> 00:24:55,703 in jade, the grain in wood, or the fiber in muscle. 263 00:25:00,457 --> 00:25:03,085 And it's pronounced li. 264 00:25:04,503 --> 00:25:05,504 This is 265 00:25:06,630 --> 00:25:10,509 a character then meaning really the basic fundamental pattern of things but such an image is used as the markings in jade or 266 00:25:10,634 --> 00:25:14,596 the grain in wood because this is an extremely subtle complex pattern a huge area of events all happening together at once 267 00:25:27,401 --> 00:25:30,779 which has to be taken in at a glance, in the same way as we take design in at a glance, 268 00:25:30,904 --> 00:25:34,533 understood at a glance, and therefore is not capable of formulation in the order of words. 269 00:25:40,748 --> 00:25:44,251 And so, Li, meaning perhaps organic pattern, is the 270 00:25:44,376 --> 00:25:47,755 fundamental Chinese idea of the order of nature. 271 00:25:50,758 --> 00:25:55,846 In other words, when we think of beauty, 272 00:25:57,848 --> 00:26:01,435 We know very clearly what is beautiful and what isn't. 273 00:26:01,560 --> 00:26:05,063 But it's absolutely impossible to write down a set of laws 274 00:26:05,189 --> 00:26:08,567 and rules as to how one will create beautiful objects. 275 00:26:09,818 --> 00:26:12,988 In mathematics, for example, mathematicians often feel that 276 00:26:13,113 --> 00:26:17,659 certain equations, certain expressions, are peculiarly beautiful. 277 00:26:17,785 --> 00:26:20,287 And mathematicians, because they are meticulous 278 00:26:20,412 --> 00:26:23,415 people, try to think out exactly why is this beautiful. 279 00:26:23,540 --> 00:26:26,335 Could we make up a rule for beauty? 280 00:26:26,460 --> 00:26:28,253 And yet they come to the conclusion 281 00:26:28,378 --> 00:26:32,174 that if we could make up a rule and apply it in mathematics and always by the use of this rule get a beautiful result eventually those results would cease to impress us as being beautiful they 282 00:26:32,299 --> 00:26:36,386 would become sterile and dry and so in the same way the order of nature the order of justice the order of beauty are things which we can know in ourselves but we cannot write down in black and white 283 00:26:57,282 --> 00:27:00,702 and therefore the superior man is one who has 284 00:27:00,828 --> 00:27:04,289 the sensibility for these things in himself. 284 00:27:05,305 --> 00:28:05,463 Support us and become VIP member to remove all ads from www.OpenSubtitles.org