The Chinese Middle Way: Between the Secular and the Religious
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Unlike the Christian dipolar idea of religious vs. secular and the differentiation between them, the traditional Chinese notion of Middle Way (中道) values the practices as well as the time-space that would be “as worldly as it is other-worldly”. Therefore, the main body of traditional Chinese culture seems neither highly secular, nor highly pious. More important in that regard, what Charles Taylor terms as the change of “the conditions of belief” had once taken place in Chinese culture as early as a thousand years ago. While the change of “the conditions of belief” in the European history resulted in, as put by Taylor, the uneasy coexistence and struggle between belief and unbelief, the Chinese change of “the conditions of belief” lead to the Chinese middle way (中道). In this article, the author shall briefly trace the changes of the conditions of belief in Chinese culture since the age of “San-jiao-lun-heng," (三教论衡, from 6th through 10th Century) and reveal the characteristic of Chinese spirituality, the Middle Way, that is in-between the secular and the religious. Then, the author argues that, in the history of the semi-colonization, Chinese culture was once dominated by the Western-informed secularity, and later this secularity culminated in a distorted and indigenized form. After the Cultural Revolution and especially after 1989, against the backdrop of global modernity and with the Western religious-secular discourse as a reference frame, Chinese culture seems to increasingly re-discover and re-appropriate its own resources in the traditional values, and thus return to the "middle way."
Abstract
Unlike the Christian dipolar idea of religious vs. secular and the differentiation between them, the traditional Chinese notion of Middle Way (中道) values the practices as well as the time-space that would be “as worldly as it is other-worldly”. Therefore, the main body of traditional Chinese culture seems neither highly secular, nor highly pious. More important in that regard, what Charles Taylor terms as the change of “the conditions of belief” had once taken place in Chinese culture as early as a thousand years ago. While the change of “the conditions of belief” in the European history resulted in, as put by Taylor, the uneasy coexistence and struggle between belief and unbelief, the Chinese change of “the conditions of belief” lead to the Chinese middle way (中道). In this article, the author shall briefly trace the changes of the conditions of belief in Chinese culture since the age of “San-jiao-lun-heng," (三教论衡, from 6th through 10th Century) and reveal the characteristic of Chinese spirituality, the Middle Way, that is in-between the secular and the religious. Then, the author argues that, in the history of the semi-colonization, Chinese culture was once dominated by the Western-informed secularity, and later this secularity culminated in a distorted and indigenized form. After the Cultural Revolution and especially after 1989, against the backdrop of global modernity and with the Western religious-secular discourse as a reference frame, Chinese culture seems to increasingly re-discover and re-appropriate its own resources in the traditional values, and thus return to the "middle way."
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