107

In this postmodern age, anyone seeing a title like Chinese Values and Western Values: Clash, Coexistence, or Consensus? should have the knee-jerk reflex to ask back: Which Chinese? Which Western? The Chinese of the Communist Party under Xi Jinping? Of Mao Zedong in Yanan? Of the Manchu Qing or the Mongol Yuan? The West of Adolf Hit-ler, Woodrow Wilson, or Pope Francis? As a Sinologist, I have witnessed many of these usually self-serving, holier than thou debates: Why did the Chinese not develop science? Is there such a thing as civil society in China? Is rule of law conceivable in China, or only by law?

This kind of self-serving goes both ways: over much of the last 150 years, in the face of Western power, China has constantly sought to psy-chologically overcome technological inferiority with a pretense to moral superiority. But China has just as constantly sought to learn from the West, and millions of students have gone abroad to study, as pilgrims once went to India to learn Buddhism. If I refer to Buddhism here, it is because, next to Western learning, it represents the other most important example of a cultural invasion of China. Some students of the Buddhist invasion have called it a conquest; others prefer to shift emphasis to Chinese agency, that is, how the Chinese took Indian (or Central Asian) Bud-dhism and turned it into something quite thoroughly Chinese (as today with Christianity).

To me personally, these quarrels strike me as a senseless waste of time: from a historical point of view, both scenarios are quite obviously true, and it is therefore of equal importance and interest to explore them both. That is, what did Buddhism bring that China proved to need or

John Lagerwey

How Universal Are Human Values?

Telos 171 (Summer 2015): 10711doi:10.3817/0615171107www.telospress.com

108 JOHN LAGERWEY

desire, and what did Buddhism bring that China rejected or ignored? As the same questions may be asked about Western influence today, it may be worthwhile trying to answer them for a distant, now less controversial past. Asking what China needed or desired that Buddhism supplied comes down to asking what it borrowed. The list could go on for many, many pages, both as regards material and spiritual culture. Here is one list that concerns only Chinese religious history:

Although we have also underscored the Buddhist conquest of China, it may be useful to summarize the multiple forms and elements of this conquest: karma and retribution, heaven and hell, gods, scriptures, statues, relics, monasticism, confession, vegetarianism, merit transfer, processions, religious entertainment, preaching, singing, meditation, devotional societies, festival days, miracle tales, regular public worship, and a parallel economy. In some casesretribution, heaven and hell, scriptures, confession, vegetarianism, even merit transferBuddhism had good native foundations to build on. But even in those cases, so rich and far-reaching is the Buddhist impact that we do best to think of Bud-dhism as something that happened to China: it steamrollered China, and when China stood up again, it was a radically different place.1

A similarly long list of what China rejected or ignored could be drawn up, but I will focus attention on a single, crucial item: in India, Buddhisms birthplace, the Brahman or priestly caste was superior to the Kshatriya or warrior class, and rulers belonged to the latter. A similar contrast between political and religious power may be found in the West, as is apparent in Christs famous advice to render unto Caesar what is Caesars and unto God what is Gods. In China, Buddhisms adoption by many members of the elite led to a great debate as to whether monks should bow down before the Emperor. This was the result:

While the monks and their defenders won this critical debate in the south-ern dynasties, it was the solution of Faguo (fl. 396409) in the north that was in most obvious continuity with the basic principle: the Emperor Daowu, he said, was the living Tathgata [Thus-come-one].2

The basic principle is the Han Confucian construction of the emperor as Son of Heaven, who affirmed this divine sonship in regular sacrifices

1. John Lagerwey, Introduction, in Early Chinese Religion II: The Period of Divi-sion (220589 AD), ed. John Lagerwey and L Pengzhi (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 46.

2. Ibid., p. 6.

HOW UNIVERSAL ARE HUMAN VALUES? 109

to Heaven begun in the year 25 CE and continued right down to the year 1914. That is, this sacrifice defined what it meant to be emperor in China:

In the north, understanding the emperor as the buddha of the present age was in strict conformity with the Han Confucian vision of the Son of Heaven. As Li Gang says, never did or could the Confucian state accept the idea that spiritual power was outside the purview of political power, let alone superior to it. Reuniting China politically led immediately to the reassertion of dynastic control of religioncontrol which should not be referred to as civil because Chinese state religion was not civil religion: it was just plain religion.3

As I have tried to show at length elsewhere, this meant, concretely, that there was no churchstate division in Chinese history, because the state was the church.4 The relevance of this short detour via cultural history to understanding todays party-state should be immediately obvious.

What, in the West, attracted China from the mid-nineteenth century on? Three things: a strong nation-state, science, and democracy. These were the things the Chinese felt they lacked, and therefore desired. It may seem, looking back, that they clearly desired the first two more than the last, but even that is not self-evident: in 1940, Mao wrote On New Democracy, and if he continues to enjoy a real degree of prestige in China in spite of all we now know of the millions of deaths caused by his disas-trous choices, it is most certainly because many Chinese people still feel that he not only made China once again a respected nation but also that he put the Chinese people in power in a way they had never been before. In the 1960s, moreover, when many members of Western elites believed that political without social and economic democracy was not democracy, both Maoist China and Soviet Russia still represented to not a few Westerners an illustration of what the West itself lacked of democracy.

All of this changed with the discovery of the truth about Mao the Son-of-Heaven and, of course, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But was this the triumph of liberal democracy over dictatorship or of advanced over state capitalism? As reform and opening took off and China grew ever richer, and when Jiang Zemin then admitted capitalists into the party, the answers seemed clear. But then in 2008 Wall Street nearly collapsed, and in the intervening seven years, even among Western elites, concern never stopped growing about the widening gap between rich and poor,

3. Ibid., p. 47.4. John Lagerwey, China: A Religious State (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2010).

110 JOHN LAGERWEY

and the seemingly inevitable shrinking of the middle class that we had all learned to think of as the defining feature of our Western democracies.

These concerns, surely, are not unrelated to what we mean when we speak of Western values. Indeed, among members of the left in the West, the sense that Xi Jinping represents a return to Maoist dictatorship has a very strong parallel in the sense that the Republican Party represents a return to social Darwinism. That is, there is a strong sense that what we see today in both China and the West, starting with the United States in its present historical phase, equally represent repudiations of democratic values.

This, then, brings us back to the original question: are there Chinese and Western values? My answer is a vigorous and resounding NO! There are only human values, and human beings everywhere, with many notable exceptions to be sure, aspire to the same things, among them those so eloquently expressed by the American Founding Fathers:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Govern-ment, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolish-ing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Yes, this is a historical document with many peculiarly eighteenth-century cultural imprints. And, yes, the triad of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness may be usefully compared with the French Revolutions invo-cation of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Exploring them comparatively would lead immediately to comparisons of Locke and Descartes and, I sus-pect, of the Catholic and Protestant biases of these two eighteenth-century

HOW UNIVERSAL ARE HUMAN VALUES? 111

revolutionary societies. That is, it is not difficult to illustrate that the French system of universal health care has deep roots in the history of Catholi-cism, as the American struggle even today to implement such a system has equally deep roots in the Protestant Reformation. So are we now still talking about Western values or, as the citizens of both of these countries continue to take for granted, are these eighteenth-century revolutionary definitions still of universal relevance?

I personally believe that human rights are universal. I believe, more-over, that it can be demonstrated that the emergence of people powerof democracyis a long-term trend whose roots may be traced back over millennia. Is that not what we are saying when we evoke the beginnings of the rule of law with Hammurabi, or celebrate the promulgation of the Magna Carta? Chinese history, likewise, has its own deep democratic roots. They go back to Mencius, who explained that the Heavenly Man-date would always go to the sovereign who took best care of his people. They go back to Buddhism, which, in insisting that all people, male and female, had the heart of a buddha and could therefore become buddhas, introduced a notion of radical equality. The Neo-Confucianism to which contemporary Chinese leaders are once again referring is in fact pro-foundly influenced by this Buddhist egalitarianism, saying that all people have the heart of a sage and hence the potential of becoming one. So is this Neo-Confucianism Chinese?

Calling things Chinese (or American or Western) is basically a way to self-promote while denigrating others. It has to do with identity politics and soft power, not with values. Values, by definition, will have a cultural (historical) component as long as there is culture. But that only means that the democratic, humanistic societies of the future will owe their ever more universal understanding of their values to the historical experience of the entire human race. We will all be indebted to each other.