The Philosophy of Ang Lee

Conquering the Self: Daoism, Confucianism, and the Price of Freedom in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

19 ConquerIng the self Daoism, Confucianism, and the Price of Freedom in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon James McRae Authentic Self-Cultivation There is a famous Chinese painting entitled The Three Vinegar Tasters that depicts the founders of China’s three great philosophical systems— Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism—sampling a vat of vinegar. Confucius and the Buddha find it distasteful, but the Daoist Laozi considers the vinegar to be sweet. Although this image is primarily meant to show the importance of all three traditions for Chinese culture, it is also interpreted as a Daoist critique of the other two systems, particularly Confucianism. Confucius believes that human nature is sour and must be corrected through education, rules, and social norms, but Laozi thinks that human beings are best in their natural state. Ang Lee’s film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), explores the tension between Confucian and Daoist philosophies of self-development.1 Although both traditions agree on many points, they differ on the role that society should play in the cultivation of an exemplary person. The purpose of this chapter is to explore how the tension between these two traditions drives the conflict and character development in the film. The first section discusses the foundational metaphysical assumptions that are shared by Confucianism and Daoism. The second section compares and contrasts Confucian and Daoist notions of self-cultivation as they are illustrated in the film. The final section argues that freedom from social limitations is essential to authentic self-cultivation, but it comes at a price: every character must make sacrifices to attain liberation. Ultimately, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon illustrates that authentic self-cultivation 20 James McRae is a balance between one’s natural freedom and the roles, relationships, and obligations of society. Chinese Metaphysics: The Correlative Universe and the Focus–Field Self Laozi (born ca. 604 BCE) and Confucius (551–479 BCE) were contemporaries during the Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BCE).2 Both were scholars and active in political life: Laozi kept the archival records for the court of Zhou, while Confucius briefly served Duke Ding of Lu.3 The classical texts, Shiji and Zhuangzi, both claim that the two scholars met on at least one occasion during which Confucius consulted Laozi about the rites and praised the senior scholar for his wisdom.4 Because Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is set in 1779 CE during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911 CE), the ideas of both Confucianism and Daoism would have become culturally embedded and instantly recognizable to the film’s characters. Although Confucianism and Daoism disagree on many aspects of philosophy, they do share a common cosmology that is taken for granted by all Chinese philosophical systems. The ancient Chinese ontology of Confucianism and Daoism is fundamentally acosmotic: “They have no concept of cosmos at all, insofar as that notion entails a coherent, single-ordered world that is in any sense enclosed or defined.”5 Cosmotic thinking in Western philosophy has been problematic , postulating unhelpful ideas: a belief in an ordering agency, a contrast between reality and appearance, a focus on permanence over the process of becoming, and a preference of reason over sense experience. As acosmotic philosophies, Confucianism and Daoism profess no ordering agency and no contrast between reality and appearance, and they focus on change, the process of becoming, and the validity of sense experience over purely rational thinking.6 Ames and Rosemont draw a distinction between the Western notion of relation and the Chinese notion of correlation.7 Western epistemology is typically concerned with relationality, in which an independent self observes its environment as a separate entity. Because the individual is separate from the environment, it is necessary for one to have a set of categories through which experience can be organized and interpreted. In the Chinese notion of correlation, the knower and the known are fundamentally related because the knower is part of his or her environment. Two key terms are used to define the natural environment: tiān and dào. Neither term is clearly defined within Confucian or Daoist philoso- Conquering the Self 21 phies because these traditions emphasize ethics over metaphysics.8 Ames and Rosemont choose to translate tiān as “the Inherent Order of the Natural World,” though many scholars also render it as “the heavens” or “heaven.”9 Tiān is often used as part of the compound tiānmìng, which refers to the “propensity of circumstances” or the...