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FOUR WAR, DEATH, AND ANCIENT CHINESE COSMOLOGY Thinking through the Thickness of Culture Roger T. Ames During the several centuries leading up to the state of Qin’s consolidation of power on the central plains of present-day China, the ferocity and horror of internecine warfare rose exponentially. Indeed, death itself had become a way of life. What, then, did the infantryman on the killing field and his mother think about and feel when they reflected on the former’s mortality, that is, on the very real possibility that the day may be his last? How were these people of ancient China culturally disposed to think about dying—their own death and, perhaps even more heartrending, the loss of someone they loved? In this chapter, I will argue that the intensity of warfare has been a defining human activity in the articulation of the distinctive correlative worldview of ancient China. We must not undervalue the impact that the trauma of perennial war has had on shaping Chinese culture in its formative period. Further, I will contest a resistance among contemporary scholars to thick cultural generalizations by insisting that an always-emerging cultural vocabulary is itself rooted in and grows out of a deep and relatively stable soil of unannounced assumptions sedimented over generations into the language, customs, and life forms of a living tradition.1 I argue that the failure to acknowledge this fundamental character of cultural difference as 117 118 ROGER T. AMES an erstwhile safeguard against the sins of either “essentialism” or “relativism” is not innocent. Indeed, like the preacher who, come Monday, commits the very sins he railed against the day before, this antagonism to cultural generalizations leads to the uncritical essentializing of our own contingent cultural assumptions and to the insinuating of them into our interpretations of other traditions.2 David Keightley, in his reflections on the meaning and value of death in the classical Chinese tradition, concludes that death in this culture is rather “unproblematic.”3 Of course, Keightley is not suggesting that the end of life was approached absent some real trepidation by Chinese soldiers and their mothers alike. He means, rather, that death was not considered unnatural, perverse, or horrible. Indeed, the concept of “natural” death in early China can readily be contrasted with the enormity of death in the Abrahamic traditions, in which “death” itself is a consequence of divine animus. In this latter tradition, “death” is the punishment meted out by an angry god to human beings for their hubris and disobedience—human beings who, in their prelapsarian state, had owned God’s gift of immortality. There is certainly an uneasiness in the early Chinese literature manifested in visions of the “Yellow Springs,” a familiar name for the netherworld, but there is a marked absence of the morbidity and gloom we associate with the Greek, Roman, and medieval conceptions of death. In the classical Chinese world, there is a preponderant emphasis on “life,” with little attention given over to the tragedy and poignancy of death familiar in classical Western sources. Rather than a gruesome portrayal of death, there seems to be a Chinese tolerance of the end of life as an inevitable and relatively unremarkable aspect of the human experience.4 Again, from the sparse remnants of the body of militarist literature circulating in pre-Qin China, we are able to make some compelling observations about the value of death in ancient Chinese culture as it pertains to the battlefield specifically. For example, the military texts begin generally from the Sunzi’s premise that warfare is always a losing proposition and that, as such, it should be embarked upon as “budeyi 不得已”—that is, only with the greatest reluctance and as an always wasteful, if sometimes unavoidable, last resort. From this premise we can understand why soldiery was historically accorded a low social status in this culture, and we might further speculate that, sans the vision of military glory promoted by the Spartans and Romans, the relentless agony of battle punctuating the Warring States period was little mitigated for the Chinese soldier by the spirit of a heroic—even romantic—death we find associated with warfare in our own classical Western narrative.5 In order to dig deeper, and to understand the value of death within the cultural semantics of ancient China without overwriting its meaning with very different Western presuppositions, we must locate the phenomenon of death within the evolving correlative cosmology of its own tradition. [3.131.110.169] Project...

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