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Foreword ‘The world is common to all', or, more literally,‘All-underHeaven constitutes a commonalty'. This is the rendition of the four Chinese words, T'ien-hsia wei kung 天下為仗， written by an anonymous Confucian thinker some two thousand years ago. At first sight the saying seems an impressive expression of universality. On further thought, however, one realizes that the term t'ien-hs悶，‘ all-under-Heaven'， was less than truly universalistic when it was used two thousand years ago. First of all, its connotations at that time were overwhelmingly human. T'ien- 戶的ia then meant, for most Chinese, primarily the world of man, not that of nature and the cosmos. Moreover, even withi1cl this human sphere, t'ien-hsia primarily signified the world of known human beings: that of the people who spoke variations of a common Chinese language and possessed a common stock of Chinese cultural values. It scarcely extended to those outer shadowy regions inhabited by strange beings who could. sometimes hardly be accounted human at al1. Later, of course, the Chinese gradually sharpened their awareness of this outer world. It came to them as the result of explorations by both Chinese and non-Chinese, wars, trade relations, religious penetrations, the gradual outward spread of the Chinese people and the more sudden inward thrust of the modern Western world. AIl this, however, was only beginning when the words we have been discussing were originally written. Nevertheless, there had by then already been Chinese thinkers - notably the Taoists and the Yin-Yang and Five Elements cosmologists - who viewed the cosmos in broader terms. Such phrases as t'ien- ti 夭他 (Heaven and Earth) evoked for them thoughts of a universe reaching far beyond the human world, in which man is only one of many significant components_ Although these thinkers lacked the telescopes, microscopes and other instruments of modern science, they were able to conceive of things both as infinitely smaIl and infinitely large. Tsou Yen, founder of the Cosmologists, thought of the terrestrial world as consisting of nine large xii Foreword continents, each surrounded by seas and alI encompassed by one vast embracing ocean. He believed that the Chinese cultural realm occupied only one-ninth of one of these nine continents. Some of his followers thought of space as extending hundreds of thousands of leagues (缸里) beyond the earth, and one of them proclaimed,‘Heaven, Earth and all things are like the body of a single man. This is called the Great Unity (ta t'ung 大同).' The Taoist Chuang Tzu begins his book by describing the flight of the giant P'eng bird as it rises on a whir1wind to a height of ninety thousand leagues and then wings its way for six months toward the Southern Ocean. Later he describes two human kingdoms that are bitter1y at war and yet so tiny that each occupies the horn of a snail. This view of an integrated universe, in which the large and the small, the hard and the soft, the hot and the cold, and other complementaries all have their meaningful place and function, is basic to the key Chinese concept of kan-ying 感應. It is a concept that also forms the chief subject of the present book. Professor Le Blanc translates kan-ying as ‘stimulus and response'; 1 think the words could also be rendered as ‘action and reaction'. For the sake of convenience, he often describes this kan-ying doctrine as that of ‘resonance'. According to such a doctrine, the universe is an organismic whole consisting of things and phenomena that, despite their diversity, belong to certain common categories within which they stimulate and respond to one another. In other words, they resonate. Some may be as far apart as the celes tial moon and terrestrial ocean. whose resonance consists of the ebb and flow of the tides. Others may be as close together as the organs of the human body or any other living organism, within which they spontaneously interact for the good of the total organism. Such, at least, was the manner of all things during the age of primordial harmony. If today less harmony exists, it is only because man has interposed his artifice into the workings of Tao or the Way. (Here it should be noted that Tao, for the Taoists, is simply their designation for the total cosmic process.) These ideas are obviously of great importance as general principles, but 1 think it is also instructive to examine what 1 believe is a specific...

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