China was the cultural melting pot of humanity. Currents of thought converged there, such as Taoism, Chan Buddhism or Confucianism. Harmony with the environment and the eternal flow.
The understanding of one’s own nature and mind, or the bases of good government, were some of theThe concerns of this philosophical trinity that emerged in the 6th century BC to provide a series of keys that are very current today.
Left behind are the lives of wise men like Laozi, Huiyan or Confucius, essential figures of the wisdom of their time. the book The path of the clouds by Catherine François (Paris, 1953) is an opportunity to meet them, along with contemporary artists such as the famous painter Gu Kaizhi, the calligrapher Hongjing, the seven sages of the bamboo forest, or the unknown poet and hermit Han Shan who, in the best taoist traditionhe wrote: “The mountain is my home/No one here knows me./Sitting in white clouds,/I in silence, in silence.”
Chantal Maillard talks about the wisdom of the dragon and opposites, not exclusive but complementary
He who speaks does not know, he who knows remains silent, he said. Lao Tsealthough years later, the great poet of the Tang dynasty (618-904), Bai Juyi, wondered why the wise man needed five thousand characters to condense your knowledge in the Tao Te Ching.
Both Taoism and Buddhism were ways of knowledge linked to the nature of the universe and how the human being could reach other states of consciousness.
As Chantal Maillard (Brussels, 1951) proposes in her excellent essay The Veins of the Dragon, “Chinese thought is not based on conceptsbut in the observation of the changing and cyclical nature of the universe.”
Knowing becomes an organic process. The cosmos is sustained from the balance of two principles or dynamic soulsthe po of yin (feminine) nature and the hung, of yang or masculine nature.
In it Yijing or Book of Mutationsone of the first pre-philosophical texts from China, already talked about living in opposites, not exclusive but complementary. A concept that we also find in primitive Hinduism.
Nature can chart our moods, just as the course of the seasons marks our existence. Taoist essences that complement each other with obtaining the mental calm that Buddhism preaches, from the abstraction of external stimuli.
As in a Chinese painting, in the end we go into emptiness. The ancient sages said that poetry It is a picture without forms and a paintinga poem with shapes. Thus we modulate our own nature that Confucianism impels from the virtue of humanity. Intelligence is not enough.
Catherine François introduces us to the famous painter Gu Kaizhi, the calligrapher Hongjing or the seven wise men from the bamboo forest
There was a time when the West seemed to forget the flow of opposites that Heraclitus also pointed out. Then we lost sight of movement, we fell in love with language, reason separated from the body and we became excessively rational.
Today, recovering this ancient Chinese wisdom, we resume the path of intuitionrelativism and we stop doing, so that things continue their course.
Few stages in the history of thought were as important as the period between the 6th and 5th centuries BC, in which the pre-Socratics, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates or Plato.
There was forged the perennial wisdom that today, both Catherine François and Chantal Maillardclaim with their books that tell us about the wisdom of the dragon through whose veins run the lives of the chinese wise men and their Taoist, Buddhist or Confucian paths.
Anthropocentrism seems to be collapsing little by little, while the harmonies of nature They penetrate us under an inner gaze that reveals our connection with the universe.
As Maillard says at the end, “it is worth thinking that we can learn to govern ourselves without government«, to live without gods, to replace violence with compassion, truths with listening, death with transformation…»
Alexis Racionero ragué
