TIAN (pronounced ‘tee-in’): Heaven, Heavenly, Skylike. Originally the name of the ancestral deity of the Zhou imperial house, whose moral “mandate” underwrote the Zhou overthrow of the Shang dynasty in the thirteenth century B.C.E. Like many ancient patriarchal deities, this collective ancestor was a sky god. With the rationalizing tendencies of the Spring and Autumn Period (770-475 B.C.E.), however, including the early Confucian movement, the naturalistic association with “sky” began to grow more pronounced as the anthropomorphic and morally retributive aspects of the term were dampened. In the ‘Analects’, Confucius sometimes uses the term with clear but possibly rhetorical anthropomorphic implications, but elsewhere in the same work he states that Heaven “does not speak [i.e., issues no explicit commands], and yet the four seasons proceed through it, the hundred creatures are born through it” (Analects 17.19). The naturalistic sense of Heaven as the plain process of the sky seems to be present in this pronouncement. Interpretive hedgings continued in the work of Zhuangzi’s contemporary Mencius, representing what would later be deemed the mainstream Confucian tradition. Mencius sometimes reduced the meaning of Heaven explicitly to simply “what happens although nothing makes it happen” (Mencius 5A7). This is the sense of the term that emerges front and center in Zhuangzi’s usage: the spontaneous and agentless creativity that brings forth all beings, whatever happens without a specific identifiable agent that makes it happen and without a preexisting purpose or will or observable method. This is “skylike” in the sense that the sky is conceived as the ever-present but unspecifiable open space that “rotates” tirelessly and spontaneously, bringing the changes of the seasons and the bounty of the earth forth without having to issue explicit orders, make or enforce “laws,” or directly interfere: the sky makes the harvest without coming down and planning and planting; its action is effortless and purposeless (non-teleological). The Heavenly in all things is this “skylike” aspect of all things. The term “Nature” has been used by some early translators, but the implication of Nature as an ordered and knowable system, running according to something called “Natural Laws,” which are rooted in the wisdom of a divine lawgiver, is profoundly alien to the Chinese conception of spontaneity, which excludes the notion of positive law as an externally constraining force. Since the term no longer refers to a particular agent, but a quality or aspect of purposeless and agentless creativity present in all existents, it is here often translated as “the Heavenly” rather than the substantive “Heaven.” -from the Zhuangzi, translated by Brook Ziporyn
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 06:24:08 +0000
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