Seance 3 - 天 (Heaven)

Hong Kong Type #20

I would like to know, as spirits, do you come from heaven?

What does it mean to come from heaven?

Are you created by God, or born of nature? Are you spirits of God, or spirits of nature?

Is there a distinction between God and Heaven?

Or neither?

You always want to make distinctions.

Without distinction, I can’t understand.

There’s a kind of understanding that involves distinction, and another kind that doesn’t require distinctions.

Are you suggesting the former involves the body or material, and the latter is tied to the soul or spirit?

No, the former distinguishes between body and soul, material and spiritual, while the latter makes no such distinctions.

Body and mind are one, Miss Talented.

We are both material and spirit.

We are lead, the ink that prints the characters, the form of the characters, and what the form represents.

The character spirit is both one and many, many and one.

Your body is your spirit.

The story of your soul is the story of your physical and spiritual unity.

The Word became flesh, the Father and the Son, Holy Spirit and material, two in one.

God and Heaven, aren’t they two sides of the divine and nature?"

The most controversial aspect of James Legge is his attempt to find the Christian God in ancient Chinese beliefs.

In the ancient texts before Confucius, he saw the existence of the supreme Creator “Shang Di” (the Highest Emperor). This proves that Eastern and Western beliefs share the same origin, and there is a universal God. The Chinese knew about the true Creator long ago, but the pure original faith has been gradually forgotten.

This is also why he was dissatisfied with Confucius and Confucianism.

Did he not respect Confucius?

Yes, he respected Confucius as a moral educator.

He especially valued Confucius’s golden rule of “Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself”. However, compared to Jesus’s “Love your enemy as you love yourself”, Confucius’s benevolence is just a negative version and of a lower rank.

However, concerning declarations such as “Worship God as if God is here”, “the Master does not talk about strange forces or chaotic spirits”, and “If we do not know about life, how can we know about death”, he thought that these were significant shortcomings of Confucius.

Confucius either ignored or evaded the “Shang Di” that the ancient saints worshipped.

From the perspective of Christian monotheism, Legge values the faith of worshiping the heaven and the highest god before the Zhou Dynasty. Confucius’s ambiguous attitude towards spirits and gods is not a progress, but a regression.

From the philosophical perspective, Confucius lacks enthusiasm for metaphysical ultimate, and only cares about the order of the human world.

Legge concluded, “I hope I have not done him injustice; but after long study of his character and opinions, I am unable to regard him as a great man. He was not before his age, though he was above the mass of the officers and scholars of his time. He threw no new light on any of the questions which have a world-wide interest. He gave no impulse to religion. He had no sympathy with progress. His influence has been wonderful, but it will henceforth wane. My opinion is, that the faith of the nation in him will speedily and extensively pass away.”

It sounds like a pretty harsh criticism!

Please note, this is the view from the 1861 first edition of Chinese Classics, which was also Legge’s early view. His evaluation of Confucius would change greatly over the following thirty years.