China and the West

Whitehead, Alfred North. Works.
1911
Whitehead, Alfred North. An introduction to mathematics. (London : Williams and Norgate, 1911).
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Whitehead%2c%20Alfred%20North%2c%201861-1947.
Meanwhile from the earliest epoch (2634 B.C.) the Chinese had utilized the characteristic property of the compass needle, but do not seem to have connected it with any theoretical ideas. The really profound changes in human life all have their ultimate origin in knowledge pursued for its own sake. The use of the compass was not introduced into Europe till the end of the twelfth century A.D., more than 3000 years after its first use in China.

1917
Whitehead, Alfred North. The organisation of thought : educational and scientific. (London : Williams and Norgate, 1917).
https://archive.org/stream/organisationofth00whit/organisationofth00whit_djvu.txt.
At the present time — interrupted for the moment by the war — a great revolution in the art of painting is in progress throughout the world. Its centres are Paris and Italy and London and Munich, and its origin in the far east, in China and Japan…

Whitehead, Alfred North. An enquiry concerning the principles of natural knowledge. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919).
https://archive.org/details/enquiryconcernpr00whitrich.
When Dr Johnson surveyed mankind from China to Peru, he did it from Pump Court in London at a certain date…

1920
Whitehead, Alfred North. The concept of nature. (Cambridge, The University Press, 1920). [The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919].
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Whitehead%2c%20Alfred%20North%2c%201861-1947.
The series may start with any arbitrarily assumed duration of any temporal extension, but in descending the series the temporal extension progressively contracts and the successive
durations are packed one within the other like the nest of boxes of a Chinese toy…
Such a set, as you will remember, has the properties of the Chinese toy which is a nest of
boxes, one within the other, with the difference that the toy has a smallest box, while the abstractive class has neither a smallest event nor does it converge to a limiting event which is not a member of the set.

1926
Whitehead, Alfred North. Religion in the making. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1926). [Tarner lectures delivered in Trinity College, November, 1919].
http://alfrednorthwhitehead.wwwhubs.com/ritm1.htm.
When Christianity had established itself throughout the Roman Empire and its neighbourhood, there were before the world two main rational religions, Buddhism and Christianity. There were, of course, many rivals to both of them in their respective regions; but if we have regard to clarity of idea, generality of thought, moral respectability, survival power, and width of extension over the world, then for their combination of all these qualities these religions stood out beyond their competitors. Later their position was challenged by the Mahometans. But even today, the two Catholic religions of civilization are Christianity and Buddhism, and if we are to judge by the comparison of their position now with what it has been both of them are in decay. They have lost their ancient hold upon the world…
Both the great religions, Christianity and Buddhism, have their separate set of dogmas which deal with this great question. It is in respect to the problem of evil that one great divergence between them exists. Buddhism finds evil essential in the very nature of the world of physical and emotional experience. The wisdom which it inculcates is, therefore, so to conduct life as to gain a release from the individual personality which is the vehicle for such experience. The Gospel which it preaches is the method by which this release can be obtained…
One metaphysical fact about the nature of things which is presupposes is that this release is not to be obtained by mere physical death. Buddhism is the most colossal example in history of applied metaphysics…
Christianity took the opposite road. It has always been a religion seeking a metaphysic, in contrast to Buddhism which is a metaphysic generating a religion…
It is difficult to develop Buddhism, because Buddhism starts with a clear metaphysical notion and with the doctrines which flow from it…
The Buddha left a tremendous doctrine. The historical facts about him are subsidiary to the doctrine…
Christianity, like Buddhism, preaches a doctrine of escape. It proclaims a doctrine life is placed on a finer level. It overcomes evil with good. Buddhism makes itself probable by referring to its metaphysical theory. Christianity makes itself probable by referring to supreme religious moments in history.
Thus in respect to this crucial question of evil, Buddhism and Christianity are in entirely different attitudes in respect to doctrines. Buddhism starts with the elucidatory dogmas; Christianity starts with the elucidatory facts…
Buddhism and Christianity find their origins respectively in two inspired moments of history: the life of the Buddha, and the life of Christ. The Buddha gave his doctrine to enlighten the world. Christ gave his life. It is for Christians to discern the doctrine. Perhaps in the end the most valuable part of the doctrine of the Buddha is its interpretation of his life…
The divergence in the expression of dogmas is most clearly shown in the two traditions of Buddhism and Christianity…
There are close analogies between the two religions. In both there is, in some sense, a saviour Christ in the one, and the Buddha in the other…
To put it briefly, Buddhism, on the whole, discourages the sense of active personality, whereas Christianity encourages it…
If Europe, after the Greek period, had been subject to the Buddhist religion, the change of philosophical climate would have been in the other direction…
Thus, according to prevalent Western notions, the moral aims of Buddhism are directed to altering the first principles of metaphysics…
The absolute idealism, so influential in Europe and America during the last third of the nineteenth century, and still powerful notwithstanding the reaction from it, was undoubtedly a reaction towards Buddhistic metaphysics on the part of the Western mentality…
The decay of Christianity and Buddhism, as determinative influences in modern thought, is partly due to the fact that each religion has unduly sheltered itself from the other…

So to-day it is not France which goes to heaven, but individual Frenchmen; and it is not China which attains nirvana, but Chinamen…
In India and China the growth of a world-consciousness was different in its details, but in its essence depended on the same factors. Individuals were disengaged from their immediate social setting in ways which promoted thought…
Throughout India and China religions thought, so far as it has been interpreted in precise form, disclaims the intuition of any ultimate personality substantial to the universe. This is true for Confucian philosophy. There may be personal embodiments, but the substratum is impersonal…

1926
Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the modern world. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1926).
http://books.google.ch/books?hl=de&id=L6kZPLbCrScC&q=china#v=snippet&q=china&f=false.
There have been great civilisations in which the peculiar balance of mind required for science has only fitfully appeared and has produced the feeblest result. For example, the more we know of Chinese art, of Chinese literature, and of the Chinese philosophy of life, the more we admire the heights to which that civilization attained. For thousands of years, there have been in China acute and learned men patiently devoting their lives to study. Having regard to the span of time, and to the population concerned, China forms the largest volume of civilization which the world has seen. There is no reason to doubt the intrinsic capacity of individual Chinamen for the pursuit of science. And yet Yhinese science is practically negligible. There is no reason to believe that China if left to itself would have ever produced any progress in science…
We quickly find that the Western peoples exhibit on a colossal scale a peculiarity which is popularly supposed to be more especially characteristic of the Chinese. Surprise is often expressed that a Chinaman can be of two religions, a Confucian for some occasions and a Buddhist for other occasions. Whether this is true of China I do not know ; nor do I knew whether, if true, these two attitudes are really inconsistent…

1929
Whitehead, Alfred North. The function of reason. (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1929). [Louis Clark Vanuxem Foundation Lectures delivered at Princeton University, 1929].
https://archive.org/details/functionofreason031865mbp.
The ascription of the modern phase of the speculative Reason wholly to the Greeks, is an exaggeration. The great Asiatic civilizations, Indian and Chinese, also produced variants of the same method…

1929
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and reality : an essay in ecomology. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1929). [Gifford lectures delivered in the University of Edinburg 1927-1928].
https://archive.org/details/AlfredNorthWhiteheadProcessAndReality.
In monistic philoso-
phies, Spinoza's or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also
equivalently termed 'The Absolute.' In such monistic schemes, the ulti-
mate is illegitimately allowed a final, 'eminent' reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought…

1933
Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of ideas. (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1933).
http://books.google.ch/books?hl=de&id=UZeJuLvNq80C&q=china#v=snippet&q=china&f=false.
The mystical religion which most whole-heartedly adopts this attitude is Buddhism.
A recourse to observation at once discloses the importance of the doctrine of Malthus. China and India both afford examples of societies which illustrage his law…
Now India and China are instances of civilized societies which for a long period in their later history maintained themselves with arrested technology and with fixed geographical location…
The history of civilization in the Old World is the history of the internal development of the four continental regions fringing Asia, namely China, India, the Near East, and Europe…
China and India survived, with populations blighted by hopeless poverty…
European life began to approach the standards of the Near East and of China so far as concerned technology and general commercial activities…
For the purpose of understanding how it happened that European life escaped the restrictions which finally bound China, India, and The Near East, it is important to recapture the attitude towards Commerce prevalent in various epochs…
It must be remembered that China and Bagdad, at the height of their prosperity, eshibited forms of human life in many ways more gracious than our own…
There is ample evidence of active Commerce in China and the Near East in ancient times…
Three thousand years ago the importance of credit would have been no news either in Mesopotamia or in China. Also there was foreign trade beyond the boundaries of the Near East. There are evidences of ocean-borne trade between India and Egypt, perhaps even between China and Egypt, with Ceylon as an intermediary. Also Central Asia was nearing its last phase of prosperity before it faded out into desert. It seems to have provided the route for a flourishing overland trade between China and the Near East…
Modern Europe and America have derived their civilization from the races whose countries border the Eastern Mediterranean. In the earlier chapters, Greece and Palestine were the regions providing the initial formulations of the ideas concerning the essence of human nature. When we examine the history of science, to these two countries we must add Egypt. These three countries are the direct ancestors of our modern civilization. Of course there is a long tale of civilization behind them, Mesopotamia, Crete, Phoenicia, and India, China, also conbributed…
Columbus never reached China. But he discovered America…
The details of these codes are relative to the social circumstances of the immediate environment – life at a certain date on ‘the fertile fringe’ of the Arabian desert, life on the lower slopes of the Himalayan Mountains, life on the plains of China, or on the plains of India, life on the delta of some great river…