The following is drawn from my e-book, “Talks on Chinese Civilization.” I explain some overlapping historical phenomena in both China and the West. Our civilizations are linked, and there are certainly profound reasons behind this.
Civilization happens for a reason.
A true theist does not just look at things on one level. He will give us another perspective, allowing us to look backward or forward in time.
That is to say, the history we know about is not a natural progression but a planned process, just as a movie has a script. So, in fact, I believe that certain preparations were made beforehand to pave the way for subsequent events.
Many coincidences have occurred throughout human history. If you were to use probability to calculate the chances of these coincidences actually occurring, you would find they are unimaginable.
For example, those great men who laid the foundations of each of the major civilizations in human history whom we call “holy men,” “saints,” or “prophets” were almost all born in the same era. In China’s late Spring and Autumn period, Laozi established Taoism, and Confucius established Confucianism. In that same era, the Buddha was born on the Indian subcontinent; this era was also when the Old Testament of the Bible was written in book form; in ancient Greece, Socrates was born.
Among the major civilization systems of human society, the Chinese civilization system rests upon three schools of thought—Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism—and their founders—Confucius, Laozi, and the Buddha—were all from the era just mentioned. Before Jesus, the origins of Western civilization can be traced back to the “three philosophers” of ancient Greece: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Aristotle was Plato’s student, Plato was Socrates’s student, and Socrates was also from this era.
Chinese scholars call this period the “Original Classical Age,” while Western scholars call it the “Axial Age.” Think about it—isn’t all of this just too much of a coincidence? These once-in-a-millennium great men were born in different regions at the same time. The great classical or religious texts of the most important civilizations of mankind were also established at the same time.
History is full of similar events that co-occurred in the East and the West.
When the ancient Greek philosophers were born, China was in an era when a “hundred schools of thought” were vying for dominance during the Warring States period. King Wei of Qi built the Jixia Academy outside the capital city of Linzi, which was the equivalent of a university nowadays. There, different schools of thought would put forward their ideas and debate among themselves. Distinguished representatives of Confucianism, Mohism, Legalism, the logicians, and the diplomats gathered there. At almost the same time, Plato founded the Academy of Athens on the outskirts of Athens in ancient Greece. This, too, was a place where philosophers studied, thought, and debated.
Another example is the unification of the state. In China, the Warring States period ended with the reunification of the Qin in 221 B.C. At about the same time, Ashoka unified the ancient Indian subcontinent.
On the Chinese side, the Han territory began expanding during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han, which coincided with the expansion of the ancient Roman Empire.
The time surrounding the spread of Christianity coincided with the introduction of Buddhism to China. Buddhism was introduced to China in 67 A.D., and Jesus was in his 30s (corresponding to the 30s A.D.) when he was crucified. These two events impacted the development of the Eastern and Western civilizations, respectively.
We can also see that the Western Roman Empire was destroyed by barbarian invasions at the same time as the “Upheaval of the Five Barbarians” in Chinese history. This is also an important coincidence, as China’s economic and cultural center began shifting southward, and Europe entered the medieval feudal period.
During the three centuries of the Renaissance in Europe, many outstanding playwrights, literary figures, and painters also emerged in China, such as the Four Great Masters of Yuanqu poetry, the rise of literati painting in the Song and Yuan dynasties, and the birth of China’s first long-chapter novel, “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” among other things. Thus, while a literary and artistic renaissance emerged in the West, an era of flourishing literature and art also appeared in China.
Similarly, as history moved forward, a more unfortunate coincidence occurred.
When the Cultural Revolution took place in China (1966–76), the attitude toward tradition was to deny and destroy all of it. This was also when the counter-culture movement occurred in the West; that is, with the rise of the anti-war movement came hippies, sexual liberation, rock-and-roll, and so on. As China’s Red Guards organized the “great networking” across China, street protests raged in the West.
So we see that when a big event occurs in the East, a similar significant event also occurs in the West, and vice versa. These correspondences simply cannot be just a coincidence. A higher hand at work must have brought our civilizations together.
