#WingedWordsWindsday: 02/02/2022 -- Happy Lunar New Year! :)

 WINGED WORDS WINDSDAY

Compiled by Rob Chappell (@RHCLambengolmo)

Vol. 1, No. 14: February 2, 2022

 

Happy Lunar New Year!

Tuesday, February 1, 2022 (4720 – The Year of the Tiger)

 

“Classical Chinese Philosophies of Leadership”

By Rob Chappell, M.A.

Adapted & Condensed from Cursus Honorum IX: 1 (August 2008)

 

                China has produced many outstanding leaders in world thought, and their writings have become increasingly popular in the West during recent decades. Two notable Chinese sages whose insights on leadership (and the human condition in general) have inspired billions of readers across the centuries are Confucius and Lao-tzu, who represent the Confucian and Taoist schools of philosophy, respectively.

                Lao-tzu (fl. 6th century BCE) is regarded as the founder of the Taoist school of philosophy. According to traditional accounts of his life, he was an older contemporary of Confucius who worked as a royal archivist for the Chinese Kingdom of Chou. In his later years, Lao-tzu retired from public life at the royal court to write his masterpiece, the Tao Te Ching (The Way and Its Virtue). Lao-tzu and his followers emphasized the importance of exercising leadership in daily life through compassion, moderation, and humility. They also taught that humans should seek to live in harmony with Nature – a teaching that resonates very strongly with today’s environmental concerns.

                Confucius (551-479 BCE), a younger contemporary of Lao-tzu, lived in troubled times, when China was divided up into small kingdoms that warred against each other, causing much social upheaval and economic hardship. He developed a philosophy of life that encouraged people to exercise leadership through benevolence toward all, loyalty to one’s benefactors, devotion to one’s family, and well-rounded learning. Political leaders were expected to cultivate these character traits in order to set a good example for their subjects. Confucianism eventually came to be recognized as the leading political philosophy of East Asia. Its most popular text is the Analects, a collection of Confucius’ aphorisms and dialogues, which was compiled by his students and their successors.

                Both the Taoist and Confucian schools of thought have found some common ground in the I Ching (Book of Changes), a classical Chinese text that was compiled between 1000 and 500 BCE by several generations of sages and scholars. This book, through its aphorisms about the harmonious balance of the Universe, humanity’s place in the cosmos, and the constancy of change, resonates deeply with many thoughtful people today, both in the East and in the West.

                Over the centuries, rising generations of leaders around the world have been influenced by the sages of ancient China. The writings of Confucius, Lao-tzu, and their followers continue to be as relevant today as when they were first penned some 2500 years ago. Now that this age-old wisdom is available in Western languages, we can use it not only to improve our own leadership skills, but also to build bridges of understanding between East and West. 

 

Recommended Reading

·         The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us about the Good Life by Michael Puett and Christine Gross-Loh (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016)

·         The Art of Living: Chinese Proverbs and Wisdom: A Modern Reader of the Vegetable Roots Discourse by Hong Yingming (New York: Better Link Press, 2020)

 

The Venetian traveler Marco Polo (1254-1324, at left) meets Kublai Khan (1215-1294, at right), the Mongol Emperor of China, in 1275. (Image Credit: Medieval Manuscript Illumination – Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

 

“Kubla Khan” a/k/a “Xanadu”

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

 

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

 

But O, that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As ever beneath a waning Moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her daemon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this Earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced;

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:

And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

 

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

 

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me,

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honeydew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.