Oriental Culture Importance

The Oriental culture was nourished and developed in a semi-enclosed northern temperate plate-like continent, where the main mode of material production was the natural economy of agriculture, and the social organization was based on the patriarchal system and authoritarian government, while the surrounding area was surrounded by backward ethnic groups. Such a specific ecological environment enabled Chinese culture to develop a characteristic character.

3.1.1 Humanistic Tradition

Unlike other cultures that emphasize the natural (such as Greece) or the supernatural (such as India and the Hebrews), Chinese culture has developed its own humanistic tradition that emphasizes the life of the world, and emphasizes the worldly life, and human beings have been given a very high status, and the so-called "human beings are the spirit of all things. Human beings were given a very high status, and it was said that "man is the spirit of all things" and "man is the same as heaven and earth", which put man on a par with heaven and earth. This enabled China to avoid falling into religious fanaticism like that of medieval Europe, and to develop a kind of down-to-earth empirical rationality. The various religions that flourished in China were also imbued with a heavy humanistic color. Of course, China's "emphasis on the human being" is not a respect for the value and free development of the individual, but rather an integration of the individual into the group and an emphasis on the obligations of the human being to the clan and the state, constituting a kind of patriarchal collectivist anthropology, which is in a different category from the humanism that began to flourish in the West from the Renaissance, with the emancipation of the individuality as its banner.

3.1.2 Ethical Center

The patriarchal tradition inherited from the clan society and developed in the civilized era has always attached great importance to the norms of ethics and moral education, thus forming an "ethical culture" with the aim of "seeking goodness". This led to the formation of an "ethical culture" with the aim of "seeking goodness" and a "scientific culture" with the aim of "seeking truth" in Greece. The scientific culture has made vertical studies on cosmology, epistemology and moral theory, and ontology and epistemology have been fully developed; while the ethical Chinese culture does not or seldom talk about wisdom that is detached from ethics, and "cultivation of one's own body" is the basis for the preparation of the family, the governance of the country and the pacification of the world, and ethics has become the starting point and the final point. So much so that Chinese literature emphasizes the motive power of "edification", historiography takes "praise and blame, distinguishing good and evil" as its purpose, education uses moral education to dominate intellectual education, and the pursuit of life takes "lowly profit and noble righteousness" as the value of orientation. The first is to make sure that you have a good understanding of the concepts of the world.

3.1.3 Respect for the king and the people.

The natural economy of agriculture, which has long operated in China, is an isolated economy with little exchange of goods. The extremely decentralized society that grew out of this soil needed to be unified by a centralized political power from on high to defend itself against foreign enemies and natural disasters, and the personalized unifying force came from the authoritarian monarch. Therefore, the tradition of honoring the monarch as "the state is not capable of being two" is an inevitable product of the agrarian patriarchal society. On the other hand, the normal functioning of the agricultural patriarchal society depends on the peasants as the main body of the people to live and work in peace and contentment, so that they can provide the court with servitude and guarantee the basic means of subsistence needed by the society, so that the state of the gods of earth, grain and family can be preserved, or else there will be the risk of destruction and collapse. Therefore, the people-oriented tradition of "the people are the foundation of the state" is also an inevitable product of the agricultural patriarchal society. The "respect for the king" and the "people-oriented" are opposite and complementary, and *** together form the two wings of the Chinese culture

3.1.4 Mediocrity and harmony.

The idea of mediocrity is the mentality of the people cultivated by the natural economy of agriculture and patriarchal society, who live in one place and take stability and peace as their goal. The Chinese style of wisdom is characterized by the "high-mindedness and the middle-of-the-road" and the "use of both ends of the spectrum and its use in the people". This middle way is applied to politics, which is to curb the powerful, equalize property and rights, thus expanding the basis of the patriarchal society of agriculture; applied to culture, which is to seek commonality amidst differences when multiple cultures converge and to encompass all streams***; applied to customs, which is to be unbiased, not to complain, and to take into account both the internal and external aspects; and the ideal personality of practicing the middle way is to be a gentleman who is moderate and modest in his execution of both ends of the spectrum. The middle way of harmony and balance is a spirit of obedience to natural rhythms, which affirms change and identifies with "Huan Dao", which is obviously a revelation of the farming nation from the cycle of agricultural production from sowing, growing to harvesting. The closed circular sequence described by the doctrine of the five elements is a generalization of this way of thinking.

3.1.5 Extended Resilience.

Oriental culture is an ethical culture that grew out of the soil of the "agricultural and patriarchal" society. The agrarian and patriarchal society provides a kind of tough traditional strength, and the ethical paradigm creates tenacious customary stereotypes, while the spirit of "self-improvement" and "carrying things in the form of virtues" already formed in the pre-Qin period makes the Chinese culture's identity and adaptability both strong. "Identity" makes Chinese culture cohesive and maintains its own traditions; "adaptation" makes Chinese culture adapt to the changes of the times, constantly adjusting the trajectory of development, and absorbing the exotic and exotic, so that Chinese culture has an unparalleled continuity. The cultures of other ancient civilizations in the world have all experienced substantial "faults", or even died at the height of their popularity, giving rise to the feeling of "white clouds for thousands of years, but the buildings are empty" in the course of remembrance. Only Chinese culture, through the vicissitudes of life, suffered a lot of trials and tribulations, in the ups and downs of the inheritance, in the thousands of years of development, each generation has remarkable achievements. In terms of literature, the Poetry Scriptures, Chu Rhetoric, pre-Qin prose, Han Fugue, Wei and Jin poems, Tang poetry, Song lyrics, Yuanqu Opera, Ming and Qing novels, the peaks of the strange; in terms of academics, the pre-Qin Ziqi, the two Han scriptures, Wei and Jin Xuanxue, Sui and Tang Buddhism, Song and Ming ethics, and Qing Park, all of these are a great spectacle. This kind of within the scope of a country, the development of cultural categories of the sequence of retaining such a complete and continuous stage form, is the world's cultural history of the special case.

Since the mid-19th century, with the expansion of the world's unified market into East Asia, China's agrarian natural economy and patriarchal authoritarianism, which had lasted for several centuries, tended to disintegrate, and the society entered into a stage of modern transformation, which led to the gradual introduction of changes in the instrumental, institutional, behavioral, and conceptual dimensions of culture. However, despite the "strange changes of the past" in modern China, the long years of tradition, as a kind of dynamic stereotypes and deeper underlying, is still either obvious or hidden influence, modern Chinese culture is bound to be in the intertwining of the Chinese and foreign, the ancient and the present in the evolution of the cause and effect, such as the mighty river, the latter wave by the former wave, the flow of the river is unceasing.