What are the basic principles of China's traditional way of thinking?

The most striking features of China's traditional way of thinking are holistic thinking, intuitive thinking, analogical thinking and dialectical thinking.

First, the general idea.

The so-called holistic thinking means that heaven and earth, man and society are regarded as a closely linked whole, and that heaven and earth, man and me, man and heart are in a whole system, and the elements of each system are interdependent.

The ancients had many typical remarks in this regard. For example, Mencius of Confucianism said: "What a gentleman does is what he does, what he keeps is what he does. How can he say it's a small supplement? " Zhuangzi of Taoism said: "Heaven and earth coexist with me, and everything is one with me." (Zhuangzi's theory of the same origin of all things) We link "up and down with heaven and earth" and "everything is one with me", and we can see that both Confucianism and Taoism in the pre-Qin period regarded people and all things in heaven and earth as a whole system. From this, we can understand the meaning of "one" in a large number of pre-Qin classics. For example, the Book of Changes says, "Everything in the world is real." Lao Tzu said, "saints hold one as the world wind." Fundamentally speaking, "one" is all about the whole, the system and their connections.

In the Yijing era, the Chinese nation formed a harmonious world view composed of "heaven-earth-man". Sixty-four hexagrams, composed of yin and yang, in the Book of Changes symbolize all things in heaven and earth and their changes, indicating the combination of heaven and earth, the transformation of all things, and the separation of man and heaven.

On the whole thinking, the theory of Yin and Yang was put forward in Han Dynasty.