"And so one lodges the demons by following Earth."
The word demons here is the other term that, ghost, <i>gui</i> 鬼, that is often translated ghost.
In just a moment, on the table, in fact that's the way I'm going to translate them: gods and ghosts.
"Thus when the sages created music, they did it by echoing Heaven,
and, when they designed the rites they did it to match the Earth."
Now we're going to take this same passage and while you'll be looking at a table,
we will read it again and you can see how everything
is being organized into poles of Yang 陽 and Yin 陰.
That is to say how these categories, which are cosmological
categories, of Yangqi 陽氣 and Yinqi 陰氣, Yang and Yin energies,
also serves to think about ethics, to think about ritual, to think about music,
to think about the relation between heaven and earth.
Okay, so now,
we're going to be looking at the table that summarizes what we've just read and I'm going to read it again,
and we'll look at the table and comment on it. So this new cosmology of Dao, Qi, the vital energy,
Yin and Yang forms of Qi
And I've entitled this table "ontological monism or mitigated dualism".
Why? Because there are many people who looking at China and contrasting it with the West,
where dualistic oppositions between body and soul are so prominent,
who say that there's no such dualism in China,
there's maybe a duality of Yin and Yang, but they're all part of the Dao, okay?
And in what we've just read,
we can see where that idea comes from, that there's an ontological monism.
What we mean by ontological [monism]? Simply that the being of
the universe and our own being is in the end singular, not dual.
But I think that this is a little bit too quick to speak of an ontological monism.
And so I suggest that maybe "mitigated dualism" is perhaps a better way, because it's when
we see that there is that duality and that that duality runs through absolutely everything,
and that the opposition, rather the relationship between the two poles
—heaven and earth, male and female, spring and winter, harmony and segregation
—that as we go through history, the alternating complementarity,
complementary character of these two poles, will become frequently more dramatically dualistic, okay?
So: if we don't start out with an understanding that if all within this monistic Dao,
that the duality is not also just as important as in the West
—body/soul, ethics/physics, okay?
—then we cannot understand the later evolution of Chinese thought,
and in fact we can't even understand the difference between these two kinds of
what I've called Confucian self-cultivation for the persuaders and the thinkers
engaged in government and politics, and the more individualistic self-cultivation
that we associate and the Chinese have associated with Daoism on the other hand, okay?
So: now let's look once again, listen once again to that text from the <i>Treatise on Music</i>:
"Creating in spring and maturing in summer."
What are these? These are the two Yang, summer and spring, the two periods of growth,
the two periods of Yangqi, that is to say of life-giving energy.
This then is equivalent of benevolence.
Like I say, Ren can be translated as benevolence, as charity, as humaneness.
And again when we get to the Song 宋, we'll see that this becomes the core concept of Confucianism.
Here it is still in alternance with that other concept of righteousness and they form a pair,
but a pair which is nonetheless contrasting,
because righteousness is associated with gathering in autumn,
the harvest, and then storing it up,
storing the grains up over winter so that you have to eat during the long winter months.
This is righteousness. So the two ethical terms,
key ethical terms of Confucius and the Confucian tradition are here associated with the seasons,
the cycle of the seasons.
But now we then bring this cycle of the seasons to bear on ritual.
"Benevolence is close to music and righteousness to ritual."
Both of them, of course, are inseparable, because there's no ritual without music,
and the music is related to ritual: it's ritual music, okay?
Now why does he say that benevolence or Ren or humanity is closer to music, well,
it's because music is about honesty. But let's focus here especially on harmony.
Of course, you say, music is harmony.
But, harmony is this idea of heaven and earth,