創造和調和以及追越

Abstract

In order to understand a cultural tradition, it is essential to examine the culture’s basic views on important philosophical concepts, including their views of creation, movement, and transformation. This paper examines the characteristics of the socio-cultural traditions of East Asia by exploring some key concepts including creation, transformation, and transcendence. The same concepts tend to convey diverse meanings based on different contexts. Creation, for instance, can be used in terms of making goods and cultural activities, rather than in terms of cosmogony. This is because East Asian traditions do not assume an external cause or divine entity in the process of creation and movement. Instead, East Asians tend to think that things are self-generative as the term ziran自然 (being so spontaneously) suggests. Within this tradition, humans have a unique status, in no small part because they are not regarded as beings created by God but as one of three fundamental agents operating in the universe. This unique cultural tradition of East Asia requires humans to interact with others and transform themselves so that they can realize all entities share the same origins. In this regard, constant transformation is idealized one of the essential human characteristics in East Asian thought.