How Universal Are Human Values?

John Lagerwey
In this postmodern age, anyone seeing a title like Chinese Values and
Western Values: Clash, Coexistence, or Consensus? should have the
knee-jerk reflex to ask back: Which Chinese? Which Western? The
Chinese of the Communist Party under Xi Jinping? Of Mao Zedong in
Yanan? Of the Manchu Qing or the Mongol Yuan? The West of Adolf Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, or Pope Francis? As a Sinologist, I have witnessed
many of these usually self-serving, holier than thou debates: Why did
the Chinese not develop science? Is there such a thing as civil society in
China? Is rule of law conceivable in China, or only by law?
This kind of self-serving goes both ways: over much of the last 150
years, in the face of Western power, China has constantly sought to psychologically overcome technological inferiority with a pretense to moral
superiority. But China has just as constantly sought to learn from the West,
and millions of students have gone abroad to study, as pilgrims once went
to India to learn Buddhism. If I refer to Buddhism here, it is because, next
to Western learning, it represents the other most important example of
a cultural invasion of China. Some students of the Buddhist invasion
have called it a conquest; others prefer to shift emphasis to Chinese
agency, that is, how the Chinese took Indian (or Central Asian) Buddhism and turned it into something quite thoroughly Chinese (as today
with Christianity).
To me personally, these quarrels strike me as a senseless waste of
time: from a historical point of view, both scenarios are quite obviously
true, and it is therefore of equal importance and interest to explore them
both. That is, what did Buddhism bring that China proved to need or
Telos 171 (Summer 2015): 10711
doi:10.3817/0615171107
www.telospress.com

107

108 JOHN LAGERWEY

desire, and what did Buddhism bring that China rejected or ignored? As
the same questions may be asked about Western influence today, it may
be worthwhile trying to answer them for a distant, now less controversial
past. Asking what China needed or desired that Buddhism supplied comes
down to asking what it borrowed. The list could go on for many, many
pages, both as regards material and spiritual culture. Here is one list that
concerns only Chinese religious history:
Although we have also underscored the Buddhist conquest of China, it
may be useful to summarize the multiple forms and elements of this
conquest: karma and retribution, heaven and hell, gods, scriptures,
statues, relics, monasticism, confession, vegetarianism, merit transfer,
processions, religious entertainment, preaching, singing, meditation,
devotional societies, festival days, miracle tales, regular public worship,
and a parallel economy. In some casesretribution, heaven and hell,
scriptures, confession, vegetarianism, even merit transferBuddhism
had good native foundations to build on. But even in those cases, so rich
and far-reaching is the Buddhist impact that we do best to think of Buddhism as something that happened to China: it steamrollered China, and
when China stood up again, it was a radically different place.1

A similarly long list of what China rejected or ignored could be drawn up,
but I will focus attention on a single, crucial item: in India, Buddhisms
birthplace, the Brahman or priestly caste was superior to the Kshatriya or
warrior class, and rulers belonged to the latter. A similar contrast between
political and religious power may be found in the West, as is apparent in
Christs famous advice to render unto Caesar what is Caesars and unto
God what is Gods. In China, Buddhisms adoption by many members
of the elite led to a great debate as to whether monks should bow down
before the Emperor. This was the result:
While the monks and their defenders won this critical debate in the southern dynasties, it was the solution of Faguo (fl. 396409) in the north that
was in most obvious continuity with the basic principle: the Emperor
Daowu, he said, was the living Tathgata [Thus-come-one].2

The basic principle is the Han Confucian construction of the emperor

as Son of Heaven, who affirmed this divine sonship in regular sacrifices
1. John Lagerwey, Introduction, in Early Chinese Religion II: The Period of Division (220589 AD), ed. John Lagerwey and L Pengzhi (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 46.
2. Ibid., p. 6.

HOW UNIVERSAL ARE HUMAN VALUES? 109

to Heaven begun in the year 25CE and continued right down to the year
1914. That is, this sacrifice defined what it meant to be emperor in China:
In the north, understanding the emperor as the buddha of the present age
was in strict conformity with the Han Confucian vision of the Son of
Heaven. As Li Gang says, never did or could the Confucian state accept
the idea that spiritual power was outside the purview of political power,
let alone superior to it. Reuniting China politically led immediately to
the reassertion of dynastic control of religioncontrol which should not
be referred to as civil because Chinese state religion was not civil
religion: it was just plain religion.3

As I have tried to show at length elsewhere, this meant, concretely, that

there was no churchstate division in Chinese history, because the state
was the church.4 The relevance of this short detour via cultural history to
understanding todays party-state should be immediately obvious.
What, in the West, attracted China from the mid-nineteenth century
on? Three things: a strong nation-state, science, and democracy. These
were the things the Chinese felt they lacked, and therefore desired. It
may seem, looking back, that they clearly desired the first two more than
the last, but even that is not self-evident: in 1940, Mao wrote On New
Democracy, and if he continues to enjoy a real degree of prestige in China
in spite of all we now know of the millions of deaths caused by his disastrous choices, it is most certainly because many Chinese people still feel
that he not only made China once again a respected nation but also that he
put the Chinese people in power in a way they had never been before. In
the 1960s, moreover, when many members of Western elites believed that
political without social and economic democracy was not democracy, both
Maoist China and Soviet Russia still represented to not a few Westerners
an illustration of what the West itself lacked of democracy.
All of this changed with the discovery of the truth about Mao the
Son-of-Heaven and, of course, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But
was this the triumph of liberal democracy over dictatorship or of advanced
over state capitalism? As reform and opening took off and China grew
ever richer, and when Jiang Zemin then admitted capitalists into the party,
the answers seemed clear. But then in 2008 Wall Street nearly collapsed,
and in the intervening seven years, even among Western elites, concern
never stopped growing about the widening gap between rich and poor,
3. Ibid., p. 47.
4. John Lagerwey, China: A Religious State (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 2010).

110 JOHN LAGERWEY

and the seemingly inevitable shrinking of the middle class that we had
all learned to think of as the defining feature of our Western democracies.
These concerns, surely, are not unrelated to what we mean when we
speak of Western values. Indeed, among members of the left in the West,
the sense that Xi Jinping represents a return to Maoist dictatorship has a
very strong parallel in the sense that the Republican Party represents a
return to social Darwinism. That is, there is a strong sense that what we
see today in both China and the West, starting with the United States in
its present historical phase, equally represent repudiations of democratic
values.
This, then, brings us back to the original question: are there Chinese
and Western values? My answer is a vigorous and resounding NO!
There are only human values, and human beings everywhere, with many
notable exceptions to be sure, aspire to the same things, among them those
so eloquently expressed by the American Founding Fathers:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.That
to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed,That whenever
any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers
in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety
and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and
accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed
to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of
abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a
design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is
their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for
their future security.

Yes, this is a historical document with many peculiarly eighteenth-century

cultural imprints. And, yes, the triad of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness may be usefully compared with the French Revolutions invocation of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Exploring them comparatively
would lead immediately to comparisons of Locke and Descartes and, I suspect, of the Catholic and Protestant biases of these two eighteenth-century

HOW UNIVERSAL ARE HUMAN VALUES? 111

revolutionary societies. That is, it is not difficult to illustrate that the French
system of universal health care has deep roots in the history of Catholicism, as the American struggle even today to implement such a system
has equally deep roots in the Protestant Reformation. So are we now still
talking about Western values or, as the citizens of both of these countries
continue to take for granted, are these eighteenth-century revolutionary
definitions still of universal relevance?
I personally believe that human rights are universal. I believe, moreover, that it can be demonstrated that the emergence of people powerof
democracyis a long-term trend whose roots may be traced back over
millennia. Is that not what we are saying when we evoke the beginnings
of the rule of law with Hammurabi, or celebrate the promulgation of the
Magna Carta? Chinese history, likewise, has its own deep democratic
roots. They go back to Mencius, who explained that the Heavenly Mandate would always go to the sovereign who took best care of his people.
They go back to Buddhism, which, in insisting that all people, male and
female, had the heart of a buddha and could therefore become buddhas,
introduced a notion of radical equality. The Neo-Confucianism to which
contemporary Chinese leaders are once again referring is in fact profoundly influenced by this Buddhist egalitarianism, saying that all people
have the heart of a sage and hence the potential of becoming one. So is
this Neo-Confucianism Chinese?
Calling things Chinese (or American or Western) is basically a
way to self-promote while denigrating others. It has to do with identity
politics and soft power, not with values. Values, by definition, will have
a cultural (historical) component as long as there is culture. But that only
means that the democratic, humanistic societies of the future will owe
their ever more universal understanding of their values to the historical
experience of the entire human race. We will all be indebted to each other.