Dragon’s Mind: The Chinese

Strategic View continues...

INTELLECTUAL GIANTS AND WARRIOR HEROES

The public mind, in particular the Chinese public mind, may look up

to and revere intellectual giants, but like the public mind everywhere

else in the world, it really admires the action heroes, in particular those

who fight powerful villains, even more so if the fight is against fearsome

odds.

Modern manifestations are common, and one only has to look at

the popularity of the earlier Amitabh Bachchan movies in his ‘angry

young man period’ to get a good idea of what the general public loves.

In India, this is evidently an ancient phenomenon, and the popularity

of the Ramayana, and its ‘good-hero’, Prince Ramchandra or ‘Rama’ for short, has undoubtedly been a good story to tell and to enact to illiterates and simple, ordinary people in the days before books, movies, TV and the Internet. That he was a prince makes the story even better,

and it is easy to understand how and why at some stage in the history of

the story the ‘good-hero’ became the ‘God-King’, Raja Ramchandra or

Lord Rama. His benevolent and idealized rule gradually became the

exemplar of good governance, which is therefore described by the term

‘Ram-rajya’.

In this sense the historical Chinese public mind could not have

been too different. The Confucian-derived intellectual class in China,

with its roots also in Taoism, or the Tao (Dao), the gentle philosophical

path that saw goodness in nature, were undoubtedly anti-militaristic, in

spite of the military classics, which were written in the Warring States period and soon thereafter.

These Chinese intellectuals also drew inspiration from Buddhism, a very pacifist faith. But the public still looked up to the martial action heroes, some of whom were the non intellectual warlords, and others often little more than barbaric but successful brigands. This resulted in the grudging acceptance of phenomena such as the romanticization and apotheosis of a warrior hero into the Chinese ‘God of War’ in Chinese ‘traditional religion’.

To be continued...