Eastern Mysticism

One of the difficulties encountered when pursuing the study of Eastern Mysticism (Shenmi Xue 神秘学) is that a great majority of the information written about it comes from its detractors, not from practitioners who have long employed traditions of secrecy. One way to begin is to understand where the need for Shenmi originated. At one time, human beings enjoyed a closeness to Nature, but this started to be eroded when we invented civilisation. China was one of the first places to undergo this kind of transition. Ten to fifteen thousand years ago the people in the regions that are now China were mainly hunter gatherers. At some point agriculture was introduced and the people of the time started to grow rice, wheat and millet in the fertile region around the Yellow River. This kind of thing happened all over the world, but China was one of the first places to begin the process, along with Egypt and Mesopotamia. Agricultural surpluses became the first form of significant wealth, which was not distributed equally. This gave rise to rich and powerful people who became Wang 王 (“kings”) over everyone else. These people began to control society both through force and through subtler means such as social conditioning, myth-making and religion. They also began build the kind of monumental architecture and fortified towns and cities which are associated with civilisation. In moving from the hunter gatherer way of life to the civilised way of life people both gained something and lost something. Most people embraced or at least accepted the new civilised way of living, but a few people tried to preserve the secrets of closeness to Nature that had sustained their ancient ancestors, while re-formulating them for practical use within a civilised context. To put it another way, Mysticism is the on-going attempt to make Animism and Shamanism relevant within a civilised context. This is what we mean by the term Shenmi 神秘, which literally means “Divine Secrets”. Among those who initiated the process of moving from hunter-gatherer to civilised lifestyle in the Yellow River region were the people we now know as the Yangshao Culture 仰韶文化, which lasted roughly from about seven thousand until about five thousand years ago. In this sense it pre-dates historical records in China, and is known in concrete terms mainly from archaeology. However may aspects and consequences of the Yangshao Culture are still with us today, and developments that occurred within it were important to the subsequent development early historical dynasties such as the Xia, Shang and Zhou. The Yangshao people grew mostly millet, and also kept domesticated animals such as dogs and pigs. They still gained much of their meat from hunting, but their dietary staple, millet, came from agriculture. They developed enough agricultural wealth to allow specialist trades to start to develop within their society, that is to say people focused on things other than food production. In particular, their pottery reached a high level of sophistication despite the fact that they had not yet invented the potter’s wheel. Pottery was decorated with the kind of animal and geometric patterns that have commonly been associated with animistic cultures all over the world. Yangshao villages could be quite large, housing several hundred people. Houses were dug down into the ground and then covered with a wooden superstructure covered with wattle and mud. There is evidence of social differentiation with some individuals being more “important” than others. They also appear to have been in the process of transitioning form a matriarchal society to a patriarchal one. The earliest copper artefacts found in China were associated with a Yangsho village now called Jiangzhai 姜寨, which represents the development of metallurgical technology. The Yangshao were not yet a large and powerful unified empire like the Xia or Shang Dynasties that developed about a thousand years later, but, together with other similar cultures (like the Longshan Culture) they laid the foundations of wealth and power that would lead directly to the development of these civilisations.