The Spirit of the Chinese People

"Yes. He was the first professor to teach foreigners in English so he wrote this book to give his students a better understanding of what the Chinese people are like. It was published in 1915 and it talks about the soul of Chinese culture. He explains why Chinese people respect old people and food. So, for example, for Chinese people part of the social order is that you never challenge your elders. This book is all about the roots of today’s culture. He wants Westerners to understand why we are so different from them. A large part of that is because we are brought up by the seasons and nature. We don’t have such strong religious roots. We adopted Buddhism as our Chinese philosophy relatively late on into our culture. In this tiny book Hung-ming Ku wants people to understand that we are much more rooted in the power of nature like stone, plants, water, fire and gold. If you look at all the old Chinese paintings they are not about heaven and royalty like many of those in the West. We are much more focused on nature, the seasons, animals, birds and water. You will see those things in many of the ink and silk old paintings. I must have given 50 or 60 copies of this book away to all my Western friends who want to understand more about Chinese people. I explain to them that understanding the Chinese is just like how you would try to understand a tree. It is not just the leaves and the branches – you have to understand the roots as well. We are like plants: you need to understand our environment to understand our culture."