Bulletin Number Five 1983

connected. It's quite natural because after all the Tao can be considered the Order o f Nature, the way in which Nature works. The Taoists were not anti-scientific. On the contrary, they were profoundly interested in knowing more about the natural world, and about what advantage could be taken o f it. So many o f their doctrines, like wu wei, for instance, are exemplified by things in the natural order. For instance, if you want to get water in a city perhaps fairly high up above the river, the way not to do it is to have a lo t o f people paddling to get the water up from the river. It's much more sensible to take the water higher up the valley and lead it downwards on a higher contour, so you get the water where you want it. Not going against the grain o f things but following the grain o f things —this is a very Taoist attitude really, and deserves to be under­ stood all over the world. Q. Is the dominating influence o f the Confucian school o f thought one o f the factors fo r science not being so developed in later centuries in China? A. Well, I don't think so. I 'm not all that anti- Confucian. The Confucian philosophy was one which had a great deal o f scepticism about the natural world. You know that phrase in the Analects, ‘there were several things on which the Master never spoke . ' One was natural phenomena, another one was feats o f strength and all that kind o f thing. O f course, if you don't want to speak about natural phenomena, you can't get much out o f Nature. But Confucianism was basically very sceptical o f all sorts o f doctrines, and to that extent, it was rather favourable for scientific investigation, I think. Q. What about the Neo-Confucianism in Sung and Ming Dynasties? A. Neo-Confucianism was very congruent w ith science. It's amazing that if you build the universe simply out o f L i on the one hand and Ch'i on the other, and if you translate L i as pattern-principle at all levels and Ch'i as matter-energy, it's almost exactly like the basic ideas we have at the present day. And o f course another thing has just come up quite recently: it might be that it was Con fucianism that accounted for the extraordinary fact that there were no Dark Ages in China. It is often contested that there were Dark Ages in Europe, especially by humanistic philosophers and historians; but where the history o f science is concerned, there really were Dark Ages between about A.D. 300 and A D . 1100. Science at any rate in Europe sank to a very low level. It was an age o f religion, so the influence o f theology was very great. 1 dare say, there was much more to it than that. There were socio-economic reasons, like the barbarian invasions which affected Rome so much and Byzantium as well. That China didn't have any Dark Ages might be due to this steady influence of Confucianism. Just recently we have been trying to find ways o f putting the Dark Ages on graph-paper. I plotted the number o f plants which were described in botanical books. It's very interesting because where in the 3rd century B.C. Theophrastus knew about 500 plants, Odo o f Meung about 1100 could only describe about 70. But as soon as the Renaissance arrived, it shot upward and the German fathers o f Botany were soon able to describe thousands o f plants. So there was a ‘bad period' in Europe whereas there was no such bad period in China. Q. What about the Ch'ingDynasty? A. We don't think really science in China ever declined. It just went on at a very slow and steady rate as it had been doing since Ch'in Shih Huang Ti or before. It was overtaken by the rise o f modem science after Galileo, but eventually towards the end o f the Ch'ing Dynasty, modem natural science has begun to be taught in China; and after that everything was straightforward except that even today there aren't enough scientists and engineers than we have. Apart from that, the standard is as good as anywhere in the world. Q. A fte r so many years o f research on traditional Chinese culture, how do you assess its present position and possible future development? A. Well, we are not China-watchers nor futurologists and so on. We are really historians o f science, technology and medicine, so what the future w ill bring us ， I simply don't know. As I said before all that is lacking in China in the present day is the number o f scientifically trained people. I have always maintained that i f the thousands and millions o f bright people in China are given adequate training and more education and so on ， that vast pool o f human talents, energy and creative ability is bound to have enormous effect on the world in the future. Q. In undertaking such a large-scale project ， you must have encountered a lot o f difficulties. A . One type o f problem would be: How to dig out the material from the Chinese texts? One is ACADEMIC/CULTURAL EVENTS 23