Читать книгу A Chinese cookbook for happiness and success - Nadine Koerner - Страница 10

The occupation with happiness in China has a long history and tradition, reaching more than 2300 years back to the Warring States Period from 475 to 221 BC. During that time a man named Mencius laid unprecedented emphasis on human nature and the role of the mind in the quest for happiness.^[37] He was born about 190 years after Confucius during the same era as the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi and the Greek philosopher Plato. Mencius and Confucius shared many characteristics as they were both born in the area of modern Shandong Province, were teachers by profession and they had traveled extensively to provide philosophical and political counsel to various rulers during a very politically tense period. Confucian philosophy is wordy and has been the most powerful influence shaping the Chinese culture and the conceptions of Chinese people for more than 2000 years. According to Confucius’ observations and teachings, happiness could be achieved through knowledge, benevolence and harmony of the group. Mencius has been called by some Chinese scholars the pioneer of positive psychology, because The Book of Mencius provides lengthy debates on happiness, in which he claims that within people lie the ‘sprouts of virtue’, and if people nourish these ‘sprouts’ of identification and sympathy and extend such feelings to broader social and political relationships, they would be filled with a flourishing sense of irrepressible and enthralling joy. Mencius believed that a person had a “lesser self”, the physiological self, and a “greater self”, the moral self, and he was convinced that the mind played a mediating role between those two. Personal fulfillment and happiness would come from getting the priorities right between these two.^[38]

Another early piece of work in history devoted to happiness is said to be from Zhuangzi, a Chinese philosopher, who was born about 2,300 years ago. He wrote an essay with the title “Ultimate Happiness,” which is now a chapter of the book named Zhuangzi, after the author. One of his most famous thoughts might be the following: “Instead of running around pointing fingers, why not laugh? Better than laughing why not go along with things? Then you can experience the mysterious oneness of the ‘Dao’. Whereas Confucius placed emphasis on human relationships, Mencius on rationality, Zhuangzhi, and Daoists in general, rejoice in nature, and particularly the mysterious ‘Dao’, which is manifested through our natural surroundings. For Mencius, Buddha and Aristotle, the role of the mind is critical in the quest for happiness. Zhuangzhi and other Daoists, on the other hand, argue that thinking too much is not desirable as it would lead us away from the intuitive Dao. For Zhuangzi, ultimate happiness is wuwei, the skill of doing nothing against the ‘Dao’, which can be translated as “way”. “Dao”, is the source of a much deeper form of happiness, which only needs to be harnessed, as we are in the midst of nature and therefore part of the Dao itself. This is done through the practice of wuwei, which is the skill of “going along with things” (see chapter 4.2)^[39]

But despite this long history of Chinese occupation with happiness, research studies on Chinese happiness are not sufficient in terms of extent and depth. The first studies on happiness reach back to 2006 and most recent studies on happiness in China are based on the data collected by academic institutions, for example the China Social Sciences Academy, which are in general not available to the public. Also, their validation is often hard to assess. Relevant literature can be summarized as either theoretical studies or empirical analysis. Theoretical studies include Guangqiang Tian and Liyan Yang’s attempt to introduce the mainstream economic approaches into happiness research. By constructing a standard theoretical model, they demonstrated the existence of a critical income level. Empirical analysis began to appear in recent years, mostly after 2006, and the number is still very small, including Chuliang Luo’s study from 2006, who used data from China’s Social Sciences Academy to detect the subjective well-being in urban and rural residents, and Daiyan Peng and Baoxin Wu’s study in 2008 about the relationship between income gap and farmers life satisfaction in rural Hebei and Hubei provinces.