Chinese virtue

Chapter 50 Not Paying Attention to the Basics
When building a house, the part that the Chinese pay the least attention to is the foundation of the house.They put the least amount of effort into the foundation, which can be said to be a common fault in their construction methods.Millions of Chinese people have never seen what a mountain looks like in their lifetime, including small hills.There are no mountains where they live, so it is expensive for them to use stones to build houses, and they don't even know that stones can be used as building materials.Brick is the best building material besides stone.But the cost of burning bricks is also very high, and Chinese bricks will definitely not burn well.Put the soft soil into the brick mold, smooth the surface, and then send it into the brick kiln when it is dry enough to move.

Because it has not been pressed, and it is only roughly fired, most of the final fired bricks are full of holes, just like a sponge, which is very easy to seep water.If there is too much sodium carbonate in the soil (as is the case with most prairie soils), the sodium carbonate will gradually seep into the interior of the brick through the pores, so that it will spread to the roof and foundation, and the whole will form a cheese-like thing and withstand The gnawing of mice.Sometimes a lot of straw, thin wood chips and other things are put on the foundation to reduce damage, but this is just a cover and cannot prevent rapid erosion at all.Over the course of a few years, this erosion would have required the owner to renovate the house, while the upper half of the house was still intact.

Regardless of the defects of the brick itself, almost all Chinese builders have these two problems: the foundation is dug too shallow, and the amount of lime is too little.We often see a wall built almost on a flat base, and with little lime.And if a foreign contractor had done the work, they would have dug a trench, about five feet deep, and filled it with tons of lime to lay the foundation.The main issue they consider is the firmness of the building. In contrast to Chinese builders, their first consideration is the issue of materials.If one wants to see more of the buildings with obvious Chinese flaws, one only needs to walk around the perimeter of Beijing's Forbidden City.The only solid Chinese building we can think of is probably a jewelry pawn shop, because safety is the number one priority for them.

The difficulty that China encounters in protecting ancient buildings comes largely from this kind of construction method in China.This is very similar to the situation in China in terms of education. The Chinese obviously lack mathematics education.They never set a simple hypothesis, and then list the evidence related to it. Each evidence is obviously closely connected with the previous evidence, so that each expression conforms to strict logic.Logic should have been a very important part of China's imperial examination system, but the current situation is disappointing. I really don't know what the situation is like for the scholars or candidates produced under the current imperial examination system.It is hard to imagine for Chinese scholars to clearly express the law of identity, contradiction and excluded middle.But what is certain is that Chinese people agree with propositions such as "A is A" and "A is not non-A", which already shows that Chinese people's beliefs in certain fields are not correct.

For some contradictory beliefs, the Chinese often combine them skillfully. This is not because they resist the common principles of human thought, but because there are incorrect counter-enlightenment thoughts in their brains.The Chinese have never been able to see the true face of contradictions.

According to our standards, the Chinese people lack precision in their nature, and they do not analyze other things in terms of verified facts.How they came to their conclusions is often difficult to figure out, and sometimes, even if we do, we cannot understand the process.There are some things that in our opinion should require the most rigorous argumentation, but in the Chinese view, these things are natural.They state their conclusions, which are not deduced, and appear very authoritarian.

In terms of evidence, a theory of evidence that can maintain self-sufficiency has appeared in modern jurisprudence, and this theory has been continuously consolidated in court practice.In this theory, evidence must be direct and definite, and based on facts. This evidence may or may not be relevant to the trial, and may or may not be admitted by the court.It must be noted that every word here has been fixed because of its connotation and has become a term.In modern courtrooms, the debate over whether evidence should be admitted has become a game of chess.Although it is impossible to predict how every move in chess will be made, every move must be strictly followed by the rules. No matter what the judge thinks, he cannot ignore these rules and act recklessly.On the other hand, looking at the court trials in China, although the judges sometimes want to make some achievements to make themselves appear fair and honest, even if all the evidence is accepted, there are still some evidences that are outside the trial and should have been accepted. Extensive collection of secondary evidence was simply ignored, and no one even thought to collect it.If the case is ultimately decided on something other than some direct, conclusive evidence, then the trial is meaningless and utterly irrational to begin with.But in China, this is not a big deal, and there is no need to be surprised by it.

About China's trial, probably every reader can find many facts to prove its fairness, and what I want to explain here is that I don't want to use the difficulty of finding a fair judge and trial to completely negate the Chinese trial, but from Judging from the facts of most of the trials, its fairness is open to question.I won't say much about this issue for the time being. I just want to compare Chinese trials with Western trials.If a British judge had the opportunity to examine the records of a Chinese trial, no matter how impartial the Chinese judge was, the British judge would always find that almost everything in the record was an attack on others.

In Chinese history, it can also be clearly seen that the Chinese people do not pay attention to the foundation.When they looked at their own prehistoric history, they did not objectively regard it as an indefinable and indefinable history.For prehistoric history, it is impossible to draw a definite conclusion, but the Chinese are on the contrary. Here is a statement by the British sinologist Mr. Mei Huili: "Before the Han Dynasty, ancient Chinese literati were keen to imagine the world of the cumbersome rulers. In their eyes, since the person who absorbed the essence of heaven and earth and conquered the whole of China appeared, he could never return to that glorious period " Then he said: "For the legends handed down from prehistoric history and hereditary system, Chinese scholars never discuss their reliability, but only consider the reliability of the narratives that closely follow the glorious age of Yao, Shun and Yu in the mythological period, and then Get it fixed. Even so, European critics will propose stricter standards. But if you want to change this perception in China, you must have more reliable evidence."

There is no need to focus on how big the differences between China and the West are when it comes to accuracy. Let me first tell the story of a farmer in a development zone.The farmer boasted vigorously of how thick the fog in his hometown was, and gave an example to prove it.He invited a group of people to build a granary for himself, and it happened to be foggy at the time, and the men worked in the thick fog, and finally found that the granary had been built to a height of forty feet.This incident is used as a metaphor. The Chinese are also trapped in the fog of ancient times, and have been trapped for thousands of years. They have never realized the source of history, nor have they realized the fog of mythology.A Chinese saying can be quoted here: "It is better to have no books than to believe in books."

At this time, if we focus on the foundation of the three major religions in China, we can clearly see how reasonable the Chinese view of history is.Both Taoism and Buddhism have their own histories, and their histories are only known to a few top-notch people within them.Those Taoist priests or monks who are parasites often don't understand or care about the history of their religion at all.If you want to ask a Taoist priest about the meaning of a difficult sentence in the Tao Te Ching, it is useless to ask, because they can't read any chapter in it. If they knew this before, they wouldn't ask such a stupid question problem.How many years did the Buddha live, 600 years or 200 years, or never appeared?Regarding this question, what views did the believers before the advent of Christianity hold?If you do some research, you will be surprised to find that with regard to these issues of historical origin, ordinary believers believe that such issues do not exist at all, and even if they exist, they should not be seriously studied, although these issues are very important and should even be ranked first. prior to the understanding of the doctrine.

There are countless secret sects in China, which have caused great trauma to China, and when investigating the history of these sects, we will also encounter the problems mentioned above.The believers of those sects don't know when their own sects appeared, who the founders are, and what the purpose of the establishment is, and they don't care at all.You can make an analogy like this: an Englishman walks into an umbrella shop just because he needs a new umbrella, but you have to ask him when the umbrella was invented and when it became popular, which is the same as asking a Chinese what he admires The origin of the gods is the same.People treat charity in the same way. If a person needs to do good deeds, he will provide sponsorship when there are charitable organizations that can provide a way for his charity, because this way and other ways are of great significance to his deeds of charity. are exactly the same.No matter what kind of god it is, as long as it benefits a certain group of people in some way, then this group of people will believe in this god.

We often see academic discussions on the distribution of the number of Buddhists and Taoists in China.

In fact, in our eyes, such questions are like comparing the number of people in the United Kingdom who use tenpence nail clippers or the number of people who eat kidney beans. It does not make any sense at all.Just as a man may use tenpence nail clippers if he can afford them, so he may eat kidney beans if he can afford them.Such a metaphor is very suitable for these two major religions in China.As long as a person can afford it, he can invite monks to hold religious ceremonies for him, and he becomes a Buddhist;In the eyes of Chinese people, it doesn't matter who you invite.As long as he has the ability, he can invite both sides at the same time, and when he becomes a Buddhist, he is also a Taoist.Many books have suggested that being completely indifferent to the existence of gods is actually more terrible than complete atheism, and this situation is true.It can be found in China that there are many opposing beliefs, and polytheism and atheism are just one of them.Many literati see this as normal, but fail to recognize the contradiction.The saddest thing about Chinese thinking is that they don't care about the spirit at all.The fusion of polytheism and atheism shows that they have agreed with the view that the body does not need a soul, the soul does not need a spirit, the spirit does not need vitality, the universe does not need an origin, and the world does not need God.

(End of this chapter)