PAPER 79
ANDITE EXPANSION IN THE ORIENT
79:0.1 ASIA is the homeland of the human race. It
was on a southern peninsula of this continent that Andon and Fonta were born;
in the highlands of what is now Afghanistan, their descendant Badonan founded
a primitive center of culture that persisted for over one-half million years.
Here at this eastern focus of the human race the Sangik peoples differentiated
from the Andonic stock, and Asia was their first home, their first hunting
ground, their first battlefield. Southwestern Asia witnessed the successive
civilizations of Dalamatians, Nodites, Adamites, and Andites, and from these
regions the potentials of modern civilization spread to the world.
1. THE ANDITES OF TURKESTAN
79:1.1 For over twenty-five thousand years, on down
to nearly 2000 B.C., the heart of Eurasia was predominantly, though
diminishingly, Andite. In the lowlands of Turkestan the Andites made the
westward turning around the inland lakes into Europe, while from the highlands
of this region they infiltrated eastward. Eastern Turkestan (Sinkiang) and, to
a lesser extent, Tibet were the ancient gateways through which these peoples
of Mesopotamia penetrated the mountains to the northern lands of the yellow
men. The Andite infiltration of India proceeded from the Turkestan highlands
into the Punjab and from the Iranian grazing lands through Baluchistan. These
earlier migrations were in no sense conquests; they were, rather, the
continual drifting of the Andite tribes into western India and China.
79:1.2 For almost fifteen thousand years centers of
mixed Andite culture persisted in the basin of the Tarim River in Sinkiang and
to the south in the highland regions of Tibet, where the Andites and Andonites
had extensively mingled. The Tarim valley was the easternmost outpost of the
true Andite culture. Here they built their settlements and entered into trade
relations with the progressive Chinese to the east and with the Andonites to
the north. In those days the Tarim region was a fertile land; the rainfall was
plentiful. To the east the Gobi was an open grassland where the herders were
gradually turning to agriculture. This civilization perished when the rain
winds shifted to the southeast, but in its day it rivaled Mesopotamia itself.
79:1.3 By 8000 B.C. the slowly increasing aridity of
the highland regions of central Asia began to drive the Andites to the river
bottoms and the seashores. This increasing drought not only drove them to the
valleys of the Nile, Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow rivers, but it produced a
new development in Andite civilization. A new class of men, the traders, began
to appear in large numbers.
79:1.4 When climatic conditions made hunting
unprofitable for the migrating Andites, they did not follow the evolutionary
course of the older races by becoming herders. Commerce and urban life made
their appearance. From Egypt through Mesopotamia and Turkestan to the rivers
of China and India, the more highly civilized tribes began to assemble in
cities devoted to manufacture and trade. Adonia became the central Asian
commercial metropolis, being located near the present city of Ashkhabad.
Commerce in stone, metal, wood, and pottery was accelerated on both land and
water.
79:1.5 But ever-increasing drought gradually brought
about the great Andite exodus from the lands south and east of the Caspian
Sea. The tide of migration began to veer from northward to southward, and the
Babylonian cavalrymen began to push into Mesopotamia.
79:1.6 Increasing aridity in central Asia further
operated to reduce population and to render these people less warlike; and
when the diminishing rainfall to the north forced the nomadic Andonites
southward, there was a tremendous exodus of Andites from Turkestan. This is
the terminal movement of the so-called Aryans into the Levant and India. It
culminated that long dispersal of the mixed descendants of Adam during which
every Asiatic and most of the island peoples of the Pacific were to some
extent improved by these superior races.
79:1.7 Thus, while they dispersed over the Eastern
Hemisphere, the Andites were dispossessed of their homelands in Mesopotamia
and Turkestan, for it was this extensive southward movement of Andonites that
diluted the Andites in central Asia nearly to the vanishing point.
79:1.8 But even in the twentieth century after
Christ there are traces of Andite blood among the Turanian and Tibetan
peoples, as is witnessed by the blond types occasionally found in these
regions. The early Chinese annals record the presence of the red-haired nomads
to the north of the peaceful settlements of the Yellow River, and there still
remain paintings which faithfully record the presence of both the blond-Andite
and the brunet-Mongolian types in the Tarim basin of long ago.
79:1.9 The last great manifestation of the submerged
military genius of the central Asiatic Andites was in A.D. 1200, when the
Mongols under Genghis Khan began the conquest of the greater portion of the
Asiatic continent. And like the Andites of old, these warriors proclaimed the
existence of "one God in heaven." The early breakup of their empire long
delayed cultural intercourse between Occident and Orient and greatly
handicapped the growth of the monotheistic concept in Asia.
2. THE ANDITE CONQUEST OF INDIA
79:2.1 India is the only locality where all the
Urantia races were blended, the Andite invasion adding the last stock. In the
highlands northwest of India the Sangik races came into existence, and without
exception members of each penetrated the subcontinent of India in their early
days, leaving behind them the most heterogeneous race mixture ever to exist on
Urantia. Ancient India acted as a catch basin for the migrating races. The
base of the peninsula was formerly somewhat narrower than now, much of the
deltas of the Ganges and Indus being the work of the last fifty thousand
years.
79:2.2 The earliest race mixtures in India were a
blending of the migrating red and yellow races with the aboriginal Andonites.
This group was later weakened by absorbing the greater portion of the extinct
eastern green peoples as well as large numbers of the orange race, was
slightly improved through limited admixture with the blue man, but suffered
exceedingly through assimilation of large numbers of the indigo race. But the
so-called aborigines of India are hardly representative of these early people;
they are rather the most inferior southern and eastern fringe, which was never
fully absorbed by either the early Andites or their later appearing Aryan
cousins.
79:2.3 By 20,000 B.C. the population of western
India had already become tinged with the Adamic blood, and never in the
history of Urantia did any one people combine so many different races. But it
was unfortunate that the secondary Sangik strains predominated, and it was a
real calamity that both the blue and the red man were so largely missing from
this racial melting pot of long ago; more of the primary Sangik strains would
have contributed very much toward the enhancement of what might have been an
even greater civilization. As it developed, the red man was destroying himself
in the Americas, the blue man was disporting himself in Europe, and the early
descendants of Adam (and most of the later ones) exhibited little desire to
admix with the darker colored peoples, whether in India, Africa, or elsewhere.
79:2.4 About 15,000 B.C. increasing population
pressure throughout Turkestan and Iran occasioned the first really extensive
Andite movement toward India. For over fifteen centuries these superior
peoples poured in through the highlands of Baluchistan, spreading out over the
valleys of the Indus and Ganges and slowly moving southward into the Deccan.
This Andite pressure from the northwest drove many of the southern and eastern
inferiors into Burma and southern China but not sufficiently to save the
invaders from racial obliteration.
79:2.5 The failure of India to achieve the hegemony
of Eurasia was largely a matter of topography; population pressure from the
north only crowded the majority of the people southward into the decreasing
territory of the Deccan, surrounded on all sides by the sea. Had there been
adjacent lands for emigration, then would the inferiors have been crowded out
in all directions, and the superior stocks would have achieved a higher
civilization.
79:2.6 As it was, these earlier Andite conquerors
made a desperate attempt to preserve their identity and stem the tide of
racial engulfment by the establishment of rigid restrictions regarding
intermarriage. Nonetheless, the Andites had become submerged by 10,000 B.C.,
but the whole mass of the people had been markedly improved by this
absorption.
79:2.7 Race mixture is always advantageous in that
it favors versatility of culture and makes for a progressive civilization, but
if the inferior elements of racial stocks predominate, such achievements will
be short-lived. A polyglot culture can be preserved only if the superior
stocks reproduce themselves in a safe margin over the inferior. Unrestrained
multiplication of inferiors, with decreasing reproduction of superiors, is
unfailingly suicidal of cultural civilization.
79:2.8 Had the Andite conquerors been in numbers
three times what they were, or had they driven out or destroyed the least
desirable third of the mixed orange-green-indigo inhabitants, then would India
have become one of the world's leading centers of cultural civilization and
undoubtedly would have attracted more of the later waves of Mesopotamians that
flowed into Turkestan and thence northward to Europe.
3. DRAVIDIAN INDIA
79:3.1 The blending of the Andite conquerors of
India with the native stock eventually resulted in that mixed people which has
been called Dravidian. The earlier and purer Dravidians possessed a great
capacity for cultural achievement, which was continuously weakened as their
Andite inheritance became progressively attenuated. And this is what doomed
the budding civilization of India almost twelve thousand years ago. But the
infusion of even this small amount of the blood of Adam produced a marked
acceleration in social development. This composite stock immediately produced
the most versatile civilization then on earth.
79:3.2 Not long after conquering India, the
Dravidian Andites lost their racial and cultural contact with Mesopotamia, but
the later opening up of the sea lanes and the caravan routes re-established
these connections; and at no time within the last ten thousand years has India
ever been entirely out of touch with Mesopotamia on the west and China to the
east, although the mountain barriers greatly favored western
intercourse.
79:3.3 The superior culture and religious leanings
of the peoples of India date from the early times of Dravidian domination and
are due, in part, to the fact that so many of the Sethite priesthood entered
India, both in the earlier Andite and in the later Aryan invasions. The thread
of monotheism running through the religious history of India thus stems from
the teachings of the Adamites in the second garden.
79:3.4 As early as 16,000 B.C. a company of one
hundred Sethite priests entered India and very nearly achieved the religious
conquest of the western half of that polyglot people. But their religion did
not persist. Within five thousand years their doctrines of the Paradise
Trinity had degenerated into the triune symbol of the fire god.
79:3.5 But for more than seven thousand years, down
to the end of the Andite migrations, the religious status of the inhabitants
of India was far above that of the world at large. During these times India
bid fair to produce the leading cultural, religious, philosophic, and
commerical civilization of the world. And but for the complete submergence of
the Andites by the peoples of the south, this destiny would probably have been
realized.
79:3.6 The Dravidian centers of culture were located
in the river valleys, principally of the Indus and Ganges, and in the Deccan
along the three great rivers flowing through the Eastern Ghats to the sea. The
settlements along the seacoast of the Western Ghats owed their prominence to
maritime relationships with Sumeria.
79:3.7 The Dravidians were among the earliest
peoples to build cities and to engage in an extensive export and import
business, both by land and sea. By 7000 B.C. camel trains were making regular
trips to distant Mesopotamia; Dravidian shipping was pushing coastwise across
the Arabian Sea to the Sumerian cities of the Persian Gulf and was venturing
on the waters of the Bay of Bengal as far as the East Indies. An alphabet,
together with the art of writing, was imported from Sumeria by these seafarers
and merchants.
79:3.8 These commercial relationships greatly
contributed to the further diversification of a cosmopolitan culture,
resulting in the early appearance of many of the refinements and even luxuries
of urban life. When the later appearing Aryans entered India, they did not
recognize in the Dravidians their Andite cousins submerged in the Sangik
races, but they did find a well-advanced civilization. Despite biologic
limitations, the Dravidians founded a superior civilization. It was well
diffused throughout all India and has survived on down to modern times in the
Deccan.
4. THE ARYAN INVASION OF INDIA
79:4.1 The second Andite penetration of India was
the Aryan invasion during a period of almost five hundred years in the middle
of the third millennium before Christ. This migration marked the terminal
exodus of the Andites from their homelands in Turkestan.
79:4.2 The early Aryan centers were scattered over
the northern half of India, notably in the northwest. These invaders never
completed the conquest of the country and subsequently met their undoing in
this neglect since their lesser numbers made them vulnerable to absorption by
the Dravidians of the south, who subsequently overran the entire peninsula
except the Himalayan provinces.
79:4.3 The Aryans made very little racial impression
on India except in the northern provinces. In the Deccan their influence was
cultural and religious more than racial. The greater persistence of the
so-called Aryan blood in northern India is not only due to their presence in
these regions in greater numbers but also because they were reinforced by
later conquerors, traders, and missionaries. Right on down to the first
century before Christ there was a continuous infiltration of Aryan blood into
the Punjab, the last influx being attendant upon the campaigns of the
Hellenistic peoples.
79:4.4 On the Gangetic plain Aryan and Dravidian
eventually mingled to produce a high culture, and this center was later
reinforced by contributions from the northeast, coming from China.
79:4.5 In India many types of social organizations
flourished from time to time, from the semidemocratic systems of the Aryans to
despotic and monarchial forms of government. But the most characteristic
feature of society was the persistence of the great social castes that were
instituted by the Aryans in an effort to perpetuate racial identity. This
elaborate caste system has been preserved on down to the present
time.
79:4.6 Of the four great castes, all but the first
were established in the futile effort to prevent racial amalgamation of the
Aryan conquerors with their inferior subjects. But the premier caste, the
teacher-priests, stems from the Sethites; the Brahmans of the twentieth
century after Christ are the lineal cultural descendants of the priests of the
second garden, albeit their teachings differ greatly from those of their
illustrious predecessors.
79:4.7 When the Aryans entered India, they brought
with them their concepts of Deity as they had been preserved in the lingering
traditions of the religion of the second garden. But the Brahman priests were
never able to withstand the pagan momentum built up by the sudden contact with
the inferior religions of the Deccan after the racial obliteration of the
Aryans. Thus the vast majority of the population fell into the bondage of the
enslaving superstitions of inferior religions; and so it was that India failed
to produce the high civilization which had been foreshadowed in earlier
times.
79:4.8 The spiritual awakening of the sixth century
before Christ did not persist in India, having died out even before the
Mohammedan invasion. But someday a greater Gautama may arise to lead all India
in the search for the living God, and then the world will observe the fruition
of the cultural potentialities of a versatile people so long comatose under
the benumbing influence of an unprogressing spiritual vision.
79:4.9 Culture does rest on a biologic foundation,
but caste alone could not perpetuate the Aryan culture, for religion, true
religion, is the indispensable source of that higher energy which drives men
to establish a superior civilization based on human brotherhood.
5. RED MAN AND YELLOW MAN
79:5.1 While the story of India is that of Andite
conquest and eventual submergence in the older evolutionary peoples, the
narrative of eastern Asia is more properly that of the primary Sangiks,
particularly the red man and the yellow man. These two races largely escaped
that admixture with the debased Neanderthal strain which so greatly retarded
the blue man in Europe, thus preserving the superior potential of the primary
Sangik type.
79:5.2 While the early Neanderthalers were spread
out over the entire breadth of Eurasia, the eastern wing was the more
contaminated with debased animal strains. These subhuman types were pushed
south by the fifth glacier, the same ice sheet which so long blocked Sangik
migration into eastern Asia. And when the red man moved northeast around the
highlands of India, he found northeastern Asia free from these subhuman types.
The tribal organization of the red races was formed earlier than that of any
other peoples, and they were the first to migrate from the central Asian focus
of the Sangiks. The inferior Neanderthal strains were destroyed or driven off
the mainland by the later migrating yellow tribes. But the red man had reigned
supreme in eastern Asia for almost one hundred thousand years before the
yellow tribes arrived.
79:5.3 More than three hundred thousand years ago
the main body of the yellow race entered China from the south as coastwise
migrants. Each millennium they penetrated farther and farther inland, but they
did not make contact with their migrating Tibetan brethren until comparatively
recent times.
79:5.4 Growing population pressure caused the
northward-moving yellow race to begin to push into the hunting grounds of the
red man. This encroachment, coupled with natural racial antagonism, culminated
in increasing hostilities, and thus began the crucial struggle for the fertile
lands of farther Asia.
79:5.5 The story of this agelong contest between the
red and yellow races is an epic of Urantia history. For over two hundred
thousand years these two superior races waged bitter and unremitting warfare.
In the earlier struggles the red men were generally successful, their raiding
parties spreading havoc among the yellow settlements. But the yellow man was
an apt pupil in the art of warfare, and he early manifested a marked ability
to live peaceably with his compatriots; the Chinese were the first to learn
that in union there is strength. The red tribes continued their internecine
conflicts, and presently they began to suffer repeated defeats at the
aggressive hands of the relentless Chinese, who continued their inexorable
march northward.
79:5.6 One hundred thousand years ago the decimated
tribes of the red race were fighting with their backs to the retreating ice of
the last glacier, and when the land passage to the west, over the Bering
isthmus, became passable, these tribes were not slow in forsaking the
inhospitable shores of the Asiatic continent. It is eighty-five thousand years
since the last of the pure red men departed from Asia, but the long struggle
left its genetic imprint upon the victorious yellow race. The northern Chinese
peoples, together with the Andonite Siberians, assimilated much of the red
stock and were in considerable measure benefited thereby.
79:5.7 The North American Indians never came in
contact with even the Andite offspring of Adam and Eve, having been
dispossessed of their Asiatic homelands some fifty thousand years before the
coming of Adam. During the age of Andite migrations the pure red strains were
spreading out over North America as nomadic tribes, hunters who practiced
agriculture to a small extent. These races and cultural groups remained almost
completely isolated from the remainder of the world from their arrival in the
Americas down to the end of the first millennium of the Christian era, when
they were discovered by the white races of Europe. Up to that time the Eskimos
were the nearest to white men the northern tribes of red men had ever
seen.
79:5.8 The red and the yellow races are the only
human stocks that ever achieved a high degree of civilization apart from the
influences of the Andites. The oldest Amerindian culture was the Onamonalonton
center in California, but this had long since vanished by 35,000 B.C. In
Mexico, Central America, and in the mountains of South America the later and
more enduring civilizations were founded by a race predominantly red but
containing a considerable admixture of the yellow, orange, and
blue.
79:5.9 These civilizations were evolutionary
products of the Sangiks, notwithstanding that traces of Andite blood reached
Peru. Excepting the Eskimos in North America and a few Polynesian Andites in
South America, the peoples of the Western Hemisphere had no contact with the
rest of the world until the end of the first millennium after Christ. In the
original Melchizedek plan for the improvement of the Urantia races it had been
stipulated that one million of the pure-line descendants of Adam should go to
upstep the red men of the Americas.
6. DAWN OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION
79:6.1 Sometime after driving the red man across to
North America, the expanding Chinese cleared the Andonites from the river
valleys of eastern Asia, pushing them north into Siberia and west into
Turkestan, where they were soon to come in contact with the superior culture
of the Andites.
79:6.2 In Burma and the peninsula of Indo-China the
cultures of India and China mixed and blended to produce the successive
civilizations of those regions. Here the vanished green race has persisted in
larger proportion than anywhere else in the world.
79:6.3 Many different races occupied the islands of
the Pacific. In general, the southern and then more extensive islands were
occupied by peoples carrying a heavy percentage of green and indigo blood. The
northern islands were held by Andonites and, later on, by races embracing
large proportions of the yellow and red stocks. The ancestors of the Japanese
people were not driven off the mainland until 12,000 B.C., when they were
dislodged by a powerful southern-coastwise thrust of the northern Chinese
tribes. Their final exodus was not so much due to population pressure as to
the initiative of a chieftain whom they came to regard as a divine
personage.
79:6.4 Like the peoples of India and the Levant,
victorious tribes of the yellow man established their earliest centers along
the coast and up the rivers. The coastal settlements fared poorly in later
years as the increasing floods and the shifting courses of the rivers made the
lowland cities untenable.
79:6.5 Twenty thousand years ago the ancestors of
the Chinese had built up a dozen strong centers of primitive culture and
learning, especially along the Yellow River and the Yangtze. And now these
centers began to be reinforced by the arrival of a steady stream of superior
blended peoples from Sinkiang and Tibet. The migration from Tibet to the
Yangtze valley was not so extensive as in the north, neither were the Tibetan
centers so advanced as those of the Tarim basin. But both movements carried a
certain amount of Andite blood eastward to the river settlements.
79:6.6 The superiority of the ancient yellow race
was due to four great factors:
79:6.7 1. Genetic. Unlike their blue cousins
in Europe, both the red and yellow races had largely escaped mixture with
debased human stocks. The northern Chinese, already strengthened by small
amounts of the superior red and Andonic strains, were soon to benefit by a
considerable influx of Andite blood. The southern Chinese did not fare so well
in this regard, and they had long suffered from absorption of the green race,
while later on they were to be further weakened by the infiltration of the
swarms of inferior peoples crowded out of India by the Dravidian-Andite
invasion. And today in China there is a definite difference between the
northern and southern races.
79:6.8 2. Social. The yellow race early
learned the value of peace among themselves. Their internal peaceableness so
contributed to population increase as to insure the spread of their
civilization among many millions. From 25,000 to 5000 B.C. the highest mass
civilization on Urantia was in central and northern China. The yellow man was
first to achieve a racial solidarity -- the first to attain a large-scale
cultural, social, and political civilization.
79:6.9 The Chinese of 15,000 B.C. were aggressive
militarists; they had not been weakened by an overreverence for the past, and
numbering less than twelve million, they formed a compact body speaking a
common language. During this age they built up a real nation, much more united
and homogeneous than their political unions of historic times.
79:6.10 3. Spiritual. During the age of
Andite migrations the Chinese were among the more spiritual peoples of earth.
Long adherence to the worship of the One Truth proclaimed by Singlangton kept
them ahead of most of the other races. The stimulus of a progressive and
advanced religion is often a decisive factor in cultural development; as India
languished, so China forged ahead under the invigorating stimulus of a
religion in which truth was enshrined as the supreme Deity.
79:6.11 This worship of truth was provocative of
research and fearless exploration of the laws of nature and the potentials of
mankind. The Chinese of even six thousand years ago were still keen students
and aggressive in their pursuit of truth.
79:6.12 4. Geographic. China is protected by
the mountains to the west and the Pacific to the east. Only in the north is
the way open to attack, and from the days of the red man to the coming of the
later descendants of the Andites, the north was not occupied by any aggressive
race.
79:6.13 And but for the mountain barriers and the
later decline in spiritual culture, the yellow race undoubtedly would have
attracted to itself the larger part of the Andite migrations from Turkestan
and unquestionably would have quickly dominated world civilization.
7. THE ANDITES ENTER CHINA
79:7.1 About fifteen thousand years ago the Andites,
in considerable numbers, were traversing the pass of Ti Tao and spreading out
over the upper valley of the Yellow River among the Chinese settlements of
Kansu. Presently they penetrated eastward to Honan, where the most progressive
settlements were situated. This infiltration from the west was about half
Andonite and half Andite.
79:7.2 The northern centers of culture along the
Yellow River had always been more progressive than the southern settlements on
the Yangtze. Within a few thousand years after the arrival of even the small
numbers of these superior mortals, the settlements along the Yellow River had
forged ahead of the Yangtze villages and had achieved an advanced position
over their brethren in the south which has ever since been maintained.
79:7.3 It was not that there were so many of the
Andites, nor that their culture was so superior, but amalgamation with them
produced a more versatile stock. The northern Chinese received just enough of
the Andite strain to mildly stimulate their innately able minds but not enough
to fire them with the restless, exploratory curiosity so characteristic of the
northern white races. This more limited infusion of Andite inheritance was
less disturbing to the innate stability of the Sangik type.
79:7.4 The later waves of Andites brought with them
certain of the cultural advances of Mesopotamia; this is especially true of
the last waves of migration from the west. They greatly improved the economic
and educational practices of the northern Chinese; and while their influence
upon the religious culture of the yellow race was short-lived, their later
descendants contributed much to a subsequent spiritual awakening. But the
Andite traditions of the beauty of Eden and Dalamatia did influence Chinese
traditions; early Chinese legends place "the land of the gods" in the
west.
79:7.5 The Chinese people did not begin to build
cities and engage in manufacture until after 10,000 B.C., subsequent to the
climatic changes in Turkestan and the arrival of the later Andite immigrants.
The infusion of this new blood did not add so much to the civilization of the
yellow man as it stimulated the further and rapid development of the latent
tendencies of the superior Chinese stocks. From Honan to Shensi the potentials
of an advanced civilization were coming to fruit. Metalworking and all the
arts of manufacture date from these days.
79:7.6 The similarities between certain of the early
Chinese and Mesopotamian methods of time reckoning, astronomy, and
governmental administration were due to the commercial relationships between
these two remotely situated centers. Chinese merchants traveled the overland
routes through Turkestan to Mesopotamia even in the days of the Sumerians. Nor
was this exchange one-sided -- the valley of the Euphrates benefited
considerably thereby, as did the peoples of the Gangetic plain. But the
climatic changes and the nomadic invasions of the third millennium before
Christ greatly reduced the volume of trade passing over the caravan trails of
central Asia.
8. LATER CHINESE CIVILIZATION
79:8.1 While the red man suffered from too much
warfare, it is not altogether amiss to say that the development of statehood
among the Chinese was delayed by the thoroughness of their conquest of Asia.
They had a great potential of racial solidarity, but it failed properly to
develop because the continuous driving stimulus of the ever-present danger of
external aggression was lacking.
79:8.2 With the completion of the conquest of
eastern Asia the ancient military state gradually disintegrated -- past wars
were forgotten. Of the epic struggle with the red race there persisted only
the hazy tradition of an ancient contest with the archer peoples. The Chinese
early turned to agricultural pursuits, which contributed further to their
pacific tendencies, while a population well below the land-man ratio for
agriculture still further contributed to the growing peacefulness of the
country.
79:8.3 Consciousness of past achievements (somewhat
diminished in the present), the conservatism of an overwhelmingly agricultural
people, and a well-developed family life equaled the birth of ancestor
veneration, culminating in the custom of so honoring the men of the past as to
border on worship. A very similar attitude prevailed among the white races in
Europe for some five hundred years following the disruption of Graeco-Roman
civilization.
79:8.4 The belief in, and worship of, the "One
Truth" as taught by Singlangton never entirely died out; but as time passed,
the search for new and higher truth became overshadowed by a growing tendency
to venerate that which was already established. Slowly the genius of the
yellow race became diverted from the pursuit of the unknown to the
preservation of the known. And this is the reason for the stagnation of what
had been the world's most rapidly progressing civilization.
79:8.5 Between 4000 and 500 B.C. the political
reunification of the yellow race was consummated, but the cultural union of
the Yangtze and Yellow river centers had already been effected. This political
reunification of the later tribal groups was not without conflict, but the
societal opinion of war remained low; ancestor worship, increasing dialects,
and no call for military action for thousands upon thousands of years had
rendered this people ultrapeaceful.
79:8.6 Despite failure to fulfill the promise of an
early development of advanced statehood, the yellow race did progressively
move forward in the realization of the arts of civilization, especially in the
realms of agriculture and horticulture. The hydraulic problems faced by the
agriculturists in Shensi and Honan demanded group co-operation for solution.
Such irrigation and soil-conservation difficulties contributed in no small
measure to the development of interdependence with the consequent promotion of
peace among farming groups.
79:8.7 Soon developments in writing, together with
the establishment of schools, contributed to the dissemination of knowledge on
a previously unequaled scale. But the cumbersome nature of the ideographic
writing system placed a numerical limit upon the learned classes despite the
early appearance of printing. And above all else, the process of social
standardization and religio-philosophic dogmatization continued apace. The
religious development of ancestor veneration became further complicated by a
flood of superstitions involving nature worship, but lingering vestiges of a
real concept of God remained preserved in the imperial worship of
Shang-ti.
79:8.8 The great weakness of ancestor veneration is
that it promotes a backward-looking philosophy. However wise it may be to
glean wisdom from the past, it is folly to regard the past as the exclusive
source of truth. Truth is relative and expanding; it lives always in
the present, achieving new expression in each generation of men -- even in
each human life.
79:8.9 The great strength in a veneration of
ancestry is the value that such an attitude places upon the family. The
amazing stability and persistence of Chinese culture is a consequence of the
paramount position accorded the family, for civilization is directly dependent
on the effective functioning of the family; and in China the family attained a
social importance, even a religious significance, approached by few other
peoples.
79:8.10 The filial devotion and family loyalty
exacted by the growing cult of ancestor worship insured the building up of
superior family relationships and of enduring family groups, all of which
facilitated the following factors in the preservation of
civilization:
1. Conservation of property and wealth.
2. Pooling of the experience of more than one
generation.
3. Efficient education of children in the arts and
sciences of the past.
4. Development of a strong sense of duty, the
enhancement of morality, and the augmentation of ethical sensitivity.
79:8.11 The formative period of Chinese
civilization, opening with the coming of the Andites, continues on down to the
great ethical, moral, and semireligious awakening of the sixth century before
Christ. And Chinese tradition preserves the hazy record of the evolutionary
past; the transition from mother- to father-family, the establishment of
agriculture, the development of architecture, the initiation of industry --
all these are successively narrated. And this story presents, with greater
accuracy than any other similar account, the picture of the magnificent ascent
of a superior people from the levels of barbarism. During this time they
passed from a primitive agricultural society to a higher social organization
embracing cities, manufacture, metalworking, commercial exchange, government,
writing, mathematics, art, science, and printing.
79:8.12 And so the ancient civilization of the
yellow race has persisted down through the centuries. It is almost forty
thousand years since the first important advances were made in Chinese
culture, and though there have been many retrogressions, the civilization of
the sons of Han comes the nearest of all to presenting an unbroken picture of
continual progression right on down to the times of the twentieth century. The
mechanical and religious developments of the white races have been of a high
order, but they have never excelled the Chinese in family loyalty, group
ethics, or personal morality.
79:8.13 This ancient culture has contributed much to
human happiness; millions of human beings have lived and died, blessed by its
achievements. For centuries this great civilization has rested upon the
laurels of the past, but it is even now reawakening to envision anew the
transcendent goals of mortal existence, once again to take up the unremitting
struggle for never-ending progress.
79:8.14 Presented
by an Archangel of Nebadon.
