What Is the Foundation of Morality and Real Traditional Chinese Culture?

Honesty has been a recurring theme for judging human morality, but why is this the case? For those who believe in gods and the concept of Heaven, they say that gods are watching everything and that good deeds will be rewarded and bad deeds punished. Even for those who do not believe in gods, they still believe that honesty is an inborn quality and virtue.

However, in present day China, making money has become the underlying, driving force behind people's behaviour. When people behave without the restraint of belief in higher beings and values, they may think, "If I am honest while others are not, I will be the one who suffers for it, so that would be acting foolishly!" This lack of honesty and integrity is reaching the point of crisis. Chinese society's moral baseline is rapidly disappearing.

In China, society's ultimate moral basis came from traditional Chinese culture, generally consisting of the tenants of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. The concepts of "truth" in Taoism, of "compassion" in Buddhism, and of "tolerance, compassion, loyalty, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness" in Confucianism constituted the backbone of traditional Chinese morality. The Chinese people emphasise "genuine beliefs," those that are rooted in heavenly principles, arising from the depths of one's heart, and immune to being swayed by external factors.

Under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), many traditional values were branded as the "Four Olds" - Old Customs, Old Cultures, Old Habits, and Old Ideas and cast aside. Meanwhile, the Party pretends to hold the banner of traditional Chinese culture in interacting with other countries.

The CCP has consistently maintained a policy of "keeping the best and discarding the rest" toward traditional Chinese culture. The key, though, is that the regime gets to choose what is considered "the best" to suit its needs. Different schools of thought have risen into and fall out of favour over the years, but the Chinese Communist Party's stance on atheism being the state "religion" has remained throughout.

Over the course of several decades, the CCP has liberally used violence to eradicate people's belief in and reverence for divine beings. Even today, they still maintain its mantra of "doing away with superstitions," which is a different way of targeting spiritual beliefs. It has reached the point that it is difficult to reverse the effects of the Party-driven march into atheism.

It may sound bizarre that the CCP has used the label of "the dregs of feudal society" to attack religion and spiritual beliefs. Today, the CCP's scholars claim that Confucius and Lao Zi were originally atheists and that Buddhism was introduced to China from the outside. They seek to discredit and cheapen the virtues that traditional Chinese culture has championed.

The Chinese Communist Party took the term "heaven" from Confucianism's belief of "unity of heaven and man," as well as the term "nature" from the Taoist scripture of "the ways of men are conditioned by those of earth; the ways of earth by those of heaven; the ways of heaven by those of Tao; and the ways of Tao by nature," and twisted them to mean that materialism and atheism are the "natural" course of action for man to take. The Book of Changes, which leads the "Five Classics", was recast as a tome on science from ancient times. They twisted the Confucius saying to "respect the spirits and gods but keep a distance from them" to mean that Confucius did not believe in gods.

In reality, the "nature" in Taoism refers to a realm of non-action, rather than the literal representation of the natural environment. Taoism stresses that "the human body is a small universe," but it is not about the human body literally as the CCP says it is, but rather the principles of Taoist cultivation. Throughout Chinese history, the emperor's role included respecting and worshipping heaven, earth, and gods. How could it be said that traditional Chinese culture is "atheistic?"

As the Party appears to promote the morality of traditional Chinese culture, it tries its best to erase belief in higher beings, even though the two go hand in hand. In propagating traditional Chinese culture by discarding the essence of people's belief in heavens and gods, they are sabotaging traditional Chinese culture and poisoning the beliefs of its own people.

Divine Performing Arts' world tour, on the other hand, is putting on display China's five thousand years of traditional, divinely-inspired culture on stage in a dignified and glorious way, which will help to revive mankind's morality. That approach is a great way to truly restore traditional Chinese culture.