The Urantia Book
PAPER 79
ANDITE EXPANSION IN THE ORIENT
Presented by an Archangel of Nebadon.
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.
