[continued]
The sharing of modern civilization requires honest and genuine contribution, which can only come from roots that have been nurtured by cultural evolution and creative input over the centuries. As for the revitalization of one’s own culture, the beautiful flowers plucked from a neighbor’s garden will never produce roots for future blossoms. The hypothetical “global culture” that many envision cannot offer a vista larger than the view through the window of whichever society claims it. At this time, “globalization” simply means “Americanization,” and “commercialization” — a reality Europeans have understood better than Asians.
So, then, what is culture? And what does creativity mean? In the West, culture is generally understood as a society’s heritage and its way of life. In Asia it may have a more specific meaning. In China the earliest reference to culture is probably the term, renwen, found in Yijing, which means approximately “arts of humanity.” It is one of the three dimensions of the Chinese universe: heaven, earth and humanity. It supposedly embodies the highest value of the society and interacts with the other two: the spiritual and philosophical (tianwen) and the environmental and ecological (diwen). Creativity is the source of this mobility between these three dimensions. This mobility is perhaps very close to the meaning of dao in Daoism. As the Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi states, “that which moves among things is Dao.” Confucius has been quoted in Lun Yu, “aiming at dao, moving among the arts”. Thus, in creativity, as in learning, one must achieve dao, the ultimate truth or the supreme understanding. The path to truth is always difficult. But, in the ancient Chinese concept, only truth can give birth to creativity; as the Tang scholar Liu Zongyuan writes, “arts are to illuminate dao”. According to this way of thinking, all cultures deprived of creativity will decline and become inert, ultimately fossilized.
The meaning of creativity however is elusive. Also, it is not universal. In the modern West, it suggests innovation, invention, or even novelty. An artist is often called a “creator” — a lofty title — but he/she is not expected to shoulder specific responsibilities. In traditional Asia, it is hard to find a term equivalent to the modern Western understanding of “creativity.” Among many Chinese classic texts, the closest equivalent to creativity is found in the classic treatise on crafts Kaogong Ji, stating that “a person with true knowledge initiates things.” But the real meaning of creativity seems to be encapsulated in the meaning of dao as cited earlier. And the Dao de Jing defines Dao as “that which gives birth to things.”