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The 5th Epochal Revelation
-The Urantia Papers
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.
*
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