01x03 - China- The Mandate of Heaven

[bunniefuu]

China was the last of
the great civilisations

to develop independently in the old world,

over a thousand years
after the first in Iraq.

And theirs was a vision of life
unique to itself.

The Chinese conception of civilisation
differed completely from that of the West.

For them, its goal was
a moral order on earth,

sustained by virtue,

ritual and reverence for ancestors.

These ancient ideas permeated
all aspects of Chinese life.

Even the cataclysms of our own time,

from the communist revolution

down to the crushing of the
democracy movement

here in Tiananmen Square in 1989,

have been played out
against these deeper forces

which have shaped China
for thousands of years.

This is a search for
the roots of Chinese history.

And our search begins in the old lanes

here near the Temple of Heaven in Beijing.

Tucked away in the alleys here

is the oldest pharmacy in Beijing,
founded in 1663.

It's simply Beijing,
Tung Ring Tang pharmacy.

It's so famous.

And now it's Beijing, China.

In Chinese medicine,

as in all traditional Chinese culture,

the basic idea
is the search for harmony on earth.

Ultimately, this was
the goal of civilisation itself.

And to reach it,

inner and outer lives
must be in congruence.

Yin and yang, as they say,

female and male, dark and light.

This elemental balance

underlies all Chinese thought,

whether in science or philosophy,

in food, or as here, in medicine.

The discovery of the origins
of Chinese history

happened by a strange chance.

In 1899, a Chinese scholar

who was quite well-known here in Peking,

Wang Yijun, was suffering from malaria.

He had prescriptions for it
made up in his local pharmacy.

It could even have been this one.

At the time, a friend of his was
staying with him as a house guest,

and he saw the prescriptions
being made up.

One of the ingredients was a recipe

which had been used by Chinese doctors

for hundreds of years,

ground up old bones,

known as dragon bones.

But to their astonishment,
when the two men looked at the bones,

they saw that on them was
a strange, archaic form of writing,

some of whose characters were the same
as those used in modern Chinese writing.

And though this recipe
had been used for hundreds of years,

this was the first time it had come
to the attention of scholars.

The two men determined to find out
where the bones had come from.

They combed the apothecary's shops
in this part of Peking,

and eventually
they came up with their answer.

The bones had been dug up

near a dusty little town in central China,

in the plain of the Yellow River,

a town called Anyang.

Huang He,

the Yellow River.

Coming down from Mongolia,

bearing its rich yellow silt
to the Yellow Sea.

Destroyer of cities, k*ller of millions,
even in our own century.

Chinese civilisation
first arose on its banks,

but unlike the civilisations of the West,

the source of political power
did not lie in control of nature,

but in control of the past.

There's nothing to see at Anyang today.

The sight of the palaces and tombs

where the dragon bones were found
has been ploughed over.

But here were the ruins of Yin,

the last city of
the ill-fated Shang dynasty,

burned down in 1100 BC.

And here was the answer
to the riddle of the dragon bones.

The chemists in Beijing had been grinding
up the ritual archive of the Shang kings.

These were oracle bones

used by royal diviners
to communicate with the ancestral spirits.

In these strange marks lay
the beginnings of the I Ching,

the great Chinese book of wisdom.

It was through the magic power of writing

that the ancestral spirits could be raised.

And the ancient Chinese word
for these symbols,

wen, writing,

would become
the word for civilisation itself.

In the beginning was not the city,
but the word.

The second key find at Anyang
was the bronzes.

They were used for sacrifices
and ritual meals.

Their inscriptions tell of the worship
of ancestors and lineage,

basic preoccupations
of the Chinese till today.

It was the possession of these things,

the performance of the correct rituals,

the monopoly of bronze
and writing,

which gave the rulers access
to the wisdom of the ancestors.

This was the basis of political power.

And only with this could the ruler possess
the greatest of all gifts.

A gift to be kept
only so long as he was just

and cared for the people.

The Mandate of Heaven.

A fresh grave in the cemetery
of the Kung family in Chufu.

A monument to the most influential
figure in Chinese history,

Kǒng Fūzǐ, Confucius.

It was Confucius who transformed
the magic of the Bronze Age

into the conception of the state
as a moral order,

sustained by virtue and ritual.

Confucius lived in that
astonishing Axis age

when the Buddha was alive and Pythagoras

and the Greek philosophers,
the Jewish prophets.

Not a religious leader,

but the codifier of China's traditions
in history, poetry and ritual.

His teachings were the ideal of Chinese
government for 2,000 years.

At the centre of Confucius' message
was a very simple and original idea.

He wasn't concerned with God
or the afterlife or heaven.

I don't know anything
about those things, he said.

His concern was that of every
government today on Earth.

How do you build a just
and stable society here?

And his answer was this.

Goodness was the essential quality
needed to keep society together.

People are not born good,

they need to be taught goodness,
rulers and ruled.

But it was essential that
the rulers were taught goodness,

spiritual and intellectual,

because if rulers rule with
unjust harshness and severity,

meeting out punishments
with regimentation,

then people lose their faith in the law,

they lose their respect for themselves,

they have no sense of shame.

But if people are taught goodness,

then they have all those qualities
and they regulate themselves.

Confucius' vision then
was of a moral society

bound together by mutual respect
and trust.

And though he was an aristocrat,
it was an anti-authoritarian idea

because the ideology
would rest with the scholars,

not with the emperors,

who themselves had to obey
that golden mean.

Otherwise they risked forfeiting
the mandate of heaven,

as even today's rulers of China
have found out.

In the last few years,

the rulers of China have revived
some of the old Confucian traditions,

at least in their outward form.

Performance of these rituals ceased
after the Communist Revolution.

These are actors,

and this ceremony
in Confucius' home town is for tourists.

They are largely foreign Chinese tourists

from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore,

rediscovering roots severed,

temporarily, it would now seem, in 1949.

It's a vision of a splendid past

which the rulers of China, in our time,

attempted to do away with

in the belief that
new traditions could replace them.

But just when we think we've shaken it off,

the past has an
uncanny habit of coming back

to restate its old claims on our loyalties.

The ancient Chinese believed

that earth, nature and the cosmos

were part of a harmonious natural order.

The Dao, or path.

The search for the right path, Daoism,

is the second great stream
of Chinese thought,

a natural mysticism to set beside
the practical common sense of Confucius.

Not an alternative,

but the other half
of a necessary balance in life.

The pilgrim path up the sacred
mountain, Taishan,

is a symbol for that search for the Dao.

It's been walked for thousands of years
by Chinese people, rich and poor,

from the first emperor to Chairman Mao.

And today, tourists and pilgrims
are coming again.

For so long, Western culture
has seen nature

in terms of control and exploitation.

But for the Chinese,

it is the source of all
harmony and balance.

They thought it was our duty
as human beings,

through art, religion or science,

to understand the harmony,

not to abuse it or needlessly to change it,

but to go with the force of nature,
the yin and yang, as they would say.

The little Daoist temple
on the top of Taishan,

dedicated to the goddess of the mountain,

was wrecked in the Cultural Revolution.

It's now lived in again, not by actors,

but by real Daoist monks and nuns

who came back in 1985,
committing themselves to the old way.

In the end, said the Daoist sage Laozi,

all creatures returned
to their distinctive roots.

That is called returning to one's destiny.

These people are tourists from Taiwan.

Their leader is a spirit medium
well known on TV in Taipei.

It's the kind of ceremony you can
see in backstreet ancestor temples

in the urban jungles
of Singapore and Hong Kong.

Now they're returning to commune again
with the older ancestors.

On the summit of Taishan,

the pilgrims wait
for the first glimpse of the dawn.

It was up here that Chairman Mao
proclaimed the east is red.

But that was before his great leap forward
turned the dawn yellow with pollution.

The first empress surveyed
his kingdom from here

as the sun rose and announced,

now I've united the whole world.

Confucius said simply,
now I realize how small the world is.

The silk route in the Gobi desert
in the far west of China,

the most inhospitable landscape
in the world.

Across this desert
from the second century AD

came the ideas, goods and people

which ushered in
China's first international age.

Till this time, Chinese civilization
had developed in isolation,

uniquely itself,

neither wanting nor needing
anything from the outside world.

But now contacts opened up
with Central Asia, Persia, even Rome,

but especially with India,

for what the Chinese wanted
was not material riches,

but spiritual enlightenment.

The wisdom of the Buddha.

The Chinese never developed,

perhaps never needed
an elaborate theology of their own.

Indeed, the western idea
of a personal god is

utterly foreign to them.

But Buddhism, with its atheistic
and democratic message,

its deep care for ritual,

was to have the greatest appeal

of all the foreign religions

which took root here.

Buddhism was the third great stream

making up the current
of Chinese civilization,

along with Confucian wisdom
and Taoist mysticism.

And the later Chinese came to believe
that these three philosophies

contained the essential
ideas of civilization,

and without any one of them,
life would be unbalanced.

But however sophisticated
and technologically advanced

a society might become,

its people could only be fulfilled

through inner enlightenment
and the contemplation of eternity.

In the Tang Dynasty,

Chinese scholars went on
great missionary journeys to India

to bring back authentic texts
and relics of the Buddha.

And in this little temple,

in a secluded valley outside Sian, are kept

the ashes of the most famous
of those missionaries, Suan Sang.

Some of the texts he brought back
from India

in the 7th century are still here.

What is it made out of?

It's made of palm trees in India.

Palm leaf, yes.

And the script is not Sanskrit, is it?

What is the language?

Ancient tale.

This is ancient.

Does he know how many books

Suan Sang actually brought
back to China from India?

Suan San brought 650 books
back to Sian for translation,

rucksack on his back,
a lamp to light his way.

It's rare in history that
we can pinpoint the very moment

when one great civilization goes out
to learn from another.

In the 8th century AD,

all roads in Asia led to Sian,
or China as it was then known.

It was the greatest city in the world,

rivaled only by Baghdad
and Constantinople.

Its vast square
laid out like a chessboard.

A huge ritual enclosure,

Sianan's central boulevard
was four miles long

and twice as wide as today's avenue,

which leads to the city's bell tower.

This was the first time that foreigners
had entered China in any numbers,

and as often in later days,

they were confined
to their own area at night,

well away from the center of power.

Over in the western
quarter of the city, though,

in the foreigners' enclave,

you could find an anarchic vitality
and a sophistication and a cultural mix

that impressed all visitors to Chang'an.

Here there were Muslims,
Christians and Jews

from Syria and Iraq,

Zoroastrians and Manichaeans
from Iran and Central Asia.

There were Persian conjurers,

Turkish moneylenders and Hindu fakiers.

In the cafes there was Central Asian music,

Asian food as there still is today,

and also entertainment

from singing and dancing girls

from Persia and even further afield.

Some of them it was said
with blond hair and blue eyes.

Small wonder then,
that as the writer of the time said,

you could misspend
your youth in cities like this

and end up with nothing

but the reputation of a wanderer
in the blue houses.

In Chinese eyes,
the Tang Dynasty was above all

the most golden of the many
golden ages of their poetry.

An art whose roots go back to the
shamanistic magic of the Bronze Age.

For the Chinese, indeed, composing poetry

is one of the essential
ingredients of civilisation.

But if we could choose a single career

to symbolise this first
international era of Chinese culture,

then it would be perhaps
the great poet Li Pei,

or Li Po
as we know him in the West.

Li Po was the product of the Silk Road.

He was born not in China
but out in Central Asia

and spoke one of the Turkish languages.

He spent his early years
as a wandering soldier of fortune

before he found his opportunities here
in the greatest city on earth.

He was a magnetic personality,

irascible, self-taught, flashing eyes,

a fearsome voice and a heaven-sent talent.

He was a prodigious drinker, too.

The story goes that he died

falling drunk into a river

trying to catch
the reflection of the moon.

But Li Po wandered through
the music halls

and the cabarets and restaurants of
Shanghai and the other cities of China,

his ear tuned
not only to classical poetry

but to folk songs and ballads
and the latest pop music

coming heart out of Central Asia
on the caravan trails.

He was always an outsider.
He refused, pointedly,

to sit the Confucian examinations

preferring to do it,
as he would have put it, his way.

Always an outsider,

but still today among the Chinese people

along with his friend Du Fu,

their best-loved
and their best-known poet.

Beyond the vermilion gates
and the smell of wine and flesh,

wrote Du Fu,

people are freezing
and starving to death.

In thousands of villages,

they harvest only weeds
while the women do the plowing.

The people of China can face any test

if only their leaders treat them humanely.

The Tang Dynasty ended in
social upheaval and revolution

like many in Chinese history,

but it was followed by one even greater.


down the Yellow River, lies Kaifeng.

In the 11th century AD,

Kaifeng was the capital
of what is regarded

as the peak of Chinese civilisation,

the Song Dynasty,

a golden age
unsurpassed in world history.

The Song achievement
was right across the board,

from industry and technology

to art, literature, poetry, history,

and it makes it one of the great
cultural epochs of the world.

And with the existence of printing,
they could disseminate their ideals

right across eastern Asia.

There was another
characteristic to that time,

and that was of an intense

inward cultivation,
of inward development.

They reshaped the old
ideals of Confucian philosophy

of self-development and secular piety,

harnessed them to an examination system

which ensured that only the best
could aspire to positions of power,

and they made that
the root of their state culture.

Indeed, that philosophy would dominate
eastern Asia for the next millennium,

and is the cultural basis of the
phenomenal success of countries

like Japan and Korea in modern times,

for they are still essentially Confucian.

Here in Kaifeng, as everywhere
in today's China,



have not severed these deeper beliefs.

Reverence for ancestors, filial piety,

Confucian virtues are
all coming back into the open

now that freedom of worship
is once more guaranteed.

It's the autumn festival tonight
in Kaifeng, and on the streets,

the old market and restaurant
culture of the city is resurgent.

Here in Kaifeng, in the 11th century,

are the origins of another of China's
great gifts to humanity,

its cooking.

The Chinese was the world's first
great cuisine, long before the French.

In Song Times, vast restaurants here,
like the Humane Harmony Diner,

it was said, turned night into day.

Like its medicine,

Chinese cooking is based on
ancient theories of harmony and balance.

On the five elements, the five tastes,

yin and yang,
the old themes of Chinese culture.

And here today in Kaifeng,

you can still find the oldest
restaurant in the world,

Ma Yuching's Bucket Chicken House,
founded in 1153.

Tell that to Maxims of Paris.

A cuisine is a whole way of
seeing the world.

It's one of the simplest and most direct
ways in which people can enjoy life,

a mark of civilization,

and the Chinese excelled
in it as they still do.

In the 13th century,

when European visitors came
in numbers to China for the first time,

they were still open-mouthed
at what they saw.

Sailing up the Grand Canal
here in Suzhou,

the Venetian Marco Polo had no doubt

that this was the greatest civilization
in the world.

I tell you, he said, in all truth,

the riches and resources,

it's all on such a stupendous scale,

you wouldn't believe it unless you saw it.

If the Chinese were warlike,
they could conquer the rest of the world.

Thank goodness they're not.

At this time, agricultural
and commercial revolutions

led to a population boom,

which saw China become
the most populous country on Earth,

as it still is today.

But the country was self-sufficient
and could feed all its people.

As the Arab traveller Ibn Abatuta said,

theirs was incomparably the highest
standard of living in the world.

There comes a point
in the life of any civilization

when the basic necessities of life
for the people have been satisfied.

Food, shelter, freedom from violence.

Then it can aspire to extend its higher
ideals to more and more of its people.

The key conception of Chinese civilisation

had always been the search for harmony.

And all its manifestations were
part of that search.

From the patterns of the bronze caster
and the painter,

the porcelain maker,

to the designs of the silk weaver.

By cultivating such odds,

a noble person could realise
the universal harmony

which Confucian wisdom sought.

For the Chinese,

this was the supreme mission
of civilisation.

The path to such wisdom

still began with the magic of writing.

From its beginnings
as a tool of divination,

writing remained the means of access
to the wisdom of the ancestors.

The symbol for writing,

the sign called wen,

had begun by signifying
the characters on the oracle bones.

Through time its meanings
deepened and widened

to embrace writing, culture, refinement,

elegance till writing
came to mean civilisation itself.

It was nothing less
than an expression of the way

the Chinese saw the world.

But now the way China saw the world

began to change.

From this vast bay at Quanzhou
in South China,

now silted up
but then the busiest port in the world,

Admiral Zheng He embarked

on great voyages of
exploration in the 15th century,

which could have changed
the course of history.

Zheng He sailed his fleets to the
great South Indian harbour of Cochin,

the meeting place of East and West.

Here he would have seen the Chinese
fishing nets imported in Mongol times,

for Indian merchants had long
traded with China from here,

exchanging pepper and spices
for porcelain and silk.

From Cochin, Zheng He explored East Africa

and visited the Persian Gulf
and Mecca itself.

He could have discovered the West
and he had the inclination.

It would be nearly a century
before Vasco de Gama

sailed into this same harbour,

not as a bearer of peace

but a harbinger of w*r and conquest.

Then suddenly the imperial bureaucrats

banned any further voyages

despite their rich commercial potential.

The ships were broken up,
their logbooks destroyed

and now only a few stone inscriptions
on a windswept hillside

remain to speak of one of
the great mysteries of history.

Western thinkers have always taken

a brutally simple line

on the stopping of
Zheng He's explorations.

For them it would be like calling
a halt to manned space exploration

on the eve of the first moon landing.

It's proof that the Chinese are
backward-looking and ignorant,

had no desire for new knowledge

and were run by a load of
hidebound bureaucrats.

Proof, too, that the West was

the fount of science and
technology and progress

and had a monopoly
on the spirit of enterprise.

But as always in history,

there are many ways of
looking at the same question.

After all, it was the Chinese

who were the great technological
innovators.

So perhaps it's really a question

of how different civilisations think
you should use technology.

And perhaps then the Chinese saw

quite sensibly on the face of it

that their true interests lay here,

inside their own borders,

cultivating their soil,

cultivating the inner life,

searching for the harmony

that had always been
the goal of their civilisation.

And that it was the West,
on the other hand,

that had a compulsive desire
to change,

a compulsive need to invade
other people's space,

both moral and physical,

and a refusal to accept
limits on its own.

Since the 18th century,

it's been customary to talk about

the East needing
to catch up with the West.

These days, that's obviously happening

all around us, materially,
if it's not happened already.

But it takes two to make a dialogue.

And perhaps the West still

has some catching up to do.

Perhaps the West still
has to learn from the East

a way of cultivating its inner space,

of accepting limits on desires

and space
in an increasingly finite world.

At the beginning of this modern dialogue
between the East and the West,

the French philosopher Pascal said

that the trouble
with Western man was this,

he did not know how to be content
in an empty room.

The banning of the Ming voyages was

part of a deeper introspection
in Chinese culture.

Now, behind a new great wall
to keep out the barbarians,

the Chinese built a new capital
far to the north,

Beijing, the North City.

Here, at the altar of heaven,

the emperor continued to perform
the rituals of the Bronze Age

in the belief that the world
would never change.

The longest and richest
intellectual tradition in the world

now increasingly turned in on itself.

And here in the National Library in Beijing

is the most staggering proof

both of that greatness
and of its progressive desiccation.

This is the greatest
literary enterprise of all time,

an encyclopedia running to


still in its original shelves and boxes,

labelled in green, red, blue and grey,

according to the imperial
cataloguing system

of spring, summer, autumn and winter,

for classics, history,
philosophy and literature.

A testimony to the idea
that all knowledge

past, present and future

could be contained in a single room.

But all this time,
far away in barbarian Europe,

Bacon, Newton, Descartes
had been concerning themselves

not with how to perfect the past,

but how to control the future.

And now some Chinese intellectuals

began to plead for a more
open approach to knowledge,

among them an obscure young historian

called Chang Suicheng.

It was Chang Suicheng

on the very eve of the most momentous
upheaval in Chinese history

since the time of the Qin emperor,
in other words, the clash with the West,

and all of that would engender,

it was he who attempted to re-appraise

the way that the Chinese had seen history

since the very beginnings
of the Confucian tradition.

For him, history was
an all-embracing concept

which would include all of this,

the entire canon of Chinese literature.

The Confucian texts, he said,
were all history.

Confucius may be a true guide to life,

but he is also simply a historical text.

And the time is past

when history should be merely

minute textual analysis and compilation

by squads of scholars burrowing away

on a rigid and old-fashioned curriculum.

History should be dynamic and meaningful.

Some have seen him as
a precursor of the revolution,

a prophet of democracy,
an enemy of feudalism.

That's no doubt exaggerated.

But in 1799, two years before his death,

he wrote a prophetic letter

about what he saw as the inevitable
decline of the Qing dynasty

and the worrying prospects ahead.

This was a time, he said,

when history should
no longer concern itself

merely with the past,

but should use the past
to reform the present

and indeed to look into the future.

And the historian's greatest gifts,
he said,

were not just knowledge,

but inspiration and insight.

And the historian's inspiration,
he thought,

was just like the I Ching,

the Book of Changes, in that
it enabled him to look into the future.

At the moment of his death,

China was about to come face to face

with another culture
whose view of history was

diametrically opposed
to that of the Chinese tradition.

The Europeans, with their
Judeo-Christian heritage,

believed that history was purposive,

that it was leading towards
an appointed end,

and that they would be the winners.

The first Chinese descriptions of
we Westerners are not flattering.

These barbarians have a grim look,
untidy hair and unpleasant smell.

They have no rituals worthy of the name.

They're liars and are rather arrogant.

They conquer countries by fraud and force,

ingratiating themselves in a friendly way
before they oppress the natives.

At the heart of their conduct is violence.

By the 18th century,

the coasts of the South China Sea

were frequented by the Spanish,

the Dutch, Portuguese, English,
and later Americans.

All bearing Chinese inventions,

gunpowder, the stern rudder,
the magnetic compass, paper maps.

Coming not just to sell,

but to impose their goods,

their ideas, their religion, their will.

They soon set up trading colonies,

lauding it from grand mansions

paid for by the illicit trade
in goods like opium.

In the tale of colonial infamy,

this is one of the least known
episodes in the West.

But it culminated in the central event
of 19th century Chinese history,

the Opium w*r.

The point of the opium trade

simply was to sell opium to China,

but in practice that meant
getting as many Chinese people

addicted to the drug as possible.

But opium was prohibited in China

and had an almost
negligible local consumption,

so it had to be sold illicitly in bulk

from the one permitted trading post

on the mainland, Canton,

and from offshore bases like this one.

The indispensable link
in this set up was India.

There the British imperial possessions
had grown in the last decades

of the 18th century.

And as the British themselves
produced nothing

which the Chinese wished to buy,

it was in India that the opium,

and to a lesser extent the cotton,

could be grown that could be traded in

for the luxuries that the British desired,

and especially tea which by then

had become a national obsession.

And so an infernal triangle was set up

between Britain, China and India,

which parallels the tragic triangle
of the previous century

between Africa, the Caribbean and Europe,

the sl*ve trade.

And this was no small business,
incredible as it may sound.

In the early 19th century,

opium was the biggest single trade
anywhere.

It is as if today

the Colombian drug barons

possessed such a powerful fleet

that they were able
to sail into San Francisco Bay

and compel a large portion of

the population of the United States

to become addicted to heroin and cocaine

and to wipe out the US fleet
if it intervened.

In what Gladstone called

the most disreputable w*r
ever fought by the British,

the Chinese fleets, hopelessly outgunned

and outdated, were smashed to pieces.

Defeated by the very technology

which they had invented,
but let stand still.

For the Chinese defeat
was a shattering revelation,

forced now to watch impotent
as the western barbarians,

their cultural inferiors,

now began to carve up the Middle Kingdom

into colonies with the same greedy relish

that they had scrambled for Africa

and dismembered India.

Unable to cope with the
pressure of the outside world,

the Chinese government now collapsed.

Chinese people were
treated like animals in their own land

by the western imperialists,
harnessed to polo traps for sport.

Banned along with dogs
in their own public parks.

The great time of revolution

had arrived as the I Ching,
the Book of Changes, states,

and the great man was at hand,
in whom all belief would reside.

In 1949,

Mao and the Communists took power

on a tide of emotion and optimism

after years of civil w*r,
of famine and foreign rule.

But in their haste to erase the past,

they k*lled millions by ill-judged reforms

and tyrannical violence.

And this in the name of a western ideology

and a western conception of history.

Today, the Chinese people are living
through a time of great opportunity.

Still without political power,

they're poised nonetheless
to become an economic giant.

They could regain their place
as the greatest of all civilisations.

But when their rulers crushed
the democracy movement,

here in Tiananmen Square in 1989,

they showed the old fear of
authoritarians throughout history,

the fear of the past
to discredit the present.

On the streets at night,

the Chinese people can listen once more

to the old music

banned under Mao's dictatorship.

In the I Ching,

the ancient Chinese book of divination,

there is a hexagram entitled Revolution.

In a revolution, it says,
two mistakes must be avoided.

You must not move with excessive haste,

nor use excessive ruthlessness

against the people.

What is done must correspond
to a higher truth.

A revolution not founded on inner truth

will come to grief.

For in the end, the people will support

only what they feel in their hearts

to be just.

This is the meaning

of the Mandate of Heaven.