ABSTRACT
Attitudes to the cosmos in the cultures of the world seem to be drawn towards two opposed polarities, which one might term dynamic and static. In the dynamic view the cosmos is essentially the theatre of a cyclic process which is also dramatic; the same things have to happen over and over again at the proper time each year, or sometimes at longer intervals; and they have to be helped to happen by our doing the right things at certain seasons. Few of us probably have considered that we are heirs, through our Middle Eastern Judeo-Christian religion, to this attitude, typically predicated of the ancient Near East. But it seems to me to live on in the view of the world as something that progresses from one state to another (and is not even its dramatic aspect evident, for instance, in Marxists who, believing the revolution inevitable, feel nevertheless obliged to help it on its way?). This no doubt makes it harder for us to understand the opposite, static apprehension, in which the emphasis is laid rather on the preservation of a cosmic harmony, in particular between our bit of the cosmos and the macrocosm as a whole. To those who hold that view, it is self-evident that the processes of the cosmos have kept it going for a very long time. Far from there being an impulse to give the cosmic processes a regular push, there is an impulse to sit steady, and to reproduce as closely as possible in one’s own parish the conditions that make the cosmos go round without wobbling. That ‘static’ view is (I would say) typical of both India and China.
