Tiandi 天地 is literally translated into English as "heaven and earth", or space. Like time space is an abstract term for a complex set of ideas. Different cultures differ in how they divide up their world, assign values to its parts, and measure them. In the biblical view, Genesis describes the creation of the world out of nothingness, God dwells in heaven, and part of his creation, humankind, dwells on earth. Alternatively, the Western cosmological speculation is at the beginning of Greek philosophy, in Ptolemy's cosmos, the four agents of earth, fire, air, and water are subordinated to cardinal points of planetary gods, and the colors of the agents are attached to the gods.

The Western spatial grid of cardinal points existed since antiquity, but its role in the structure of the cosmos and human society was less significant than that in China. The Chinese used a spatial frame of cardinal points to organize the components of nature and human society, whereas the Greeks only used the planetary gods. It is what Benjamin Schwartz calls “correlative anthropocosmology” essential to Chinese.”[1] The organizing of the world and the founding of human institutions are equivalent to the cosmogony. Schwartz specifies: “it is entirely conceivable that such correlative thinking may have existed even in Neolithic ‘primitive’ China before the rise of high civilization and before the divergence between high and popular culture.”[2]

Just like there is no classical Chinese word equivalent to the English word space, there is no English word that may readily translate the Chinese words tiandi. Nevertheless, Chinese conceived their "heaven" and "earth" in a very unique way since antiquity. According to Huainan zi, 淮南子, or Prince Huainan, written in the second century B.C., “The way of heaven is round, and the way of earth is square.”[3] This account takes the plane of earth to be a projection into space of the equator. The round heaven is “defined by the circle of the celestial equator,” and the square earth is “defined by the solstitial and equinoctial points projected onto the celestial equator.”[4]

This Chinese spatial model places the four cardinal directions with the center as its main point of the compass. Animal symbols lie at the four sides. To the east is qinglong 青龍, or the Blue Dragon that is associated with the color of blue, the agent of wood, and season of spring. The south is zhuque 朱雀, or the Red Phoenix, summer, and fire agent. The west is baihu 白虎, or the White Tiger, autumn, and metal agent. The north is xuanwu 玄武, or the Black Turtle, winter, and water agent. At the center of cosmos is man of the yellow earth agent. Each of the four animals resonates with each of the seven of the twenty-eight asterisms of stars and constellations with the North Dipper in the center.

Mircea Eliade insightfully remarks: “As for the structure and rhythms of universe, there is perfect unity and continuity among the various fundamental conceptions from the time of Shang to the revolution of 1911. The traditional image of the universe is that of the Center traversed by a vertical axis connecting zenith and nadir and framed by the four quarters. Heaven is round (it has the shape of an egg) and the Earth is square. The sphere of Heaven encloses the Earth. When the earth is represented as square body of a chariot, a central pillar supports the dais, which is round like Heaven. Each of the five cosmological numbers—four quarters and one Center—has a color, a taste, a sound, and a particular symbol. China is situated at the center of the world, the capital is in the middle of the kingdom, and the royal palace is at the center of the capital.”[5]

The essential idea of Chinese heaven and earth is ganying 感應, or the “sympathy” among man, events, and stars. In this cosmological order, things and events belonging to the same category affect each other. The process, however, is not mechanical causation but rather “resonant”. For instance, the direction of west resonates with human emotions (sorrow and regret), organs (lungs, skin, and hair), and certain human and social activities. It is symbolic of weapons, war, death, and harvest, of fruitful conclusion and calmness of twilight, of memory and regret… Therefore, in fall, “the emperor wears white outfit, offering ancestors with livers of animal, riding black tailed white horse with white flag, sleeping in the west palace, he engages in war, hunting…”[6] The idea stresses how human behavior can influence nature, and the converse is also believed to occur.

It was shaman (wu/shi)'s job to "sympathize" (communicate) between heaven and earth, nature and man by performing shamanic rituals and rites. Harvard anthropology professor K. C. Chang states: "Civilizations such as those of China and Maya, in which shamans and shamanism played a major role, were long ignored by scholars studying the origins of civilization…in the context of ethnography, a shaman is defined as someone who can communicate with both heaven and earth or, in other words, with both gods and humans…when a shaman is in the act of communicating between heaven and earth, he often dances, plays music, and swallows medicinal plants and fermented drinks to help him enter into a state of semiconsciousness, and in this trancelike state he makes contact with gods and spirits." [7]

In this perspective of the epistemological differences of seeing and knowing the world between China and the West, K. C. Chang sketched a new paradigm for the rise of civilizations in 1987. After his preliminary comparative study, involving China, Maya, and the Sumerian civilizations, K. C. Chang referred to the Chinese, and the Mayans as the civilization of continuity and the West as the civilization of rupture. According to Chang, the Sumerian civilization “characterizes a new social order that must have represented from its beginning a qualitative break from the ancient substratum common to the lot of the rest of men.” “When the threshold from barbarism to civilization is crossed, man passes from a world of nature he shared with his animal friends to a world of his own making, in which he surrounds himself with artifacts that insulate him from, and elevate him above, his animal friends—monumental architecture, writing, a great art style, and a new religion.” Accordingly, the Western civilization is characterized by rupture of the cosmic holism, and by demarcation between man and his natural resources. The civilization of rupture is built by wealth accumulated through innovations in productive technology and importation of new resources by trade.[8]

In sharp contrast to the civilization of rupture, the civilization of continuity is built by continuity between man and animals, between earth and heaven, and between culture and nature. We have seen, as the most striking feature of the ancient Chinese civilization, ideologically speaking, it was created within a framework of cosmogonic holism. Therefore, the Chinese universe is a “magical one (somewhat shamanistic), and the phenomena of the natural and supernatural environments are the consequence of magical transformation, not creation ex nihilo, as they are in Judeo-Christian tradition.”[9]