Introduction

Civilizations, like people, undergo stages of growth, maturity and decline. This chapter describes the beginning of the maturation of civilizations in India and China as well as the emergence of civilization in Japan as a "spin off" from China. It shows how the Mongol conquest impacted these civilizations. The Gupta age in India and Tang and Sung dynasties in China brought full shape to all the elements of civilization. They absorbed ideas from other cultures. Hinduism borrowed from Buddhism while Neo-Confucianism borrowed from Taoism and Buddhism. There was an outpouring of scientific, technological, literary and artistic creativity which made these countries the leading lights of the world at a time when the West was still in its "dark ages."

Political disruption and warfare can divert civilization from its course of development, however. The Hinduism that demonstrated such creativity under the Guptas turned inward and defensive when faced with the challenge of Islam. Solidifying the caste system rituals prevented Hindus from converting to Islam in large numbers but it also forfeited intellectual creativity. Confucian China likewise was swept off its cultural foundations by the Mongol conquest and thereafter became suspicious of outside contacts.

Japan, however, had the advantage of choice. Never conquered, the Japanese chose the civilization they wanted from Tang China and when, after three centuries, their Chinese-style imperial government began to weaken, they reacted in a similarly purposeful way. Instead of seeking to restore a "Golden Age" as the Chinese had, they evolved a new political system based on a feudal dictatorship, the Kamakura Shogunate, which boosted its legitimacy by keeping the imperial line as "appointers" of shoguns. The political adaptations of the Japanese and their modern-sounding reforms remind us to look for innovation among these ancients, who faced many of the same basic problems of government as we do today-national productivity, cost of living and wage fluctuations, credit, taxes, and balance between the interests of the state and those of the citizen.