Go and oriental philosophy

Go and oriental culture - proverbs

As we have seen in the previous chapters, in Japan, in China and in Korea, the knowledge of an educated man from the aristocracy was defined by four "Royal Arts". They were slightly different from one of those countries to another (music in Japan, lute in China), but globally, they are common to those three countries, and the Game of Go is one of them. Moreover, there is an old Chinese story about two generals who where stuck in a fight none of them was able to win; in order to preserve the life of their men, they decided to share the territory they were fighting for according to the result of a Go game they would play. The Game of Go is part of the oriental culture; what I will now try to highlight is the real impact of the Game of Go on the oriental societies, and reciprocally, the impact of the oriental way of life, the oriental philosophy, on the way Go is played. Thus, I will try two answer a double question: understanding why the Game of Go is so famous in the East and not in the West, and on an other hand, using the Game of Go to illustrate the differences between the oriental and occidental ways of living.

Proverbs

We occidentals like to think about the Chinese culture through its proverbs; they became both a characteristic and a caricature of China in our mind. Chinese philosophers, apart from essays full of deep and complex thoughts on mystical subjects, were also adepts of those short sentences that anyone can easily remember and  use in every day’s life. The WeiQi is no exception to this rule: myriads of proverbs  were written to describe how to place stones on the Goban. What is more original is what those proverbs became: a lot of proverbs initially written for the Game of Go became later proverbs about the way to act on a battlefield, or during a conflict of any kind. There was, in the Chinese way of thinking, an intense correlation between the way to solve a conflict on a Goban and in "real life". Reciprocally, several proverbs initially written for other reasons became Go proverbs later.

Before providing examples, I will first try to explain why there was such a correlation. In China, the Game of Go is seen as a representation of the life and the humanity. For a Chinese author, the 361 intersections of the Goban represent the 360 days of the year, gravitating around their centre, the 361th intersection, the Sky (Tengen). The four corner are the four seasons.

Other authors link the Game of Go to the ancient divination arts of China, establishing strong correlations between playing a game and predicting the future. The conclusion is always the same: the Game of Go, with its wonderful simplicity, represents the world, and understanding its mechanism is equivalent, for Chinese sages, to understanding the way of being in every day’s life.

Here is a first famous Chinese proverb to illustrate my words :

"The World is a Game of Go whose rules have been uselessly complicated".

The chess world champion Emmanuel Lasker used to say about the Game of Go that "The rules of the Game of Go are so elegant, so organic and rigorously logical that if there exists somewhere in the universe an intelligent form of life, it certainly play Go."

The majority of Go proverbs simply indicate ways to choose moves during a game and are not directly usable outside a Goban - any Go player has once been told in his life "The corner is gold, the edge is silver and the centre is a desert",  which explains that aiming for the corners at the beginning of the game is the most natural and efficient way of playing. There are a lot of other proverbs - "answer the keima with a kosumi", "void angle is a bad shape", "a turtle back is sixty points", "only fools ignore the nozoki"... - but they are not relevant here; The most famous among them are listed in the Ten Precepts of Go by Wang Chi Shin.

However, other proverbs were used outside the Goban, they are way more interesting and it is often hard to determine if they were first written for Go players or not. Here is a small fraction of them :

"The one who knows how to win usually does not fight" (Zhang, 1078 EC)

"Do not be sure of your plan and always reconsider your ability to get rid of your opponent" (Zhong-Pu Liu, 1078 EC)

"If you cannot win, aim for a glorious death" (unidentified author)

"Play slowly to win slowly. Play fast to loose fast." (unidentified author)

This last proverb illustrates the patience of the oriental players. Another strong illustration of this patience can be seen in the way Go is taught - see article "The teaching of the Game of Go".

Go and oriental culture - the Teaching of the Game of Go

The French Go community benefits a lot from the presence of Fan Hui. Fan Hui is a two dan Chinese professional who has been living in France for some years. He is working for the French Go Federation (FFG) and his teaching had a visible influence on the strong level of the French players among the European players. He used to give this advice to his students: whenever you have a move in mind and you are ready to place it on the Goban, first put it back on the table, slowly count to three, and then only take back your stone. Then you may play your move. This simple advice is the perfect transcript of the first quality that is necessary for any Go player : the patience. It is extremely easy to follow what seems to be a "natural flow" and play sequences without really thinking and reading the different possibilities; any strong player knows how to avoid precipitateness and how to think steadily about each move.

The second important quality for a Go player is the respect. It is not a rule invented to preserve conviviality between players, or an old Chinese tradition, but an absolute necessity. Indeed, when reading a sequence, a player shall always assume that his opponent will play ideally. it is the only way to avoid difficulties and to improve. Any thought starting with "if my opponent makes a mistake" is prohibited in Go: it prevents improving as any sequence you will remember after playing that way will fail once you will face a stronger player than your previous opponent. More generally, the Game of Go is not about fighting. Unlike chess, the goal is not to capture pieces and to kill the king, but to share and to negotiate for territory. Several games are played without any fighting at all; it is all about sharing and asking. Anyone willing to take a territory that is too big will not be able to keep it; each game is a silent discussion with the opponent. Negotiations are made by assuming that players are equally strong; trying to abuse an opponent assumed to be weaker is usually a very bad idea.

More could be said about the way Go is taught, but those two words are perfectly fine to describe the basis of any Go player: patience and respect. It is simultaneously a deep characteristic of the Game of Go and the oriental philosophy.

Go and oriental culture - poker and chess

Those two games are the first to come in mind when one try to oppose the Game of Go to occidental games, the first because it has in America the same popularity that the Game of Go has in Asia; the second because it is the game every European will think of when someone mention the Game of Go: it is a board abstract strategy symmetric game without random chance.

Georges Perect is a French writer, famous member of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) and author of numerous books. He is also the one who introduced the Game of Go in France, through a little book he wrote when returning from a long stay in Japan. In this book, he dedicates a chapter to the comparison between Go and chess, with a visible fondness for the Game of Go. First, chess are absolute: only victory, Pat or defeat are possible. The Game of Go, however, offers the subtleties of a more or less large victory, symbol, according to Perec, of the deepness of the Chinese art of war: a victory is never total, a defeat is never absolute. Chess is a game of war : two armies are fighting to kill the king of their opponent; on the opposite, the Game of Go is a game of construction of influence, creation of territories, questions and invitations. Chess is a very direct game; the Goban is more vast, theatre of different conflicts at different places. The notions of locality and globalism are predominant in the Game of Go.

The comparison with poker cannot be made the same way. What shall be compared is the relative popularities. In the USA, the poker champions are very notorious; television channels are dedicated to the broadcast of their exploits, as in Asia, television channels are dedicated to the broadcast of Go games. Poker is typical of the American exuberance, a game of "show", characteristic of the way the Occident like to see the way reputations are built: in a few instants, a fortune can be built and destroyed. The chance is a predominant factor, and the most important talent is the capacity to bluff, to fool the adversaries. In comparison, the East glorifies the calm, slow, rational players, whose genius was structured by a long assiduousness and a lot of practice. Chance has no place, only talent matter.

Go and oriental culture - the 36 Chinese Stratagems

The Chinese art of war is ruled by 36 ancient obscure stratagems which are subject to numerous interpretations. They come from a very long tradition and are meant to contain the essence of the strategies a general has to be able to apply to win. "Shout at the east and attack at the west", "Kill with a borrowed knife", "Rest when your enemy is exhausted", "Besiege Wei to save Zhao", "Cheat the emperor and cross the sea", "Build from nothing" are the first of them.

those 36 stratagems have been deeply studied in How to use the 36 Stratagems to win by Kenrick E. Cleveland. This book analyses the meaning and the concrete applications of those strange maxims; he goes upon the ethical problems linked to those proverbs and replaces them in their historical context. The Game of Go is never mentioned: it is a purely historical work. However, this book is now part of the needed book for the study of the Game of Go; today, people who wants to study the Game of Go deeply and understand its mechanism still do so by studying the old Chinese battle strategies. Xiaochun, a Chinese 9th dan (the strongest level for a professional), illustrated it in his book The 36 Stratagems applied to Go". Who, in Europe, would think about reading military books to study chess? This strange fact illustrates again the deep links between the Chinese society and the Game of Go, each of them using the other as a source of inspiration. Even Mao Tse-tung used to compare his guerilla tactics to those used in the Game of Go.

Go and oriental culture - the Japanese business managers

Miura Yasuyuki, director of the Japan Airlines Development Company and of the Nikko hostels, dedicated to book to the comparison between the strategies of the Japanese businessmen and the techniques of the Go players, in his book Go, an Asian Paradigm for Business Strategy. Yasuyuki asserts that the study of the Game of Go reveals the way businessmen think and develop their strategies.

Lots of other examples could illustrate my thesis; however, it is not necessary to give more. Those facts highlight the very deep relation within the oriental way of thinking and the functioning of the Game of Go. In front of those different phenomena, the huge notoriety of the Game of Go becomes an obviousness and not a curiosity: the Game of Go is as anchored in the oriental culture as the oriental culture is anchored in the mechanism of the Game of Go.