Mandate of Heaven . . . . (it's all the same)
天下 Mandate of Heaven This is the mandate, that beautiful notion, the perfection of that which is in the historical. What is the difference between mandate of heaven and manifest destiny or divine providence? It is that which comes about through no metaphysical being, but rather is the resultant in history. The Zhou were the first to reference 天下 as that which is meant to be when a ruler won a battle. It was, to put it in a way that we can understand the sense, ordained. There was no personage in heaven or willful nature which ordained the result. This is a very difficult concept to portray in Western ideas or language. Just as the heart of perfect wisdom sutra states, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” so too the mandate of heaven is a concept of unusual meaning, for the Westerner. Bottom line, there may be no equivalent in English, but it seems like that it indicates the winner gets to define history. Sound familiar? It is no wonder that, in a wor...
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