9 | The Son of Heaven and Earth

‘HEAVEN is his father, Earth his mother.’ So reads the formula—always exactly the same wherever it occurs, regardless of time or place^[1]—that defines the nature of the relationship between Man and the other two terms of the Great Triad by describing him as ‘Son of Heaven and Earth’. The very fact that it is an initiatic formula is itself a clear indication that, if we are to understand it in its fullest sense, it must not just be thought of as referring to the ordinary man who is the product of present world conditions, but as describing the ‘true man’ all of whose possibilities the initiate is called upon to realise within himself.

This particular point deserves a little further explanation, however, because it could be objected that as manifestation in its entirety is, and can be nothing other than, the resultant of the union of Heaven and Earth, it follows that every man—indeed every being we might choose to think of—is equally a son of Heaven and Earth because by nature he or it will contain something of the nature of both.

In a sense this is true. Every being consists of both an essence and a substance (using these terms in a relative sense): a yang aspect and a yin aspect, a side that is ‘in act’ and a side that is ‘in potency’, an ‘interior’ and an ‘exterior’. And yet the precise extent of this participation is a matter of degree, for in manifested beings the celestial and terrestrial influences clearly combine in many different ways and in many different proportions: this after all is what produces their endless diversity. But as to what it is that all beings are, to varying degrees and in various ways, that is none other than Man. And by Man here we mean ‘true man’,^[2] for in our state of existence he and he alone is fully and pre-eminently Man, just as it is he alone who among his other privileges is given the capacity of actually being able to recognise Heaven as his ‘True Ancestor’.^[3]

What we have just said is a direct and immediate consequence of man’s ‘central’ position in relation to his own state of existence.^[4] To be more precise we ought to speak of the ‘central’ position which man should (normally and in principle) occupy. Here, in the very fact that we have to make a distinction between the place man actually occupies and the place he should occupy, we are confronted with the difference between ordinary man and ‘true man’. From the traditional point of view it is ‘true man’ alone who is worthy of being described as normal. He is given the name ‘true man’ to show that he truly possesses the fullness of human nature, due to the fact that he has developed within himself every aspect of the possibilities implicit in his humanity. As to other men the best that can be said is that they possess, so to speak, a human potentiality. This potentiality will be more or less developed in some of its aspects, and particularly in those aspects corresponding to the simple corporeal modality of the individuality; but in any case it will be far from being totally actualised. It is this predominant characteristic of potentiality which makes these men sons of Earth far more than sons of Heaven, and it is also what makes them yin in relation to the Cosmos.

For a man to be truly the ‘Son of Heaven and Earth’, the ‘act’ in him must be equal to the ‘potency’. This implies nothing short of the full and complete realisation of his humanity—that is, the state of ‘true man’. It is the reason why ‘true man’ is perfectly balanced in terms of yang and yin; it is also why at the same time he is yang in relation to the Cosmos, for the heavenly nature neces- sarily has supremacy over the terrestrial wherever the two are actualised in equal measure. This, and this alone, is what makes him capable of fulfilling effectively his ‘central’ role as man; yet he can only truly fulfil this role provided he is man in the fullest sense of the word, which means that for all other manifested beings ‘he is the image of the True Ancestor’.^[5]

Now it is very important to bear in mind that ‘true man’ is also ‘primordial man’. In other words, the condition of ‘true man’ is the condition that was natural for humanity at its origins. Since then, humanity has distanced itself little by little from that original state as it moved through its terrestrial cycle, and the end result now is the state in which what we have called ordinary man finds himself—although fallen man would be a more appropriate term. This spiritual decline, which as it increases produces a greater and greater imbalance between yang and yin, can be described as a gradual moving away from the central position occupied by ‘primordial’ man. The further removed a being is from the centre, the less yang he is and the more yin, for the ‘outward’ begins to prevail over the ‘inward’ in exact proportion to the distance he moves away from the centre. This is why we said above that he ends up virtually a ‘son of Earth’ alone: ‘in act’ if not ‘in potency’ he becomes less and less distinguishable from non-human beings sharing the same level of existence. ‘Primordial man’, on the other hand, was not merely one more being among the rest: he was the living synthesis of them all in his fully realised humanity.^[6] By virtue of his ‘inwardness’, which embraced his entire state of existence just as Heaven embraces all manifestation (for in reality the centre contains everything), he included these beings in himself as particular possibilities inherent in his own nature.^[7] So it is that Man, as the third term of the Great Triad, effectively represents the totality of all manifested beings.

The ‘place’ occupied by this ‘true man’ is the central point where the powers of Heaven and Earth converge and unite. This means that ‘true man’ is the direct, culminating product of their union. And here again we see why other beings—because in a sense they are merely secondary and partial products of the union of Heaven and Earth—will necessarily proceed from him in a line of indefinite gradation determined by their greater or lesser distance from that central point. This is the reason why, as we pointed out earlier, ‘true man’ alone deserves the designation ‘Son of Heaven and Earth’: the title is pre-eminently his, and it is his to the highest degree possible. Everything else in existence is only entitled to the name by virtue of participation; and the necessary means of this participation is ‘true man’ himself, for only in him are Heaven and Earth directly united—if not Heaven and Earth themselves, then at least in the form of the influences they both exert in the sphere of existence to which the human state belongs.^[8]

As we have explained elsewhere,^[9] initiation falls into two parts. Its first part, which constitutes what are called the ‘lesser mysteries’, is concerned specifically with the possibilities of the human state and has as its object the restoration of the ‘primordial state’. This means that through this initiation, if it is effectively realised, man is brought back from the state of ‘off-centredness’ which he now occupies to the central position which normally should be his; and once there, all the prerogatives inherent in this central location are restored to him.

In other words, ‘true man’ is the person who has effectively reached the goal of the ‘lesser mysteries’, and this goal is nothing else than the perfection of the human state. The man who has achieved this finds himself established once and for all at the ‘Unchanging Centre’ (Chung Yung). He has now escaped the vicissitudes of the ‘cosmic wheel’, for the centre does not move like the rest of the wheel but is the fixed and stationary point around which the movement occurs.^[10]

When he has arrived at this point, ‘true man’ has not yet attained the highest degree which is the final goal of initiation and the term of the ‘greater mysteries’. But he has passed from the circumference to the centre, from the ‘outer’ to the ‘inner’, and so truly fulfils the function of ‘unmoved mover’ in relation to the world that is his.^[11] And the ‘action of presence’ belonging to this function imitates in its particular domain the ‘actionless’ activity of Heaven.^[12] When we compare different traditional ternaries with each other, we may find it possible to establish a genuine correspondence between them term by term. However, it would be wrong to conclude automatically from this that the corresponding terms are actually identical; and we must be no less wary of jumping to such conclusions even in cases where some of the terms have very similar names or designations, for it is quite possible that these designations are in fact being applied by analogical transposition at completely different levels.

These comments are especially relevant when comparing the Far-Eastern Great Triad with the Hindu Tribhuvana. The Tribhuvana, as is well known, comprises ‘three worlds’—Earth (Bhu), Air (Bhuvas) and Heaven (Svar). And yet this Heaven and this Earth are most certainly not the T’ien and Ti of the Far-Eastern tradition, for which the equivalents in the Hindu tradition are Purusha and Prakriti.^[1] In fact, whereas T’ien and Ti (or Purusha and Prakriti) are outside of manifestation, and indeed are the immediate principles behind manifestation, the ‘three worlds’ signify the totality of manifestation itself, divided into its three basic categories—the realm of supra-formal manifestation, the realm of subtle manifestation and the realm of gross or corporeal manifestation.

Once this necessary distinction has been observed, we are still left with the apparently awkward fact that we are obliged to use the same terms—‘Heaven’ and ‘Earth’—in both cases. But to justify this dual application or connotation of the same terms we need only point out that the supra-formal realm of manifestation is clearly the realm in which celestial influences are predominant, while terrestrial influences will obviously predominate in the gross realm. (We are here using the expressions ‘celestial influences’ and ‘terrestrial influences’ in the specific sense we gave them earlier.) We can also say—and in fact this amounts to saying the same thing in a different way—that the supra-formal realm is closer to essence while the gross realm is closer to substance, although of course this in no way entitles us to identify them with universal Essence and universal Substance themselves.^[2]

As for subtle manifestation, this is the ‘intermediary world’ (antariksha) and therefore the middle term in the schema we have just outlined. It derives from a combination of the two different classes of mutually complementary influences, balanced and intermingled to such an extent that it is impossible—at least when speaking of this intermediary world as a whole—to say which set of influences is stronger than the other. Admittedly its enormous complexity means it must contain some elements which may tend more towards the essential side of manifestation and others which may tend more towards the substantial side. Yet the fact remains that all these elements, regardless of their specific nature, are always on the side of substance relative to supra-formal manifestation, and always on the side of essence relative to gross manifestation.

On no account must this middle term of the Tribhuvana be confused with the middle term of the Great Triad, Man. This is by no means to assert that they have nothing in common: in fact a definite connection between them does exist which (as we shall soon show) is no less real for the fact that it is not immediately apparent. But even so, there are certain respects in which the roles they perform are not the same. To be specific: the middle term of the Great Triad is strictly speaking the product or resultant of the two extremes, hence its traditional designation ‘Son of Heaven and Earth’. But as for subtle manifestation, this derives from the supra-formal realm alone, and gross manifestation derives in its turn from subtle manifestation. In other words, if we take each term of the _Tribhuvana_ in a descending order, it will have as its immediate principle the term that precedes it.

So we see that a valid concordance between the two ternaries cannot be established from the standpoint of the order of their production. Such a concordance can only be established so to speak ‘statically’—that is, at the stage when all three terms have already been produced. In this case the two extremes of both ternaries can be thought of as corresponding in a relative sense to essence and substance within the realm of universal manifestation, provided we consider universal manifestation in its entirety as constituted analogously to a particular being—that is, provided we view it as the ‘macrocosm’ in the strict sense of the word.

There is no need to go to any great length here on the subject of the analogy between the constitution of ‘macrocosm’ and ‘microcosm’, for we have already covered this ground fully enough in other studies. But there is one particular aspect of this analogy which does deserve restating, and that is that a being such as man must, as a ‘microcosm’, necessarily participate in the ‘three worlds’ and therefore contain elements corresponding to each. In fact the same broad ternary division applies to him as well: through his spirit he belongs to the realm of supra-formal manifestation, through his soul to the realm of subtle manifestation, and through his body he belongs to the realm of gross manifestation. We will return to this tripartite division later on and develop it further, as this will help us to throw into clearer relief the relationship between several of the most important ternaries.

This brings us to another point, which is that the expression ‘microcosm’ truly applies to man—and by ‘man’ we mean above all ‘true man’, or man fully self-realised—more than to any other living being. The reason for this lies, yet again, in that ‘central’ position of his which makes him a kind of image, or ‘summation’ in the sense of the Latin word _summa_, of the totality of mani- festation. Man’s nature, as explained earlier, is a synthesis of the nature of all other living beings, and this means there is nothing to be found in manifestation which does not have its correspondence and equivalent in man. This last statement is not just a mere ‘metaphor’, as people today would be only too ready to believe; on the contrary, it is the expression of an exact truth which happens to be the foundation for a considerable portion of the traditional sciences. And here, incidentally, we have the explanation of the correlations which exist, in the most ‘positive’ fashion, between modifications in the human order and in the order of the cosmos. Perhaps no other tradition attaches more importance to these correlations than the Far-Eastern tradition, which is unmatched in its thoroughness in deducing and then applying in practice all the consequences that they logically entail.

Looking at the subject from a slightly different angle, we have already mentioned that there is a particular correlation between man and the ‘intermediary world’, which is what could be called a correlation of ‘function’ as we will now explain. We have seen earlier that man occupies a position mid-way between Heaven and Earth—regardless of whether these terms are understood in their principal sense (as in the Great Triad) or in the more specialised sense of spiritual world and corporeal world (as in the Tribhuvana). The fact that man by his constitution participates in both of them means he plays an intermediary role in relation to the Cosmos as a whole which is comparable to the role played in a living being by the soul as the intermediary between spirit and body. The crucial point to be noted here is that this intermediary domain—which when viewed as a whole is called the ‘soul’ or ‘subtle form’—is also the location of the element characteristic of human individuality as such: namely the ‘mental faculty’, or _manas_. We can therefore say that this specifically human element occupies the same place in man that man himself occupies in the Cosmos.

It should now be obvious that the functional factor which we mentioned above as being the basis for the correlation between man and the middle term of the _Tribhuvana_, as well as with soul which corresponds to this middle term in the case of a living being, is strictly a ‘mediatory’ function. In fact the animic principle, or principle of soul, has often been described as the ‘mediator’ between spirit and body;^[3] and similarly as far as man is concerned he is the true ‘mediator’ between Heaven and Earth, as we will explain later in greater detail. In this respect only (and not because of man being ‘Son of Heaven and Earth’) a term-by-term correspondence can be established between the Great Triad and the Tribhuvana, but on the understanding that this correspondence in no way implies an identification of the terms of the one ternary with the terms of the other. Earlier we called this point of view a ‘static’ one, to differentiate it from what could be called the ‘genetic’^[4] point of view which is concerned with the sequence in which the terms are produced. From this second point of view a correlation between the two ternaries is no longer possible; and our next chapter will show even more clearly why this must be so.