“India’s journey today is not merely about development; it is also a journey of psychological renaissance.”
— Narendra Modi
“Realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is the greatest dream of the Chinese nation in modern times.”
— Xi Jinping
India and China — the world’s two most populous nations, both heirs to ancient, living civilizations — are both in the midst of striking civilizational revivals. In each case, modern national identity is being reshaped not only by economic growth or geopolitical ambition, but by a renewed turn toward cosmological traditions that reach deep into the past.
In the West, these traditions are usually encountered through familiar terms such as dharma, karma, wu wei and qi. Over the past century, philosophers, psychologists and writers translated these ideas into narratives of personal growth and spirituality, often in ways that lifted them out of the broader cultural worlds in which they first took shape.
Yet concepts such as dharma and wu wei were never merely abstract principles. They emerged from integrated worldviews that linked cosmic order to moral responsibility, social life and everyday conduct. They shaped how people understood their place in the world.
Revisiting the deep cosmological foundations of India and China helps explain the renewed cultural confidence visible in both countries today. Those foundations continue to inform their sense of identity, their values and their complementary visions of the future.
Varnas and yugas
The differences between India and China come most clearly into view when we look at their distinct cosmologies, the large-scale worldviews each civilization developed to explain the nature of the universe, its moral order, and humanity’s place within it.
In classical Indian cosmology, the four yugas (cosmic ages) and the four varnas (archetypal human orientations) form part of a cyclical vision of history rather than a narrative of linear progress.
In early thought, the varṇas were not rigid castes but symbolic patterns of human disposition — the contemplative Brahmin, governing Ksatriya, productive Vaisya, and skilled Sudra — each representing a capacity that civilization foregrounds at different moments in the cycle.
The four varnas are generic psychological profiles. Most humans have features of two or more Varnas, but one of the four predominates in most people. In modern parlance, he is a born leader, a model worker, a devoted teacher.
In the Brahmin/Satya (Age of Wisdom), life is oriented toward insight and alignment between the cosmic and social orders. The Ksatriya/Treta (Age of Order) emphasizes law, governance and disciplined institutions, strengthening political organization even as hierarchy intensifies.
The Vaisya/Dvapara (Age of Productivity) foregrounds commerce, administration and technical specialization, increasing material complexity while loosening the unity of ethics and cosmology. In the Sudra/Kali (Age of Labor and Technique), society becomes intensely practical and technologically driven, even as social cohesion and moral grounding weaken.
Taken together, the cycle expresses a form of civilizational learning: each age cultivates contemplative, political, economic, and technical capacities that reappear in renewed form, portraying human development as a recurring movement of differentiation, imbalance and restoration across time.
In the varna–yuga cycle, the moral and spiritual logic of Indian cosmology is structured around four key concepts: rta, dharma, karma and moksa.
Rta is the principle of cosmic order that governs both the universe and human life. In the early phases of the cycle, particularly in the Age of Wisdom, society is understood as closely aligned with rta. Social roles, ritual life and ethical conduct reflect the wider harmony of the cosmos.
Dharma expresses this cosmic order in the human realm. It refers to appropriate action relative to one’s varna, stage of life, and historical age. As the cycle progresses and moral clarity weakens, dharma becomes increasingly difficult to discern and sustain. Social order grows increasingly reliant on law, hierarchy and discipline rather than intrinsic harmony.
Karma gives the cycle personal and ethical continuity. Actions are understood to carry consequences across lifetimes, binding individuals to the moral logic of the world. Across declining ages, karma ensures that ethical responsibility persists even when social and cosmic alignment weakens.
Finally, moksa offers a path beyond the cycle itself. It represents liberation from conditioned existence and release from the binding effects of karma. In some interpretations, the crisis of Kali Yuga can intensify the longing for mokṣa, preparing the ground for renewal when the varna cycle returns to the Age of Wisdom.
Together, rta, dharma, karma, and moksa weave cosmology, ethics and spiritual aspiration into a unified framework that endows cyclical history with meaning rather than reflecting linear progress.
In recent years, Western thinkers have reframed Indian concepts such as karma, dharma, and moksa within modern narratives of linear progress or personal development. While valuable as concepts in their own right, when removed from their historical roots, they lose the anchoring context of cyclical time and cosmic meaning that made them ethically and civilizational coherent.
China’s earthly path
While Indian thought often looks outward across vast cycles of time and moral consequence extending over multiple lifetimes, Chinese cosmology is rooted less in fixed cosmic eras than in continuous process, change and relational harmony.
Central to Chinese cosmology is the I Ching, the oldest of the Chinese classics. The I Ching’s 64 hexagrams express the dynamic interplay of cosmic polarities, mutually dependent polarities later given the generic terms yin and yang, that transform into one another through the movement of qi. This vital energy permeates all existence.
Qi is neither strictly “material” nor “spiritual”; it is the living continuum that runs through mountains and rivers, bodies and emotions, mind, society, and landscape alike. Well-being, moral balance, and practical action depend on the harmonious flow of one’s inner life and one’s relationships with the surrounding world.
The polarities are not opposites locked in conflict, but interdependent phases of a single, ongoing dynamic. Every phenomenon and process contains aspects of both, each holding the seed of the other. This constant, fluid reciprocity drives change in the universe and in everyday human experience.
At the basis of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching are the eight Trigrams, each associated with fundamental natural forces — heaven, Earth, and terrestrial phenomena such as wind, fire, and water. The interaction between heaven and Earth shapes the terrestrial environment.
Confucian thinkers extended this symbolic structure to human life. They linked the Eight Trigrams with the family, i.e., parents and six children. This embedded society itself within the cosmic order conceptualized by the I Ching.
While the I Ching illuminates the dynamics of the polarities in nature and the cosmos, Confucianism articulates their ethical expression in human affairs: the search for harmony between individual and community, parent and child, ruler and subject.
In Confucianism, ethical life was not understood as a path of withdrawal or transcendence from the world (as in the Indian ideal of moksa), but as a disciplined practice of cultivating balance within the world.
Confucianism guided conduct at every social level, from the household to the state. It linked Heaven, Earth, and humanity in a unified moral framework that shaped Chinese intellectual and political culture for centuries.
Whereas Indian thought frequently grounds moral meaning in the cosmic causality of karma across lifetimes, Chinese thought anchors ethics in the relational networks, ritual propriety, and social harmony of the present world.
In contemporary China, echoes of this ancient idea persist in the government’s emphasis on harmonious governance, social stability, and adaptive leadership as proof of its ongoing mandate. It reinforces the civilizational revival by linking modern governance to ancient cosmological principles.
Buddhism and Daoism
Buddhism reached China from India around the first century CE, roughly five centuries after the death of Confucius. Its rapid spread unsettled Chinese philosophers and officials. They worried that Buddhism’s emphasis on renunciation and transcendence would draw people away from family responsibility, social ethics, and the grounded harmony of the Dao that underpinned Chinese life.
Partly in response to this new presence, Daoism began to transform. What had earlier been a largely philosophical current gradually developed more formal institutional and ritual dimensions. Daoism selectively adopted elements of Buddhism — monasteries, ritual structures, and meditative techniques — while reshaping them to reflect distinctly Chinese aesthetics of balance, beauty, and cosmological harmony.
Early translators rendered Buddhist concepts through Daoist vocabulary: wu wei (non-forcing) was used to express aspects of non-attachment, and dao (the Way) was adopted to convey the Buddhist path (dharma). This linguistic bridge helped present Buddhism not as an import, but as a tradition that could be read as continuous with China’s own philosophical inheritance.
From this encounter emerged Chan (Zen) Buddhism, a synthesis that absorbed Daoist themes, including ziran (natural, uncontrived spontaneity). Chan shifted emphasis toward sudden insight, direct transmission between teacher and student, and instilling a disciplined awareness anchored in the present moment.
Western decontextualization
In the 20th century, Western philosophers, writers and psychologists introduced Eastern thought to broader Western audiences. Their work exposed millions of people to meditation, yoga, and new ways of thinking.
However, some features of Asian thought were lost in translation. Ideas originally rooted in holistic cosmologies, with visions of the universe, ethics, ritual and community, were often reframed to align with Western priorities, such as personal psychology, self-discovery and individual growth.
Carl Jung, who wrote the foreword to the first German translation of the I Ching, compared yin-yang and non-duality to reflections of inner psychic balance and archetypal integration.
British-American writer Alan Watts, who helped popularize Western reinterpretations of Asian philosophies in the 1950s and 1960s, presented Zen as an invitation to spontaneity and existential freedom, themes that became part of the hippie ethos.
Other interpreters wove Eastern concepts into narratives of spiritual evolution: Theosophists and New Age movements portrayed karma and rebirth as stages in a journey of soul development.
In the work of Integral theorist Ken Wilber, Asian terms such as moksa and atman were reframed as phases of psychological maturation. Wilber’s interpretation of “nondual awareness” draws on Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhist teachings about the dissolution of the ego-self.
Despite selective reinterpretation, Asian concepts such as mindfulness have had beneficial influences on modern psychotherapy. They helped shape approaches to stress reduction, emotional regulation, and awareness-based therapies by encouraging patients to observe thoughts and feelings without immediate reaction or judgment.
In this adapted form, mindfulness was recast less as a spiritual discipline and more as a practical method for cultivating attention, resilience, and psychological well-being within everyday life.
Similarly, yoga was largely detached from its original sociocosmic and devotional setting. In its classical context, yoga (“union”) referred to aligning one’s inner life with a morally ordered cosmos and the long arc of spiritual liberation.
In its modern, globalized form, yoga evolved into a practice oriented toward physical vitality, stress reduction, and mental clarity. While still meaningful in its own right, it reflects a different set of cultural aims and interpretations.
Complimentarity
Neither the histories of India nor China are fully monolithic, seamless, and continuous. India engaged in internal debates about the varṇa framework, and China’s Legalists challenged Confucianism.
Similarly, the cyclical/transcendent visions of India and the relational/this-worldly perspectives of China are not black and white. Hindu traditions emphasized loka-saṅgraha (worldly welfare), while Chinese Daoist thought had transcendent aspirations.
However, the different cosmologies of India and China help explain both their deep civilizational divergence and their complementarity.
For the ancient sages of India, the yuga-varna concept was a psychological and spiritual schema embedded in a prophetic vision of cyclical time and renewal after long epochs of decline. It placed moral causality at the heart of the universe: actions carry consequences across lifetimes, and the chain of karma binds ethical behavior to cosmic order.
This worldview cultivates a strong sense of responsibility and continuity, but it can also slip into moral fatalism. Social position or suffering may be interpreted as deserved rather than contingent or unjust.
For the authors of the I Ching, the Eight Trigrams were not a hierarchical social construct. They represented a symbolic grammar of nature that highlighted the tension (qi) between the polarities of existence. The I Ching provided guidance on aligning human existence with these polar dynamics.
The Confucian classics emphasized relational obligation in the present world. What matters is not earlier incarnations, but how one acts within webs of family, community, and the social hierarchy. This construct has its own shadow: it can reinforce conformity and make dissent or individual deviation harder to justify.
But the sense of continuity remains alive in India and China today. The resurgent confidence of the two countries has an economic and political dimension; it is civilizational in character. It reflects a conscious effort to anchor modern development, power, and identity in older understandings of cosmic order and moral purpose.
Quiet assumptions
As both countries assume a larger role in shaping the 21st-century world, their cosmological traditions are likely to influence how they approach shared global challenges. Their cosmologies do not function as policy doctrines, but as quiet assumptions about ethics, responsibility, and humanity’s place in a larger order.
The Indian perspective, rooted in the cyclical yugas, understands decline as a prelude to renewal. Environmental and social crises, viewed through this lens, become phases within a regenerative arc rather than terminal breakdowns, encouraging long-range resilience and ethical responsibility across generations.
By contrast, the Chinese emphasis on relational harmony and the balance of polarities points toward a sensibility that favors adaptive equilibrium over confrontation and pragmatic accommodation over ideological rigidity. The preferred approach is coordination, stability, and incremental adjustment rather than zero-sum rivalry.
Neither tradition has all the answers, and both continually negotiate the realities of modern political and economic power. But their enduring orientations — cyclical renewal on one side, harmonious interdependence on the other — offer meaningful additions to the dominant Western imagination of history as a linear project of individual achievement and advancement.
At a time when the global system is seeking new sources of stability and purpose, these ancient cosmologies reappear as creative resources for imagining alternative futures.