Humanity has always lived in great fear and suffering, and the sages of the Axial Age have taught us that only compassion, respect, and universal concern are the "golden rules" for dealing with suffering.
Between 800 BC and 200 BC, there was a very miraculous phenomenon in human history - a group of geniuses appeared in a group: in China, there were Confucius, Mencius, Laozi; In India, there is Shakyamuni; In Israel, there were Jewish prophets; In ancient Greece, there were Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.
This is a hitherto unexplained phenomenon that humans have not been able to explain. How many thousands of years has humanity stumbled in the history of evolution, and why have so many important thinkers gathered for the present 600 years?
During this period, the four great civilizations – Confucianism and Taoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece – all began to take shape.
This was the first ideological explosion in human history, and it was also the most important breakthrough in human civilization so far, which laid the foundation of the entire human civilization and became the driving force behind the development of human history.
This period is the "Axial Age" proposed by the famous German philosopher Jasbels, which is recognized and respected by later generations.
To this day, Jaspers said, "humanity has been living on all that was thought and created during this period".
The "breakthrough period" of human civilization
Jaspers divides the development of human history before the 20th century into four stages: the prehistoric era, the ancient age of high civilization, the axial age and the age of technology.
Of these four phases, Jaspers refers to the "Axial Age" as the "Breakthrough Period", and the "Prehistoric Era", the "Ancient Age of High Civilization", and the "Technological Age" that followed it are all called the "Interludes".
We can understand it this wayThe history of mankind is based on the Axial Age, for which everything before was prepared, and after that, all human progress was based on it:Including the humanistic enlightenment of the Renaissance, the rationalization and secularization of the Reformation, the rational spirit of modern science and technology, the concept of social contract in the age of enlightenment, and so on. All the awakenings and leaps that have taken place in the history of mankind have all been inspired by this, so much so that now, whenever mankind encounters a spiritual crisis and a social crisis, it always has to return to the Axial Age to seek guidance.
In the millions of years of human history, 600 years is just a short moment, but it is this 600 years of history that has always influenced the overall spiritual course of mankind after that. Pre-Axial: Mental Activity Shrouded in Fear
Historian Toynbee argues thatCivilization arises because the challenges of the environment cause people to rise up to fight, and in the cycle of challenges and responses, civilization is born. Since the first time human beings felt fear, they began to engage in mental activity, striving to find a way out of fear.
The Roman poet Lucretius said, "Fear is the first mother of the gods, especially the fear of death." ”
In primitive societies, people, like other animals, knew nothing about the world and passively sought to survive in nature, and all kinds of disasters could occur at any time, and life was not guaranteed. Early humans did not believe that death was a natural phenomenon, but that some supernatural force was in control. The fear of death led human beings to hope for help from outside forces (divine help) and beg for a good fate, so religious beliefs arose.
Since then, religion has ruled the spiritual world of man, and man has been focused on the search for divinity. The emergence of any crisis, human beings attribute it to the violation of God, as a result, human sacrifice is becoming more and more cruel, the primitive sacrifice of all civilizations, there is a history of sacrificing living people, this "piety", is a clear proof of human ignorance, fear and cruelty in the pre-Axial era.
Subsequently, although the Babylonian culture, Egyptian culture, Indus Valley culture and ancient Chinese culture appeared, human beings generally did not get rid of the rule of religion, let alone question the authority of religion, until they entered the Axial Age.
The Axial Age: The Beginning of Human Intelligence
Political scientist Liu Junning said that human wisdom is divided into two kinds, one is about rational wisdom, often referred to as Greek wisdom; One is the wisdom of morality, often referred to as the wisdom of Jerusalem. The wisdom of Jerusalem was superior to that of Greece because, in the final analysis, the purpose of all wisdom is to enable mankind to survive better. In the Axial Age, many sages began to abandon the exploration of theological questions and turn to the human self itself, which marked the birth of human self-consciousness and the spiritual becoming of man as a true human being.
The sages of this period broke through the purely sensual and primitive mode of thinking of religious mythology, and began to think in a rational, moral, and religious way.
In China, Confucius founded Chinese Confucianism, advocating "benevolence" and "loyalty and forgiveness", and he was not concerned with the heavens and ghosts, but on the present world, the world that people can know. Mozi put forward the idea of "love and love", and he believed that if human beings do not cultivate love for the whole human race, then patriotism and love for family will only become narrow collective egocentrism. In the "Our Classics" (four volumes), the famous scholar Li Ling reinterpreted the four classics such as "Zhou Yi" and "Sun Tzu" in simple terms, which can be called the classics of "Chinese classics in the Axial Age". 
In the Arab region, the thinking of prophets and priests such as Jeremiah also began to turn to the inner world of man, and they proposed that human beings should face suffering calmly and avoid solving problems in violent ways, thus avoiding the emergence of a religion based on resentment and revenge, and creating a spiritual belief that affirmed the sanctity of all life.
In India, Gautama developed a spiritual method of liberating the suffering person, arguing that the state of selflessness naturally exists in every human being, and that this selfless compassion from the heart can bring ultimate happiness and liberation to everyone. Gautama's ideas were sorted out by later generations to form the far-reaching Buddhism.
In Greece, people began to reflect on the justice of war through tragedy; The mathematician Pythagoras founded a secret sect that rejected meat and sacrifice, and sought enlightenment through the study of science and mathematics...These are just a few of the Axial eras, and we could go on a much longer list. The ideas that emerged in the Axial Age may seem "prosaic" to people today, and some of them have long been proven wrong, butWhy, 2,000 years later, do we always have to come back here for revelation whenever humanity is faced with a crisis or a new leap?
In the final analysis, the contribution of the prophets of the Axial Age to the entire human civilization did not lie in what kind of ideas they established and what sects they founded, but in the fact that they shifted the object of their thinking from the gods of another world to the real human beings themselves in the real world, and rethought the problem from the starting point of man to seek a solution to the problem.
The sages of the Axial Age believed that "respect for the divine right of all life – not the orthodox creed – is religion." They are reformers in the true sense of the word, and what they are reforming is not the system of one country or one place, but the thinking paradigm of the entire human civilization.
Back in the Axial Age, we can find outThe common thing behind the wisdom of the sages is compassion, respect, and universal concern. It transcends time, space and geography, and is the common ethical norm of all mankind, which is also the spirit of the Axial Age. To this end, I strongly recommend the famous British scholar Karen Armstrong's "The Axial Age", which reproduces the spirit of the historical picture scroll of the Axial Age with magnificent bearing, compassion and concise brushstrokes, and goes straight to the essence of Eastern and Western sages.
In the book, the author laments: The Axial Age is an era that produces spiritual geniuses, and we live in an era that produces scientific and technological geniuses. In such an era of quick success, we especially need to purify our hearts and spirits, and the secret of this is contained in the "golden rules" developed by the sages of the Axial Age from different religions and different ideas. At the same time, Axial Age also introduces us to the following questions:
In that era of almost isolation, why did different regions and civilizations invariably enter a period of bursting creativity? What happened after that that ended the glory of this era?
After the Axial Age, why did some civilizations disappear into history, while the remaining civilizations did not follow the same path, but gradually drifted away according to their own trajectories?
More than 2,000 years after the Axial Age, why did some civilizations bring prosperity and freedom to mankind, while others brought humanity back to fear and chaos?
The New York Times commented: In the book "Axial Age", any small part of any detail can write a book; And the former ** García Perez of Peru said: Karen Armstrong is a university scholar I admire, and her "Axial Age" is a masterpiece that every person with a conscience should read. Click on the product card below to collect this book.