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The relationship between things was another important concern of the ancient Chinese philosophers, which made them different from their European counterparts. The ancient European philosophers mainly concerned the nature of things. In some sense, European philosophy originated from the exploration of "What's the nature of it." In China, however, it was quite different. In the history of Chinese philosophy, the commonest question might be "What's the relationship between them." No matter in the ancient or modern China, the question on relationship between things had been a widely-discussed issue, where most philosophers would be involved and reached the consensus meanwhile. This rarely happened in the history of European philosophy and differentiated Chinese and western philosophies. To be specific, Chinese's view on relationship could be summarized into three types, among which the heaven-human relationship was the oldest and likely the earliest form of Chinese people's concept or understanding of what relationship between things was. It was notable that Chinese philosophers' thought on relationship was embodied to the largest extent on two sides: dialectical outlook and holistic outlook, which fully presented the essence of Chinese philosophy.
The heaven-human relationship was the oldest relationship. According to the existing scholarship and materials available, it was also likely the earliest evidence and form of Chinese people's concept or understanding of what relationship between things was. In the ancient Chinese thought, heaven-human relationship was very complex as it related to philosophical, religious, and intellectual ideas. Religiously, it referred to Heaven-Human Harmony and Fate (Ming), and the latter meanwhile included God's Will (Tian Ming) and Destiny (Ming Yun). Intellectually, it referred to the theories Heaven-Human Difference and Heaven-Human Rule, as well as the concepts Properness (Yi), Dependence (Yin), Force (Li), etc.
• The Religious Approach to Heaven-human Relationship
• The Intellectual Approach to Heaven-human Relationship
Dialectical outlook or dialectical thinking was a remarkable achievement made in the ancient Chinese philosophy. Intellectually, dialectical outlook based itself on opposite phenomena and basically concerned the universal opposition among things. In specific, dialectical outlook was presented in three forms: mutual reliance, mutual transformation, the relativity of opposition. With dialectical outlook, Chinese treated things as a whole rather than a part, considered things dynamic rather than static, and took relativist rather than absolutist stance.