INTRODUCTION

There are Western scholars who point out that movements with revolutionary ideology have often religious roots in millenarian, eschatological and messianic mass movements, usually associated with the Judeo-Christian tradition. They have said that the messiah idea is unique to the West, and that any manifestation of it in Chinese history and civilisation has to be the result of dissemination from the West. For example, Wilhelm Miihlmann argues that ‘mystical religions’, like Taoism and Buddhism, lack a linear concept of time, which is essential to messianic thinking, new ideas or revolutionary movements. They have had the impression that East Asia has not known such movements as its own, except when ideas behind such have been exported from the West. After all, the socalled cyclical nature of time in the East supposedly prevents real change or expectation of such.

The Chinese concept of time

The fact is, the Chinese concept of time is not exclusively cyclical. However, ideas of reincarnation or rebirth were not native to China, but came from China's West – India – and never quite replaced local Chinese concepts of time. These are constituted of both cyclical and linear elements. So time remains more spiral than cyclical, with a linear-like thrust.

Starting over three thousand years ago, the Chinese measured time by using two interlocking sets of cyclical characters: the ‘heavenly stems’ and the ‘earthly branches.’ Such an invention made possible the counting of years, weeks, days, and hours.