EDUCATION, RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY.
Chinese education has been very much overestimated. The literati
have boasted of the antiquity of the government and educational
system, the invention of the compass, the printing press and of
gunpowder, and the western world has been inclined to concede their
claims, but these claims will not bear investigation. The government
is ancient, but it is also antiquated. The emperor exercises a
power as unlimited as that of the czar and is as inaccessible to
his subjects. The ruling family seized the throne two and a half
centuries ago and has retained power because the people have learned
to submit to almost anything. The laws have not only been arbitrary,
but they have been cruel; the officials have not only been appointed
without consulting the governed, but they have been shamelessly
corrupt.
When Confucius and Mencius taught, they complained of the degeneracy
of the government, and in more than twenty centuries that have
elapsed since those days, there has been no marked improvement.
Of course there have been pure and patriotic men in high places
occasionally, but the government showed neither perfection then nor
improvement afterwards--until within the last few years.
What if the compass was known to the Chinese before it was to
Europe? They made little use of it compared with the use to which
it was put by the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and other
Europeans.
They invented gunpowder, and yet they equipped their soldiers with
bows and arrows down to the present generation.
They invented the printing press, and yet until recently they had
scarcely any newspapers and but few books. I shall speak in another
article of the improvement in this direction, but as an evidence of
the little use made of the printing press even now, I record the
fact that in a four days' ride (at present the train runs only in
the daytime) from the capital of the empire to Hankow, through a
densely populated section, we did not see a man reading a paper or
hear the voice of a newsboy.
Equally without justification is the boast of great learning among
the people. They have had no educational system and their children
have had to rely upon private schools, a few families getting
together and hiring a teacher. Even then the main purpose of their
higher education was to obtain a government position. As only a
very limited number could possibly be selected at the competitive
examinations held by the government, there was small incentive
to study and the written language, with two hundred and fourteen
radicals and twelve hundred different characters, was enough to
discourage even the ambitious. A Chinese official informed me that
not more than one man in a hundred could write a letter and that not
more than one in ten could understand a letter when read to him.
The object of the schools, such as they had, was to cultivate the
memory and to teach the pupils to write essays expounding the
doctrines of the Chinese sages. All of the schools used the same
text book, the primer in universal use having been prepared over
eight hundred years ago. Education was limited in the number who
received it and limited in the amount provided, and the course
of instruction was fossilized. None of the students were taught
anything about the outside world and but few of the people were
students. It is sufficient evidence of the absolute failure of
their educational system to compare this great empire, containing
approximately one-fourth of the population of the globe, with even
the smaller states of Europe in the production of scientists,
scholars and poets. China has had diplomats and astute statesmen,
but these have been developed in the school of experience rather
than in halls of learning. Considering the educational opportunities
furnished, it is astonishing that she has produced any great men at
all.
China has her religions and they have doubtless exerted a moulding
influence upon the people, but the influence has not been an unmixed
good. Take, for instance, ancestor worship; it contains a germ of
good, in that it teaches respect and care for parents, but the
spirit has been lost in the observance of the letter until the
welfare of the living is neglected, that senseless sacrifices may
be made to the dead. At Canton we visited a place called "The Place
of the Dead." It is connected with a Buddhist temple and is just
outside the city wall. There are some four hundred rooms in the
group of buildings and nearly every room contains a coffin. Here the
well-to-do deposit the body of an ancestor and keep incense burning
as long as they can afford to pay for it. Rent must be paid for the
rooms; the light must be kept bright; food and drink must be offered
to the departed each day and the incense must be paid for. As
someone has remarked, it costs more to care for a dead ancestor than
a live one. We saw one coffin that had cost three thousand dollars;
it had been in the building for sixteen years and had been moved
from one apartment to another, a cheaper one being chosen each time
as the resources of the family declined. In some cases the families
have become so poor that they can neither pay rent nor buy a burying
plot.
There is also at Canton an ancestral hall where for a specified sum
the name of an ancestor may be inscribed on a little wooden tablet;
incense is also burned here, too. Foreign residents relate instances
where servants have spent three years' income in burying a parent,
the money being borrowed and gradually repaid from the earnings.
Besides the first cost of burial, there must be frequent pilgrimages
to the grave. It is within the bounds of truth to say that the money
expended in elaborate funerals, in sacrifices to the dead, and in
periodical pilgrimages to tombs would have gone far toward educating
and enlightening each rising generation--and who will say that
respect for the dead can better be shown by formal ceremonies than
by a proper regard for the welfare of the descendants?
The tombs of the royal family are always objects of interest to the
tourist. The most famous of these tombs are north of Pekin and so
near to the great wall that they are usually visited at the same
time, three or four days being required for the trip. There are
other tombs of less renown still nearer to Pekin, while the tomb of
the first emperor of the Ming dynasty is just outside the walls of
Nanking. Some of these tombs are mere masses of masonry now, but
all were once richly carved. The avenues leading up to these tombs
are lined with large stone figures of men and animals. These are
arranged in pairs, one on each side of the road--two huge warriors,
two priests, two elephants standing, two elephants kneeling, two
camels standing and two kneeling, two horses standing and two
kneeling, and lions, bears and other animals in like positions.
These figures are put near the tomb that the ruler may be supplied
with the things needful for his happiness in the spirit world. And,
speaking of tombs, the worship of ancestors is destined to make
China a vast graveyard, if, as now, graves cannot be disturbed.
It will be remembered that the Chinese government cautioned the
Russians and Japanese not to trespass upon the graveyards at Mukden,
where a number of Manchu emperors are buried. The graves of the
masses are as securely regarded, although distinguished merely by a
mound. In the neighborhood of the large cities the cemeteries cover
many square miles, and as they are constantly added to and never
diminished, they occupy an ever increasing area. In the agricultural
districts the burying grounds are scattered through the fields, each
family having its own plot. Sometimes when the family has died out,
the mound is neglected and the coffin is exposed. At Shanghai and
at Nanking we saw a number of coffins in the fields which had never
been covered.
The temples of China are interesting, but are generally in a state
of decay. The Confucian temple at Pekin is visited once a year when
sacrifices are made to China's supreme sage. The court of the temple
is filled with gnarled and knotted cedars of great age, in which a
colony of crows was chanting a requiem when we were there. There are
also in the court numerous tablets of marble, each resting on the
back of a stone turtle and bearing inscriptions; there are other
tablets bearing quotations from the writings of Confucius.
At Canton our guide took us to the temple of the five hundred gods.
They represent Buddhistic saints, are life size and each has an
incense urn before him. One of the gods has a very long arm, he
being the one who puts the moon up at nights; another represents
a saint who cut open his breast and exposed an image of Buddha to
prove his fidelity to the faith.
(Our guide at Canton was Ah Cum, who had conducted travelers through
the city for more than forty years and has brought up his sons to
the same profession. I mention his name for the benefit of any
readers of these lines who may chance to visit, as every tourist
should, this most Chinese of Chinese cities.)
There is in the vicinity of Pekin a temple with several thousand
images of Buddha, but they are small and made of clay, the original
bronze images having been carried away by the foreign troops during
the Boxer troubles.
Close to the walls of the city of Pekin stands what is called
the Yellow Temple, a rare work of art. The figures representing
incidents in the life of Buddha are very skillfully carved and one
can not help feeling indignation at the vandalism of the foreign
soldiers who, during the Boxer troubles, defaced this ancient
monument. By far the most impressive and elaborate religious
structure in China is the "Altar of Heaven," not far from the
city of Pekin. It was built under the Ming dynasty five hundred
years ago and is still visited twice each year by the emperor, who
here offers sacrifices to heaven. The sacrificial altar is built
entirely of white marble. It is a triple circular terrace, the base
being a little more than two hundred feet in diameter, the middle
terrace one hundred and fifty feet and the top terrace nearly a
hundred feet, each terrace being enclosed by a beautifully carved
balustrade. It stands about eighteen feet high, and the emperor
ascending to it alone, kneels at midnight and, as the representative
of the whole people, makes his offering to heaven. A bullock
without a blemish is used as the offering on these occasions. In
architecture the altar reminds one of the Greek structures, while
some of the features of the ceremony recall the rites of the
Israelites as described in the Old Testament.
[Illustration: ALTAR OF HEAVEN--PEKIN]
Near to this altar is a pagoda, standing upon another triple, but
smaller, marble terrace; it is popularly known as the "Temple of
Heaven." Here on the first day of the Chinese year the emperor
offers his supplications to heaven for a blessing upon the year.
This is the most graceful and symmetrical pagoda in the empire, if
not in the Orient, and no one who visits the capital should fail to
see it. Both the altar and the temple are surrounded by a high wall,
and the enclosed court is shaded by veteran cedars.
While Buddhism has been regarded as the religion of China, Taoism
has also influenced the thought of the nation. It teaches the
existence of spirits but has degenerated into superstition and the
attempted conciliation of evil spirits. For instance, before each
official residence and before many private residences will be found
a wall, higher and wider than the front door, the purpose of which
is to keep out the evil spirits, which are supposed to travel only
in a straight line. When a building is to be made more than two
stories high, bunches of leaves are often tied to the top of the
poles used for scaffolding: this is done to deceive the evil spirits
and make them believe that it is a forest instead of a building,
they being supposed to be hostile to high buildings. After the
roof is on, however, the building is safe, but the ridge pole must
curve up at the ends to keep the spirits from descending. Boys are
very much at a premium in China, because the duty of guarding the
graves devolves upon the oldest son. If a man loses a boy or two, he
sometimes dresses the next boy like a girl in order to deceive the
spirits, for a girl is, or at least used to be, beneath the notice
of even evil spirits. A very intelligent Chinaman explained the
disinclination of the ordinary Chinaman to rescue a drowning man on
the ground that if the evil spirits were trying to drown the man,
they would resent and punish any attempt to save him.
But more potent than either Buddhism or Taoism has been the
influence of Confucius and his commentators. This great philosopher
was born 551 B. C., and Mencius, his greatest disciple, nearly
two hundred years later. The moral principles discussed by them
were not presented as original conceptions but rather urged as the
principles of previous emperors whose lives were regarded as ideal.
In another article, in the discussion of China's awakening, I shall
speak of the ethical teachings of Confucius, but it is worth while
to note at this time that his utterances with regard to government
fall far short of the generally accepted doctrines of to-day. While
he insisted that rulers owed certain duties to their subjects, and
were good or bad in proportion as they set an example of virtue and
governed wisely, he did not intimate that the people have either
the right to, or the capacity for, self-government. His doctrines
support the idea that classes are necessary, the "superior" people
governing and teaching, the rest doing the manual labor.
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION OF FOOT BINDING.]
Confucius taught that those who were not in office need not concern
themselves about the administration of the government--a doctrine
which paralyzed the patriotism of the masses and invited abuses on
the part of the officials.
The system by which officials were chosen was also calculated to
breed selfishness and indifference to the public weal, as well as
to impede progress. The course of instruction, as before stated,
contemplated merely the memorizing of the Chinese classics composed
of the sayings of the sages, poetry and Chinese history.
The aspirants for honors were not required to think for themselves,
to understand the problems of their generation or to know anything
of the science of government. To compose a good essay upon what
Confucius said, upon what Mencius thought, or upon what Shun or Wan
or Woo did was sufficient. This naturally chained each generation to
the past and locked the door to advancement.
The successful candidate felt that his appointment was due to his
own merit and that he was under no obligation to anyone except the
members of his family who had furnished the money necessary to
enable him to take the various examinations. Neither the securing
of the office nor the retaining of it rested upon his ability to
devise wise policies or upon his interest in the people at large.
The emperor with unlimited power was above him, and the people with
unlimited patience were below him.
In later years the examinations have sometimes become a farce,
and rank has been offered to the highest bidder, bidding being
encouraged by an intimation that this might be the last chance. But
even when honestly conducted, the civil service system of China was
not calculated to develop the official or to secure a good, wise and
progressive government.
[Illustration: TRAVELING IN NORTH CHINA]