RELIGIONS IN CHINA
The real power of a race lies in its religion; other motives inevitably
tend to egotism, disorganisation, and national death, and China is no
exception to the rule; the strength and the weakness of China lies in
her religion and in its absence. There are few nations who set less
store by the outward observance of religion and yet there are few
nations with a greater belief in the supernatural. On the one hand,
the temples are deserted or turned into schools, and the Chinese are
believed to have no other motives than self-interest. On the other
hand, the whole of Chinese life turns round the relation of man to the
spirit of his ancestors and to the spiritual world, and the Chinaman
obviously believes that a man's soul is immortal and that its welfare
has the very closest connection with the welfare of his descendant.
The commercial man will tell you that the Chinese are
materialists--people who have no faith; and yet with glorious
inconsistency he will explain that the difficulty of using Chinese
labour abroad is that even the commonest coolie demands that his body
shall be repatriated and shall lie in some place which will not hinder
his son doing filial {148} worship to his spirit. The whole question
of what the race believes is rendered more difficult of comprehension
to a Westerner by the confused nature of that belief, and is
complicated by the characteristic of the Chinese of mixing all
religions together regardless of their natural incongruity. It is
hoped that the reader will bear this in mind during the following
explanation.
The religions of China are usually classed as three. Not three
well-marked religions in our sense of the word, but three elements
which tend to merge into a common religion. There are separate
religions. A large number of Chinese, for instance, are Mohammedan,
and they neither marry nor are given in marriage to the other Chinese;
there is a very small Jewish community; and there is also a native
Greek Christian village still tolerated by the Chinese, which was
transplanted from Siberia as the result of a Chinese conquest in the
days of Peter the Great; there are a quarter of a million Christians
converted by non-Roman missions, besides a million belonging to the
Roman Catholic Communion. But Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism
put all together, form but a small part of the Chinese community, and
the greater part of China believes, according to all orthodox
expositors, in three religions--Buddhism, Taoism, and what is termed
Confucianism.
This conglomerate of three religions consists in its turn of composite
faiths. Buddhism in China is not like the Buddhism of Ceylon with its
agnostic {149} teaching. Buddhism is divided into two great
divisions--the "greater vehicle" and the "lesser vehicle." The "lesser
vehicle" is known to the world as pure Buddhism; the "greater vehicle"
contains many sects, all of which claim that the revelation extended to
Gautama was only a partial revelation, and that the truth has been more
fully revealed to those who succeeded him. This is called Lamaism, and
in China has incorporated much of the idolatry which it supplanted and
perhaps some of the Nestorian Christianity which succeeded it; in fact,
the Buddhist temple in China is nothing more than an idol temple.
Buddha of Gautama is always the principal idol; he is represented calm
and without thought or trouble; he sits, the embodiment of peace and
rest; but though he may be the first in the Buddhist temple, he is far
from being alone; close behind him in popular estimation come two other
deities, Amita and Kwannin. Amita, Amitobha or O-mi-to, is held by
some to be the father of Kwannin, and is at once a guardian of the
Western Paradise and the personification of purity; to this wholly
mythical personage is attributed such virtue that the mere repetition
of his name will secure salvation. In Japan a sect holds that every
Buddhist law can be broken with immunity as long as there is faith in
Amita. In China such statements are made as this: to follow the strict
law of Buddhism is to climb to heaven as a fly crawls up the wall, but
to attain Salvation by repeating {150} the name O-mi-to is like sailing
heavenwards in a boat with wind and tide behind, at the pace of a
hundred li an hour. There is a general agreement that adherence to the
strict Buddhist law of chastity, honesty, truth, temperance, abstinence
from anger and serenity of mind, is an ideal which is impossible at any
rate for the laity. But the exact method of escaping this burden
differs in various sects. The most popular is by a "saving faith" in
Amita.
If the origin of this deity can be attributed to the personification of
a spirit of purity, the origin of the next, Kwannin, is probably from
some source outside Buddhism. She is the goddess of mercy, but
whatever her origin, she at present represents the remnants of either
the Nestorian or the mediæval Roman teaching. In Peking they have a
curious image of her which any one might mistake for a Madonna, the
truth being that there was at one time an intimate contact between
Christianity and Buddhism, when many of the externals of the Christian
religion and some of its doctrines were transplanted. The Buddhist
temple with its altar in the centre looks strangely like a Christian
church, and the Buddhist monks and nuns, with their rosaries and their
regular hours for chanting and service, recall the Roman Catholic
services; the picture of the Buddhist hell which stands in the great
Mongol temple at Peking reminds one of a scene from Dante's Inferno,
and among the many things the Buddhists borrow from Christian sources
{151} are these two ideas, embodied in two idols, the goddess of mercy
who intercedes for mankind, and the god of faith in whom the worshipper
should put all trust and confidence. Besides these gods there are the
god of war and the god of good-fellowship, probably taken from old
heathen sources. Again, there are hundreds of Buddhas, or as we should
call them, "saints," whose position is somewhere between human and
divine, much the same position that the saints occupy in the mind of a
Neapolitan peasant.
After Buddhism comes Taoism. Taoism is again a conglomerate faith.
Technically it is the faith of Laotze, who was an opponent and a
contemporary of Confucius. He taught a dualism which reminds the
Westerner of the doctrine of the Manichees. Again, Western and Eastern
thought have been confused; Manichees are known to have existed in
China, and whether Manichæism originally came from the East or whether
subsequently Chinese thought has been affected by Manichæism is hard to
decide. At any rate, Laotze did not claim that his teaching was
original; he was merely the prophet of an established school of
thought. The greater part of China follows his rival and despises
Laotze's teaching, yet the dualism that he taught is part of the
essential faith of China, and a part which is most opposed to all that
is good. He taught that good and evil were essentially divided, were
halves, as it were, of one whole. He called them the "Yang" and the
"Yin"--terms {152} which are in no way confined to the few disciples
who now follow him. This division between good and evil makes up the
mystery of the world--light and darkness, heaven and earth, male and
female, each couple makes up one whole divided between good and evil;
and so the world beyond is peopled with good and evil spirits, the
"Yang" and the "Yin." Obviously such a faith has all the evil which we
recognise in Manichæism, and its practical disadvantages are very
great. For instance, the inferior position of women is defended as
inevitable; they are "Yin." No mine must be sunk or cutting made for
fear of angering the earth spirits, for as man is as essentially a part
of the world as the earth, those earth spirits will avenge themselves
upon him. Even such great men and such good Confucianists as His
Excellency the late Chang-Chih-Tung are not insensitive to such a
superstition. The town over which he ruled was divided by a steep
gravel hill. A Western engineer recommended that this hill should be
cut through to facilitate access from one part of the town to the
other, and the Viceroy, ever ready to accept new and Western ideas of
practical advantage, immediately ordered the suggestion to be carried
out. Shortly afterwards a large wen developed on his neck, and,
arguing that an evil spirit of the earth, who had originally made the
gravel hill, was so angered at the destruction of it that he determined
to re-make it on the neck of the offender, the Governor had the cutting
filled up, and there it stands to this very day, a {153} witness of the
evil influence that an evil religion can have on the greatest men of a
nation. Taoism has now but few adherents, and yet there are many
Taoist priests, since these priests are regarded as particularly
efficient in dealing with the evil spirits in whom Taoism believes so
fully.
The third religion is generally called Confucianism, and this may
easily lead to a great misunderstanding, for under the term
Confucianism two very different things are included. First, a belief
in the philosophy of Confucius. This for the most part is outside what
we are accustomed to call religion, and we shall have occasion to deal
with it later on. Secondly, and more commonly, the spiritual beliefs
of those who call themselves Confucians, and who, owing to his silence
on religion, have to find other authorities for their faith. Sometimes
they claim that their faith was the same as the faith of Confucius,
that the background of his philosophy was the religion that they
believe, but more commonly they accept it without any question. This
religion is commonly mixed up both with Buddhism and with Taoism, but
its essential doctrine is very distinct and has great weight in China,
namely, that the spirits of men who are dead live and have influence
over the lives of their descendants. I was told by a Chinese Christian
that a religious Chinaman of the lower class never goes out without
burning a stick of incense to the tablet of his father, and no one can
go through Chinese towns without being impressed by the number of
people who in that {154} poor country are kept hard at work
manufacturing mock money to be burnt for the use of parents and
ancestors.
The missionaries find that this doctrine is the hardest doctrine for
Christianity to assail; and there are not a few who, despairing of
success, suggest that the position must be turned, and ancestor worship
must be Christianised and accepted as an essential part of a man's
belief. The logical Western mind immediately wants to know what is
behind the ancestor; if an ancestor is to have power he can only have
it, says the logical Westerner, by being in contact with some higher
power. One of the greatest missionaries that China possesses answers
this difficulty by saying that the Chinese mind is not the Western
mind; that he does not concern himself very much with remote
speculation; he has not that itching longing to use the word "why,"
which is at once the glory and the difficulty of the Western mind, and
therefore he looks at the spiritual world much as he looks at the
earthly world; the man immediately over him in the town is the
magistrate, and, to use the Chinese phrase, "is the father and mother
of his people," and so over him in spiritual things is his father and
grandfather. Behind the magistrate there is in his distant thought the
prefect--the head of the prefecture or Fu town--a being who only comes
into his village life when there is trouble and difficulty; he comes to
punish, rarely to reward, and so behind his father and grandfather in
{155} the spiritual world are the great clan leaders whom he worships
at regular intervals with the rest of his clan. In civil government
there are in a distant background a Viceroy with awful powers and awful
majesty, and an Emperor whose very name is so divine that he scarcely
likes to use it; and behind the clan leaders are many beings borrowed
from Buddhism, relics of old idolatry, muddled up with Taoism; and in
the dim and distant background is the Supreme Being--the Supreme Being
Who rewards the just and punishes the unjust, Who can in no way be
deceived, Who refuses the rain to the sinner and makes the land
desolate, Who has power to dethrone the earthly Emperor and to place
China under a foreign domination. This great and awful power is,
however, so far distant that the average Chinaman thinks but little
about Him.
The Temple of Heaven at Peking is the beautiful shrine of this Supreme
Being. Here once a year, after spending a night fasting, the Emperor,
as the father of his nation, worships the great God who made heaven and
earth. The chief feature of this worship is that it is performed in
the open air on a beautiful marble dais. No place in China is quite so
lovely; it is the fitting shrine of the beautiful faith of China's most
glorious days, a faith which though dormant is not dead. The traveller
who stands there should remember that the worship which is here
performed is as old as the date of the patriarchs and not un-akin to
their religious {156} ideals; and if there are some things which are
not sympathetic to the Christian idea, they are subordinate. In the
main it is the worship of the One True Being.
This faith has no right to be called Confucian. There is great doubt
about the faith of Confucius. He is silent about religion, or he
refers to it only indirectly; it is no part of his teaching; but his
indirect references to it apparently express a belief in a Supreme
Being whom he calls "Heaven," a Supreme Being who has an influence on
human affairs. He also recognises ancestor worship, but with such a
dubious phrase that many Chinese and English scholars have doubted his
meaning. Neither is this the faith of all the leading Confucianists in
China, many of whom are professedly agnostics in matters of religion,
and follow the teaching of Chu; but it is the faith, the ill-understood
faith, of the great multitude of thinking and non-thinking Chinamen,
and it is looked upon as the State religion of China. Its power over
China is universal and yet insecure.
Many ages ago it was partially defeated by the more logical and more
sympathetic faith of Buddhism. The fight was bitter, the persecutions
were cruel, but Buddhism conquered. Now Buddhism fails. With its
failure a vast mass of superstition, kept alive by the sacrifice to the
ancestor, once more rises up and stands right in the path of
progress--right in the way of civilisation. It was superstition that
moved the Boxer, and this it was that lost credit when {157} Boxerdom
failed. Story after story is told of the influence of this incoherent
but vital mass of religion. The junk will dart across the bows of your
steamer; there will be much whistling, reversing of engines, peremptory
commands in English, abuse in Chinese; and when you inquire why the
lowdah of the junk risked his cargo, perhaps his life, and put the
steamer and its passengers in a state of excitement, if not in
jeopardy, the answer is that every junk lowdah is afraid of the evil
spirit that is following him, and if he crosses the steamer's bow he
expects that the evil spirit, seeing a more worthy quarry, will neglect
him and follow the steamer. The head of the Shanghai Telephone Company
tells how he is not uncommonly met by some sleek well-to-do Chinaman
who is most distressed because the shadow of a telephone pole falls
over his door, so that as he goes out he passes beneath it, and that
will bring bad luck. The houses in China stand unconformably with the
road, because a certain aspect is lucky; a cracker is exploded to
frighten the evil spirits away, and so on through tales innumerable.
The world around is full of evil spirits to the Chinaman. Every
village has the witch doctor who is learned in the ways of these evil
spirits. Diabolical possession is as present with them as ever it was
in Bible times. Your hard-headed commercial man smiles when he relates
these stories, incredulous that there can be any foundation for them;
but those who have dwelt among the Chinese take much the same line
{158} about these stories as we do about spiritualism. Much is folly,
more is fraud; but behind both the folly and the fraud there is a
mysterious reality. The faith of the masses of China in the spiritual
world has never been encouraged by its philosophers. It owes its
vitality to the fact that, as with us, so with them, manifestations of
powers beyond this world are real if ill-comprehended, and connected
too often with man's evil side. The Psychical Research Society will do
well to inquire closely into many of these phenomena. Nothing
convinced me of the reality of this belief more than the line that was
taken by one of our English missionaries. He was speaking of
diabolical possession, and he related the same story which one has
heard so often that a man suddenly spoke as another personality; and
then he added, "I realised that it was not he who was speaking to me,
but the evil spirit within him;" and he went on, "I was afraid to speak
to him, because if you speak to those who are possessed with an evil
spirit, the evil spirit will take possession of you." It was strange
to hear such a testimony to the reality of diabolical possession from
an Englishman, but you will hear it from every Chinaman. Those who
have read "Pastor Hsi" will remember how firm was his belief in such
possession.
Against all this mass of the evil world the Chinaman has but one
defence: his father and his ancestor belong to that world and they will
defend him; and so the ancestor cult is intimately connected with this
{159} belief in evil spirits. If the father does not bestir himself
the son may come to harm--in fact, the main part of a Chinaman's
religious idea centres round ancestor worship; and there is no such
awful moment in a Christian convert's life as when he is required to
destroy the tablet of his ancestors. A Confucianist cannot understand
the missionary position; to his mind contempt for the ancestor only
means a deep and spiritual scepticism, an absence of all faith in the
supernatural, a negation of all sense of duty. A missionary recounted
a story illustrative of this difficulty. He was travelling up-country
in China, and his road lay along the same way down which a well-to-do
merchant was travelling, and as they journeyed on side by side and met
every night at the inns at which they put up, he noticed that the
Chinaman eyed him askance; but as the missionary spoke Chinese well,
and as travellers have many little wants which another traveller can
supply, it was not unnatural that in spite of the mistrust manifested
by the Chinaman they should fall gradually into more intimate converse.
One night as they were sitting at an inn the Chinaman said to the
missionary, "Do you know I thought you were a Christian, but I see you
are a good fellow." The missionary assured him that he was a
Christian, and did not deny that he was a good fellow. He felt,
however, that there was some obstacle in the Chinaman's mind that kept
them still apart, and as they journeyed on from day to day and had
grown more intimate, the Chinaman said, "You know {160} people do tell
such lies that one cannot believe a word they say." The missionary
assented to this general proposition as true of all the world, but
asked for a more immediate application. The Chinaman continued: "Well,
I hope you will not be offended if I tell you the lies they tell about
you--lies that I am afraid I believed till I met you and could see what
a good fellow you are. They say--" but he broke off. "Pardon me, it
is such a horrible accusation that I do not like to repeat it, even
though I know that it is untrue." The missionary pressed him to tell
what this accusation was, and the Chinaman continued apologetically, "I
know that it is such a lie that I am ashamed that my people should tell
such lies, but they do say that you Christians actually teach men to
break up the tablet on which their father's name is written;" and the
missionary realised all at once the depth of the conviction of the
Chinaman and the wide gulf that separated him from Christianity. And
so many and many a person who knows China best confidently asserts that
Christianity will never become the religion of China till it permits
and recognises this ancestral worship.
But now a new factor has entered into this problem. Western
materialism is spreading its malign influence over China; the educated
classes of Japan boldly profess that they have long since ceased to
believe in any religion, and they are calling upon China with great
effect to follow their example, and so the position changes altogether.
Ancestor worship, {161} with all its accompanying superstition, tends
to disappear where Western knowledge is taught. The Boxers were not
untrue prophets when they told their people that they or Western
civilisation, as they knew it, must leave China, and that they could
not co-exist. The position is surely one that must excite the very
deepest interest. It is scarcely conceivable that a race so deeply
convinced of the realities of the spiritual world will, as a whole,
accept the belief that there are no spirits. It is equally
inconceivable that with modern Western education the people shall
believe in the spirit that follows the junk, or in the spirit that is
angered by a mining operation. The religious sentiment of China will,
as it were, be turned out of doors by Western knowledge. There will be
a terrible moment when, with all the insolence of youth, the young man
refuses to believe in God or in a devil, and rushes into every wild
anarchical and socialistic scheme to satisfy his craving for action.
It is a terrible moment, and one which one sees rapidly developing in
Japan and among the Westernised Chinese; but beyond that terrible
period there dawns a brighter day when China will reassert its natural
sentiment and will accept Christianity as the only reasonable religion
that is consonant with modern science and a belief in the spiritual
world. The question of policy that needs solving is whether it is wise
in the face of this great Western unbelieving movement to treat respect
for {162} ancestors too drastically. Western education must remove its
objectionable features and Christianity might accept the modified form
of this belief which is not wholly inconsistent with the doctrine of
the resurrection of the dead.
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