The horizon of Chinese history lies near the middle of the third
millennium B. C. The first date sinologists dare swear to is 776;
in which year an eclipse of the sun is recorded, that actually
did happen: it is set down, not as a thing interesting in
itself, but as ominous of the fall of wicked kings. Here, then,
in the one place where there is any testing the annals, it
appears they are sound enough; which might be thought to speak
well for them. But our scholars are so damnebly logical, as Mr.
Mantalini would say, that to them it only proves this: you are
to accept no date earlier. One general solar indorsement will not
do; you must have an eclipse for everything you believe, and
trust nothing unless the stars in their courses bear witness.
Well; we have fortunately Halley's Comet in the Bayeux Tapestry
for our familiar 1066; but beware! everything before that is to
be taken as pure fudge!
The fact is there is no special reason for doubting either
chronology or sequence of events up to about 2357 B. C., in which
year the Patriarch Yao came to the throne. He was the first of
those three, Yao, Shun, and Yu, who have been ever since
the patterns for all Chinese rulers who have aspired to be
Confucianly good. "Be like Yao, Shun, and Yu; do as they did";--
there you have the word of Confucius to all emperors and
governors of states.
Yao, it is true, is said to have reigned a full century, or but
one year short of it. This is perhaps the first improbability we
come to; and even of this we may say that some people do live a
long time. None of his successors repeated the indiscretion.
Before him came a line of six sovereigns with little historic
verisimilitude: they must be called faint memories of epochs,
not actual men. The first of them, Fo-hi (2852-2738), was half
man, half dragon; which is being interpreted, of course, an
Adept King;--or say a line of Adept Kings. As for the dates given
him, I suppose there is nothing exact about them; that was all
too far back for memory; it belongs to reminiscence. Before Fo-
hi came the periods of the Nest-Builders, of the Man-Kings, the
Earth-Kings, and the Heaven-Kings; then P'an K'u, who built the
worlds; then, at about two and a quarter million years before
Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One. All
this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at
least that--the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the
West, with our creation six trumpery millenniums ago.
This much we may say: about the time when Yao is said to have
come to the throne a manvantara began, which would have finished
its course of fifteen centuries in 850 or so B. C. It is a
period we see only as through a glass darkly: what is told about
it is, to recent and defined history, as a ghost to a living man.
There is no reason why it should not have been an age of high
civilization and cultural activities; but all is too shadowy to
say what they were. To its first centuries are accredited works
of engineering that would make our greatest modern achievements
look small: common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of
something actual. Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into
daylight history, not primitive but effete: senile, not
childlike. That may be only a racial peculiarity, a national
prejudice, of course.
And where should you look, back of 850 B. C., to find actual
history--human motives, speech and passions--or what to our eyes
should appear such? As things near the time-horizon, they lose
their keen outlines and grow blurred and dim. The Setis and
Thothmeses are names to us, with no personality attaching;
though we have discovered their mummies, and know the semblance
of their features, our imagination cannot clothe them with life.
We can hear a near Napoleon joking, but not a far-off Rameses. We
can call Justinian from his grave, and traverse the desert with
Mohammed; but can bold no converse with Manu or Hammurabi;--
because these two dwell well this side of the time-horizon, but
the epochs of those are far beyond it. The stars set: the summer
evenings forget Orion, and the nights of winter the beauty of
Fomalhaut: though there is a long slope between the zenith _Now_
and the sea-rim, what has once gone down beyond the west of time
we cannot recall or refashion. So that old Chinese manvantara is
gone after the Dragon Fo-hi and the Yellow Emperor, after the
Man-Kings and the Earth-Kings and the Heaven-Kings; and Yao,
Shun, and Yu the Great, and the kings of Hia, and Shang, and even
Chow, are but names and shadows,
_Quo pater, Aeneas, quo dires Tullus et Ancus,_
--we cannot make them interestingly alive. But it does not follow
that they did not live when they are supposed to have lived, or
do the things attributed to them. Their architecture was
ephemeral, and bears no witness to them; they built no pyramids
to flout time; they raised no monument but a people, a culture,
an idea, that still endures.
Then, too, we shall see that at the beginning of the last Chinese
manvantara a conscious attempt was made to break wholly with the
past,--to wipe it from human memory, and begin all anew. Such a
thing happened in Babylon once; there had been a Sargon in
remote antiquity with great deeds to his credit; thousands
of years after, another Sargon arose, who envied his fame;
and, being a kind, and absolute, decreed that all the years
intervening should never have existed--merged his own in the
personality of his remote predecessor, and so provided a good
deal of muddlement for archaeologists to come. Indeed, such a
thing almost happened in France at the Revolution. It is said
that in some French schools now you find children with a vague
idea that things more or less began with the taking of the
Bastille: that there was a misty indefinable period between the
12th of October (or on whatever day it was Eve's apple ripened)
and the glorious 14th of July:--an age of prehistory, wandered
through by unimportant legendary figures such as Jeanne Darc,
Henri Quatre, Louis Quatorze, which we may leave to the
superstitious--and come quickly to the real flesh and blood of M.
de Mirabeau and Citizen Danton.--Even so, in our own time, China
herself, wearied with the astral molds and inner burdens of two
millenniums, has been writhing in a fever of destruction: has
burnt down the Hanlin College, symbol and center of a thousand
years of culture; destroyed old and famous cities; sent up
priceless encyclopaedias in smoke; replaced the Empire with a
republic, and the Dragon of wisdom with five meaningless
stripes;--breaking with all she was in her brilliant greatness,
and all she has been since in her weakness and squalid decline.--
We ask why history is not continuous; why there are these
strange hiatuses and droppings out?--the answer is simple enough.
It is because Karma, long piled up, must sometime break out upon
the world. The inner realms become clogged with the detritus of
ages and activity, till all power to think and do is gone: there
is no room nor scope left for it. The weight of what has been
thought and done, of old habit, presses down on men, obstructs
and torments them, till they go mad and riot and destroy. The
manvantara opens: the Crest-Wave, the great tide of life, rushes
in. It finds the world of mind cluttered up and encumbered;
there is an acute disparity between the future and the past,
which produces a kind of psychic maelstrom. Blessed is that
nation then, which has a man at its head who can guide things, so
that the good may not go with the bad, the useful with the
useless! The very facts that Ts'in Shi Hwangti, when the
manvantara opened at the beginning of the third century B.C., was
driven (you may say) to do what ruthless drastic things he did.--
and that his action was followed by such wonderful results--are
proof enough that a long manvantara crowded with cultureal and
national activities had run it course in the past, and clogged
the astral, and made progress impossible. But what he did do,
throws the whole of that past manvantara, and to some extent the
pralaya that followed it, into the realm of shadows.--He burnt
the literature.
In a few paragraphs let me summarize the history of that past age
whose remnants Ts'in Shi Hwangti thus sought to sweep away.--Yao
adopted Shun for his successor; in whose reign for nine years
China's Sorrow, that mad bull of waters, the Hoangho, raged
incessantly, carrying the world down towards the sea. Then Ta
Yu, who succeeded Shun on the throne presently, devised and
carried through those great engineering works referred to above:
--cut through mountains, yoked the mad bull, and saved the world
from drowning. He was, says H. P. Blavatsky, an Adept; and had
learnt his wisdom from the Teachers in the snowy Range of SiDzang
or Tibet. His dynasty, called the Hia, kept the throne until
1766; ending with the downfall of a cruel weakling. Followed
then the House of Shang until 1122; set up by a wise and
merciful Tang the Completer, brought to ruin by a vicious tyrant
Chousin. It was Ki-tse, a minister of this last, and a great
sage himself, who, fleeing from the persecutions of his royal
master, established monarchy, civilization, and social order
in Corea.
Another great man of the time was Won Wang, Duke of the
Palatinate of Chow, a state on the western frontier whose
business was to protect China from the Huns. Really, those Huns
were a thing to marvel at: we first hear of them in the reign of
the Yellow emperor, two or three centuries before Yao; they were
giving trouble then, a good three millenniums before Attila. Won
Wang, fighting on the frontier, withstood these kindly souls;
and all China looked to him with a love he deserved. Which of
course roused King Chousin's jealousy; and when a protest came
from the great soldier against the debaucheries and misgovernment
at the capital, the king roused himself and did what he could;
imprisoned the protestant, as he dared not kill him. During the
three years of his imprisonment Won Wang compiled the mysterious
I-King, of Book of Changes; of which Confucius said, that were
another half century added to his life, he would spend them all
in studying it. No western scholar, one may safely say, has ever
found a glimmer of meaning in it; but all the ages of China have
held it profounder than the profound.
His two sons avenged Won Wang; they roused the people, recruited
an army in their palatinate--perhaps enlisted Huns too--and swept
away Chousin and his dynasty. They called their new royal house
after their native land, Chow; Wu Wang, the elder of the two,
becoming its first king, and his brother the Duke of Chow, his
prime minister. I say _king;_ for the title was now _Wang_
merely; though there had been _Hwangtis_ or Emperors of old.
Won Wang and his two sons are the second Holy Trinity of China;
Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu being the first. They figure enormously in
the literature: are stars in the far past, to which all eyes,
following the august example of Confucius, are turned. There is
a little to be said about them: they are either too near the
horizon, or too little of their history has been Englished, for
us to see them in their habit as they lived; yet some luster of
real greatness still seems to shine about them. It was the Duke
of Chow, apparently, who devised or restored that whole Chinese
religio-political system which Confucius revivified and impressed
so strongly on the stuff of the ideal world--for he could get no
ruler of his day to establish it in the actualities--that it
lasted until the beginning of a new manvantara is shatter it now.
That it was based on deep knowledge of the hidden laws of life
there is this (among a host of other things) to prove: Music was
an essential part of it. When, a few years ago, the tiny last of
the Manchu emperors came to the throne, an edict was published
decreeing that, to fit him to govern the empire, the greatest
care should be taken with his education in music. A wisdom,
truly, that the west has forgotten!
When William of Normandy conquered England, he rewarded his
followers with fiefs: in England, while English land remained so
to be parceled out; afterwards (he and his successors) with
unconquered lands in Wales, and then in Ireland. they were to
carve out baronies and earldoms for themselves; and the Celtic
lands thus stolen became known as the Marches: their rulers,
more or less independent, but doing homage to the king, as Lords
Marchers. The kings of Chow adopted the same plan. Their old
duchy palatinate became the model for scores of others. China
itself--a very small country then--southern Shansi, northern
Homan, western Shantung--was first divided up under the feudal
system; the king retaining a domain, known as Chow, in Homan,
for his own. Then princes and nobles--some of the blood royal,
some of the old shang family, some risen from the ranks--were
given warrant to conquer lands for themselves from the barbarians
beyond the frontier: so you go rid of the ambitious, and
provided Chow with comfortable buffers. They went out, taking a
measure of Chinese civilization with them, and conquered or
cajoled Huns, Turks, Tatars, Laos, shans, Annamese, and all that
kind of people, into accepting them for their rulers. It was a
work, as you may imagine, of centuries; with as much history
going forward as during any centuries you might name. The states
thus formed were young, compared to China; and as China grew old
and weak, they grew into their vigorous prime. The infinity of
human activities that has been! These Chow ages seem like the
winking of an eye; but they were crowded with great men and
small, great deeds and trivialities, like our own. The time will
come when our 'Anglo-Saxon' history will be written thus:
England sent out colonies, and presently the colonies grew
stronger and more populous than England;--and it will be enough,
without mention of the Pitts and Lincolns, the Washingtons and
Gladstones, that now make it seem so full and important.
By 850 the balance of power had left or was leaving the Chow king
at Honanfu. His own subjects had grown unwarlike, and he could
hardly command even their allegiance; for each man's feudal duty
was first to his own duke, marquis, earl, viscount, or baron;--
strangely enough, there were those five degrees of nobility in
ancient China as in modern England. Of these nobles, each with
his court and feudal dominion, there were in what we may call
China Proper some unascertainable number between thirteen and a
hundred and fifty: mostly small and insignificant, but mostly,
too, full of schemes and ambitions.
But it was the Lords Marchers that counted. One after another of
them had wrested from the Chow the title of _Wang_ or King; it
was not enough for them to be dukes and marquises. Then came a
time when a sort of Bretwalda-ship was established; to be
wielded by whichever of them happened to be strongest--and
generally to be fought for between whiles: a glorious and
perpetual bone of contention. International law went by the
board. The Chow domain, the duchies and marquisates, lay right
in the path of the contestants--midmost of all, and most to be
trampled. Was Tsin to march all round the world, when a mere
scurry across neutral (and helpless) Chow would bring it at the
desired throat of Ts'u?--A question not to be asked!--there at
Honanfu sat the Chow king, head of the national religion, head of
the state with its feudatories, receiving (when it suited them
to pay it) the annual homage of all those loud and greedy
potentates, who for the rest kicked him about as they pleased,
and ordered each other to obey him,--for was he not still the son
of Heaven, possessor of the Nine Tripods of sovereignty, the
tripods of Ta Yu?--So the centuries passed, growing worse and
worse ever, from the ninth to the sixth: an age of anarchy, bad
government, disorder, crime and clash of ambitions: when there
was a decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice
in the world;--and we know what manner of incarnation, at such
times, is likely to happen.
Conditions had outgrown the astral molds made for them in the
last manvantara: the molds that had been made for a small
homogeneous China. The world had expanded, and was no longer
homogeneous: China herself was not homogeneous; and she found
on all sides of her very heterogeneous Ts'ins, Tsins, Ts'is,
Ts'us, Wus and Yuehs; each of whom, like so many Great Powers of
our own times, had the best of intentions to partake of her
sacramental body when God's will so should be.--Indeed, the
situation was very much as we have seen it.
Then, as now (or recently), China was old, inert, tired, and
unwarlike; must depend on her cunning, and chiefly on their
divisions, for what protection she might get against the
rapacious and strong. She was dull, sleepy and unimaginative,
and wanted only to be left alone; yet teemed, too, with
ambitious politicians, each with his sly wires to pull. Her
culture, ancient and decrepit, was removed by aeons from all
glamor of beginnings.--For a good European parallel, in this
respect, you might go to Constantinople in the Middle Ages, when
it hung ripe on the bough, so to say, and waiting to fall into
Latin, Turkish, Bulgar, or even Russian jaws, whichever at the
psychic moment should be gaping and ready beneath. There too was
the sense of old age and sterility; of disillusionment; of all
fountains and inspirations run dry.--In ancient Grecce, it was no
such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles' or of
Plato's time to the antiquity of Homer's. In India, the faery
light of an immemorial dawn mingles so with the facts of history
that there is no disentangling myth from matter-of-fact; if you
should prove almost any king to have reigned quite recently, his
throne would still be somehow set in the mellow past and near the
fountains of time. Augustan Rome, modern in all its phases,
stands not so far in front of a background peopled with nymphs
and Sibyls: a past in which the Great Twin Brothers might fight
at Lake Regillus, and stern heroes make fantastic sacrifices for
Rome. Even modern Europe is much less modern than Medieval
Constantinople or Chow China. We can breathe still the
mysterious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; you shall find
still, and that not in remote countries only, fairy-haunted
valleys; a few hours out from London, and you shall be in
the heart of druidry, and among peoples whose life is very
near to Poetry. But China, in those first pre-Confucian centuries,
was desperately prosaic: not so much modern, as pertaining to an
ugly not impossible future. Antiquity was far, far away. The dawn
with its glow and graciousness; noon and the prime with their
splendor, were as distant and unimaginable as from our Amercan
selves the day when Charlemain with all his peers went down. If
you can imagine an American several hundred years from now--one
in which Point Loma had never been; several hundred years more
unromantic than this one; an America fallen and grown haggard
and toothless; with all impulse to progress and invention gone;
with centrifugal tendencies always loosening the bond of union;
advancing, and having steadily advanced, further from all
religious sanctions, from anything she may retain of the
atmosphere of mystery and folklore and the poetry of racial
childhood; you may get a picture of the mental state of that
China. A material civilization, with (except in war areas)
reasonable security of life and goods, remained to her. Her
people lived in good houses, wore good clothes, used chairs and
tables, chopsticks, plates and dishes of pottery; had for
transit boats, carts and chariots,* wheelbarrows I suppose, and
"cany wagons light." They had a system of writing, the origin of
which was lost in remote antiquity; a large literature, of which
fragments remain. They were home-loving, war-hating, quiet,
stagnant, cunning perhaps, quite un-enterprising; they lived in
the valley of the Hoangho, and had not discovered, or had
forgotten, the Yangtse to the south of them, and the sea to the
east. They might have their local loyalties and patriotism of the
pork-barrel, and a certain arrogance of race: belief in
the essential superiority of the Black-haired People to the
barbarians on their borders; but no high feeling for Chu Hia--
All the Chinas;--no dream of a possible national union and
greatness. Some three hundred of their folk-ballads come down to
us, which are as unlike the folk-ballads of Europe as may be.
They do not touch on the supernatural; display no imagination;
there are no ghosts or fairies; there is no glory or delight in
war; there is no glory in anything;--but only an intense
desirability in _home,_--in staying at home with your family, and
doing your I work in the fields. And nothing of what we should
call romance, even in this home-love: the chief tie is that
between parents and children, not that between husband and wife,
and still less that between lovers. There is much moralizing and
wistful sadness.--Such was the life of the peasants; at the
other pole was the life of the courts: intrigue and cunning, and
what always goes with cunning--ineptitude; a good measure of
debauchery; some finicking unimportant refinement; each man for
self and party, and none for Gods and Men. We have to do, not
with the bright colors of the childhood of a race, but with the
grayness of its extreme old age. Those who will may argue that
you can have old age with never a prime, youth, or childhood
behind it. Some say that Laotse was born at sixty-one, or
seventy, or eighty-two years old--a few decades more or less are
not worth bothering about--whence his name _lao tse,_ the _old
son_ (but _tse_ may also mean Teacher or Philosopher). But I
misdoubt the accuracy of such accounts, myself. I think it likely
he was a baby to begin with, like the majority of us. And I
imagine his country had been young, too, before she grew old;--as
young as America, and as vigorous.
------
* _Chinese Literature:_ Giles;--whence also much else in
these articles.
------
Among such a people, how much should you expect to find of the
Sacred Mysteries?--There were the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu with the
king at Honanfu, to say that his kinghood had behind it symbolic
sanctions; there was the Book of Changes; there was the system
of the Duke of Chow, more dishonored in the breach than honored
in the observance.... For the rest, you might as well look for
the Eleusinia in Chicago. Who could believe in religion, those
days?--Well; it was the pride of some of the little duchies and
marquisates to keep up a reputa-tion for orthodoxy: there
was Lu in Shantung, for example,-very strict.* (As strictness
went, we may say.) And if you wished to study ritual, you
went up to Honanfu to do so; where, too, was the National
or Royal Library, where profitable years might be spent. But
who, except enthusiasts, was to treat religion seriously?
--when one saw the doddering Head of Religion yearly flouted,
kicked about and hustled in his own capital by his Barbarian
Highness the 'King'--so he must now style himself and be
styled, where in better days 'Count Palatine' or 'Lord Marcher'
would have served his turn well enough--of Ts'in or Tsin
or Ts'i or Ts'u, who would come thundering down with his
chariots when he pleased, and without with-your-leave or
by-your-leave, march past the very gates of Honanfu;--and
lucky if he did march past, and not come in and stay awhile;
--on his way to attacking his Barbarian Highness the 'King'
of somewhere else. The God that is to be sincerely worshiped
must, as this world goes, be able now and then to do some
little thing for his vicegerent on earth; and Heaven did
precious little in those days for the weakling King-pontiff
puppets at Honanfu. A mad world, my masters!
------
* _Ancient China Simplified:_ E. Harper Parker;--also much
drawn on.
------
Wherein, too, we had our symbols:--the Dragon, the Sky-wanderer,
with something heavenly to say; but alas! the Dragon had been
little visible in our skies of Chu Hia these many years or
centuries;--the Tiger, brute muscularity, lithe terrible limbs,
fearful claws and teeth,--we knew him much better! This, heaven
knew, was the day of the Tiger of earthly strength and passions;
were there not those three great tigers up north, Ts'in, Tsin,
and Ts'i; and as many more southward; and all hungry and
strong?--And also, some little less thought of perhaps, the
Phoenix, Secular Bird, that bums itself at the end of each cycle,
and arises from its ashes young and dazzling again: the Phoenix
--but little thought of, these days; for was not the world old
and outworn, and toppling down towards a final crash? The days
of Chu Hia were gone, its future all in the long past; no one
dared dream of a time when there should be something better than
Yen diddling Lu, or Ts'u beating Ts'i at a good set-to with these
new sixty-warrior-holding chariots. Who should think of the
Phoenix--and of a new age to come when there should be no more
Yen and Lu and Chow and Tsin and Ts'in, but one broad and
mighty realm, a Middle, a Celestial Kingdom,--such a Chu
Hia as time had no memory of;--to whose throne the Hun himself
should bow, or whose hosts should drive him out of Asia;--a
Chu Hia to whom tribute should come from the uttermost ends
of the earth? Who should dream of the Secular Bird now,--
as improbable a creature, in these dark days of the Tiger,
as that old long-lost Sky-wanderer the Dragon himself?
Let be; let three little centuries pass; let the funeral pyre
but be kindled, and quite burn itself out; and let the ashes
grow cold--
And behold you now, this Phoenix of the World, bright and
dazzling, rising up from them! Behold you now this same
Black-haired People, young, strong, vigorous, gleaming with
all the rainbow hues of romance and imagination; conquering
and creative, and soon to strew the jewels of faerie over
all the Eastern World. . . .
But this is to anticipate: to take you on to the second century
B. C.; whereas I want you now in the sixth.--I said that you
should find better chances for study in the Royal Library at
Honanfu, could you get together the means for journeying thither,
than anywhere else in Chu Hia. That was particularly true in the
latter part of that sixth century: because there was a man by
the name of Li Urh, chief librarian there, from whom, if you
cared to, you might hear better things than were to be found in
the books in his charge. His fame, it appears, has gone abroad
through the world; although his chief aim seems to be to keep in
the shadows and not be talked about. Scholars resort to him from
far and near; one of them, the greatest of all, who came to him
in the year 517 and was (if we are to believe accounts) treated
without too much mercy, came out awestruck, and said: "Today I
have seen the Dragon."--What! that little old man with the bald
head and straggly lank Chirese beard?--Like enough, like enough!
--they are not all, as you look at them with these physical eyes,
to be seen winged and wandering the heavens. . . .
But wandering the heavens, this one, yes! He has the blue ether
about him, even there in the Library among the books.--He has a
way of putting things in little old quiet paradoxes that seem to
solve all the problems,--to take you out of the dust and clatter
of this world, into the serenity of the Dragon-world where all
problems are solved, or non-existent. Chu Hia is all a fuss and
turmoil, and running the headlong Gadarene road; but the Old
Philosopher--as he has come to be called--has anchorage right
outside of and above it, and speaks from the calmness of the
peaks of heaven. A kind of school forms itself around him; his
wisdom keeps provincials from returning home, and the young men
of the capital from commonplace courses. Though he has been
accredited with much authorship, I think he wrote nothing;
living among books, he had rather a contempt for them,--as things
at the best for patching up and cosseting life, new windings and
wrappings for its cocoon;--whereas he would have had the whole
cocoon stripped away, and the butterfly beautifully airing its
wings. Be that as it may, there are, shall we say, stenographers
among his disciples, and his sayings come down to us. They have
to do with the Way, the Truth, and the Life; which things, and
much else, are included in Chinese in the one word _Tao._
"The main purpose of his studies" says Ssema Tsien (the 'Father
of Chinese History'), "was to keep himself concealed and
unknown." In this he succeeded admirably, so far as all future
ages were to concerned; for Ssema himself, writing in the reign
of Han Wuti some four centuries later, could be by no means sure
of his identity. He tells us all we know, or think we know,
about Laotse:--that he was born in a village in southern Honan;
kept the Royal Library at Honanfu; met Confucius there in 517;
and at last rode away on his ox into the west, leaving the _Tao
Teh King_ with the Keeper of the Pass on the frontier;--and then
goes on to say that there were two other men "whom many regarded
as having been the real Laotse"; one of the Lao Lai, a
contemporary of Confucius, who wrote fifteen treatises on
the practices of the school of Tao; the other, a "Grand
Historiographer of Chow," Tan by name, who lived some century and
a quarter later. To me this is chiefly interesting as a
suggestion that the 'School of Tao' was a thing existent and
well-established at that time, and with more than one man writing
about it.
It may we'll have been. Taoists ascribe the foundation of their
religion to the Yellow Emperor, twenty-eight centuries B. C.;
but there never was time Tao was not; nor, I suppose, when there
was quite no knowledge of it, even in China. In the old
manvantara, past now these three hundred years, the Black-haired
People had wandered far enough from such knowledge;--with the
accumulation of complexities, with the piling up of encumberments
of thought and deed during fifteen hundred busy years of
intensive civilization. As long as that piling up had not
entirely covered away Tao, the Supreme Simplicity, the Clear
Air;--as long as men could find scope to think and act and
accomplish things;--so long the manvantara lasted; when nothing
more that was useful could be accomplished, and action could no
longer bring about its expectable results (because all that old
dead weight was there to interpose itself between new causes set
in motion and their natural outcome)--then the pralaya set in.
You see, that is why pralayas do set in; why they must;--why no
nation can possibly go on at a pitch of greatness and high
activity beyond a certain length of time.--And all that activity
of the manvantara--all that fuss and bustle to achieve greatness
and fortune--it had all been an obscuration of and moving away
from Tao.
The Great Teachers come into this world out of the Unknown,
bringing the essence of their Truth with them. We know well what
they will teach: in some form or another it will be Theosophy;
it will be the old self-evident truths about Karma and the two
natures of man. But how they will teach it: what kind of
sugar-coating or bitter aloes they will prescribe along with it:
--that, I think, depends on reactions from the age they come in
and the people whom they are to teach. It is almost certain, as
I said, that Li Urh the Old Philosopher left no writings. "Who
knows, does not tell," said he; and Po Chu-i quotes this, and
pertinently adds: "What then of his own five thousand words and
more.--the _Tao Teh King._" That book was proved centuries ago, in
China, not to have come, as it stands, even from Laotse's age;
because there are characters in it that were invented long
afterwards. The wisest thing to believe is that it is made up
mostly of his sayings, taken down by his disciples in the Pitman
of the time; and surviving, with accretions and losses perhaps,
through the disquiet of the next two centuries, and the burning
of the books, and everything. Because whatever vicissitudes may
have befallen it, one does hear in its maxims the tones of
a real voice: one man's voice, with a timbre in it that
belongs to the Lords of Wisdom. And to me, despite Lao Lai
and Tan the Grand Historiographer, it is the voice of an
old man in the seclusion of the Royal Library: a happy little
bald-headed straggly-bearded old man anxious to keep himself
unknown and unapplauded; it is a voice attuned to quietness,
and to mental reactions from the thunder of the armies, the
drums and tramplings and fuss and insolence of his day. I
thoroughly believe in the old man in the Royal Library, and
the riding away on oxback at last into the west,--where was
Si Wang Mu's Faery Garden, and the Gobi Desert, with sundry
oases therein whereof we have heard. I can hear that voice,
with childlike wonder in it, and Adept-like seriousness, and
childlike and Adept-like laughter not far behind, in such sayings
as these: "Tao is like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use
of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency. How
deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things!
We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications
of things. . . . How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with
the semblance of permanence! I do not know whose son it is.
It might appear to have been before God."
We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal God,
and also the inefficacy of mere ethics. Believers make their God
in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an
imitation of themselves. At the best of times they take their
New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and
excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of
their Deity:--the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the
great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds
the whole together. It is after all but a swollen personality;
and whether you swell your personalitv with virtues or vices, the
result is an offense. There is a bridge, razor-edged, between
earth and heaven; and you can never carry that load across it.
Laotse, supremely ethical in effect, had a cordial detestation--
take this gingerly!--of un-re-enforced ethics. "When the great
Tao is lost," says he, "men follow after charity and duty to
one's neighbor." Again: "When Tao is lost, virtue takes its
place. When virtue is lost, benevolence succeeds to it. When
benevolence is lost, justice ensues. When justice is lost, then
we have expediency." He does not mean, of course, that these
things are bad; but simply that they are the successive stages
of best, things left when Tao is lost sight of; none of them in
itself a high enough aim. They are all included in Tao, as the
less in the greater. He describes to you the character of the man
of Tao; but your conduct is to be the effect of following Tao;
and you do not attain Tao by mere practice of virtue; though you
naturally practise virtue, without being aware of it, while
following Tao. It all throws wonderful light on the nature of
the Adept; about whom you have said nothing at all when you have
accredited him with all the virtues. Joan was blemishless; but
not thereby did she save France;--she could do that because, as
Laotse would have said, being one with Tao, she flowed out into
her surroundings, accomplishing absolutely her part in the
universal plan. No compilation of virtues would make a Teacher
(such as we know): it is a case of the total absence of
everything that should prevent the natural Divine Part of man
from functioning in this world as freely and naturally as the sun
shines or the winds blow. The sun and the stars and the tides and
the wind and the rain--there is that perfect glowing simplicity
in them all: the Original, the Root of all things, Tao. _Be
like them,_ says Laotse, impersonal and simple. "I hold fast to
and cherish Three Precious Things," he says: "Gentleness,
Economy, Humility." Why? So, you would say, do the ethics of
the New Testament; such is the preaching of the Christian
Churches. But (in the latter case) for reasons quite unlike
Laotse's. For we make of them too often virtues to be attained,
that shall render us meek and godly, acceptable in the eyes of
the Lord, and I know not what else: riches laid up in heaven; a
pamperment of satisfaction; easily to become a cloak for self-
righteousness and, if worse can be, worse. But _tut!_ Laotse
will not be bothered with riches here or elsewhere. With him
these precious things are simply absences that come to be when
obstructive presences are thrown off. No sanctimoniousness for
the little Old Man in the Royal Library!
He would draw minds away to the silence of the Great Mystery,
which is the fountain of laughter, of life, the unmarred; and he
would have them abide there in absolute harmony. Understand him,
and you understand what he did for China. It is from that Inner
Thing, that Tao, that all nourishment comes and all greatness.
You must go out with your eyes open to search for it: watch for
Dragons in the sky; for the Laugher, the Golden Person, in the
Sun: watch for Tao, ineffably sparkling and joyous--and quiet--
in the trees; listen for it in the winds and in the sea-roar;
and have nothing in your own heart but its presence and
omnipresence and wonder-working joy. How can you flow out to the
moments, and capture the treasure in them; how can you flow out
to Tao, and inherit the stars, and have the sea itself flowing in
your veins;--if you are blocked with a desire, or a passion for
things mortal, or a grudge against someone, or a dislike? Beauty
is Tao: it is Tao that shines in the flowers: the rose, the
bluebell, the daffodil--the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, the
peony--they are little avatars of Tao; they are little gateways
into the Kingdom of God. How can you know them, how can you go
in through them, how can you participate in the laughter of the
planets and the angelic clans, through their ministration, if you
are preoccupied with the interests or the wants of contemptible
you, the personality? Laotse went lighting little stars for the
Black-haired People: went pricking the opacity of heaven, that
the Light of lights might filter through. If you call him a
philosopher, you credit him with an intellectualism that really
he did not bother to possess. Rather he stood by the Wells of
Poetry, and was spiritual progenitor of thousands of poets.
There is no way to Poetry but Laotse's Way. You think you must go
abroad and see the world; you must not; that is only a
hindrance: a giving the eyes too many new externals, to hinder
them from looking for that which you may see, as he says,
'through your own window.' If you traverse the whole world
seeking, you will never come nearer to the only thing that
counts, which is Here, and Now. Seek to feed your imagination on
outward things, on doings and events, and you will perhaps
excite, but surely soon starve it. But at the other pole, the
inner "How deep and mysterious is Tao, as if it were the author
of all things!" And then I hear someone ask him whence it
originated--someone fishing for a little metaphysics, some dose
of philosophy. What! catch Laotse? "I know," said Confucius,
"how birds fly, beasts run, fishes swim. But the runner may be
snared, the swimmer hooked, the flyer shot with an arrow. But
there is the Dragon; I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind
through the clouds and rises into heaven." No; you cannot hook,
snare, or shoot the Dragon. "I do not know whose son Tao is,"
says Laotse. "It might appear to have been before God."
So I adhere to the tale of the old man in the Royal Library,
holding wonderful quiet conversations there; that "it might
appear to have been before God" is enough to convince me. There
was a man once*--I forget his name, but we may call him Cho Kung
for our purposes; he was of affable demeanor, and an excellent
flautist; and had an enormous disbelief in ghosts, bogies,
goblins, and 'supernatural' beings of every kind. It seized
him with the force of a narrow creed; and he went forth to
missionarize, seeking disputants. He found one in the chief
Librarian of some provincial library; who confessed to a
credulousness along that line, and seemed willing to talk. Here
then were grand opportunities--for a day's real enjoyment, with
perchance a creditable convert to be won at the end of it.
Behold them sitting down to the fray, in the shadows among the
books: the young Cho Kung, affable (I like the word well),
voluble and earnest; the old Librarian, mild, with little to say
but _buts_ and _ifs,_ and courteous even beyond the wont in that
"last refuge of good manners," China. All day long they sat; and
affable Cho, like Sir Macklin in the poem,
"Argued high and argued low,
And likewise argued round about him";
--until by fall of dusk the Librarian was fairly beaten. So
cogent were Cho's arguments, so loud and warm his eloquence,
so entirely convincing his facts adduced--his modern instances,
as you may say--that there really was nothing for the old
man to answer. Ghosts were not; genii were ridiculously
unthinkable; supernatural beings could not exist, and it
was absurd to think they could. The Librarian had not a
leg to stand on; that was flat. Accordingly he rose to
his feet--and bowed.--"Sir," said he, with all prescribed
honorifics, "undoubtedly you are victorious. The contemptible
present speaker sees the error of his miserable ways. He
is convinced. It remains for him only to add"--and here
something occurred to make Cho rub his eyes--"that he is
himself a supernatural being."--And with that his form and
limbs distend, grow misty--and he vanishes in a cloud up through
the ceiling.--You see, those old librarians in China had a way of
doing things which was all their own.
------
* The story is told in Dr. H. H. Giles' _Dictionary of Chinese
Biography._
------
So Li Urh responded to the confusions of his day. Arguments?--
You could hardly call them so; there is very little arguing,
where Tao is concerned. The Tiger was abroad, straining all
those lithe tendons,--a tense fearful symmetry of destruction
burning bright through the night-forests of that pralaya:
grossest and wariest energies put forth to their utmost in a race
between the cunning for existence, a struggle of the strong for
power.--"It is the way of Tao to do difficult things when they
are easy; to benefit and not to injure; to do and not to
strive." Come out, says Laotse, from all this moil and topsey-
turveydom; stop all this striving and botheration; give things
a chance to right themselves. There is nothing flashy or to make
a show about in Tao; it vies with no one. Let go; let be;
find rest of the mind and senses; let us have no more of these
fooleries, war, capital punishment, ambition; let us have self-
emptiness. Just be quiet, and this great Chu Hia will come right
without aid of governing, without politics and voting and
canvassing and such.--_Here and Now_ and _What comes by_ were his
prescriptions. He was an advocate of the Small State. Aristotle
would have had no government ruling more than ten thousand
people; Laotse would have had his State of such a size that the
inhabitants could all hear the cocks crowing in foreign lands;
and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad. What
he taught was a total _bouleversement_ of the methods of his age.
"It is the way of Tao not to act from personal motives, to
conduct affairs--without feeling the trouble of them, to
taste without being aware of the flavor, to account the
great as the small and the small as the great, to recompense
injury with kindness."
The argument went all against him. Their majesties of Ts'in
and Tsin and Ts'i and Ts'u were there with their drums and
tramplings; the sixty warrior-carrying chariots were thundering
past;--who should hear the voice of an old quiet man in the Royal
Library? Minister This and Secretary That of Lu and Chao and
Cheng were at it with their wire-pullings and lobbyings and petty
diddlings and political cheateries--(it is all beautifully
modern); what had the world to do with self-emptiness and Tao?
The argument was all against him; he hadn't a leg to stand on.
There was no Tao; no simplicity; no magic; no Garden of Si
Wang Mu in the West; no Azure Birds of Compassion to fly out
from it into the world of men. Very well then; he, being one
with that non-existent Tao, would ride away to that imaginary
Garden; would go, and leave--
A strand torn out of the rainbow to be woven into the stuff of
Chinese life. You could not tell it at the time; you never would
have guessed it--but this old dull tired squalid China, cowering
in her rice-fields and stopping her ears against the drums and
tramplings, had had something--some seed of divinity, thrown down
into her mind, that should grow there and be brooded on for three
centuries or so, and then--
There is a Blue Pearl, Immortality; and the Dragon, wandering
the heavens, is forever in pursuit or quest of it. You will see
that on the old flag of China, that a foolish republicanism cast
away as savoring too much of the Manchu. (But it was Laotse and
Confucius, Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong, and Wu Taotse and the
Banished Angel that it savored of really.) Well, it was this Blue
Pearl that the Old Philosopher, riding up through the pass to the
Western Gate of the world, there to vanish from the knowledge of
men;--it was this Blue Pearl that, stopping and turning a moment
there so high up and near heaven, he tossed back and out into the
fields of China;--and the Dragon would come to seek it in his
time.--You perhaps know the picture of Laotse riding away on his
ox. I do not wonder that the beast is smiling.
For it really was the Blue Pearl: and the Lord knew what it was
to do in China in its day. It fell down, you may say, from the
clear ether of heaven into the thick atmosphere of this world;
and amidst the mists of human personality took on all sorts of
iridescences; lit up strange rainbow tints and fires to glow and
glisten more and more wonderfully as the centuries should pass;
and kindle the Chinese imagination into all sorts of opal
glowings and divine bewilderments and wonderments;--and by and by
the wonder-dyed mist-ripples floated out to Japan, and brought to
pass there all sorts of nice Japanese cherry-blossomy and plum-
blossomy and peonyish things, and Urashima-stories and Bushido-
ish and Lafcadioish and badger-teakettle things:--reawakened, in
fact, the whole of the faery glow of the Eastern World.
It is not to be thought that here among the mists and personalities
the Pearl could quite retain all its pure blueness of the ether.
It is not to be thought that Taoism, spread broadcast among
the people, could remain, what it was at the beginning, an
undiluted Theosophy. The lower the stratum of thought into
which it fell, the less it could be Thought-Spiritual, the
stuff unalloyed of Manas-Taijasi. Nevertheless, it was the
Pearl Immortality, with a vigor and virtue of its own, and
a competence for ages, on whatever plane it might be, to work
wonders. Among thinking and spiritual minds it remained a true
Way of Salvation. Among the masses it came to be thought of
presently as personal immortality and the elixir of life.
Regrettable, you may say; but this is the point: nothing was
ever intended to last forever. You must judge Taoism by what it
was in its day, not by what it may be now. Laotse had somehow
flashed down into human consciousness a vision of Infinity: had
confronted the Chinese mind with a conviction of the Great
Mystery, the Divine Silence. It is simply a fact that that is
the fountain whose waters feed the imagination and make it grow
and bloom. Search for the Secret in chatter and outward sights
and deeds, and you soon run to waste and nothingness; but seek
here, and you shall find what seemed a void, teeming with lovely
forms. He set the Chinese imagination, staggered and stupefied
by the so long ages of manvantara, and then of ruin, into a glow
of activity, of grace, of wonder; men became aware of the vast
world of the Within; as if a thousand Americas had been
discovered. It supplied the seed of creation for all the poets
and artists to come. It made a new folklore; revivified the
inner atmosphere of mountains and forests; set the fairies
dancing; raised Yellow Crane Pagodas to mark the spot where Wang
Tzu-chiao flew on the Crane to heaven in broad daylight. It sent
out the ships of Ts'in Shi Hwangti presently to seek the Golden
Islands of Peng-lai, where the Immortals give cups of the elixir
to their votaries; in some degree it sent the armies of Han Wuti
in search of the Garden of Si Wang Mu. The ships found (perhaps)
only the Golden Islands of Japan; the armies found certainly
Persia, India, and even the borders of Rome;--and withal, new
currents, awakening and inter-national, to flow into China and
make splendid the Golden Age of Han.