Confucius died in 478: the year, it may be noted, in which
Athens attained her hegemony: or just when the Greek Cycle
thirteen decades was opening. Looking backward thirteen decades
from that, we come to 608 B.C.; four years after which date,
according to the usually accepted tradition, Laotse was born.
Thus we find the cycle preceding that of Greece mainly occupied,
in China, by the lives of the two great Teachers.
We should have seen by this time that these two lives were, so to
say, parts of a single whole: co-ordinated spiritually, if not
in an organization on this plane. Laotse, like H.P. Blavatsky,
brought the Teachings; he illuminated the inner worlds. That
was his work. We can see little of him as he accomplished it:
and only the smallest fragment of his doctrine remains:--five
thousand words, out of his whole long life. But since we have
had in our own time an example of how these things are done, we
may judge him and his mission by this analogy; also by the
results. Then came Confucius, like Katherine Tingley, to link
this wisdom with individual and national life. The teachings
were there; and he had no need to restate them: he might take
the great principles as already enounced. But every Teacher has
his own method, and his need to accentuate this or that: so time
and history have had most to say about the differences between
these two. What Confucius had to do, and did, was to found his
school, and show in the lives of his disciples, modeled under his
hands, how the wisdom of the Ages (and of Laotse) can be made a
living power in life and save the world.
Contrasting the efforts of that age and this, we may say that
then, organization, such as we have now, was lacking. Confucius
did not come as the official successor of Laotse; Laotse,
probably, had had no organized school that he could hand over to
Confucius. He had taught, and his influence had gone far and
wide, affecting the thought of the age; but he had had no
trained and pledged body of students to whom he could say:
'Follow this man when I am gone; he is my worthy successor.'--
All of which will be laughed at: I firmly believe, however, that
it is an accurate estimate of things. When you come to think of
it, it was by the narrowest margine that H. P. Blavatsky, through
Mr. Judge--and his heroism and wisdom alone to be thanked
for it!--had anything beyond the influence of her ideas and
revelation to hand on to Katherine Tingley. In the way of an
organization, I mean. Very few among her disciples had come to
have any glimmering of what discipleship means, or were prepared
to follow her accredited successors.
And Confucius, in his turn, had no established center for
his school; it was a thing that wandered the world with
him, and ceased, as in organization (however hazy) to exist
when he died. Nothing remained, then, of either Teacher
for posterity except the ideas and example. And yet I have
hinted, and shall try to show, that tremendous results for
good followed: that the whole course of history was turned
in an upward direction. You may draw what inferences you will.
The matter is profoundly significant.
Thirteen decades after the death of Confucius, Plato died in
Greece; and about that time two men arose in China to carry
forward, bring down, and be the expositors of, the work of
the two great Teachers of the sixth and seventh centuries.
These were Chwangtse for Taoism, and Mangtse or Mencius for
Confucius: the one, the channel through which spiritual thought
flowed to the quickening of the Chinese imagination; the other,
the man who converted the spiritual thought of Confucius into the
Chinese Constitution. Alas! they were at loggerheads: a wide
breach between the two schools of thought had come to be by their
time; or perhaps it was they who created it. We shall arrive at
them next week; tonight, to introduce you to Liehtse, a Taoist
teacher who came sometime between Laotse and Chwangtse;--perhaps
in the last quarter of the fifth century, when Socrates was
active in Greece.
Professor De Groot, of Holland, speaks boldly of Confucius as a
Taoist; and though I dislike many of this learned Dutchman's
ideas, this one is excellent. His thesis is that Laotse was no
more an innovator than Confucius; that both but gave a new
impulse to teachings as old as the race. Before Laotse there had
been a Teacher Quan, a statesman-philosopher of the seventh
century, who had also taught the Tao. The immemorial Chinese
idea had been that the Universe is made of the interplay of two
forces, _Yang_ and _Yin,_ positive and negative;--or simply the
Higher and the Lower natures. To the Yang, the Higher, belong
the _Shen_ or gods,--all conscious beneficent forces within and
without man. To the Yin or lower belong the _kwei,_ the opposite
of gods: _fan_ means foreign; and _Fan Kwei_ is the familiar
Chinese term for white men. From Shen and Tao we get the term
_Shentao,_ which you know better as _Shinto,_--the Way of the
Gods; or as well, the Wisdom of the Gods; as good an equivalent
of our term _Theosophy_ as you should find; perhaps indeed
better than _Theosophy_ itself; for it drives home the idea that
the _Wisdom_ is a practical _Way of Life._ Shentao, the Taoism
of the Higher Nature, then, was the primeval religion of the
Chinese;--Dr. De Groot arrives at this, though perhaps hardly
sees how sensible a conclusion he has reached. In the sixth
century B.C. it was in a fair way to becoming as obsolete as
Neoplatonism or Gnosticism in the nineteenth A.D.; and Laotse
and Confucius simply restated some aspects of it with a new force
and sanction;--just as H.P. Blavatsky, in the _Key to Theosophy,_
begins, you will remember, with an appeal to and restatement of
the Theosophy of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists of Alexandria.
It may seem a kind of divergence from our stream of history, to
turn aside and tell stories from the _Book of Liehtse;_ but
there are excuses. Chinese history, literature, thought--
everything--have been such a closed book to the West, that those
scholars who have opened a few of its pages are to be considered
public benefactors; and there is room and to spare for any who
will but hold such opened pages up;--we are not in the future to
dwell so cut off from a third of mankind. Also it will do us
good to look at Theosophy from the angle of vision of another
race. I think Liehtse has much to show us as to the difference
between the methods of the Chinese and Western minds: the latter
that must bring most truths down through the brain-mind, and set
them forth decked in the apparel of reason; the former that is,
as it seems to me, often rather childlike as to the things of the
brain-mind; but has a way of bringing the great truths down and
past the brain-mind by some circuitous route; or it may be only
by a route much more direct than ours. The West presents its
illuminations so that they look big on the surface; you say,
This is the work of a great mind. A writer in the _Times Literary
Supplement_ brought out the idea well, in comparing the two
poetries. What he said was, in effect, as follows:--the Western
poet, too often, dons his singing robe before he will sing;
works himself up; expects to step out of current life into the
Grand Manner;--and unless the Soul happens to be there and vocal
at the time, achieves mostly _pombundle._ The Chinaman presents
his illumination as if it were nothing at all,--just the simplest
childish-foolish thing; nothing in the world for the brain-mind
to get excited about. You take very little notice at the time:
more of their quaint punchinello _chinoiserie,_ you say. Three
weeks after, you find that it was a clear voice from the
supermundane, a high revelation. The Chinese poet saunters along
playing a common little tune on his Pan-pipes. Singing robes?--
None in the world; just what he goes to work in. Grand Manner?--
'Sir,' says he, 'the contemptible present singer never heard of
it; wait for that till the coming of a Superior Man.'--'Well,'
you say, 'at least there is no danger of _pombundle';_ and
indeed there is not. But you rather like the little tune, and
stop to listen . . . and then . . . Oh God! the Wonder of wonders
has happened, and the Universe will never be quite the dull,
fool, ditchwater thing it was to you before . . .
Liehtse gives one rather that kind of feeling. We know
practically nothing about him.--I count three stages of growth
among the sinologists: the first, with a missionary bias; the
second, with only the natural bias of pure scholarship and
critical intellectualism, broad and generous, but rather running
at times towards tidying up the things of the Soul from off the
face of the earth; the third, with scholarship plus sympathy,
understanding, and a dash of mystical insight. The men of the
first stage accepted Liehtse as a real person, and called him a
degenerator of Taoism, a teacher of immoral doctrine;--in the
_Book of Liehtse,_ certainly, such doctrine is to be found. The
men of the second stage effectually tidied Liehtse up: Dr. H. A.
Giles says he was an invention of the fertile brain of Chwangtse,
and his book a forgery of Han times. Well; people did forge
ancient literature in those days, and were well paid for doing
so; and you cannot be quite certain of the complete authenticity
of any book purporting to have been written before Ts'in Shi
Hwangti's time. Also Chwangtse's brain was fertile enough for
anything;--so that there was much excuse for the men of the
second stage. But then came Dr. Lionel Giles* who belongs to the
third stage, and perhaps _is_ the third stage. He shows that
though there is in the _Book of Liehtse_ a residue or scum of
immoral teaching, it is quite in opposition to the tendency of
the teaching that remains when this scum is removed; and deduces
from this fact the sensible idea that the scum was a later
forgery; the rest, the authentic work of a true philosopher with
an original mind and a style of his own. Such a man, of course,
might have lived later than Chwangtse, and taken his nom de plume
of Liehtse from the latter's book; but against this there is the
fact that Liehtse's teaching forms a natural link between
Chtangtse's and that of their common Master Laotse; and above
all--and herein lies the real importance of him--the real Liehtse
treats Confucius as a Teacher and Man of Tao. But by Chwangtse's
time the two schools had separated: Confucius was Chwangtse's
butt;--we shall see why. And in the scum of Liehtse he is
made fun of in Chwangtse's spirit, but without Changtse's wit
and style.
------
* Whose translation of parts of the _Book of Liehtse,_ with an
invaluable preface, appears in the _Wisdom of the East Series;_
from which translation the passages quoted in this lecture are
taken;--as also are many ideas from the preface.
------
So that whoever wrote this book,--whether it was the man referred
to by Chwangtse when he says: "There was Liehtse again; he could
ride upon the wind and go wheresoever he wished, staying away as
long as thirteen days,"--or someone else of the same name, he did
not take his non de plume from that passage in Chwangtse, because
he was probably dead when Chwangtse wrote it. We may, then,
safely call him a Taoist Teacher of the fifth century,--or at
latest of the early fourth.
The book's own account of itself is, that it was not written by
Liehtse, but compiled from his oral teaching by his disciples.
Thus it begins:
"Our Master Liehtse live in the Cheng State for forty years, and
no man knew him for what he was. The prince, his ministers, and
the state officials looked upon him as one of the common herd. A
time of dearth fell upon the state, and he was preparing to
emigrate to Wei, when his disciples said to him: 'Now that our
Master is going away without any prospect of returning, we have
ventured to approach him, hoping for instruction. Are there no
words from the lips of Hu-Ch'iu Tsu-lin that you can impart to
us?'--Lieh the Master smiled and said: 'Do you suppose that Hu
Tzu dealt in words? However, I will try to repeat to you what my
Teacher said on one occasion to Po-hun Moujen. I was standing by
and heard his words, which ran as follows.'"
Then come some rather severe metaphysics on cosmogony: really, a
more systematic statement of the teaching thereon which Laotse
referred to, but did not (in the _Tao Teh King_) define. 'More
systematic,'--and yet by no means are the lines laid down and the
plan marked out; there is no cartography of cosmogenesis; . . .
but seeds of meditation are sown. Of course, it is meaningless
nonsense for the mind to which all metaphysics and abstract
thought are meaningless nonsense. Mystics, however, will see in
it an attempt to put the Unutterable into words. One paragraph
may be quoted:
"There is life, and That which produces life; form, and That
which imparts form; sound, and That which causes color; taste,
and That which causes taste. The source of life is death; but
That which produces life never comes to an end."
Remember the dying Socrates: 'life comes from death, as death
from life.' We appear, at birth, out of that Unseen into which
we return at death, says Liehtse; but that which produces life,
--which is the cause of this manifestation (you can say, the
Soul),--is eternal.
"The origin of form is matter; but That which imparts form has
no material existence."
No; because it is the down-breathing spirit entering into
matter; matter being the medium through which it creates, or to
which it imparts, form. "The form to which the clay is modeled
is first united with"--or we may say, projected from--"the
potter's mind."
"The genesis of sound lies in the sense of hearing; but That
which causes sound is never audible to the ear. The source of
color"--for 'source' we might say, the 'issuing-point'--"is
vision; but That which produces color never manifests to the
eye. The origin of taste lies in the palate; but That which
causes taste is never perceived by that sense. All these
pehnomena are functions of the Principle of Inaction--the inert
unchanging Tao."