"Chwantse was fishing in the river P'u when the Prince of Ch'u
sent two high officials to ask him to take charge of the
administration.
"Chwangtse went on fishing, and without turning his head said:
'I have heard that in Ch'u there is a sacred tortoise which has
been dead now some three thousand years. And that the prince
keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of
his ancestral temple. Now if this tortoise had its choice, which
would it prefer: to be dead, and have its remains venerated; or
to be alive, and wagging its tail in the mud?'
"'Sir,' replied the two officials, 'it would rather be alive, and
wagging its tail in the mud.'
"'Begone!' cried Chwangtse. 'I too will wag my tail in the mud!'"
Well; so much for _Butterfly;_ now for _Chwang_--and to
introduce you to some of his real thought and teaching. You will
not have shot so wide of the mark as to see in his story of the
skull traces of pessimism: Chwantse had none of it; he was a
very happy fellow; like the policeman in the poem,
".....a merry genial wag
Who loved a mad conceit."
But he was by all means and anyhow for preaching the Inner as
against the outer. Yet he did not dismiss this world, either, as
a vain delusion and sorrowful mockery;--the gist of his teaching
is this: that men bear a false relation to the world; and he
desired to teach the true relation. He loved the Universe, and
had a sublime confidence in it as the embodiment and expression
of Tao; and would apply this thought as a solvent to the one
false thing in it: the human personality, with its heresy of
separateness. Dissolve that,--and it is merely an idea; in the
words of a modern philosopher, _all in the mind,_--and you have
the one true elixir flowing in your veins, the universal harmony;
are part of the solemn and glorious pageant of the years. The
motions of the heavenly bodies, the sweetness of Spring and the
wistfulness of Autumn, flaunting Summer and Winter's beauty of
snow--all are parcel of yourself, and within the circle of your
consciousness. Often he rises to a high poetic note;--it is
largely the supreme beauty of his style which keeps his book, so
thouroughly unorthodox, still alive and wagging its tail among
his countrymen. Chwangtse will not help you through the
examinations; but he is mighty good to read when your days of
competing are over; as I think it is Dr. Giles who says.
Like his contemporary Diogenes, he would have his dead body cast
out to the vultures; but the spirit of his wish was by no
means cynical. "When Chwangtse was about to die," he writes
(anticipating things pleasantly), "his disciples expressed a wish
to give him a splendid funeral. But he said: 'With heaven and
earth for my coffin and shell, and the sun, moon, and stars for
my burial regalia; with all creation to escort me to the grave--
is not my funeral already prepared?'"
He speaks of the dangers of externalism, even in the pursuit of
virtue; then says: "The man who has harmony within, though he
sit motionless like the image of a dead man at a sacrifice, yet
his Dragon Self will appear; though he be absorbed in silence,
his thunder will be heard; the divine power in him will be at
work, and heaven will follow it; while he abides in tranquillity
and inaction, the myriads of things and beings will gather under
his influence."--"Not to run counter to the natural bias of
things," he says, "is to be perfect." It is by this running
counter--going aginst the Law, following our personal desires and
so forth,--that we create karma,--give the Universe something to
readjust,--and set in motion all our troubles. "He who fully
understands this, by storing it within enlarges the heart, and
with this enlargement brings all creation to himself. Such a man
will bury gold on the hillside, and cast pearls into the sea."--
sink a plummet into that, I beseech you; it is one of the grand
utterances of wonder and wisdom.--"He will not struggle for
wealth or strive for fame; rejoice over longevity, or grieve at
an early death. He will get no elation from success, nor chagrin
from failure; he will not account the throne his private gain,
no look on the empire of the world as glory personal. His glory
is to know that all thigns are one, and life and death but phases
of the same existence."
Why call that about burying gold and casting pearls into the sea
one of the supreme utterances?--Well; Chwangtse has a way of
putting a whole essay into a sentence; this is a case in point.
We have discussed Natural Magic together many times; we know how
the ultimate beauty occurs when something human has flowed out
into Nature, and left its mysterious trace there, upon the
mountains, or by the river-brink,
"By paved fountain, or by rushy brook.
Or on the beached margent of the sea."
Tu Fu saw in the blues and purples of the morning-glory the
colors of the silken garments of the lost poet Ssema Hsiangju, of
a thousand years before--that is, of the silken garments of his
rich emotion and adventures. China somehow has understood this
deep connexion between man and Nature; and that it is human
thought molds the beauty and richness, or hideousness and
sterility of the world. Are the mountains noble? They store
the grandeur and aspirations of eighteen millions of years of
mankind. Are the deserts desolate and terrible? It was man made
the deserts: not with his hands, but with his thought. Man is
the fine workshop and careful laboratory wherein Nature prepares
the most wonderful of her wonders. It is an instinct for this
truth that makes Chinese poetry the marvel that it is.--So the
man of Tao is enriching the natural world: filling the hills
with gold, putting pearls in the sea.
I do not know where there is a more pregnant passage than this
following,--a better acid (of words) to corrode the desperate
metal of selfhood; listen well, for each clause is a volume.
"Can one get Tao to possess it for one's own?" asks Chwangtse;
and answers himself thus: "Your very body is not your own; how
then should Tao be?--If my body is not my own, whose is it,
pray?--It is the delegated image of God. Your posterity is not
your own; it is the delegated exuviae of God. You move, but
know not how; you are at rest, but know not why; you taste, but
know not the cause; these are the operations of universal law.
How then should you get Tao so as to possess it for your own?"
Now then, I want to take one of those clauses, and try to see
what Chwangtse really meant by it. "Your individuality is not
your own, but the delegated adaptability of God."--There is a
certain position in the Scheme of Things Entire,--a point, with a
relation of its own to the rest of the Scheme, to the Universe;--
as the red line has a relation of its own to the rest of the
spectrum and the ray of light as a whole..... From that point,
from that position, there is a work to be done, which can be done
from no other. The Lonely Eternal looks out through these eyes,
because it must see all things; and there are things no eyes can
see but these, no other hands do. This point is an infinitesimal
part of the whole; but without its full and proper functioning,
the Whole falls short in that much:--because of your or my petty
omissions, the Universe limps and goes lame.--Into this position,
as into all others impartially, the One Life which is Tao flows,
adapting itself through aeons to the relations which that point
bears to the Whole: and the result and the process of this
adaptation is--your individuality or mine.
_You_ are not the point, the position: because it is merely that
which you hold and through which you function; it is yours, but
not you. What then are _you?_ That which occupies and adapts
itself to the point? But that is Tao, the Universal. You can
only say it is you, if from _you_ you subtract all _you_-ness.
Your individuality, then, is a temporary aspect of Tao in a
certain relation to the totality of Tao, the One Thing which is
the No Thing:--or it is the "delegated adaptability of God."
How and wherein adaptable?--The Infinite, occupying this
position, has formed therein all sorts of attachments and
dislikes; and each one of them hinders it adaptability. Your
surroundings have reflected themselves on you: and the sum of
the reflexions is your personality,--the little cage of I-am-ness
from which it is so hard to escape. Every reflected image
engraves itself on the stuff of yourself by the sensation of
attachment or repulsion which it arouses. When it says, "The
One becomes the Two"--which is the way in one form or another all
ancient philosophy sums up the beginning of things;--this is what
is meant: the 'One' is Tao; the 'Two' is this conditioned
world, whose nature and essence is to appear as pairs of
opposites--to be attractive, or to repel. The pigs' point of
view was that it was better to live on bran and escape the
shambles; the Grand Augur's, that the pomp and ceremony of the
sacrifice, the public honor, ought more than to compensate them
for the momentary inconvenience of being killed. Opposite ways
of thinking; points of view: which cherishing, Grand Augur and
pigs alike dwelt on the plane of externals; and so there was no
real difference between them. When you stand for you, and I for
myself, it is six of one and half a dozen of the other; but when
either of us stand for That which is both of us, and all else,--
then we touch reality; then there is no longer conflict, or
opposites; no longer false appearances,--but the presence and
cognition of the True.
Here let me note what seems to me a radical superiority in
Chinese methods of thought. You may take the _Bhagavad-Gita,_
perhaps, as the highest expression of Aryan religio-philosophic
thinking. There we have the Spirit, the One, shown as the self
of the Universe, but speaking through, and as, Krishna, a human
personality. Heaven forbid that I should suggest there is
anthropomorphism in this. Still, I think our finest mystical and
poetic perceptions of the Light beyond all lights do tend to
crystallize themselves into the shape of a _Being;_ we do tend
to symbolize and figure that Wonder as ..... an Individuality
.....in some indefinable splendid sort. Often you find real
mystics, men who have seen with their own eyes so to say, talking
about _God, the Lord,_ the _Great King,_ and what not of the
like; and though you know perfectly well what they mean, there
was yet that necessity on them to use those figures of speech.
But in China, no. There, they begin from the opposite end.
Neither in Laotse nor in Confucius, nor in their schools, can you
find a trace of personalism. Gods many, yes; as reason and
common sense declare; but nothing you can call a god is so
ancient, constant, and eternal as Tao, "which would appear to
have been before God." Go to their poets, and you find that the
rage is all for Beauty as the light shining through things. The
grass-blade and the moutain, the moonlit water and the peony, are
lit from within and utterly adorable: not because God made them;
not as reminding you of the Topmost of any Hierarchy of Being;
but, if you really go to the bottom of it, because there is no
personality in them,--and so nothing to hinder the eternal
wonder, impersonal Tao, from shining through.--As if _we_ came
through our individuality to a conception of the Divine;
but _they,_ through a perception of the divine, to a right
understanding of their individuality. It amounts to _us_ to fall
into gross hideous anthropomorphism; the worst of them into
superstitions of their own.--When one quotes Chwangtse as
speaking of "the delegated adaptability of _God,_" one must
remember that one has to use some English word for his totally
impersonal _Tao_ or _Tien,_ or even _Shangti,_ or whatever it
may be.
This Tao, you say, something far off,--a principle in philosophy
or a metaphysical idea,--may be very nice to discuss in a lecture
or write poetry about; but dear me! between whiles we have a
great deal to do, and really--But no! it is actually, as Mohammed
said, "nearer to thee than thy jugular vein." It is a simple
adjustment of oneself to the Universe,--of which, after all, one
cannot escape being a part; it is the attainment of a true
relationship to the whole. What obscures and hinders that, is
simply our human brain-mind consciousness. "Consider the lilies
of the field," that attain a perfection of beauty. The thing
that moves us, or ought to move us, in flowers, trees, seas and
mountains, is this: that lacking this fretting, gnawing sense of
I-am-ness, their emanations are pure Tao, and may reach us along
the channel we call beauty: may flood our being through "the
gateway of the eyes." Beauty is Tao made visible. The rose and
peony do not feel themselves 'I,' distinct from 'you' and the
rest; they are in opposition to nothing; they do not fall in
love, and have no aversions: they simply worship Heaven and are
unanxious, and so beautiful. When we know this, we see what
beauty means; and that it is not something we can afford to
ignore and treat with stoic indifference or puritan dislike. It
is Tao visible; I call every flower an avatar of God. Now you
see how Taoism leads to poetry; is the philosophy of poetry; is
indeed _Poetics,_ rather than _Metephysics._ Think of all the
little jewels you know in Keats, in Shelley, or Wordsworth:
the moments when the mists between those men and the divine
"defecated to a thin transparency";--those were precisely the
moments when the poets lost sight of their I-am-ness and entered
into true relations with the Universe. A daffodil, every second
of its life, holds within itself all the real things poets have
ever said, or will ever say, about it; and can reach our souls
directly with edicts from the Dragon Throne of the Eternal.--I
watched the linarias yesterday, and their purple delicacy assured
me that all the filth, all the falsehood and tragedy of the
world, should pass and be blown away; that the garden was full
of dancing fairies, joy moving them to their dancing; that it
was my own fault if I could not see Apollo leaning down out of
the Sun; and my own fatuity, and that alone, if I could not hear
the Stars of Morning singing together, and all the sons of God
shouting for you. And it was the truth they were telling; the
plain, bald, naked truth;--they have never learned to lie, and do
not know what it means. There is no sentimentalism in this;
only science. We live in a Universe absolutely soaked through
with God,--or with Poetry, which is perhaps a better name for It;
a Universe peopled thick with Gods. But it is all very far from
our common thoughts and conceptions; that is why it sounds to
most people like sentimental nonsense and 'poetry.' No wonder
Plato hated that word;--since it is made a hand-grenade, in the
popular mind, to fling at every truth. And yet Poetry 'gets in
on us,' too, occasionally, and accomplishes for
"the woods and waters wild"
the work they cannot do for themselves;--the work they cannot do,
cause we will not look at them, cannot see them, and have
forgotten their ancient language, being too much immersed in a
rubbishing gabble of our own.
What Toism, and especially Chwangtse as I think, did for the
Chinese was to publish the syntax and vocabulary of that ancient
language; to make people understand how to take these grand
protagonists of Tao; how to communicate familiarly with these
selfless avatars of the Most High. Listen to this: the thought
is close-packed, but I think you will follow it:--
"The true Sage rejects all distinction of this and that," that is
to say, of subjective, or that which one perceives within one's
own mind and consciousness, and objective, or that which is
perceived as existing outside of them;--he does not look upon the
mountain or the daffodil as things different or apart from his
own conscious being. "He takes his refuge in Tao, and places
himself in subjective relations with all things"; he keeps the
mountain within him; the scent of the daffodil, and her yellow
candle-flame of beauty, are within the sphere and circle of
himself;
"...the little wave of Breffny goes stumbling through his
soul."
"Hence it is said"--this is Chwangtse again--"that there is
nothing like the light of Nature.
"Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the
identity of things. They do not view things as apprehended by
themselves, but transfer themselves into the position of the
things viewed."--And there, I may say, you have it: the last is
the secret of the wonder-light in all Far Eastern Poetry and Art;
more, it is the explanation of all poetry everywhere. It is the
doctrine, the archeus, the _Open Sesame,_ the thyme- and
lavender- and sweetwilliam-breathed Secret Garden of this old
wizardly Science of Song;--who would go in there, and have the
dark and bright blossoms for his companions, let him understand
this. For Poetry is the revelation of the Great Life beyond the
little life of this human personality; to tap it, you must evict
yourself from the personal self; "transfer yourself into the
position of the things viewed," and not see, but _be,_ the little
stumbling wave or the spray of plum-blossom, thinking its
thoughts.--"Viewing things thus," continues our Chwangtse, "you
are able to comprehend and master them. So it is that to place
oneself in inner relation with externals, without consciousness
of their objectivity,--this is Tao. But to wear out one's
intellect in an obstinate adherence to the objectivity--the
apartness--of things, not recognizing that they are all one--this
is called _Three in the Morning._--'What do you mean by _Three in
the Morning?'_ asked Tse Yu.--'A keeper of monkeys,' Tse Chi
replied, 'said with regard to their daily ration of chestnuts
that each monkey should have three in the morning and four at
night. At this the monkeys were very angry; so he said that
they might have four in the morning and three at night; whereat
they were well pleased. The number of nuts was the same; but
there was an adaptation to the feelings of those concerned.'"--
which, again, means simply that to follow Tao and dodge until it
is altogether sloughed off the sense of separateness, is to
follow the lines of least resistance.
All these ideas are a natural growth from the teachings of
Laotse; but Butterfly Chwang, in working them out and stating
them so brilliantly, did an inestimable service to the ages that
were to come.