When the news came drifting back over the Roman world that
the Emperor had been killed in Persia, and that an unknown
insignificant Jovian reigned in his stead;--and while three parts
of the population were rejoicing that there was an end of the
Apostate and his apostasy; and half the rest, that there was an
end of this terrible strenuosity, this taking of the Gods (good
harmless useful fictions--probably fictions) so fearfully in
earnest: I wonder how many there were to guess how near the end
of the world had come? The cataclysm was much more sudden and
over-whelming than we commonly think; and to have prophesied, in
Roman society, in the year 363, that in a century's time the
empire and all its culture would be things of the past (in the
West), would have sounded just as ridiculous, probably, as such a
prophesy concerning Europe and its culture would have sounded in
a London drawing-room fifteen years ago. There were signs and
portents, of course, for the thoughtful; and no doubt some few
Matthew Arnolds in their degree to be troubled by them. And of
course (as in our own day, but perhaps rather more), an idea with
cranks that at any moment Doomsday might come. But while the
world endured, and the Last Trump had not sounded, of course the
Roman empire would stand.--Christianity? Well, yes; it had
grown very strong; and the extremists among the Christians were
rabid enough against culture of any sort. But there were also
Christians who, while they hated the olden culture of Paganism,
were ambitious to supply a Christian literature in prose and
verse to take the place of the Classical. There had been an
awful devastation of Gaul; the barbarians of the north had been,
now and again, uneasy and troublesome; but see how Julian--even
he, with the Grace of God all against him--had chastised them!
The head of the Roman State would always be the Master of the
World.
And strangely enough, this was an idea that persisted for
centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to
kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman
empire and its civilization were gone.
Life, when Julian died, was still capable of being a very
graceful and dignified affair,--outwardly, at any rate. On their
great estates in Gaul, in Britain, in Italy, great and polished
gentlemen still enjoyed their _otium cum dignitate._ The culture
of the great past still maintained itself amongst them; although
thought and all mental vigor were buried deep under the detritus.
In fourth century Gaul there was quite a little literary
renaissance; centering, as you might expect, in the parts
furthest from German invasion. Its leading light was born in
Bordeaux in the three-thirties; and was thus (to link things up
a little) a younger contemporary of the Indian Samudragupta. He
was Ausonius: teacher of rhetoric, tutor to the prince Gratian,
consul, country gentleman, large land-owner, and, in a studious
uninspired reflective way, a goodish poet. Also a convert to
Christianity, but unenthusiastic:--altogether, a dignified and
polished figure; such as you might find in England now, in the
country squire who has held important offices in India in his
time, hunts and shoots in season, manages his estates with
something between amateur and professional interest, reads Horace
for his pleasure, and even has a turn for writing Latin verses.
Ausonius leaves us a picture of the life of his class: a placid,
cultured life, with quite a strong ethical side to it; sterile
of any deep thought or speculation; far removed from unrest.--
Another respresentative man was his friend Symmachus at Rome:
also highly cultured and of dignified leisure; a very upright
and capable gentleman widely respected for his sterling honesty;
a pagan, not for any stirring of life within his heart or
mind, but simply for love of the ancient Roman idea,--sheer
conservatism;--for much the same reasons, in fact, as make the
Englishman above-mentioned a staunch member of the English Church.
There were many such men about: admirable men; but unluckily
without the great constructive energies that might, under
Julian's guidance for example, have saved the empire. But the
empire! In that crisis,--in that narrow pass in time! It is not
excellent gentlemen that can do such near-thaumaturgic business;
but only disciples; for the proposition is, as I understand it,
to link this world with the God-world, and hold fast through
thunders and cataclysm, so that what shall come through,--what
shall be when the thunder is stilled and the cataclysm over,--
shall flow on and up onto a new order of cycles, higher, nearer
the Spirit. . . . . No; it is not to be done by amiable
gentlemen, or excellent administrators, or clever politicians. .
. . Julian had come flaming down into the world, to see if he
could rouse up and call together those who should do it; but his
bugles had sounded in the empty desert, and died away over the
sands.
There were tremendous energies abroad; but they were all with
the Destroyers, and were to be, ever increasingly: with such men
as, at this time, Saint Martin of Tours, that great tearer-down
of temples; or in the next century, Saint Cyril of Alexandria
and Peter the Reader, the tearers-to-pieces of Hypatia. Perhaps
the greatest energies of all you should have found, now and
later, in the Christian mob of Alexandria,--wild beasts innocent
of nothing but soap and water.
It was Symmachus who was chosen by the Roman Senate to remonstrate
with the emperor Valentinian against the removal of the altar
and statue of Victory,--the Pagan symbols,--from the senate
house. I quote you Gibbon's summary of a part of his petition:
"The great and incomprehensible Secret of the Universe eludes the
enquiry of man. Where reason cannot instruct, custom may be
permitted to guide; and every nation seems to consult the
dictates of prudence by a faithful attachment to those rites and
opinions which have received the sanction of ages. If those ages
have been crowned with glory and prosperity--if the devout people
have frequently obtained the blessings which they have solicited
at the altars of the Gods--it must appear still more advisable to
persist in the same salutary practise and not to risk the unknown
perils that may attend any rash inovations. The test of antiquity
and success, (continues Gibbon), was applied with singular
advantage to the Religion of NUMA, and Rome herself, the
celestial genius that presided over the fates of the city, is
introduced by the orator to plead her own cause before the
tribunal of the emperors. 'Most excellent princes,' says the
venerable matron, 'fathers of your country! pity and respect my
age, which has hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of
piety. Since I do not repent, enjoy my domestic institutions.
This religion has reduced the world under my laws. These rites
have repelled Hannibal from the city, and the Gauls from the
Capitol. Were my grey hairs reserved for such intolerable
disgrace? I am ignorant of the new system I am required to
adopt; but I am well assured that the correction of old age is
always an ungrateful and ignominious office.'"
Symmachus was addressing a Christian emperor; and it was an ill
thing then, as in the days of Hadrian, to argue with the master
of the legions. Still, the method he chooses is interesting:
it holds a light up to the inwardness of the age, and shows
it dead. This was at twenty-one years after the death of the
Dragon-Apostate; whose appeal had all been to the realities and
the divinity of man and the living splendor of the Gods he knew and
loved. That splendor, said he, should burn away the detritus,
and make Romans men and free again. But Symmachus, for all his
admirable restraint, his rhetorical excellence, his good manners
and gentlemanly bearing,--which I am sure we should admire,--
appeals really only to the detritus; to nothing in the world
that could possibly help or save Rome. The Christians wanted to
be free of it, because they felt its weight; the Pagans wanted
to keep it, because they found it warm and comfortable. Symmachus
sees nothing higher or better than custom; the secret of the
universe, says he, is unknowable; there is no inner life.
--He was confuted by a much more alive and less estimable
man: Ambrose, bishop of Milan,--with whom, also, both he and
Ausonius were on friendly terms. Ambrose's argument, too, is
illuminating: like the King of Hearts', it was in the main that
"you were not to talk nonsense." How ridiculous, said he, to
impute the victories of old Rome to the Religion of Numa and
favor of the Gods,--when the strength and valor of the Roman
soldier were quite enough to account for all. Thus he appears in
the strange role of a rationalist. Christianity, he continued,
was the one and only true religion; and all the rest--etc.,
etc., etc. Ambrose and his party were fighting towards a
definite and positive end; knew what they wanted, and meant to
get it. Of course they won. Symmachus and the senate were
fighting only for a sentiment about the past, and had no chance
at all. And it really did not matter: Rome was doomed anyway.
But in passing I must e'en linger on a note of sublimity in this
petition of Symmachus: of sublime faith;--when he makes Dea
Roma refer to her history as having "hitherto flowed in an
uninterrupted course of piety." It makes one think that they
taught Roman history in their schools then much in the same way
that we teach our national histories in our schools today; here
and in England, and no doubt elsewhere, _"An uninterrupted course
of piety!"_ quotha. Marry come up!
But all this is anticipating the years a little: looking into
the eighties, whereas we have not finished with the sixties yet.
Julian died in 363, on the 26th of June; and within a couple of
years, you may say,--many said so then,--the Gods began to avenge
him. Nature herself took a hand, to warn a degenerate world. In
365 came an earthquake; gollowed by a huge withdrawal of the
sea, so that you could explore dry-shod the antres of the
sea-gods. And then a tidal wave which threw large ships up onto the
roofs of houses two miles inland, and killed in Alexandria alone
fifty thousand people.--"Aha!" said the Pagans, "we told you
so."--"Nothing of the kind!" said the Christians in reply; "did
not we set a saint on the beach at Epidaurus, before whom the
oncoming billow stopped, bowed its head, and retired?" Well; no
doubt that was so; but Alexandria was a perfect hotbed of
saints, one of whom, you might think, might have been lured down
to the beach and the perilous proximity of water for the
occasion. But let it pass!
Ten years later the Law began to marshal its armies seriously for
the destruction of an obsolete world. The Huns crossed the Volga,
and fell upon the Ostrogoths, who had had a Middle-European
empire up through Austria and Germany. The Ostrogoths, somewhat
flattened out, joined with the Huns to fall upon the Visigoths;
who theeupon poured down through the Balkans to fall upon
the Romans; and defeated and killed the emperor Valens at
Adianople in 378. Theodosius, from 379 to 395, held precariously
together a frontier cracking and bulging all along the line as it
had never cracked and bulged before. When he died, the empire
finally split: of his two sons, Arcadius taking the East,
Honorius the West.
In Honorius' half, from now on it is a record of ruin hurrying on
the footsteps of ruin. Ended the quiet _otium cum dignitate_ of
the great country gentlemen; the sterile culture, the somewhat
puritan morality, the placid refined life we read of in Ausonius.
You shall see now the well-ordered estate laid waste;--the
peasants killed or hiding in the woods;--the mansion smashed, and
its elegant furniture;--the squire, the kindly-severe religious
matron his mother the young wife,--gracious lady of the house,--
and the bonny children:--they are hacked corpses lying at random
in the wrecked salons, or in the trampled garden where my lady's
flowers now grow wild. The land went out of cultivation; the
populace, what remained of it, crowded into the walled cities,
there to frowse in mental and physical stuffiness until the
Middle Ages were passed,--or else took to the wilds under any
vigorous mind, and became bandits. The open country was all
trodden down by wave after wave of marauding, murdering,
beer-swilling, turbulent giants from the north,--or by the still
more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had
driven long since out of Asia. They poured down into Greece;
they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy;
host after host of them;--civilization was a pathetic sand-castle
washed over and over by ruining seas. Rome, indeed, could still
command generals at times: Stilicho, Aetius, and afterwards
Belisarius and Narses; but they were all pitiful Partingtons
swishing their mops round against a most ugly Atlantic. In 410
Rome itself was sacked by Alaric; in the same year Britain,
and then Brittany, rose and threw off the Roman yoke. In the
four-fifties came the keen point of the Hunnish terror, putting
the fear of death on even the worst of the barbarians that had
wrecked the Roman world. In 476, the pretense of a Western
Empire was abandoned.--So now to follow the great march of the
cycles eastward; with this warning: that next week we shall
glance at a little backwash in the other direction, and see
the disembodied soul of this now closed phase of human culture
'go west.'
The split with Rome was altogether of value to the Eastern empire
of Constantinople. That empire lasted, from the time of Arcadius
to that of Constantine IX and Mohammed the Conqueror, "one
thousand and fifty-eight years," says Gibbon, "in a state of
premature and perpetual decay."--A statement which, taken as an
example of Gibbonese, is altogether delightful; but for the true
purposes of history it may need a little modification. The
position of this Byzantine Empire was a curious one: European in
origin, mainly West-Asian in location. Its situation permitted
it to last on so long into the West-Asian manvantara; its origin
doomed that long survival to be, for the most part, devoid of the
best characteristics of life. Yet during most of the European
pralaya it was far and away the richest and most civilized power
in Christendom; and, except during the reigns of extraordinary
kings in the west, like Charlemagne, the strongest too. It
specialized in military science; and the well-trained Byzantine
soldiers and highly scientific generals had little to fear, as a
rule, from the rude energies and huge stature of the northern and
western hordes. But culture remained there in the sishta state,
and could do nothing until it was transplanted. There were
cycles: weaknesses and recoveries; on the whole its long
life-period matters very little to history; it only became of
great importance when it died.
The reason why it did not succumb when Rome did was that the
tides of life in the whole empire had long been flowing eastward,
and were now gathered there almost wholly: there was much more
activity in the east; there were much bigger cities, and a much
greater population. So that part was harder to penetrate and
conquer: there was more resistance there. The barbarian deluge
flowed down where it might flow down most easily: following, as
deluges and everything else gifted with common sense always do,
the lines of least resistance. The way through Gaul and Spain
was quite open; the way into Italy nearly so;--but the way into
Asia was blocked by Constantinople. That city is naturally one
of the strongest in the world, in a military sense; and, you
would say, inevitably the capital of an empire. If Dardanus had
had a little more intuition, and had founded his Troy on the
Golden Horn instead of on the Dardanelles, Anax andron Agamemnon
and his chalcho-chitoned Achaeans, I dare say, would have gone
home to Greece much sadder and wiser men;--or more probably, not
at all. But Troy is near enough to that inevitable site to argue
the strong probability of its having been, perhaps long before
Priam's time, a great seat of empire, trade, and culture. If one
dug in Constantinople itself, I dare say one should find the
remains of cities that had been mighty. Events of the last seven
years have shown how difficult it is to attack, how easy to
defend. Since its foundation by Constantine it has been besieged
nine times, and only twice taken by foreign enemies. When the
Turks took it, they had already overflowed all the surrounding
territories; and they were the strongest military power in the
world, and the Byzantines were among the weakest.--So it stood
there in the fifth century to hold back the hordes of northern
Europe from the rich lands of Asia Minor and Syria: a strength
much beyond the power of those barbarians to tackle; while all
Europe west-ward was being trampled to death.
Further, the peace imposed on Jovian by Shah Sapor in 364 lasted,
with one small intermission of war, and that successful for the
Romans, for a hundred and thirty-eight years; during which time,
also, the powers that were at Constantinople ruled mainly wisely
and with economy. They were generally not the reigning emperor,
but his wife or mother or aunt, or someone like that.
So then, in the year 400 we find the world in this condition:--
western Europe going
"With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition;"
--the Eastern Empire weakish, but fairly quiet and advancing
towards prosperity: in pralaya certainly, and so to remain for
thirteen decades (395 to 527) from the death of Theodosius to
the accession of Justinian;--Persia, under an energetic and
intelligent Yazdegird II (399 to 420), a strongish military
power: Yazdegird held his barons well in hand, and even made a
brave effort to broaden the religious outlook; he tried to stop
the persecution of the Christians, and allowed them to organize a
national church, the Nestorian;--India, still and until 456, at
the height of her glory:--there is a continual rise as you go
eastward, with the climax in India. The next step is China; to
which now after all these centuries we return.
As we have seen, since the Hans fell there had been a confusion
of ephemeral kingdoms jostling and hustling each other across the
stage of time: there had been too much history altogether; too
many wars, heroes, adventures and wild escapades. Life was too
riotous and whirling an affair: China seemed to have sunk into a
mere Europe, a kind of Kilkenny Christendom. Not that culture
ever became extinct; indeed, through this whole period the
super-refinement that had grown up under the Hans persisted side
by side with the barbarian excursions and alarms. It was not, as
in Rome, a case of major pralaya: men did not resort to
savagery; literary production seems never to have run quite so
sterile. But things were in the melting-pot, centripetalism had
gone; little dynasties flared up quickly and expired; and
amidst all those lightning changes there was no time for
progress, or deep concerns, or for the Soul of the Black-haired
People to be stirring to manifestation.
You will, I dare say, have learned to look for a rise in China at
any falling-time in Europe; so would consider something should
have happened there in 365, the year of the great earthquake and
tidal wave, when the fifty thousand Alexandrians were drowned,--
the second year after Julian's death. Well; in that 365 Tao
Yuan-ming was born, who later became known as Tao Chien: in
Japanese, Toemmei. There had been poets all along. During the
last thirty years of the Hans, 190 to 220, there had been the
Seven Scholars of the Chien An Period: among them that jolly
K'ung Jung who, because he was a descendant of Confucius, claimed
blood-relationship with the descendants of Laotse. Ts'ao Ts'ao
himself wrote songs: he was that bold bad adventurer and highly
successful general who turned out the last Han and set his own
son on the throne as Wei Wenti; who also was a poet, as was his
brother Ts'ao Chih. Of Ts'ao Chih a contemporary said: "If all
the talent in the world were divided into ten parts, Ts'ao Chih
would have eight of them."--"Who, then, would have the other
two?" asked somebody.--"I should have one of them myself,"
was the answer, "and the rest of the world the other." Ts'ao
Chih enriched the language with one of its most familiar and
delicious quotations:
"The Superior Man takes precautions,
And avoids giving rise to suspicion:
He does not pull up his shoes in a melon patch,
Nor adjust his cap while passing through an orchard of plums."
It is indicative of his own position at court.
Later in the third century came the Seven Sages of the Bamboo
Grove, a "club of rather bibulous singers"; and there are names
of many scholars besides to say that the time was not too barren;
yet on the whole it was, I suppose, a period of slump in literary
production, as it was of confusion in politics. But when Julian
had been dead two years in the west of the world, Tao Yuan-ming
was born in the east: I do not say the creator of a new time;
but certainly a sign of its coming.
A large amount of his poetry survives; and it is filled with a
new spirit. Like Wordsworth, he went back to nature. Ambition,
of course, had been a great mark of the age: men raced after
office, and scrambled for the spoils. Tao Yuan-ming was called
to fill an official post, and went up reluctantly to the
capital; but very soon escaped back to the things he loved:
the mountains, and his chrysanthemum garden, and the country,
where he could hear the dogs barking in the far farms, and see
the chickens scratching in the lanes. We do not find in him,
perhaps, the flood of Natural Magic that came with the poets of
the Great Age three or four centuries later; but we do find a
heart-felt worship of the great unspoiled world under the sky:
he is there to say that China was returning to her real strength,
which is Nature-worship. While he pottered about in the front
garden, he tells us, his wife pottered about in the back garden;
they made an idol of their chrysanthemums, and started or
nourished the cult which has flourished so strongly since in
Japan. He was I suppose the greatest poet since Ch'u Yuan, who
came some seven centuries earlier; it is from him we get the story
some of you may know under the title _Red Peach-Blossom Inlet._
For about half a cycle (sixty-five years) barbarian dynasties had
been holding the north; with the result that the center of
gravity of the real Black-haired People had been shifted from the
puritan landscapes of North China to the pagan landscapes of the
Yangtse Valley,--a region of mountains and forests and lakes and
wild waters: Tsu the land of Laotse and Ch'u Yuan, and I think
Chwangtse too. It is here are the Hills of T'ang, the metropolis
of Natural Magic perhaps for all the world; and the mind and
imagination of China, centered here, were receiving a new
polarization; something richer and more luminous was being born.
Contemporary with Tao Yuan-ming was Ku Kaichih, the first supreme
name in painting. Fenollosa speaks of a "White Lotus Club,"
organized by Hui Yuan, A Buddhist priest, and consisteing of
"mountain-climbers and thinkers,"--Tao Yuan-ming being a member.
One would like to get at the heart of what happened in that last
quarter of the fourth century. This is what we see on our side:
Canton and Yangtse ports were being visited more and more by
Hindu, Arab, and Sassanian traders, bringing in new things and
ideas: the Hindus, especially, an impetus towards culture from
the splendor of the gupta period, then at its topmost height.
Also ther were new inventions, such as that of paper, which was
an incentive to literary output. The Chinese mind, in the south
especially, was quickened on the one hand by the magical wind
from the mountains, and on the other by a wind from the great
world over-seas: the necessary nationalistic and international
quickenings. But deeper quickenings also were taking place.
India was fast becoming, under the Gupta reaction towards
Brahmanism, no place for the Buddhists; and the Hindu ships that
put in at Canton and the Yangtse were bringing much to China
besides merchandise. A great propaganda of Buddhism was in
process; by Indian monks, and now too for the first time by
native Chinese. We read of a missionary who went about preaching
to an indifferent world; then in sorrow took to the mountains,
and proclaimed the Good Law to the mountain boulders; and they
"nodded as it were their heads in assent." * But there is
evidence that China was fast becoming the spiritual metropolis of
the world: Buddhism was drifting in, and mingling among the
mountains with mountain Taoism, that dear and hoary magic of the
Eastern World; and the result was an atmosphere in which
astounding events were to happen.
------
* Giles _Dictionary of Chinese Biography;_ from which work,
and from the same author's _Chinese Literature,_ the facts,
quotations, and enecdotes given in this lecture are taken.
------
In 401, Kumarajiva, the seventeenth Buddhist Patriarch, came from
India and took up his residence at the court at Changan, where a
Tibetan family was then reigning over the north; and this, when
you think that these Patriarchs were (as I believe) no popes
elected by a conclave of churchly dignities, but the Spiritual
Successors of the Buddha, each appointed by his predecessor, an
event momentous enough in itself. Still, Kumarajiva came (it
would appear) but to prepare the way for the great change that
was impending; left behind him a successor in India, or one to
fill the office at his death; in India the headquarters of
Buddhism remained. Two years before his arrival, Fa Hian, a
Chinese Buddhist monk, had set out on foot from Central China,
walked across the Gobi Desert, and down through Afghanistan into
India, a pilgrim to the sacred places: a sane and saintly man,
from whom we learn most of what we know about the Gupta regime.
He returned by sea in 412, landing at Kiao-chao in Santung,--a
place latterly so sadly famous,--bringing with him spiritual and
quickening influences. In the south, meanwhile, another Indian
teacher, Buddhabhadra, had been at work. Before very long, a
Renaissance was in full flow.
The political events that led up to it were these: between 304
and 319 a Tatar family by the name of Liu, from Manchuria,
succeeded in driving the House of Tsin out of northern China:
these Tsins were that effete, ladylike, chess-playing, fan-waving,
high-etiquettish dynasty I have spoken of before. In 319
they took up their abode in Nanking, and there ruled corruptly
for a hundred years, leaving the north to the barbarians. In
420, a soldier in their employ, Liu-yu by name, deposed the
last Tsin emperor, and set himself on the throne as the first
sovereign of the Liu-song Dynasty. He was a capable man, and
introduced some vigor and betterment into affairs; he found
conditions ripe for a renaissance of civilization; and in his
reign we may say that the renaissance took shape. 420 is, so far
as a date can be given for what was really a long process, a
convenient date to give. We have seen Persia rise in the
two-twenties; India in the three-twenties; we shall not go far
wrong in giving the four-twenties to China. That decade, too,
marks a fresh step downward in the career of Rome: Honorius died
in 423. Fenollosa is definite upon 420 for the inception of
the great age of the Southern Renaissance of art. That age
culminated in the first half of the next century, and ended with
the passing of the Liang dynasty in the five-fifties: a matter
of thirteen decades again; which, I take it, is further reason
for considering our four-twenties epochal.
I fancy we shall grow used to finding the twenties in each
century momentous, and marked by great political and spiritual
re-shapings of the world. We shall find this in our historical
studies; in the next few years we may find it in current events
too; and what we shall see may remind us that in these decades
the sun generally rises in some new part of the world,--the sun
of culture and power. Naturally enough:--in the last quarter of
each century you have the influx of spiritual forces; which
influx, it is to be supposed, can hardly fail to produce changes
inwardly,--a new temperature, new conditions in the world of
mind. So there must be readjustments; there is a disharmony
between outer and inner things, between the world of causes and
the world of effects; and one commonly finds the first two
decades of the new century filled with the noise and confusion of
readjustment. New wine has been poured into the old skin-bottles
of the world; and ferments, explodes, rends them. Then, in
the twenties or so, things calm down, and it is seen that
readjustments have been made. By 'readjustments,' one does not
mean the treaties of statesmen and the like; brain-mind affairs
for the most part, that amount to nothing. One means a new
direction taken by the tide of incarnating souls. As if the
readjusting cataclysms had blocked their old channels of these,
and opened new ones...
A new _arpeggio_ chord, but rather a faint and broken one, sounds
in the five-twenties, or begins then. At Constantinople the
thirteen pralayic and recuperative decades since the death of
Theodosius and the split with the West have ended. Now an
emperor dies; and it becomes a question which of several likely
candidates can lay out his money to best advantage and secure the
succession. There is an official of some sort at court there,
one Justin, a Balkan peasant by birth; you will do well to bribe
him heavily, for he, probably, can manage the affair for you,--
One of the candidates does so: hands him a large sum, on the
assurance from Justin that he shall be the man. But the old
fellow has peasant shrewdness, shall we say; and the money is
_used_ most thriftily; but not as its donor intended. Justin
duly ascends the throne.
Nothing very promising in that, to insure manvantaric times
coming in. But the old man remembers a nephew of his back there
in Bulgaria or Jugoslavia or where it may have been; and sends
for him, and very wisely lets him do most of the running of
things. In 527, this nephew succeeds to the purple on his
uncle's death: as Justinian; and, for Europe and the Byzantine
empire, and for the times,--that is to say, 'considering,'
--manvantaric doings do begin. A man of hugely sanguine
temperament, inquisitive and enterprising and impulsive, he had
the fortune to be served by some great men: Tibonian, who drew
up the Pandects; Belisarius and Narses, who thrashed the
barbarians; the architect who built Saint Sophia. Against these
assets to his reign of thirty-eight years you must set the
factions of the circus, at Constantinople itself; and bloody
battle over the merits of the Greens, the Blues, the Whites, etc.
But certainly Justinian contrived to strike into history as no
other Byzantine emperor did; with his law code, and with his
church. So now enough of him.
Four years after the accession of this greatest of the Byzantines,
the greatest of the Sassanids came to the throne in Persia:
Chosroes Anushirwan: a wise and victorious reign until 579.
There was an 'Endless Peace' sworn with Rome in 533; and
not peace merely, but friendship and alliance; it was to last
for all time, and did last for seven years. The Chosroes,
jealous of the western victories of Justinian, listened to the
pleadings of the Ostrogoths, and declared war; peace came again
in 563, on the basis of a yearly tribute from Rome to Persia,--
but with compensations, such as toleration for the Christians in
Persia.--there were reforms in the army and in taxation;
improvements in irrigation; encouragement of learning;
revision of the laws; some little outburst in literature and
culture generally: the culmination, in all but extent of
territory, of the whole Sassanian period.--We may throw in one
item from the future,--that is from 620: in that year Sassanian
Persia had flowed out to the full limits of the empire of Darius
Hystaspes: held Egypt, Syria, all West Asia to within a mile of
the walls of Constantinople. Within three years the fall had
begun; within twenty it was completed.
As to India, this (520) is among the hidden times: the
Ephthalites had overturned the Guptas; they were Huns of the
Hunniest; they had over-turned the Guptas and all else (in the
north). Tales come down of the fiendishness of their kings: of
a man that for his sport would have elephants hurled from the top
of precipices; it may be that the Indian manvantara closed with
the Gupta fall;--though we get the finical dandiacal 'great'
reign of Harsha in 700. The light certainly was dying from India
now: the Crest-Wave had been there, in all its splendor; they
had made good use of it in all but the spiritual sense, and very
bad use of it in that. The year in which you may say (as nearly
as history will tell you) the light died there, was precisely
this year of 520; and that effected a change in the spiritual
center of gravity of the world of the most momentous kind: so
much so that we may think of a new order of ages as beginning
then; and looking at world-history as a whole, we may say, Here
endeth the lesson that began where we took things up in the time
of the Six Great Teachers; and here beginneth a new chapter,--
with which these lectures will hardly concern themselves. But we
may glance at the event that opens it.
It made very little stir at the time. It was merely the landing
at Canton of an old man from India: a 'Blue-eyed Brahmin,'--but
a Buddhist, and the head of all the Buddhists at that;--and his
preaching there until Liang Wuti, the emperor at Nanking, had
heard of his fame, and invited him to court; and his retirement
thence to a cave-temple in the north. Beyond this there is very
little to tell you. He was a king's son from southern India;
his name Bodhidharma; and one would like to know what the records
of the Great Lodge have to say about him. For he stands in
history as the founder of the Dhyana or Zen School, another form
of the name of which is _Dzyan;_ when one reads _The Voice of
the Silence,_ or the Stanzas in _The Secret Doctrine,_ one might
remember this. Outwardly,--I think this is true,--he refused to
cut into history at all: was a grand Esoteric figure, whose
campaigns, (super-Napoleonic, more mirific than those of Genghiz
Khan), were all fought on spiritual planes whence no noise of the
cannonading could be heard in this outer world. He was the
twenty-eighth Successor of the Buddha; of a line of Masters that
included such great names as those of Vasubandhu, and of
Nagarjuna, founder of the Mahayana,--"one of the four suns that
illumine the world." We have seen that he had been preceded:
Kumarajiva had come to China a century before; but experimentally,
leaving the Center of the Movement in India; there must have
been thousands of disciples in the Middle Kingdom in 520 when
Bodhidharma came, bringing with him the Buddha's alms-bowl,
the symbol of the Patriarchate, to make in China his headquarters
and that of his successors. For a thousand years the Buddha's
Movement had been in India a living link with the Lodge;--in
that land of esoteric history which hides from us what it
means to be so linked and connected. Now India had failed.
The Guptas had reigned in great splendor; but they had flourished
upon a reaction away from the Light. I suppose it means this:
that the burden of fighting upward had been too much for this
people, now wearied with old age; they had dropped the burden
and the struggle, and found in the relief a phantom of renewed
youth to last them a little day.
Whatever may be true of Buddhism now,--however the long cycles
may have wasted its vitality, and to whatever depths it may have
fallen,--we should remember this: that certainly for about
fourteen centuries there was contained within it a living link
with the Masters' Lodge. It was not like any other existing
religion (so far as one knows): like none of the dominant
religions of today, at any rate. At its head, apparently,
through all those long centuries, was a line of Adepts, men of
spiritual genius, members of the Lodge. So what Bodhidharma's
coming meant, I take it, was that in China that was established
actually which in the West first Pythagoras, and then Plotinus
had tried to establish, and tried in vain. It was, as you may
say, the transplanting of the Tree of Life from a soil that had
grown outworn to one in which it could flourish; and the result
was, it appears to me, a new impulse given to the ages, to
all history.
Hitherto, in the main, we have seen (except in China) a downward
trend of cycles; from this point an upward trend began. We have
been dealing, latterly, with dullish centuries, and history in a
febrile and flickering mood;--but give this wonderful change time
to take effect, and the centuries begin to flame up, and history
to become a roaring conflagration. We might here spy out into
that time, which will lie beyond the scope of these lecture; and
see the glory of the T'angs begin in China in 618; Corea's one
historic age of splendor, in art and also in military prowess, at
its highest point about 680; the era of Shotoku Daishi, saint,
sage, prince and protagonist of civilization in Japan, from about
580 to 620; the rise of Siam, and of Tibet, into strength and
culture and Buddhism, in the first half of the seventh century;--
then, looking westward, the wonderful career of Mohammed in
Arabia, who gave the impetus that rescued civilization first
in West Asia and then, when in the thirteenth century a new
European manvantara was ready to open, in Europe also: rescued
civilization first in West Asia and then, when in the thirteenth
century a new European manvantara was ready to open, in Europe
also; an impetus which worked on the intellectual-cultural plane
until it had brought things to the point where H. P. Blavatsky
might come to give things a huge twist towards the spiritual,--
and where Katherine Tingley might accomplish that which all the
ages had been expecting, and the whole creation groaning and
travailing to see. Oh, on brain-mind lines you can trace no
connexion; but then the plane of causes lies deeper than the
brain-mind. We may understand now, I think, what place the
Buddha holds in human history: how it was not for nothing that he
was _the Buddha,_ the central Avatar, the topmost and Master
Figure of humanity for these last twenty-five hundred years, with
what other sublime men appeared as it were subordinate to him,
and the guides of tributary streams: Laotse and Confucius
preparing the way for him in China; Pythagoras carrying his
doctrine into the West.... Well; here is scope for thought; and
for much thought that may be true and deep, and illuminative of
future ages; and _yet not convenient to write down at this time._
But to Bodhidharma again.
H. P. Blavatsky affirmed that Buddhism had an esoteric as well as
an exoteric side: an affirmation that was of course disputed.
But here is this from a Chinese writer quoted by Edkins:
"Tathagata taught great truths and the causes of things. He
became the instructor of men and devas; saved multitudes, and
spoke the contents of more than five hundred books. Hence arose
the Kiaumen or Exoteric branch of the system, and it was believed
to hold the tradition of the words of the Buddha. Bodhidharma
brought from the Western Heaven the seal of truth, and opened the
Fountain of Dhyana in the east. He pointed directly to Buddha's
heart and nature, swept away the parasitic growth of book
instruction, and thus established the Esoteric branch of the
system containing the doctrine of the heart, the tradition of the
Heart of Buddha. Yet the two branches, while presenting of
necessity a different aspect, form but one whole."
Now that Doctrine of the Heart had always been in existence; it
does not mean that Bodhidharma invented anything. But in a line
of Teachers, each will have its own methods, and, if there is
progress, there will be new and deeper revelations. The Buddha
gave out so much, as the time permitted him; Nagarjuna, founding
the Mahayana, so much further; Bodhidharma, now that with the
move to China a new lease of life had come, gave out, or rather
taught to his disciples, so much more again of the doctrine that
in its fulness is and always has been the doctrine of the Lodge.
Lian Wuti, the emperor at Nanking, had been at the end of the
fifth century a general in the service of the last scion of a
dying dynasty there, and a devout Taoist; in 502 he became the
first of a new dynasty, the Liang; and presently, a devout
Buddhist. Chinese historians love him not; Fenollosa describes
him as too generous-minded and other-worldly for success. Yet he
held the throne for nearly fifty years; a time in which art was
culminating and affairs advancing through splendor and unwisdom
to a downfall. Twice he took the yellow robe and alms-bowl, and
went forth through his domains, emperor still, but mendicant
missionary preaching the Good Law.--The Truth? the Inner
doctrine?--I learn most about this poor Lian Wuti from the record
of an interview held once between him and the 'Blue-eyed Brahmin'
Master of Dzyan. Lian Wuti invited Bodhidharma to court, and
Bodhidharma came. Said the emperor:
--"Since my accession I have been continually building temples,
transcribing books, and admitting new monks to take the vows.
How much merit may I be supposed to have accumulated?"
--"None," said Bodhidharma.
--"And why none?"
--"All this," said the Master, "is but the insignificant effect
of an imperfect cause not complete in itself; it is but the
shadow that follows the substance, and without real existence."
--"Then what," asked Wuti, "is real merit?"
--"It consists in purity and enlightenment, depth and completeness;
in being wrapped in thought while surrounded by vacancy and
stillness. Merit such as this cannot be won by worldly means."
Wuti, I suppose, found this kind of conversation difficult, and
changed the subject,--with an exotericist's question. Said he:
--"Which is the most important of the holy doctrines?"
--"Where all is emptiness," said Bodhidharma, "nothing can be
called holy."
A neat compliment, thinks good externalist Wuti, may improve
things.--"If nothing can be called holy," says he, "who is
it then that replies to me?"--holiness being a well-known
characteristic of Bodhidharma himself. Who answered merely:
--"I do not know"; and went his ways. The final comment on the
interview is given by a Japanese writer thus: "Can an elephant
associate with rabbits?"
For the rest, he spent the remaining years of his life in a
cave-temple near Honanfu; and died after appointing a Chinaman
his successor. Besides this small stock of facts there is a
sort of legend; as for example:
After leaving the court of Lian, he crossed the Yangtse on a
reed,--a theme in sacred art for thousands ever since,--and
because of this miraculous crossing, is worshiped still by
Yangtse boatman as their patron saint,--on the 28th of February
in each year.--Once, as he sat in meditation, sleep overcame him;
and on waking, that it might never happen again, he cut off his
eyelids. But they fell on the earth, took root and sprouted;
and the plant that grew from them was the first of all tea
plants,--the symbol (and cause!) of eternal wakefulness. He is
represented in the pictures as being footless; in his missionary
travels, it is said, he wore away his feet. Thus where there is
no known life-story, but all hidden away beneath a veil of
esotericism and a Master's seclusion, myths have grown, and a
story has been made.--He sat there in his cave silent through the
years, they say; his face to the wall. Chih Kuang came to him,
asking to be taught the doctrine; and for seven days stood in
the snow at the cave-mouth, pleading and unnoticed. Then, to
show that he was in earnest, he drew his sword and sliced off his
left arm; and the Master called him in, and taught him.--Legend
again, no doubt.
I imagine we can only judge of the man and of his astounding
greatness by the greatness of the ages he illumined. It was as
if he gave, in East Asia, the signal for nation after nation to
leap into brilliant being. As for China, she became something
new. The Age of Han had been golden, strong, manly, splendid.
But Han was like other empires here and there about the world.
Henceforth during her cycle China was to be as a light-giving
body, a luminary wondrous in the firmament with a shining array
of satellite kingdoms circling about her. Her own Teachers of a
thousand years before had prepared the way for it: Confucius
when he gave her stability; Laotse when he dropped the Blue
Pearl into her fields. That Pearl had shone, heaven knows. Now
Ta-mo, this Bodhidharma, breathed on it; and it glowed, and
flame shot up from it, and grew, and foamed up beautiful, till it
was a steady fountain of wonder-fire spraying the far stars.
Heretofore we have had a background of Taoist wizardry: in its
highest aspects, Natural Magic,--the Keatsism of the waters and
the wild, the wood, the field, and the mountain; henceforth
there was to be a sacred something shining through and inmingled
with this: the urge of the Divine Soul, the holy purposes of
evolution. We may say this in Art, to take that one field alone,
the most perfect, the fullest, the divinest, expression of
Natural Magic
"whereof this world holds record"
was to come in the school of the Successors of Bodhidharma,
directly the result of his 'Doctrine of the Heart.'
His school remained esoteric; but it was established, not among
the secret mountains, nor in far unvisited regions; but there in
the midst of imperial China: an extension of the Lodge, you may
say, visible among men. Bodhidharma--are you to call him a
_Messenger_ at all? He hardly came out into the world. It was
known he was there; near by was the northern capital;--he taught
disciples, when they had the strength to insist on it. Yet he
dwelt aloof too, and wrapped about in the seclusion Masters must
have, to carry on their spiritual work. One must suppose that
Messengers of the Lodge had been very busy in China between 375
and 400, in the days of Tao Yuang-ming and Ku Kai-chih; that
they had been very busy again in the last quarter of the fifth
century; for it seems as if somehow or other there was such an
atmosphere in China in the first half of the sixth century,--when
ordinarily speaking the Doors of the Spiritual World would be
shut,--that the Lodge was enabled partly to throw off its
seclusion, and it was possible for at least one of its Members to
take up his abode there, and to be known to the world as doing
so.
A Messenger was sent out into the Chinese world from the School
of Bodhidarma in 575: Chih-i, the founder of the Tientai School
which was the spiritual force underlying the glory of the
T'ang age; but he was a Messenger from the Dzyan School of
Bodhidharma, not its Head. As far as I have been able to
gather the threads of it, the line of those Heads, the Eastern
Patriarchs, Bodhidharma's successors, was as follows: He died in
or about 536, having appointed Chi Kuang to succeed him. Chi
Kuang appointed Hui Ssu, called the "Chief of the Chunglung
School of the followers of Bodhidharma." Hui Ssu died in 576,
having sent out Chih-i into the world the year before, and having
appointed Seng T'san to succeed him as head of Dzyan. Seng T'san
died in 606; Tao Hsin, his successor, in 651; Hung Jen, his, in
675. Hung Jen, it appears, left two successors: Lu Hui-neng in
the south, and Shen Hsiu in the north. It was the last quarter
of the century: I imagine Lu Hui-neng was the Messenger sent out
into the world; he spent the rest of his life teaching in the
neighborhood of Canton; I imagine Shen Hsiu remained the Head of
the Esoteric School. After that the line disappears; but the
school attained its greatest influence in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries in China, and later still in Japan.--All
these were men living not quite in the world: it was known that
they were there, and where they might be found. After Shen Hsiu,
the last Northern Chinese Patriarch, the line probably withdrew
to Tibet, which had lately come into relations with China, and
where civilization had been established through the efforts of
T'ang Taitsong. And now I will close this lecture with a saying
of Shen Hsiu's which, in this modified form, is very familiar to
all of you:
"Mind is like a mirror: it gathers dust while it reflects. It
needs the gentle breezes of soul wisdom to brush away the dust of
our illusions."