Four hours a day he spun the coarse khaddar, hoping by his example to persuade his countrymen to use this simple homespun instead of buying the product of those British looms that had ruined the textile industry of India. His only possessions were three rough cloths—two as his wardrobe and one as his bed. Once a rich lawyer, he had given all his property to the poor, and his wife, after some matronly hesitation, had followed his example. He slept on the bare floor, or on the earth. He lived on nuts, plantains, lemons, oranges, dates, rice, and goat’s milk;52 often for months together he took nothing but milk and fruit; once in his life he tasted meat; occasionally he ate nothing for weeks. “I can as well do without my eyes as without fasts. What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are for the inner.”53 As the blood thins, he felt, the mind clears, irrelevancies fall away, and fundamental things—sometimes the very Soul of the World—rise out of Maya like Everest through the clouds.

At the same time that he fasted to see divinity he kept one toe on the earth, and advised his followers to take an enema daily when they fasted, lest they be poisoned with the acid products of the body’s self-consumption just as they might be finding God.54 When the Moslems and the Hindus killed one another in theological enthusiasm, and paid no heed to his pleas for peace, he went without food for three weeks to move them. He became so weak and frail through fasts and privations that when he addressed the great audiences that gathered to hear him, he spoke to them from an uplifted chair. He carried his asceticism into the field of sex, and wished, like Tolstoi, to limit all physical intercourse to deliberate reproduction. He too, in his youth, had indulged the flesh too much, and the news of his father’s death had surprised him in the arms of love. Now he returned with passionate remorse to the Brahmacharia that had been preached to him in his boyhood—absolute abstention from all sensual desire. He persuaded his wife to live with him only as sister with brother; and “from that time,” he tells us, “all dissension ceased.”55 When he realized that India’s basic need was birth-control, he adopted not the methods of the West, but the theories of Malthus and Tolstoi.


Is it right for us, who know the situation, to bring forth children? We only multiply slaves and weaklings if we continue the process of procreation whilst we feel and remain helpless. . . . Not till India has become a free nation . . . have we the right to bring forth progeny. . . . I have not a shadow of doubt that married people, if they wish well to the country and want to see India become a nation of strong and handsome, well-formed men and women, would practice self-restraint and cease to procreate for the time being.56

Added to these elements in his character were qualities strangely like those that, we are told, distinguished the Founder of Christianity. He did not mouth the name of Christ, but he acted as if he accepted every word of the Sermon on the Mount. Not since St. Francis of Assisi has any life known to history been so marked by gentleness, disinterestedness, simplicity, and forgiveness of enemies. It was to the credit of his opponents, but still more to his own, that his undiscourageable courtesy to them won a fine courtesy from them in return; the Government sent him to jail with profuse apologies. He never showed rancor or resentment. Thrice he was attacked by mobs, and beaten almost to death; not once did he retaliate; and when one of his assailants was arrested he refused to enter a charge. Shortly after the worst of all riots between Moslems and Hindus, when the Moplah Mohammedans butchered hundreds of unarmed Hindus and offered their prepuces as a covenant to Allah, these same Moslems were stricken with famine; Gandhi collected funds for them from all India, and, with no regard for the best precedents, forwarded every anna, without deduction for “overhead,” to the starving enemy.57

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born in 1869. His family belonged to the Vaisya caste, and to the Jain sect, and practised the ahimsa principle of never injuring a living thing. His father was a capable administrator but an heretical financier; he lost place after place through honesty, gave nearly all his wealth to charity, and left the rest to his family.58 While still a boy Mohandas became an atheist, being displeased with the adulterous gallantries of certain Hindu gods; and to make clear his everlasting scorn for religion, he ate meat. The meat disagreed with him, and he returned to religion.

At eight he was engaged, and at twelve he was married, to Kasturbai, who remained loyal to him through all his adventures, riches, poverty, imprisonments, and Brahmacharia. At eighteen he passed examinations for the university, and went to London to study law. In his first year there he read eighty books on Christianity. The Sermon on the Mount “went straight to my heart on the first reading.”59 He took the counsel to return good for evil, and to love even one’s enemies, as the highest expression of all human idealism; and he resolved rather to fail with these than to succeed without them.

Returning to India in 1891, he practised law for a time in Bombay, refusing to prosecute for debt, and always reserving the right to abandon a case which he had come to think unjust. One case led him to South Africa; there he found his fellow-Hindus so maltreated that he forgot to return to India, but gave himself completely, without remuneration, to the cause of removing the disabilities of his countrymen in Africa. For twenty years he fought this issue out until the Government yielded. Only then did he return home.

Traveling through India he realized for the first time the complete destitution of his people. He was horrified by the skeletons whom he saw toiling in the fields, and the lowly Outcastes who did the menial work of the towns. It seemed to him that the discriminations against his countrymen abroad were merely one consequence of their poverty and subjection at home. Nevertheless he supported England loyally in the War; he even advocated the enlistment of Hindus who did not accept the principle of non-violence. He did not, at that time, agree with those who called for independence; he believed that British misgovernment in India was an exception, and that British government in general was good; that British government in India was bad just because it violated all the principles of British government at home; and that if the English people could be made to understand the case of the Hindus, it would soon accept them in full brotherhood into a commonwealth of free dominions.60 He trusted that when the War was over, and Britain counted India’s sacrifice for the Empire in men and wealth, it would no longer hesitate to give her liberty.

But at the close of the War the agitation for Home Rule was met by the Rowland Acts, which put an end to freedom of speech and press; by the establishment of the impotent legislature of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms; and finally by the slaughter at Amritsar. Gandhi was shocked into decisive action. He returned to the Viceroy the decorations which he had received at various times from British governments; and he issued to India a call for active civil disobedience against the Government of India. The people responded not with peaceful resistance, as he had asked, but with bloodshed and violence; in Bombay, for example, they killed fifty-three unsympathetic Parsees.61 Gandhi, vowed to ahimsa, sent out a second message, in which he called upon the people to postpone the campaign of civil disobedience, on the ground that it was degenerating into mob rule. Seldom in history had a man shown more courage in acting on principle, scorning expediency and popularity. The nation was astonished at his decision; it had supposed itself near to success, and it did not agree with Gandhi that the means might be as important as the end. The reputation of the Mahatma sank to the lowest ebb.

It was just at this point (in March, 1922) that the Government determined upon his arrest. He made no resistance, declined to engage a lawyer, and offered no defense. When the Prosecutor charged him with being responsible, through his publications, for the violence that had marked the outbreak of 1921, Gandhi replied in terms that lifted him at once to nobility.


I wish to endorse all the blame that the learned Advocate-General has thrown on my shoulder in connection with the incidents in Bombay, Madras, and Chauri Chaura. Thinking over these deeply, and sleeping over them night after night, it is impossible for me to dissociate myself from these diabolical crimes. . . . The learned Advocate-General is quite right when he says that as a man of responsibility, a man having received a fair share of education, . . . I should have known the consequences of every one of my acts. I knew that I was playing with fire, I ran the risk, and if I was set free I would still do the same. I felt this morning that I would have failed in my duty if I did not say what I say here just now.

I wanted to avoid violence. I want to avoid violence. Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered had done an irreparable harm to my country, or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it, and I am therefore here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen.62

The Judge expressed his profound regret that he had to send to jail one whom millions of his countrymen considered “a great patriot and a great leader”; he admitted that even those who differed from Gandhi looked upon him “as a man of high ideals and of noble and even saintly life.”63 He sentenced him to prison for six years.

Gandhi was put under solitary confinement, but he did not complain. “I do not see any of the other prisoners,” he wrote, “though I really do not see how my society could do them any harm.” But “I feel happy. My nature likes loneliness. I love quietness. And now I have opportunity to engage in studies that I had to neglect in the outside world.”64 He instructed himself sedulously in the writings of Bacon, Carlyle, Ruskin, Emerson, Thoreau and Tolstoi, and solaced long hours with Ben Jonson and Walter Scott. He read and re-read the Bhagavad-Gita. He studied Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu so that he might be able not only to write for scholars but to speak to the multitude. He drew up a detailed schedule of studies for the six years of his imprisonment, and pursued it faithfully till accident intervened. “I used to sit down to my books with the delight of a young man of twenty-four, and forgetting my four-and-fifty years and my poor health.”65

Appendicitis secured his release, and Occidental medicine, which he had often denounced, secured his recovery. A vast crowd gathered at the prison gates to greet him on his exit, and many kissed his coarse garment as he passed. But he shunned politics and the public eye, pled his weakness and illness, and retired to his school at Ahmedabad, where he lived for many years in quiet isolation with his students. From that retreat, however, he sent forth weekly, through his mouthpiece Young India, editorials expounding his philosophy of revolution and life. He begged his followers to shun violence, not only because it would be suicidal, since India had no guns, but because it would only replace one despotism with another. “History,” he told them, “teaches one that those who have, no doubt with honest motives, ousted the greedy by using brute force against them, have in their turn become a prey to the disease of the conquered. . . . My interest in India’s freedom will cease if she adopts violent means. For their fruit will be not freedom, but slavery.”66

The second element in his creed was the resolute rejection of modern industry, and a Rousseauian call for a return to the simple life of agriculture and domestic industry in the village. The confinement of men and women in factories, making with machines owned by others fractions of articles whose finished form they will never see, seemed to Gandhi a roundabout way of burying humanity under a pyramid of shoddy goods. Most machine products, he thought, are unnecessary; the labor saved in using them is consumed in making and repairing them; or if labor is really saved it is of no benefit to labor, but only to capital; labor is thrown by its own productivity into a panic of “technological unemployment.”67 So he renewed the Swadeshi movement announced in 1905 by Tilak; self-production was to be added to Swaraj, self-rule. Gandhi made the use of the charka, or spinning-wheel, a test of loyal adherence to the Nationalist movement; he asked that every Hindu, even the richest, should wear homespun, and boycott the alien and mechanical textiles of Britain, so that the homes of India might hum once more, through the dull winter, with the sound of the spinning-wheel.68

The response was not universal; it is difficult to stop history in its course. But India tried. Hindu students everywhere dressed in khaddar; highborn ladies abandoned their Japanese silk saris for coarse cloths woven by themselves; prostitutes in brothels and convicts in prison began to spin; and in many cities great Feasts of the Vanities were arranged, as in Savonarola’s day, at which wealthy Hindus and merchants brought from their homes and warehouses all their imported cloth, and flung it into the fire. In one day at Bombay alone, 150,000 pieces were consumed by the flames.69

The movement away from industry failed, but it gave India for a decade a symbol of revolt, and helped to polarize her mute millions into a new unity of political consciousness. India doubted the means, but honored the purpose; and though it questioned Gandhi the statesman, it took to its heart Gandhi the saint, and for a moment became one in reverencing him. It was as Tagore said of him:


He stopped at the thresholds of the huts of the thousands of dispossessed, dressed like one of their own. He spoke to them in their own language. Here was living truth at last, and not only quotations from books. For this reason the Mahatma, the name given to him by the people of India, is his real name. Who else has felt like him that all Indians are his own flesh and blood? . . . When love came to the door of India that door was opened wide. . . . At Gandhi’s call India blossomed forth to new greatness, just as once before, in earlier times, when Buddha proclaimed the truth of fellow-feeling and compassion among all living creatures.70

It was Gandhi’s task to unify India; and he accomplished it. Other tasks await other men.

VII. FAREWELL TO INDIA

One cannot conclude the history of India as one can conclude the history of Egypt, or Babylonia, or Assyria; for that history is still being made, that civilization is still creating. Culturally India has been reinvigorated by mental contact with the West, and her literature today is as fertile and noble as any. Spiritually she is still struggling with superstition and excess theological baggage, but there is no telling how quickly the acids of modern science will dissolve these supernumerary gods. Politically the last one hundred years have brought to India such unity as she has seldom had before: partly the unity of one alien government, partly the unity of one alien speech, but above all the unity of one welding aspiration to liberty. Economically India is passing, for better and for worse, out of medievalism into modern industry; her wealth and her trade will grow, and before the end of the century she will doubtless be among the powers of the earth.

We cannot claim for this civilization such direct gifts to our own as we have traced to Egypt and the Near East; for these last were the immediate ancestors of our own culture, while the history of India, China and Japan flowed in another stream, and is only now beginning to touch and influence the current of Occidental life. It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to us such questionable gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all, our numerals and our decimal system. But these are not the essence of her spirit; they are trifles compared to what we may learn from her in the future. As invention, industry and trade bind the continents together, or as they fling us into conflict with Asia, we shall study its civilizations more closely, and shall absorb, even in enmity, some of its ways and thoughts. Perhaps, in return for conquest, arrogance and spoliation, India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of the mature mind, the quiet content of the unacquisitive soul, the calm of the understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all living things.


BOOK THREE


THE FAR EAST

A. CHINA

An emperor knows how to govern when poets are free to make verses, people to act plays, historians to tell the truth, ministers to give advice, the poor to grumble at taxes, students to learn lessons aloud, workmen to praise their skill and seek work, people to speak of anything, and old men to find fault with everything.

—Address of the Duke of Shao to King Li-Wang,


ca. 845 B.C.1


CHRONOLOGY OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION*


B.C.


2852-2205:

Legendary Rulers:


2852-2737:

Fu Hsi


2737-2697:

Shen Nung


2697-2597:

Huang Ti


2356-2255:

Yao


2255-2205:

Shun


2205-1766:

Hsia Dynasty


2205-2197:

Yü


1818-1766:

Chieh Kuei


1766-1123:

Shang (and Yin) Dynasty


1766-1753:

T’ang


1198-1194:

Wu Yih, the atheist emperor


1154-1123:

Chou-Hsin, model of wickedness


1122-255:

Chou Dynasty


1122-1115:

Wu-Wang


Fl. 1123:

Wen Wang, author (?) of the Book of Changes


1115-1078:

Cheng Wang


1115-1079:

Chou Kung, author (?) of the Chou-li, or Laws of Chou


770-255:

The Feudal Age


683-640:

Kuang Chung, prime minister of Ts’i


604-517:

Lao-tze (?)


551-478:

Confucius


501:

Confucius Chief Magistrate of Chung-tu


498:

Confucius Acting Supt. of Public Works in Duchy of Lu


497:

Confucius Minister of Crime


496:

Resignation of Confucius


496-483:

Confucius’ Wander-years


Fl. 450:

Mo Ti, philosopher


403-221:

Period of the Contending States


Fl. 390:

Yang Chu, philosopher


372-289:

Mencius, philosopher


B. 370:

Chuang-tze, philosopher


D. 350:

Ch’u P’ing, poet


B. 305:

Hsün-tze, philosopher


D. 233:

Han Fei, essayist


230-222:

Conquest and unification of China by Shih Huang-ti


255-206:

Ch’in Dynasty


221-211:

Shih Huang-ti, “First Emperor”


206 B.C.-221 A.D.:

Han Dynasty


179-157 B.C.:

Wen Ti


B. 145:

Szuma Ch’ien, historian


140-87 B.C.:

Wu Ti, reformer emperor


5-25 A.D.:

Wang Mang, socialist emperor


67 A.D.:

Coming of Buddhism to China


Ca. 100:

First known manufacturer of paper in China


200-400:

Tartar invasions of China


221-264:

Period of the Three Kingdoms


221-618:

The Minor Dynasties


365-427:

T’ao Ch’ien, poet


Fl. 364:

Ku K’ai-chih, painter


490-640:

Great Age of Buddhist Sculpture


618-905:

T’ang Dynasty


618-627:

Kao Tsu


627-650:

T’ai Tsung


651-716:

Li Ssu-hsün, painter


699-759:

Wang Wei, painter


B. ca. 700:

Wu Tao-tze, painter


705-762:

Li Po, poet


712-770:

Tu Fu, poet


713-756:

Hsuan Tsung (Ming Huang)


755:

Revolt of An Lu-shan


CHRONOLOGY OF CHINESE CIVILIZATION


A.D.


768-824:

Han Yü, essayist


770:

Oldest extant block prints


722-846:

Po Chü-i, poet


868:

Oldest extant printed book


907-960:

Five “Little Dynasties”


932-953:

Block printing of Chinese Classics


950:

First appearance of paper money


960-1127:

Northern Sung Dynasty


960-976:

T’ai Tsu


970:

First great Chinese encyclopedia


1069-1076:

Administration of Wang Anshih, socialist prime minister


1040-1106:

Li Lung-mien, painter


1041:

Pi Sheng makes movable type


B. 1100:

Kuo Hsi, painter


1101-1126:

Hui Tsung, artist emperor


1126:

Tatars sack Hui Tsung’s capital, Pien Lang (K’aifeng); removal of capital to Lin-an (Hangchow)


1127-1279:

Southern Sung Dynasty


1130-1200:

Chu Hsi, philosopher


1161:

First known use of gunpowder in war


1162-1227:

Genghis Khan


1212:

Genghis Khan invades China


1260-1368:

Yüan (Mongol) Dynasty


1269-1295:

Kublai Khan


1269:

Marco Polo leaves Venice for China


1295:

Marco Polo returns to Venice


1368-1644:

Ming Dynasty


1368-1399:

T’ai Tsu


1403-1425:

Ch’eng Tsu (Yung Lo)


1517:

Portugese at Canton


1571 :

Spanish take the Philippines


A.D.


1573-1620:

Shen Tsung (Wan Li)


1637:

English traders at Canton


1644-1912:

Ch’ing (Manchu) Dynasty


1662-1722:

K’ang Hsi


1736-1796:

Ch’ien Lung


1795:

First prohibition of opium trade


1800:

Second prohibition of opium trade


1823-1901:

Li Hung-chang, statesman


1834-1908:

Tzu Hsi, “Dowager Empress”


1839-1842:

First “Opium War”


1850-1864:

T’ai-p’ing Rebellion


1856-1860:

Second “Opium War”


1858-1860:

Russia seizes Chinese territory north of the Amur River


1860:

France seizes Indo-China


1866-1925:

Sun Yat-sen


1875-1908:

Kuang Hsu


1894:

The Sino-Japanese War


1898:

Germany takes Kiaochow; U. S. takes the Philippines


1898:

The reform edicts of Kuang Hsu


1900:

The Boxer Uprising


1905:

Abolition of the examination system


1911 :

The Chinese Revolution


1912:

(Jan.-Mar.): Sun Yat-sen Provisional President of the Chinese Republic


1912-1916:

Yuan Shi-k’ai, President


1914:

Japan takes Kiaochow


1915:

The “Twenty-one Demands”


1920:

Pei-Hua (“Plain Speech”) adopted in the Chinese schools; height of the “New Tide”


1926:

Chiang K’ai-shek and Borodin subdue the north


1927:

The anti-communist reaction


1931 :

The Japanese occupy Manchuria


CHAPTER XXIII


The Age of the Philosophers

I. THE BEGINNINGS

1. Estimates of the Chinese

THE intellectual discovery of China was one of the achievements of the Enlightenment. “These peoples,” Diderot wrote of the Chinese, “are superior to all other Asiatics in antiquity, art, intellect, wisdom, policy, and in their taste for philosophy; nay, in the judgment of certain authors, they dispute the palm in these matters with the most enlightened peoples of Europe.”1a “The body of this empire,” said Voltaire, “has existed four thousand years, without having undergone any sensible alteration in its laws, customs, language, or even in its fashions of apparel. . . . The organization of this empire is in truth the best that the world has ever seen.”2 This respect of scholars has survived closer acquaintance, and in some contemporary observers it has reached the pitch of humble admiration. Count Keyserling, in one of the most instructive and imaginative books of our time, concludes that


altogether the most perfect type of humanity as a normal phenomenon has been elaborated in ancient China . . . China has created the highest universal culture of being hitherto known . . . The greatness of China takes hold of and impresses me more and more . . . The great men of this country stand on a higher level of culture than ours do; . . . these gentlemen* . . . stand on an extraordinarily high level as types; especially their superiority impresses me. . . . How perfect the courtesy of the cultured Chinaman! . . . China’s supremacy of form is unquestionable in all circumstances. . . . The Chinaman is perhaps the profoundest of all men.3

The Chinese do not trouble to deny this; and until the present century (there are now occasional exceptions) they were unanimous in regarding the inhabitants of Europe and America as barbarians.4 It was the gentle custom of the Chinese, in official documents before 1860, to employ the character for “barbarian” in rendering the term “foreigner”; and the barbarians had to stipulate by treaty that this translation should be improved.5* Like most other peoples of the earth, “the Chinese consider themselves the most polished and civilized of all nations.”7 Perhaps they are right, despite their political corruption and chaos, their backward science and sweated industry, their odorous cities and offal-strewn fields, their floods and famines, their apathy and cruelty, their poverty and superstition, their reckless breeding and suicidal wars, their slaughters and ignominious defeats. For behind this dark surface that now appears to the alien eye is one of the oldest and richest of living civilizations: a tradition of poetry reaching as far back as 1700 B.C.; a long record of philosophy idealistic and yet practical, profound and yet intelligible; a mastery of ceramics and painting unequaled in their kind; an easy perfection, rivaled only by the Japanese, in all the minor arts; the most effective morality to be found among the peoples of any time; a social organization that has held together more human beings, and has endured through more centuries, than any other known to history; a form of government which, until the Revolution destroyed it, was almost the ideal of philosophers; a society that was civilized when Greece was inhabited by barbarians, that saw the rise and fall of Babylonia and Assyria, Persia and Judea, Athens and Rome, Venice and Spain, and may yet survive when those Balkans called Europe have reverted to darkness and savagery. What is the secret of this durability of government, this artistry of hand, this poise and depth of soul?

2. The Middle Flowery Kingdom

Geography—Race—Prehistory

If we consider Russia as Asiatic—which it was till Peter, and may be again—then Europe becomes only a jagged promontory of Asia, the industrial projection of an agricultural hinterland, the tentative fingers or pseudopodia of a giant continent. Dominating that continent is China, as spacious as Europe, and as populous. Hemmed in, through most of its history, by the largest ocean, the highest mountains, and one of the most extensive deserts in the world, China enjoyed an isolation that gave her comparative security and permanence, immutability and stagnation. Hence the Chinese called their country not China but Tien-hua—“Under the Heavens”—or Sz-hai—“Within the Four Seas”—or Chung-kuo—“Middle Kingdom”—or Chung-hwa-kuo—“Middle Flowery Kingdom”—or, by decree of the Revolution, Chun-hwa-min-kuo—“ Middle Flowery People’s Kingdom.”8 Flowers it has in abundance, and all the varied natural scenery that can come from sunshine and floating mists, perilous mountain crags, majestic rivers, deep gorges, and swift waterfalls amid rugged hills. Through the fertile south runs the Yang-tze River, three thousand miles in length; farther north the Hoang-ho, or Yellow River, descends from the western ranges amid plains of loess to carry its silt through vacillating estuaries once to the Yellow Sea, now to the Gulf of Pechili, tomorrow, possibly, to the Yellow Sea again. Along these and the Wei and other broad streams* Chinese civilization began, driving back the beast and the jungle, holding the surrounding barbarians at bay, clearing the soil of brush and bramble, ridding it of destructive insects and corrosive deposits like saltpetre, draining the marshes, fighting droughts and floods and devastating changes in the courses of the rivers, drawing the water patiently and wearily from these friendly enemies into a thousand canals, and building day by day through centuries—huts and houses, temples and schools, villages, cities and states. How long men have toiled to build the civilizations that men so readily destroy!

No one knows whence the Chinese came, or what was their race, or how old their civilization is. The remains of the “Peking Man”† suggest the great antiquity of the human ape in China; and the researches of Andrews have led him to conclude that Mongolia was thickly populated, as far back as 20,000 B.C., by a race whose tools corresponded to the “Azilian” development of mesolithic Europe, and whose descendants spread into Siberia and China as southern Mongolia dried up and became the Gobi Desert. The discoveries of Andersson and others in Honan and south Manchuria indicate a neolithic culture one or two thousand years later than similar stages in the prehistory of Egypt and Sumeria. Some of the stone tools found in these neolothic deposits resemble exactly, in shape and perforations, the iron knives now used in northern China to reap the sorghum crop; and this circumstance, small though it is, reveals the probability that Chinese culture has an impressive continuity of seven thousand years.10

We must not, through the blur of distance, exaggerate the homogeneity of this culture, or of the Chinese people. Some elements of their early art and industry appear to have come from Mesopotamia and Turkestan; for example, the neolithic pottery of Honan is almost identical with that of Anau and Susa.11 The present “Mongolian” type is a highly complex mixture in which the primitive stock has been crossed and recrossed by a hundred invading or immigrating stocks from Mongolia, southern Russia (the Scythians?), and central Asia.12 China, like India, is to be compared with Europe as a whole rather than with any one nation of Europe; it is not the united home of one people, but a medley of human varieties different in origin, distinct in language, diverse in character and art, and often hostile to one another in customs, morals and government.

3. The Unknown Centuries

The Creation according to China—The coming of culture—Wine and chopsticks—The virtuous emperors—A royal atheist

China has been called “the paradise of historians.” For centuries and millenniums it has had official historiographers who recorded everything that happened, and much besides. We cannot trust them further back than 776 B.C.; but if we lend them a ready ear they will explain in detail the history of China from 3000 B.C., and the more pious among them, like our own seers, will describe the creation of the world. P’an Ku, the first man (they tell us), after laboring on the task for eighteen thousand years, hammered the universe into shape about 2,229,000 B.C. As he worked his breath became the wind and the clouds, his voice became the thunder, his veins the rivers, his flesh the earth, his hair the grass and trees, his bones the metals, his sweat the rain; and the insects that clung to his body became the human race.13 We have no evidence to disprove this ingenious cosmology.

The earliest kings, says Chinese legend, reigned eighteen thousand years each, and struggled hard to turn P’an Ku’s lice into civilized men. Before the arrival of these “Celestial Emperors,” we are told, “the people were like beasts, clothing themselves in skins, feeding on raw flesh, and knowing their mothers but not their fathers”—a limitation which Strindberg did not consider exclusively ancient or Chinese. Then came the emperor Fu Hsi, in precisely 2852 B.C.; with the help of his enlightened Queen he taught his people marriage, music, writing, painting, fishing with nets, the domestication of animals, and the feeding of silkworms for the secretion of silk. Dying, he appointed as his successor Shen Nung, who introduced agriculture, invented the wooden plough, established markets and trade, and developed the science of medicine from the curative values of plants. So legend, which loves personalities more than ideas, attributes to a few individuals the laborious advances of many generations. Then a vigorous soldier-emperor, Huang-ti, in a reign of a mere century, gave China the magnet and the wheel, appointed official historians, built the first brick structures in China, erected an observatory for the study of the stars, corrected the calendar, and redistributed the land. Yao ruled through another century, and so well that Confucius, writing of him eighteen hundred years later in what must have seemed a hectically “modern” age, mourned the degeneration of China. The old sage, who was not above the pious fraud of adorning a tale to point a moral, informs us that the Chinese people became virtuous by merely looking at Yao. As first aid to reformers, Yao placed outside his palace door a drum by which they might summon him to hear their grievances, and a tablet upon which they might write their advice to the government. “Now,” says the famous Book of History,


concerning the good Yao it is said that he ruled Chung-kuo for one hundred years, the years of his life being one hundred, ten and six. He was kind and benevolent as Heaven, wise and discerning as the gods. From afar his radiance was like a shining cloud, and approaching near him he was as brilliant as the sun. Rich was he without ostentation, and regal without luxuriousness. He wore a yellow cap and a dark tunic and rode in a red chariot drawn by white horses. The eaves of his thatch were not trimmed, and the rafters were unplaned, while the beams of his house had no ornamental ends. His principal food was soup, indifferently compounded, nor was he choice in selecting his grain. He drank his broth of lentils from a dish that was made of clay, using a wooden spoon. His person was not adorned with jewels, and his clothes were without embroidery, simple and without variety. He gave no attention to uncommon things and strange happenings, nor did he value those things that were rare and peculiar. He did not listen to songs of dalliance, his chariot of state was not emblazoned. . . . In summer he wore his simple garb of cotton, and in winter he covered himself with skins of the deer. Yet was he the richest, the wisest, the longest-lived and most beloved of all that ever ruled Chung-kuo.14

The last of these “Five Rulers” was Shun, the model of filially devoted sons, the patient hero who fought the floods of the Hoang-ho, improved the calendar, standardized weights and measures, and endeared himself to scholastic posterity by reducing the size of the whip with which Chinese children were educated. In his old age Shun (Chinese tradition tells us) raised to a place beside himself on the throne the ablest of his aides, the great engineer Yü, who had controlled the floods of nine rivers by cutting through nine mountains and forming nine lakes; “but for Yü,” say the Chinese, “we should all have been fishes.”15 In his reign, according to sacred legend, rice wine was discovered, and was presented to the Emperor; but Yü dashed it to the ground, predicting: “The day will come when this thing will cost some one a kingdom.” He banished the discoverer and prohibited the new beverage; whereupon the Chinese, for the instruction of posterity, made wine the national beverage. Rejecting the principle of succession by royal appointment, Yü established the Hsia (i.e., “civilized”) Dynasty by making the throne hereditary in his family, so that idiots alternated with mediocrities and geniuses in the government of China. The dynasty was brought to an end by the whimsical Emperor Chieh, who amused himself and his wife by compelling three thousand Chinese to jump to their euthanasy in a lake of wine.

We have no way of checking the accounts transmitted to us of the Hsia Dynasty by the early Chinese historians. Astronomers claim to have verified the solar eclipse mentioned by the records as occurring in the year 2165 B.C., but competent critics have challenged these calculations.16 Bones found in Honan bear the names of rulers traditionally ascribed to the second or Shang Dynasty; and some bronze vessels of great antiquity are tentatively attributed to this period. For the rest we must rely on stories whose truth may not be proportioned to their charm. According to ancient tradition one of the Shang emperors, Wu Yi, was an atheist; he defied the gods, and blasphemed the Spirit of Heaven; he played chess with it, ordered a courtier to make its moves, and derided it when it lost; having dedicated to it a leathern bag, he filled the bag with blood, and amused himself by making it a target for his arrows. The historians, more virtuous than history, assure us that Wu Yi was struck dead with lightning.

Chou Hsin, royal inventor of chopsticks brought the dynasty to an end by his incredible wickedness. “I have heard,” he said, “that a man’s heart has seven openings; I would fain make the experiment upon Pi Kan”—his minister. Chou’s wife Ta-ki was a model of licentiousness and cruelty: at her court voluptuous dances were performed, and men and women gamboled naked in her gardens. When public criticism rose she sought to still it with novelties of torture: rebels were made to hold fiery metals in their hands, or to walk greased poles over a pit of live charcoal; when victims fell into the pit the Queen was much amused to see them roast.17 Chou Hsin was overthrown by a conspiracy of rebels at home and invaders from the western state of Chou, who set up the Chou Dynasty, the most enduring of all the royal houses of China. The victorious leaders rewarded their aides by making them almost independent rulers of the many provinces into which the new realm was divided; in this way began that feudalism which proved so dangerous to government and yet so stimulating to Chinese letters and philosophy. The newcomers mingled their blood in marriage with the older stocks, and the mixture provided a slow biological prelude to the first historic civilization of the Far East.

4. The First Chinese Civilization

The Feudal Age in China—An able minister—The struggle between custom and law—Culture and anarchy—Love lyrics from the “Book of Odes”

The feudal states that now provided for almost a thousand years whatever political order China was to enjoy, were not the creation of the conquerors; they had grown out of the agricultural communities of primitive days through the absorption of the weaker by the stronger, or the merger of groups under a common chief for the defense of their fields against the encompassing barbarians. At one time there were over seventeen hundred of these principalities, ordinarily consisting of a walled town surrounded by cultivated land, with smaller walled suburbs constituting a protective circumference.18 Slowly these provinces coalesced into fifty-five, covering what is now the district of Honan with neighboring portions of Shan-si, Shen-si and Shantung. Of these fifty-five the most important were Ts’i, which laid the bases of Chinese government, and Chin (or Tsin), which conquered all the rest, established a unified empire, and gave to China the name by which it is known to nearly all the world but itself.

The organizing genius of Ts’i was Kuan Chung, adviser to the Duke Huan. Kuan began his career in history by supporting Huan’s brother against him in their competition for the control of Ts’i, and almost killed Huan in battle. Huan won, captured Kuan, and appointed him chief minister of the state. Kuan made his master powerful by replacing bronze with iron weapons and tools, and by establishing governmental monopoly or control of iron and salt. He taxed money, fish and salt, “in order to help the poor and reward wise and able men.”19 During his long ministry Ts’i became a well-ordered state, with a stabilized currency, an efficient administration, and a flourishing culture. Confucius, who praised politicians only by epitaph, said of Kuan: “Down to the present day the people enjoy the gifts which he conferred. But for Kuan Chung we should now be wearing our hair disheveled, and the lappets of our coats buttoning on the left side.”*20

In the feudal courts was developed the characteristic courtesy of the Chinese gentleman. Gradually a code of manners, ceremonies and honor was established, which became so strict that it served as a substitute for religion among the upper classes of society. The foundations of law were laid, and a great struggle set in between the rule of custom as developed among the people and the rule of law as formulated by the state. Codes of law were issued by the duchies of Cheng and Chin (535, 512 B.C.), much to the horror of the peasantry, who predicted divine punishment for such outrages; and indeed the capital of Cheng was soon afterward destroyed by fire. The codes were partial to the aristocracy, who were exempted from the regulations on condition that they should discipline themselves; gentlemen murderers were allowed to commit suicide, and most of them did, in the fashion later so popular in samurai Japan. The people protested that they, too, could discipline themselves, and called for some Harmodius or Aristogiton to liberate them from this new tyranny of law. In the end the two hostile forces, custom and law, arrived at a wholesome compromise: the reach of law was narrowed to major or national issues, while the force of custom continued in all minor matters; and since human affairs are mostly minor matters, custom remained king.

As the organization of states proceeded, it found formulation in the Chou-li, or Law of Chou, a volume traditionally but incredibly ascribed to Chou-kung, uncle and prime minister of the second Duke of Chou. This legislation, suspiciously infused with the spirit of Confucius and Mencius, and therefore in all likelihood a product of the end rather than of the beginning of the Chou Dynasty, set for two thousand years the Chinese conception of government: an emperor ruling as the vicar and “Son of Heaven,” and holding power through the possession of virtue and piety; an aristocracy, partly of birth and partly of training, administering the offices of the state; a people dutifully tilling the soil, living in patriarchal families, enjoying civil rights but having no voice in public affairs; and a cabinet of six ministries controlling respectively the life and activities of the emperor, the welfare and early marriage of the people, the ceremonies and divinations of religion, the preparation and prosecution of war, the administration of justice, and the organization of public works.22 It is an almost ideal code, more probably sprung from the mind of some anonymous and irresponsible Plato than from the practice of leaders sullied with actual power and dealing with actual men.

Since much deviltry can find room even in perfect constitutions, the political history of China during the Feudal Age was the usual mixture of persevering rascality with periodic reforms. As wealth increased, luxury and extravagance corrupted the aristocracy, while musicians and assassins, courtesans and philosophers mingled at the courts, and later in the capital at Loyang. Hardly a decade passed without some assault upon the new states by the hungry barbarians ever pressing upon the frontiers.23 War became a necessity of defense, and soon a method of offense; it graduated from a game of the aristocracy to competitive slaughter among the people; heads were cut off by tens of thousands. Within a little more than two centuries, regicides disposed of thirty-six kings.24 Anarchy grew, and the sages despaired.

Over these ancient obstacles life made its plodding way. The peasant sowed and reaped, occasionally for himself, usually for his feudal lord, to whom both he and the land belonged; not until the end of the dynasty did peasant proprietorship raise its head. The state—i.e., a loose association of feudal barons faintly acknowledging one ducal sovereign—conscripted labor for public works, and irrigated the fields with extensive canals; officials instructed the people in agriculture and arboriculture, and supervised the silk industry in all its details. Fishing and the mining of salt were in many provinces monopolized by the government.25 Domestic trade flourished in the towns, and begot a small bourgeoisie possessed of almost modern comforts: they wore leather shoes, and dresses of homespun or silk; they rode in carts or chariots, or traveled on the rivers by boat; they lived in well-built houses, used tables and chairs, and ate their food from plates and dishes of ornamented pottery;26 their standard of living was probably higher than that of their contemporaries in Solon’s Greece, or Numa’s Rome.

Amid conditions of disunity and apparent chaos the mental life of China showed a vitality disturbing to the generalizations of historians. For in this disorderly age were laid the bases of China’s language, literature, philosophy and art; the combination of a life made newly secure by economic organization and provision, and a culture not yet forged into conformity by the tyranny of inescapable tradition and an imperial government, served as the social framework for the most creative period in the history of the Chinese mind. At every court, and in a thousand towns and villages, poets sang, potters turned their wheels, founders cast stately vessels, leisurely scribes formed into beauty the characters of the written language, sophists taught to eager students the tricks of the intellect, and philosophers pined over the imperfections of men and the decadence of states.

We shall study the art and language later, in their more complete and characteristic development; but the poetry and the philosophy belong specifically to this age, and constitute the classic period of Chinese thought. Most of the verse written before Confucius has disappeared; what remains of it is chiefly his own stern selection of the more respectable samples, gathered together in the Shi-Ching, or “Book of Odes,” ranging over a thousand years from ancient compositions of the Shang Dynasty to highly modern poems as recent as Pythagoras. Its three hundred and five odes celebrate with untranslatable brevity and suggestive imagery the piety of religion, the hardships of war, and the solicitude of love. Hear the timeless lament of soldiers torn from their homes and dedicated to unintelligible death:


How free are the wild geese on their wings,

And the rest they find on the bushy Yu trees!

But we, ceaseless toilers in the king’s services,

Cannot even plant our millet and rice.

What will our parents have to rely on?

O thou distant and azure Heaven!

When shall all this end? . . .

What leaves have not turned purple?

What man is not torn from his wife?

Mercy be on us soldiers:

Are we not also men?27

Though this age appears, to our ignorance, to have been almost the barbaric infancy of China, love poetry abounds in the Odes, and plays a gamut of many moods. In one of these poems, whispering to us across those buried centuries that seemed so model to Confucius, we hear the voice of eternally rebellious youth, as if to say that nothing is so old-fashioned as revolt:


I pray you, dear,

My little hamlet leave,

Nor break my willow-boughs;

’Tis not that I should grieve,

But I fear my sire to rouse.

Love pleads with passion disarrayed,—

“A sire’s commands must be obeyed.”

I pray you, dear,

Leap not across my wall,

Nor break my mulberry-boughs;

Not that I fear their fall,

But lest my brother’s wrath should rouse,

Love pleads with passion disarrayed,—

“A brother’s words must be obeyed.”

I pray you, dear,

Steal not the garden down,

Nor break my sandal trees;

Not that I care for these,

But oh, I dread the talk of town.

Should lovers have their wilful way,

Whatever would the neighbors say?28

And another—the most nearly perfect, or the most excellently translated, of all—reveals to us the ageless antiquity of sentiment:


The morning glory climbs above my head,

Pale flowers of white and purple, blue and red.

I am disquieted.


Down in the withered grasses something stirred;

I thought it was his footfall that I heard.

Then a grasshopper chirred.


I climbed the hill just as the new moon showed,

I saw him coming on the southern road,

My heart lays down its load.29

5. The Pre-Confucian Philosophers

The “Book of Changes”—The “yang” and the “yin”—The Chinese Enlightenment—Teng Shih, the Socrates of China

The characteristic production of this epoch is philosophy. It is no discredit to our species that in all ages its curiosity has outrun its wisdom, and its ideals have set an impossible pace for its behavior. As far back as 1250 B.C. we find Yu Tze sounding the keynote in a pithy fragment then already stale, and now still fresh in counsel to laborious word-mongers who do not know that all glory ends in bitterness: “He who renounces fame has no sorrow”30—happy the man who has no history! From that time until our own, China has produced philosophers.

As India is par excellence the land of metaphysics and religion, China is by like preëminence the home of humanistic, or non-theological, philosophy. Almost the only important work of metaphysics in its literature is the strange document with which the recorded history of Chinese thought begins—the I-Ching, or “Book of Changes.” Tradition insists that it was written in prison by one of the founders of the Chou Dynasty, Wen Wang, and that its simplest origin went back as far as Fu Hsi: this legendary emperor, we are told, invented the eight kua, or mystic trigrams, which Chinese metaphysics identifies with the laws and elements of nature. Each trigram consisted of three lines—some continuous and representing the male principle or yang, some broken and representing the female principle or yin. In this mystic dualism the yang represented also the positive, active, productive and celestial principle of light, heat and life, while the yin represented the negative, passive and earthly principle of darkness, cold and death. Wen Wang immortalized himself, and racked the head of a billion Chinese, by doubling the number of strokes, and thereby raising to sixty-four the number of possible combinations of continuous and broken lines. To each of these arrangements some law of nature corresponded. All science and history were contained in the changeful interplay of the combinations; all wisdom lay hidden in the sixty-four hsiangs, or ideas symbolically represented by the trigrams; ultimately all reality could be reduced to the opposition and union of the two basic factors in the universe—the male and the female principles, the yang and the yin. The Chinese used the Book of Changes as a manual of divination, and considered it the greatest of their classics; he who should understand the combinations, we are told, would grasp all the laws of nature. Confucius, who edited the volume and adorned it with commentaries, ranked it above all other writings, and wished that he might be free to spend fifty years in its study.31

This strange volume, though congenial to the subtle occultism of the Chinese soul, is alien to the positive and practical spirit of Chinese philosophy. As far back as we can pry into the past of China we find philosophers; but of those who preceded Lao-tze time has preserved only an occasional fragment or an empty name. As in India, Persia, Judea and Greece, the sixth and fifth centuries saw, in China, a brilliant outburst of philosophical and literary genius; and as in Greece, it began with an epoch of rationalist “enlightenment.” An age of war and chaos opened new roads to the advancement of unpedigreed talent, and established a demand, among the people of the towns, for instructors skilled in imparting the arts of the mind. These popular teachers soon discovered the uncertainty of theology, the relativity of morals and the imperfections of governments, and began to lay about them with Utopias; several of them were put to death by authorities who found it more difficult to answer than to kill. According to one Chinese tradition Confucius himself, during his tenure of office as Minister of Crime in the Duchy of Lu, condemned to death a seditious officer on the ground that “he was capable of gathering about him large crowds of men; that his arguments could easily appeal to the mob and make perversity respectable; and that his sophistry was sufficiently recalcitrant to take a stand against the accepted judgments of right.”32 Szuma-Ch’ien accepts the story; some other Chinese historians reject it;33 let us hope that it is not true.

The most famous of these intellectual rebels was Teng Shih, who was executed by the Duke of Cheng during the youth of Confucius. Teng, says the Book of Lieh-tze, “taught the doctrines of the relativity of right and wrong, and employed inexhaustible arguments.”34 His enemies charged him with being willing to prove one thing one day and its opposite the next, if proper remuneration were forthcoming; he offered his services to those who were trying their cases in court, and allowed no prejudice to interfere with serviceability. A hostile Chinese historian tells a pretty story of him:


A wealthy man of Teng’s native state was drowned in the Wei River, and his body was taken up by a man who demanded of the bereaved family a large sum of money for its redemption. The dead man’s family sought Teng’s counsel. “Wait,” said the Sophist; “no other family will pay for the body.” The advice was followed, and the man who held the corpse became anxious and also came to Teng Shih for advice. The Sophist gave the same counsel: “Wait; nowhere else can they obtain the body.”35

Teng Shih composed a code of penology that proved too idealistic for the government of Cheng. Annoyed by pamphlets in which Teng criticized his policies, the prime minister prohibited the posting of pamphlets in public places. Teng thereupon delivered his pamphlets in person. The minister forbade the delivery of pamphlets. Teng smuggled them to his readers by concealing them in other articles. The government ended the argument by cutting off his head.36

6. The Old Master

Lao-tze—The “Tao”—On intellectuals in government—The foolishness of laws—A Rousseauian Utopia and a Christian ethic—Portrait of a wise man—The meeting of Lao-tze and Confucius

Lao-tze, greatest of the pre-Confucian philosophers, was wiser than Teng Shih; he knew the wisdom of silence, and lived, we may be sure, to a ripe old age—though we are not sure that he lived at all. The Chinese historian, Szuma Ch’ien, tells how Lao-tze, disgusted with the knavery of politicians and tired of his work as curator of the Royal Library of Chou, determined to leave China and seek some distant and secluded countryside. “On reaching the frontier the warden, Yin Hsi, said to him: ‘So you are going into retirement. I beg you to write a book for me.’ Thereupon Lao-tze wrote a book, in two parts, on Tao and Te, extending to over five thousand words. He then went away, and no one knows where he died.”37 Tradition, which knows everything, credits him with living eighty-seven years. All that remains of him is his name and his book, neither of which may have belonged to him. Lao-tze is a description, meaning “The Old Master”; his real name, we are told, was Li—that is to say, a plum. The book which is ascribed to him is of such doubtful authenticity that scholars quarrel learnedly about its origin.* But all are agreed that the Tao-Te-Ching—i.e., the “Book of the Way and of Virtue”—is the most important text of that Taoist philosophy which, in the opinion of Chinese students, existed long before Lao-tze, found many firstrate defenders after him, and became the religion of a considerable minority of the Chinese from his time to our own. The authorship of the Tao-Te-Ching is a secondary matter; but its ideas are among the most fascinating in the history of thought.

Tao means the Way: sometimes the Way of Nature, sometimes the Taoist Way of wise living; literally, a road. Basically, it is a way of thinking, or of refusing to think; for in the view of the Taoists thought is a superficial affair, good only for argument, and more harmful than beneficial to life; the Way is to be found by rejecting the intellect and all its wares, and leading a modest life of retirement, rusticity, and quiet contemplation of nature. Knowledge is not virtue; on the contrary, rascals have increased since education spread. Knowledge is not wisdom, for nothing is so far from a sage as an “intellectual.” The worst conceivable government would be by philosophers; they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action.


Those who are skilled do not dispute; the disputatious are not skilled. . . . When we renounce learning we have no troubles. . . . The sage constantly keeps men without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, keeps them from presuming to act. . . . The ancients who showed their skill in practising the Tao did so not to enlighten the people, but to make them simple and ignorant. . . . The difficulty in governing the people arises from their having too much knowledge. He who tries to govern a state by his wisdom is a scourge to it, while he who does not do so is a blessing.40

The intellectual man is a danger to the state because he thinks in terms of regulations and laws; he wishes to construct a society like geometry, and does not realize that such regulation destroys the living freedom and vigor of the parts. The simpler man, who knows from his own experience the pleasure and efficacy of work conceived and carried out in liberty, is less of a peril when he is in power, for he does not have to be told that a law is a dangerous thing, and may injure more than it may help.41 Such a ruler regulates men as little as possible; if he guides the nation it is away from all artifice and complexity towards a normal and artless simplicity, in which life would follow the wisely thoughtless routine of nature, and even writing would be put aside as an unnatural instrument of befuddlement and deviltry. Unhampered by regulations from the government, the spontaneous economic impulses of the people—their own lust for bread and love—would move the wheels of life in a simple and wholesome round. There would be few inventions, for these only add to the wealth of the rich and the power of the strong; there would be no books, no lawyers, no industries, and only village trade.


In the kingdom the multiplication of prohibitions increases the poverty of the people. The more implements to add to their profit the people have, the greater disorder is there in the state and clan; the more acts of crafty dexterity men possess, the more do strange contrivances appear; the more display there is of legislation, the more thieves and robbers there are. Therefore a sage has said: “I will do nothing, and the people will be transformed of themselves; I will be fond of keeping still, and the people will of themselves be correct. I will take no trouble about it, and the people will of themselves become rich; I will manifest no ambition, and the people will of themselves attain to the primitive simplicity. . . .

In a little state with a small population I would so order it that though there would be individuals in it with the abilities of ten or a hundred men, there should be no employment for them; I would make the people, while looking upon death as a grievous thing, yet not remove elsewhere (to avoid it). Though they had boats and carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them; though they had buff coats and sharp weapons, they should have no occasion to don or use them. I would make the people return to the use of knotted cords.* They should think their (coarse) food sweet, their (plain) clothes beautiful, their (poor) dwellings places of rest, and their common ways sources of enjoyment. There should be a neighboring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us; but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.”42

But what is this nature which Lao-tze wishes to accept as his guide? The Old Master draws as sharp a distinction between nature and civilization as Rousseau was to do in that gallery of echoes called “modern thought.” Nature is natural activity, the silent flow of traditional events, the majestic order of the seasons and the sky; it is the Tao, or Way, exemplified and embodied in every brook and rock and star; it is that impartial, impersonal and yet rational law of things to which the law of conduct must conform if men desire to live in wisdom and peace. This law of things is the Tao or way of the universe, just as the law of conduct is the Tao or way of life; in truth, thinks Lao-tze, both Taos are one, and human life, in its essential and wholesome rhythm, is part of the rhythm of the world. In that cosmic Tao all the laws of nature are united and form together the Spinozistic substance of all reality; in it all natural forms and varieties find a proper place, and all apparent diversities and contradictions meet; it is the Absolute in which all particulars are resolved into one Hegelian unity43

In the ancient days, says Lao, nature made men and life simple and peaceful, and all the world was happy. But then men attained “knowledge,” they complicated life with inventions, they lost all mental and moral innocence, they moved from the fields to the cities, and began to write books; hence all the misery of men, and the tears of the philosophers. The wise man will shun this urban complexity, this corrupting and enervating maze of law and civilization, and will hide himself in the lap of nature, far from any town, or books, or venal officials, or vain reformers. The secret of wisdom and of that quiet content which is the only lasting happiness that man can find, is a Stoic obedience to nature, an abandonment of all artifice and intellect, a trustful acceptance of nature’s imperatives in instinct and feeling, a modest imitation of nature’s silent ways. Perhaps there is no wiser passage in literature than this:


All things in nature work silently. They come into being and possess nothing. They fulfil their function and make no claim. All things alike do their work, and then we see them subside. When they have reached their bloom each returns to its origin. Returning to their origin means rest, or fulfilment of destiny. This reversion is an eternal law. To know that law is wisdom.44

Quiescence, a kind of philosophical inaction, a refusal to interfere with the natural courses of things, is the mark of the wise man in every field. If the state is in disorder, the proper thing to do is not to reform it, but to make one’s life an orderly performance of duty; if resistance is encountered, the wiser course is not to quarrel, fight, or make war, but to retire silently, and to win, if at all, through yielding and patience; passivity has its victories more often than action. Here Lao-tze talks almost with the accents of Christ:


If you do not quarrel, no one on earth will be able to quarrel with you. . . . Recompense injury with kindness. . . . To those who are good I am good, and to those who are not good I am also good; thus (all) get to be good. To those who are sincere I am sincere, and to those who are not sincere I am also sincere; and thus (all) get to be sincere. . . . The softest thing in the world dashes against and overcomes the hardest. . . . There is nothing in the world softer or weaker than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it.*45

All these doctrines culminate in Lao’s conception of the sage. It is characteristic of Chinese thought that it speaks not of saints but of sages, not so much of goodness as of wisdom; to the Chinese the ideal is not the pious devotee but the mature and quiet mind, the man who, though fit to hold high place in the world, retires to simplicity and silence. Silence is the beginning of wisdom. Even of the Tao and wisdom the wise man does not speak, for wisdom can be transmitted never by words, only by example and experience. “He who knows (the Way) does not speak about it; he who speaks about it does not know it. He (who knows it) will keep his mouth shut and close the portals of his nostrils.”47 The wise man is modest, for at fifty† one should have discovered the relativity of knowledge and the frailty of wisdom; if the wise man knows more than other men he tries to conceal it; “he will temper his brightness, and bring himself into agreement with the obscurity (of others);49 he agrees with the simple rather than with the learned, and does not suffer from the novice’s instinct of contradiction. He attaches no importance to riches or power, but reduces his desires to an almost Buddhist minimum:

I have nothing that I value; I desire that my heart be completely subdued, emptied to emptiness. . . . The state of emptiness should be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with unwearying vigor. . . . Such a man cannot be treated familiarly or distantly; he is beyond all considerations of profit or injury, of nobility or meanness; he is the noblest man under heaven.50

It is unnecessary to point out the detailed correspondence of these ideas with those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the two men were coins of the same mould and mint, however different in date. It is a philosophy that periodically reappears, for in every generation many men weary of the struggle, cruelty, complexity and speed of city life, and write with more idealism than knowledge about the joys of rustic routine: one must have a long urban background in order to write rural poetry. “Nature” is a term that may lend itself to any ethic and any theology; it fits the science of Darwin and the unmorality of Nietzsche more snugly than the sweet reasonableness of Lao-tze and Christ. If one follows nature and acts naturally he is much more likely to murder and eat his enemies than to practise philosophy; there is small chance of his being humble, and less of his being silent. Even the painful tillage of the soil goes against the grain of a species primordially wont to hunt and kill; agriculture is as “unnatural” as industry.—And yet there is something medicinal in this philosophy; we suspect that we, too, when our fires begin to burn low, shall see wisdom in it, and shall want the healing peace of uncrowded mountains and spacious fields. Life oscillates between Voltaire and Rousseau, Confucius and Lao-tze, Socrates and Christ. After every idea has had its day with us and we have fought for it not wisely or too well, we in our turn shall tire of the battle, and pass on to the young our thinning fascicle of ideals. Then we shall take to the woods with Jacques, Jean-Jacques and Lao-tze; we shall make friends of the animals, and discourse more contentedly than Machiavelli with simple peasant minds; we shall leave the world to stew in its own deviltry, and shall take no further thought of its reform. Perhaps we shall burn every book but one behind us, and find a summary of wisdom in the Tao-Te-Ching.

We may imagine how irritating this philosophy must have been to Confucius, who, at the immature age of thirty-four, came up to Lo-yang, capital of Chou, and sought the Old Master’s advice on some minutiae of history.* Lao-tze, we are told, replied with harsh and cryptic brevity:


Those about whom you inquire have moulded with their bones into dust. Nothing but their words remain. When the hour of the great man has struck he rises to leadership; but before his time has come he is hampered in all that he attempts. I have heard that the successful merchant carefully conceals his wealth, and acts as though he had nothing—that the great man, though abounding in achievements, is simple in his manners and appearance. Get rid of your pride and your many ambitions, your affectation and your extravagant aims. Your character gains nothing for all these. This is my advice to you.61

The Chinese historian relates that Confucius sensed at once the wisdom of these words, and took no offense from them; that on the contrary he said to his pupils, on his return from the dying sage: “I know how birds can fly, fishes swim, and animals run. But the runner may be snared, the swimmer hooked, and the flyer shot by the arrow. But there is the dragon—I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds, and rises to heaven. Today I have seen Lao-tze, and can compare him only to the dragon.”62 Then the new master went forth to fulfil his own mission, and to become the most influential philosopher in history.

II. CONFUCIUS

1. The Sage in Search of a State

Birth and youth—Marriage and divorce—Pupils and methods—Appearance and character—The lady and the tiger—A definition of good government—Confucius in office—Wander-years—The consolations of old age

K’ung-fu-tze—K’ung the Master, as his pupils called K’ung Ch’iu—was born at Ch’ufu, in the then kingdom of Lu and the present province of Shantung, in the year 551 B.C. Chinese legend, not to be outdone by any rival lore, tells how apparitions announced his illegitimate birth63 to his young mother, how dragons kept watch, and spirit-ladies perfumed the air, as she was delivered of him in a cave. He had, we are informed, the back of a dragon, the lips of an ox, and a mouth like the sea.64 He came of the oldest family now in existence, for (the Chinese genealogists assure us) he was derived in direct line from the great emperor Huang-ti, and was destined to be the father of a long succession of K’ungs, unbroken to this day. His descendants numbered eleven thousand males a century ago; the town of his birth is still populated almost entirely by the fruit of his loins—or those of his only son; and one of his progeny is Finance Minister of the present Chinese Government at Nanking.65

His father was seventy years old when K’ung was born,66 and died when the boy was three. Confucius worked after school to help support his mother, and took on in childhood, perhaps, that aged gravity which was to mark nearly every step of his history. Nevertheless he had time to become skilled in archery and music; to the latter he became so addicted that once, hearing an especially delectable performance, he was moved to the point of vegetarianism: for three months he did not eat meat.67 He did not immediately agree with Nietzsche about a certain incompatibility between philosophy and marriage. He married at nineteen, divorced his wife at twenty-three, and does not seem to have married again.

At twenty-two he began his career as a teacher, using his home as a schoolhouse, and charging whatever modest fee his pupils could pay. Three subjects formed the substance of his curriculum: history, poetry, and the rules of propriety. “A man’s character,” he said, “is formed by the Odes, developed by the Rites” (the rules of ceremony and courtesy), “and perfected by music.”68 Like Socrates he taught by word of mouth rather than by writing, and we know his views chiefly through the unreliable reports of his disciples. He gave to philosophers an example seldom heeded—to attack no other thinker, and waste no time in refutations. He taught no strict logical method, but he sharpened the wits of his students by gently exposing their fallacies, and making stern demands upon their alertness of mind. “When a man is not (in the habit of) saying, ‘What shall I think of this? What shall I think of this?’ I can indeed do nothing with him.”69 “I do not open up the truth to one who is not eager, nor help out any one who is not anxious to explain himself. When I have presented one corner of a subject to any one, and he cannot from it learn the other three, I do not repeat my lesson.”70 He was confident that only the wisest and the stupidest were beyond benefiting from instruction, and that no one could sincerely study humanistic philosophy without being improved in character as well as in mind. “It is not easy to find a man who has learned for three years without coming to be good.”71

He had at first only a few pupils, but soon the news went about that behind the lips of an ox and the mouth like a sea there was a kindly heart and a well-furnished mind, and in the end he could boast that three thousand young men had studied under him, and had passed from his home to important positions in the world. Some of the students—once as many as seventy—lived with him like Hindu novices with their guru; and they developed an affection that often spoke out in their remonstrances against his exposure of his person to danger, or of his good name to calumny. Though always strict with them, he loved some of them more than his own son, and wept without measure when Hwuy died. “There was Yen Hwuy,” he replied to Duke Gae, who had asked which of his pupils learned best; “he loved to learn. . . . I have not yet heard of any one who loves to learn (as he did). . . . Hwuy gave me no assistance; there was nothing that I said which did not give him delight. . . . He did not transfer his anger; he did not repeat a fault. Unfortunately, his appointed time was short, and he died; and now there is not (such another).”72 Lazy students avoided him, or received short shrift from him; for he was not above instructing a sluggard with a blow of his staff, and sending him off with merciless verity. “Hard is the case of him who will stuff himself with food the whole day, without applying his mind to anything. . . . In youth not humble as befits a junior; in manhood doing nothing worthy of being handed down; and living on to an old age—this is to be a pest.”73

He must have made a queer picture as he stood in his rooms, or, with nearly equal readiness, in the road, and taught his disciples history and poetry, manners and philosophy. The portraits that Chinese painters begot of him show him in his later years, with an almost hairless head gnarled and knotted with experience, and a face whose terrifying seriousness gave no inkling of the occasional humor and tenderness, and the keen esthetic sensitivity, that made him human despite his otherwise unbearable perfection. One of his music-teachers described him as he was in early middle age:


I have observed about Chung-ni many marks of a sage. He has river eyes and a dragon forehead—the very characteristics of Huangti. His arms are long, his back is like a tortoise, and he is nine (Chinese) feet six inches in height. . . . When he speaks he praises the ancient kings. He moves along the path of humility and courtesy. He has heard of every subject, and retains with a strong memory. His knowledge of things seems inexhaustible. Have we not in him the rising of a sage?74

Legend assigns to his figure “forty-nine remarkable peculiarities.” Once, when accident had separated him from his disciples during his wanderings, they located him at once by the report of a traveler that he had seen a monstrous-looking man with “the disconsolate appearance of a stray dog.” When they repeated this description to Confucius he was much amused. “Capital!” he said, “capital!”75

He was an old-fashioned teacher, who believed that the maintenance of distance was indispensable to pedagogy. He was nothing if not formal, and the rules of etiquette and courtesy were his meat and drink. He tried to check and balance the natural epicureanism of the instincts with the puritanism and stoicism of his doctrine. At times he appears to have indulged himself in self-appreciation. “In a hamlet of ten families,” he said, with some moderation, “there may be found one honorable and sincere as I am, but not so fond of learning.”76 “In letters I am perhaps equal to other men, but (the character of) the higher man, carrying out in his conduct what he professes, is what I have not yet attained to.”77 “If there were any of the princes who would employ me, in the course of twelve months I should have done something considerable. In three years (the government) would be perfected.”78 All in all, however, he bore his greatness with modesty. “There were four things,” his disciples assure us, “from which the Master was entirely free. He had no foregone conclusions, no arbitrary predeterminations, no obstinacy, and no egoism.”79 He called himself “a transmitter and not a maker,”80 and pretended that he was merely passing down what he had learned from the good emperors Yao and Shun. He strongly desired fame and place, but he would make no dishonorable compromises to secure or retain them; again and again he refused appointments to high office from men whose government seemed to him unjust. A man should say, he counseled his scholars, “I am not concerned that I have no place; I am concerned how I may fit myself for one. I am not concerned that I am not known; I seek to be worthy to be known.”81

Among his pupils were the sons of Mang He, one of the ministers of the Duke of Lu. Through them Confucius was introduced to the Chou court at Lo-yang; but he kept a modest distance from the officials, preferring, as we have seen, to visit the dying sage Lao-tze. Returning to Lu, Confucius found his native province so disordered with civil strife that he removed to the neighboring state of T’si, accompanied by several of his pupils. Passing through rugged and deserted mountains on their way, they were surprised to find an old woman weeping beside a grave. Confucius sent Tsze-loo to inquire the cause of her grief. “My husband’s father,” she answered, “was killed here by a tiger, and my husband also; and now my son has met the same fate.” When Confucius asked why she persisted in living in so dangerous a place, she replied: “There is no oppressive government here.” “My children,” said Confucius to his students, “remember this. Oppressive government is fiercer than a tiger.”82

The Duke of Ts’i gave him audience, and was pleased with his answer to a question about good government. “There is good government when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister; when the father is father, and the son is son/’83 The Duke offered him for his support the revenues of the town of Lin-k’ew, but Confucius refused the gift, saying that he had done nothing to deserve such remuneration. The Duke was minded to insist on retaining him as an adviser, when his chief minister dissuaded him. “These scholars,” said Gan Ying, “are impractical, and cannot be imitated. They are haughty and conceited of their own views, so that they will not be content in inferior positions. . . . This Mr. K’ung has a thousand peculiarities. It would take generations to exhaust all that he knows about the ceremonies of going up and going down.”84 Nothing came of it, and Confucius returned to Lu, to teach his pupils for fifteen years more before being called into public office.

His opportunity came when, at the turn of the century, he was made chief magistrate of the town of Chung-tu. According to Chinese tradition a veritable epidemic of honesty swept through the city; articles of value dropped in the street were left untouched, or returned to the owner.85 Promoted by Duke Ting of Lu to be Acting Superintendent of Public Works, Confucius directed a survey of the lands of the state, and introduced many improvements in agriculture. Advanced again to be Minister of Crime, his appointment, we are told, sufficed of itself to put an end to crime. “Dishonesty and dissoluteness,” say the Chinese records, “were ashamed, and hid their heads. Loyalty and good faith became the characteristics of the men, and chastity and docility those of the women. Strangers came in crowds from other states. Confucius became the idol of the people.”86

This is too good to be true, and in any case proved too good to endure. Criminals put their hidden heads together, no doubt, and laid snares for the Master’s feet. Neighboring states, say the historian, grew jealous of Lu, and fearful of its rising power. A wily minister of Ts’i suggested a stratagem to alienate the Duke of Lu from Confucius. The Duke of Ts’i sent to Ting a bevy of lovely “sing-song” girls, and one hundred and twenty still more beautiful horses. The Duke of Lu was captivated, ignored the disapproval of Confucius (who had taught him that the first principle of good government is good example), and scandalously neglected his ministers and the affairs of the state. “Master,” said Tsze-loo, “it is time for you to be going.” Reluctantly Confucius resigned, left Lu, and began thirteen years of homeless wandering. He remarked later that he had never “seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty,”87 and indeed, from some points of view, it is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.

The Master and a few faithful disciples, no longer welcome in his native state, passed now from province to province, receiving courtesies in some, undergoing dangers and privations in others. Twice they were attacked by ruffians, and once they were reduced almost to starvation, so that even Tsze-loo began to murmur that such a lot was hardly appropriate to the “higher man.” The Duke of Wei offered Confucius the leadership of his government, but Confucius, disapproving of the Duke’s principles, refused.88 Once, as the little band was traveling through Ts’i, it came upon two old men who, in disgust with the corruption of the age, had retired like Lao-tze from public affairs and taken to a life of agricultural seclusion. One of them recognized Confucius, and reproached Tsze-loo for following him. “Disorder, like a swelling flood,” said the recluse, “spreads over the whole empire; and who is he that will change it for you? Rather than follow one who withdraws from this state and that state, had you not better follow those who withdraw from the world altogether?”89 Confucius gave much thought to this rebuke, but persisted in hoping that some state would again give him an opportunity to lead the way to reform and peace.

At last, in the sixty-ninth year of Confucius, Duke Gae succeeded to the throne of Lu, and sent three officers to the philosopher, bearing appropriate presents and an invitation to return to his native state. During the five years of life that remained to him Confucius lived in simplicity and honor, often consulted by the leaders of Lu, but wisely retiring to a literary seclusion, and devoting himself to the congenial work of editing the classics, and writing the history, of his people. When the Duke of Shi asked Tsze-loo about his master, and Tsze-loo did not answer him, Confucius, hearing of it, said: “Why did you not say to him?—He is simply a man who, in his eager pursuit of knowledge, forgets his food; who in the joy (of its attainment) forgets his sorrows; and who does not perceive that old age is coming on.”90 He consoled his solitude with poetry and philosophy, and rejoiced that his instincts now accorded with his reason. “At fifteen,” he said, “I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty I stood firm. At forty I was free from doubt. At fifty I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy I could follow what my heart desired without transgressing what was right.”91

He died at the age of seventy-two. Early one morning he was heard singing a mournful song:


The great mountain must crumble,

The strong beam must break,

And the wise man wither away like a plant.

When his pupil Tsze-kung came to him he said: “No intelligent monarch arises; there is not one in the empire that will make me his master. My time is come to die.”92 He took to his couch, and after seven days he expired. His students buried him with pomp and ceremony befitting their affection for him; and building huts by his grave they lived there for three years, mourning for him as for a father. When all the others had gone Tsze-kung, who had loved him even beyond the rest, remained three years more, mourning alone by the Master’s tomb.93

2. The Nine Classics

He left behind him five volumes apparently written or edited by his own hand, and therefore known to China as the “Five Ching” or Canonical Books. First, he edited the Li-Chi, or Record of Rites, believing that these ancient rules of propriety were subtle aides to the formation and mellowing of character, and the maintenance of social order and peace. Second, he wrote appendices and commentaries for the I-Ching, or Book o) Changes, seeing in this the profoundest contribution yet made by China to that obscure realm of metaphysics which he himself had sedulously avoided in his philosophy. Third, he selected and arranged the Shi-Ching, or Book of Odes, in order to illustrate the nature of human life and the principles of morality. Fourth, he wrote the Ch’un Ch’iu, or Spring and Autumn Annals, to record with unadorned brevity the main events in the history of his own state of Lu. Fifth, and above all, he sought to inspire his pupils by gathering into a Shu-Ching, or Book of History, the most important and elevating events or legends of the early reigns, when China had been in some measure a unified empire, and its leaders, as Confucius thought, had been heroic and unselfish civilizers of the race. He did not think of his function, in these works, as that of an historian; rather he was a teacher, a moulder of youth; and he deliberately selected from the past such items as would rather inspire than disillusion his pupils; we should do him injustice if we turned to these volumes for an impartial and scientific account of Chinese history. He added to the record imaginary speeches and stories into which he poured as much as he could of his solicitude for morals and his admiration for wisdom. If he idealized the past of his country he did no more than we do with our own less ancient past; if already our earliest presidents have become sages and saints in hardly a century or two, surely to the historians of a thousand years hence they will seem as virtuous and perfect as Yao and Shun.

To these five Ching the Chinese add four Shu, or “Books” (of the Philosophers), to constitute the “Nine Classics.” First and most important of these is the Lun Yü, or Discourses and Dialogues, known to the English world, through a whim of Legge’s, as the “Analects”—i.e., the collected fragments—of Confucius. These pages are not from the Master’s hand, but record, with exemplary clarity and brevity, his opinions and pronouncements as remembered by his followers. They were compiled within a few decades of Confucius’ death, perhaps by the disciples of his disciples,94 and are the least unreliable guide that we have to his philosophy. The most interesting and instructive of all statements in the Chinese Classics appears in the fourth and fifth paragraphs* of the second Shu—a work known to the Chinese as Ta Hsüeh, or The Great Learning. The Confucian philosopher and editor, Chu Hsi, attributed these paragraphs to Confucius, and the remainder of the treatise to Tseng Ts’an, one of the younger disciples; Kea Kwei, a scholar of the first century A.D., attributed the work to K’ung Chi, grandson of Confucius; the sceptical scholars of today agree that the authorship is unknown.95 All students concur in ascribing to this grandson the third philosophical classic of China, the Chung Yung, or Doctrine of the Mean. The last of the Shu is the Book of Mencius, of which we shall speak presently. With this volume ends the classic literature, but not the classic period, of Chinese thought. There were, as we shall see, rebels and heretics of every kind to protest against that masterpiece of conservatism, the philosophy of Confucius.

3. The Agnosticism of Confucius

A fragment of logic—The philosopher and the urchins—A formula of wisdom

Let us try to do justice to this doctrine; it is the view of life that we shall take when we round out our first half-century, and for all that we know it may be wiser than the poetry of our youth. If we ourselves are heretics and young, this is the philosophy that we must marry to our own in order that our half-truths may beget some understanding.

We shall not find here a system of philosophy—i.e., a consistent structure of logic, metaphysics, ethics and politics dominated by one idea (like the palaces of Nebuchadrezzar, which bore on every brick the name of the ruler). Confucius taught the art of reasoning not through rules or syllogisms, but by the perpetual play of his keen mind upon the opinions of his pupils; when they went out from his school they knew nothing about logic, but they could think clearly and to the point. Clarity and honesty of thought and expression were the first lessons of the Master. “The whole end of speech is to be understood”96—a lesson not always remembered by philosophy. “When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not, to admit the fact—this is knowledge.”97 Obscurity of thought and insincere inaccuracy of speech seemed to him national calamities. If a prince who was not in actual fact and power a prince should cease to be called a prince, if a father who was not a fatherly father should cease to be called a father, if an unfilial son should cease to be called a son—then men might be stirred to reform abuses too often covered up with words. Hence when Tsze-loo told Confucius, “The prince of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government; what will you consider the first thing to be done?” he answered, to the astonishment of prince and pupil, “What is necessary is to rectify names.”98

Since his dominating passion was the application of philosophy to conduct and government, Confucius avoided metaphysics, and tried to turn the minds of his followers from all recondite or celestial concerns. Though he made occasional mention of “Heaven” and prayer,99 and counseled his disciples to observe sedulously the traditional rites of ancestor worship and national sacrifice,100 he was so negative in his answers to theological questions that modern commentators agree in calling him an agnostic.101 When Tsze-kung asked him, “Do the dead have knowledge, or are they without knowledge?” Confucius refused to make any definite reply.102 When Ke Loo asked about “serving the spirits” (of the dead), the Master responded: “While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?” Ke Loo asked: “I venture to ask about death?” and was answered: “While you do not know life, how can you know about death?”103 When Fan Ch’e inquired “what constituted wisdom?” Confucius said: “To give one’s self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.”104 His disciples tell us that “the subjects on which the Master did not talk were extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.”105 They were much disturbed by this philosophic modesty, and doubtless wished that the Master would solve for them the mysteries of heaven. The Book of Lieh-tze tells with glee the fable of the street-urchins who ridiculed the Master when he confessed his inability to answer their simple question—“Is the sun nearer to the earth at dawn, when it is larger, or at noon, when it is hotter? “106 The only metaphysics that Confucius would recognize was the search for unity in all phenomena, and the effort to find some stabilizing harmony between the laws of right conduct and the regularities of nature. “Tsze,” he said to one of his favorites, “you think, I suppose, that I am one who learns many things and keeps them in his memory?” Tsze-kung replied, “Yes, but perhaps it is not so?” “No,” was the answer; “I seek unity, all-pervading.”107 This, after all, is the essence of philosophy.

His master passion was for morality. The chaos of his time seemed to him a moral chaos, caused perhaps by the weakening of the ancient faith and the spread of Sophist scepticism as to right and wrong; it was to be cured not by a return to the old beliefs, but by an earnest search for more complete knowledge, and a moral regeneration based upon a soundly regulated family life. The Confucian program is expressed pithily and profoundly in the famous paragraphs of The Great Learning:


The ancients who wished to illustrate the highest virtue throughout the empire first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their own selves. Wishing to cultivate their own selves, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things.

Things being investigated, knowledge became complete. Their knowledge being complete, their thoughts were sincere. Their thoughts being sincere, their hearts were then rectified. Their hearts being rectified, their own selves were cultivated. Their own selves being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their states were rightly governed. Their states being rightly governed, the whole empire was made tranquil and happy.108

This is the keynote and substance of the Confucian philosophy; one might forget all other words of the Master and his disciples, and yet carry away with these “the essence of the matter,” and a complete guide to life. The world is at war, says Confucius, because its constituent states are improperly governed; these are improperly governed because no amount of legislation can take the place of the natural social order provided by the family; the family is in disorder, and fails to provide this natural social order, because men forget that they cannot regulate their families if they do not regulate themselves; they fail to regulate themselves because they have not rectified their hearts—i.e., they have not cleansed their own souls of disorderly desires; their hearts are not rectified because their thinking is insincere, doing scant justice to reality and concealing rather than revealing their own natures; their thinking is insincere because they let their wishes discolor the facts and determine their conclusions, instead of seeking to extend their knowledge to the utmost by impartially investigating the nature of things. Let men seek impartial knowledge, and their thinking will become sincere; let their thoughts be sincere and their hearts will be cleansed of disorderly desires; let their hearts be so cleansed, and their own selves will be regulated; let their own selves be regulated, and their families will automatically be regulated—not by virtuous sermonizing or passionate punishments, but by the silent power of example itself; let the family be so regulated with knowledge, sincerity and example, and it will give forth such spontaneous social order that successful government will once more be a feasible thing; let the state maintain internal justice and tranquillity, and all the world will be peaceful and happy.—It is a counsel of perfection, and forgets that man is a beast of prey; but like Christianity it offers us a goal to strike at, and a ladder to climb. It is one of the golden texts of philosophy.

4. The Way of the Higher Man

Another portrait of the sage—Elements of character—The Golden Rule

Wisdom, therefore, begins at home, and the foundation of society is a disciplined individual in a disciplined family. Confucius agreed with Goethe that self-development is the root of social development; and when Tsze-loo asked him, “What constitutes the Higher Man?” he replied, “The cultivation of himself with reverential care.”109 Here and there, throughout the dialogues, we find him putting together, piece by piece, his picture of the ideal man—a union of philosopher and saint producing the sage. The Superman of Confucius is composed of three virtues severally selected as supreme by Socrates, Nietzsche and Christ: intelligence, courage, and good will. “The Higher Man is anxious lest he should not get truth; he is not anxious lest poverty should come upon him. . . . He is catholic, not partisan. . . . He requires that in what he says there should be nothing inaccurate.”110 But he is no mere intellect, not merely a scholar or a lover of knowledge; he has character as well as intelligence. “Where the solid qualities are in excess of accomplishments, we have rusticity; where the accomplishments are in excess of the solid qualities, we have the manners of a clerk. When the accomplishments and solid qualities are equally blended, we then have the man of complete virtue.”111 Intelligence is intellect with its feet on the earth.

The foundation of character is sincerity. “Is it not just an entire sincerity which marks the Higher Man?”112 “He acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions.”113 “In archery we have something like the way of the Higher Man. When the archer misses the center of the target, he turns round and seeks for the cause of his failure in himself.”114 “What the Higher Man seeks is in himself; what the lower man seeks is in others. . . . The Higher Man is distressed by his want of ability, not . . . by men’s not knowing him”; and yet “he dislikes the thought of his name not being mentioned after his death.”115 He “is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. . . . He seldom speaks; when he does he is sure to hit the point. . . . That wherein the Higher Man cannot be equaled is simply this: his work, which other men cannot see.”116 He is moderate in word and deed; in everything “the Higher Man conforms with the path of the mean.”117 For “there is no end of things by which man is affected; and when his likings and dislikings are not subject to regulation, he is changed into the nature of things as they come before him.”118* “The Higher Man moves so as to make his movements in all generations a universal path; he behaves so as to make his conduct in all generations a universal law; he speaks so as to make his words in all generations a universal norm.’120† He accepts completely the Golden Rule, which is here laid down explicitly four centuries before Hillel and five centuries before Christ: “Chung-kung asked about perfect virtue. The Master said, . . . ‘Not to do unto others as you would not wish done unto yourself.’122 The principle is stated again and again, always negatively, and once in a single word. “Tsze-kung asked, ‘Is there one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one’s life?’ The Master said, ‘Is not reciprocity such a word?’”123 Nevertheless he did not wish, like Lao-tze, to return good for evil; and when one of his pupils asked him, “What do you say concerning the principle that injury should be recompensed with kindness?” he replied, more sharply than was his custom: “With what, then, will you recompense kindness? Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.”124

The very basis of the Higher Man’s character is an overflowing sympathy towards all men. He is not angered by the excellences of other men; when he sees men of worth he thinks of equaling them; when he sees men of low worth he turns inward and examines himself;124a for there are few faults that we do not share with our neighbors. He pays no attention to slander or violent speech.124b He is courteous and affable to all, but he does not gush forth indiscriminate praise.125 He treats his inferiors without contempt, and his superiors without seeking to court their favor.126 He is grave in deportment, since men will not take seriously one who is not serious with them; he is slow in words and earnest in conduct; he is not quick with his tongue, or given to clever repartee; he is earnest because he has work to do—and this is the secret of his unaffected dignity.127 He is courteous even to his familiars, but maintains his reserve towards all, even his son.128 Confucius sums up the qualities of his “Higher Man”—so similar to the Megalopsychos, or “Great-Minded Man,” of Aristotle—in these words:


The Higher Man has nine things which are subjects with him of thoughtful consideration. In regard to the use of his eyes he is anxious to see clearly. . . . In regard to his countenance he is anxious that it should be benign. In regard to his demeanor he is anxious that it should be respectful. In regard to his speech he is anxious that it should be sincere. In regard to his doing of business he is anxious that it should be reverently careful. In regard to what he doubts about, he is anxious to question others. When he is angry he thinks of the difficulties his anger may involve him in. When he sees gain to be got he thinks of righteousness.129

5. Confucian Politics

Popular sovereignty—Government by example—The decentralization of wealth—Music and manners—Socialism and revolution

None but such men, in the judgment of Confucius, could restore the family and redeem the state. Society rests upon the obedience of the children to their parents, and of the wife to her husband; when these go, chaos comes.130 Only one thing is higher than this law of obedience, and that is the moral law. “In serving his parents (a son) may remonstrate with them, but gently; when he sees that they do not incline to follow (his advice), he shows an increased degree of reverence, but does not abandon (his purpose). . . . When the command is wrong, a son should resist his father, and a minister should resist his August Master.”131 Here was one root of Mencius’ doctrine of the divine right of revolution.

There was not much of the revolutionist in Confucius; perhaps he suspected that the inheritors of a revolution are made of the same flesh as the men whom it deposed. But he wrote bravely enough in the Book of Odes: “Before the sovereigns of the Shang (Dynasty) had lost (the hearts of) the people, they were the mates of God. Take warning from the house of Shang. The great decree is not easily preserved.”132 The people are the actual and proper source of political sovereignty, for any government that does not retain their confidence sooner or later falls.


Tsze-kung asked about government. The Master said, “(The requisites of government) are three: that there should be sufficiency of food, sufficiency of military equipment, and the confidence of the people in their ruler.” Tsze-kung said, “If it cannot be helped, and one of these must be dispensed with, which of the three should be foregone first?” “The military equipment,” said the Master. Tsze-kung asked again, “If it cannot be helped, and one of the remaining two must be dispensed with, which of them should be foregone?” The Master answered, “Part with the food. From of old, death has been the lot of all men; but if the people have no faith (in their rulers) there is no standing (for the state).”133

The first principle of government, in the view of Confucius, is as the first principle of character—sincerity. Therefore the prime instrument of government is good example: the ruler must be an eminence of model behavior, from which, by prestige imitation, right conduct will pour down upon his people.


Ke K’ang asked Confucius about government, saying, “What do you say to killing the unprincipled for the good of the principled?” Confucius replied, “Sir, in carrying on your government, why should you use killing at all? Let your (evinced) desires be for what is good, and the people will be good. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows across it. . . . He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place, and all the stars turn toward it. . . . Ke K’ang asked how to cause the people to reverence (their ruler), to be faithful to him, and to urge themselves to virtue. The Master said, “Let him preside over them with gravity—then they will reverence him. Let him be filial and kind to all—then they will be faithful to him. Let him advance the good and teach the incompetent—then they will eagerly seek to be virtuous.”134

As good example is the first instrument of government, good appointments are the second. “Employ the upright and put aside the crooked: in this way the crooked can be made to be upright.”135 “The administration of government,” says the Doctrine of the Mean, “lies in (getting proper) men. Such men are to be got by means of (the ruler’s) own character.”136 What would not a ministry of Higher Men do, even in one generation, to cleanse the state and guide the people to a loftier level of civilization?137 First of all, they would avoid foreign relations as much as possible, and seek to make their state so independent of outside supplies that it would never be tempted to war for them. They would reduce the luxury of courts, and seek a wide distribution of wealth, for “the centralization of wealth is the way to scatter the people, and letting it be scattered among them is the way to collect the people.”138 They would decrease punishments, and increase public instruction; for “there being instruction, there will be no distinction of classes.”139 The higher subjects would be forbidden to the mediocre, but music would be taught to all. “When one has mastered music completely, and regulates his heart and mind accordingly, the natural, correct, gentle and sincere heart is easily developed, and joy attends its development. . . . The best way to improve manners and customs is to . . . pay attention to the composition of the music played in the country.* . . . Manners and music should not for a moment be neglected by any one. . . . Benevolence is akin to music, and righteousness to good manners.”140

Good manners, too, must be a care of the government, for when manners decay the nation decays with them. Imperceptibly the rules of propriety form at least the outward character,141 and add to the sage the graciousness of the gentleman; we become what we do. Politically “the usages of propriety serve as dykes for the people against evil excesses”; and “he who thinks the old embankments useless, and destroys them, is sure to suffer from the desolation caused by overflowing water”:142 one almost hears the stern voice of the angry Master echoing those words today from that Hall of the Classics where once all his words were engraved in stone, and which revolution has left desecrated and forlorn.

And yet Confucius too had his Utopias and dreams, and might have sympathized at times with men who, convinced that the dynasty had lost “the great decree” or “mandate of Heaven,” dragged down one system of order in the hope of rearing a better one on the ruins. In the end he became a socialist, and gave his fancy rein:


When the Great Principle (of the Great Similarity) prevails, the whole world becomes a republic; they elect men of talents, virtue and ability; they talk about sincere agreement, and cultivate universal peace. Thus men do not regard as their parents only their own parents, nor treat as their children only their own children. A competent provision is secured for the aged till their death, employment for the middle-aged, and the means of growing up for the young. The widowers, widows, orphans, childless men, and those who are disabled by disease, are all sufficiently maintained. Each man has his rights, and each woman her individuality safeguarded. They produce wealth, disliking that it should be thrown away upon the ground, but not wishing to keep it for their own gratification. Disliking idleness they labor, but not alone with a view to their own advantage. In this way selfish schemings are repressed and find no way to arise. Robbers, filchers and rebellious traitors do not exist. Hence the outer doors remain open, and are not shut. This is the state of what I call the Great Similarity.143

6. The Influence of Confucius

The Confucian scholars—Their victory over the Legalists—Defects of Confucianism—The contemporaneity of Confucius

The success of Confucius was posthumous, but complete. His philosophy had struck a practical and political note that endeared it to the Chinese after death had removed the possibility of his insisting upon its realization. Since men of letters never quite reconcile themselves to being men of letters, the literati of the centuries after Confucius attached themselves sedulously to his doctrine as a road to influence and public employment, and created a class of Confucian scholars destined to become the most powerful group in the empire. Schools sprang up here and there for the teaching of the Master’s philosophy as handed down by his disciples, developed by Mencius, and emended by a thousand pundits in the course of time; and these schools, as the intellectual centers of China, kept civilization alive during centuries of political collapse, much as the monks preserved some measure of ancient culture, and some degree of social order, during the Dark Ages that followed the fall of Rome.

A rival school, the “Legalists,” disputed for a while this leadership of Confucian thought in the political world, and occasionally moulded the policy of the state. To make government depend upon the good example of the governors and the inherent goodness of the governed, said the Legalists, was to take a considerable risk; history had offered no superabundance of precedents for the successful operation of these idealistic principles. Not men but laws should rule, they argued; and laws must be enforced until, becoming a second nature to a society, they are obeyed without force. The people are not intelligent enough to rule themselves well; they prosper best under an aristocracy. Even tradesmen are not too intelligent, but pursue their interests very often to the detriment of the state; perhaps, said some of the Legalists, it would be wiser for the state to socialize capital, monopolize trade, and prevent the manipulation of prices and the concentration of wealth.144 These were ideas that were destined to appear again and again in the history of Chinese government.

In the long run the philosophy of Confucius triumphed. We shall see later how the mighty Shih Huang-ti, with a Legalist for his prime minister, sought to end the influence of Confucius by ordering that all existing Confucian literature should be burned. But the power of the word proved stronger than that of the sword; the books which the “First Emperor” sought to destroy became holy and precious through his enmity, and men died as martyrs in the effort to preserve them. When Shih Huang-ti and his brief dynasty had passed away, a wiser emperor, Wu Ti, brought the Confucian literature out of hiding, gave office to its students, and strengthened the Han Dynasty by introducing the ideas and methods of Confucius into the education of Chinese youth and statesmanship. Sacrifices were decreed in honor of Confucius; the texts of the Classics were by imperial command engraved on stone, and became the official religion of the state. Rivaled at times by the influence of Taoism, and eclipsed for a while by Buddhism, Confucianism was restored and exalted by the T’ang Dynasty, and the great T’ai Tsung ordered that a temple should be erected to Confucius, and sacrifices offered in it by scholars and officials, in every town and village of the empire. During the Sung Dynasty a virile school of “Neo-Confucians” arose, whose innumerable commentaries on the Classics spread the philosophy of the Master, in varied dilutions, throughout the Far East, and stimulated a philosophical development in Japan. From the rise of the Han Dynasty to the fall of the Manchus—i.e., for two thousand years—the doctrine of Confucius moulded and dominated the Chinese mind.

The history of China might be written in terms of that influence. For generation after generation the writings of the Master were the texts of the official schools, and nearly every lad who came through those schools had learned those texts by heart. The stoic conservatism of the ancient sage sank almost into the blood of the people, and gave to the nation, and to its individuals, a dignity and profundity unequaled elsewhere in the world or in history. With the help of this philosophy China developed a harmonious community life, a zealous admiration for learning and wisdom, and a quiet and stable culture which made Chinese civilization strong enough to survive every invasion, and to remould every invader in its own image. Only in Christianity and in Buddhism can we find again so heroic an effort to transmute into decency the natural brutality of men. And today, as then, no better medicine could be prescribed for any people suffering from the disorder generated by an intellectualist education, a decadent moral code, and a weakened fibre of individual and national character, than the absorption of the Confucian philosophy by the nation’s youth.

But that philosophy could not be a complete nourishment in itself. It was well fitted to a nation struggling out of chaos and weakness into order and strength, but it would prove a shackle upon a country compelled by international competition to change and grow. The rules of propriety, destined to form character and social order, became a strait-jacket forcing almost every vital action into a prescribed and unaltered mould. There was something prim and Puritan about Confucianism which checked too thoroughly the natural and vigorous impulses of mankind; its virtue was so complete as to bring sterility. No room was left in it for pleasure and adventure, and little for friendship and love. It helped to keep woman in supine debasement,145 and its cold perfection froze the nation into a conservatism as hostile to progress as it was favorable to peace.

We must not blame all this upon Confucius; one cannot be expected to do the thinking of twenty centuries. We ask of a thinker only that, as the result of a lifetime of thought, he shall in some way illuminate our path to understanding. Few men have done this more certainly than Confucius. As we read him, and perceive how little of him must be erased today because of the growth of knowledge and the change of circumstance, how soundly he offers us guidance even in our contemporary world, we forget his platitudes and his unbearable perfection, and join his pious grandson, K’ung Chi in that superlative eulogy which began the deification of Confucius:


Chung-ni (Confucius) handed down the doctrines of Yao and Shun as if they had been his ancestors, and elegantly displayed the regulations of Wen and Wu, taking them as his model. Above he harmonized with the times of heaven, and below he was conformed to the water and land.

He may be compared to heaven and earth in their supporting and containing, their overshadowing and curtaining, all things. He may be compared to the four seasons in their alternating progress, and to the sun and moon in their successive shining. . . .

All-embracing and vast, he is like heaven. Deep and active as a fountain, he is like the abyss. He is seen, and the people all reverence him; he speaks, and the people all believe him; he acts, and the people are all pleased with him.

Therefore his fame overspreads the Middle Kingdom, and extends to all barbarous tribes. Wherever ships and carriages reach, wherever the strength of man penetrates, wherever the heavens overshadow and the earth sustains, wherever the sun and moon shine, wherever frosts and dews fall—all who have blood and breath unfeignedly honor and love him. Hence it is said: “He is the equal of Heaven.”146

III. SOCIALISTS AND ANARCHISTS

The two hundred years that followed upon Confucius were centuries of lively controversy and raging heresy. Having discovered the pleasures of philosophy, some men, like Hui Sze and Kung Sun Lung, played with logic, and invented paradoxes of reasoning as varied and subtle as Zeno’s.147 Philosophers flocked to the city of Lo-yang as, in the same centuries, they were flocking to Benares and Athens; and they enjoyed in the Chinese capital all that freedom of speech and thought which made Athens the intellectual center of the Mediterranean world. Sophists called Tsung-heng-kia, or “Crisscross Philosophers,” crowded the capital to teach all and sundry the art of persuading any man to anything.148 To Lo-yang came Mencius, inheritor of the mantle of Confucius, Chuang-tze, greatest of Lao-tze’s followers, Hsün-tze, the apostle of original evil, and Mo Ti, the prophet of universal love.

1. Mo Ti, Altruist

An early logician—Christian—and pacifist

“Mo Ti,” said his enemy, Mencius, “loved all men, and would gladly wear out his whole being from head to heel for the benefit of mankind.149

He was a native of Lu, like Confucius, and flourished shortly after the passing of the sage. He condemned the impracticality of Confucius’ thought, and offered to replace it by exhorting all men to love one another. He was among the earliest of Chinese logicians, and the worst of Chinese reasoners. He stated the problem of logic with great simplicity:


These are what I call the Three Laws of Reasoning:

1. Where to find the foundation. Find it in the study of the experiences of the wisest men of the past.

2. How to take a general survey of it? Examine the facts of the actual experience of the people.

3. How to apply it? Put it into law and governmental policy, and see whether or not it is conducive to the welfare of the state and the people.150

On this basis Mo Ti proceeded to prove that ghosts and spirits are real, for many people have seen them. He objected strongly to Confucius’ coldly impersonal view of heaven, and argued for the personality of God. Like Pascal, he thought religion a good wager: if the ancestors to whom we sacrifice hear us, we have made a good bargain; if they are quite dead, and unconscious of our offerings, the sacrifice gives us an opportunity to “gather our relatives and neighbors and participate in the enjoyment of the sacrificial victuals and drinks.”151

In the same manner, reasons Mo Ti, universal love is the only solution of the social problem; for if it were applied there is no doubt that it would bring Utopia. “Men in general loving one another, the strong would not make prey of the weak, the many would not plunder the few, the rich would not insult the poor, the noble would not be insolent to the mean, and the deceitful would not impose upon the simple.”152 Selfishness is the source of all evil, from the acquisitiveness of the child to the conquest of an empire. Mo Ti marvels that a man who steals a pig is universally condemned and generally punished, while a man who invades and appropriates a kingdom is a hero to his people and a model to posterity.153 From this pacifism Mo Ti advanced to such vigorous criticism of the state that his doctrine verged on anarchism, and frightened the authorities.154 Once, his biographers assure us, when the State Engineer of the Kingdom of Chu was about to invade the state of Sung in order to test a new siege ladder which he had invented, Mo Ti dissuaded him by preaching to him his doctrine of universal love and peace. “Before I met you,” said the Engineer, “I had wanted to conquer the state of Sung. But since I have seen you I would not have it even if it were given to me without resistance but with no just cause.” “If so,” replied Mo Ti, “it is as if I had already given you the state of Sung. Do persist in your righteous course, and I will give you the whole world.”155

The Confucian scholars, as well as the politicians of Lo-yang, met these amiable proposals with laughter.156 Nevertheless Mo Ti had his followers, and for two centuries his views became the religion of a pacifistic sect. Two of his disciples, Sung Ping and Kung Sun Lung, waged active campaigns for disarmament.157 Han Fei, the greatest critic of his age, attacked the movement from what we might call a Nietzchean standpoint, arguing that until men had actually sprouted the wings of universal love, war would continue to be the arbiter of nations. When Shih Huang-ti ordered his famous “burning of the books,” the literature of Mohism was cast into the flames along with the volumes of Confucius; and unlike the writings and doctrines of the Master, the new religion did not survive the conflagration.158

2. Yang Chu, Egoist

An epicurean determinist—The case for wickedness

Meanwhile a precisely opposite doctrine had found vigorous expression among the Chinese. Yang Chu, of whom we know nothing except through the mouths of his enemies,159 announced paradoxically that life is full of suffering, and that its chief purpose is pleasure. There is no god, said Yang, and no after-life; men are the helpless puppets of the blind natural forces that made them, and that gave them their unchosen ancestry and their inalienable character.160 The wise man will accept this fate without complaint, but will not be fooled by all the nonsense of Confucius and Mo Ti about inherent virtue, universal love, and a good name: morality is a deception practised upon the simple by the clever; universal love is the delusion of children who do not know the universal enmity that forms the law of life; and a good name is a posthumous bauble which the fools who paid so dearly for it cannot enjoy. In life the good suffer like the bad, and the wicked seem to enjoy themselves more keenly than the good.161 The wisest men of antiquity were not moralists and rulers, as Confucius supposed, but sensible sensualists who had the good fortune to antedate the legislators and the philosophers, and who enjoyed the pleasures of every impulse. It is true that the wicked sometimes leave a bad name behind them, but this is a matter that does not disturb their bones. Consider, says Yang Chu, the fate of the good and the evil:


All agree in considering Shun, Yü, Chou-kung and Confucius to have been the most admirable of men, and Chieh and Chou the most wicked.*

Now Shun had to plough the ground on the south of the Ho, and to play the potter by the Lei lake. His four limbs had not even a temporary rest; for his mouth and belly he could not even find pleasant food and warm clothing. No love of his parents rested upon him; no affection of his brothers and sisters. . . . When Yao at length resigned to him the throne, he was advanced in age; his wisdom was decayed; his son Shang-chun proved without ability; and he had finally to resign the throne to Yü. Sorrowfully came he to his death. Of all mortals never was one whose life was so worn out and empoisoned as his. . . .

All the energies of Yü were spent on his labors with the land; a child was born to him, but he could not foster it; he passed his door without entering; his body became bent and withered; the skin of his hands and feet became thick and callous. When at length Shun resigned to him the throne, he lived in a low mean house, though his sacrificial apron and cap were elegant. Sorrowfully came he to his death. Of all mortals never was one whose life was so saddened and embittered as his. . . .

Confucius understood the ways of the ancient sovereigns and kings. He responded to the invitations of the princes of his time. The tree was cut down over him in Sung; the traces of his footsteps were removed in Wei; he was reduced to extremity in Shang and Chou; he was surrounded in Ch’an and Ts’i; . . . he was disgraced by Yang Hu. Sorrowfully came he to his death. Of all mortals never was one whose life was so agitated and hurried as his.

These four sages, during their lives, had not a single day’s joy. Since their death they have had a fame that will last through myriads of ages. But that fame is what no one who cares for what is real would chose. Celebrate them—they do not know it. Reward them—they do not know it. Their fame is no more to them than to the trunk of a tree, or a clod of earth.

(On the other hand) Chieh came into the accumulated wealth of many generations; to him belonged the honor of the royal seat; his wisdom was enough to enable him to set at defiance all below; his power was enough to shake the world. He indulged the pleasures to which his eyes and ears prompted him; he carried out whatever it came into his thoughts to do. Brightly came he to his death. Of all mortals never was one whose life was so luxurious and dissipated as his. Chou (Hsin) came into the accumulated wealth of many generations; to him belonged the honor of the royal seat; his power enabled him to do whatever he would; . . . he indulged his feelings in all his palaces; he gave the reins to his lusts through the long night; he never made himself bitter by the thought of propriety and righteousness. Brightly came he to his destruction. Of all mortals never was one whose life was as abandoned as his.

These two villains, during their lives, had the joy of gratifying their desires. Since their death, they have had the (evil) fame of folly and tyranny. But the reality (of enjoyment) is what no fame can give. Reproach them—they do not know it. Praise them—they do not know it. Their (ill) fame is no more to them than the trunk of a tree, or a clod of earth.162

How different all this is from Confucius! Again we suspect that time, who is a reactionary, has preserved for us the most respectable of Chinese thinkers, and has swallowed nearly all the rest in the limbo of forgotten souls. And perhaps time is right: humanity itself could not long survive if many were of Yan Chu’s mind. The only answer to him is that society cannot exist if the individual does not cooperate with his followers in the give and take, the bear and forbear, of moral restraints; and the developed individual cannot exist without society; our life depends upon those very limitations that constrain us. Some historians have found in the spread of such egoist philosophies part cause of that disintegration which marked Chinese society in the fourth and third centuries before Christ.163 No wonder that Mencius, the Dr. Johnson of his age, raised his voice in scandalized protest against the epicureanism of Yang Chu, as well as against the idealism of Mo Ti.


The words of Yang Chu and Mo Ti fill the world. If you listen to people’s discourses about it, you will find that they have adopted the views of the one or the other. Now Yang’s principle is, “Each for himself”—which does not acknowledge the claims of the sovereign. Mo’s principle is, “To love all equally”—which does not acknowledge the peculiar affection due to a father. To acknowledge neither king nor father is to be in the state of a beast. If their principles are not stopped, and the principles of Confucius set forth, their perverse speaking will delude the people, and stop up the path of benevolence and righteousness.

I am alarmed by these things, and address myself to the defense of the doctrines of the former sages, and to oppose Yang and Mo. I drive away their licentious expressions, so that such perverse speakers may not be able to show themselves. When sages shall rise up again, they will not change my words.164

3. Mencius, Mentor of Princes

A model mother—A philosopher among kings—Are men by nature good?—Single tax—Mencius and the communists—The profit-motive—The right of revolution

Mencius, destined to be second in fame to Confucius alone in the rich annals of Chinese philosophy, belonged to the ancient family of Mang; his name Mang Ko was changed by an imperial decree to Mang-tze—i.e., Mang the Master or Philosopher; and the Latin-trained scholars of Europe transformed him into Mencius, as they had changed K’ung-fu-tze into Confucius.

We know the mother of Mencius almost as intimately as we know him; for Chinese historians, who have made her famous as a model of maternity, recount many pretty stories of her. Thrice, we are told, she changed her residence on his account: once because they lived near a cemetery, and the boy began to behave like an undertaker; another time because they lived near a slaughterhouse, and the boy imitated too well the cries of the slain animals; and again because they lived near a market place, and the boy began to act the part of a tradesman; finally she found a home near a school, and was satisfied. When the boy neglected his studies she cut through, in his presence, the thread of her shuttle; and when he asked why she did so destructive a thing, she explained that she was but imitating his own negligence, and the lack of continuity in his studies and his development. He became an assiduous student, married, resisted the temptation to divorce his wife, opened a school of philosophy, gathered a famous collection of students about him, and received invitations from various princes to come and discuss with them his theories of government. He hesitated to leave his mother in her old age, but she sent him off with a speech that endeared her to all Chinese males, and may have been composed by one of them.


It does not belong to a woman to determine anything of herself, but she is subject to the rule of the three obediences. When young she has to obey her parents; when married she has to obey her husband; when a widow she has to obey her son. You are a man in your full maturity, and I am old. Do you act as your conviction of righteousness tells you you ought to do, and I will act according to the rule which belongs to me. Why should you be anxious about me?165

He went, for the itch to teach is a part of the itch to rule; scratch the one and find the other. Like Voltaire, Mencius preferred monarchy to democracy, on the ground that in democracy it is necessary to educate all if the government is to succeed, while under monarchy it is only required that the philosopher should bring one man—the king—to wisdom, in order to produce the perfect state. “Correct what is wrong in the prince’s mind. Once rectify the prince, and the kingdom will be settled.”166 He went first to Ch’i, and tried to rectify its Prince Hsuan; he accepted an honorary office, but refused the salary that went with it; and soon finding that the Prince was not interested in philosophy, he withdrew to the small principality of T’ang, whose ruler became a sincere but ineffectual pupil. Mencius returned to Ch’i, and proved his growth in wisdom and understanding by accepting a lucrative office from Prince Hsuan. When, during these comfortable years, his mother died, he buried her with such pomp that his pupils were scandalized; he explained to them that it was only a sign of his filial devotion. Some years later Hsuan set out upon a war of conquest, and, resenting Mencius’ untimely pacifism, terminated his employment. Hearing that the Prince of Sung had expressed his intention of ruling like a philosopher, Mencius journeyed to his court, but found that the report had been exaggerated. Like the men invited to an ancient wedding-feast, the various princes had many excuses for not being rectified. “I have an infirmity,” said one of them; “I love valor.” “I have an infirmity,” said another; “I am fond of wealth.”167 Mencius retired from public life, and gave his declining years to the instruction of students and the composition of a work in which he described his conversations with the royalty of his time. We cannot tell to what extent these should be classed with those of Walter Savage Landor; nor do we know whether this composition was the work of Mencius himself, or of his pupils, or of neither, or of both.168 We can only say that the Book of Mencius is one of the most highly honored of China’s philosophical classics.

His doctrine is as severely secular as that of Confucius. There is little here about logic, or epistemology, or metaphysics; the Confucians left such subtleties to the followers of Lao-tze, and confined themselves to moral and political speculation. What interests Mencius is the charting of the good life, and the establishment of government by good men. His basic claim is that men are by nature good,169 and that the social problem arises not out of the nature of men but out of the wickedness of governments. Hence philosophers must become kings, or the kings of this world must become philosophers.


“Now, if your Majesty will institute a government whose action will be benevolent, this will cause all the officers in the kingdom to wish to stand in your Majesty’s court, and all the farmers to wish to plough in your Majesty’s fields, and all the merchants to wish to store their goods in your Majesty’s market-places, and all traveling strangers to wish to make their tours on your Majesty’s roads, and all throughout the Kingdom who feel aggrieved by their rulers to wish to come and complain to your Majesty. And when they are so bent, who will be able to keep them back?”

The King said, “I am stupid, and not able to advance to this.”170

The good ruler would war not against other countries, but against the common enemy—poverty, for it is out of poverty and ignorance that crime and disorder come. To punish men for crimes committed as the result of a lack of opportunities offered them for employment is a dastardly trap to set for the people.171 A government is responsible for the welfare of its people, and should regulate economic processes accordingly.172 It should tax chiefly the ground itself, rather than what is built or done on it;173 it should abolish all tariffs, and should develop universal and compulsory education as the soundest basis of a civilized development; “good laws are not equal to winning the people by good instruction.”174 “That whereby man differs from the lower animals is but small. Most people throw it away; only superior men preserve it.”175

We perceive how old are the political problems, attitudes and solutions of our enlightened age when we learn that Mencius was rejected by the princes for his radicalism, and was scorned for his conservatism by the socialists and communists of his time. When the “shrike-tongued barbarian of the south,” Hsu Hsing, raised the flag of the proletarian dictatorship, demanding that workingmen should be made the heads of the state (“The magistrates,” said Hsu, “should be laboring men”), and many of “The Learned,” then as now, flocked to the new standard, Mencius rejected the idea scornfully, and argued that government should be in the hands of educated men.”176 But he denounced the profit-motive in human society, and rebuked Sung K’ang for proposing to win the kings to pacifism by persuading them, in modern style, of the unprofitableness of war.


Your aim is great, but your argument is not good. If you, starting from the point of profit, offer your persuasive counsels to the kings of Ch’in and Ch’i, and if those kings are pleased with the consideration of profit so as to stop the movements of their armies, then all belonging to those armies will rejoice in the cessation (of war), and will find their pleasures in (the pursuit of) profit. Ministers will serve the sovereign for the profit of which they cherish the thought; sons will serve their fathers, and younger brothers will serve their elder brothers, from the same consideration; and the issue will be that, abandoning benevolence and righteousness, sovereign and minister, father and son, younger brother and elder, will carry on all their intercourse with this thought of profit cherished in their breasts. But never has there been such a state (of society), without ruin being the result of it.177

He recognized the right of revolution, and preached it in the face of kings. He denounced war as a crime, and shocked the hero-worshipers of his time by writing: “There are men who say: ‘I am skilful at marshaling troops, I am skilful at conducting a battle.’ They are great criminals.”178 “There has never been a good war,” he said.179 He condemned the luxury of the courts, and sternly rebuked the king who fed his dogs and swine while famine was consuming his people.180 When a king argued that he could not prevent famine, Mencius told him that he should resign.181 “The people,” he taught, “are the most important element (in a nation); . . . the sovereign is the lighest”;182 and the people have the right to depose their rulers, even, now and then, to kill them.


The King Hsuan asked about the high ministers. . . . Mencius answered: “If the princes have great faults, they ought to remonstrate with him; and if he do not listen to them after they have done so again and again, they ought to dethrone him.” . . . Mencius proceeded: “Suppose that the chief criminal judge could not regulate the officers (under him), how would you deal with him?” The King said, “Dismiss him.” Mencius again said: “If within the four borders (of your kingdom) there is not good government, what is to be done?” The King looked to the right and left, and spoke of other matters. . . . The King Hsuan asked, “Was it so that T’ang banished Chieh, and that King Wu smote Chou (Hsin)?” Mencius replied, “It is so in the records.” The King said, “May a minister put his sovereign to death?” Mencius said: “He who outrages the benevolence (proper to his nature) is called a robber; he who outrages righteousness is called a ruffian. The robber and the ruffian we call a mere fellow. I have heard of the cutting off of the fellow Chou, but I have not heard of putting a sovereign to death.”183

It was brave doctrine, and had much to do with the establishment of the principle, recognized by the kings as well as the people of China, that a ruler who arouses the enmity of his people has lost the “mandate of Heaven,” and may be removed. It is not to be marveled at that Hung-wu, founder of the Ming Dynasty, having read with great indignation the conversations of Mencius with King Hsuan, ordered Mencius to be degraded from his place in the temple of Confucius, where a royal edict of 1084 had erected his tablet. But within a year the tablet was restored; and until the Revolution of 1911 Mencius remained one of the heroes of China, the second great name and influence in the history of Chinese orthodox philosophy. To him and to Chu Hsi* Confucius owed his intellectual leadership of China for more than two thousand years.

4. Hsün-tze, Realist

The evil nature of man—The necessity of law

There were many weaknesses in Mencius’ philosophy, and his contemporaries exposed them with a fierce delight. Was it true that men were by nature good, and were led to evil only by wicked institutions?—or was human nature itself responsible for the ills of society? Here was an early formulation of a conflict that has raged for some eons between reformers and conservatives. Does education diminish crime, increase virtue, and lead men into Utopia? Are philosophers fit to govern states, or do their theories worse confound the confusion which they seek to cure?

The ablest and most hardheaded of Mencius’ critics was a public official who seems to have died at the age of seventy about the year 235 B.C. As Mencius had believed human nature to be good in all men, so Hsün-tze believed it to be bad in all men; even Shun and Yao were savages at birth.184 Hsün, in the fragment that remains of him, writes like another Hobbes:


The nature of man is evil; the good which it shows is factitious.* There belongs to it, even at his birth, the love of gain; and as actions are in accordance with this, contentions and robberies grow up, and self-denial and yielding to others are not to be found (by nature); there belong to it envy and dislike, and as actions are in accordance with these, violence and injuries spring up, and self-devotedness and faith are not to be found; there belong to it the desires of the ears and the eyes, leading to the love of sounds and beauty, and as the actions are in accordance with these, lewdness and disorder spring up, and righteousness and propriety, with their various orderly displays, are not to be found. It thus appears that to follow man’s nature and yield obedience to its feelings will assuredly conduct to contentions and robberies, to the violation of the duties belonging to every one’s lot, and the confounding of all distinctions, till the issue will be a state of savagery; and that there must be the influence of teachers and laws, and the guidance of propriety and righteousness, from which will spring self-denial, yielding to others, and an observance of the well-ordered regulations of conduct, till the issue will be a state of good government. . . . The sage kings of antiquity, understanding that the nature of man was thus evil, . . . set up the principles of righteousness and propriety, and framed laws and regulations to straighten and ornament the feelings of that nature and correct them, . . . so that they might all go forth in the way of moral government and in agreement with reason.185

Hsün-tze concluded, like Turgeniev, that nature is not a temple but a workshop; she provides the raw material, but intelligence must do the rest. By proper training, he thought, these naturally evil men might be transformed even into saints, if that should be desirable.186 Being also a poet, he put Francis Bacon into doggerel:


You glorify Nature and meditate on her;

Why not domesticate her and regulate her?

You obey Nature and sing her praise;

Why not control her course and use it?

You look upon the seasons with reverence, and await them;

Why not respond to them by seasonly activities?

You depend on things and marvel at them;

Why not unfold your own ability and transform them?187

5. Chuang-tze, Idealist

The Return to Nature—Governmentless society—The Way of Nature—The limits of the intellect—The evolution of man—The Button-Moulder—The influence of Chinese philosophy in Europe

The “return to Nature,” however, could not be so readily discouraged; it found voice in this age as in every other, and by what might be called a natural accident its exponent was the most eloquent writer of his time. Chuang-tze, loving Nature as the only mistress who always welcomed him, whatever his infidelities or his age, poured into his philosophy the poetic sensitivity of a Rousseau, and yet sharpened it with the satiric wit of a Voltaire. Who could imagine Mencius so far forgetting himself as to describe a man as having “a large goitre like an earthenware jar?”188 Chuang belongs to literature as well as to philosophy.

He was born in the province of Sung, and held minor office for a time in the city of Khi-yüan. He visited the same courts as Mencius, but neither, in his extant writings, mentions the other’s name; perhaps they loved each other like contemporaries. Story has it that he refused high office twice. When the Duke of Wei offered him the prime ministry he dismissed the royal messengers with a curtness indicative of a writer’s dreams: “Go away quickly, and do not soil me with your presence. I had rather amuse and enjoy myself in a filthy ditch than be subject to the rules and restrictions in the court of a sovereign.”189 While he was fishing two great officers brought him a message from the King of Khu: “I wish to trouble you with the charge of all my territories.” Chuang, Chuang tells us, answered without turning away from his fishing:


“I have heard that in Khu there is a spirit-like tortoise-shell, the wearer of which died three thousand years ago, and which the king keeps, in his ancestral temple, in a hamper covered with a cloth. Was it better for the tortoise to die and leave its shell to be thus honored? Or would it have been better for it to live, and keep on dragging its tail after it over the mud?” The two officers said, “It would have been better for it to live, and draw its tail after it over the mud.” “Go your ways,” said Chuang; “I will keep on drawing my tail after me through the mud.”190

His respect for governments equaled that of his spiritual ancestor, Lao-tze. He took delight in pointing out how many qualities kings and governors shared with thieves.191 If, by some negligence on his part, a true philosopher should find himself in charge of a state, his proper course would be to do nothing, and allow men in freedom to build their own organs of self-government. “I have heard of letting the world be, and exercising forbearance; I have not heard of governing the world.”192 The Golden Age, which preceded the earliest kings, had no government; and Yao and Shun, instead of being so honored by China and Confucius, should be charged with having destroyed the primitive happiness of mankind by introducing government. “In the age of perfect virtue men lived in common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with all creatures, as forming one family: how could they know among themselves the distinctions of superior men and small men?”193

The wise man, thinks Chuang, will take to his heels at the first sign of government, and will live as far as possible from both philosophers and kings. He will court the peace and silence of the woods (here was a theme that a thousand Chinese painters would seek to illustrate), and let his whole being, without any impediment of artifice or thought, follow the divine Tao—the law and flow of Nature’s inexplicable life. He would be sparing of words, for words mislead as often as they guide, and the Tao—the Way and the Essence of Nature—can never be phrased in words or formed in thought; it can only be felt by the blood. He would reject the aid of machinery, preferring the older, more burdensome ways of simpler men; for machinery makes complexity, turbulence and inequality, and no man can live among machines and achieve peace.194 He would avoid the ownership of property, and would find no use in his life for gold; like Timon he would let the gold lie hidden in the hills, and the pearls remain unsought in the deep. “His distinction is in understanding that all things belong to the one treasury, and that death and life should be viewed in the same way”195—as harmonious measures in the rhythm of Nature, waves of one sea.

The center of Chuang’s thought, as of the thought of that half-legendary Lao-tze who seemed to him so much profounder than Confucius, was a mystic vision of an impersonal unity, so strangely akin to the doctrines of Buddha and the Upanishads that one is tempted to believe that Indian metaphysics had found its way into China long before the recorded coming of Buddhism four hundred years later. It is true that Chuang is an agnostic, a fatalist, a determinist and a pessimist; but this does not prevent him from being a kind of sceptical saint, a Tao-intoxicated man. He expresses his scepticism characteristically in a story:


The Penumbra said to the Umbra:* “At one moment you move, at another you are at rest. At one moment you sit down, at another you get up. Why this instability of purpose?” “I depend,” replied the Umbra, “upon something which causes me to do as I do; and that something depends upon something else which causes it to do as it does. . . . How can I tell why I do one thing or do not do another?” . . . When the body is decomposed, the mind will be decomposed along with it; must not the case be pronounced very deplorable? . . . The change—the rise and dissolution—of all things (continually) goes on, but we do not know who it is that maintains and continues the process. How do we know when any one begins? How do we know when he will end? We have simply to wait for it, and nothing more.196

These problems, Chuang suspects, are due less to the nature of things than to the limits of our thought; it is not to be wondered at that the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute particles should end in contradictions, “antinomies,” and befuddlement. This attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has been a gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the ground of the amusement which it has caused; for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The intellect, says Chuang-tze, can never avail to understand ultimate things, or any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. “Disputation is a proof of not seeing clearly,” and in order to understand the Tao, one “must sternly suppress one’s knowledge”;197 we have to forget our theories and feel the fact. Education is of no help towards such understanding; submersion in the flow of nature is all-important.

What is the Tao that the rare and favored mystic sees? It is inexpressible in words; weakly and with contradictions we describe it as the unity of all things, their quiet flow from origin to fulfilment, and the law that governs that flow. “Before there were heaven and earth, from of old it was, securely existing.”198 In that cosmic unity all contradictions are resolved, all distinctions fade, all opposites meet; within it and from its standpoint there is no good or bad, no white or black, no beautiful or ugly,* no great or small. “If one only knows that the universe is but (as small as) a tare seed, and the tip of a hair is as large as a mountain, then one may be said to have seen the relativity of things.”200 In that vague entirety no form is permanent, and none so unique that it cannot pass into another in the leisurely cycle of evolution.


The seeds (of things) are multitudinous and minute. On the surface of the water they form a membranous texture. When they reach to where the land and water join they become the (lichens that form the) clothes of frogs and oysters. Coming to life on mounds and heights, they become the plantain; and receiving manure, appear as crows’ feet. The roots of the crow’s foot become grubs, and its leaves, butterflies. This butterfly is changed into an insect, and comes to life under a furnace. Then it has the form of a moth. The mother after a thousand days becomes a bird. . . . The yinghsi uniting with a bamboo produces the khing-ning; this, the panther; the panther, the horse; and the horse the man. Man then enters into the great Machinery (of Evolution), from which all things come forth, and which they enter at death.201

It is not as clear as Darwin, but it will serve.

In this endless cycle man himself may pass into other forms; his present shape is transient, and from the viewpoint of eternity may be only superficially real—part of Maya’s deceptive veil of difference.


Once upon a time I, Chuang-tze, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming that I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.202

Death is therefore only a change of form, possibly for the better; it is, as Ibsen was to say, the great Button-Moulder who fuses us again in the furnace of change:


Tze Lai fell ill and lay gasping at the point of death, while his wife and children stood around him weeping. Li went to ask for him, and said to them: “Hush! Get out of the way! Do not disturb him in his process of transformation.” . . . Then, leaning against the door, he spoke to (the dying man). Tze Lai said: “A man’s relations with the Yin and the Yang is more than that to his parents. If they are hastening my death, and I do not obey, I shall be considered unruly. There is the Great Mass (of Nature), that makes me carry this body, labor with this life, relax in old age, and rest in death. Therefore that which has taken care of my birth is that which will take care of my death. Here is a great founder casting his metal. If the metal, dancing up and down, should say, ‘I must be made into a Mo Yeh’ (a famous old sword), the great founder would surely consider this metal an evil one. So, if, merely because one has once assumed the human form, one insists on being a man, and a man only, the author of transformation will be sure to consider this one an evil being. Let us now regard heaven and earth as a great melting-pot, and the author of transformation as a great founder; and wherever we go, shall we not be at home? Quiet is our sleep, and calm is our awakening.”203

When Chuang himself was about to die his disciples prepared for him a ceremonious funeral. But he bade them desist. “With heaven and earth for my coffin and shell, with the sun, moon and stars as my burial regalia, and with all creation to escort me to the grave—are not my funeral paraphernalia ready to hand?” The disciples protested that, unburied, he would be eaten by the carrion birds of the air. To which Chuang answered, with the smiling irony of all his words: “Above ground I shall be food for kites; below I shall be food for mole-crickets and ants. Why rob one to feed the other?”204

If we have spoken at such length of the ancient philosophers of China it is partly because the insoluble problems of human life and destiny irresistibly attract the inquisitive mind, and partly because the lore of her philosophers is the most precious portion of China’s gift to the world. Long ago (in 1697) the cosmic-minded Leibnitz, after studying Chinese philosophy, appealed for the mingling and cross-fertilization of East and West. “The condition of affairs among ourselves,” he wrote, in terms which have been useful to every generation, “is such that in view of the inordinate lengths to which the corruption of morals has advanced, I almost think it necessary that Chinese missionaries should be sent to us to teach us the aim and practice of national theology. . . . For I believe that if a wise man were to be appointed judge . . . of the goodness of peoples, he would award the golden apple to the Chinese.”205 He begged Peter the Great to build a land route to China, and he promoted the foundation of societies in Moscow and Berlin for the “opening up of China and the interchange of civilizations between China and Europe.”206 In 1721 Christian Wolff made an attempt in this direction by lecturing at Halle “On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese.” He was accused of atheism, and dismissed; but when Frederick mounted the throne he called him to Prussia, and restored him to honor.207

The Enlightenment took up Chinese philosophy at the same time that it carved out Chinese gardens and adorned its homes with chinoiseries. The Physiocrats seem to have been influenced by Lao-tze and Chuang-tze in their doctrine of laissez-faire;208 and Rousseau at times talked so like the Old Master* that we at once correlate him with Lao-tze and Chuang, as we should correlate Voltaire with Confucius and Mencius, if these had been blessed with wit. “I have read the books of Confucius with attention,” said Voltaire; “I have made extracts from them; I have found in them nothing but the purest morality, without the slightest tinge of charlatanism.”210 Goethe in 1770 recorded his resolution to read the philosophical classics of China; and when the guns of half the world resounded at Leipzig forty-three years later, the old sage paid no attention to them, being absorbed in Chinese literature.211

May this brief and superficial introduction lead the reader on to study the Chinese philosophers themselves, as Goethe studied them, and Voltaire, and Tolstoi.


CHAPTER XXIV


The Age of the Poets

I. CHINA’S BISMARCK

The Period of Contending States—The suicide of Ch’u P’ing—Shih Huang-ti unifies China—The Great Wall—The “Burning of the Books”—The failure of Shih Huang-ti

PRESUMABLY Confucius died an unhappy man, for philosophers love unity, and the nation that he had sought to unite under some powerful dynasty persisted in chaos, corruption and division. When the great unifier finally appeared, and succeeded, by his military and administrative genius, in welding the states of China into one, he ordered that all existing copies of Confucius’ books should be burned.

We may judge the atmosphere of this “Period of the Contending States” from the story of Ch’u P’ing. Having risen to promise as a poet and to high place as an official, he found himself suddenly dismissed. He retired to the countryside, and contemplated life and death beside a quiet brook. Tell me, he asked an oracle,


whether I should steadily pursue the path of truth and loyalty, or follow in the wake of a corrupt generation. Should I work in the fields with spade and hoe, or seek advancement in the retinue of a grandee? Should I court danger with outspoken words, or fawn in false tones upon the rich and great? Should I rest content in the cultivation of virtue, or practise the art of wheedling women in order to secure success? Should I be pure and clean-handed in my rectitude, or an oil-mouthed, slippery, time-serving sycophant?1

He dodged the dilemma by drowning himself (ca. 350 B.C.); and until our own day the Chinese people celebrated his fame annually in the Dragonboat Festival, during which they searched for his body in every stream.

The man who unified China had the most disreputable origin that the Chinese historians could devise. Shih Huang-ti,’ we are informed, was the illegitimate son of the Queen of Ch’in (one of the western states) by the noble minister Lü, who was wont to hang a thousand pieces of gold at his gate as a reward to any man who should better his compositions by so much as a single word.2 (His son did not inherit these literary tastes.) Shih, reports Szuma Ch’ien, forced his father to suicide, persecuted his mother, and ascended the ducal throne when he was twelve years of age. When he was twenty-five he began to conquer and annex the petty states into which China had so long been divided. In 230 B.C. he conquered Han; in 228, Chao; in 225, Wei; in 223, Ch’u; in 222, Yen; finally, in 221, the important state of Ch’i. For the first time in many centuries, perhaps for the first time in history, China was under one rule. The conqueror took the title of Shih Huang-ti, and turned to the task of giving the new empire a lasting constitution.

“A man with a very prominent nose, with large eyes, with the chest of a bird of prey, with the voice of a jackal, without beneficence, and with the heart of a tiger or a wolf”—this is the only description that the Chinese historians have left us of their favorite enemy.3 He was a robust and obstinate soul, recognizing no god but himself, and pledged, like some Nietzschean Bismarck, to unify his country by blood and iron. Having forged and mounted the throne of China, one of his first acts was to protect the country from the barbarians on the north by piecing together and completing the walls already existing along the frontier; and he found the multitude of his domestic opponents a convenient source of recruits for this heroic symbol of Chinese grandeur and patience. The Great Wall, 1500 miles long, and adorned at intervals with massive gateways in the Assyrian style, is the largest structure ever reared by man; beside it, said Voltaire, “the pyramids of Egypt are only puerile and useless masses.”4 It took ten years and countless men; “it was the ruin of one generation,” say the Chinese, “and the salvation of many.” It did not quite keep out the barbarians, as we shall see; but it delayed and reduced their attacks. The Huns, barred for a time from Chinese soil, moved west into Europe and down into Italy; Rome fell because China built a wall.

Meanwhile Shih Huang-ti, like Napoleon, turned with pleasure from war to administration, and created the outlines of the future Chinese state. He accepted the advice of his Legalist prime minister, Li Ssü, and resolved to base Chinese society not, as heretofore, upon custom and local autonomy, but upon explicit law and a powerful central government. He broke the power of the feudal barons, replaced them with a nobility of functionaries appointed by the national ministry, placed in each district a military force independent of the civil governor, introduced uniform laws and regulations, simplified official ceremonies, issued a state coinage, divided most of the feudal estates, prepared for the prosperity of China by establishing peasant proprietorship of the soil, and paved the way for a completer unity by building great highways in every direction from his capital at Hien-yang. He embellished this city with many palaces, and persuaded the 120,000 richest and most powerful families of the empire to live under his observant eye. Traveling in disguise and unarmed, he made note of abuses and disorders, and then issued unmistakable orders for their correction. He encouraged science and discouraged letters.5

For the men of letters—the poets, the critics, the philosophers, above all the Confucian scholars—were his sworn foes. They fretted under his dictatorial authority, and saw in the establishment of one supreme government an end to that variety and liberty of thought and life which had made literature flourish amid the wars and divisions of the Chou Dynasty. When they protested to Shih Huang-ti against his ignoring of ancient ceremonies, he sent them curtly about their business.6 A commission of mandarins, or official scholars, brought to him their unanimous suggestion that he should restore the feudal system by giving fiefs to his relatives; and they added: “For a person, in any matter, not to model himself on antiquity, and yet to achieve duration—that, to our knowledge, has never happened.”7 The prime minister, Li Ssü, who was at that time engaged in reforming the Chinese script, and establishing it approximately in the form which it retained till our own time, met these criticisms with an historic speech that did no service to Chinese letters:


The Five Sovereigns did not repeat each other’s actions, the Three Royal Dynasties did not imitate each other; . . . for the times had changed. Now your Majesty has for the first time accomplished a great work and has founded a glory which will last for ten thousand generations. The stupid mandarins are incapable of understanding this. . . . In ancient days China was divided up and troubled; there was no one who could unify her. That is why all the nobles flourished. In their discourses the mandarins all talk of the ancient days, in order to blacken the present. . . . They encourage the people to forge calumnies. This being so, if they are not opposed, among the upper classes the position of the sovereign will be depreciated, while among the lower classes associations will flourish. . . .

I suggest that the official histories, with the exception of the Memoirs of Ch’in, be all burnt, and that those who attempt to hide the Shi-Ching, the Shu-Ching* and the Discourses of the Hundred Schools, be forced to bring them to the authorities to be burnt.8

The Emperor liked the idea considerably, and issued the order; the books of the historians were everywhere brought to the flames, so that the weight of the past should be removed from the present, and the history of China might begin with Shih Huang-ti. Scientific books, and the works of Mencius, seem to have been excepted from the conflagration, and many of the forbidden books were preserved in the Imperial Library, where they might be consulted by such students as had obtained official permission.9 Since books were then written on strips of bamboo fastened with swivel pins, and a volume might be of some weight, the scholars who sought to evade the order were put to many difficulties. A number of them were detected; tradition says that many of them were sent to labor on the Great Wall, and that four hundred and sixty were put to death.10 Nevertheless some of the literati memorized the complete works of Confucius, and passed them on by word of mouth to equal memories. Soon after the Emperor’s death these volumes were freely circulated again, though many errors, presumably, had crept into their texts. The only permanent result was to lend an aroma of sanctity to the proscribed literature, and to make Shih Huang-ti unpopular with the Chinese historians. For generations the people expressed their judgment of him by befouling his grave.11

The destruction of powerful families, and of freedom in writing and speech, left Shih almost friendless in his declining years. Attempts were made to assassinate him; he discovered them in time, and slew the assailants with his own hand.12 He sat on his throne with a sword across his knees, and let no man know in what room of his many palaces he would sleep.13 Like Alexander he sought to strengthen his dynasty by spreading the notion that he was a god; but as the comparison limped, he, like Alexander, failed. He decreed that his dynastic successors should number themselves from him as “First Emperor,” down to the ten thousandth of their line; but the line ended with his son. In his old age, if we credit the historians who hated him, he became superstitious, and went to much expense to find an elixir of immortality. When he died, his body was brought back secretly to his capital; and to conceal its smell it was convoyed by a caravan of decaying fish. Several hundred maidens (we are told) were buried alive to keep him company; and his successor, grateful for his death, lavished art and money upon the tomb. The roof was studded with constellations, and a map of the empire was traced in quicksilver on the floor of bronze. Machines were erected in the vault for the automatic slaughter of intruders; and huge candles were lit in the hope that they would for an indefinite period illuminate the doings of the dead emperor and his queens. The workmen who brought the coffin into the tomb were buried alive with their burden, lest they should live to reveal the secret passage to the grave.14

II. EXPERIMENTS IN SOCIALISM

Chaos and poverty—The Han Dynasty—The reforms of Wu Ti—The income tax—The planned economy of Wang Mang—Its overthrow—The Tatar invasion

Disorder followed his death, as it has followed the passing of almost every dictator in history; only an immortal can wisely take all power into his hands. The people revolted against his son, killed him soon after he had killed Li Ssü, and put an end to the Ch’in Dynasty within five years after its founder’s death. Rival princes established rival kingdoms, and disorder ruled again. Then a clever condottiere, Kao-tsu, seized the throne and founded the Han Dynasty, which, with some interruptions and a change of capital,* lasted four hundred years. Wen Ti (179-57 B.C.) restored freedom of speech and writing, revoked the edict by which Shih Huang-ti had forbidden criticism of the government, pursued a policy of peace, and inaugurated the Chinese custom of defeating a hostile general with gifts.15

The greatest of the Han emperors was Wu Ti. In a reign of over half a century (140-87 B.C.) he pushed back the invading barbarians, and extended the rule of China over Korea, Manchuria, Annam, Indo-China and Turkestan; now for the first time China acquired those vast dimensions which we have been wont to associate with her name. Wu Ti experimented with socialism by establishing national ownership of natural resources, to prevent private individuals from “reserving to their sole use the riches of the mountains and the sea in order to gain a fortune, and from putting the lower classes into subjection to themselves.”16 The production of salt and iron, and the manufacture and sale of fermented drinks, were made state monopolies. To break the power of middlemen and speculators—“those who buy on credit and make loans, those who buy to heap up in the towns, those who accumulate all sorts of commodities” as the contemporary historian, Szuma Ch’ien expressed it—Wu Ti established a national system of transport and exchange, and sought to control trade in such a way as to prevent sudden variations in price. State workingmen made all the means of transportation and delivery in the empire. The state stored surplus goods, selling them when prices were rising too rapidly, buying them when prices were falling; in this way, says Szuma Ch’ien, “the rich merchants and large shop-keepers would be prevented from making big profits, . . . and prices would be regulated throughout the empire.”17 All incomes had to be registered with the government, and had to pay an annual tax of five per cent. In order to facilitate the purchase and consumption of commodities the Emperor enlarged the supply of currency by issuing coins of silver alloyed with tin. Great public works were undertaken in order to provide employment for the millions whom private industry had failed to maintain; bridges were flung across China’s streams, and innumerable canals were cut to bind the rivers and irrigate the fields.18*

For a time the new system flourished. Trade grew in amount, variety and extent, and bound China even with the distant nations of the Near East.20 The capital, Lo-yang, increased in population and wealth, and the coffers of the government were swollen with revenue. Scholarship flourished, poetry abounded, and Chinese pottery began to be beautiful. In the Imperial Library there were 3,123 volumes on the classics, 2,705 on philosophy, 1,318 on poetry, 2,568 on mathematics, 868 on medicine, 790 on war.21 Only those who had passed the state examinations were eligible to public office, and these examinations were open to all. China had never prospered so before.

A combination of natural misfortunes with human deviltry put an end to this brave experiment. Floods alternated with droughts, and raised prices beyond control. Harassed by the high cost of food and clothing, the people began to clamor for a return to the good old days of an idealized past, and proposed that the inventor of the new system should be boiled alive. Business men protested that state control had diminished healthy initiative and competition, and they objected to paying, for the support of these experiments, the high taxes levied upon them by the government.22 Women entered the court, acquired a secret influence over important functionaries, and became an element in a wave of official corruption that spread far and wide after the death of the Emperor.23 Counterfeiters imitated the new currency so successfully that it had to be withdrawn. The business of exploiting the weak was resumed under a new management, and for a century the reforms of Wu Ti were forgotten or reviled.

At the beginning of our era—eighty-four years after Wu Ti’s death—another reformer ascended the throne of China, first as regent, and then as emperor. Wang Mang was of the highest type of Chinese gentleman.* Though rich, he lived temperately, even frugally, and scattered his income among his friends and the poor. Absorbed in the vital struggle to reõrganize the economic and political life of his country, he found time nevertheless not only to patronize literature and scholarship, but to become an accomplished scholar himself. On his accession to power he surrounded himself not with the usual politicians, but with men trained in letters and philosophy; to these men his enemies attributed his failure, and his friends attributed his success.

Shocked by the development of slavery on the large estates of China, Wang Mang, at the very outset of his reign, abolished both the slavery and the estates by nationalizing the land. He divided the soil into equal tracts and distributed it among the peasants; and, to prevent the renewed concentration of wealth, he forbade the sale or purchase of land.25 He continued the state monopolies of salt and iron, and added to them state ownership of mines and state control of the traffic in wine. Like Wu Ti he tried to protect the cultivator and the consumer against the merchant by fixing the prices of commodities. The state bought agricultural surpluses in time of plenty, and sold them in time of dearth. Loans were made by the government, at low rates of interest, for any productive enterprise.26

Wang had conceived his policies in economic terms, and had forgotten the nature of man. He worked long hours, day and night, to devise schemes that would make the nation rich and happy; and he was heart broken to find that social disorder mounted during his reign. Natural calamities like drought and flood continued to disrupt his planned economy, and all the groups whose greed had been clipped by his reforms united to plot his fall. Revolts broke out, apparently among the people, but probably financed from above; and while Wang, bewildered by such ingratitude, struggled to control these insurrections, subject peoples weakened his prestige by throwing off the Chinese yoke, and the Hsiung-nu barbarians overran the northern provinces. The rich Liu family put itself at the head of a general rebellion, captured Chang-an, slew Wang Mang, and annulled his reforms. Everything was as before.

The Han line ended in a succession of weak emperors, and was followed by a chaos of petty dynasties and divided states. Despite the Great Wall the Tatars poured down into China, and conquered large areas of the north. And as the Huns broke down the organization of the Roman Empire, and helped to plunge Europe into a Dark Age for a hundred years, so the inroads of these kindred Tatars disordered the life of China, and put an end for a while to the growth of civilization. We may judge the strength of the Chinese stock, character and culture from the fact that this disturbance was much briefer and less profound than that which ruined Rome. After an interlude of war and chaos, and racial mixture with the invaders, Chinese civilization recovered, and enjoyed a brilliant resurrection. The very blood of the Tatars served, perhaps, to reinvigorate a nation already old. The Chinese accepted the conquerors, married them, civilized them, and advanced to the zenith of their history.

III. THE GLORY OF T’ANG

The new dynasty—T’ai Tsung’s method of reducing crime—An age of prosperity—The “Brilliant Emperor”—The romance of Yang Kwei-fei—The rebellion of An Lu-shan

The great age of China owed its coming partly to this new biological mixture,* partly to the spiritual stimulation derived from the advent of Buddhism, partly to the genius of one of China’s greatest emperors, T’ai Tsung (627-50 A.D.) At the age of twenty-one he was raised to the throne by the abdication of his father, a second Kao-tsu, who had established the T’ang Dynasty nine years before. He began unprepossessingly by murdering the brothers who threatened to displace him; and then he exercised his military abilities by pushing back the invading barbarians into their native haunts, and reconquering those neighboring territories which had thrown off Chinese rule after the fall of the Han. Suddenly he grew tired of war, and returning to his capital, Ch’ang-an, gave himself to the ways of peace. He read and re-read the works of Confucius, and had them published in a resplendent format, saying: “By using a mirror of brass you may see to adjust your cap; by using antiquity as a mirror you may learn to foresee the rise and fall of empires.” He refused all luxuries, and sent away the three thousand ladies who had been chosen to entertain him. When his ministers recommended severe laws for the repression of crime, he told them: “If I diminish expenses, lighten the taxes, employ only honest officials, so that the people have clothing enough, this will do more to abolish robbery than the employment of the severest punishments.”27

One day he visited the jails of Ch’ang-an, and saw two hundred and ninety men who had been condemned to die. He sent them out to till the fields, relying solely on their word of honor that they would return. Every man came back; and T’ai Tsung was so well pleased that he set them all free. He laid it down then that no emperor should ratify a death sentence until he had fasted three days. He made his capital so beautiful that tourists flocked to it from India and Europe. Buddhist monks arrived in great numbers from India, and Chinese Buddhists, like Yuan Chwang, traveled freely to India to study the new religion of China at its source. Missionaries came to Ch’ang-an to preach Zoroastrianism and Nestorian Christianity; the Emperor, like Akbar, welcomed them, gave them protection and freedom, and exempted their temples from taxation, at a time when Europe was sunk in poverty, intellectual darkness, and theological strife. He himself remained, without dogma or prejudice, a simple Confucian. “When he died,” says a brilliant historian, “the grief of the people knew no bounds, and even the foreign envoys cut themselves with knives and lancets and sprinkled the dead emperor’s bier with their self-shed blood.”28

He had paved the way for China’s most creative age. Rich with fifty years of comparative peace and stable government, she began to export her surplus of rice, corn, silk, and spices, and spent her profits on unparalleled luxury. Her lakes were filled with carved and painted pleasure-boats; her rivers and canals were picturesque with commerce, and from her harbors ships sailed to distant ports on the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Never before had China known such wealth; never had she enjoyed such abundant food, such comfortable houses, such exquisite clothing.29 While silk was selling in Europe for its weight in gold,30 it was a routine article of dress for half the population of the larger cities of China, and fur coats were more frequent in eighth-century Ch’ang-an than in twentieth-century New York. One village near the capital had silk factories employing a hundred thousand men.31 “What hospitality!” exclaimed Li Po, “what squandering of money! Red jade cups and rare dainty food on tables inlaid with green gems!”32 Statues were carved out of rubies, and pretentious corpses were buried on beds of pearl.33 The great race was suddenly enamored of beauty, and lavished honors on those who could create it. “At this age,” says a Chinese critic, “whoever was a man was a poet.”34 Emperors promoted poets and painters to high office, and “Sir John Manville”* would have it that no one dared to address the Emperor save “it be mynstrelles that singen and tellen gestes.”35 In the eighteenth century of our era Manchu emperors ordered an anthology to be prepared of the T’ang poets; the result was thirty volumes, containing 48,900 poems by 2,300 poets; so much had survived the criticism of time. The Imperial Library had grown to 54,000 volumes. “At this time,” says Murdoch, “China undoubtedly stood in the very forefront of civilization. She was then the most powerful, the most enlightened, the most progressive, and the best-governed, empire on the face of the globe.36 “It was the most polished epoch that the world had ever seen.”†

At the head and height of it was Ming Huang—i.e., “The Brilliant Emperor”—who ruled China, with certain intermissions, for some forty years (713-56 A.D.). He was a man full of human contradictions: he wrote poetry and made war upon distant lands, exacting tribute from Turkey, Persia and Samarkand; he abolished capital punishment and reformed the administration of prisons and courts; he levied taxes mercilessly, suffered poets, artists and scholars gladly, and established a college of music in his “Pear Tree Garden.” He began his reign like a Puritan, closing the silk factories and forbidding the ladies of the palace to wear jewelry or embroidery; he ended it like an epicurean, enjoying every art and every luxury, and at last sacrificing his throne for the smiles of Yang Kwei-fei.

When he met her he was sixty and she was twenty-seven; for ten years she had been the concubine of his eighteenth son. She was corpulent and wore false hair, but the Emperor loved her because she was obstinate, capricious, domineering and insolent. She accepted his admiration graciously, introduced him to five families of her relatives, and permitted him to find sinecures for them at the court. Ming called his lady “The Great Pure One,” and learned from her the gentle art of dissipation. The Son of Heaven thought little now of the state and its affairs; he placed all the powers of government in the hands of the Pure One’s brother, the corrupt and incapable Yang Kuo-chung; and while destruction gathered under him he reveled through the days and nights.

An Lu-shan, a Tatar courtier, also loved Yang Kwei-fei. He won the confidence of the Emperor, who promoted him to the post of provincial governor in the north, and placed under his command the finest armies in the realm. Suddenly An Lu-shan proclaimed himself emperor, and turned his armies toward Ch’ang-an. The long-neglected defenses fell, and Ming deserted his capital. The soldiers who escorted him rebelled, slew Yang Kuo-chung and all the five families, and, snatching Yang Kwei-fei from the monarch’s hands, killed her before his eyes. Old and beaten, the Emperor abdicated. An Lu-shan’s barbaric hordes sacked Ch’ang-an, and slaughtered the population indiscriminately.* Thirty-six million people are said to have lost their lives in the rebellion.39 In the end it failed; An Lu-shan was killed by his son, who was killed by a general, who was killed by his son. By the year 762 A.D. the turmoil had worn itself out, and Ming Huang returned, heart-broken, to his ruined capital. There, a few months later, he died. In this framework of romance and tragedy the poetry of China flourished as never before.

IV. THE BANISHED ANGEL

An anecdote of Li Po—His youth, prowess and loves—On the imperial barge—The gospel of the grape—War—The Wanderings of Li Po—In prison—’Deathless Poetry”

One day, at the height of his reign, Ming Huang received ambassadors from Korea, who brought him important messages written in a dialect which none of his ministers could understand. “What!” exclaimed the Emperor, “among so many magistrates, so many scholars and warriors, cannot there be found a single one who knows enough to relieve us of vexation in this affair? If in three days no one is able to decipher this letter, every one of your appointments shall be suspended.”

For a day the ministers consulted and fretted, fearing for their offices and their heads. Then Minister Ho Chi-chang approached the throne and said: “Your subject presumes to announce to your Majesty that there is a poet of great merit, called Li, at his house, who is profoundly acquainted with more than one science; command him to read this letter, for there is nothing of which he is not capable.” The Emperor ordered Li to present himself at court immediately. But Li refused to come, saying that he could not possibly be worthy of the task assigned him, since his essay had been rejected by the mandarins at the last examination for public office. The Emperor soothed him by conferring upon him the title and robes of doctor of the first rank. Li came, found his examiners among the ministers, forced them to take off his boots, and then translated the document, which announced that Korea proposed to make war for the recovery of its freedom. Having read the message, Li dictated a learned and terrifying reply, which the Emperor signed without hesitation, almost believing what Ho whispered to him—that Li was an angel banished from heaven for some impish deviltry.40* The Koreans sent apologies and tribute, and the Emperor sent part of the tribute to Li. Li gave it to the innkeeper, for he loved wine.

On the night of the poet’s birth his mother—of the family of Li—had dreamed of Tai-po Hsing, the Great White Star, which in the West is called Venus. So the child was named Li, meaning plum, and sur-named Tai-po, which is to say, The White Star. At ten he had mastered all the books of Confucius, and was composing immortal poetry. At twelve he went to live like a philosopher in the mountains, and stayed there for many years. He grew in health and strength, practised swordsmanship, and then announced his abilities to the world: “Though less than seven (Chinese) feet in height, I am strong enough to meet ten thousand men.”41 (“Ten thousand” is Chinese for many.) Then he wandered leisurely about the earth, drinking the lore of love from varied lips. He sang a song to the “Maid of Wu”:


Wine of the grapes,

Goblets of gold—

And a pretty maid of Wu—

She comes on pony-back; she is fifteen.

Blue-painted eyebrows—

Shoes of pink brocade—

Inarticulate speech—

But she sings bewitchingly well.

So, feasting at the table,

Inlaid with tortoise-shell,

She gets drunk in my lap.

Ah, child, what caresses

Behind lily-broidered curtains!42

He married, but earned so little money that his wife left him, taking the children with her. Was it to her, or to some less-wonted flame, that he wrote his wistful lines?—


Fair one, when you were here, I filled the house with flowers.

Fair one, now you are gone—only an empty couch is left.

On the couch the embroidered quilt is rolled up; I cannot sleep.

It is three years since you went. The perfume you left behind haunts me still.

The perfume strays about me forever; but where are you, Beloved?

I sigh—the yellow leaves fall from the branch;

I weep—the dew twinkles white on the green mosses.43

He consoled himself with wine, and became one of the “Six Idlers of the Bamboo Grove,” who took life without haste, and let their songs and poems earn their uncertain bread. Hearing the wine of Niauchung highly commended, Li set out at once for that city, three hundred miles away.44 In his wanderings he met Tu Fu, who was to be his rival for China’s poetic crown; they exchanged lyrics, went hand in hand like brothers, and slept under the same coverlet until fame divided them. Everybody loved them, for they were as harmless as saints, and spoke with the same pride and friendliness to paupers and kings. Finally they entered Ch’ang-an; and the jolly minister Ho loved Li’s poetry so well that he sold gold ornaments to buy him drinks. Tu Fu describes him:


As for Li Po, give him a jugful,

He will write one hundred poems.

He dozes in a wine-shop

On a city-street of Chang-an;

And though his Sovereign calls,

He will not board the Imperial barge.

“Please, your Majesty,” says he,

“I am a god of wine.”

Those were merry days when the Emperor befriended him, and showered him with gifts for singing the praises of the Pure One, Yang Kwei-fei. Once Ming held a royal Feast of the Peonies in the Pavilion of Aloes, and sent for Li Po to come and make verses in honor of his mistress. Li came, but too drunk for poetry; court attendants threw cold water upon his amiable face, and soon the poet burst into song, celebrating the rivalry of the peonies with Lady Yang:


The glory of trailing clouds is in her garments,

And the radiance of a flower on her face.

O heavenly apparition, found only far above

On the top of the Mountain of Many Jewels,

Or in the fairy Palace of Crystal when the moon is up!

Yet I see her here in the earth’s garden—

The spring wind softly sweeps the balustrade,

And the dew-drops glisten thickly. . . .

Vanquished are the endless longings of love

Borne into the heart on the winds of spring.45

Who would not have been pleased to be the object of such song? And yet the Lady Yang was persuaded that the poet had subtly satirized her; and from that moment she bred suspicion of him in the heart of the King. He presented Li Po with a purse, and let him go. Once again the poet took to the open road, and consoled himself with wine. He joined those “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup” whose drinkings were the talk of Ch’ang-an. He accepted the view of Liu Ling, who desired always to be followed by two servants, one with wine, the other with a spade to bury him where he fell; for, said Liu, “the affairs of this world are no more than duckweed in the river.”46 The poets of China were resolved to atone for the Puritanism of Chinese philosophy. “To wash and rinse our souls of their age-old sorrows,” said Li Po, “we drained a hundred jugs of wine.”47 And he intones like Omar the gospel of the grape:


The swift stream pours into the sea and returns never more.

Do you not see high on yonder tower

A white-haired one sorrowing before his bright mirror?

In the morning those locks were like black silk,

In the evening they are all like snow.

Let us, while we may, taste the old delights,

And leave not the golden cask of wine

To stand alone in the moonlight. . . .

I desire only the long ecstasy of wine,

And desire not to awaken. . . .


Now let you and me buy wine today!

Why say we have not the price?

My horse spotted with fine flowers,

My fur coat worth a thousand pieces of gold,

These I will take out, and call my boy

To barter them for sweet wine,

And with you twain, let me forget

The sorrow of ten thousand ages!48

What were these sorrows? The agony of despised love? Hardly; for though the Chinese take love as much to heart as we do, their poets do not so frequently intone its pains. It was war and exile, An Lu-shan and the taking of the capital, the flight of the Emperor and the death of Yang, the return of Ming Huang to his desolated halls, that gave Li the taste of human tragedy. “There is no end to war!” he mourns; and then his heart goes out to the women who have lost their husbands to Mars.


’Tis December. Lo, tne pensive maid of Yu-chow!

She will not sing, she will not smile; her moth eyebrows are disheveled.

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