Our Oriental Heritage

* Among these modest possessions were twelve thousand wives.⁶⁵

* Mogul is another form of Mongol. The Moguls were really Turks; but the Hindus called—and still call—all northern Moslems (except the Afghans) Moguls.⁸⁵ “Babur” was a Mongol nickname, meaning lion; the real name of the first Mogul Emperor of India was Zahiru-d din Muhammad.⁸⁶

* Later he came to recognize the value of books, and—being still unable to read—listened for hours while others read to him, often from abstruse and difficult volumes. In the end he became an illiterate scholar, loving letters and art, and supporting them with royal largesse.

* The army was supplied with the best ordnance yet seen in India, but inferior to that then in use in Europe. Akbar’s efforts to secure better guns failed; and this inferiority in the instruments of slaughter coöperated with the degeneration of his descendants in determining the European conquest of India.

* Two of his children died in youth of chronic alcoholism.⁹⁶

* The Moslems hated Birbal, and rejoiced at his death. One of them, the historian Badaoni, recorded the incident with savage pleasure: “Birbal, who had fled from fear of his life, was slain, and entered the row of the dogs in Hell.”⁹⁹

* With the exception of the transient persecution of Islam (1582-5).

* I.e., “Light of the World”; also called Nur Mahal–“Light of the Palace.” Jehangir means “Conqueror of the World”; Shah Jehan, of course, was “King of the World.”

† This throne, which required seven years for its completion, consisted entirely of jewels, precious metals and stones. Four legs of gold supported the seat; twelve pillars made of emeralds held up the enameled canopy; each pillar bore two peacocks encrusted with gems; and between each pair of peacocks rose a tree covered with diamonds, emeralds, rubies and pearls. The total cost was over $7,000,000. The throne was captured and carried off to Persia by Nadir Shah (1739), and was gradually dismembered to defray the expenses of Persian royalty.¹¹⁴

* The following analysis will apply for the most part to post-Vedic and pre-British India. The reader should remember that India is now in flux, and that institutions, morals and manners once characteristic of her may be disappearing today.

† Vijayanagar was an exception; its people ate fowl and flesh (barring oxen and cows), as well as lizards, rats and cats.⁴

* We do not know what these “ants” were; they were more probably anteaters than ants.

* Cf. the red rug, from seventeenth-century India, presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Room D 3) by Mr. J. P. Morgan.

* The story of how Nasiru-d-din poisoned his father Ghiyasu-d-din, Sultan of Delhi (1501), illustrates the Moslem conception of peaceable succession. Jehangir, who did his best to depose his father Akbar, tells the story:

“After this I went to the building containing the tombs of the Khalji rulers. The grave of Nasiru-d-din, whose face is blackened forever, was also there. It is well known that that wretch advanced himself by the murder of his father. Twice he gave him poison, and the father twice expelled it by means of a poison-antidote amulet he had on his arm. The third time the son mixed poison in a cup of sherbet and gave it to his father with his own hand. . . . As his father understood what efforts the son was making in this matter, he loosened the amulet from his arm and threw it before him; and then, turning his face in humility and supplication towards the throne of the Creator, said: ‘O Lord, my age has arrived at eighty years, and I have passed this time in prosperity and happiness such as has been attained by no king. Now as this is my last time, I hope that thou wilt not seize Nasir for my murder, and that, reckoning my death as a thing decreed, thou wilt not avenge it.’ After he had spoken these words, he drank off that poisoned cup of sherbet at a gulp, and delivered his soul to his Creator.

“When I went to his (Nasir’s) tomb,” adds the virtuous Jehangir, “I gave it several kicks.”⁵⁴

† Still more sadistic refinements of penology may be found in Dubois, p. 659.

* Père Dubois, who, though unsympathetic to India, is usually truthful, gives us a picture of the ordeals used in his time (1820). “There are,” he says, “several other kinds of trial by ordeal. Amongst the number is that of boiling oil which is mixed with cow-dung, and into which the accused must plunge his arm up to the elbow; and that of the snake which consists in shutting up some very poisonous snake in a basket in which has been placed a ring or a piece of money which the accused must find and bring out with his eyes bandaged; if in the former case he is not scalded, and in the latter case is not bitten, his innocence is completely proved.”⁶²

† Tod believes that some of these charters were pious frauds.⁶⁶

* Among the Dravidians, however, inheritance followed the female line.⁶⁹

* Certain sexual perquisites seem to have belonged to some Brahman groups. The Nambudri Brahmans exercised the jus primœ noctis over all brides in their territory; and the Pushtimargiya priests of Bombay maintained this privilege until recent times.⁸¹ If we may believe Père Dubois, the priests of the Temple of Tirupati (in southeastern India) offered to cure barrenness in all women who would spend a night at the temple.⁸²

† Not all priests were Brahmans, and latterly many Brahmans have not been priests. In the United Provinces a large number of them are cooks.⁸⁸

‡ This word is from the Tamil paraiyan, meaning one of low caste.

* On the caste system in our time cf. Chap, XXII, Sect, iv, below.

* It should be added that Gandhi denies that this precocity has any physical basis. “I loathe and detest child marriage,” he writes. “I shudder to see a child widow. I have never known a grosser superstition than that the Indian climate causes sexual precocity. What does bring about untimely puberty is the mental and moral atmosphere surrounding family life.”¹⁰⁹

* From the Hindu nâch, dancer.

* Strabo (ca. 20 A.D.), relying on Aristobulus, describes “some novel and unusual customs at Taxila: those who by reason of poverty are unable to marry off their daughters, lead them forth to the market place in the power of their age to the sound of both trumpets and drums (precisely the instruments used to signal the call to battle), thus assembling a crowd; and to any man who comes forward they first expose her rear parts up to the shoulders, and then her front parts, and if she pleases him, and at the same time allows herself to be persuaded, on approved terms, he marries her.”¹²⁸

† Among the Rajputs, if we may believe Tod, it was usual for the prince to have different wives for each day of the week.¹²⁵

* We must compare this attitude not with our contemporary European or American views, but with the reluctance of the medieval clergy to allow a general reading of the Bible, or the intellectual education of woman.

* More properly sati, pronounced suttee, and meaning “devoted wife.”

* In considering alien customs we must continually remind ourselves that foreign practices cannot be judged intelligently by our own moral code. “The superficial observer who applies his own standard to the customs of all nations,” says Tod, “laments with affected philanthropy the degraded condition of the Hindu female, in which sentiment he would find her little disposed to join him.”¹⁶³ On contemporary changes in these customs cf. Chapter XXII below.

* A great Hindu, Lajpat Rai, reminded Europe that “long before the European nations knew anything of hygiene, and long before they realized the value of tooth-brush and a daily bath, the Hindus were, as a rule, given to both. Only twenty years ago London houses had no bath-tubs, and the tooth-brush was a luxury.”¹⁷¹

* Chess is so old that half the nations of antiquity claim its birthplace. The view generally accepted by archeologists of the game is that it arose in India; certainly we find there its oldest indisputable appearance (ca. 750 A.D.). The word chess comes from the Persian shah, king; and checkmate is originally shah-mat—“king dead.” The Persians called it shatranj, and took both the word and the game, through the Arabs, from India, where it was known as chaturanga, or “four angles”—elephants, horses, chariots and foot-soldiers. The Arabs still call the bishop al-fil—i.e., elephant (from aleph-hind, Arabic for “ox of India”).²⁰⁰

The Hindus tell a delightful legend to account for the origin of the game. At the beginning of the fifth century of our era (the story goes), a Hindu monarch offended his Brahman and Kshatriya admirers by ignoring their counsels and forgetting that the love of the people is the surest support of a throne. A Brahman, Sissa, undertook to open the eyes of the young king by devising a game in which the piece that represented the king, though highest in dignity and value (as in Oriental war), should be, alone, almost helpless; hence came chess. The ruler liked the game so well that he invited Sissa to name his reward. Sissa modestly asked for some grains of rice, the quantity to be determined by placing one grain upon the first of the sixty-four squares of the chess-board, and then doubling the number of grains with each succeeding square. The king agreed at once, but was soon surprised to find that he had promised away his kingdom. Sissa took the opportunity to point out to his master how easily a monarch may be led astray when he scorns his counsellors.²⁰¹ Credat qui vult.

* From the Tibetan word pulu, Hindu Balti dialect polo, meaning ball; cf. the Latin pila.

* In one of the Puranas there is a typical legend of the king who, though deserving heaven, stays in hell to comfort the sufferers, and will not leave it until all the damned are released.²

† “The Buddhists,” says Fergusson, “kept five centuries in advance of the Roman Church in the invention and use of all the ceremonies and forms common to both religions.”³ Edmunds has shown in detail the astonishing parallelism between the Buddhist and the Christian gospels.⁴ However, our knowledge of the beginnings of these customs and beliefs is too vague to warrant positive conclusions as to priority.

* Today there are in India proper only 3,000,000 Buddhists—one per cent of the population.

† The temple at Kandy contains the famous “eye-tooth of Buddha”—two inches long and an inch in diameter. It is enclosed in a jeweled casket, carefully guarded from the eyes of the people, and carried periodically in a solemn procession which draws Buddhists from every corner of the Orient. On the walls of the temple, frescoes show the gentle Buddha killing sinners in hell. The lives of great men all remind us how helplessly they may be transmogrified after their death.

* In the census of 1921 the religions of India divided the population as follows: Hinduism, 216,261,000; Sikhs, 3,239,000; Jains, 1,178,000; Buddhists, 11,571,000 (nearly all in Burma and Ceylon); Zoroastrians (Parsees), 102,000; Moslems, 68,735,000; Jews, 22,000; Christians, 4,754,000 (chiefly Europeans).¹²

† Nevertheless the name of Shiva, like that of Brahman itself, cannot be found in the Rig-veda. Patanjali the grammarian mentions Shiva images and devotees ca. 150 B.C.¹⁶

* The priests of Shivaism, however, are seldom Brahmans; and the majority of the Brahmans look with scorn and regret upon the Shakti cult.²⁶

* Excerpt from the 1901 Census Report to the British Government of India: “The general result of my inquiries is that the great majority of Hindus have a firm belief in one Supreme Being.”²⁹

* Teacher.

* Advaitam; this is the central word of Hindu philosophy; cf. page 549 below.

* When the Hindu is asked why we have no memory of our past incarnations, he answers that likewise we have no memory of our infancy; and as we presume our infancy to explain our maturity, so he presumes past existences to explain our place and fate in our present life.

† A monk explained his appetite on the ground that in a previous existence he had been an elephant, and Karma had forgotten to change the appetite with the body.³⁶ A woman of strong odor was believed to have been formerly a fish.³⁷

* The Hindus believe in seven heavens, one of them on earth, the others rising in gradations above it; there are twenty-one hells, divided into seven sections. Punishment is not eternal, but it is diversified. Père Dubois’ description of the Hindu hells rivals Dante’s account of Inferno, and illustrates, like it, the many fears, and the sadistic imagination, of mankind. “Fire, steel, serpents, venomous insects, savage beasts, birds of prey, gall, poison, stenches; in a word, everything possible is employed to torment the damned. Some have a cord run through their nostrils, by which they are forever dragged over the edges of extremely sharp knives; others are condemned to pass through the eye of a needle; others are placed between two flat rocks, which meet, and crush, without killing, them; others have their eyes pecked incessantly by famished vultures; while millions of them continually swim and paddle in a pool filled with the urine of dogs or with the mucus from men’s nostrils.”⁴⁰ Such beliefs were probably the privilege of the lowest Hindus and the strictest theologians. We shall find it easier to forgive them if we remember that our own Hell, unlike that of India, was not only varied, but eternal.

† The belief in Karma and transmigration is the greatest theoretical obstacle to the removal of the caste system from India; for the orthodox Hindu presumes that caste differences are decreed by the soul’s conduct in past lives, and are part of a divine plan which it would be sacrilegious to disturb.

* Schopenhauer, like Buddha, reduced all suffering to the will to live and beget, and advocated race suicide by voluntary sterility. Heine could hardly pen a stanza without speaking of death, and could write, in Hindu strain,

Sweet is sleep, but death is better;

Best of all is never to be born.⁴²

Kant, scorning the optimism of Leibnitz, asked: “Would any man of sound understanding who has lived long enough, and has meditated on the worth of human existence, care to go again through life’s poor play, I do not say on the same conditions, but on any conditions whatever?”⁴³

* Cf. footnote to page 80 above.

† So the good European caps each sneeze with a benediction, originally to guard against the soul being ejected by the force of the expiration.

* Such human sacrifices were recorded as late as 1854.⁶⁴ It was formerly believed that devotees had offered themselves as sacrifices, as in the case of fanatics supposed to have thrown themselves under the wheels of the Juggernaut (Indian Jagannath) car;⁶⁵ but it is now held that the rare cases of such apparent self-sacrifice may have been accidents⁶⁶

* Ghee is clarified butter. Urine, says the Abbé Dubois (1820), “is looked upon as most efficacious for purifying any kind of uncleanness. I have often seen superstitious Hindus following the cows to pasture, waiting for the moment when they could collect the precious liquid in vessels of brass, and carrying it away while still warm to their houses. I have also seen them waiting to catch it in the hollow of their hands, drinking some of it and rubbing their faces and heads with the rest.”⁷² De gustibus non disputandum.

* Dubois, sceptical of everything but his own myth, adds: “The greater number of these sannyasin are looked upon as utter impostors, and that by the most enlightened of their fellow-counuymen.”⁷⁵

* It was used by the Mayas of America in the first century A.D.^8a Dr. Breasted attributes a knowledge of the place value of numerals to the ancient Babylonians (Saturday Review of Literature, New York, July 13, 1935, P. 15).

* The first algebraist known to us, the Greek Diophantus (360 A.D.), antedates Aryabhata by a century; but Cajori believes that he took his lead from India.¹¹

* E.g., in The Ocean of Music (Samgita-ratnakara) of Sharamgadeva (1210-47).

* Hospitals were erected in Ceylon as early as 427 B.C. and in northern India as early as 226 B.C³⁹

* Asti, it is; n’asti, it is not.

* The Nyaya syllogism, however, has five propositions: theorem, reason, major premiss, minor premiss and conclusion. E.g.: (i) Socrates is mortal, (2) for he is a man; (3) all men are mortal; (4) Socrates is a man; (5) therefore Socrates is mortal.

* Its earliest extant literature, the Sankhya-karika of the commentator Ishvara Krishna, dates back only to the fifth century A.D., and the Sankhya-sutras once attributed to Kapila are not older than our fifteenth century; but the origins of the system apparendy antedate Buddhism itself.⁷⁰ The Buddhist texts and the Mahabharata^70a repeatedly refer to it, and Winternitz finds its influence in Pythagoras.^70b

* “The evolution of Prakriti” says one Hindu commentator on Kapila, “has no purpose except to provide a spectacle for the soul.”⁸⁰ Perhaps, as Nietzsche suggested, the wisest way to view the world is as an esthetic and dramatic spectacle.

* Cf. the poem quoted on page 512 above.

† The Bhagavad-Gita, translated by Sir Edwin Arnold as The Song Celestial, London, 1925, bk. vi, p. 35. Brahmacaria is the vow of chastity taken by the ascetic student “Me” is Krishna.

* Cf. Hobbes: Semper idem sentire idem est ac nihil sentire: “always to feel the same thing is the same as to feel nothing.”

† Eliot compares, for the illumination of this stage, a passage from Schopenhauer, obviously inspired by his study of Hindu philosophy: “When some sudden cause or inward disposition lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all at once the peace that we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord, and it is well with us.”¹⁰²

* The blunt Dubois describes them as “a tribe of vagabonds.”¹⁰⁹ The word fakir, sometimes applied to Yogis, is an Arab term, originally meaning “poor,” and properly applied only to members of Moslem religious orders vowed to poverty.

* Hence the name Advaita—non-dualism—often given to the Vedanta philosophy.

† Shankara and the Vedanta are not quite pantheistic: things considered as distinct from one another are not Brahman; they are Brahman only in their essential, indivisible and changeless essence and reality. “Brahman,” says Shankara, “resembles not the world, and (yet) apart from Brahman there is naught; all that which seems to exist outside of It (Brahman) cannot exist (in such fashion) save in an illusory manner, like the semblance of water in the desert.”^115a

* Cf. Blake:

“I will go down to self-annihilation and Eternal Death.

Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate,

And I be seized and given into the hands of my own Selfhood.”¹¹⁷

Or Tennyson’s “Ancient Sage”:

“For more than once when I

Sat all alone, revolving in myself

The word that is the symbol of myself,

The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,

And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud

Melts into Heaven. I touched my limbs—the limbs

Were strange, not mine—and yet not shade of doubt

But utter clearness, and through loss of Self

The gain of such large life as matched with ours

Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,

Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.”¹¹⁸

* We do not know how much Parmenides’ insistence that the Many are unreal, and that only the One exists, owed to the Upanishads, or contributed to Shankara; nor can we establish any connection, of cause or suggestion, between Shankara and the astonishingly similar philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

* “No Indian saint ever had anything but contempt for the knowledge gained by the senses and the intellect.”¹²⁷ “Never have the Indian sages . . . fallen into our typical error of taking any intellectual formation seriously in the metaphysical sense; these are no more substantial than any Maya formation.”¹²⁸

* Cf. Spinoza: “The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of Nature.”¹³¹ “The intellectual love of God” is a summary of Hindu philosophy.

* Cf. Bergson, Keyserling, Christian Science, Theosophy.

* Some examples of Sanskrit agglutination: citerapratisamkramayastadakarapattau, upadanavisvamasattakakaruapattih.¹

† The movement for self-rule.

* The Babylonians had done likewise; cf. p. 250 above.

† Of printing there is no sign till the nineteenth century—possibly because, as in China, the adjustment of movable type to the native scripts was too expensive, possibly because printing was looked upon as a vulgar descent from the art of calligraphy. The printing of newspapers and books was brought by the English to the Hindus, who bettered the instruction; today there are 1,517 newspapers in India, 3,627 periodicals, and over 17,000 new books published in an average year.⁵

* I.e., instructions.

* We cannot tell how much of the following (and perhaps of the preceding) quotation is Bernier’s, and how much Aurangzeb’s; we only know that it bears reprinting.

* References in the Vedas to certain characters of the Mahabharata indicate that the story of a great intertribal war in the second millennium B.C. is fundamentally historical.

* E.g.: “Do naught to others which if done to thee would cause thee pain.”²⁴ “Even if the enemy seeks help, the good man will be ready to grant him aid.”²⁵ “With meekness conquer wrath, and ill with ruth; by giving niggards vanquish, lies with truth.”²⁶

† E.g.: “As in the great ocean one piece of wood meets another, and parts from it again, such is the meeting of creatures.”²⁷

* Couplets.

† l.e., the age in which literature used Sanskrit as its medium.

* An exceptional instance. Usually, in Hindu plays, the women speak Prakrit, on the ground that it would be unbecoming in a lady to be familiar with a dead language.

* The great Hindu theorist of the drama, Dhanamjaya (ca. 1000 A.D.), writes: “As for any simple man of little intelligence who says that from dramas, which distil joy, the gain is knowledge only—homage to him, for he has averted his face from what is delightful.”⁵²

* Sir William Jones reported that the Hindus laid claim to three inventions: chess, the decimal system, and teaching by fables.

† A lively war rages in the fields of Oriental scholarship as to whether these fables passed from India to Europe, or turn about; we leave the dispute to men of leisure. Perhaps they passed to both India and Europe from Egypt, via Mesopotamia and Crete. The influence of the Panchatantra upon the Arabian Nights, however, is beyond question.⁵⁸

* Poetry tended now to be less objective than in the days of the epic, and gave itself more and more to the interweaving of religion and love. Metre, which had been loose and free in the epics, varying in the length of the line, and requiring regularity only in the last four or five syllables, became at once stricter and more varied; a thousand complications of prosody were introduced, which disappear in translation; artifices of letter and phrase abounded, and rhyme appeared not only at the end but often in the middle of the line. Rigid rules were composed for the poetic art, and the form became more precise as the content thinned.

* Rabindranath Tagore has translated, with characteristic perfection, one hundred Songs of Kabir, New York, 1915.

* Cf. p. 497 above.

† Perhaps the oldest printing of textiles from blocks was done in India,⁸ though it never grew there into the kindred art of block-printing books.

‡ From the Hindu paijamas, meaning leg-clothing.

§ These fine woolen shawls are made of several strips, skilfully joined into what seems to be a single fabric.¹⁰

* The secular Hindu dance has been revealed to Europe and America by the not quite orthodox art of Shankar, in which every movement of the body, the hands, the fingers and the eyes conveys a subtle and precise significance to the initiated spectator, and carries an undulating grace, and a precise and corporeal poetry, unknown in the Western dance since our democratic return to the African in art.

* More strictly speaking there are six ragas or basic themes, each with five modifications called ragini. Raga means color, passion, mood; ragini is its feminine form.

* Near the village of Fardapur, in the native state of Hyderabad.

* Among his preliminary sketches for The Last Supper.

† A supposition. We do not know who painted these frescoes.

* Hsieh Ho; cf. p. 752 below. The Sandanga is of uncertain date, being known to us through a thirteenth-century commentary.

* An exception outweighing this generalization was the copper colossus of Buddha, eighty feet high, which Yuan Chwang saw at Pataliputra; through Yuan and other Far Eastern pilgrims to India this may have been one ancestor of the great Buddhas at Nara and Kamakura in Japan.

* The correspondence of this interior with that of Christian churches has suggested a possible influence of Hindu styles upon early Christian architecture.^74a

* Swastika is a Sanskrit word, from su, well, and asti, being. This eternally recurring symbol appears among a great variety of peoples, primitive and modern, usually as a sign of well-being or good luck.

* Here, says Meadows Taylor, “the carving on some of the pillars, and of the lintels and architraves of the doors, is quite beyond description. No chased work in silver or gold could possibly be finer. By what tools this very hard, tough stone could have been wrought and polished as it is, is not at all intelligible at the present day.”⁹⁵

* The summit of the temple is a single block of stone twenty-five feet square, and weighing some eighty tons. According to Hindu tradition it was raised into place by being drawn up an incline four miles long. Forced labor was probably employed in such works, instead of “man-enslaving” machinery.

* In 1604 a Portuguese missionary told of hunters reporting some ruins in the jungle, and another priest made a similar report in 1672; but no attention was paid to these statements.¹¹³

* E.g., the lacquered stone Buddha in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

* I.e., minaret, from the Arabic manarat, a lamp or lighthouse.

* The Delhi Fort originally contained fifty-two palaces, but only twenty-seven remain. A harassed British garrison took refuge there in the Sepoy Mutiny, and razed several of the palaces to make room for their stores. Much looting occurred.

* It was a sad error of Shah Jehan’s to make a fortress of these lovely palaces. When the British besieged Agra (1803) they inevitably turned their guns upon the Fort. Seeing the cannon-balls strike the Khass Mahal, or Hall of Private Audience, the Hindus surrendered, thinking beauty more precious than victory. A little later Warren Hastings tore up the bath of the palace to present it to George IV; and other portions of the structure were sold by Lord William Bentinck to help the revenues of India.¹²³

† Lord William Bentinck, one of the kindliest of the British governors of India, once thought of selling the Taj for $150,000 to a Hindu contractor, who believed that better use could be made of the material.¹²⁶ Since Lord Curzon’s administration the British Government of India has taken excellent care of these Mogul monuments.

* Goods bought for $2,000,000 in India were sold for $10,000,000 in England.¹ The stock of the Company rose to $32,000 a share.²

* Literally, the “Brahma Society”; known more fully as “The Society of the Believers in Brahman, the Supreme Spirit.”

† It has today some 5,500 adherents.¹⁶ Another reform organization, the Arya-Somaj (Aryan Society), founded by Swami Dyananda, and brilliantly carried forward by the late Lala Lajpat Rai, denounced caste, polytheism, superstition, idolatry and Christianity, and urged a return to the simpler religion of the Vedas. Its followers now number half a million.¹⁷ A reverse influence, of Hinduism upon Christianity, appears in Theosophy—a mixture of Hindu mysticism and Christian morality, developed in India by two exotic women: Mme. Helena Blavatsky (1878) and Mrs. Annie Besant (1893).

* To the end of his life he accepted the divinity of Christ, but insisted that Buddha, Krishna and others were also incarnations of the one God. He himself, he assured Vivekananda, was a reincarnation of Rama and Krishna.^17a

* The more important volumes are Gitanjali (1913), Chitra (1914), The Post-Office (1914), The Gardener (1914), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and Red Oleanders (1925). The poet’s own My Reminiscences (1917) is a better guide to understanding him than E. Thompson’s R. Tagore, Poet and Dramatist (Oxford, 1926).

† Cf. his magnificent line: “When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.”²⁷

* In 1922 there were eighty-three cotton factories in Bombay, with 180,000 employees, and an average wage-scale of thirty-three cents a day. Of 33,000,000 Indians engaged in industry, 51% are women, 14% are children under fourteen.³⁵

* “People who abstain entirely from animal food acquire such an acute sense of smell that they can perceive in a moment, from a person’s breath, or from the exudation of the skin, whether that person has eaten meat or not; and that after a lapse of twenty-four hours.”³⁹

† In 1913 the child of a rich Hindu of Kohat fell into a fountain and was drowned. No one was at hand but its mother and a passing Outcaste. The latter offered to plunge into the water and rescue the child, but the mother refused; she preferred the death of her child to the defilement of the fountain.⁴¹

‡ In the year 1915 there were 15 remarriages of widows;, in 1925 there were 2,263.⁴⁴

* This does not apply to all. Some, in the significant phrase of Coomaraswamy, have “returned from Europe to India.”

* The deposed Mandarins at Tsing-tao.

* The Chinese scholar who helped Dr. Giles to translate some of the extracts in Gems of Chinese Literature, sent him, as a well-meant farewell, a poem in which occurred these gracious lines:

From of old, literature has illumined the nation of nations;

And now its influence has gone forth to regenerate a barbarian official.⁶

* The Yang-tze near Shanghai is three miles wide.

† Cf. p. 92 above.

* This is Confucius’ gloomy way of indicating that but for Kuan the Chinese people would still be barbarians; for the barbarians habitually buttoned their coats on the left side.²¹

* Professor Giles considers it a forgery composed after 200 B.C. by free pilfering from the works of the essayist and critic, Han Fei;³⁸ Dr. Legge holds that the frequent references to Lao (as “Lao Tan”) in Chuang-tze and in Szuma Ch’ien warrant continued belief in the authenticity of the Tao-Te-Ching.³⁹

* A form of communication that preceded writing. The word make is rather un-Laotzian.

* He adds, with reckless gallantry: “The female always overcomes the male by her stillness.”⁴⁶

† The Chinese think of the sage as reaching the maturity of his powers about the age of fifty, and living, through quietude and wisdom, to a century.⁴⁸

* The story is told by the greatest of Chinese historians, Szuma Ch’ien,⁵¹ but it may be fiction. We are shocked to find Lao-tze in the busiest city of China in his eighty-seventh year.

* Quoted on p. 668 below.

* Cf. Spinoza: “We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.”¹¹⁹

† Cf. one of Kant’s formulations of the “Categorical Imperative” of morals: “So to will that the maxim of thy conduct can become a universal law.”¹²¹

* “Let me write the songs of a nation,” said Daniel O’Connell, “and I care not who makes its laws.”

* For Shun and Yü cf. page 644 above; for Chieh and Chou (Hsin) cf. pp. 644-5.

* Cf. p. 731 below.

* I.e., the good in man is not born but made—by institutions and education.

* In an eclipse the penumbra is the partly illuminated space between the umbra (the complete shadow) and the light. Perhaps, in Chuang’s allegory, the complete shadow is the body, interrogated by the partly illuminated mind.

* “Hsi Shih was a beautiful woman; but when her features were reflected in the water the fish were frightened away.”¹⁹⁹

* E.g.: “Luxury, dissoluteness and slavery have always been the chastisement of the ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance in which Eternal Wisdom had placed us.” Professor (now Senator) Elbert Thomas, who quotes this passage from the Discourse on the Progress of the Sciences and Arts, considers “Eternal Wisdom” an excellent translation of Lao-tze’s “Eternal Tao.”²⁰⁹

* All dates before 551 B.C. are approximate; all before 1800 A.D. are uncertain.

*Cf. p. 665 below.

* “The situation,” says Granet, “. . . was revolutionary. If the Emperor Wu had had some kindred spirit, he might have been able to profit by this and create, in a new order of society, the Chinese State. . . . But the Emperor only saw the most urgent needs. He seems only to have thought of using varied expedients from day to day—rejected when they had yielded sufficient to appear worn out—and new men—sacrificed as soon as they had succeeded well enough to assume a dangerous air of authority. The restlessness of the despot and the short vision of the imperial law-makers made China miss the rarest opportunity she had had to become a compact and organized state.”¹⁹

* The “Western Han” Dynasty, 206 B.C.—24 A.D., had its capital at Lo-yang, now Honan-fu; the “Eastern Han” Dynasty, 24-221 A.D., had its capital at Ch’ang-an, now Sian-fu. The Chinese still call themselves the “Sons of Han.”

* Unless there is truth in the rumor circulated on the death of the boy emperor, in the year 5 A.D., that Wang Mang’s family had poisoned him.²⁴

* Cf. Sir W. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilization. London, n.d.

* The assumed name of a French physician who in the fourteenth century composed a volume of travels, mostly imaginary, occasionally illuminating, always fascinating.

† Arthur Waley.³⁷ Cf. the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th ed., xviii, 361): “In the T’ang Dynasty. China was without doubt the greatest and most civilized power in the world.”

* “When the Tatars overthrew Ming Huang and sacked Chang-an,” says Arthur Waley, “it was as if Turks had ravaged Versailles in the time of Louis XIV.”³⁸

* It is a pretty tale, perhaps composed by Li Po.

* A precious wood.

† Cf. p. 694 above.

* From the Chinese K’o T’ou—to knock the head on the ground in homage.

* The most famous of China’s many renditions of the infatuation of Ming Huang with Yang Kwei-fei, her death in revolution, and Ming’s misery in restoration. The poem is not quite everlasting, but too long for quotation here.

* A famous Chinese painting pictures “The Poet Tu Fu in the Thatched Cottage.” It may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

* It has been well translated by Mrs. Pearl Buck under the title, All Men Are Brothers, New York, 1933.

† Translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, 2 vols., Shanghai, 1925.

* On the function of the Censors cf. p. 798 below. Not one of them, Han Yü implies, had protested against the plans of the Emperor Te Tsung to give his approval to Buddhism.

* The passage is quoted in full on page 668 above.

* The Rhus vernicifera. Lacquer is from the French lacre, resin, which in turn derives from the Latin lac, milk.

* Cf. p. 897 below.

† Patina (Latin for dish) is formed by the disintegration of the metal surface through contact with moisture or earth. It is the fashion today to value bronzes partly according to the green or black patina left on them by time—or by the acids used in the modern production of “ancient” art.

* There are some examples of this style in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* Their origin, in name and fact, is in much dispute. The word may be taken from the Hindu-Persian term but-kadah—“house of idols”; the form may be indigenous to China, as some think,⁵⁴ or may be derived from the spire that crowned some Hindu topes.⁵⁵

* Though writing is in its origin a form of drawing or painting, the Chinese classify painting as a form of writing, and consider calligraphy, or beautiful writing, as a major art. Specimens of fine writing are hung on the walls in Chinese and Japanese homes; and devotees of the art have pursued its masterpieces as modern collectors roam over continents to find a picture or a vase. The most famous of Chinese calligraphers was Wang Hsi-chih (ca. 400 A.D.); it was on the Chinese characters as formed by his graceful hand that the characters were cut when block-printing began. The great T’ang emperor, T’ai Tsung, resorted to theft to get from Pien-tsai a scroll written by Wang Hsi-chih. Thereupon Pien-tsai, we are told, lost appetite and died.⁶²

* The British Museum assigns to him a faded but lovely scroll of five pictures illustrating model family life;⁷⁰ the Temple of Confucius at Chü-fu contains a stone engraving purporting to follow a design of Ku; and the Freer Gallery at Washington contains two excellent copies of compositions attributed to him.⁷¹

* Cf. p. 798 below.

* Only copies remain: chiefly a “Waterfall” in the Temple of Chisakuin at Kyoto,⁷⁹ and a roll (in both the British Museum and the Freer Gallery) entitled “Scenery of the Wang Ch’uan.”⁸⁰

† Cf. Croce’s view that art lies in the conception rather than in the execution.⁸⁴

* The Freer Gallery at Washington has a “Landscape on the Hoang-ho” uncertainly attributed to Kuo Hsi.⁹²

* A landscape attributed to Mi Fei may be seen in Room E 11 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

† Particularly striking is “The Lady Ling-chao Standing in the Snow.” The Lady (a Buddhist mystic of the eighth century) is quite still in meditation, like Socrates in the snow at Platæa. The world (the artist seems to say) is nothing except to a mind; and that mind can ignore it—for a while.

* Landscape painting was called simply shan-sui—i.e., mountains and water.

* When porcelain was introduced into Europe it was named after the porcellana, or cowrie shell, which in turn derived its name from its supposed resemblance to the rounded back of a porcella, or little hog.¹⁰²

† The Egyptians had glazed pottery unknown centuries before Christ. The decorations on the earliest glazed pottery of China indicate that China had learned the glazing process from the Near East.¹⁰⁴

* A term applied to them by the French of the seventeenth century from the name of the hero of d’Urfé’s novel l’Astrée, who, in the dramatization of the story, was always dressed in green.¹⁰⁸

† From the Occidental point of view the one is as hard as the other; for the Japanese, who have gathered in most of China’s famous céladon, refuse to sell it at any price; and no later potter has been able to rival the perfection of Sung artistry in this field.

* The name given by the Chinese to an ivory-colored species of Sung porcelain.

* Excellent specimens of the last two groups may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* An English form of the Russian name for China—Kitai, originally the name of a Mongolian tribe.

* “Shangtu” is Coleridge’s “Xanadu.” The central Asian regions described by Polo were not explored again by Europeans (with one forgotten exception) until 1838.

* “Not a day passes,” writes Marco Polo, “in which there are not distributed, by the regular officers, twenty thousand vessels of rice, millet, and panicum. By reason of this admirable and astonishing liberality which the Great Khan exercises towards the poor, the people all adore him.”⁸

* Kublai Khan had proved his conversion to civilization by developing gout.¹²

* She obeyed, and story has it that many concubines followed her example.¹⁴

* “Occupied without rest in the diverse cares of a government which men admire, the greatest monarch in the world is also the most lettered man in his empire.”

* The following description of Chinese society will apply chiefly to the nineteenth century; the changes brought on by contact with the West will be studied later. Every description must be taken with reserve, since a civilization is never quite the same over a long period of time or an extensive area of space.

* The denuded slopes and hills, unable to hold the rain-water that fell upon them, lost their top-soil, became arid, and offered no obstacle to the flooding of the valleys by the heavy rains.

* The spinning of silk out of the cocoons of wild silkworms was known to the ancient classical world; but the breeding of the worms and the gathering and weaving of the silk as an industry were introduced into Europe from China by Nestorian monks about 552 A.D.⁴⁶ The art was brought from Constantinople to Sicily in the twelfth century, and to England in the fifteenth.

* It was not unusual for a Chinese host, when entertaining guests, to pass delicate fabrics around among them,⁴⁸ as another might exhibit porcelain or unravel his favorite paintings or calligraphic scrolls.

* A word of Hindu origin, probably from the Tamil kuli, hired servant.

* Copper is still the dominant currency, in the form of the “cash”—worth a third or a half of a cent—and the “tael,” which is worth a thousand “cash.”

* His machine consisted of eight copper dragons placed on delicate springs around a bowl in whose center squatted a toad with open mouth. Each dragon held a copper ball in its mouth. When an earthquake occurred, the dragon nearest its source dropped its ball into the mouth of the toad. Once a dragon released its ball, though no shock had been felt by the inhabitants. Chang Heng was ridiculed as a charlatan, until a messenger arrived who told of an earthquake in a distant province.⁶⁹

† Feng shut (wind and water) was the art, very widespread in China, of adapting the location of homes and graves to the currents of wind and water in the locality.

* Christianity lost its opportunity early in the eighteenth century, when a quarrel arose between the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic orders in China. The Jesuits had, with characteristic statesmanship, found formulas by which the essential elements of Chinese piety—ancestor worship and the adoration of heaven—could be brought under Christian forms without disrupting deep-rooted institutions or endangering the moral stability of China; but the Dominicans and Franciscans demanded a stricter interpretation, and denounced all Chinese theology and ritual as inventions of the devil. The enlightened Emperor K’ang-hsi was highly sympathetic to Christianity; he entrusted his children to Jesuit tutors, and offered on certain conditions to become a Christian. When the Church officially adopted the rigid attitude of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, K’ang-hsi withdrew his support of Christianity, and his successors decided to oppose it actively.⁹¹ In later days the greedy imperialism of the West weakened the persuasiveness of Christian preaching, and precipitated the passionate anti-Christianism of the revolutionary Chinese.

* Men sometimes prepared themselves openly for a night in a brothel by pictures, aphrodisiacs and songs.¹⁰⁰ It should be added that this lenience towards marital deviations is disappearing today.

* Chinese legend illustrates this with characteristic humor by the story of Hakuga, who was whipped daily by his mother, but never cried. One day, however, he cried as he was being beaten; and being asked the cause of this unusual disturbance he answered that he wept because his mother, now old and weak, was unable to hurt him with her blows.¹²²

* In many cities hucksters stood at the roadside with saucer, dice and cup in hand, ready for the casual gambler.¹²³

* Hence his realm was sometimes called Tien-Chan, the “heaven-ruled.” Europeans translated this into the “Celestial Kingdom,” and spoke of the Chinese learnedly as “Celestials.”¹³³

* The imperial revenue towards the close of the last century averaged $75,000,000 a year; the revenues collected for local purposes amounted to an additional $i75,000,000.ia6 If these national receipts, essential to the maintenance of order, are compared with the $150,000,000 exacted of China by Japan in 1894, and the $300,000,000 indemnity asked by the Allies after the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of China becomes a mere matter of bookkeeping.

* From these local schools the children might go on to one of the rare and poorly-equipped colleges of the empire; more frequently they studied with a tutor, or with a few precious books, at home. Needy students were often financed through such schooling by men of means, on the understanding that they would return the loan with interest on their appointment to office and their access to “squeeze.”

* “Seldom,” says Dr. Latourette, “has any large group of mankind been so prosperous and so nearly contented as were the Chinese under this governmental machinery when it was dominated by the ablest of the monarchs.” This was likewise the opinion of the learned Capt. Brinkley.¹⁴⁰

* “The Chinese,” said Sir Robert Hart, “worship talent; they delight in literature, and everywhere they have their little clubs for learning, and for discussing each other’s essays and verses.”

*The meaning of this may be felt by recalling that a vest-pocket package of opium costs $30.⁴

* A dowager is a widow endowed—usually with a title coming down to her from her dead husband.

* Captain Brinkley writes: “It sends a thrill of horror through every white man’s bosom to learn that forty missionary women and twenty-five little children were butchered by the Boxers. But in T’ungchow alone, a city where the Chinese made no resistance, and where there was no fighting, five hundred and seventy-three Chinese women of the upper classes committed suicide rather than survive the indignities they had suffered.”⁹

*He died at Peking in 1925, at the most opportune moment for his conservative enemies.

* From that time on the city, whose name had meant “northern capital,” was renamed Peiping, i.e., “the north pacified”; while the Nationalist Government, in order to be near its financial sources at Shanghai, maintained its headquarters at the “southern capital,” Nanking.

* Once Great Britain dominated the import trade; now it accounts for 14%, the United States for 17%, Japan for 27%;²¹ and the Japanese leadership in this field mounts with every year. Between 1910 and 1930 Chinese trade increased 600% to approximately one and a half billion dollars.²²

*In 1927 alone many thousands of workers were executed for belonging to labor unions.²⁵

† Some Chinese women pad their shoes to conceal the fact that their feet were bound.²⁶

* P. 673 above. Latterly the “New Life” movement, let by Chiang Kai-shek, has attempted, with some success, to restore Confucianism.

*The Revolution grants it where both parties ask for it; but where the husband is under thirty, or the wife is under twenty-five, the consent of the parents is required for a divorce. The old causes for which the husband may divorce his wife remain in force—barrenness, infidelity, neglect of duty, loquacity, thievishness, jealousy, or serious disease; but these are not allowed to apply if the wife has mourned three years for her husband’s parents, or has no family to return to, or has been faithful to her husband during his rise from poverty to wealth.³⁰

† The frank display of contraceptive devices in Chinese drug-stores may suggest to the West a convenient escape from the “Yellow Peril.”

* In 1932 the Union Medical College, a five-million dollar gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was opened to medical students of either sex. The China Medical Board, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, maintains nineteen hospitals, three medical schools, and sixty-five scholarships.³⁶

* Latterly, under the influence of Chiang Kai-skek’s New Life movement, the acceptance of Western models in mind and morals has abated; China and Japan are beginning to make their own motion-pictures; radicalism is giving way before a renewed conservatism; and China is tending to join with Japan in a revolt against European and American ideas and ways.

* If this account be questioned as improbable, the objection has long since been answered by the most influential of Japanese critics, Moto-ori: “The very inconsistency is the proof of the authenticity of the record; for who would have gone out of his way to invent a story apparently so ridiculous and incredible?”²

† The name Japan is probably a corruption of the Malay word for the islands-Japang or Japun; this is a rendering of the Japanese term Nippon, which in turn is a corruption of the Chinese name for “the place the sun comes from”—Jih-pen. The Japanese usually prefix to Nippon the adjective Dai, meaning “Great.”³

‡ Fuji-san (less classically Fuji-yama), idol of artists and priests, approximates to a gently sloping cone. Many thousands of pilgrims ascend its 12,365 feet in any year. Fuji (Ainu for “fire”) erupted last in 1707.⁵

* “This period named ‘Engi,’” says the enthusiastic Fenollosa, “must doubtless be reckoned the high-water mark of Japanese civilization, as Ming Huang’s had been that of China. Never again would either China or Japan be quite so rich, splendid, and full of free genius. . . . In general culture and luxurious refinement of a life which equally ministered to mind and body, not only not in Japan, but perhaps not in the world was there ever again anything quite so exquisite.”³¹

* Both rider and horse, we are told, were thrown into a panic by seeing the ghost of the brother whom Yoritomo had murdered; the horse stumbled, the rider fell, and Yoritomo died some months later, at the age of fifty-three.³⁷ The story is vouched for by his enemies.

† The Spanish Armada of 1588, on its arrival in the English Channel, had some 120 ships, with 24,000 men.^38a

* In 1596 a Spanish galleon was forced into a Japanese harbor by Japanese boats, was purposely driven by them upon a reef that broke it in two, and then was pillaged by the local governor on the ground that Japanese law permitted the authorities to appropriate all vessels stranded on their shores. The outraged pilot, Landecho, protested to Hideyoshi’s Minister of Works, Masuda. Masuda asked how it was that the Christian Church had won so many lands to be subject to one man; and Landecho, being a seaman rather than a diplomat, answered: “Our kings begin by sending, into the countries they wish to conquer, religieux who induce the people to embrace our religion; and when they have made considerable progress, troops are sent who combine with the new Christians; and then our kings have not much trouble in accomplishing the rest.”⁵⁹

* Dates of rulers are of their accession and their assassinated or deposed death. Several abdicated, or were assassinated or deposed.

* This sum, however, was probably equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars in current American money.

* A word coined by the late Inazo Nitobe.

* Hara-kiri was forbidden to women and plebeians; but women were allowed to commit jigaki—i.e., they were permitted, as a protest against an offense, to pierce the throat with a dagger, and to sever the arteries by a single thrust. Every woman of quality received technical training in the art of cutting her throat, and was taught to bind her lower limbs together before killing herself, lest her corpse should be found in an immodest position.¹⁸

* This practice was forbidden in 1699.³¹

† The arable exceptions were—and are—fertilized with human waste.

‡ During the months of July and August a siesta was permitted from noon till four o’clock. Sick workers were fed by the state, and free coffins were provided for those who died during the corvée,³⁶

* The worst of the many fires in Japanese history was that which completely wiped out Yedo (Tokyo) in 1657, with the loss of 100,000 lives.

* In 1905 Tokyo had 1100 public baths, in which 500,000 persons bathed daily for 1¼ cents.⁵³

* On the other hand those Japanese who have adopted a non-physical life while continuing to eat large quantities of rice are succumbing to digestive disorders.⁵⁶

* The tea-crop, of course, is now one of the important products of Japan. The Dutch East India Co. appears to have brought Europe its first tea in 1610, and to have sold it at some $4.00 a pound. Jonas Hanway, in 1756, argued that European men were losing their stature, and women their beauty, through the drinking of tea; and reformers denounced the custom as a filthy barbarism.⁶¹

* The Taiko and the Tea-Master loved each other like geniuses. The first accused the other of dishonesty, and was accused in turn of seducing Rikyu’s daughter. In the end Rikyu committed hara-kiri.⁶³

† Similar pilgrimages are made to see the maple leaves turning in the fall.

* This was done only in the lower classes, and in extreme need.⁶⁹

* “It was mainly in seasons when people were starving,” says Murdoch, “or dying in tens of thousands from pestilence, that the monks in the great Kyoto and Nara monasteries fared most sumptuously; for it was in times like these that believers were most lavish in their gifts and benefactions.”⁹⁸

† “In 1454 . . . boys were often sold to the priests, who shaved their eyebrows, powdered their faces, dressed them in female garb, and put them to the vilest of uses; for since the days of Yoshimitsu, who had set an evil example in this as in so many other matters, the practice of pederasty had become very common, especially in the monasteries, although it was by no means confined to them.”⁹⁷

* Cf. the opening pages of De Intellectus Emendatione.

* Cf. page 733 above.

* From Sir E. Satow’s paraphrase of Mabuchi’s teaching: “In ancient times, when men’s dispositions were straightforward, a complicated system of morals was unnecessary . . . . In those days it was unnecessary to have a doctrine of right and wrong. But the Chinese, being bad at heart . . . were only good on the outside, and their bad acts became of such magnitude that society was thrown into disorder. The Japanese, being straightforward, could do without teaching.¹²¹

* The katakana script reduced these syllabic symbols to straight lines—as in the “tabloid” press, the larger billboards, and the illuminated signs of modern Japan.¹

* Printing, like writing, came from China as part of Buddhist lore; the oldest extant examples of printing in the world are some Buddhist charms block-printed at the command of the Empress Shotoku in the year 770 A.D.³ Movable type entered from Korea about 1596, but the expense involved in printing a language still composed of thousands of characters kept its use from spreading until the Restoration of 1858 opened the doors to European influence. Even today a Japanese newspaper requires a font of several thousand characters.⁴ Japanese typography, despite these difficulties, is one of the most attractive forms of printing in our time.

* The present writer regrets that the brevity of life has prevented his reading more than the first of the four volumes into which Arthur Waley has so perfectly translated Murasaki’s tale.

* Even into the ordinary home our Lady enters with understanding, and makes Uma no-Kami express, about the year 1000, a modernistic plea for feminine education: “Then there is the zealous housewife, who, regardless of her appearance, twists her hair behind her ears, and devotes herself entirely to the details of our domestic welfare. The husband, in his comings and goings about the world, is certain to see and hear many things which he cannot discuss with strangers, but would gladly talk over with an intimate who could listen with sympathy and understanding, some one who could laugh with him or weep, as need be. It often happens, too, that some political event will greatly perturb or amuse him, and he sits apart longing to tell some one about it. But the wife only says, lightly, ‘What is the matter?’ and shows no interest. This is apt to be very trying.”²⁵

* His description of this has been quoted above, p. 852.

* Hideyoshi’s generals, after successful campaigns, seem to have been content—occasionally—to be rewarded not with new areas and revenues, but with rare pieces of pottery or porcelain.⁴⁹

* The author is indebted to Mr. Adolf Kroch of Chicago for permission to examine his fine collection of netsuke and inro.

* Perhaps the great Shotoku Taishi, statesman and artist, had something to do with this achievement, for we know that he plied the chisel, and cut many statues in wood.⁶³ Kobo Daishi (ca. 816) was a sculptor as well as a painter, a scholar and a saint; Hokusai, to suggest his versatility, pictured him wielding five brushes at once, with hands and feet and mouth.⁶⁴ Unkei (1180-1220) made characterful portrait-busts of himself and many priests, and carved delightfully terrible figures of Hell’s Supreme Court, and those snarling gods whose function it was to frighten away, with the ugliness of their faces, all spirits of evil. His father Kokei, his son Jokei, and his pupil Jokaku helped him to make the Japanese supreme in the art of sculpturing wood.

* Toshiro was another name for Shirozemon; yaki means ware.

10 Perhaps the best of all collections of the Kano School—Mr. Beppu’s at Tokyo—was almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of 1923.

* The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has acquired a Korin “Wave-Screen,” which Ledoux pronounced to be “one of the greatest works of this type that has ever been permitted to leave Japan.”⁸⁰

* Who, having been exiled from Japan, sailed every day across the sea to gaze upon the Holy Mountain.

* An excellent collection of Hiroshige’s prints may be seen in the Boston Museum.

* This process corresponded essentially to the abolition of feudalism, serfdom or slavery in France in 1789, in Russia in 1862, and in the United States in 1863.

† These rights have been narrowly restricted by the war fever of the Manchurian ad venture.

* By the last official census Yokohama had 620,000 population, Kobe 787,000, Osaka 2,114,804, and Greater Tokyo 5,311,000.

† Transport by land did not grow as rapidly as marine trade, for the mountainous backbone of the islands made commerce prefer the sea. Roads remained poor by comparison with the West; and automobiles have only recently begun to be a peril in Japan. Already, however, the jinricksha, or “man-power-vehicle,” traditionally ascribed to an inventive American missionary in the early eighties,¹⁷ is disappearing before American and domestic motor cars and 200,000 miles of highway have been paved. Tokyo has a subway which compares favorably with those of Europe and America. The first Japanese railway was built in 1872, over a brave stretch of eighteen miles; by 1932 the narrow islands had 13,734 miles of iron roads. The new express from Dairen (near Por Arthur) to Hsinking (formerly Changchun), the capital of Manchuria, makes the 70a kilometers at the rate of 120 kilometers (approximately 75 miles) per hour.¹⁸

* The low remuneration of women is partly due to the expensively high turn-over among the women workers, who usually leave industry when they have amassed a marriage dowry.

* Women engaged in teaching or industry wear uniforms of Occidental cut. Both sexes, after working hours, relax into the traditional costumes.

* During the chaos that followed the earthquake of 1923 the Japanese of Yokohama, while being fed by American relief ships, took advantage of the turmoil to slaughter hundreds (some say thousands) of unarmed radicals and Koreans in the streets.²⁴ Some passionate patriot, it seems, had aroused the Japanese by announcing that the Koreans (who were a mere handful) were planning to overthrow the Government and kill the Emperor.

† “I have lived,” said Lafcadio Hearn, “in districts where no case of theft had occurred for hundreds of years—where the newly-built prisons of Meiji remained empty and useless.”²⁵

‡ Black Dragon is the Chinese name for the Amur River, which separates Manchuria from Siberia. The Japanese look upon assassination as merely a dignified substitute for exile.

* Such science as existed in Japan before 1853 was mostly an importation from the parental mainland. The Japanese calendar, previously based upon the phases of the moon, was readjusted to the solar year by a Korean priest about 604 A.D. In 680 A.D. Chinese modifications were introduced, and Japan took over (and still retains) the Chinese method of reckoning events by reference to the name and year of the reigning emperor. The Gregorian calendar was adopted by Japan in 1873.

* The current fever of nationalism has brought with it a revival of native motifs and styles.

* In 1934 the population of the Japanese Empire (i.e., Japan, Korea, Formosa and some minor possessions) totaled eighty millions. Should Japan succeed in reconciling the inhabitants of Manchuria to Japanese rule, it will control, for industry and war, 110,000,000 people. As the population of Japan alone increases by a million a year, and that of the United States is rapidly approaching a stationary condition, the two systems may soon confront each other with approximately equal populations.

* The ratio of 5-5-3 was based upon the greater extent of coast-lines or possessions requiring English or American defense, as compared with the limited and protected territory of Japan.

* By this principle the number of immigrants from any country was to bear the same ratio to the total of permitted annual immigration as persons of that nationality had borne to the total population of America in 1890.

* Written in 1934.

* It is possible that agriculture and the domestication of animals are as ancient in neolithic Europe as in neolithic Asia; but it seems more likely that the New Stone Age cultures of Europe were younger than those of Africa and Asia. Cf. Chapter VI above.

† In this and subsequent statements the word known is to be understood.

* A═Arabic; C═Chinese; E═Egyptian; F═French; G═German; Gr═Greek; He═Hebrew; H═one of the Hindu languages; I═Italian; J═Japanese; L═Latin; S═Sumerian; Sp═Spanish.

* Books starred are recommended for further study.

* The full title of a book is given only on its first occurrence in these Notes; abbreviated later references may be filled out by consulting the foregoing Bibliographical Guide to Books Referred to in the Text.

* The diacritical marks used in this index will indicate that the letters so marked are to be sounded approximately like the italicized letters in the following words: āle, câre, ădd, ärm, ; Chair; ēve, , makēr; go; īce, ; k like ch in German Ich; ôrb, ; oil, out; ūnite, ŭp, menü; short ŭ, when italicized, will be as in circus.