ARTI N V ' DR. W. A. P. MARTIN' JEt 73 he Lore or The Intellect of China BY W. A. P. MARTIN, D.D., LL.D. President of the Chinese Imperial University AUTHOR OF 'A CYCLE OF CATHAY," "THE SIEGE IN PEKING," ETC., ETC. ILLUSTRATED EDINBURGH AND LONDON OLIPHANT, ANDERSON & FERRIER 1901 Hlggs printing (Eompang ALBANY, N. Y. U. S. A. TO THE HON. JOHN W. FOSTER FORMERLY SECRETARY OF STATE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 20C55321 PREFACE <4P"T"1HE Lore of Cathay," is an essential comple- ment to " A Cycle of Cathay." The latter represents the active life of the Chinese as it appeared to the writer in the course of a long and varied experience. This book mirrors their intellectual life as it developed under investigations extending through many years of intimate association with Chinese scholars, and of identification with Chinese education. Its contents comprise the " Hanlin Papers," revised and enlarged by the addition of much new matter. Its materials have been drawn exclusively from native sources, and are the result of original research. The author has treated, with considerable detail, of subjects so diverse as Chinese education and Chinese alchemy; and he ven- tures to believe that he throws fresh light on some points of Oriental literature, science and philosophy ; and that he may fairly claim, as a field of his own discovery, the inter- national law and diplomacy of the ancient Chinese. In the San Kuo Chi it is laid down as a law of the national life, confirmed by history, that the Chinese Em- pire, when it has been long united, is sure to be divided ; when it has been long divided, is sure to be reunited. Just now the centrifugal forces are portentously active. Should they eventuate in partition, that state of things could not be permanent, though it might accelerate the acquisition of our Western civilization by the people of China. Quickened into new life, they would be sure to 2 PREFACE reconstruct the Empire and to take their place among the leading powers of the civilized world. While the Manchu rulers have made grudging conces- sions to superior force, they have always, with the ex- ception of Kuang Hsu, contrived to maintain a latent hostility in the minds of their people. That hostility has diminished strange to say with each defeat by foreign powers, and it almost disappeared during the reform movement under the young Emperor, which followed the war with Japan. To prevent the recurrence of outrages it is necessary to foster a fellow-feeling with the rest of the world. As Captain Mahan says : " Toward Asia in its present con- dition Europe has learned that it has a community of interest that may be defined as the need of bringing the Asian peoples within the compass of the family of Chris- tian States. They will have to insist that currency be permitted to our ideas liberty to exchange thought in Chinese territory with the individual Chinaman. The open door, both for commerce and for intellectual inter- action, should be our aim everywhere in China." One essential to this intellectual interaction is mutual intellectual comprehension. If China is to be a part of the family of civilized States Chinese thought, the principles at the basis of Chinese history and life must be understood. It is with the hope that this may be furthered that " The Lore of Cathay " is offered to the Anglo-Saxon public. W. A. P. M. PEKING, July ist. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PAGE THE AWAKENING IN CHINA 7 BOOK I CHINA'S CONTRIBUTION TO ARTS AND SCIENCES I. CHINESE DISCOVERIES 23 II. CHINESE SPECULATIONS IN PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE 33 III. ALCHEMY IN CHINA ; THE SOURCE OF CHEMISTRY . 44 BOOK 11 CHINESE LITERATURE IV. POETS AND POETRY OF CHINA 75 V. THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 87 VI. CONFUCIUS AND PLATO A COINCIDENCE . . . 106 VII. CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION in VIII. CHINESE LETTER WRITING 130 IX. CHINESE FABLES 144 X. NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA 148 BOOK III RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHINESE XI. THE SAN CHIAO OR THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA . 165 XII. THE ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHINESE . . 205 3 4 CONTENTS PAGE XIII. CHINESE IDEAS OF INSPIRATION 234 XIV. BUDDHISM A PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY . . 249 XV. THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS IN CHINA . . . 264 BOOK IV EDUCATION IN CHINA XVI. SCHOOL AND FAMILY TRAINING 281 XVII. CIVIL SERVICE EXAMINATIONS ..... 308 XVIII. THE IMPERIAL ACADEMY 329 XIX. AN OLD UNIVERSITY IN CHINA 371 BOOK V STUDIES IN CHINESE HISTORY XX. THE STUDY OF CHINESE HISTORY .... 387 XXI. THE TARTARS IN ANCIENT CHINA .... 409 XXII. INTERNATIONAL LAW IN ANCIENT CHINA . . . 427 XXIII. DIPLOMACY IN ANCIENT CHINA 450 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Dr. W. A. P. Martin Frontispiece FACING PAGES President Martin and Faculty of the Chinese Imperial Uni- versity 18 Dr. Martin and some of his Students 34 Shrine and Temple of Confucius 88 The Temple of Heaven 167 The Altar of Heaven . ) Arch and Temple of Confucius 200 Gateway of Lama Temple 240 Buddhist Monument 254 The Imperial Ancestral Temple 274 The Watch-tower in Examination Grounds Furnace for burning paper in Examination Grounds Row of Cells in Examination University .... 326 The Imperial Lecture Room, Old University ) t 373 Prospect Hill where the last of the Mings hanged himself j ld s}' ' 3 ' 4 THE LORE OF CATHAY THE AWAKENING IN CHINA FOR a long time the giant of the East has been rubbing his eyes. Each collision with foreign powers has had the effect of making him more conscious of his helpless condition and more ready to open his lids to the light of a new day. Never was he more wide awake than during the few years following the war with Japan, when the young Emperor, Kuang Hsu, attempted to make his reign an era of reform. The counter-revolution brought about by the Empress Dowager,* and the cosmic shock by. which it was succeeded, proved the strength and reality of the reform movement. So far from extinguishing that movement, the effect of this convulsion will be to wake it into fresh activity. The Chinese people may be ex- pected to welcome new ideas with more eagerness than ever before. This proposition will be received with distrust by some who are skeptical as to the doctrine of human progress. It will be questioned by others, who deride as visionary the efforts of Christian enterprise. Nor will it be readily admitted by that large class who are wont to regard the Chinese mind as hopelessly incrusted with the prejudices of antiquity. * Having treated that subject in " The Siege in Peking," it is unnecessary to enlarge upon it in this place. 7 8 THE LORE OF CATHAY Never have a great people been more misunderstood. They are denounced as stolid, because we are not in pos- session of a medium sufficiently transparent to convey our ideas to them, or transmit theirs to us; and stigmatized as barbarians, because we want the breadth to comprehend a civilization different from our own. They are repre- sented as servile imitators, though they have borrowed less than any other people; as destitute of the inventive faculty, though the world is indebted to them for a long catalogue of the most useful discoveries ; and as clinging with unquestioning tenacity to a heritage of traditions, though they have passed through many and profound changes in the course of their history. Nothing has done so much to lower them in our esteem and to exclude them from our sympathies as the atrocities of the Boxer outbreak. That, however, was the effect of a sudden recoil, stirred up for political purposes by a usurping Regent and her Manchu agents. Foreigners themselves, they were jealous of anything that tends to disturb the repose of the Chinese mind, or to strengthen the foothold of other foreigners. Exasperated, too, by a series of encroachments on their territory, they gave way to a mad fury that proved contagious. But if the reign of terror was the renovation of France, and the Sepoy mutiny the harbinger of better things for India, why may not this dreadful drama prove to be the birth-pangs of a new China ? That China is not incapable of reformation, we shall show first by a glance at changes that passed over the national mind prior to the first war with England. We shall then pass in review the steps taken in the way of reform in the course of the next fifty years. Finally, we shall describe in outline, the reform movement under the Emperor, Kuang Hsu, which has more right than the THE AWAKENING IN CHINA 9 Boxer craze to be accepted as the real attitude of the Chinese mind. The Chinese have not been stationary, as generally sup- posed, through the long past of their national life. The national mind has advanced from age to age with a stately march ; not indeed always in a direct course, but at each of its great epochs, recording, as we think, a decided gain ; like the dawn of an arctic morning, in which the first blush of the eastern sky disappears for many hours, only to be succeeded by a brighter glow, growing brighter yet, after each interval of darkness, as the time of sunrise approaches. The existence in such a country of such a thing as a national mind is itself an evidence of a susceptibility to change ; and, at the same time, a guarantee for the com- parative stability of its institutions. It proves that China is not an immense congeries of polyps, each encased in his narrow cell, a workshop and a tomb, and all toil- ing on without the stimulus of common sympathy or mental reaction. It proves that China is not like Africa, and aboriginal America, or even like British India, an assemblage of tribes with little or no community of feel- ing. It is a unit, and through all its members there sweeps the mighty tide of a common life. In the progress of its enormous growth, it has ab- sorbed many a heterogeneous element, which has always been transformed into its own substance by an assimila- tive power that asserts the marvelous energy of the Chinese civilization. It has, too, undergone many modi- fications, in consequence of influences operating ab extra as well as from within ; and though the process of trans- mission has often been slow, those influences have al- ways extended to the whole body. Within the bounds of China proper, there is no such thing as the waves of io THE LORE OF CATHAY Buddhism or Taoism being arrested at the confines of a particular province ; nor is there any district in which the pulsations from the great heart of the empire do not, by virtue of a common language and common feeling, meet with a prompt response. Yet the existence of this oneness and sympathy, this nationality of mind, which brings modifications on a vast scale within the range of possibility, necessarily inter- poses an obstacle in the way of their speedy consumma- tion. Planted on the deep foundations of antiquity, ex- tending over so wide an area, and proudly conscious of its own greatness, its very inertia is opposed to change. In China, accordingly, great revolutions, whether political, religious, or intellectual, have always been slow of ac- complishment. Compared with the facility with which these are brought about in some Occidental countries, they resemble the slow revolution of those huge planets on the outskirts of the solar system, which require more than the period of a human life to make the circuit of the sun, while the little planet Mercury wheels round the center once in three months. Great dynastic changes, involving as they do a period of disintegration, and another of reconstruction, have usually occupied from one to three generations, while the growth' of those grand revolutions, which resulted in the ascendency of a religion or a philosophy, must be reck- oned by centuries. A brief review of some of the more remarkable changes that have occurred in the progress of Chinese civilization, will enable us better to understand the nature of the in- tellectual movement now going on. To begin with the development of political ideas. In- stead of being wedded to a uniform system of despotic government, the Chinese have lived under as many forms THE AWAKENING IN CHINA n of government as ancient Rome or modern France. While the Romans passed under their kings, consuls, and emperors, the Chinese had their tis, their wangs, and their huang tis. And as France has passed through the various phases of a feudal and centralized monarchy, a military despotism, and a republic, so China exhibits an equal variety in the forms of her civil government. When the hand of history first lifts the curtain, two thousand years before the Christian era, it discloses to us an elective monarchy, in which the voice of the peo- ple was admitted to express the will of Heaven. Thus, Yao, the model monarch of antiquity, was raised to the throne by the voice of the nobles, in lieu of his elder brother, who was set aside on account of his disorderly life. Yao, in turn, set aside his own son, and called on the nobles to name a successor, when Shun was chosen. Again, Shun, passing by an unworthy son, transmitted the " yellow " to an able minister, the great Yu. Yu, though a good sovereign, departed from these illus- trious precedents, and incurred the censure of " convert- ing the empire into a family estate." The hereditary principle became fixed. Branches of the imperial family were assigned portions of the empire, and their descend- ants succeeding to their principalities, the feudal system was confirmed. This, in China, is the classical form of government, but it was overthrown completely two thousand years ago, by one of the most sweeping revolutions on the records of history. Since that date, China has been a consoli- dated monarchy, living in complete isolation; without neighbors, and without a conception of international inter- course. This has been a fruitful source of conflict with the great nations of the West and East. Under the dynasty of Han, about the commencement 12 THE LORE OF CATHAY of the Christian era, a still more important modification was introduced into the constitution of the empire viz., a democratic element, in virtue of which appointments to office were not left to the caprice of the sovereign and his favorites. This consisted in testing the capacity of candidates by a literary examination; and it operated so well that it was not only adopted but greatly improved by succeeding dynasties, and continues in force at the present day. The Americans would as soon surrender their ballot-box, as the Chinese that noble system of lit- erary competition, which makes public office the reward of scholarship, and gives every man an opportunity of elevating himself by his own exertions. Nor are the Chinese less familiar with the idea of change in the region of religious thought. Three systems of religion have appeared on the arena of the empire, and struggled for ascendency since the sixth century before the Christian era. Confucianism was persecuted under the dynasty of Ch'in; and Taoism and Buddhism alter- nately persecuting and persecuted, kept up a conflict for ages, each in turn seating its own disciples on the throne of the empire. The last of these is of foreign origin; and its universal prevalence does much to reconcile the people to the introduction of religious ideas from abroad ; while it stands forth as a visible proof of the possibility of converting the Chinese to a foreign creed. A leading statesman* of China has made use of this as an argu- ment to show that the emperor should not object to the propagation of Christianity. " From the time of Ch'in and Han," he says, " the doctrines of Confucius began to be obscured, and the religion of Buddha spread. Now Buddhism originated in India, but many of the Hindus have renounced Buddhism and embraced Mohammedan- * Tseng Kuo Fan, viceroy of Nanking. THE AWAKENING IN CHINA 13 ism. The Roman Catholic faith originated in the West, but some nations of the West have adopted Protestantism, and set themselves in opposition to the faith of Rome. Whence we see that other religions rise and fall from age to age, but the doctrine of Confucius survives, un- impaired throughout all ages." The writer is careful to disavow any sympathy for Christianity, and he by no means recommends its adoption; but he wishes to assure His Majesty that there is no serious evil to be appre- hended even if Christianity should succeed in supplanting Buddhism, as long as the people adhere to the cardinal doctrines of their ancient sage. It is a great thing for the leading minds to acknowledge the possibility of a change even in this hypothetical form. Aside from these religious revolutions, and altogether distinct from them, are several periods of intellectual awakening, that constitute marked epochs in the history of literature. The first of these was occasioned by the teachings of Confucius. Another occurred in the time of Mencius, a century later, when the ethical basis of the school under- went a searching revision, the great question of the origi- nal goodness or depravity of human nature being dis- cussed with acuteness and power. A third and more powerful awakening took place, when the classic books which Lu Cheng had burned, rose, phoenix-like, from their ashes, or to speak more correctly, issued, Minerva-like, from the retentive brain of those venerable scholars who had committed them to memory in their early boyhood. This was the age of criticism ; the very circumstances which roused the national mind to activity, directed its efforts to the settlement of the text of their ancient records. But it did not stop here. Slips of bamboo, and tablets of wood, the clumsy materials of ancient books, H THE LORE OF CATHAY gave place to linen, silk, and paper. The convenience and elegance of the material contributed to multiply books and to stimulate literary labor. But the grandest of all the revivals of learning, was, as might be expected, that which ensued on the discovery of the art of printing. In the period above referred to, about A. D. 177, the revised text of the sacred books was engraved on tablets of stone, by Imperial order, as a pre- caution to secure it against the danger of another con- flagration. Impressions must have been taken from these, and the art of printing thus practiced to a limited ex- tent at that early date ; but it was not till the eighth cen- tury that it came into general use for the manufacture of books. It was not so much the augmented rate of production that marked this epoch, as the improved character of its original literature. This was eminently the age of po- etry ; when Li Tai Po, and Tu Fu, and a whole constella- tion of lesser lights rose above the horizon. The Poems of T'ang are still recognized as forming the text-books of standard poetry. This period was succeeded by another in the reign of the Sung dynasty (960.1279), when the mind of China exhibited itself in a new development. It became seized with a mania for philosophical speculation, and grap- pled with the deepest questions of ontology. Choutze, Chengtze, and, above all, the famous Chu Hsi, distin- guished themselves by the penetrating subtlety and the daring freedom of their inquiries. Professing to eluci- date the ancient philosophy, they in reality founded a new one a school of pantheistic materialism, which has con- tinued dominant to the present hour. The last two dynasties have not been unfruitful in the products of the intellect; indeed, there seems to be no THE AWAKENING IN CHINA 15 end or abatement to the teeming fertility of the Chinese mind. Less daringly original than in the preceding period, it has yet, under each of these dynasties, appeared in a new style the writers of the Ming being distin- guished for masculine energy of expression, and those of the Ta Ch'ing for graceful elegance. Enough has been said to show that the Chinese have not maintained through all the ages that character of cast-iron uniformity so generally ascribed to them. Worshipers of antiquity, they certainly are, and strongly conservative in their mental tendencies ; but they have not been content, as is too commonly supposed, to hand down from the earliest times a small stock of crystallized ideas without increase or modification. The germs of their civilization, like those of any civilization worth pre- serving, are not precious stones to be kept in a casket, but seeds to be cultivated and improved. In fact, modi- fications have taken place on an extensive scale, foreign elements have from time to time been engrafted on the native root, and the native scholar, as he follows back the pathway of history, fails to discover anything like uniformity or constancy, except in a few of the most fundamental principles. The doctrine of filial piety, car- ried to the point of religious devotion, extends like a golden thread through all the ages, as the foundation of family ties and social order; while the principle of the divine origin of government, administered by one man as the representative of Heaven, and modified by the corresponding doctrine that the will of Heaven is ex- pressed in the will of the people, is found alike in every period, as the basis of their civil institutions. Though not so much given to change as their more mercurial antipodes, it is still true that the constant factors of their civilization have been few, and the varia- 16 THE LORE OF CATHAY ble ones many. Bold innovations and radical revolutions rise to view all along in the retrospect of their far-reach- ing past, and prepare them to anticipate the same for the future. With such antecedents, and such a character for intellectual activity, it would be next to impossible that they should not be profoundly affected by their contacts and collisions with the civilization of Christendom. In point of fact the impression was profound, though it was not immediately apparent. For over half a cen- tury the West had been acting on China by the combined influence of its arms, its commerce, its religion, and its science. Some of these influences commenced to operate at a much earlier date, and their effects were by no means insignificant. But of late years all of them have been combined with an oxyhydrogen blow-pipe intensity, that one would think sufficient to melt a mountain of ada- mant. They could not, in the nature of things, have been brought to bear on China so effectively at any earlier period on account of her geographical isolation. The na- tions of the West were too remote to cause solicitude ; but when steamships and the cutting of the Isthmus brought them nearer, and when in two wars they displayed their ability to beat her in every battle, they taught her a les- son, without which all attempts to benefit the Chinese must have proved like irrigating the side of a mountain by projecting water from its base. The effect was immediate. The Chinese were for the first time convinced that they had something to learn. Within less than a year from the close of hostilities in 1860, large bodies of Chinese troops might have been seen learning foreign tactics under foreign drill-masters, on the very battle grounds where they had been defeated. Arsenals, well supplied with machinery from foreign countries, were put in operation at four important points, THE AWAKENING IN CHINA 17 and Navy Yards were established at two principal sea- ports, where native mechanics were taught the construc- tion of steam gun-boats. Such, indeed, was their proficiency in the arts of war, that they supposed themselves able to cope with a first- class power, until the war with Japan dispelled the illu- sion. Nor was education in other lines wholly neglected. A school for the training of interpreters was opened in Can- ton, and a similar school established in the Capital. It is significant of the animus of the ruling race that in both schools the students were exclusively drawn from the Tartar tribes, or from Chinese whose families had been adopted into the Manchu race in the age of the conquest. The government was not desirous of extending the bene- fits of the new education to its Chinese subjects. One Manchu statesman there was, with sounder views and greater breadth Wen Hsiang, the enlightened chief of the Board of Foreign Affairs. He induced the throne to open the doors of the College to Chinese who were high- class graduates in letters; but the haughty graduates de- clined to enter. Wojin, the Emperor's teacher, de- nounced the proposal to have her learned doctors sit at the feet of foreigners as derogatory to the dignity of China. Being at the head of the Imperial Academy, he encouraged the Hanlins in their opposition to such an innovation. Unable to reach the higher literati, Wen Hsiang had to content himself with recruits from lower grades. The number of scholarships was raised from thirty to one hundred and twenty, and the curriculum en- larged to embrace a liberal course in sciences and arts, as well as languages. The Imperial T'ung Wen College became an important factor in helping forward the cause of progress. 1 8 THE LORE OF CATHAY Some of its students found employment in schools and arsenals. Many of them were attached to embassies in foreign parts, and two of them had the distinguished honor of becoming tutors in English to His Majesty, the Emperor, then in his early minority. Instead of printed books, they were required to place in the hands of their Imperial pupil, a series of lessons written out in beauti- ful manuscript. These they always brought to me to be sure that they were correct. I may here mention that my first appointment in connection with the T'ung Wen College, was the charge of a class of boys, ten in number, who were studying English. After a short time, I pro- posed to give up the charge. An aged minister, who had the oversight of the school, inquiring my reason for re- signing, I told him 1 thought the business too small for me. " Don't call it small," he said, " some of your students may yet become teachers of the Emperor." Needless to say, this argument proved conclusive; not only was his prophesy with reference to the students ful- filled, a prediction which he had a good deal to do in fulfilling, but, in the further enlargement of the institu- tion, I was appointed to the Presidency in connection with the Chair of International Law, a two-fold position, which I continued to hold for twenty-five years, until ill-health compelled my resignation. Our students, who went abroad in connection with em- bassies, were some of them interpreters, some secretaries, some consuls and vice-consuls, while one or two even rose to the dignity of minister plenipotentiary: notably was this the case with Mr. Ching Chang,* late minister to France. * The late Marquis Tseng, Minister to England, though not a student of the College, took private lessons from me, and always manifested towards me the respect due to a teacher. THE AWAKENING IN CHINA 19 The embassies themselves must not be overlooked as an educational agency. Each minister and his suite re- garded themselves as on a mission of exploration. Some- times the minister embodied his observations in a set of volumes. More frequently their secretaries published an account of their travels. These publications, not being pigeon-holed like official reports, had the effect of doing much to awaken the reading class. One of the most remarkable enterprises of that age was the educational mission originated by Mr. Yung Wing, a graduate and doctor of laws of Yale University. By him and his successors, about three hundred picked youth were led to Hartford for training in every branch of knowledge that could make them useful to their country. The mission was, as I have elsewhere stated, finally re- called, because it was thought these young men were learning too much. The efforts hitherto made in this direction, were mainly official, and intended for the use of the Government. They were feeble in comparison with the strength of the movement which followed on the war with Japan. The first effect of defeat was to excite earnest inquiry as to the cause of China's humiliation. Those haughty schol- ars, the members of the Hanlin, who had disdained to enter the T'ung Wen College, now became convinced that the Japanese were victorious because a new education had supplied them with new sources of power. They began the organization of reform clubs in the capital and throughout the empire, in many places. They sought the advice of missionaries, such as Dr. Allen, the Rev. Tim- othy Richard, and the Rev. Gilbert Reid. They were en- couraged by Viceroys and Governors. The Great Vice- roy, Chang Chih Tung published a book to stimulate the movement, showing that a change of base for the educa- tional system is " China's Only Hope." 20 THE LORE OF CATHAY In 1897, the eminent Cantonese scholar, Kang Yii Wei, went to the capital to compete for a place in the Imperial Academy. He won for himself a more distinguished position by getting the ear of the Emperor. Deeply penetrated with the conviction that China's safety re- quired her to imitate the example of Japan, he fired the mind of the Emperor with enthusiasm to be the leader of his people in the path of reform. The Emperor issued a series of decrees, all commend- ing themselves to the judgment of reasonable men, but fraught with the spirit of innovation. He proposed, in- stead of choosing the employees of the government as the result of a competition in ornamental handwriting and verse making, to have them examined in sciences and practical arts. With this in view, he ordered the estab- lishment of common schools, for which the idol temples in the provinces were to be thrown open, an act regarded by his people as equivalent to confiscation. He also or- dered the creation of upper schools and colleges in the provinces, and established a University in the capital, which should gather in the provincial graduates and train them for the service of the state. The writer was called to the Presidency of this institution. It had been in op- eration for two years with a corps of ten foreign profes- sors, and twelve native assistants, mostly Christian grad- uates of mission schools, when its operations were brought to a standstill by the Boxer outbreak. That temporary madness which showed itself in the burning of the Hanlin Library, the destruction by fire of the richest sections of the capital, and the destruction by water of the library of our University, is sure to have the effect of giving a fresh impetus to the cause of edu- cational reform. BOOK I China's Contribution to Arts and Sciences 20 THE LORE OF CATHAY In 1897, the eminent Cantonese scholar, Kang Yii Wei, went to the capital to compete for a place in the Imperial Academy. He won for himself a more distinguished position by getting the ear of the Emperor. Deeply penetrated with the conviction that China's safety re- quired her to imitate the example of Japan, he fired the mind of the Emperor with enthusiasm to be the leader of his people in the path of reform. The Emperor issued a series of decrees, all commend- ing themselves to the judgment of reasonable men, but fraught with the spirit of innovation. He proposed, in- stead of choosing the employees of the government as the result of a competition in ornamental handwriting and verse making, to have them examined in sciences and practical arts. With this in view, he ordered the estab- lishment of common schools, for which the idol temples in the provinces were to be thrown open, an act regarded by his people as equivalent to confiscation. He also or- dered the creation of upper schools and colleges in the provinces, and established a University in the capital, which should gather in the provincial graduates and train them for the service of the state. The writer was called to the Presidency of this institution. It had been in op- eration for two years with a corps of ten foreign profes- sors, and twelve native assistants, mostly Christian grad- uates of mission schools, when its operations were brought to a standstill by the Boxer outbreak. That temporary madness which showed itself in the burning of the Hanlin Library, the destruction by fire of the richest sections of the capital, and the destruction by water of the library of our University, is sure to have the effect of giving a fresh impetus to the cause of edu- cational reform. BOOK I China's Contribution to Arts and Sciences 24 THE LORE OF CATHAY The author of the Liao Chai, a popular story book compiled about two centuries ago, describes a tube into which a message might be spoken and conveyed to a dis- tant place, when on the removal of a seal the words become audible. I am not going to champion Chiang Hsien-sheng against Mr. Edison, as the inventor of a pho- nograph. His specifications are too few and vague to pass muster in our patent office. Like many anticipa- tory hints to be found in the literature of other countries this fanciful outline seems rather to indicate the con- sciousness of a want than to show the way in which the problem was to be solved. Discarding fancy, we shall confine ourselves to solid ground, and after vindicating for the Chinese the honor of discovery in two or three important arts, we shall indi- cate in a few words what they have done in the less famil- iar domain of science. I. i. Gunpowder, which Sir James MacKintosh brackets together with printing as securing our civilization against another irruption of barbarians, is, in my opinion, to be set to the credit of the Chinese. The honor is con- tested by English, German, Arab and Hindu; nor is it impossible that the discovery may have been made inde- pendently by each. Its ingredients, sulphur, nitre and carbon, were in constant use by alchemists, and it was inevitable that the explosive force of the compound should be found out if only by accident especially as no fixed proportion is required. The first to meet with this happy accident would be the Chinese, who were the first experi- menters in the field of alchemy.* The pretentions of Schwartz and Roger Bacon need not be discussed on account of their comparatively recent date. As for the Arabs, they were transmitters, not * See chapter III. CHINESE DISCOVERIES 25 inventors. The only people who can seriously compete with the Chinese are the Hindus. Their knowledge of gunpowder is certainly of great antiquity, but their ancient dates are difficult to fix, and the balance of evi- dence as to priority appears to be in favor of China. One of the weightiest documents bearing on the ques- tion is a paper set for a metropolitan examination about twenty years ago. The answers given by the candidates would be of little worth ; but the facts stated or assumed in the questions are of great value, emanating as they do from the chief examiner, one of the most learned men in the Empire. " Fire-arms began with the use of rockets in the dy- nasty of Chou (B. c. 1122-255) m what book do we first meet with the word p'ao, now used for cannon ? " " Is the defense of Kai Feng Fu against the Mongols (1232) the first recorded use of cannon?" " The Sung dynasty (A. D. 960-1278) had several vari- eties of small guns what were their advantages ? " These three questions all relate to fire-arms. They imply an explosive, but it does not follow that such ex- plosive was always employed to discharge projectiles. Indeed the rockets referred to can scarcely be reckoned as projectiles, being used for signals or for festive display, rather than as weapons of war. The famous siege re- ferred to in the second question was more than a hun- dred years earlier than the first incontestable use of cannon in Europe (1338). If we turn to the Ko Chieh Ching Yuan, " The Mirror of Research ", the best Chinese authority on the subject of invention, we obtain a little light on the transition from * signal rockets to fire-arms properly so-called. The 26 THE LORE OF CATHAY author cites an ancient book to the effect that in 998 A. D. one Tang Fu produced a rocket of a new style having a head of iron, proof that it was not intended for a mere signal or a feu de joie. He also cites another book which relates that in A. D. 1131 a piratical fleet on the River Yangtze was destroyed by a " thunder bomb ", secretly sent among the ships. The bomb made of paper was filled, he says, with sulphur and quicklime. As it rose to the sky with a report like thunder, it must have been launched from a mortar by the force of gunpowder. He further quotes a statement that at a date not men- tioned, but earlier than the defense of Kai Feng Fu the walls of Hsi An, the ancient capital, were provided with cannon which went off with a report that could be heard thirty miles and spread flames over half an acre. The balls or bombs for these guns were made of iron, but porcelain was also used. Goubel, cited by Pauthier, says that cannon throwing stones were used in the defense of T'ai Yuan, A. D., 767, and that mines were employed. He says no explosive is mentioned by the native author, its existence being taken as well-known. 2. China's claim to the discovery of the Mariner's Compass is uncontested. The magnet was known at an early epoch to both Greeks and Egyptians ; the former gave it its name, and the latter, according to Plutarch, employed it as a symbol for a good man who not only attracts others but possesses the power of imparting his virtues. Yet the first to observe its directive properties were the Chinese. By them the polarity of the needle was utilized long before the Christian era. Some of their books assert that it was used to guide war-chariots across a desert as early as 2600 B. c., but the war is legendary and the assertion groundless. More within CHINESE DISCOVERIES 27 range is their unvarying statement, that magnetic needles were given to ambassadors from a southern country to enable them to find their way home, uoo B. c. Those ambassadors came by land, and from its use in their vehicles the compass came to be described as Chih nan chil, a "South-pointing chariot." A curious illustration of that primitive application of the needle may be seen any day in a small compass suspended in the sedan or cart of a Mandarin. The use of the needle at sea follows as a matter of course. The Chinese employed it in coasting voyages as early as the fifth century A. D., and it is probable that their junks as well as their land carriages were provided with it long before that date. Its use was known in Europe as early as the twelfth century, and possibly much earlier, the crusades, which mingled all nations, having served to propagate the arts of the East but it was slow in coming into vogue. In the bold hands of Columbus three centuries later it pointed the way to a new world. Yet Vasco da Gama seems to have made little or no use of it in his voyage to India in 1497, which was in fact a coasting voyage all the way. Camoens in his poetical narrative Os Lusiadas, though he praises the astrolabe and is ever on the alert for things marvellous and strange, makes no allusion to the needle. 3. That Gutenberg's invention of printing was prompted by the knowledge that something similar existed in China is next to certain. For seven hundred years the art had been practiced there, not in secret as he and Faustus practiced it, but as a great popular industry. Its origin is remarkable. A tyrant, determined to uproot the principles of Confucius, burned the books of the Sage. They were restored partly from memory, partly from im- perfect copies found hidden in the wall of a house. The 28 THE LORE OF CATHAY Emperor Tai Tsung, (A. D. 627) resolved that the sacred inheritance should never again be exposed to destruction by fire, caused the books to be engraved on stone. That stone library is still extant. A hundred and seventy slabs of granite bearing on their faces the text of the thirteen classics may still be seen at Hsi An Fu, and a modern imi- tation of it stands in the old Confucian University at Peking. No sooner was that Imperial edition completed than the idea occurred of making it accessible to scholars in all parts of the country by means of rubbings. That was printing. Nor in China has the form of that art greatly changed in the lapse of a thousand years. Wood has been substituted for stone and relievo for intaglio, mak- ing the page white instead of black, but the impressions are still rubbings, made with a soft brush and without the use of a press. From the invention of block printing it was not long until attempts were made to print with divisible type, but they failed to supersede the primitive method, the Chinese not having hit on that happy alloy known as " printers' metal." It is not necessary to suppose that Chinese type of wood, copper or terra cotta found their way to May- ence; the smallest fragment of printed paper carried in a China vase or roll of silk would be sufficient to suggest the whole art to a mind like that of Gutenberg. 4. The art of making porcelain is so obviously Chi- nese in its origin that porcelain continues to bear the name of China ware. 5. The same may be said of the manufacture of silk. The name is somewhat disguised, but it is obviously de- rived from Seres the Latin for Chinese, through the ad- jective scricum, which dropping the final syllable becomes serie-silk, i. e., China stuff. I need not push the argument CHINESE DISCOVERIES 29 so far as to assert that ser is Chinese for silkworm; though that derivation is not without plausibility. In the making of paper, not only were the Chinese far in advance of us they preceded us in the special art of pro- ducing it from wood pulp. Paper was invented by China about the beginning of the Christian era; but for many centuries preceding their books were engraved on slips of bamboo with the point of a stile. It is a curious fact that arts originating in China seem to require transplanting in order to attain a higher de- velopment. Witness the marvellous improvements made in the application of gunpowder, printing and the mari- ner's compass. This may be due to an inborn conservatism which makes the Chinese reluctant to alter the methods approved by their fathers. II. The same observation may be made in regard to their essays in the field of science. Ideas which in their native soil have remained stunted and deformed yield a rich fruitage under a more genial sky. 1. Notably is this the case with Alchemy,* which in the western world has expanded into a vast body of sci- ence which, in no mean sense, fulfils its promise of trans- muting baser elements into gold. In its native soil it con- tinues to be an occult art laden with all the superstitions of the middle ages. There is no other science for which we are indebted to China, but there are many in which the Chinese made a beginning at an epoch when Europe was still in a state of barbarism. 2. Astronomy. In this they made a good beginning twenty-two centuries before Christ. They had an astro- nomical board with regular professors, two of whom were put to death for failing, as some think, to foretell an * See chap. III. 30 THE LORE OF CATHAY eclipse of the sun. Others, however, suppose that their offense was failing to solemnize the event with proper rites. At that epoch they had fixed the length of the year more exactly than it was fixed by the Romans in the time of Numa. In their later astronomy Indian and Babylonian influences are conspicuous and we are unable to assign to them any credit beyond that of being good observers. .3. Mathematics. Decimal Arithmetic, we are told, was brought to Europe by the Arabs, along with what we still call the Arabic figures. That the Arabs obtained it from India requires no demonstration ; but did it origi- nate in India ? Whether it passed from China to India or vice versa is not easy to determine. It is not very likely, however, that the Chinese would borrow it as early as 2600 B. c., when their chronological computation was adopted a system in which it is manifestly involved. Their oldest arithmetic, the Chou Pel, proceeds upon it, and that dates, in part at least, from the Chou dynasty, whose name it bears, 1125 B. c. Not a little remarkable is it that this venerable book contains a treatise on right-angled triangles, bearing the name of Chou Kung, the founder of the House of Chou. Trigonometry as it appeared in Europe is ascribed to the Hindus, but with them it dates from the Greek invasion, having been developed from the Geometry of the Greeks. Of Algebra the Chinese possess an original form called Tien Yuan, which though not found in any book earlier than A. D. 1247, gives signs of being of indigenous growth. The words Tien and Yuan are equivalent to x and y signs for unknown quantities. 4. Physics. Ether, that mysterious substance which of late has forced itself on the attention of our philosophers as a necessary postulate, was known to the CHINESE DISCOVERIES 31 Chinese a thousand years ago. It is, says Professor Lodge, " The simplest conception of the Universe that has yet occurred to the mind of man one continuous sub- stance filling all space, which can vibrate as light, which can be parted into positive and negative electricity, which in whirls or vortices constitutes matter, and which trans- mits by continuity, not by impact, every action and re- action of which matter is capable this is the modern view of ether and its functions." This conception, as I shall show in the next chapter, is not new to the philosophers of China. How early it appeared there it is not easy to affirm perhaps eleven centuries before our era, when the earliest speculations on the forces of nature were embodied in" the / Ching, or " Book of Changes." It is found as a full-fledged doc- trine in several writers of the eleventh century of our era, who not only speak of an ethereal medium, but ascribe to it all the properties above enumerated, except that of pro- ducing electricity. The word Ether is Greek, but our scientific use of it is essentially Chinese. That we borrowed the idea from China I will not assert, but it is easy to point out a way by which it might have passed into Europe. The author of the modern theory of ether is Rene Descartes. Edu- cated at the Jesuit Seminary of La Fleche in France, who can prove that he did not there meet with fragments of Chinese philosophy in the writings of Jesuit missionaries? 5. If the Chinese had the Cartesian philosophy before Descartes, it is equally true that they understood the Baconian method before Bacon. They knew the doctrine only to reject it, as did Descartes at a later date. Even such general ideas as that of Biological Evolution, and that of the conservation of energy, they appear to have apprehended with great clearness, but they never took the 32 THE LORE OF CATHAY trouble to fortify them by the laborious process of sys- tematic induction. Says Mencius, " The study of nature has for its object to get at the causes of things. In causes the ground principle is advantage. Tho' heaven is high, and sun and stars are far away, if we could find out the causes of their phenomena, we might sit still and calculate the solstice of a thousand years." In this remarkable speech uttered 400 B. c. he shows that he knew how to set about the study of nature. It might perhaps be going too far to affirm, that in speaking of " advantage " as a fundamental principle in natural causes, he anticipated the author of The Origin of Species ; yet this obscure hint, if followed up, might have led to Darwin's doctrine. As most of the points under this last head are treated in the next chapter, I bring the enumeration to a close by inquiring why the Chinese failed to profit by their discov- eries? The answer is brief but decided : In the arts, the slavish habit of following in the footsteps of their fathers acted as a bar to improvement. In the sciences, progress was rendered impossible by a system of state education which made the ancient classics the only basis of public instruction. II CHINESE SPECULATION IN PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE THE term speculative philosophy* is a little hazy ; perhaps, however, not more so than the thing indicated. It represents an early stage of thought prior to the rise of physical science may we not add prior to, and for the most part in neglect of, that logic whose office it is to analyze the process of reasoning and to fix the limits of knowledge? Irregular and haphazard as it has shown itself in most countries, it is not inaptly described by the word specu- lation, as understood in business transactions. Why is it that the speculator in the stock market may, as by the cast of a die, achieve fortune or provoke ruin? Is it not because the unknown and the variable are elements that elude his grasp? Yet the element of uncertainty is pre- cisely that which contributes most to the fascination of his ventures. Has it not been the same with most of those early thinkers who have undertaken to explain the mystery of existence? When the pole of which they are in search is hedged about by frozen seas, what wonder if their happiest efforts have not been rewarded by complete success ? Yet has the pursuit of truth in those regions and in all ages been justly regarded as the most ennobling occupation of the human mind. Nor has it been barren of results. Would * This chapter is included under the head of Science, notwith- standing the word Philosophy in its title, because it deals chiefly with the study of nature. 33 34 THE LORE OF CATHAY it not be a surprise to find that Chinese explorers in these high latitudes have planted their standard nearer to the pole than those of most other nations? To show what they have accomplished, I shall not deem it necessary to trace their philosophy, even in outline, from the dawn of speculation, but shall select a period when their speculative thought was most active and when the now dominant philosophy was formulated. Of the forty centuries included in the records of the Chinese Empire, there is one century, and no other, that can be selected as preeminently the age of philosophy. This was at the beginning of the Sung dynasty ( 1020 to 1 120 A. D.), when gross darkness brooded over Europe and when the western world was convulsed by the Crusades. Earlier dynasties had been distinguished by various forms of in- tellectual activity, one by the invention of political sys- tems, one by historical writings, one for poetry and the drama, etc., but not until this epoch did the Chinese mind evince a disposition to question everything in heaven and earth. In the work of setting anew the foundations of faith and knowledge, five men took the lead, whose family names (two being brothers) fall curiously into an allitera- tive line of four syllables, Chou, Chang, Cheng, Chu, all so distinguished that they may be compared with a Pleiad cluster, a constellation (and are there not many such?) whose light has not yet reached our shores. The last named is by far the most celebrated. Not more origi- nal than the others, he combined the qualities of a labori- ous scholar and an acute thinker, and knew how to gather the scattered rays of his predecessors into a focus. Though shining in part by borrowed light, Chu Hsi looms up like a pharos, taking (after Confucius and Mencius) the third place among the great teachers of the Chinese people. All five were -Confucian scholars, but there can DR. MARTIN AND SOME OF HIS STUDENTS CHINESE SPECULATION 35 be no doubt that their mental activity was stimulated and its direction determined by the speculations of Buddhist and Taoist writers. Their writings derive immense im- portance from the fact that for five hundred years, since the publication by imperial authority of the great Ency- clopedia of Philosophy, they have been accepted by the government as the standard of orthodoxy to which all who aspire to the honors of the civil-service examinations are expected to conform. Their views are therefore to be taken as the views of the educated men o-f the China of to-day. In their mode of philosophizing they resemble Des- cartes more than Bacon. Their method is a priori, and, like the great Frenchman who had read Bacon and re- jected his doctrine, they adopted theirs, not through ig- norance of the experimental method, but from choice. Confucius himself had laid down the maxim that " knowl- edge comes from the study of things," a maxim which seems as much out of place in his pages as that fine aphorism which sets forth the value of experiment does in those of Plato : Ifnfeipia Jtotsi rbv ai&va rw&v xopeve- atiat Kara Texvrjva, ittipia 8k Kara rv^rfr.* The Chinese assert that their sage wrote a treatise on the experimental study of nature, but that it was lost, and this fact they offer as an excuse for the backwardness of their country in that department of science. Descartes's preference for the deductive method sprang from his mathematical genius. On the part of the Chinese it was due to a desire to follow what they considered the order of nature. Both esteemed it most rational to do as Stan- ley did in exploring the Congo to strike the stream at its * Experiment for experience, for in Greek as in French the word means both) causes the world to go forward in a scientific way ; the want of it, in a haphazard manner. Gorgias. 3 6 THE LORE OF CATHAY head and follow it down to the sea rather than with Bacon to enter the mouth and creep slowly upward against the current. Which is the more daring feat, and which the more certain method, needs not to be pointed out. To compare the two methods and define the province of each, does not belong to our present theme. Suffice it to say that the champions of the one not infrequently made use of the other. When the Baconian got hold of a great principle, he did not fail to deduce its consequences ; nor, on the other hand, did a Cartesian neglect to appeal to experiment. With the former experiment preceded discovery; with the latter it was employed to confirm conclusions. Practical as the Chinese mind confessedly is, it is not a little remarkable that in the study of nature Chinese philosophers have never made extensive use of the in- ductive method. That they have not been unacquainted with it is evident from the following questions and answers found in the writings of the brothers Cheng : " One asked whether, to arrive at a knowledge of na- ture, it is necessary to investigate each particular object; or may not some one thing be seized upon from which the knowledge of many things may be derived ? " " The Master replied : ' A comprehensive knowledge of nature is not so easily acquired. You must examine one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow, and when you have accumulated a store of facts, your knowledge will burst its shell and come forth into fuller light, con- necting all the particulars by general laws.' " In view of this lucid response of one of their great oracles, who can deny that the Chinese had a clear con- ception of the inductive method five hundred years before Bacon ? But, as Channing says, " Great men are not so much distinguished by difference of ideas, as by different CHINESE SPECULATION 37 degrees in the impression made by the same idea." Con- trast with this a dictum of Chang, the second of the five : " To know nature, you must first know Heaven. If you have pushed your science so far as to know Heaven, then you are at the source of all things. Knowing their evolution you can tell what ought to be, and what ought not to be, without waiting for anyone to inform you." The former statement made no impression on the Chinese mind, while the latter is universally regarded as its guid- ing star. How different must have been the history of the world had Chinese thinkers, instead of seeking for a short cut to universal knowledge, been content to study one thing at a time, with a view to " connecting all the particulars by general laws." In accordance with the principle so confidently enunci- ated, Chang and his followers (and his predecessors as well) have directed their main attack to the problems of cosmogony, believing that they might thereby arrive at the " source of all things." Tomes are filled with conjec- tures and reasonings which it would be unprofitable to follow out in detail. The results, however, if I may so call them, which they reached by a sort of happy guess work, are not unworthy of notice, forming as they do the philosophical creed of educated China. Stimulated, as I have said, by the speculations of Bud- dhist and Taoist schools, they took care to follow neither ; and betray the influence of these sectaries chiefly by the pains they are at to steer a middle course between the two. To the one school, mind is the only entity, and matter a deceptive figment of the imagination ; to the other, matter is the sole essence, and mind one of its products. Each inculcated a species of monism. The thinkers of the Sung dynasty, combining these one-sided conceptions, boldly assert a dualism in nature, and fix on li and ch'i, 38 THE LORE OF CATHAY force and matter, as the seminal principles of the universe.* Is it not a little startling to find them at that early date hitting on a generalization which to us appears among the late results of modern science? Yet we shall see as we advance that this is not the only instance in which their unscientific speculations have anticipated the teachings of modern science. Both terms in their dual formula require elucidation. Of the two principles, one is active, the other passive. I have rendered li by the word " force," as being active, but it is not mere force. The word signifies a principle of order, a law of nature. It is often synonymous with Too, " reason," answering to the Greek logos. When Chu Hsi says that " heaven is li," he evidently means that the prime force in the universe is reason, exactly the position maintained by the Taoists, though they use Tao, and not li, to express the idea. With both, this reason, if we may so call it, is rather a property of mind than mind itself. Each denies its personality, not perceiving that a property implies a substance, and that in this case the substance must be mind. Ch'i, the second term of the formula, being passive, is matter. In popular use, however, it is limited to matter in a gaseous form and in these philosophical speculations it means primordial matter. Hear what they say of it : In a treatise called Cheng Mcng " Right Discipline for Youth," Chang, with a thoroughness characteristic of the Chinese, begins with the origin of the universe. " The immensity of space, though called the great void," he says, * They profess to derive their doctrines from the / Ching, the Chinese Genesis and so do the Taoists. It is surprising with what skill each school succeeds in reading its tenets into that ancient text, parts of which are referred to B. c. 2800! CHINESE SPECULATION 39 " is not void. It is filled with a subtile substance. In fact, there is no such thing as a vacuum." Now what is this omnipresent " subtile substance? " If we compare the descriptions of it given by these writers, we cannot resist the conclusion that it is ether ; not the ether of the Greeks, the burning air, the empyrean, but the all-pervading ether of our modern science. It is the stuff out of which matter was produced. This is^now a familiar idea, not of sci- ence, but of scientific speculation. It is set forth with special fullness in a work on the unseen universe, by those eminent professors, P. G. Tate and Balfour Stewart, along with the correlative doctrine of the reversion of matter to its primitive state. Our Chinese philosophers taught the same thing cen- turies ago. What says the author of Right Discipline? His words are : " Within the immensity of space matter is alternately concentrated and dissipated, much as ice is congealed or dissolved in water." Not merely do they antedate these English writers in making it the source of matter, they seem to have hit on the dynamical theory of the molecule, and particularly on vortex motion, as the process of transformation. Chou, a contemporary of Chang, is known as the author of a diagram of cos- mogony. He begins with a ring or circle of uniform whiteness, representing the primitive uniform ether. Then follows a circle partly dark, which shows the origi- nal substance differentiated into two forms, or rather forces, called Yin and Yang. Speaking of this diagram, " It shows," says Chu, the great expositor of the Chinese canonical books, " how the primitive void is transformed into matter." The two forces, mo lai mo ch'il, grind back and forth, like millstones, in opposite directions, and the detritus resulting from their friction is what we call matter." 40 THE LORE OF CATHAY Perhaps the most striking point in this Chinese cos- mogony is the account it gives of the creation of light. T'ai ch'i tung erh shcng yang. " The primal essence moved, and light was born." That the mode of motion was vibratory they also conjectured, but I do not assert that they ever carried their researches so far as to measure the length of a luminiferous wave, a performance which may now be witnessed any day in our physical laboratories. The Occidental theory of the ether and its functions is confirmed by a magnificent array of scientific facts ; the Oriental theory, standing apart from experimental sci- ence, never emerged from the state of speculation ; a speculation wonderfully acute and sublime, in which the scientific imagination shows itself to the best advantage, divining as if by instinct great truths which require for their confirmation the slower process of patient investigation. Nor must we forget that in the West this theory existed in the state of a discarded specula- tion for at least two centuries before it received the seal of science. The first European to get a glimpse of the circumam- bient ocean was Rene Descartes. His mistake in referring the motions of the planets to whirlpools of ether brought discredit on his whole system, notwithstanding the fact that he also held that minute vortices were necessary to explain the constitution of matter. But what a glorious resurrection awaited it ! In the last year of the eigh- teenth century, touched literally by a sunbeam, it woke from its long slumber. Young found it necessary to the hypothesis of undulations, to which he was led by the interference of rays, and Fresnel resorted to it to explain the phenomena of polarization. If this revival enhances the respect with which we regard the " father of modern philosophy," should it not also reflect a little luster on CHINESE SPECULATION 41 those early thinkers of the far East who made the Cartesian ether the basis of their cosmogony? Two or three doctrines that have played a great part in the intellectual movements of our age remain to be noticed as having been long ago propounded by the specu- lative philosophers of China. That they should have some conception of an evolutionary process in nature is not to be wondered at. What but a most thoroughgoing doctrine of evolution is to be expected from men who begin with the evolution of matter? The original unity of matter, suggested by modern researches in molecular physics, we may remark, was assumed in all of their cos- mological speculations. What the eminent physicist, J. W. Draper, says of the alchemists of Europe is true in a still higher degree of those of China, who led the way, both in speculation and investigation. " They were the first to seize the grand idea of evolution in its widest extent as a progress from the imperfect to the more per- fect in lifeless as well as living nature, in an increasing progression in which all things take part toward a higher and nobler state." This view is prominent in the writings of many of the philosophers of ancient China. Here is a statement from the works of one of the Cheng brothers, which shows that they came very near to the doctrine of the conservation of energy. He says : " Body in motion is force. Its contact with another is followed by a reaction or effect. This effect in turn acts as a force producing another effect, and so on without end." " Here," he adds, " is a vast subject for the student of philosophy." The Chinese " students of philosophy " have not troubled themselves to verify this, any more than other shrewd guesses of their predecessors. The remark, however, which Chu makes on this passage shows a com- prehensive grasp of the idea. " Heaven and earth," he 42 THE LORE OF CATHAY says, " with all they contain, are nothing but transforma- tions of one primitive force." In conclusion, the cosmogony of our Chinese philoso- phers is by no means so atheistic as it might appear. True, Chu Hsi, the authorized expounder of their system, says : " We must beware of thinking that there is a man up in the sky, who controls the motion of the universe." But he does not deny that there is a power at work whose nature is inscrutable. Says Chang, the most daring of the five : " The great void is filled with a pure or perfect fluid. Since it is perfectly fluid, it offers no obstruction to move- ment " (i. e., it neither impedes motion nor is its proper motion impeded). "There being no obstruction [i. e., nothing to bring about a change of state], a divine force converts the pure into the gross." To explain the cre- ation of matter, he invokes, though reluctantly, the inter- vention of a divine power. Is it not what Horace calls Nodus tali vindice dignusf That our Chinese thinkers meant God in a proper sense, I will not affirm, but they considerately leave room for him. Have we not seen that one of the dual principles postulated by them is invested with some of the " at- tributes of mind?" They dogmatize about self-acting laws, but there is reason to expect that another genera- tion will come to understand that law implies mind, and will proclaim with Emerson that " Conscious law is King o kings." To them our Western school of agnosticism is, as yet unknown. In that line, too, they are in advance of us by several centuries. But their agnosticism is of a milder type than ours. It is not aggressive, neither is it so bigoted as not to be open to conviction. It is, moreover, as the Occidental is not. profoundly reverential. For this CHINESE SPECULATION 43 habit of mind it is indebted to Confucius, who, to wean his people from debasing forms of idolatry, employed for the Supreme Being the vague term Heaven, and dis- couraged them from prying into those transcendental mysteries hidden by the veil of blue. He believed, how- ever, in a moral government, and so do all his followers to this day. He ascribed to the object of his reverence more of personality than they are willing to admit. " The superior man," he said, " fears three things, and the first is Heaven." " With what words does Heaven speak to us? " he asks again. " The seasons run their rounds, and animal and vegetable life displays itself in a hundred forms. These are the language of Heaven." He ap- proaches far nearer to the Christian idea of God than the negations of Buddha, or the metamorphoses of Taoism ; and there is reason to hope that his disciples will come back to the mental attitude of their great master, which has been somewhat obscured by later speculations. To bring them back, and to carry them beyond it, they require, above all things, a truer logic and a juster psy- chology than they have ever possessed.* Happy will it be for China when those who control the opinions of the people learn, in that vague Power of which they stand in awe, to recognize the Pater Mundi. * With a view to meeting this demand, I prepared three years ago, in Chinese, a volume on Christian Psychology, which was in- troduced to the Chinese world by a preface from the pen of Li Hung Chang, and published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. Ill ALCHEMY IN CHINA, THE SOURCE OF CHEMISTRY " The search itself rewards the pains ; So though the chymist his great secret miss, For neither it in art nor nature is, Yet things well worth his toil he gains, And does his charge and labor pay, With good unsought experiments by the way." COWLEY. ONE in their etymological origin, the words Al- chemy and Chemistry describe different stages in the progress of the same science. The former represents it in its infancy, nursed on the bosom of superstition ; its field of vision limited to special objects, and vainly striving to accomplish the impossible. The latter presents it in its maturity, when, emancipated from puerile fancies, it claims the realm of nature for its domain, and the laws of matter as its proper study. A glance at alchemy as practiced in the West will be necessary to prepare us for understanding the role it has played in the distant Orient. In its earlier stage it acknowledged no other aim than the pursuit of the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life. In its more advanced state it renounces them both, yet it secures substantial advantages of scarcely inferior magnitude, alleviating disease and prolonging life by the improvements it has introduced into the practice of medi- cine; while by the mastery it gives us over the elements 44 ALCHEMY IN CHINA 45 of nature it surpasses the most sanguine expectations of its early votaries. Those early votaries, whether they lived and labored in the West or East, should not be forgotten. They were the intrepid divers who explored the bottom of the stream, and laid the foundation for those magnificent arches on which modern science has erected her easy thoroughfare. Like coral insects, " building better than they knew," they toiled upward in the midst of darkness, guided only by a faint glimmer of the light, but without any conception of the extent and richness of the new world of knowledge that was destined to spring from their ill-directed labors. Heirs of the world's experience, and themselves daring experimenters, we need not be surprised to find them in possession of a large mass of empirical information.* The old Arabian Geber.f as early as the eighth century, was acquainted with the preparation of sulphuric acid and aqua regia, and gave an elaborate description of the more useful metals. He was a chemist ; if A. Von Hum- boldt is right in saying that " Chemistry begins when men have learned to employ mineral acids and powerful solvents." In the twelfth century, Albertus Magnus J understood * Cowley expresses this idea in the verses prefixed to this essay, which, it must be confessed, contain more truth than poetry. tFrom his name comes gibberish much as dunce comes from Duns Scotus. t Humboldt speaks of Albertus Magnus as " an independent observer in the domain of analytical chemistry ; " and adds, " It is true that his hopes were directed to the transmutation o metals, but in his attempts to fulfil this object he not only improved the practical manipulation of ores, but also enlarged the insight of men into the general mode of action of the chemical forces of nature." 46 THE LORE OF CATHAY the cupellation of gold and silver, and their purification by means of lead, as also the preparation of caustic potassa, ceruse, and minium. In the thirteenth, Roger Bacon described with accuracy the properties of saltpetre, giving the recipe for gun- powder, and approaching very nearly to the explanation of the functions of air in combustion. In the same century, Raymond Lully described the process of obtaining the essential oils ; and, a little later, Basil Valentine obtained copper from blue vitriol by the use of iron; and discovered antimony, sulphuric ether, and fulminating gold. Isaac de Hollandais fabricated gems and described the process. Brandt, while analyzing a human body in quest of the philosopher's stone, stumbled on the discovery of phosphorus. In the early part of the sixteenth century, Paracelsus did much to overthrow the inert methods of the Galenists, and gained a great and well-deserved reputation by intro- ducing the use of mineral medicines, i. e. of chemical compounds.* This last-named individual, though among its more modern professors, may be taken as the very best type of the so-called science of alchemy, whether in its wisdom or its folly, in the absurdity of its pretensions or in the solid value of its actual achievements. His name, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastes Paracelsus von Hohenheim, is synonymous with charlatan; and his fate sadly illustrates the history of his profession, which one of his fellow-laborers describes as " beginning in deceit, progressing with toil, and ending in beggary." * " With the rise of the Spagyrists and Paracelsus, who taught that the true use of chemistry is not to make gold, but medicines, we seem to perceive the first attempt at a rational pursuit of the study " (review of article " Chemistry " in the Encyclopedia Britannica; Nature, January, 1877.) ALCHEMY IN CHINA 47 His life was terminated, like those of so many professed adepts, by imbibing a draught of his own elixir.* Nor was Paracelsus the last victim of this bewitching delusion. In 1784, Dr. Price, an English physician, after having made gold in the presence of several persons, and pre- sented some of the precious product to George III., on being examined by a scientific commission, committed suicide to escape the shame of exposure. Alchemy is not exclusively an old-world delusion. It crossed the ocean in the Mayflower along with witch- craft. " One of the most curious things revealed to us in these volumes (of voyages)" says Mr. Lowell, "is the fact that John Winthrop Jr., was seeking the philosopher's stone." In Jonathan Brewster, we have a specimen (of a dif- ferent kind). Is it not curious that there should have been a balneum mortal at New London, two hundred years ago? that la recherche de labiolu should have been going on there in a log hut under constant fear that the Indians would put out, not merely the flower of one little life, but rob the world of this divine secret.f Dr. Barnard, " the diamond-maker of Sacramento," with his feet on the auriferous dust of California, sacri- ficed his life a few years ago in the vain attempt to manu- facture something more precious than gold. Charging * Of martyrs of science of this description, no country can show a longer catalogue than China. It may be found in extenso in native polemics against the Taoist religion, or scattered through the pages of the national histories. It will be sufficient here to refer to the Emperors Mu Tsung (A. D. 825), and Wu Tsung (A. D. 847), of the T'ang dynasty, both of whom are said to have shortened their lives by drinking a pretended elixir of immortality. f Among My Books, pp. 253, 256. 48 THE LORE OF CATHAY a hollow sphere with the costly ingredients, which, on the application of fire, were to crystallize into diamonds, he was blown into the air by a premature explosion, and died without revealing the secret of which he believed himself to be the sole depositary.* In Germany a Societas Hermetica existed as late as the year 1819; and this suggests a suspicion that the race of alchemists may not yet be altogether extinct, even among us. In fact the papers tell us of a man, who, in Canada, in 1877, committed suicide for the avowed pur- pose of testing the virtues of a restorative elixir which he professed to have invented. By the side of his lifeless corpse a letter was found directing that " a few particles of my ' creative all-changeful essence ' be scattered over my remains, when the elements will resolve themselves into a new combination, and I will reappear a living evi- dence of the truth of this new discovery." If these are the words of a madman, they are those of one whose brain was turned by the study of alchemy. A large bottle containing the elixir was found standing by the letter. If this poor fellow was the last to offer himself as a sacri- fice to the Moloch of alchemy, the last alchemist who succeeded in victimizing the public was Count Cagliostro, who, after vending his " elixir of immortal youth " in most of the courts of Europe, closed his career in a papal prison in 1795.! * His melancholy history was given at length under the title of " The Diamond-maker of Sacramento," some years ago, in the Overland Monthly, a spirited magazine of San Francisco, suc- cessfully edited by the poet Bret Harte, and the Hon. B. P. Avery. late U. S. Minister at Peking. Against the possibility of making large transparent crystals of pure carbon, modern chem- istry has never undertaken to pronounce ; the ancient and unsuc- cessful diamond makers, however, were not chemists but alche- mists. ^Scientific American, March 31, 1877. ALCHEMY IN CHINA 49 In China, the hermetic art still flourishes in full vigor. The Abbe Hue, in his History of Christianity in China, relates an amusing incident illustrating the ardor with which these persevering Orientals still continue to pursue the golden phantom. When the missionaries established themselves in Chao Ch'ing, in Canton province, a com- pany of educated natives possessed of considerable means were busily engaged in seeking to solve the problem of ages. A servant of the missionaries hinted to them that those learned Europeans were already in possession of it. Believing his assertion, they began to load him with favors to induce him to obtain the secret, for their ad- vantage. They gave him fine clothes, and furnished him with money to hire handsome apartments and purchase a beautiful wife; while he, on his part, was in no haste to fulfil his engagement. He was only waiting for the Western sphinxes to open their lips. But the patience of his generous victims finally gave out; or, what is more probable, they learned from the missionaries that they had no such secret to communicate. To escape their vengeance, the crafty rogue was compelled to fly to a neighboring city, where he ended his days in a prison. If the Chinese are the last to surrender this pleasing delusion, there is good reason to believe that they deserve the more honorable distinction of being the first to originate the idea. The origin of an idea so fruitful in results is a question of great interest; and many writers have expended on it the resources of their learning. Some find it in the my- thology of the Greeks, maintaining (an interpretation older than the Christian era) that the golden fleece sought for by the Argonauts was merely a sheepskin on which was inscribed the secret of making gold ;* and this fancy * This construction of the legend comes from Dionysius of Mitylene, who lived circa B. c. 50. 50 THE LORE OF CATHAY derives, it must be confessed, a little support from the cir- cumstance that Medea is represented as possessed of the corresponding secret of perpetuating or restoring youth, having cut to pieces and reconstructed her aged father- in-law. Some, again, discover the origin of the idea in Egypt, the land of Thoth (Hermes Trismegistus), and allege, in corroboration of their view, that the ancient Egyptians possessed considerable skill in practical chemistry. But the advocates of its Egyptian origin are not able to trace it back further than the time of the Ptolemies, and stu- dents of Hindu literature maintain that the Indians possessed a knowledge of it long before that date, though it must not be forgotten that there is nothing more uncer- tain than the chronology of ancient India.* Others adduce conclusive proof to show that modern Europe received it from the Arabs. They have not, how- ever, shown that the Arabs were its authors; and seem scarcely to have entertained a suspicion that those wan- dering sons of the desert, like birds and bees, were noth- ing more than agents through whom a prolific germ was conveyed from some portion of the remoter East. What that portion is, the name of Avicenna, one of the most eminent of the Arabian scholars, might have served to suggest, if they had followed the leading of words as carefully as a certain erudite Orientalist f who not only finds in India the origin of the doctrines of Pythagoras, but recognizes his name under the disguise of Budd- * Some instructive disclosures on this subject may be found in a lecture of the late Cardinal Wiseman entitled " Early History." It has been asserted by those who claim to be well versed in the history of India that in that country the earliest date that can be considered historical is April, B. c. 327, the date of its inva- sion by Alexander the Great. fPococke, Greece in India. ALCHEMY IN CHINA 51 haguru! For what is Avicenna but Ebn-Cinna? And what is Ebn-Cinna or Ibn Sina, as it is sometimes written, but a " Son of China?" a designation assumed by the learned physician probably because he was born at Bokhara, on the confines of the Chinese Empire! If we were as ready to rest in etymologies as the above- cited Orientalist, who triumphantly concludes a chapter with that curious derivation of the name of Pythagoras, we might consider our point as carried. Our etymology is, to say the least, as good as his; but we let it go for what it is worth, and rest our argument on better evidence.* * Nothing is more fallacious than the attempt to identify words in different languages by means of a mere superficial resemblance. Some years ago, in reading the Amour Medecin of Moliere, I fancied I had detected a translation in a combined form of the most familiar names for tan the Chinese elixir of life. The word orvietan, which is made so conspicuous in one of the scenes, describes a mysterious panacea, whose virtues the vender vaunts in strains as pompous as those of the Chinese alchemist. It struck me at once that, setting aside the accent, which goes for nothing in etymology, it might be taken as expressing golden elixir, and elixir o long life. Littre and the Dictionnaire de V Academic decided against me, referring the word to the old city of Orvieto (urbs vetus). But, whatever the source of the name, so exactly to the thing itself answers Chinese tan, or elixir, that I cannot forbear quoting a few lines descriptive of its qualities. " Sganarelle. Monsieur, je vous prie de me donner une boite de votre orvietan, que je m'en vais vous payer. "-L'Operateur (chantant). L'or de tous les climats qu'entoure 1'Ocean, Peut-il jamais payer ce secret d'importance? Mon remede guerit, par sa rare excellence, Plus de maux qu'on n'en peut nombrer dans tout un an: La gale, La rogne, La teigne, La fievre, La peste, La goutte, Verole, Descente, Rougeole. O grande puissance De 1'orvietan ! " 52 THE LORE OF CATHAY It is not improbable, as we shall attempt to show, that the true cradle of alchemy was China a country in which one of the oldest branches of the human family began their career of experience ; a country in which we discover so many of the seeds of our modern art; germs which, dwarfed and stunted in their native climate, have only been made to flourish by a change of soil. To establish this would be an interesting contribution to the history of science; and it might perhaps lead us to take an opti- mistic view even of the sins and follies of mankind, to discover that our modern chemistry, which is now dropping its mature fruits into the hands of Western en- terprise, had its root in the religion of Tao the most extravagant of the superstitions of the East. We shall briefly sketch the rise and development of alchemy in China, and then conclude by comparinig it with the leading phases of the same pursuit as exhibited in Western countries. Originating at the least six hundred years before the Christian era,* the religion of Tao still exerts a powerful influence over the mind of the Chinese. This is not the place to discuss either its sober tenets or its wild fan- tasies, but there is one of its doctrines that connects it The reader may compare this with passages quoted in the sequel from Taoist books. N. B. Or, in the first line of the description, is an evident allu- sion to the first syllable of the name, which the vendor takes to mean " golden." * It is indigenous to China ; and though we are unable to trace it to an earlier date, there is good reason to believe that it is as old as the Chinese race. The connection of alchemy with Tao- ism did not escape the notice of the earlier Jesuit missionaries ; but the Rev. Dr. Edkins, in a paper on Taoism published about forty years ago, was the first, I believe, to suggest a Chinese origin for the alchemy of Europe. ALCHEMY IN CHINA 53 closely with our present subject. It looks on the soul as only a more refined form of matter ; regards the soul and body as identical in substance, and maintains the possi- bility of preventing their dissolution by a course of phy- sical discipline. This is the seed-thought of Chinese al- chemy ; for this materialistic notion it was that first led the disciples of Laotze to investigate the properties of matter. Its development is easy to trace. Man's first desire is long life his second is to be rich. The Taoist com- menced with the former, but was not long in finding his way to the latter. As it was possible by physical disci- pline to lengthen the period of life, he conceived that the process might be carried far enough to result in cor- poreal immortality, accompanied by a mastery of matter and all its potencies. The success of the process, though, like the quest of the Holy Grail, involving moral qualifi- cations, depended mainly on diet and medicine; and in quest of these he ransacked the forest, penetrated the earth, and explored distant seas. The natural longing for immortality was thus made, under the guidance of Taoism, to impart a powerful impulse to the progress of discovery in three departments of science botany, min- eralogy, and geography. Nor did the other great object of pursuit remain far in the rear. A few simple experi- ments, such as the precipitation of copper from the oil of vitriol by the application of iron, and the blanching of metals by the fumes of mercury, suggested the possibility of transforming the baser metals into gold.* This * Science is not opposed to the abstract theory of transmuta- tion. Indeed, the modern chemist has been led by the phe- nomena of allotropy and isomerism, not to speak of other con- siderations, almost to accept as a principle what he lately de- nounced as a groundless assumption of his ancient forerunner 54 THE LORE OF CATHAY brought on the stage another, and, if possible, a more energetic, motive for investigation. The bare idea of acquiring untold riches by such easy means inspired with a kind of frenzy minds that were hardly capable of the loftier conception of immortality. It had, moreover, the effect of directing attention particularly to the study of minerals, the most prolific field for chemical discovery. Whether in the vegetable or the mineral kingdom, the researches of the Chinese alchemists were guided by one simple principle the analogy of man to material nature. As in their view the soul was only a more refined species of matter, and was endowed with such wondrous powers, so every object in nature, they argued, must be possessed of a soul, an essence or spirit, which controls its growth and development a something not unlike the essentia quinta of Western alchemy. This they believed to be the case, not only with animals, which display some of the viz., that a fundamental unity underlies many, if not all of, the forms of matter. On this subject see two interesting papers in the volume of Nature for 1879 (pp. 593, 625) on the question "Are the Elements Elementary?" The writer speaks approv- ingly of the hypothesis of original matter having a molecular or atomic structure ; all the molecules being uniform in size and in shape, but not all possessed of the same amount of motion the difference of their motions giving rise to all the properties of the various elements. The speculation which resolves matter into force tends in the same direction. " I must confess," says Pro- fessor Cook, " that I am rather drawn to that view of nature which has favor with many of the most eminent physicists of the present time, and which sees in the Cosmos, besides mind, only two essentially distinct beings namely, matter and energy; which regards all matter as one, and all energy as one ; and which refers the qualities of substances to the affections of the one substratum modified by the varying play of forces" (Lec- tures on the New Chemistry, lecture iv., International Series). ALCHEMY IN CHINA 55 attributes of mind, but with plants, which extract their appropriate nourishment from the earth, and transform it into fruits; and the same with minerals, which they re- garded as generated in the womb of the earth. It was to this half-spiritual, half-material theory that they had re- course to account for the transformations that are per- petually going on in every department of nature. As the active principle in each object was so potent in effecting the changes which we constantly observe, they imagined that it might attain to a condition of higher development and' greater efficiency. Such an upward tendency was, in fact, perpetually at work; and all things were striving to " purge off their baser fires " and enter on a higher and purer state. Nor were they merely striving to clothe themselves with material forms of a higher order. Matter itself was constantly passing the limits of sense and putting on the character of conscious spirit. This idea threw over the face of nature a glow of poetry. It awakened the torpid imagination and created an epoch in literature. It kindled the fancy of Chuangtze, in- spired the eloquence of Lu-tsu, and it figures in a thou- sand shapes among the graceful tales of the Liao-chai. It filled the earth with fairies and genii. An easy step connected them with those mysterious points of light which in all ages have excited so powerfully the hopes and fears of the human race. Astrology became wedded to alchemy, and the five principal planets bear in the current language of the present day the names of the elements over which they are regarded as presiding. In China, as elsewhere, alchemy has always been an occult science. Its students have been pledged to secrecy, and their knowledge transmitted mainly by means of oral tradition, each adept tracing his lineage back to Huang 56 THE LORE OF CATHAY Ti (B. c. 2700) or Kuang Ch'engtze, as the Freemason deduces his pedigree from Solomon or Hiram of Tyre.* Their doctrines, like the delicate beauties of some Eastern climes, were never allowed to go abroad without being covered with a veil. They were wrapped in folds of impenetrable mystery, and expressed, for the most part, in the measured lines and metaphorical language of poetry. Still, in spite of every precaution that pride or jealousy was able to suggest, some of their secrets would gradually ooze out, and many of the rules for working metals now in common use bear in their very terms the stamp of an alchemic parentage. After this cursory survey, it may not be amiss to intro- duce a few extracts from native authors, professors of the mysterious lore, in order to ascertain how far they corroborate the foregoing views, but especially to aid us in deciding whether any real connection is to be traced between the Chinese and European schools of alchemy. I. FROM KAO SHANGTZE. The Secret of Immortality. \ " The body is the dwelling-place of life ; the spirits are the essence of life ; and the soul is the master of life. * Huang Ti is at least semi-mythical. The earliest historical sovereign who became a votary of alchemy was Ch'in Shih Huang, the builder of the Great Wall, B. C. 220. t These extracts are not arranged in the order of time. The antiquity of the system will be considered in another place; and I begin with two from writers whose age I am not able to fix with precision. For the citations from both I am indebted to a compilation, in twelve volumes, entitled The Elixir or Quintes- sence of the Philosophers. Among the philosophers cited, those who favored alchemy are in a very small minority. ALCHEMY IN CHINA 57 When the spirits are exhausted, the body becomes sick; when the soul is in repose, the spirits keep their place; and when the spirits are concentrated, the soul becomes indestructible. Those who seek the elixir must imitate the Yin and Yang [the active and passive principles in nature] and learn the harmony of numbers. They must govern the soul and unite their spirit. If the soul is a chariot, the spirits are its horses. When the soul and spirits are properly yoked together, you are immortal." II. FROM TANTZE. The Power of Miracles. " The clouds are a dragon, the wind a tiger. Mind is the mother, and matter the child. When the mother summons the child, will it dare to disobey? Those who would expel the spirits of evil must (by the force of their mind) summon the spirits of the five elements. Those who would conquer serpents must obtain the influences of the five planets. By this means the Yin and Yang, the dual forces of nature, may be controlled; winds and clouds collected ; mountains and hills torn up by the roots ; and rivers and seas made to spring out of the ground. Still the external manifestation of this power is not so good as the consciousness of its possession within." III. FROM THE SAME. The Adept Superior to Hunger, Cold, and Sickness. " He inhales the fine essence of matter, how can he be hungry? He is warmed by the fire of his own soul, how can he be cold? His five vitals are fed on the essence of the five elements, how can he be sick ? " 58 THE LORE OF CATHAY IV. FROM LU TSU, OF THE T*ANG DYNASTY.* Patience Essential to Success. "Would you seek the golden tan [the elixir], it is not easy to obtain. The three powers [sun, moon, and stars] must seven times repeat their footsteps; and the four seasons nine times complete their circuit. " You must wash it white and burn it red ; when one draught will give you ten thousand ages, and you will be wafted beyond the sphere of sublunary things." V. FROM THE SAME. The Necessity of a Living Teacher. " Every one seeks long life, but the secret is not easy to find. If you covet the precious things of heaven, you must reject the treasures of earth. You must kindle the fire that springs from water, f and evolve the Yin con- * Lii-Tsu (or Lii-Yen) flourished in the latter half o the eighth century. In early life respected as a scholar and a magistrate, and in later years famed for the eloquence of his style and the elevation of his character, he did much to revive the decaying credit of the " school of the genii." His works are voluminous and well known, but, like most o those ascribed to the great masters of Taoism, probably comprehend much that is not genu- ine. fThis phrase reminds us of a quaint piece of doggerel from the pen of George Ripley, a noted alchemist of England, who died in 1490, notwithstanding the medicines recommended in his two books on Alchymie and Aurum Potabile. The following are a few of his incomprehensible verses : " The well must brenne in water clear, Take good heed, for this they fere, The fire with water brent shall be, The earth on fire shall be set And water with fire shall be knit. ALCHEMY IN CHINA 59 tained within the Yang. One word from a sapient master, and you possess a draught of the golden water." VI. FROM THE SAME. The Chief Elements in Alchemy. " All things originate from earth. If you can get at the radical principle, the spirit of the green dragon is mercury, and the water of the white tiger * is lead. The knowing ones will bring mother and child together, when earth will become heaven, and you will be extricated from the power of matter." VII. FROM THE SAME. Description of the Philosopher's Stone: Self -culture Nec- essary to Obtain it. " I must diligently plant my own field. There is within it a spiritual germ that may live a thousand years. Its flower is like yellow gold. Its bud is not large, but the seeds are round [globules of mercury?] and like to a spotless gem. Its growth depends on the soil of the cen- tral palace [the heart], but its irrigation must proceed Of the white stone and the red Lo, here is the true deed ! " * Yin and Yang are the dual forces which control the elements of nature. Though generally referred to the sexual system, their chief symbols are the sun and moon, and the original signi- fication of the terms is light and darkness. The " tiger " and " dragon " are synonyms for the oft-repeated Yin and Yang. Their use in this sense is comparatively ancient, as we may gather from the title of a book still extant, by the historian Pan Ku, in the first century of our era. 60 THE LORE OF CATHAY from a higher fountain [the reason]. After nine years of cultivation, root and branch may be transplanted to the heaven of the greater genii." VIII. FROM A BIOGRAPHER OF LU-TSU. Speaking of the labors of his great master, he says, " Among the eight stones, he made most use of cinnabar, because from that he extracted mercury ; and among the five metals, he made most use of lead, because from that he obtained silver. The fire of the heart [blood] is red as cinnabar; and the water of the kidneys [urine] is dark as lead. To these must be added sulphur, that the com- pound may be efficacious. Lead is the mother of silver, mercury, the child of cinnabar. Lead represents the in- fluence of the kidneys, mercury that of the heart." We must here introduce a few extracts from the Wu Chen Pien, a work which still holds the place of a text- book among the followers of Laotze. They will serve to indicate the spirit and aim of these operations, though the processes are still carefully concealed. In fact, all that is given to the public seems merely designed to in- flame the imagination, and to induce readers to place themselves under the instruction of a Taoist master. 1. The Great Motive. " However long this mortal life, its events are all uncertain. He who yesterday bestrode his horse so grandly at the head of the street, to-day is a corpse in the coffin. His wife and his wealth are his no longer. His sins must take their course, and self- deception will do no good. If you do not seek the great remedy, how will you find it? If you find out the method and do not prepare it, how unwise are you ! " 2. A Vindication. " If the virtuous follow a false doc- trine, they reclaim it; but if the vicious profess a true doctrine, they pervert it. So it is with the golden elixir: ALCHEMY IN CHINA 61 a deviation of an inch leads to the error of a mile. If I succeed, then my fate is in my own hands, and my body may last as long as the heavens. But the vulgar pervert this doctrine to the gratification of low desires [such as those for wealth and pleasure]." 3. Outline of Process. " In the gold-furnace you must separate the mercury 'from the cinnabar, and in the gemmy bath you must precipitate the silver from the water. To wield the fires of this divine work is not the task of a day. But out of the midst of the pool suddenly the sun rises." * No one at all acquainted with the operations of chem- istry can fail to remark how much is implied in this reference to the precipitation of silver. Nor can any one familiar with the language of Western alchemists avoid being struck by the similarity of the terms here employed. As he reads of " separating mercury from cinnabar," " precipitating silver," " wielding the fires of the divine work," the " gemmy bath," and the " sun rising out of the pool," does he not fancy himself perusing a fragment from Lully or Albertus describing the balneum marice and the production of gold? We add three more to our series of illustrative ex- tracts : I. The Reason for Obscure and Figurative Phrase- ology. " The holy sage was afraid of betraying the secrets of heaven. He accordingly sets forth the true Yin and Yang under the images of the white tiger and * A few years ago I made the acquaintance of a Kiangsi man by the name of Hsiung, who had published a book of some literary merit, and was withal an ardent student of the occult science. A manuscript volume of his own compilation, which he permitted me to examine, contained, among other diagrams, one which rep- resented the sun rising out of a smoking furnace showing that the hermetic symbol for gold is the same in China as in Europe. 62 THE LORE OF CATHAY the green dragon. And the harmony of the two chords he represents under the symbols of the true lead and the true mercury." * 2.. Nature of the Inward Harmony. " The two things to be united are wuh and wo, the me and the not me. When these combine, the passions are in harmony with nature, and the elements are complete." In other passages we have noticed the outcropping of a moral idea. In this we find a materialistic doctrine suddenly metamorphosed into the most subtle form of pantheistic idealism. 3. Self -discipline the Best Elixir (from Tantze, not in Wu Chen Pien) " Among the arts of the alchemist is that of preparing an elixir which may be used as a sub- stitute for food. This is certainly true; yet the ability to enjoy abundance or endure hunger comes not from the elixir, but from the fixed purpose of him who uses it. When a man has arrived at such a stage of progress that to have and not to have are the same; when life and death are one ; when feeling is in harmony with nature, and the inner and the outer worlds united then he can escape the thraldom of matter, and leave sun, moon, and stars behind his back. To him it will then be of no conse- quence whether he eat a hundred times in a day, or only once in a hundred days." We might fill volumes with * It is curious to see how Western alchemists exhibit the same phase of feeling. Howes, an old writer, quoted in Mr. Lowell's New England of Two Centuries Ago, expresses himself thus in a letter to Gov. Winthrop of Massachusetts : " Dear friend, I desire with all my heart that I might write plainer to you ; but in discovering the mystery, I may diminish its majesty, and give occasion to the profane to abuse it, if it should fall into unworthy hands." The mystery was the unity of matter. He adds, " As there is all good to be found in unity, and all evil in duality and multiplicity, phccnix ilia admiranda sola semper existit." ALCHEMY IN CHINA 63 similar extracts without, we fear, adding much to the information of our readers. The composition of the elixir was a secret which the alchemist did not care to divulge. If, therefore, we seek for precise directions for its preparation in the writings of a professed adept, we seek in vain. There is, indeed, one oft-repeated formula, which ap- pears to be absurdly simple. It is this : " Pb. 8 oz., Hg. l / 2 lb.; mix thoroughly, and the combination will result in a mass of the golden elixir." But it ceases to be simple when we learn that both metals and proportions are to be taken in a mystical sense ; that, in fact, instead of indi- cating the materials of the elixir, they only point to the precise moment when the final touch is to be given to a complicated process viz., one minute after the full of the moon. If this resolves itself into " moonshine," an- other, which has the air of being more in detail, is still less luminous. " Plant the Yang and grow the Yin; cul- tivate and cherish the precious seed. When it springs up, it shows a yellow bud ; the bud produces mercury, and the mercury crystallizes into granules like grains of golden millet. One grain is to be taken at a dose, and the doses repeated for a hundred days, when the body will be transformed and the bones converted into gold. Body and spirit will both be endowed with miraculous properties, and their duration will have no end." These recipes are both from standard text-books of the Taoist school. Ko Hung, of the fourth century, is one of the most voluminous writers on the subject. He gives nine varie- ties of the tan, but no clear account of the preparation of any of them. The following extract from his work may serve to show the kind of reasoning by which he and his fellows suffered themselves to be deluded: 64 THE LORE OF CATHAY " I formerly thought the Taoist mystery was intended to delude simple folk, and that there was nothing in it but empty words ; but when I saw the Emperor Wu sub- ject Tso Tse and others to a fast of nearly a month their complexion continuing fresh and their strength un- abated I said there was no reason why they should not extend the fast to fifty years. " Another Taoist, Kan Shih, placed a number of fish in boiling oil; some of them having first swallowed a few drops of an elixir, swam about as if they were in the water, the others were boiled so that they could be eaten. " Silk-worms taking the same medicine lived for ten months; chickens and young dogs taking it ceased to grow ; and a white dog on taking it turned black ; all of which shows that there are things in heaven and earth surpassing our comprehension. Would that I could break the fetters of sense and give my whole heart to the pursuit of the elixir of life ! " We find a more explicit account of the composition of the elixir in the Ko Chih Ching Yuan, or Mirror of Scientific Discovery; but here again we are not favored with anything beyond a barren inventory of ingredients, without any statement of proportion or manipulation. " The elixir of the eight precious things," says this author, " is so called because it contains cinnabar, orpi- ment, realgar, sulphur, saltpetre, ammonia, empty green [an ore of cobalt], and mother-of-clouds [a kind of mica]." This and the other passages above cited throw, we con- fess, very little light on any question of practical science : but they are not unimportant in relation to the history of science, indicating as they do the spirit and aims of the Chinese alchemists the most enthusiastic, and, as we ALCHEMY IN CHINA 65 think, the earliest, explorers in a region which has proved to be one of inexhaustible fertility. The results of their labors in the way of chemical dis- covery it may not be easy to determine ; though it is safe to affirm that, for what they knew on that subject prior to their recent intercourse with the West, the Chinese are mainly indebted to those early devotees of the experi- mental philosophy who passed their lives among the fumes of the alembic. The skill which the Chinese exhibit in metallurgy, their brilliant dye-stuffs and numerous pig- ments ; their early knowledge of gunpowder, alcohol, arsenic, Glauber's salt, calomel, and corrosive sublimate; their pyrotechny ; their asphyxiating and anaesthetic com- pounds all give evidence of no contemptible proficiency in practical chemistry.* In their books of curious receipts, we find instructions for the manufacture of sympathetic inks, for removing stains, compounding and alloying metals, counterfeiting gold, whitening copper, overlaying the baser with the precious metals, etc. In some of these recipes a caution is added that neither " women, cats, nor chickens " be allowed to approach during the process, obviously a relic of alchemistic superstition. The Hermes of China has no female disciples, though Europe can boast the names of not a few. The alchemist of China has generally been a celibate, and very fre- quently a religious ascetic, to whom the life-giving elixir, * See Davis's Chinese, ch. xviii., for a very interesting account of the preparation of calomel (chloride of mercury) by a Chinese chemist, and by a truly Chinese process. In the same chapter the author sketches the fantastic physical theories of the Chinese, and adds, " All this looks very much as if the philosophy of our forefathers was derived intermediately from China." 66 THE LORE OF CATHAY rather than the aurific stone, was the chief object of pur- suit. Lii-tsu, one of the most eminent, is said to have earned immortality by rejecting the art of making gold.* In the Chinese system there are two processes the one inward and spiritual, the other outward and mate- rial. To obtain the greater elixir, involving the attain- ment of immortality, both must be combined ; but the lesser elixir, which answers to the philosopher's stone, or a magical control over the powers of nature, might be procured with less pains. Both processes were pursued in seclusion, commonly in the recesses of the mountains, the term for adepts signifying " mountain men." In a discourse on metals in one of the works above cited, we are told that the seminal principle of gold first assumes the form of quicksilver. Exposed to the -influ- ence of the moon, it is liquid; but when subjected to the action of the pure Yang, the sun or the male essence, it solidifies and becomes yellow gold. Those who desire to convert quicksilver into gold should carry on their operations among the mountains, that the effluences from the stones may assist the process. Nothing seems to be required in addition to the inci- dental proofs already adduced to establish the existence * As the legend goes, shortly after commencing the study of the art, he was met by one of the old genii, who offered to impart to him the great secret of transmutation. " But," asked the young man, " will not the artificial gold, relapse to its original elements in the course of time?" "Yes," replied the genius, " but that need not concern you, as it will not happen until after ten thousand ages." " I decline it then," said Lii-tsu. " I would rather live in poverty than bring a loss on my fellow-men, though after ten thousand ages." The noble sense of right was more meritorious than any number of sham charities ; and the youth who had conscience enough to spurn the gilded bait was at once admitted to the heaven of the genii. ALCHEMY IN CHINA 67 of a connection between the alchemy of Europe and that of China ; still, a few considerations in the way of com- parison may serve to make the nature and extent of that connection somewhat more apparent. 1. The study of alchemy did not make its appearance in Europe until it had been in full vigor in China for at least six centuries. Nor did it appear there, according to the best authorities, until the fourth century, when intercourse with the Far East had become somewhat fre- quent. It entered Europe, moreover, by way of Byzan- tium and Alexandria, the places in which that intercourse was chiefly centred. At a later day it was revived in the West by the irruption of the Saracens, who may be sup- posed to have had better opportunities for becoming ac- quainted with it in consequence of being nearer to its original source. One of the most renowned seats of al- chemic industry was Bagdad while it was the seat of the caliphate. An extensive commerce was at that period carried on between Arabia and China. In the eighth century embassies were interchanged between the caliphs and the emperors. Colonies of Arabs were established in the seaports of the Empire ; and the grave of a cousin of Mahomet remains at Canton as a monument of that early intercourse. 2. The objects of pursuit were in both schools identi- cal, and in either case twofold immortality and gold. In Europe the former was the less prominent because the people, being in possession of Christianity, had a suf- ficiently vivid faith in a future life to satisfy their in- stinctive longings without having recourse to question- able arts. 3. In either school there were two elixirs, the greater and the less, and the properties ascribed to them corre- sponded very closely. 68 THE LORE OF CATHAY 4. The principles underlying both systems are identical in the composite nature of the metals, and their vegetation from a seminal germ. Indeed, the characters tsing, for the germ, and tai, for the matrix, which constantly occur in the writings of Chinese alchemists, might be taken for the translation of terms in the vocabulary of the Western school, did not their higher antiquity forbid the hypo- thesis. 5. The ends in view being the same, the means by which they were pursued were nearly identical ; mercury and lead (to which sulphur was tertiary) being as con- spicuous in the laboratories of the East as mercury and sulphur were in those of the West. It is of less signifi- cance to add that many other substances were common to both schools than it is to note the remarkable coincidence that in Chinese as in European alchemy the names of the principal reagents are employed in a mystical sense.* 6. Both schools, or at least individuals in both, held the strange doctrine of a cycle of changes, in the course of which the precious metals revert to their original ele- ments. 7. Both systems were closely interwoven with astrology. 8. Both led to the practice of magical arts and un- bounded charlatanism. 9. Both dealt in language of equal extravagance ; and the style of European alchemists, so unlike the sobriety of thought characteristic of the Western mind, would, if considered alone, furnish ground for a probable conjec- * Robert Boyle (quoted in Nature, January, 1877) is unspar- ing in his denunciation of " those sooty empirics, who have their eyes darkened and their brains troubled with the smoke of their furnaces ; and who are wont to evince their salt, sulphur, and mercury (to which they give the canting title of hypostatical principles) to be the true principle of things." ALCHEMY IN CHINA 69 ture that their science must have had its origin in the fervid fancy of an Oriental people.* In conclusion, granting that the leading objects of al- chemical pursuit are such as might have suggested them- selves to the human mind in any country, as it felt its way towards an acquaintance with the forces of nature, yet the similarity of the circumstances with which they are found associated in the West and the East forbids the supposition of an independent origin. Setting aside as untenable the claims of Europe and of Western Asia, we regard alchemy as unquestionably a product of the re- moter East. To the honor of being its birthplace, India ?nd China are rival claimants. The pretensions of the former f we are not in a position to estimate by direct investigation ; but they appear to us to be excluded by the proposition, of which there is abundant proof, that the alchemy of China is not an exotic, but a genuine pro- duct of the soil of that country. As before remarked, it springs from Taoism, an in- * The whimsical idea of the homunculus, which was so promi- nent in the works of the later alchemists o the West, and which plays such a conspicuous role in the second part of Goethe's Faust, is one of which I can find no vestige in the records of Eastern alchemy. In the writings of the latter school, however, the power of synthetic creation is asserted boldly enough, and the idea of producing the homunculus, i. e. of creating a human being by an artificial process, is, in fact, only a particular appli- cation of the principle. f That much-lamented sinologue, the late Mr. Mayers, favors the claim of India, though, alas ! it is no longer possible to ques- tion him as to the grounds of his opinion. In his essay on the origin of gunpowder, he says, " It is at least allowable to sur- mise that those Brahmin chemists who, it is almost proved, in- augurated the search after the philosopher's stone and the elixir vita may have been the first to discover what secret forces are developed in the fiery union between sulphur and saltpetre." 70 THE LORE OF CATHAY digenous religion ; and shows itself in clearly defined out- lines, if not in full maturity, at a time when there was little or no intercourse with India. Had it appeared some centuries later simultaneously with the introduction of Buddhism, there might have been more reason to look on it as a foreign importation. In polar antagonism with the idealistic philosophy of Buddha, its fundamental tenets are not only found in the ancient manual of Laotze,* they are distinctly traceable in the oldest of the Confucian classics: In the / Ching, the diagrams of which are referred to Fu Hsi, B. c. 2800, while the text dates from Wen Wang, B. c. 1150, and the commentary from Confucius, B. c. 500, we discover at length what appears to us the true source 6f those prolific ideas which prepared the way for our modern chemistry. Its name, The Book of Changes, is suggestive; and we find throughout its contents the vague idea of change replaced by the more definite one of " transformation," the key-word of alchemy. In the very first section, Wen Wang descants on the " changes and transmutations of the creative principle ; " and Confucius, in several chapters of his commentary, grows eloquent over the same theme. " How great," he exclaims, " is change ! How wonderful is change ! When heaven and earth were formed, change was throned in their midst ; and should change cease to take place, heaven and earth would soon cease to exist." " The diagrams," he says again, " comprehend the profoundest secrets of * The famous poet, Pailotien, in a well-known stanza, asserts that the extravagances of alchemy are not to be found there. Yet the thoughtful reader cannot fail to discover its latent princi- ples, especially the effect of discipline in securing an ascendency over matter, and the protean power of transmutation hidden in the forces of nature. The alchemists all claim Laotze as a lineal ancestor, though they derive their origin from a remoter source. ALCHEMY IN CHINA 71 the universe; and the power of exciting the 'various mo- tions of the universe depends on their explanation : the power to effect transmutation depends on the understand- ing of the diagrams of changes." Here, in a word, is the leading idea of the / Ching; and, at the same time, the general object of Chinese students of alchemy. In- deed ; so thoroughly are their works pervaded by the spirit of that venerable epitome of primitive science that it is impossible to mistake the source from which they derive their inspiration. The Taoists, without a dissent- ing voice, recognize it as the first book in the canon of their sect; and the Tyrant of Ch'in, a zealous votary of alchemy, spared the / Ching from the flames to which he consigned all the other writings of Confucius and his disciples. We have therefore no hesitation in affirming that alchemy is INDIGENOUS TO CHINA, AND COEVAL WITH THE DAWN OF LETTERS. BOOK II Chinese Literature IV POETS AND POETRY IN CHINA THAT the Chinese are capable of poetry may to some be a revelation, so practical and prosaic are the specimens of the race with whom they have come in contact. Yet an educated Chinese is, of all men, the most devoted to the cultivation of poetry. If he makes a remarkable voyage, he is sure to give the wo?ld his impressions in verse. He inscribes fresh couplets on his door-posts every New Year's Day. Poetical scrolls, the gifts of friends, adorn the walls of his shop or study. He spends his leisure in tinkering sonnets; and, when he escorts a guest as far as some pretty pavilion on a hill- side, he never fails to extract from his boot-top the ready pencil, and to indite in verse an adieu, which passes for impromptu scrawling, at the same time, on wall or pillar a record of the occasion. All this is, no doubt, somewhat artificial, but it has its root in national sentiment. For of China it is true to-day, as of no other nation, that an apprenticeship in the art of poetry forms a leading feature in her educational system. Wales has her Eisteddfod, or annual assemblage of bards, and the great schools of England have their prize poems ; but in China no youth who aspires to civil office or literary honors is exempted from composing verse in his trial examination. To be a tax-collector, he is tested not hi arithmetic but in prosody a usage that has been in force for nearly a thousand years. Its origin, in fact, goes back much further. For did not Confucius make poetry 75 76 THE LORE OF CATHAY the front foot of his educational tripos ? " Let poetry," he says, "be the beginning, manners the middle, and music the finish." The sage who prescribed this course of study was a musician ; but if he ever wrote verse, not a line of it has come down to our day. He was, however, far from prosaic. His sayings sparkle with gems of metaphor; and that he keenly enjoyed poetry and appreciated its refining influence is evident from the maxim just quoted. A stronger proof of his taste for poetry is the fact that, in one of the Five Classics, he took pains to collect and preserve the most noteworthy poems that had appeared prior to his day. In another, the Shu, or Book of History, edited by him, he has also preserved sundry fragments of primeval poetry. We have there the spectacle of princes and their ministers improvising responsive verse, a thousand years before the Trojan War. In China, as in Greece, the birth of poetry preceded that of philosophy. The Lyric Muse heralded the dawn of culture; and, by the first light of history, her rosy fingers are discerned busily engaged in weaving a robe of many colors to cover the nakedness of new-born hu- manity. Epic poetry, so conspicuous in India, is wholly want- ing in China, its place being supplied by historical ro- mance, which exhibits all the features of poetry with the exception of verse. Dramatic poetry is abundant; but the drama, though it emerged ten centuries ago, is, if compared with our modern stage, still in a very primitive condition. It has scarcely got beyond the age of Thespis. An actor changes his dress, as he changes his role, in the sight of the audi- ence, singing out as he dons the robes of majesty : " Now I am your humble servant, the Emperor." POETS AND POETRY IN CHINA 77 Didactic poems, in which verse serves simply as an aid to the memory, are so common that official proclama- tions are frequently thrown into that form. When, in consequence of the triumph of British arms half a cen- tury ago, five ports were opened to the residence of foreigners, the Emperor caused a compend of the teach- ings of the sages to be published in verse as an antidote to their doctrines. Indeed, so highly esteemed is verse as a vehicle for instruction that a popular encyclopaedia, in forty volumes, is composed entirely in verse. Passing over minor divisions, we shall devote special attention to lyric poetry, of which the Chinese have pro- duced an enormous quantity, and in which, in the face of all competitors, they are able to vindicate a high posi- tion. Their lyric poetry falls, roughly, into three periods ancient, mediaeval and modern. Their ancient lyrics con- sist chiefly of a copious anthology, re-edited by Confucius, but not compiled by him. This anthology contains three hundred and six pieces songs, ballads, heroic odes and sacrificial hymns. The songs and ballads are so selected as to reflect the manners of the several states into which the Empire was at that time divided. They exhibit a sim- plicity in social arrangements which is in strong con- trast with the artificial life of the present day. Besides epithalamial verse, which is admitted to be ethically correct, there are love songs and love stories which shocked the formal moralists of later times. We, with a less fettered judgment, find in them nothing to object to, unless it be the vapid inanity of most of them. As a whole, they stand in point of morality far above any similar collection that has come down to us from pagan antiquity. To secure this degree of purity, they under- went a Bowdlerizing process at the hands of Confucius 7 or his predecessors. So confident was Confucius that all traces of evil had been expunged that he declared that, " of these three hundred odes, there is not one that de- parts from the purity of thought." We must not think of Confucius as always discoursing wisdom, or as perpetually hampered by a stiff ceremonial. He was one of the most human of sages a sort of wiser, better Solomon, who, though he spoke more than " three thousand proverbs," found time to edit, if he did not compose, a great many charming canticles. As a musician, he must have enjoyed their harmonies of rhyme and rhythm attractions which those ancient poems have entirely lost, through changes which the language has undergone in the lapse of ages. Here is a fragment that has a history: " A speck upon your ivory fan You soon may wipe away ; But stains upon the heart or tongue Remain, alas, for aye." Hearing a young man repeat these lines from time to time, Confucius chose him for his son-in-law. He showed enough affection for his daughter to select an honest man for her husband ; yet he admitted into his collection, without note or comment, a ballad which has done much to perpetuate among his people a barbarous contempt for women: " When a son is born in a lordly bed Wrap him in raiment of purple and red ; Jewels and gold for playthings bring For the noble boy who shall serve the king. " When a girl is born in coarse cloth wound, With a tile for a toy, let her lie on the ground. In her bread and her beer be her praise or her blame And let her not sully her parents' good name." POETS AND POETRY IN CHINA 79 Had the sage but bethought himself to attach to this relic a little note of disapproval, how much cruelty he might have averted by the stroke of a pen! The following song for New Year's Eve is as true to human sentiment to-day as it still is to the aspects of nature. To make it suit the season, however, we must remember that the date of New Year's Eve was prob- ably a month earlier than at present, and the latitude about thirty-five degrees that of Honan: " The voice of the cricket is heard in the hall, The leaves of the forest are withered and sere; My sad spirits droop at those chirruping notes, So thoughtlessly sounding the knell of the year. " Yet why should we sigh at the change of a date, When life's flowing on in a full, steady tide? Come, let us be merry with those that we love; For pleasure in measure there is no one to chide." This is the oldest temperance ode in the world. It was designed, as the Chinese say, to curb the excesses incident to the season, by recommending " pleasure in measure.'' It probably antedates the founding of Rome. Before dismissing these ancient odes, it should be said that a characteristic of their structure is the refrain. They generally start with a poetic image, such as the plaintive cry of a deer, or the note of a water-fowl ; which is repeated at the beginning or end of each stanza, albeit without any very clear relation to the theme of the poem. Burns's famous song, " Green grow the rashes, O ! " is in this respect thoroughly Chinese. Tennyson's graver melody, " Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea ! " is equally in keeping with the style of a Chinese lyric. The whole piece is pervaded by the moaning of the sea, suggesting more than words: 8o THE LORE OF CATHAY " And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me." There is a book of elegies, of a somewhat later age, which is held in much esteem. It is chiefly the work of one man, Chu Yuan, who proved his genius, or at least impressed it on posterity, by drowning himself. Passing over this, we come to the beginning of China's Middle Age, the dynasty of Han, under which the re- vival of letters quickened every kind of intellectual ac- tivity. The poetry of this period shows a notable advance toward perfection of form ; though its high qualities may not be discoverable in the specimens which I have to offer. The first is by Chia I, a Minister of State who was sent into banishment about 200 B. c. In spirit and inci- dent, it reminds one of Poe's " Raven ; " but the task of finding out how Poe got wind of his Chinese predecessor must be left to others : " In dismal, gloomy, crumbling halls, Betwixt moss-covered, reeking walls, An exiled poet lay " On his bed of straw reclining, Half despairing, half repining When, athwart the window sill, In flew a bird of omen ill, And seemed inclined to stay. " To my book of occult learning Suddenly I thought of turning, All the mystery to know Of that shameless owl or crow, That would not go away. " ' Wherever such a bird shall enter 'Tis sure some power above has sent her,' So said the mystic book, ' to show The human dweller forth must go;' But where, it did not say. 8i " Then anxiously the bird addressing, And my ignorance confessing, ' Gentle bird, in mercy deign The will of Fate to me explain. Where is my future way ? ' " It raised its head as if 'twere seeking To answer me by simply speaking; Then folded up its sable wing, Nor did it utter anything; But breathed a ' Well-a-day ! ' " More eloquent than any diction, That simple sigh produced conviction; Furnishing to me the key Of the awful mystery That on my spirit lay. " ' Fortune's wheel is ever turning, To human eye there's no discerning Weal or woe in any state; Wisdom is to bide your fate.' That is what it seemed to say By that simple ' Well-a-day.' " A hundred years later, we have a touching ode ad- dressed to his wife by Su Wu, when on the eve of a perilous embassy to the Grand Khan of Tartary: " Twin trees whose boughs together twine, Two birds that guard one nest, We'll soon be far asunder torn, As sunrise from the West. " Hearts knit in childhood's innocence, Long bound in Hymen's ties, One goes to distant battle-fields, One sits at home and sighs. 82 THE LORE OF CATHAY " Like carrier dove, though seas divide, I'll seek my lonely mate ; But if afar I find a grave You'll mourn my hapless fate. " To us the future's all unknown ; In memory seek relief. Come, touch the chords you know so well, And let them soothe our grief." It speaks well for the domestic affections of the Chinese that the sentiment of this piece has so penetrated their literature that it has had imitators in every age, even down to our own days. The Commissioner Lin, whose high-handed proceedings provoked the Opium War, on going into banishment, addressed a similar adieu to his wife. Passing over another century, we come to Pan Chih Yu, the Sappho of China, a gifted lady of the Court, B. c. 18. Though several of her compositions are extant, the best known is an ode inscribed on a fan, and presented to the Emperor: " Of fresh, new silk, all snowy white, And round as harvest moon ; A pledge of purity and love, A small but welcome boon. " While Summer lasts, borne in the hand, Or folded on the breast, 'Twill gently soothe thy burning brow, And charm thee to thy rest. " But, ah ! When Autumn frosts descend, And Winter's winds blow cold, No longer sought, no longer loved, 'Twill lie in dust and mold. POETS AND POETRY IN CHINA 83 " This silken fan, then, deign accept, Sad emblem of my lot Caressed and fondled for an hour, Then speedily forgot." After an interval of two centuries, we come to the period of the " Three Kingdoms." A weak tyrant, who occupied one of the thrones, was jealous of the talents of his younger brother, who had the reputation of being the first poet of his day. Reproach- ing the poet for thinking too highly of himself, he threat- ened him with death, unless he should on the instant com- pose a quatrain that would be accepted as a proof of genius. The young man strode slowly across the hall, his footsteps keeping time to the cadence of his verse, while he pronounced these lines: " Are there not beans in yon boiling pot, And bean-stalks are burning below? Now why, when they spring from one parent root, Should they scorch each other so?" The dynasty of Tang (618-905 A. D.) witnessed the rise of the drama, and at the same time the culmination of lyric poetry. Tu Fu and Li Po were the Dryden and Pope of that age. The former, though for ten centuries he has enjoyed an immense popularity, had for a long time to struggle with poverty. " For thirty years I rode an ass," is a pathetic confession, which I shall not mar by the addition of another line from his voluminous works. His great rival was more fortunate. Welcomed at court in his early prime, and praised by posterity as the brightest star that ever shone in the poetical firmament of China, Li Po is best known as a sort of Oriental Anac- 84 THE LORE OF CATHAY reon, a prince of bacchanalian bards. We have not space for more than two specimens of his verse an epistle from a young wife to her husband in the army, evidently inspired by the farewell sonnet of Su Wu, and an ode on drinking alone by moonlight. The first is marked by the simplicity of Wordsworth; the second by the humor of Hood. A SOLDIER'S WIFE TO HER HUSBAND. " 'Twas many a year ago How I recall the day ! When you, my own true love, Came first with me to play. " A little child was I, My head a mass of curls; I gathered daisies sweet, Along with other girls. "You rode a bamboo horse, And deemed yourself a knight With paper helm and shield And wooden sword bedight. " Thus we together grew, And we together played Yourself a giddy boy, And I a thoughtless maid. " At fourteen I was wed, And if one called my name As quick as lightning flash The crimson blushes came. "'Twas not till we had passed A year of married life, My heart was knit to yours In joy to be your wife. POETS AND POETRY IN CHINA 85 " Another year, alas ! And you had joined your chiei While I was left at home In solitary grief. " When victory crowns your arms, And I your triumph learn, What bliss for me to fly To welcome your return ! " ON DRINKING ALONE BY MOONLIGHT. " Here are flowers and here is wine ; But there's no friend with me to join Hand to hand and heart to heart, In one full bowl before we part. " Rather then, than drink alone, I'll make bold to ask the Moon To condescend to lend her face, The moment and the scene to grace. " Lo ! she answers and she brings My shadow on her silver wings That makes three, and we shall be, I ween, a merry company. " The modest Moon declines the cup, My shadow promptly takes it up; And when I dance, my shadow fleet Keeps measure with my twinkling feet. " Although the Moon declines to tipple, She dances in yon shining ripple; And when I sing, my festive song The echoes of the Moon prolong. " Say, when shall we next meet together ? Surely not in cloudy weather, For you, my boon companions dear, Come only when the sky is clear." 86 THE LORE OF CATHAY A text book used in Chinese schools is called " Selec- tions from a Thousand Bards." The authors are of all ages, but it would not be difficult to make a catalogue of a thousand belonging to this dynasty. Of the present dynasty,* the most distinguished poet, if not the most gifted, is the Emperor Chien Lung, who closed his reign of a full cycle almost exactly a hundred years ago. * Pao and Tung, late Ministers of State, were poets of no mean order. Both presented me with their works, as did several bards of less note. Not to enumerate other gifts of the kind, of which I have been the recipient, two old men (one ninety years of age), eminent as scholars and wearing the buttons of official rank, called on me lately, as I was passing through Shanghai, each bend- ing under a load of original poems, which he desired to present. It was a great honor, but it was something of a burden also, for I had to buy another trunk to carry their books to Peking. Then, am I not expected to clothe them in English dress, and to make them known beyond the seas? a thing which space forbids, at present. THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA ASTRONOMERS tell us that, though Venus is so much nearer than Mars, it is impossible to obtain a clear view of her surface, on account of her dazzling brightness. Do we not experience a similar difficulty in contemplating the great luminaries of the human race ? In their case, an atmosphere of myth always gathers round the nucleus of history, concealing and distorting their features. This was the case with Him to whom the Western world owes its deliverance from the darkness of heathen- ism. Outside of the authentic records left us by the Four Evangelists, there was extant for a long time a floating mass of fable which it cost no little labor to expose and suppress. It was so with the wisest of the sages of Greece. How different the aspect which Socrates pre^ sents in the simple narrative of Xenophon from that which he is made to assume in the voluminous Dialogues of Plato! In the latter, we know that we are not reading history ; yet they do contain historic elements, Many of the doctrines and much of the manner of propounding them are derived from Socrates, even if the words in which they are clothed belong wholly to his eloquent disciple. Such, is the case of Confucius. So great was the ascendency to which he attained, within the five or six centuries succeeding his death, that it became the fashion to invoke his name for any document for which his fol- 87 88 THE LORE OF CATHAY lowers desired to conciliate popular favor. Especially was this the habit with that large class of writers, the Po Tze, whom we may describe as the Sophists of China. Take up a volume of Leitze or Chuangtze, and you meet with anecdotes, apologues, and discourses, put forth under the name of Confucius, all of which are so evi- dently fictitious as to suggest a query whether they were ever intended to be taken as historical. These writers deal in a similar way, and some of them to a much greater extent, with the name of Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor, a personage who belongs altogether to the realm of myth. The pains-taking and conscientious authors of the Lun Yti, the Confucian Memorabilia, have made the world familiar with the Sage, who always spoke with delibera- tion, and acted with dignity ; who had such a weakness for ginger that he was " never tired of eating it ; " and who was so scrupulous as to petty proprieties that he " never sat down if his mat was awry." T<5 these trifling details, they add that, at home, he wore a tunic with one sleeve shorter than the other, and slept in a night-gown fifty per cent longer than his body; that, on going to bed, he ceased to talk; and, not to cite other traits of aspect and carriage, the conviction is forced upon us that we have here glimpses of a real man. But turn to the outline of biography, familiar to every Chinese school-boy. Passing over the supernatural por- tents connected with his birth and death, we find the statement that Confucius was prime minister of Lu for three months ; that, within that time, he effected such a reformation that precious things might be dropped in the street without risk of misappropriation ; that shepherds refrained from watering their sheep before driving them to market, lest they should draw more than their proper SHRINE AND TEMPLE OF CONFUCIUS THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 89 weight ; that prisons were empty, and tribunals idle ; that men were honest, and women chaste; and that the little state began to acquire such a preponderance that its neighbors resorted to unworthy stratagems to under- mine the influence of the great reformer. These and other incidents, either wholly fictitious or greatly exag- gerated, are found in the sober pages of Sze Ma Ch'ien, the Herodotus of China. THE SAGE TAUGHT BY A CHILD. Many of these incidents have been taken up and further expanded by later writers. For instance, the historian records that " Confucius took lessons from Hsiang T'o." Now, Hsiang T'o was a precocious child of seven years ; and the record probably means nothing more than that the Sage condescended to take a hint from the lad, or to make use of him as an illustration in teaching, as a Greater Teacher did, when, his disciples contending for precedence, he set a little child before them as an object lesson in the graces of faith and humility. Here is a specimen of the stories that have grown out of this obscure incident: Confucius, it is said, seeing a little boy playing with tiles in the street, called to him to make way for his carriage. " Not so," said the boy ; " I am building a city. A city wall does not give way for a cart, but a cart goes round the wall." " You seem to be uncom- monly clever for your years," said Confucius, surprised at the self-possession of the lad. "How so?" said the lad ; " a hare at the age of three days can scamper over the fields, and should I not know a thing or two at the age of seven years? If you will tell me how many stars there are in heaven, I shall know more than I do now." " Why do you inquire about things so far away ? " said 90 THE LORE OF CATHAY the Sage ; " ask about something near at hand, and I will answer you." " Then," said the boy, " please tell me how many hairs you have in your eye-brows." The Sage was non-plussed ; and, giving the lad a kindly smile, he drove silently away. Another story, derived from the same source, is found in the works of Leitze. Confucius met with two boys, who were discussing the question whether the sun is more distant in the morning or at noon. " It appears larger in the morning," said one; "and the nearer an object is, the larger it appears." " But," replied the other, " is not the sun hotter at noon than in the morning? And does not a hot object give more heat when near, than when far away ? " Unable to agree, they referred the matter to the Sage; and he, with characteristic caution, left the question undecided ; or, as one version has it, he was unable to decide, and the boys formed a low opinion of his intelligence.* In treating of the apocryphal literature relating to Confucius, it is important to distinguish that which originated before the " burning of the books " from that which belongs to a later date. Works that preceded that catastrophe have, of course, the better chance of con- taining genuine traditions, especially if, as in the case * The German poet Claudius puts a similar dispute into the mouth of two rustics : Wie gross meinst du die Sonne sei? So gross vielleicht wie ein futter Heu etc., etc. How big, asked Hans, is the sun, do you say? As big, said Sep, as a load of hay. No ! no ! cried Hans, not half so big, About the size of an ostrich egg. THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 91 of Leitze and Chuangtze, they belong to the Taoist school, which was not proscribed, and therefore escaped the conflagration. In the writers last named, the reck- less use of imagination vitiates their authority. In Chuangtze, there are more than fifty references to Con- fucius and his disciples, not one of which possesses any historical value. In works of the later period, reminiscences of the Sage are far more multiplied; but their genuineness is not merely questionable on account of their remoteness from the times of their subject. Is it not obvious that an occurrence like the "fires of Ch'in," (240 B. c.) the avowed aim of which was to extirpate the teachings of Confucius, would open a wide field for the production of supposititious literature? So well, indeed, did the tyrant succeed in his purpose that only a few manuscripts escaped ; and they, by being hidden for generations in the walls of houses. A PREMIUM ON FORGERY. On the accession of the Han Dynasty, when the first attempt was made to wake the lost books from their ashes, the same edict, which caused old men to ransack their brain for pages committed to memory in boyhood, en- couraged others to exercise their inventive faculties to produce a plausible substitute. The rewards offered for discoveries of hidden Classics acted as a premium on forgery. All the circumstances of the time were adapted to favor imposture. Under a new dynasty, letters blos- somed afresh ; and the subject which appealed most powerfully to the inventive faculties of the learned was the huge void left by the missing books. Pecuniary re- wards, imperial favor, and popular esteem, all conspired 92 THE LORE OF CATHAY to incite them to effort ; and aut inveniam aut faciam be- came a motto with thousands of zealous scholars. Zeal for the Confucian school, which, for a time over- shadowed by Taoism, now began to recover its lost ground, supplied an additional motive; and scholars, who wished to give currency to their own ideas, did not scruple to publish them under the names of the apostles of Confucianism, or even under that of the great Master himself. The Arabs of Egypt are not mo.re expert in manu- facturing antique mummies than were the students of Han in the construction of ancient classics. Not to speak of spurious portions foisted into several of the canonical books, two at least of the works now reckoned among the Thirteen Classics are admitted to be of apocryphal origin. These are the Li Chi, or Book of Rites, and Hsiao Ching, or Manual of Filial Duty. THE BOOK OF RITES. This has had the good fortune to be included in the five Ching, for what reason it is difficult to divine, unless because it professes to record ritual observances which were in vogue in the period covered by the other four. It enjoys, therefore, a great authority from the eminence to which it has been raised. More than any other work, it has shaped the external form of Chinese civilization, preserving its essential unity under all vicissitudes, prescribing alike official forms and private manners. The rules of the Li Chi are not, indeed, held as obliga- tory, any more than are the rituals of the Old Testa- ment in the practice of Christendom; but, never having been formally abrogated, a larger proportion of them has entered into the life of the modern Chinese. THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 93 The compilers of this work no doubt found much genu- ine material drifting in a state of wreckage down the stream of time, and they had no hesitation in supplying from their own resources whatever might be required for its reconstruction. Nor did they, in any case, take pains to point out the boundary between the old and the hew. What they discovered was at best a torso, and their ambition was to present it as a complete statue. On reading it one is struck by a great inequality of style; parts are crabbed and obscure, while other parts flow in a pellucid stream, characteristic ot an advanced stage of literary art. Take, for example, the chapter en- titled Ju Hsing, the " Character of a Scholar," and you have an eloquent exposition of the conduct becoming a man of letters. Again, in the Yileh Chi, you have a rhap- sody on music, without a single indication which might enable a student to reproduce the music of the ancients. Both discourses are credited to Confucius, but the style is too modern by at least four centuries. In some parts of the collection, the Sage is made to appear as interlocutor in a dialogue ; and occasionally an incident is related as a basis for moral reflections. Such an incident is that of a family who exposed themselves to be devoured by wild beasts rather than submit to the exactions of mandarins. " Mark that, my children," said Confucius, turning to his disciples ; " oppressive officers are dreaded more than tigers." The incident is sufficiently striking, and its moral is worthy of a Sage. The story of the serpent-catcher, by Liu Tsung Yuan, is based on it, and enforces the same moral in the elegant diction of a later age, exerting a restraining influence on the rapacity of officials, and pro- moting a spirit of independence among the people. 94 THE LORE OF CATHAY In itself, the tiger story is not incredible. In Oregon, I was told of a woman who had lost three husbands by grizzly bears. Perhaps one attraction to the soil of the new territory was just this facility of divorce? THE BOOK OF FILIAL DUTY. Like the Li Chi, the Manual of Filial Duty dates from the first century B. c. ; and, like that work, it is reputed to have been discovered in the wall of a house belonging to a descendant of Confucius. In form, it consists of a series of discourses, addressed by the Sage to his disciple Tsengtze, who served him as amanuensis, and who now wears the proud title of Ch'uan Sheng, " Transmitter of the Sage." In style, the book bears the impress of the age of its alleged discovery, being more modern by several cen- turies than that of its reputed author. It is remarkable for the fullness with which it expounds the working of filial piety as a social regulator in all the relations of life. Though the Christian finds in it no sufficient substitute for the prompting and restraining influence of faith in an omnipresent God, he must acknowledge that in China filial piety might be made a useful auxiliary to the higher sentiment. The decay of that higher sentiment (if it ever existed in China) was no doubt owing to the rise of polytheism ; and philosophers were fain to seek in filial piety a force which should serve as the prop of morality. The state makes it the basis of its legislation ; and this book, whose canonicity the state has good reasons for upholding, is therefore a corner-stone in the social fabric. The very phrase " to rule the empire by filial piety," so often seen in official documents is found in the eighth Chapter; and so beautifully is the idea developed THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 95 in the proem that I cannot forbear citing a few lines : " One day, when the Master was at leisure and Tseng- tze in attendance, he said, ' The ancient Sages possessed a perfect method for governing the empire, by which the people were made to live in harmony without dis- cord between high and low ; do you understand it ? ' Tsengtze rose and replied : ' I am dull of apprehen- sion ; how should I understand it ? ' ' Sit down then,' said the Master, ' and I will teach you. Filial piety is the root of virtue, and the fountain of moral teaching. It begins with due care for the body because received from your parents ; it culminates in conduct which will make your name immortal, and reflect glory on your father and mother. Its beginning is the service of your parents ; its middle, the service of the sovereign ; and its end, the for- mation of character.' " The eighteen short chapters which follow do nothing more than amplify this text. They are so brief and pithy that school children commit them to memory, and accept them as rules of conduct for their subsequent life. The effect of the doctrines, thus set forth, can hardly be over- estimated; and, in general, they are consonant with the teachings of the Sage as given in records of unquestioned authenticity. The Hsiao' Ching, therefore, though apocry- phal, does him no injustice, unless it be in one point, viz., in making conformity to the ordinances and even the costume of the ancient Kings an obligation of filial piety. It is known that Confucius was somewhat conservative; but it may be affirmed that he never enjoined such unrea- soning submission to antiquity. Does he not teach, in the first section of the Ta Hsiieh, the Great Study, that the chief duty of a Prince is to effect the renovation of his people? How I have longed to see the rulers of China 96 THE LORE OF CATHAY wake up to the fact that their Great Teacher never in- tended them to be fast bound to the wheels of the ancient kings. THE FAMILY TRADITIONS. The last of these apocryphal writings which we shall notice at present is in some respects the most important of all. It is the Chia Yu, or Family Traditions. It ap- peared between two and three centuries later than the Li Chi and Hsiao Ching; i. e., in the period of the Three Kingdoms. Its fortune, though less brilliant than that of those two most lucky forgeries, has been such as to sur- pass the ambition of its so-called editor. For though not, like them, set in the constellation of sacred classics, it is held to be " deutero-canonical ; " and, as such, it stands in the Imperial catalogues at the head of Ju Chia, or or- thodox writers of the Confucian School. The editor, Wang Su, frankly states the object he has in view in giving these Traditions to the world. " Errors are ram- pant," he says in his preface, " and the Confucian high- way is overgrown with brambles. Why should not I make an effort to clear it of obstructions. If no one, then, chooses to follow it, it will not be my fault." The zeal expressed in these words is not fitted to in- spire confidence; and, when he informs us that he has opportunely obtained these Traditions in manuscript from a descendant of the Sage in the twenty-second generation, are we not disposed to regard the discovery as rather too opportune? Why should a member of the family of K'ung, after the lapse of seven centuries, be more likely to possess genuine traditions than any other of the " hun- dred names?" That the work as a whole is spurious, is admitted by native critics. That which secures for it unrivalled popularity is: THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 97 I. Its worthy aim; 2. Its pleasing style; 3. Some- thing like an element of real tradition, derived from vari- ous sources ; 4. Adroit insertion and skilful amplification of authentic records. Notwithstanding its multifarious contents, it is easy to separate the few grains of golden sand carried down by the stream of time from the bright clay in which the author has wrapped them up, with a view to increasing their bulk and weight. A STRANGE MONITOR. As a good example of his method, I may mention the manner in which he deals with a brief notice which he finds in Hsiintze, who lived three centuries before. Confucius had seen a water-vessel, which, when empty, hung obliquely; when half-full, hung vertically; but, on being filled, turned over and spilled its contents. It was said to have been placed on the right of the Prince's throne as a warning against pride, or fullness, which " precedes a fall." Taking this for a text, Wang Su expands it into a discourse of considerable length, a copy of which I ob- tained in Japan, where it had evidently been used as an inscription in a princely or imperial palace. It is, however, in paraphrases on the Lun Yii that he most frequently displays his peculiar skill. A few illustra- tions may not be out of place. THREE WISHES. Borrowing a hint from a passage in which Confucius calls on his disciples to describe the employ which each would find to his taste, our author shows us the Master with three of his disciples on a hill top. Enjoying the 98 THE LORE OF CATHAY boundless prospect, he says to them : " Here our thoughts fly unfettered in all directions. Here you may give wing to fancy, and clothe your wildest dreams in words. Now, let each of you name the situation, or achievement, which would most completely fill the meas- ure of his ambition." Tze Lu declares for feats of prowess, choosing above all things to be able with a small force to humble a proud foe ; and with his own hand to capture the leader of the opposing camp. Tze Kung, the finest talker of the School, bent on proving the tongue mightier than the sword, enlarging on his friend's picture of opposing armies ready to join in bloody conflict, adds that it would be his ambition to come between the hostile camps, to disarm them both by mere force of argument, showing each his true interest, and by skilful diplomacy to bring about an adjustment of their differences. " I should wish," he says, " no higher glory than that of such a peaceful victory." Confucius commends his eloquence, and then calls on Yen Hui, his favorite disciple, the St. John of his School. With unassuming modesty, Yen declines to engage in competition with his arrogant companions ; but, when urged by the Master, he says : " My desire would be to find a good Prince, who would accept me for his Vizier. I would teach his people justice, propriety, and benevo- lence; and lead them no longer to build walls, or dig moats, but to turn their weapons of war into instruments of husbandry." " Admirable," exclaimed Confucius ; " such is the power of virtue." In the Memorabilia, or Lun Yii, the Sage gives his suffrage to a disciple, who draws a charming picture of the pleasures of idleness. Wang Su has re-cast the en- THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 99 tire scene, in order to give it a conclusion more worthy of the nation's teacher, emphasizing the sentiment ex- pressed by Longfellow: Were half the force that keeps the world in terror, Were half the wealth that's spent on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals and forts. TO BE OR NOT TO BE. The famous saying of the great Agnostic " We know not life, how can we know death ? " supplies an equally fine text for artful amplification. It is accordingly ex- panded into the following dialogue : " Do the dead retain a conscious existence ? " inquired Tze Kung. " If," replied Confucius, " I should say they do, I fear the pious and filial would neglect their living parents through devotion to the dead. If, on the other hand, I should say they do not, I fear that the unfilial might so far disregard their duties to the dead as to leave their parents unburied." With this ambiguous answer, he closed his lips, and left his disciples on the horns of a torturing dilemma. THE LESSON OF RUNNING WATER. In the Lun Yii, we are told that the Sage, looking on a running stream, exclaimed : " Behold an emblem of time; it ceases not, day or night." In the Traditions, Confucius was gazing intently on the eastward flowing current of the Yellow River. A disciple, inquiring why a superior man always loves to look on the surface of a great stream, he replies : " Be- cause its flow never ceases ; it nourishes all living things, and yet without labor. Its water is like virtue; it seeks ioo THE LORE OF CATHAY a low place; yet cities and palaces follow its course. It is like goodness, vast and inexhaustible; it is like truth, gtoing straight forward without fear, even though a plunge of a hundred fathoms may be before it. This is why the superior man loves to look on the face of the flowing waters." FOOLISH QUESTIONS AND WISE ANSWERS. In the Lun Yti, Ai Kung, Duke of Lu, asks one or two questions. In the Traditions, he is made to ask a score or more. Here are two, both frivolous; but they elicit wise answers : " Will you tell me," said the Duke, " what kind of crown was worn by the Emperor Shun ? " After a pro- longed silence, Confucius replied, but not until he was urged to speak : " I was silent, because I do not know what kind of garments Shun wore; but I do know the principles on which he ruled his people. Why should not Your Highness inquire about them?" On another oc- casion, the Duke said to Confucius : " I have heard of a man, who, on removing to a new house, forgot to take , his wife. Was there ever a case of greater forgetful- ness ? " " Yes," replied Confucius ; " it is that of the man who forgets himself." TWO VIEWS OF LIFE. A fine story, which Wang Su borrows from Leitze, is that of an old man of ninety, who, being asked why, under the burdens of age, poverty, and toil, he was still able to sing so merrily, replied : " I have many reasons for feeling happy, but the principal are these, viz : That I have come into life as a man; that I have reached a good old age ; and that I am now soon to be released by the hand of death." THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 101 After relating this without acknowledgment, our au- thor invents one in a similar style : Passing near a river, Confucius heard the voice of weeping. Overtaking an old man, from whom the voice proceeded, he inquired the cause of his distress. " They are three," replied the man ; " I have failed in three things, which it is now too late to mend, and nothing remains but unavailing remorse. When young, I went wandering over the world in quest of knowledge; and, when I returned home, my parents were dead. In mature years, I served the Prince of Ch'i; but the Prince ruined himself by pride and debauchery, and I was unable to check his downward course. In my life-time, I have had many friends, but I failed to attach them to me by a sincere and lasting affection ; and now, in my old age, they have all forsaken me. Of these three errors, the greatest was the neglect of my parents." Yielding to a fresh transport of grief, the old man threw himself into the water and perished. " Mark this," said Confucius, turning to his disciples; and that very day thirteen of them went home to serve their parents. In general, stories and discourses which re-appear in the Traditions, display a marked improvement on their originals; at least, in literary finish, though in some instances " expanded gold exchanges solid strength for feeble splendor." Thus far, we have looked on the finer side of the tapestry. Let us now turn to its seamy side, as it is necessary to do in order to complete the evidence of patch-work. 102 THE LORE OF CATHAY AN IMAGINARY NIAGARA. On the road from Wei to Lu, Confucius comes to a cataract, thirty fathoms in height, which creates a whirl- pool ninety li (30 miles) in circumference, and so furious is the current that neither fish nor tortoise can live in it ; yet an intrepid swimmer, more lucky than Captain Webb at Niagara, succeeds in crossing. This passage suggests the wild fancy of Chuangtze ; and, on turning to the older writer, we find it there, but less extravagant in its terms. Wang Su uses it to point a vapid moral ; but he has blundered in admitting it among authentic tra- ditions. WISE QUESTIONS AND FOOLISH ANSWERS. In the Lun Yii, it is said there were four things of which Confucius never spoke, viz. : Fairy tales, feats of strength, outrageous crimes, and the gods (or the super- natural). A book exists, which takes these for its sub- ject, and bears the title, Things of which Confucius did not Speak. There are not a few pages in these alleged Traditions that might be grouped under such a rubric. One of the Princes asking him a question, Confucius launches into a dissertation on giants and dwarfs, in which he says the latter grow to three feet and the former to thirty. Prince Chao, of Ch'u, in crossing a river, picks up a floating fruit resembling a cocoa-nut, and sends a messenger to learn its nature from Confucius. Without the least hesitation, the omniscient Sage gives the name of the fruit, and adds that the Prince may eat it, as it is a fruit of good omen, which only falls into the hands of one destined to be a leader of the nations. When a disciple asks him how he happens to know these facts THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 103 so exactly, he replies that he once heard a nursery rhyme to that effect: it was prophetic, and this he knew to be its fulfilment. In another passage, he explains the appearance of a strange bird in the same way. It was called Shang Yang, had only one leg, and, as he learned from a childish ditty, its arrival portended a deluge of rain. These instances, with many others of the same kind, may be taken as completing the evidence that the so- called Traditions are a transparent fiction. If I have dwelt too long on this particular work, it is on account of the influence it exerts in fixing the popular ideal of the Sage, from the credit it enjoys of heading, as it does in official catalogues, the entire body of philosophers. There are other works which contain similar fictions; but time fails to enumerate, not to say, examine them. Taken as a whole, the volume of these apocryphal writings far exceeds that of the authentic records; the gaseous envelope surrounding the luminary is greater than its solid nucleus. But it may be doubted whether these fabrications, however well meant, have not de- tracted from the essential greatness of China's model wise man. CONFUCIUS NO MYTH. Let us conclude by briefly indicating a few points in which the apocryphal Confucius differs from the real founder of Chinese civilization; for, at this stage of our discussion, I need hardly say that Confucius was no myth. He is so far historical that he, and not Sze Ma, is the Father of Chinese History. His words and acts were minutely noted by contemporary pens, hundreds of his pupils contributing to transmit his teachings and per- petuate his memory. The attempt to make him a mythical 104 THE LORE OF CATHAY personage, like Pan Ku or Nu Kua, may afford an agree- able exercise for the leisure hours of an ingenious stu- dent ; but it can no more unsettle the received convic- tion than Archbishop Whately's Historic Doubts con- cerning Napoleon could relegate the Corsican Conqueror to the companionship of Hercules and Bacchus. But, in the double personality that goes under that venerated name, it is time to point out the features in which the mythical Confucius differs from the historical. I limit myself to five: THE REAL AND THE MYTHICAL COMPARED. I. The real Sage was noted for modesty; the fictitious is a prig, who assumes to know everything. The myth- makers, who have attempted to display the universality of his knowledge, have succeeded in exposing their own ignorance. 2. The real Confucius was a man of few words ; his style, laconic and grave. The mythical is loquacious, and often occupied with trifles. 3. The real Sage was reverential towards the Supreme Power of the Universe, but agnostic in spirit and prac- tice. The Confucius of these Apocryphal books is ex- cessively superstitious, drawing omens of the future from birds, beasts, and the nonsensical ditties of children. 4. The real Sage, when asked if it is right to repay injury by injury, forbids revenge. The Apocryphal is made to teach the vendetta in its most truculent form, prescribing its measure for each degree of relationship, the slayer of a father to be slain at sight, even in the halls of an imperial palace. 5. The real Sage was humane, making humanity, or love, the first of the cardinal virtues in his moral system. The Apocryphal personage is cruel and unjust, putting THE CONFUCIAN APOCRYPHA 105 Shao Cheng Mao to death for five reasons, not one of which would justify anything more severe than dismissal from office; and cutting off the hands and feet of a mountebank, who sought to amuse two princes on the occasion of a public meeting. These Apocryphal writings contain, as I have said, much that is good. They must be studied to get at the sources of the later literature. But would it not be a worthy undertaking for some enlightened scholar, native or foreign, to sift these heterogeneous materials, and clear the name of the Great Master from all connection with the absurd, vain, and wicked things with which his memory has been loaded ? VI CONFUCIUS AND PLATO A COINCIDENCE THE coincidence relates to a moot point of filial duty. In China, filial piety is recognized as the basis of social order. By the orthodox, it is even held to supply the place of religion; so that " he who serves his parents at home has no need to go far away to burn incense to the gods." In the Hsiao Ching, a well-known manual for the in- struction of youth, it is represented as affording an incen- tive to the discharge of duty in all situations, giving force and vitality to consciences which might otherwise remain dormant. Thus, a soldier who runs away is unfilial ; an officer who is unfaithful to his prince is unfilial; and, in general, any conduct that entails disgrace is unfilial, be- cause it must of necessity reflect discredit on the parents of the offender. A whole system of morals is deduced from this root; and casuistry finds scope in inventing difficult situations and in reconciling conflicting obliga- tions. Truth is a virtue not much insisted on in Chinese books; and its comparative rarity brings into relief a class of people who vaunt their frankness, and scorn to palliate or extenuate in the interest of their dearest friends. They are called chih jen, " straight men." A disciple of Confucius, speaking of one of these, says to the Master : " In my country, there was a man re- nowned for truthfulness. When his father had stolen a sheep, he went to the magistrate and informed against him. Is his conduct to be commended ? " 1 06 CONFUCIUS AND PLATO 107 " In my country," the Sage replies, " the duty of truth- fulness is understood differently, A son is required in all cases to conceal the faults of his father, and a father to conceal those of his son. The obligations of truth are not violated by this practice." A hundred years later, the question was not yet re- garded as settled ; or, to speak more properly, as with all moral questions, the old battles had to be fought over again. Mencius was the oracle of the age, and one of his dis- ciples brought up the subject by stating a hypothetical case. " Suppose," he said, " the father of the Emperor, being a private man, should commit murder. Is it the duty of the Criminal Judge to seize and condemn him ? " " Without doubt," replied Mencius. " But then, how could the Emperor endure to see his father treated in that way ? When the wise Shun was on the throne, if his villainous old father, Ku Sou, had com- mitted murder, and was in danger of being condemned by Kao Yao, what would Shun have done ? " " Shun," replied the teacher, " would have taken his father on his back and fled to the borders of the sea. Dwelling there in obscurity, and rejoicing that he had saved the life of his parent, he would have forgotten that he ever filled a throne." Mencius, who formulated the doctrines of his school, goes in this passage a step beyond the teachings of his Master. The latter confined the duty of a child toward a parent, guilty of a crime, to the passive part of con- cealment. The former gives it an active form, requir- ing a son, on behalf of a parent, to do all in his power to defeat the ends of justice. But when, in this dilemma, he sets himself in opposition to the law, he is no longer fit to be a prince ; he should abdicate the throne, to win io8 THE LORE OF CATHAY the crown of filial piety; for, according to Mencius, filial duty primes all others. A case, analogous to the first of these, forms the sub- ject of Euthyphron, one of the Dialogues of Plato. Soc- rates, going to the court of King's Bench, meets Eu- thyphron, and learns with horror that he has come for the express purpose of denouncing his own father as guilty of a capital crime. A hired laborer, having killed another in a drunken brawl, the father of the accuser had him bound hand- and-foot and thrown into a pit, where the next morning he was found dead. Euthyphron saw in the hapless vic- tim, not a chattel or a broken tool, but a fellow-man un- justly slain ; while, in the murderer, he recognized, not a parent, but a criminal. There is something chivalrous and noble in his taking up the cause of humanity, in opposition to the narrower claims of family. But it detracts from his merit that he is fully conscious of the beau role which he has assumed. Socrates, who as usual expresses the sentiments of the author, is not dazzled by this splendid instance of public virtue triumphing over private feeling. After passing the ideas and motives of the hero through the sieve of his dialectic, he shows him that those instincts which he despises are the voice of nature ; and that, in spite of his assumption of superior knowledge, he neither knows what he is to believe concerning the gods, nor what duty the gods require of him. " The victim," said Socrates, " must have been one of your near relatives ; otherwise, you would not have been able to overcome your natural repugnance to denouncing your father." " Nothing is more ridiculous," Euthyphron replied, " than to suppose that it makes any difference whether CONFUCIUS AND PLATO 109 the victim is a relative or a stranger. The whole question is, whether the homicide was justifiable or not. If it was not, then it was my duty to denounce the perpetrator, no matter how closely connected with me ; for it would be contamination to associate with such a person, instead of clearing myself by denouncing him." " My relations," he adds, " view this proceeding as impious and unholy ; not knowing the nature of the gods, nor the real distinc- tion between things holy and unholy." " But," asked Socrates, " are you sure that you under- stand the nature of the gods, and the distinction of holy and unholy? Tell me what you call holy and unholy." " I," replied Euthyphron, " call that holy which I am now doing: namely, the denouncing of a wrong-doer who commits sacrilege, murder, or other grave offense, no matter whether the offender be father, mother, or other relative. It would be unholy to refrain from doing so." In support of this position, he appeals to the example of Zeus, the " best and most just of the gods," who chained and mutilated his father, as a punishment for his monstrous cruelties. Socrates repeats his demand for a definition ; and Eu- thyphron answers that the holy is that which pleases the gods, the unholy that which displeases them. Soc. " But what rule shall poor mortals have to go by when the gods are divided on these questions ? " Euth. " They are never so much divided as not to be unanimous in support of the principle that he who com- mits an unjustifiable homicide ought to be punished." Soc. " But what is to be done when they are not agreed as to the quality of a crime, whether it was justifiable or not ? " As this is a frequent occurrence in human tribunals, no THE LORE OF CATHAY Euthyphron is forced to admit that it might also occur in the councils of the gods; and he modifies his defini- tion by inserting the word " all," so as to make an act holy or unholy according as it is loved or hated by all the gods. Here Socrates pushes him into deeper water by asking whether such act is holy because it is loved by the gods, or loved because it is holy ? To this Euthyphron is unable to make any satisfac- tory answer; and, after a brief skirmish on other points, he drops the discussion. Through all its mazes, Socrates had pursued him as the Furies pursued Orestes, showing him that the dic- tates of nature are the basis of our notions of right and wrong; and that, to outrage our best instincts as he is doing, is to fight against the gods. Like the Chinese philosophers, he teaches that a son is not at liberty to assume the attitude of public prosecutor as against a parent. The prolixity of the Socratic dialogue, of which I have given only a brief outline, is in strong contrast with the sententiousness of the Confucian school. But, not only is the subject of discussion identical ; the name Eu- thyphron " straight thinker," is singularly similar to the chih jen, or " straight man," of the Chinese. VII CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION A PROFESSOR of Chinese in America is reported to have said that " in the Chinese language there is no such thing as a florid style or a beautiful style. Style is not taken into consideration. It is in writing the language that skill is displayed; and the man that executes the characters with dexterity and in- genuity is the one that understands the language." Though somewhat unexpected as coming from the chair of a professor, this opinion is not novel. It ex- presses but too truly the estimate in which the literature of China has been generally held by the learned world. The value of Chinese records is fully conceded. The great antiquity of the people ; their accurate system of chronology; their habit of appealing to history as a tri- bunal before which they can arraign their sovereigns; and especially their practice of noting as a prodigy every strange phenomenon that occurs in any department of nature all conspire to render their annals an inexhausti- ble mine of curious and useful information. It is in these that our savants may find, extending back in unbroken series for thousands of years, notices of eclipses, comets, star-showers, aerolites, droughts, floods, earthquakes, etc., as well as a comparatively faithful ac- count of the rise and fortunes of the most numerous branch of the human family. But, while admitting that it is worth while to encounter all the toil of a difficult language in order to gain access in H2 THE LORE OF CATHAY to such a field of research, who ever dreams that the Chinese language contains anything else to repay the labor of acquisition ? Who ever imagines that in pursuing his favorite game, instead of traversing deserts and jungles, he will find himself walking among forests filled with the songs of strange birds and perfumed with the fragrance of unknown flowers, while ever and anon he is ravished by the view of some landscape of surpassing beauty ? As soon would the student of literary art expect to find the graces of diction among the hieratic inscrip- tions of Egypt, or the arrow-headed records of Assyria, as to meet them on pages that bristle with the ideographic symbols of China. It is with a view to correcting such prevalent impressions that this paper is written. In at- tempting this, however, I do not propose a disquisition on the value of Chinese literature in general, nor commit myself to the task of elucidating the principles of its rhetoric and grammar; but limit myself rather to the single topic of style, and more particularly the style of its prose composition. This is a subject, which, I am aware, it will not be easy to discuss in such a manner as to render it intelligible or interesting to those who are unacquainted with the Chinese language. Style is a volatile quality, which escapes in the process of transfusion ; and illustrations of style, however carefully rendered, are at best but as dried plants and stuffed animals compared with living nature. Chinese, moreover, being from our idiom the most re- mote of all languages, suffers most in the process of ren- dering. I fear, therefore, that the best versions I may be able to offer will only have the effect of confirming the impressions which it is my object to combat. That such impressions are erroneous ought to be apparent from the mere consideration of the antiquity and extent CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION 113 of the Chinese literature. For, to suppose that a great people have been engaged from a time anterior to the rise of any other living language in building up a litera- ture, unequalled in extent, which contains nothing to gratify the taste or feed the imagination, is it not to sup- pose its authors destitute of the attributes of our common humanity? Are we to believe that the bees of China are so different from those of other countries that they con- struct their curious cells from a mere love of labor, with- out ever depositing there the sweets on which they are wont to feed? It is not always true that external decoration implies internal finish or furniture; still, we may assert that it would be impossible that the taste which the Chinese dis- play in the embellishment of their handwriting and letter- press should not find its counterpart in the refinements of style. They literally worship their letters. When letters were invented, they say, heaven rejoiced and hell trembled. Not for any consideration will they tread on a piece of lettered paper; and to foster this reverence, literary as- sociations employ agents to go about the streets, collect waste paper, and burn it on a kind of altar with the solemnity of a sacrifice. They execute their characters with the painter's brush, and rank writing as the very highest of the fine arts. They decorate their dwellings and the temples of their gods with ornamental inscrip- tions ; and exercise their ingenuity in varying both chir- ography and orthography in a hundred fantastic ways. We may well excuse them for this almost idolatrous ad- miration for the greatest gift of their ancestors, for there is no other language on earth whose written characters approach the Chinese in their adaptation to pictorial effect. Yet all this exaggerated attention to the mechanical art H4 THE LORE OF CATHAY of writing is but an index of the ardor with which Chinese scholars devote themselves to the graces of com- position. Their style is as varied as their chirography, and as much more elaborate than that of other nations. If they spend years in learning to write, where others give a few weeks or months to the acquisition of that accomplish- ment, it is equally true that, while in other countries the student acquires a style of composition almost by acci- dent, those of China make it the earnest study of half a lifetime. While, in the lower examinations, elegance of mechani- cal execution, joined to a fair proportion of other merits, is sure to achieve success, in competition for the higher degrees the essays are copied by official clerks before they meet the eye of the examiner; style is everything, and handwriting nothing. Even the matter of the essay is of little consequence in comparison with the form in which it is presented. This is perceived and lamented by the more intelligent among the Chinese themselves. They often contrast the hollow glitter of the style of the present day with the solid simplicity of the ancients ; and de- nounce the art of producing the standard u'en chang, or polished essay, as no less mechanical than that of orna- mental penmanship. The writer has heard an eminent mandarin who himself wielded an elegant pen, speak of the stress which the literary tribunals lay on the super- ficial amenities of style as a " clever contrivance adopted by a former dynasty to prevent the literati from thinking too much." * Still, however sensible to its defects, Chinese scholars, without exception, glory in the extent and high refine- * The use of -wen chang as an official test is ascribed to Wang An Shih of the Sung dynasty, about 1050. CHINliSE PROSE COMPOSITION 115 mcnt of their national literature. " We yield to you the palm of science," one of them once said to me, after a discussion on their notions of nature and its forces ; but he added, " You, of course, will not deny to us the meed of letters." The Chinese language is not so ill adapted to purposes of rhetorical embellishment as might be inferred from its primitive structure. Totally destitute of inflection its substantives without declension, its adjectives without comparison, and its verbs without conjugation it seems at first view " sans everything " that ought to belong to a cultivated tongue. Bound, moreover, to a strict order of collocation, which its other deficiencies make a neces- sity, it would seem to be a clumsy instrument for thought and expression. Nor do I deny that it is so in com- parison with the leading languages of the West; but it is a marvel how fine a polish Chinese scholars have made it receive, and what dexterity they acquire in the use of it. It possesses, too, some compensating qualities. Its monosyllabic form gives it the advantage of concentrated energy; and if the value of its words must be fixed by their position, like numerals in a column of figures, or mandarins on an occasion of state ceremony, it makes amends for this inconvenience by admitting each char- acter to do duty in all the principal parts of speech. In English, we find it to be an element of strength to be able to convert many of our nouns into verbs. In Chinese, the interchange is all but universal. It is easy to perceive how much this circumstance must contribute to variety and vigor of expression, as well as to economy of re- sources. The truculent advice which Han Yu gives as to the treatment of the Buddhist priesthood is jen ch'i jen, lu ch'i chu, huo ch'i shu; literally, man their men, house their n6 THE LORE OF CATHAY temples, fire their books an expression of which all but the last clause is as unintelligible as the original Chinese. To the Chinese reader it means " make laity of their priests, make dwelling houses of their sacred places, and burn their books." In its native form it is as elegant as it is terse and forcible. Before all things, a Chinese loves conciseness. This taste he has inherited from his forefathers of forty cen- turies ago, who, having but a scanty stock of rude em- blems, were compelled to practise economy. The com- plexity of the characters and the labor of writing con- firmed the taste; so that though the pressure of poverty is now removed, the scholar of the present day, in re- gard to the expenditure of ink, continues to be as parsimo- nious as his ancestors. While we construct our sentences so as to guard against the possibility of mistake, he is satisfied with giving the reader a clue to his meaning. Our style is a ferry-boat that carries the reader over without danger or effort on his part ; the Chinese is a succession of stepping-stones which test the agility of the passenger in leaping from one to another. The Chinese writer is not ignorant of the Horatian canon, that in " striving after brevity he becomes ob- scure ; " but with him obscurity is a less fault than re- dundancy. Accordingly, in Chinese, those latent ideas, to which a French writer has lately drawn attention, play an important part.* In return for a few hints, the reader * To say that latent ideas form an essential, often a principal, part of human speech is as much a paradox, and yet as true, as to affirm that in reading we depend on the absence of light, and that the printed letters do not impress the eye. In case of an in- scription lit up by an electric current, the metallic letters, though necessary to convey the fluid, remain invisible, and we see only the illuminated intervals. The greater the interstices consistent with the passage of the spark, the more brilliant the effects. CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION 117 himself supplies all the links that are necessary for the continuity of thought. This intense brevity is better adapted to a language which is addressed to the eye than it. would be to one which is expected to be equally in- telligible to the ear. Light is quicker than sound. Segnius irritant animos demissa per aitrem. Next to conciseness, or perhaps in preference to it, the Chinese writer is bound to keep in view the law of symmetry. He loves a kind of parallelism ; but it is not that of the Hebrew poets, whose tautology he abhors. It may consist of a simile; but more frequently it merely amounts to the expression of correlated ideas in nicely corresponding phrases. Every sentence is balanced with the utmost precision ; every word has its proper counter- poise, and the whole composition moves on with the measured tread of a troop of soldiers. Dr. Johnson's famous parallel between Pope and Dry- den, and the studied antitheses of Lord Macaulay, are quite in accordance with the taste of the Chinese. When they meet with such a passage in a foreign book, they usually exclaim, " This writer knows something of the art of composition." And where, in addition to a super- fluity of words, they find, as they often do, a neglect of this cardinal principle, they do not fail to express their disgust. A difficulty in rendering the Christian Scriptures is that the translator is not at liberty to measure off his periods according to the canons of Chinese taste ; and he not un frequently gives unnecessary offence by retaining all the circumstances of gender, number, and tense where the sense does not require them, and where the genius of the Chinese language and the rules of Chinese rhetoric alike reject them. In this respect, the earlier transla- tions were particularly faulty. Of the more recent ver- n8 THE LORE OF CATHAY sions, one at least (that of the Delegates) is distinguished for classical taste. In such a task, the distinction between the Dolmetscher and the Uebersetzer which Schleiermacher has so clearly drawn should always be kept in view. For, difficult as is the task of translating out of a foreign language, that of translation into it is still more so ; and still more essen- tial is it that the translator be thoroughly imbued with its spirit. He must himself be in a manner naturalized, in order that his literary offspring may enjoy the privileges of citizenship. The bane of Chinese style is a servile imitation of an- tiquity. This not only confines the writer within a nar- row circle of threadbare thoughts ; it has the effect of disfiguring modern literature by spurious ornaments bor- rowed from the ancients. The authors of the Thirteen Classics are canonized. Infallible in letters as in doctrine, every expression which they have employed becomes a model, or rather, I should say, a portion of the current vocabulary. But, like the waters of the Ching and Wei, the diverse elements refuse to mingle, giving to the most admired composition a heterogeneous aspect which mars its beauty in our eyes as much as it enhances it in those of the Chinese. A premium is thus placed on pedantry, and fetters are imposed on the feet of genius. The pecu- liar dialect which we sometimes hear from the pulpit, made up of fragments of the sacred text skilfully incor- porated with the language of every-day life, may serve as an illustration of this singular compound. In spite of this imitation of antiquity, they are, age after age, insensibly drifting away from their standard. A law of movement seems to be impressed on all things, which even the Chinese are unable to resist. By conse- quence, each century in their long history, or, more CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION 119 properly, each dynasty, has formed a style of its own. The authors of the Chou, Han, T'ang, and Sung periods are broadly discriminated. China abounds in literary adventurers of the stamp of Constantine Simonides, and the prevalent antiquity-wor- ship affords them encouragement ; but happily she has her critics too, as acute as Aristarchus of old. The great schools of religious philosophy are also strongly differentiated in their style of expression. The Confucian, dealing with the things of common life, aims at perspicuity. The Taoist, occupied with magic and mystery, veils his thoughts in symbols and far-fetched metaphors. The Buddhist, to the obscurity inseparable from the imported metaphysics of India, adds an opaque medium by the constant use of Sanscrit phrases which are ill understood. Subdivisions of these great schools have likewise their peculiarities of style. Of these, how- ever, I shall not speak, but hasten to indicate certain species of composition, each of which is characterized by a style of its own. In no country are private correspondence, official des- patches, and didactic and narrative writings distinguished by more marked peculiarities. The style of epistolary intercourse, instead of approach- ing, as with us, to that of familiar conversation, is singu- larly stiff and affected. Whatever the subject, it is ushered in by a formal parade of set phrases, and finished off by a conclusion equally stereotyped and unmeaning. Form dominates everything in China. It is seldom that a letter flows freely from the heart and pen even of an able writer; and as for the less educated, though quite capable of expressing their own thoughts in their own way, they never think of such a thing as throwing off the constraint of prescribed forms. It is amusing to see iio THE LORE OF CATHAY how carefully one who hears of the death of a relative culls from a letter-book a form exactly suited to the de- gree of his affliction. If the Chinese wrote love-letters (which they never do), they would all employ the same honeyed phrases; or, like Falstaff in the Merry Wives, address the same epistle to all the different objects of their admiration. By way of sample, here is a " note of congratulation on the birthday of a friend." " The Book of History lauds the five kinds of happi- ness, and the Book of Odes makes use of the nine similes. Both extol the honors of old age. Rejoicing at the anni- versary of your advent, I utter the prayer of Hua Feng; and, by way of recording my tally in the seaside cot- tage, I lay my tribute (the customary gift) at your feet, by retaining the whole of which you will shed lustre on him who offers it." In this short note we have four classic allusions, two of which require a word of explanation. The prayer of Hua Feng was for the Emperor Yao, that he might be blessed with a happy old age and numerous posterity. The " tally in the seaside cottage " refers to a legend in which one of the immortals says that he does not reckon time by years, but whenever sea and land change places, he deposits a tally. Those tallies now fill ten cham- bers. The reply to the foregoing ran as follows : " My trifling life has passed away in vanity, unmarked by a single trait of excellence. On my birthday especially this fills me with shame. How dare I, then, accept your congratulatory offerings? I beg to decline them, and, prostrate, pray for indulgence." The official correspondence and state-papers of the Chinese are, for the most part, dignified, clear, and free CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION 121 from those pedantic allusions with which they love to adorn their other writings. Whoever has read, even in the form of a translation, the memorials on the opium trade laid before the Emperor Tao Kuang, or the papers of Commissioner Lin on the same subject, cannot have failed to be struck with their manifest ability. Some of them are eloquent in style and masterly in argument. Imperial edicts are generally well written ; but those of the Emperor Yung Ching are of such conspicuous merit that they are collected in a series of volumes and studied as models of composition. The didactic style, whether that of commentaries on the classic texts or of treatises on science, morals, and practical arts, is always formed in accordance with the maxim of Confucius, Tze ta erhi, " Enough, if you are clear." Such writings are as lucid as the nature of the subject, the genius of the language, and the brain of the author will admit. The commentaries on the classics are admirable specimens of textual exposition. The narrative style ranges from the gravity of history to the description of scenery and humorous anecdote. Its ideal is the combination of the graphic with simplicity. Of the historical writings of the Chinese, so far as their style is concerned, nothing more can be said than that they are simple and perspicuous. Interesting they are not ; for their bondage to the annal and journal form has prevented their giving us comprehensive tableaux; while the idea of a philosophy of history has never dawned on their minds. In descriptions of scenery the Chinese excel. They have an eye for the picturesque in nature; and nature throws her varied charms over the pages of their literature with a profusion unknown among the pagan nations of the West. Chinese writers are particularly fond of relating incidents that are susceptible of a prac- 122 THE LORE OF CATHAY tical application. One such is the tiger apologue ascribed to Confucius in the preceding chapter. Liu Tsung Yuan, of the T'ang period, has a similar narrative in which a poisonous reptile takes the place of the tiger. A poor man was employed to capture the spotted snake for medicinal purposes, and had his taxes remitted on condition of supplying the Imperial college of physicians with two every year. The author expressing his sympathy for his perilous occupation, the man re- plied, " ' My grandfather died in this way, my father also, and I, during the twelve years in which I have been so engaged, have more than once been near dying by the bite of serpents.' As he uttered this with a very sorrow- ful expression of countenance, ' Do you wish,' said I, ' that I should speak to the magistrates and have you released from this hard service ? ' His look became more sorrowful, and, bursting into tears, he exclaimed, ' If you pity me, allow me, I pray you, to pursue my present occupation; for be assured that my lot, hard as it is, is by no means so pitiable as that of those who suffer the exactions of tax-gatherers.' " I add a specimen, in the same vein, from Liu Chi, a writer of the Ming period, who flourished no more than five hundred years ago. " I saw," he says, " oranges ex- posed on a fruit-stand in midsummer, and sold at a fabulous price. They looked fresh and tempting, and I bought one. On breaking it open, a puff of something like smoke filled my mouth and nose. Turning to the seller, I demanded, ' Why do you sell such fruit ? It is fit for nothing but to offer to the gods or to set before strangers. What a sham ! What a disgraceful cheat ! ' ' Well were it,' replied the fruit-seller, ' if my oranges were the only shams.' And he went on to show how we have sham soldiers in the field, sham statesmen in the CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION 123 cabinet, and shams everywhere. I walked away silently, musing whether this fruit-seller might not be, after all, a philosopher who had taken to selling rotten oranges in order to have a text from which to preach on the subject of shams." The last two pieces, though separated from it by a space of from twelve to sixteen hundred years, are evi- dently modelled after the first. I have quoted them to show that Chinese writers are not always servile in their imitation, or timid in denouncing the corruptions of their government. Another kind of style is that of the wen chang, or polished essay a brief treatise on any subject, constructed according to fixed rules, and limited to seven hundred words. In our own literature it answers to short papers such as those of the Spectator and Rambler, which were so much in vogue in the last century invariably ushered in by a classic motto, and expected to be a model of fine writing. The production of these is the leading test of literary ability. The schoolboy writes wen chang as soon as he is able to construe the native classics ; and the gray-haired competitor for the doctorate in the examinations at the capital is still found writing wen chang. In all the world there is no kind of literature produced in equal quantity excepting, perhaps, sermons. Nor is their prodigious quantity their only point of resemblance to the produc- tions of the Western pulpit. They always have a text from the sacred books, which they analyze in a most artificial manner, and uniformly reduce to eight heads. They aim at nothing beyond exposition, on the principle that the moderns can do nothing more than unfold the germs of ancient wisdom ; originality is renounced, and, as already intimated, their chief adornment consists in 124 THE LORE OF CATHAY the artful interweaving of sacred and modern phrase- ology. Like the inlaid wares of the Japanese or ihe mosaic pictures of the West, the more numerous and minute their borrowed ornaments, the more are these compositions admired. Of no practical utility except as a mental gymnastic, the style of these essays exerts an in- fluence through the whole range of literature. Indeed, the term which is commonly employed to cover the whole field of belles-lettres is no other than wen chang. Here is an opening paragraph of an essay which took the first honor in a recent examination for the doctorate : Subject Good-faith and Dignity. " When we begin, we should look to the end. Good-faith and dignity of carriage should therefore be objects of our care. By faith we mean that our acts should respond to our prom- ise; by dignity, that our bearing should be such as to repel any approach towards insolent familiarity. This is only attained by cherishing a sense of right, cultivating a regard for propriety, and at the same time maintaining a sympathy for our fellow-men. In this earthly pilgrim- age, what we most desire is to escape the blame of being untrue. We choose our words with care, for fear we should be untrue to our fellows. We choose our actions with care, for fear we should be untrue to ourselves. We choose our companions with care, lest we should prove unfaithful to our friends or they should prove unfaithful to us. By so doing we can fulfil our obligations, main- tain our dignity of character, and yet preserve inviolate our social attachments. Within, we shall have a heart that feels its self-imposed engagements as much as if it were bound by the stipulations of a solemn covenant; while without we shall wear an aspect that will command the respect of those who approach us." " Enough of such platitudes," one will say, yet no trans- CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION 125 lation can ever do justice to the subtle qualities which caused this performance to be crowned among seven thousand competitors. The delicate sutures which blend its various elements into an harmonious whole must, of course, like the wavy lines of a Damascus blade, disap- pear when cast into the crucible of the translator. From what has been said of the style of schools, periods, and different provinces in the empire of letters, it follows that, notwithstanding their propensity for imitation, Chinese writers must be as strongly individualized as those of other countries. If gifted with original genius, they form a style of their own; if not, they produce in new and undesigned combinations the traits of earlier authors by whom they have been most deeply impressed. Confucius professed to be an imitator, but he was eminently original. Direct, practical, and comprehensive, his thoughts are expressed in language at once concise and rhythmical resembling as much as anything else those choice lines of Shakespeare which by their com- bined felicity of idea and expression have become trans- formed into popular proverbs. Whether, like the Hindoo guru, he threw them into this form as the text for his daily discourse, or whether they were reduced by his disciples, it is not in all cases easy to determine. But certain it is that, stripped of their attractive dress, what- ever their intrinsic merit, they never could have attained such universal currency. The teachings of Confucius owe as much to style as those of Mahomet. The extent to which style was studied in his time we may infer from the account he gives us of the manner in which the ele- gant state-papers of the principality of Cheng were pro- duced. They were the work of four men with long, strange names. One " drew out a rough draft," a second "sifted the arguments," another "added rhetorical em- 126 THE LORE OF CATHAY bellishments," and the fourth finished them by " polishing off the periods." Lao Tse, a senior contemporary of Confucius, left his instructions to posterity in " five thousand words," cast in a semi-poetical mould. Obscure and paradoxical like Heraclitus of Ephesus, surnamed the Dark (a writer with whom it would not be difficult to trace other points of analogy besides their common partiality for enigma), his dark pages are illumined by many a flash of far-reach- ing light. Each of these great masters impressed his style on the school which he founded. Mencius is Confucius with less dogmatism and more vehemence; while the wild fancy of Chuangtze repro- duces the characteristics of Lao Tse in exaggerated pro- portions. With both, the current of their diction flows like a river, but in each case it wears the complexion of its distant source. As another example of a contrast in manner, I may adduce two historians of the Chou period. Kung Yang Kao and Tso Chiu Ming both confine themselves to the role of expositors, taking the Confucian annals as their text ; but the first often commences with a minute analysis of the text, while the other proceeds at once to a narra- tive of facts. The former, for instance, thus expounds the heading of a chapter: Text " First year, spring, royal first moon." " Why the first year? Because it was the commencement of a new reign. Why does he mention spring? Because the year began at that season. Why, in speaking of the month, does he prefix the word royal? To indicate that it was fixed by the Imperial calendar. Why refer to the Imperial calendar? To show that all the states are united under one sovereign," etc. From Tso Chiu Ming I cite a passage which, whether CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION 127 it do or do not exhibit any other peculiarity, will at least show- the absence of interrogation marks. Text " The Prince of Cheng conquers Tuan at Yen" Premising that the belligerents were brothers ; that their mother had abetted the rebellion of Tuan the younger; and that the Prince, pronouncing against her a sentence of banishment, had taken a solemn oath never to see her again until they should both be under the ground, the historian continues, " The Prince soon repented of his hasty oath. The Governor of Ying Ku heard it, and came with a present. The Prince detained him to dine. Ying Ku put aside a portion of the meats. The Prince inquired the reason. Said Ying Ku, ' They are for my mother, who has never tasted such royal dainties.' ' You have a mother, then,' said the Prince ; ' alas ! I have none.' He then told him of his oath, at the same time informing him of his repentance. ' Why need your Majesty be troubled on that ac- count ? ' exclaimed Ying Ku. ' If you will only make a subterranean chamber with two doors, and meet there, who will say that you have not kept your oath ? ' " The Prince took the counsel, and, meeting his mother beneath the ground, they became mother and son as be- fore. How perfect the piety of Ying Ku, who devised this plan ! " The great masters of style are a thousand years later than these last ; and then we find philosophers, poets, and historians in such constellations as to make the dynasties of T'ang and Sung a Golden Age for Chinese letters. Then flourished such writers as Han Yu, surnamed the Prince of Literature ; Li Pei, in whom the planet Venus was believed to be incarnate; the three Su, father and sons ; and a host of others whose light has not yet reached our Western shores, and whose names it would be tedious 128 THE LORE OF CATHAY to recount. Their names, musical enough in the tones of their native land, are harsh to Occidental ears. What a pity they have not all been clothed in graceful Latin, like those of Confucius and Mencius! These sages, if they owe to their style in a great degree their popularity at home, are almost equally indebted for their fame abroad to the classical terminations of their names. Name is fame in more than one sense, and more than one language in Chinese as in Hebrew; and it is obvious that in the Western world no amount of merit would be sufficient to confer celebrity on a man bearing the name of K'oong Footze! I refrain from further extracts. For reasons already given, no translation can do justice to the style of a Chinese writer; and a volume, instead of a brief essay, would be required to give an approximate idea of the other qualities of what the Chinese describe as their elegant literature. It is on their poetry that they especially pique them- selves; but, as I think, with mistaken judgment. For while their prose-writers, like those of France, are un- surpassed in felicity of style, their poetry, like that of France, is stiff and constrained. Like their own women, their poetical muses have cramped feet and no wings. For variety in prose composition, the nature of the lan- guage affords a boundless scope. For, not to speak of local dialects, the language of scholars, or the written language, ranges in its choice of expressions from the familiar patois up to the most archaic forms. In China nothing becomes obsolete ; and a writer is thus enabled to pitch his composition, at option, on a high or low key, and to carry it through consistently. There are, for ex- ample, three sets of personal pronouns that correspond to as many grades of style; while there are other styles CHINESE PROSE COMPOSITION 129 in which the personal pronoun is dispensed with, and substantives employed instead. Founded on pictorial representation, the language is, in many of its features, highly poetical, the strange beauties with which it charms the fancy at every step, suggesting a ramble among the gardens of the sea-nymphs. Nor is it a dead language, though in its written form no longer generally spoken. It contains " thoughts that breathe, and words that burn," writers whom the student will gladly acknowledge as worthy compeers of the most ad- mired authors of the ancient West. I say " ancient," for China is essentially ancient. She is not yet modernized, and finds fitter parallels in pagan antiquity than in modern Christendom. The time, I trust, is not far distant when her language will find a place in all our principal seats of learning, and when her classic writers will be known and appreciated. VIII CHINESE LETTER WRITING IN no other language is the style of private corre- spondence so widely separated from that of official or public documents as in the Chinese. The latter, simple and direct in expression, eschews ornament, and aims chiefly at clearness and force; the former, artificial to the last degree, teems with trite allusions which are rather pedantic than elegant. With us, in this as in so many other things, the reverse is not far from the truth. It is the official despatch that is cast in iron moulds ; and the familiar letter is left free to take any shape the easy play of thought and feeling may impress upon it. Western authors accordingly sometimes choose to throw their compositions into the convenient form of epistles when they wish to invest them with the double charm of clearness and vivacity. By employing the form of letters, Pascal imparted to polemic discussion the grace and humor of the comic drama ; while Swift and Junius availed themselves of the same weapon in their terrible attacks on the government. Not so the Chinese: though necessity leads to the dis- cussion of grave topics in the form of letters, and though the teachings of some of their ancient philosophers were communicated in the way of correspondence, no modern Chinese ever thinks of throwing his ideas into such a shape, any more than he would treat a grave subject under the form of the modern prize essay. Thoughtful men denounce the regulation essay as utterly useless ; but they 130 CHINESE LETTER WRITING 131 never denounce the conventional style of letter-writing, though both have a family likeness. The reason is that the letter of friendship or business is a social necessity, and the literary ornament with which it is tricked out is deemed essential to save it from vulgarity. In friendly correspondence the opening paragraphs are always consecrated to the expression of high-flown senti- ments, real or assumed, and not unfrequently the falsetto pitch of the exordium is painfully sustained to the very- close. Nothing is more offensive to our taste, or less cal- culated to encourage the labor of acquisition. If a letter contains any serious business, the foreign reader, if he does not, as in most cases, rely on a native teacher for explanation, finds that he can arrive at it by a process of elimination, i. e. by leaving out of account all the unin- telligible rhetoric. But this is not merely unscholarly ; it limits the use of correspondence, and shuts out the stu- dent (he does not deserve the name of student if willing to be shut out) from a department of literature which more than any other presents us with pictures of indi- vidual character and social life. The student who desires to enter this field will find numerous private collections of more or less celebrity soliciting his attention. If any of them were from the pens of gifted women ; and if the canons of Chinese taste (for the fault is not in the language) permitted them, like their sisters of the West, to write as they talk, he might, even in this department, verify the quaint old maxim, " The sweetness of the lips increaseth knowl- edge." But, alas ! there is no Sevigne, who, by her bril- liant gossip, can shed the dews of immortality, over the ephemeral intrigues of a court, and by her wit give a value to things that are worthless, as amber does to the insects which it embalms ; there is no Wortley, who chats 132 THE LORE OF CATHAY with equal charm of literature and love; no Lady Duff Gordon, who, by her genius and enterprise, puts us in love with boat life and Bedouins. The paths of epistolary literature, where the choicest flowers are dropped from female hands, are in China almost untrodden by female feet ; and a reason gravely given for withholding from women the key of knowledge is that men are afraid they will learn to write letters. It is not nature, but man, that is ungenerous to the daughters of the East. " Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll ; Chill jealousy repressed their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul." Nor, it must be confessed, is there any such indemnity in store for our student as the epistles of a moralizing Seneca ; or the correspondence of a malignant and intrigu- ing Walpole, which lifts the veil from the mysteries of contemporary politics, and from the writer's own bosom, so that Macaulay ingeniously compares the flavor of the letters of the great minister to that of pate s de foie gras, because derived from a disease of the liver in the animal that produced them. But as some of our most eminent poets, such as Dryden, Gray, and Cowper, have left behind them letters that are preserved as models of elegance, in which fancy and feeling are no less happily blended than in their poetical works, so we find that in China the list of distinguished letter writers is headed by the names of poets, showing that they enjoyed the favor of the musa pedestris as well as of her winged sisters. The earliest collection of letters, or at least the most famous of those that are accepted as models of epistolary style, came from the pens of two celebrated poets of the CHINESE LETTER WRITING 133 Sung dynasty, Su Tung P'o, and Huang T'ing Chien. Under the joint name of Su Huang Ch'ih Tu, though not properly a Briefwechsel, or correspondence between the two authors, it has ever since the battle of Hastings given law to this species of composition. The stream of time, like that which floated the bor- rowed axe of the prophet, usually carries down the weightier matters, and deposits the less important as sedi- ment ; yet in this instance we have reason to regret that, like natural rivers, it has only brought down to us the lighter material on its surface. Both writers held high offices, and one of them was especially honored at the Imperial Court; but their letters have little to do with State policy; and the selection has obviously been made on the principle that if one of their merits is in the ele- gance of their form, another ought to be in the absence of facts. Still, even these shining husks, if carefully sifted, will be found to yield some grains of valuable informa- tion. A book of letters of more modern date, and scarcely inferior in reputation, is the Ch'ih Tu of Hsiao Ts'ang, or Sui Yuan, as it is variously styled. The author, Yuan Mei, a native of Che kiang, won a seat in the Imperial Academy in the reign of Ch'ien Lung; and declining office, passed his life at Nanking, chiefly engaged in scholastic pursuits, boasting that for thirty years he never appeared at court. Known mainly as a professor of belles-lettres, with pupils dispersed over several provinces, instead of col- lected into one lecture room, and communicating by post instead of viva voce, this worthy man has not merely left models of composition, but set an example, both as scholar and instructor, which is much admired though little fol- lowed. i 3 4 THE LORE OF CATHAY A poet of refined taste, and not without talent, it is interesting to know that he gave instruction in the art of poetry to numerous ladies of high family and culture, making, from time to time, the circuit of the cities where they resided a fact the rarity of which rather supports than invalidates the view above given of the deficiencies of female education. There are numerous works passing under the general name of Ch'ih Tu, which were prepared expressly for form-books, and will repay perusal for that purpose. Of these I may mention the Yen chi mu tan, Hai shang hung ni, and Liu ch'ing chi; but they have not the additional recommendation of a history. It is, however, with a view to drawing attention to a more recent collection that this article is written. The Tze Yuan Ch'ih Tu, published at Peking a few years ago in four thin volumes, consists of a selection from the letters of Liu Chia Chu. This is a name which, being unknown, carries no weight; and our author, like Hawthorne in one of his earlier works, might speak of himself as enjoying the distinction of being one of the obscurest men of letters in all China. A native of Hunan, he passed many years in the office of the Governor of Canton ; a representative of that nameless but influential class who transact the business while their superiors enjoy the honors of official station. During this period he wrote, he tells us, heaps of papers higher than his head, among which one might play hide- and-seek in more senses than one. Most of them were, of course, sent forth in the name of others, and the writer facetiously compares himself with a milliner who prepares the clothing for a bride, or a go-between who arranges for her nuptials. Of these he gives us none, unless, in- CHINESE LETTER WRITING 135 deed, by surreptitiously changing their address and adapt- ing them to his own use. The most of his papers bear unmistakable marks of having been culled from his private portfolio; affording such incidental glimpses of life and manners that one is compelled to accept them as a genuine record a portion of the writer's autobiography. This gives the work an element of interest of no mean order, and a value of its own, as a mirror held up to the face of Chinese life by the hand of a native. So frank, indeed, are its disclosures, so little care is taken to draw a veil over things that are deemed discreditable, that one might almost regard the work as belonging to the category of " confessions " originated by St. Augustine, and rendered popular by Rousseau. As to the literary merits of the performance, it is suf- ficient to cite the names of the two sponsors under whose patronage the author comes before the public Kuo Sung Tao, Minister to England, and Wang K'ai Tai, the late enlightened governor of the Province of Fukien each of them having filled the post of Governor of Can- ton, and employed Liu Chia Chu as a confidential secre- tary. Other great names are invoked in a long list of lauda- tory notices ; and some that we meet With incidentally in the course of the correspondence, such as Tseng Kuo Fan, Chiang I Li, Li Hung Chang, and Liu Ch'ang Yu, (viceroy of Yunnan and Kweichou), impart to it an air of historical truth that is much in its favor. Without pausing longer to discourse about the book, let us open its pages and see what we shall find there. To begin, we shall find a meteoric shower of allusions. This is the most prominent characteristic of this species of writing; and the primary object of the artifice is to 136 THE LORE OF CATHAY hide the nakedness of commonplace. Employed in excess or handled clumsily, it aggravates the evil by exposing the poverty of the writer, or substitutes the graver faults of pedantry and cant; used with skill and taste, it throws over the page a glitter of iridescent hues, or, it may be, contributes largely to the significance and force of lan- guage. These allusions are of various kinds. Some suggest whole chapters of history ; others bring up the words or actions of real or mythical personages ; while others still, by a single word or phrase, cast a beam of light on some poetical tableau, which brings its entire effect to bear on the subject in hand. For instance, when Dry den says of Thais that, " Like another Helen, she fired another Troy," what a crowd of teeming associations he condenses into the space of a single line! How much is expressed by such brief phrases as " a Barmecide feast," " a Bellerophon letter," " a Judas kiss ! " The Chinese language abounds in such ; and no one can be said to understand the language who is not in some degree familiar with them. Then there are curt allusions of a purely literary kind catch words which suggest any one of the three hundred classic odes, or refer to thou- sands of well-known passages in later literature. To these we may add a vocabulary of metaphorical words and phrases, the use of which is de rigeur in a certain style which makes it a point of taste not to call things by their right names. Thus the poet or the elegant letter-writer never speaks of copper cash, but calls them " green beetles ; " a sheet of paper he calls " a flowery scroll ; " an epistle is " a wild goose." Husband and wife are Ch'ang-sui, " tenor and treble ; " K'ang-li, " strength and CHINESE LETTER WRITING 137 beauty ; " Yuan-yang, " duck and drake ; " and a hundred other pretty things, at the poet's option. A man is a prince and his wife a princess ; his house a palace and his children a phoenix brood. To repay the kindness of par- ents is to emulate the stork ; to return a borrowed article is to restore the gem ; a man of genius employed in a work of drudgery as Charles Lamb in the India Office is " a race-horse in a salt-wagon." These are but a few specimens of a sort of dialect that has its own dictionaries without number or limit; and of which every reader of Chinese is under the necessity of knowing something, if he does not master it. Per- haps the best key to it for any student, native or foreign, is a collection of wen chang, or of well-written letters, such as those of our obscure friend Liu Chia Chu. In dic- tionaries and cyclopaedias, or in such a useful hand-book as Mayers' Chinese Reader's Manual, he will find gems arranged as in a mineralogical cabinet ; but in these com- positions he meets them in their proper setting. The object of such works is to aid, not to supersede, the reading of difficult authors as a certain learned Dutch- man proposed to supersede Homer by presenting the Homeric archaeology in a tabulated form. We now proceed to the substratum of facts underly- ing the gold and tinsel of which we have been speaking. Of little importance in themselves, and not by any means thick-sown through these pages, they are still not devoid of interest as illustrations of character, personal and na- tional. It was from the letters of Cicero that Mr. Middleton drew the principal materials for his admirable life of the great Roman statesman. But the letters of Chu Futze or Su Tung P'o would furnish scanty materials for a history of their lives; and meagre indeed are the out- 138 THE LORE OF CATHAY lines of biography which we are able to extract from the sentimental effusions of Liu Chia Chu. Our author first drew his breath, and with it what poetic inspiration he possessed, amidst the mountain scenery of Southern Hunan, about the middle of the reign of Chia Ching (circa 1810). Born in a rustic vil- lage not far from the city of Hsin Hua, he came of a family distinguished for scholarship -a. fact of which he never ceases to remind the reader; and there can be no doubt that he inherited talent, though his patrimony in- cluded little else. Boasting somewhat of his early precocity, he hints at youthful dissipations as having proved fatal to his career as a scholar, and planted the seeds of unending regrets. He failed probably from a defective chirography, as many a worthier man has done to win the first or lowest degree in the civil-service examinations ; and about the age of thirty he removed with his family to Can- ton, forgetting, it seems, to liquidate certain debts of honor. Concerned in the conduct of a charity-school, Liu, thinking that charity ought to begin at home, " borrowed " a portion of the funds to meet his own necessities. Ar- rived at Canton, he learned with much regret that the slight liberty he had taken with its capital was likely to occasion the dissolution of the school. Against this he protests with much eloquence ; but has nothing more sub- stantial to encourage the good work than " promises to pay." In this connection his reference to himself, as a good example of the benefits of education, is, to say the least, a little naive. After this, we are not surprised to find many epistles filled with complaints of poverty. He has work enough, but scant remuneration. Great men admire his genius, CHINESE LETTER WRITING 139 and load him with compliments; but, like virtue, which he does not much resemble in any other respect, laudatur et alget. From one friend he begs the loan of a " few hundred pieces of gold," from another he borrows a suit of decent apparel. Good models these letters for one who has much to do in the line of begging or borrowing! All this time Liu's family is increasing at a rather alarming rate ; not that he has any children born, but from time to time he takes a new beauty into his harem in the hope that children will follow. One is presented to him by a friend ; another, not unnaturally, runs away, or, as he euphemistically terms it, " carries her guitar to another door." A correspondent of comparatively severe morals ex- postulates with Liu on this seeming abandonment to a life of sensuality. The latter replies by drawing an affecting picture of an aged father who cannot die in peace with- out the joy of embracing a grandson ! At length his hopes are awakened only to meet with disappointment one of his wives presenting him with a daughter. The little creature appears not to be alto- gether unwelcome, and, in fact, makes for herself a warm place in her father's heart; though he frequently alludes to her in uncomplimentary terms borrowed from the classic odes : " A girl is born ; in coarse cloth wound, With a tile for a toy, let her lie on the ground," etc. The spell broken, another of his ladies crowns his desires by giving him a son, whose advent is duly hailed by a flourish of trumpets, and further quotations from the Book of Odes : i 4 o THE LORE OF CATHAY " A son is born ; on an ivory bed, Wrap him in raiment of purple and red ; Gold and jewels for playthings bring To the noble boy who shall serve the king." In a few months this child of many hopes sickens and dies. The disconsolate father mourns deeply, and fills many sheets with melodious tristia. About this time the doors of official preferment, be- fore which he had been so long waiting (having failed to find the key in his earlier youth), began slowly to open before him. Appointed magistrate of a sub-district in the country, called Lo Kang, he contrived to send some one to act in his stead (subletting the profits of the position), while he remained at the provincial capital in the midst of the literary society which he loved so dearly. Appointed to Kowloon, on the mainland opposite to Hongkong, Liu again finds excuses for not repairing to his post; and the governor, offended by his tardiness, cancels the appointment. After due penance, he is re- stored to favor and offered another post, such as Caesar himself would have preferred to being the second man at Rome. Taught by experience, he lost no time in installing himself in his new yamen. Its roof leaks, its walls are crumbling, and all its apartments filled with rubbish ; but, to compensate for all this, it contains a throne, which, if he had read Milton, he might have compared with that of the " anarch old " who ruled the realms of chaos. Here he finds a new order of talents called into requi- sition: he has to deal with facts instead of words, and is evidently proud of the success with which he per- forms the functions of a judge favoring us with one of his judgments as a model of its kind. It betrays, how- ever, the fact that his right hand has not forgotten its cunning; that he continues to be a rhetorician in spite CHINESE LETTER WRITING 141 of himself, and is more at home in reading a lecture than in pronouncing a sentence. Unique among the rose-water productions of his epis- tolary pen, his report of this lawsuit reminds us that Liu has also given us a few specimens of another species of composition. In the course of his career he is some- times assistant examiner, and sometimes appears in the character of a competitor; not, indeed, in the ordinary examinations, but in those special trials which expectant officers are required to pass at the provincial capital. On one of these occasions Liu's essays were endorsed by the high authorities in terms which placed them on a level with the best productions of the classic ages. These eulogies he not only repeats in many of his letters, but favors his friends with copies of the fortunate papers, that they may judge for themselves whether the praise is merited ; pleasing himself with the reflection that but for the injustice of the lower courts he might long since have worn the highest honors of the literary arena. Liu's literary ability is duly recognized by a host of junior aspirants, who solicit copies of his essays, send presents on his fete-days, and institute theatricals in his honor. His moral character is more doubtful. A polyg- amist on principle, he disclaims the virtues of an ascetic philosopher in order to emulate the libertinism of certain dissolute poets. Had he, indeed, done nothing worse than fill his own cage with bright-winged songsters, he would have been walking too closely in the footsteps of saints and sages to attract attention. To vindicate for himself the reputation of being a free spirit one that spurns what he denominates the " minor morals " he mingles occasionally with the " soiled doves." For this, his best apology is that the silly occupants of his own dove-cot are incapable of appreciating his genius ; i 4 2 THE LORE OF CATHAY while some of these unappropriated ones, like the hetaerae of Greece, had their charms enhanced by the advantages of education. He gives us a letter which he wrote to one of this class, with hypocritical morality recommend- ing her to take refuge in a house of religion. In an epistle to another friend, he gives us reason to suspect that even the vestals of Buddha were not sacred in his eyes; and that with him sacrilege was necessary to give the highest flavor to license. Freely unfolding his inner life, and trenching often on forbidden ground, it is something in his favor that he is always elegant and never indecent. After this account of his morals, it would be useless to inquire for his religion. He says, indeed, very little on the subject. He alludes to a " Creator " more than once, but in language of studied levity, showing that to him the author of nature is not a " living God." As to outward observances, he conforms to popular usage ; he believes in fate, and, impatient to know its de- crees, applies to a professional fortune-teller; in all these points only too true a type of the average literati of his country. The boundary-line between friendly and official corre- spondence is not easy to trace. It is to the former that we confine ourselves in the present communication ; but it will not be amiss to remark that much of the best writing in the Chinese language may be found on inter- mediate ground between formal business documents and friendly letters. In this class of compositions, vaguely described as official letters, the grace of the polished epistle is often added to the directness and force of the despatch style a happy combination, of which some of the best speci- mens may be seen in the published correspondence of CHINESE LETTER WRITING 143 Hu Lin-Yeh, canonized under the title of Hu Wen Cheng Kung ; and in that of Ch'en Wen Chung Kung, who, hav- ing won three times in succession the first literary honor of his province and of the Empire, received from that circumstance the sobriquet of Ch'en San Yuan, " Cn'en the Triple First." IX CHINESE FABLES THE student of Chinese inquires in vain for any collection of native fables ; and he feels their absence as a personal inconvenience when he recalls his obligations to JEsop and Phaedrus, Lessing and La Fontaine, for alleviating the toil of his earlier studies in the classic languages of ancient and modern Europe. This deficiency is the more disappointing, as the constant occurrence of the words pi fang in our colloquial exercises leads us to expect to find the fields of literature thick- sown with every variety of similitude. Parables and alle- gories are, indeed, not wanting, but their congener, the fable, seems never to have existed, or in some mysterious way to have become well-nigh extinct. Nor is this last supposition a mere fancy. We turn up from time to time what seem to be fossil fragments enough to give it, to say the least, as good a foundation as some scientific theories have to rest on. For what are those numerous proverbial expressions drawn from the habits of animals but the ghosts, or rather the skele- tons, of vanished fables. But whether such originals ever existed, certain it is that nothing is more easy or natural than to expand these phrases into the full di- mensions of the proper apologue. Take, for instance, " the sheep in a tiger's skin," " when the hare dies the fox weeps," " he who nurses a tiger's cub will rue his kindness," etc. Do not these seem to point back to ancient fables as their source; just as we 144 CHINESE FABLES 145 know " the fox and the grapes," " the ass in a lion's skin," and other proverbial expressions current among us were derived from fables? But how did such originals, supposing them to have existed, come to be lost? We reply, they were either never reduced to writing, or not written in a style adapted to the taste of the country. For ages past the Chinese have affected an extreme sententiousness in the style of their literary composition. This would naturally lead them to extract the living spirit and to reject the cum- brous form of such fables as might spring up in the humbler walks of their folk-lore. Thus they may have had their unknown Pilpays and their mute, inglorious JEsops. At all events, the defect of which we are speaking was not occasioned, as some would have us infer, by a want of imagination. For Chinese literature, while it contains nothing that rises to the dignity of the epic muse, yet teems with the productions of a fertile fancy metamorphoses as numerous (if not as elegant) as those of Ovid; fairy tales more monstrous than Grimm's; and narratives of adventure (generally accepted as sober his- tory) as strange as those of Sindbad or Gulliver. It is, we repeat, a question of taste rather than talent ; and this, we think, is borne out by the reception which the Chinese gave to Mr. Thorn's excellent translation of ^sop, a work which, instead of finding its way into every house- hold, is rarely to be met with even in the stalls of a book- seller. The mandarins suspected that wolves and bears were masks for dangerous doctrines and biting satire ; while neither prince nor peasant has cared enough about the production to keep it alive. As to talent, while we will not assert that the Chinese could have excelled in this department of literature, there 146 THE LORE OF CATHAY is proof, we think, that they are not wholly destitute of a capacity for it. This will be found in the following fables, derived from various sources, which we give by way of specimen, hoping that readers of Chinese will add to the number any that happen to come under their notice: 1. The King of Chu inquiring with some surprise why the people of the North were so frightened at the ap- proach of Chou Hsi Hsu, one of his ministers replied as follows : " A tiger who happened to be preceded by a fox was greatly astonished to see all the animals running away from the fox, little suspecting that their terror was inspired by himself. It is not Chou, but your Majesty, of whom the people of the North are in dread." 2. " I may go out and play without any danger now," said a little mouse to its mother. " The old cat has be- come religious ; I see her with her eyes shut, engaged in praying to Buddha." Grimalkin's devotions, however, did not prevent her seizing the silly little creature as soon as it ventured near. 3. A tiger who had never seen an ass was terrified at the sound of his voice, and was about to run away, when the latter turned his heels and prepared to kick. " If that is your mode of attack," said the tiger, " I know how to deal with you." 4. A tiger having clapped his paw on an unlucky monkey, the latter begged to be released on the score of his insignificance, and promised to show the tiger where he might find a more valuable prey. The tiger complied, and the monkey conducted him to a hill-side where an ass was feeding an animal which the tiger, till then, had never seen. " My good brother," said the ass to the monkey, CHINESE FABLES 147 " hitherto you have always brought me two tigers, how is it that you have only brought me one to-day ? " Hearing these words, the tiger fled for his life. Thus a ready wit may often ward off great dangers. 5. A tiger, finding a cat very prolific in devices for catching game, placed himself under her instruction. At length he was told there was nothing more to be learned. " Have you, then, taught me all your tricks ? " he in- quired. " Yes," replied the cat. " Then," said the tiger, " you are of no further use, and so I shall eat you." The cat, however, sprang lightly into the branches of a tree, and smiled at his disappointment. She had not taught him all her tricks. The Chinese apply this to their foreign instructors in the art of war, and evidently suspect that some master secret is always held in reserve. X NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA THE word " tract," in its more general sense, signi- fies a treatise on any subject. In the special sense, which the activity of our Tract Societies has brought into use, it means a small book in which the sanctions of religion are brought forward in support of morality. Its aim is to enlighten the human mind, and to purify the widening stream of human life. That the people of that ancient empire, who have an- ticipated us in so many discoveries, and in every kind of social experiment, should have gone before us in the creation of a tract-literature, is not surprising. In China, as in other countries, one of the earliest uses of written speech was to extend the influence of good men, by causing their words to reach a wider circle, beyond the bounds of personal intercourse, which in space is limited to a few miles, and in time to a few years. For the same reasons, one of the first applications of the art of printing, in which China was six hundred years in advance of Europe, was to multiply tracts; and the aggregate mass of its publications in this department has, in the course of ten centuries, attained an enormous development. To enumerate even the most popular of them would necessitate the recitation of a long catalogue ; and to offer an outline criticism of each would be an endless task. They fall, however, into certain well-de- fined categories, such as : i. Those which inculcate morality in general. 148 NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA 149 2. Those which persuade to the practice of particular virtues. 3. Those which seek to deter from particular vices. 4. Those that are written in the interest of particular religions or divinities. One or two in each class, as types of the whole will be sufficient to exhibit their character and scope. In the first class, a leading place might properly be assigned to the discourses of Confucius and Mencius, and to numerous treatises of later philosophers; but, as we are accustomed to make a distinction between scrip- tures and tracts, these, or at least those first mentioned, are to be regarded as the sacred scriptures of the Chinese. With us, many tracts consist almost entirely of Scrip- ture passages, selected and arranged. In the native literature of the Chinese, similar tracts based on their best books may be found in great numbers. One such is called the Ming Hsin Pao Chien, Mirror of the Heart. It contains a choice collection of the best sayings of the best men that country has produced. Those sayings are gems, neatly cut, highly polished, and sparkling with the light of truth. In other tracts they may be differently arranged; but everywhere they shine with the mild radiance of wisdom and virtue. A collection of this kind, called Ming Hsien Chi, Say- ings of the Wise, is a great favorite in Peking. It differs from the tract last named in drawing its wise saws chiefly from modern sources. It opens with the noble maxim: " Only practice good works, and ask no questions about your future destiny." The first chapter ends with the encouraging assurance : " Human desires can be broken off; Heaven's laws can be observed." ISO THE LORE OF CATHAY Another maxim gives the general tenor of its teach- ings : " All things bow to real worth ; happiness is stored up by honesty." Every sentence is a proverb; and though, like the Hebrew proverbs, there are many that inculcate thrift and worldly wisdom, there are not a few that rise to a higher level. Its religion is unhappily of a very colorless description, contrasting strongly with the doctrine of direct responsibility to a living God, which pervades the proverbs of the Jews, making their religion the most practical of their concerns. The idea of direct responsibility is not indeed altogether wanting, though in this class of tracts it is not sufficiently insisted on. In this, and in nearly all similar collections, we find the warning that " The gods behold an evil thought, As clearly as a flash of lightning ; And whispers uttered in a secret place, To them sound loud as thunder." The Family Monitor of Chu Po Lu so well known, sets forth an admirable system of precepts for the ordering of a household, in which children are brought up with judicious severity, and servants treated with considerate tenderness, purity and honor being vital elements of the domestic atmosphere. The Ti Tze Kuei, or Guide to the Young, though less known, is a book of a higher order. Composed almost in our own times, in imitation of the far-famed Trimetri- cal Classic, it surpasses its model, and shows, if we may judge by words alone, that the line of sages is not yet ex- tinct. In the second chapter, entitled Truth and Virtue, we find a doctrine too rarely taught in Chinese books : ' In every word you utter, Let truth be first ; NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA 151 Deceit and falsehood, How can you endure! Do not lightly speak Of what you do not certainly know; Things not right, Do not lightly promise; If you do promise, Whether you go forward or go back, You are equally in fault." Here is a neat definition: " To do wrong without intention Is an error; To do wrong with purpose Is a crime." The author adds: " Your errors, if you correct them, End in no error; If you hide or cloak them, You add one sin more." The Sacred Edict, containing the maxims of Kang Hsi amplified by Yung Cheng, is not too large to be classed with tracts. Each chapter may, indeed, be regarded as a tract on a special subject. Nothing gives a better view of the kind of morals inculcated by the head of the gov- ernment morals which harmonize in a wonderful man- ner with some of the teachings of Christianity. The tracts that I have mentioned emanate from the school of pure Confucianism. They are not irreligious, for they everywhere admit the supremacy of a vague power called Heaven. They admit, further, that that power, whatever it may be, is not indifferent to human conduct. i 5 2 THE LORE OF CATHAY Does not the venerable Book of Changes, the most ancient of the canonical writings, expressly declare that " On those who store up righteousness, Heaven sends down a hundred blessings; And on those who store up ill-desert, Heaven sends down a hundred woes." This sentence re-appears in all these tracts ; and the doctrine of a providential retribution, unfailing for the good, unrelenting for the evil, is affirmed, amplified, and illustrated, as a cardinal truth which no man can doubt. By this school it is taught, as it was by the Sadducees of Judea, without reference to hopes or fears connected with a belief in a life to come. The certainty of prosperity in this world as the reward of virtue, and of shame and suffering as the penalty of vice, is the motive most con- stantly appealed to, though it should not be forgotten that, in a passage already quoted, a sublimer conception is set forth : " Only do good, and ask no questions as to your future destiny," assuring us that some among the moralists of the pure Confucian school might unite with us in the petition of Pope's Universal Prayer " What conscience tells me should be done, Or warns me not to do, This, teach me more than hell to shun, That, more than heaven pursue." The experience of moralists in China coincides, how- ever, with that of the West in showing that the theory of virtue as its own reward is too refined for the mass of mankind. One, here and there, who is moulded of purer clay, may be seized with a kind of Platonic passion for virtue, but the great majority are so constituted that to them virtue has no charms aside from happiness. Nor NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA 153 is this of necessity an ignoble sentiment ; for, in this case, what God has joined together it may not be possible for man to put asunder, " Happiness (to quote a Chinese saying), follows in the footsteps of virtue { as shadow follows substance." Are we not told that even Moses had " respect unto the recompense of the reward? " When Buddhists imported from India a distinct notion of a future life, their doctrine of transmigration was first adopted by the Taoists, and afterwards accepted by many who never ceased to call themselves disciples of Con- fucius. All parties felt that an immense reinforcement was added to the sanctions of morality. Instead of the shadowy idea of a vicarious recompense, reserved for one's posterity in some remote age, came the conviction that each individual soul, sooner or later, inevitably reaps the reward of its deeds ; a conviction which took so strong a hold on the public mind as to become the foun- dation for a mixed school of moral teaching. In the tracts of this mixed school, Confucianism may in some cases to be the leading element, Taoism or Bud- dhism in others ; but the most powerful argument to incite to good, and deter from evil, is always the certainty of retribution in a future life. The two most celebrated tracts in this department, if not in the whole cycle of Chinese literature, are dis- tinctly on the subject of retribution. They are the Kan Ying P'ien, and the Yin Chi Wen. Each bears the name of a Taoist divinity, one goes under the auspices of Laotze, the other under those of Wen Ch'ang. One sets out with the declaration that " Happiness and Misery never enter a door until they are invited by the occupant of the house." " They are the reward that follows good and evil, as surely as a shadow follows a body." The other begins with a statement that its beatified author 154 THE LORE OF CATHAY practised virtue through no fewer than seventeen lives or stages of existence before he attained to perfect felicity. Starting from this point, each unfolds its text with ad- mirable skill, building a rainbow arch of virtues, with one foot resting on the earth, and the other lost in the blue of heaven ; while the vices are depicted in fiery colors, on a back-ground of utter darkness. While on this branch of the subject, a very vulgar tract ought to be noticed, which has perhaps a wider cur- rency than either of the preceding. Like them, the Yu Li Ch'ao Chuan, or String of Pearls, is devoted to the doctrine of retribution. Instead, however, of insisting on true morality, this treatise spends its force in clothing the infernal world with imaginary horrors. They are drawn in such colors that they are not Dantesque, but grotesque.. The letter press is accompanied by pictorial illustrations, in which one sees a soul in the process of being sawn in twain, or pounded in a mortar; a bridge from which sinners are precipitated into a field of up-turned sword points; a cauldron of boiling water in which they stew and simmer for ages ; then a bed of ice on which they freeze for an equal period ; together with other scenes equally adapted to bring a wholesome doctrine into con- tempt. An idea, to which this gross view of retribution natur- ally gives rise, is that of opening a debt and credit ac- count with the chancery of Heaven. Such account books form a distinct class of tracts. On one side are ranged all conceivable bad actions, each stamped with its ex- change value according to a fixed tariff. The Chinese moralist has not, like Tetzel, gone so far as to convert this numerical valuation into a sale of indulgences, but we may be sure that the ingenuity of the reader does not fail to find out a way NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA 155 " To atone for sins he has a mind to, By doing things he's not inclined to." The artifice of keeping with one's heart such an ac- count current is one which, if properly conducted, might end in the practice of virtue. Franklin tried something of the kind with success, and he tells us that it enabled him to make such proficiency in the grace of humility that he grew proud of it. Among tracts of the second category those that inculcate particular virtues I may mention the Hsiao Ching, or Manual of Filial Duty, de- scribed in a previous chapter. More ancient than any of its class, it is also more venerated, being referred to Con- fucius himself, whose discourses on the subject were taken down by one of his- most eminent disciples. While its origin is apocryphal, its fullness and perfection give it the weight of a classic, while the simplicity and beauty of its style make it specially attractive to the young, for whose instruction it was composed. The teachings of the book culminate in the grand idea that filial piety, as the first of virtues, may be made a rule and regulator for the entire conduct of life. Every act has reference to our ancestors; good acts reflect honor, and bad acts bring disgrace on the name of our pro- genitors. The process of reasoning is somewhat similar to that which makes the love of God the law of a Chris- tian life ; but how feeble the sentiment that attaches itself to the moss-covered monuments of dead ancestors, in comparison with love to a living God, whom we are privileged to call our Father in Heaven ! As in China all social, political, and even religious obli- gations center in the duty of filial piety, that cardinal virtue is, as might be expected, the theme of innumerable hortatory compositions. Some of them are excellent from every point of view ; but not a few are tinged with 156 THE LORE OF CATHAY extravagance, extolling the merits of children who have saved the lives of parents by mixing medicines with their own blood, or giving them broth made of their own flesh.* There is one, and that the most popular of all, which sinks to a depth of silliness quite beyond anything at- tained by Mother Goose. I refer to the stories of the Four-and-Twenty Filial Children. One of those worthies is held in remembrance because, when his parents had lapsed into second childhood, he, at the age of threescore and ten, dressed himself in parti- coloured vestments, and acted the clown to make them laugh. Another, when a little boy, was seen lying on the ice; and, when questioned as to his object, replied that he " wished to melt it to catch a fish for his mother.'' One of them, hearing a physician commend the virtues of milk freshly drawn from the teats of a wild deer, dis- guised himself as a deer in order to procure the precious beverage for his invalid mother. One of them, on the occurrence of a thunder storm, always threw himself on his mother's grave, saying " Mother, your boy is with you, do not be afraid." The other stories are equally foolish, and some of them positively wicked; yet Chi- nese artists vie with each other in embellishing this precious nonsense, and the greatest men of China make a merit of writing out the text for engraving on wood. Is it not probable that these exaggerated views of filial * For this purpose the flesh is commonly taken from the fatty portions of the thigh ; but a morsel of the liver is more effica- cious. How young girls (for it is always women who do it) can perform on themselves an operation of such difficulty and sur- vive is a mystery. Perhaps the best explanation is that such statements are figures of speech. NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA 157 piety have had a tendency to dwarf other virtues, and to distort the moral character of the Chinese people? The duty of speaking the truth, for instance, so much insisted on by us of the West, is seldom touched on by the moral writers of China. While the foundation stone is neglected by these builders, what masses of wood, hay, and stubble, do they put in its place! It would be easy to load a cart with separate treatises on the duty of showing respect to written or printed paper. Absurd as are the rhapsodies which Chinese scholars indite on this subject, may they not teach a les- son to our tract distributors, the lesson not to show dis- respect to their own cargoes of printed paper, by selling too cheaply, or giving too lavishly? Then we have exhortations in equal quantity to com- passion for brute animals. The radical sentiment is just and praise-worthy, but the writers rush into extremes as before; and, instead of nourishing a well-poised, active humanity to man, they make a merit of emancipating birds and fish, and of succoring ants that are struggling in the water. Under the influence of this literature, a society has been formed in Peking for the release of captive sparrows ; but I have yet to hear that any society has been organized for the suppression of the sale of little children, a traffic which is openly carried on in all the cities of China ! Our own Cowper wept over a dead hare, and wrote the lines " I would not count upon my list of friends, A man who wantonly set foot upon a worm." But his pity was not exhausted by such manifesta- tions. He admitted man among the objects of his com- passion, and sounded the note of anti-slavery long be- fore the abolition of the trade in slaves : 158 THE LORE OF CATHAY " Fleecy locks and black complexion Cannot forfeit nature's claim : Skins may differ, but affection Dwells in white and black the same." Against particular vices there are numerous tracts which are earnest and powerful. In some, the enormities of infanticide are set forth; some denounce the folly of gambling-; others deal in scathing terms with licentious practices of every description ; still others dissuade from opium-smoking, drunkenness, and the like. Tracts of a distinctly religious type are neither so abundant, nor so highly esteemed, as those that aim to mend the morals of mankind. Yet they are not want- ing; one meets every day with little pamphlets com- mending the worship of particular divinities. Here is one that points out the way to obtain the favor of Chang Hsien, the greatest of the Taoist genii, who rewards his worshippers with the blessing of offspring. Here is an- other which consists chiefly of prayers to Kuan Tin, the goddess of mercy. The prayers are in Sanscrit, and utterly unintelligible to those who use them. Of polemics there are very few, indeed I have only seen one or two of modern origin. The earlier ages teemed with them ; and the literati, by inserting in every collection of ancient essays, Han Yu's ferocious onslaught on Buddhism, seek to keep alive a feeling of animosity against the Indian creed. Time, however, is a great peace-maker. The conflicting elements, that once threat- ened to turn this celestial empire into primeval chaos, have gradually subsided into a stable equilibrium. Antagonistic and mutually destructive, their teachings may be found mixed together in most of the tracts of which we have been speaking. In one of them, in a conspicuous place, at the head of a list of good actions, NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA 159 stands the injunction Kuang Hsing San Chiao, " Spread far and wide the Three Religions." A little treatise full of deep thought, which shows to advantage the blending of the three creeds, is Ts'ai Ken T'ien. Its author, Hung Ying Ming, was a moralist >f a high order, but nothing is known of him except that he lived about three centuries ago. Philosophers tell us of a time, happily far in the future, when earth shall no more be the scene of terrific storms, when north wind and south wind shall cease to con- tend for the mastery, because the atmosphere no longer receives sufficient heat from the sun to disturb its re- pose. It is the heat of conviction that engenders contro- versy. Where that has ceased, is there not reason to suspect that faith has lost its vitality, and that sincere convictions no longer exist? In ancient Rome, the gods of the conquered nations came trooping into the capital; and all of them, in the lapse of time, were seated in friendly conclave in the pantheon of Agrippa. They were at peace, because they were dead. Lucian, in his satirical dialogues, deals with dead gods as well as with dead men; but those dead gods were galvanized into life by the contact of Chris- tianity. Christ came into their midst, and, at his touch, their dry bones began to shake, and they rose up to do battle against the Lord of Life. History repeats itself. What we have seen in Rome, is now taking place in China. The calm of ages is disturbed, and the heat of controversy begins to show itself anew; but the only polemics from the pagan camp are those in which the adherents of the Three Religions combine in vituperative attacks on that arrogant creed which claims for itself the homage of the world. Inert as are the creeds of paganism, in comparison with 160 THE LORE OF CATHAY the undying energies of our Holy Faith, it would be wrong to infer that they are either active for evil, or powerless for good. To those who have not the sun, star-light is oftentimes a precious guide. In looking over a vast variety of native tracts, we are struck by the fact that authors of all the schools agree in seeking to fortify their moral teachings by the sanc- tions of religion. Even the Confucianists ascribe to their canonical books the authority of inspiration. Chu Fu- tze, sceptical as he was on most subjects, admitted the claim of the Confucian teachings to a superhuman origin. Later writers naturally sought to invest their produc- tions with the sanctity derived from an inspired source. The two other creeds peopled the heavens with deified mortals. With them it was easy to hold communication, and from them oracular responses were obtained. If the divinities deigned to give prescriptions for the cure of measles or toothache, why not for the maladies of the human mind? The medium of response was planchette, an instrument known to the Chinese a thousand years before it began to make a figure in Europe. I have my- self seen effusions in faultless verse, fresh from the pens of deified spirits. In connecting religion with morals, these writers agree with us ; for what a feeble thing would be a moral prop- aganda unaided by the fervor of religious faith ! One of the literary lights of the English firmament defines religion as " morality touched by emotion." The definition is neither logical nor complete; but it hits in happy phrase one feature of a union formed by two dis- tinct things. Morality, to borrow the imagery of a Hebrew poet, springs up out of the earth, and religion looks down from Heaven. Morality is the body, cold and beautiful until religion, which is its soul, enters into NATIVE TRACTS OF CHINA 161 it and gives it life; or, in the words of Mr. Arnold, " touches it with emotion." The love of God is religion ; the love of man, morality. The two must be combined, in order to give the highest effect to an enterprise like that of our Tract Societies. The assertion may sound strange, but it is true neverthe- less, that morality is our supreme object. If men were to persist in the debasing practices inseparable from hea- thenism, would we deem it worth while to substitute the names of Jehovah and Jesus for those of Kuan Ti and Buddha? We should not fail to recognize how much has been done by the agency of native tracts to prepare the way for the tractarian crusade, in which we are now em- barked. It is owing to them that our efforts in this direction meet with a respectful welcome. Let us, on our part, cultivate a sympathy for all that is good in native books and native methods, and endeavor to learn from them something that may enable us more efficiently to carry on our own enterprise. That which we may study with most advantage is their mode of communicating instruction on religious and moral subjects. No missionary should undertake the composition of a Christian tract, without having first made himself acquainted with a wide range of native tracts. Not only may he learn from them how to treat his sub- ject in a style at once concise and lucid, respectable in the eyes of the learned, yet not above the comprehension of the vulgar, what is more, he may learn from them the spiritual wants of the audience whom he proposes to instruct and relieve. A weakness of tfie native tract lies in the fact that, for the most part, elegant as it may be, it contains noth- ing but what everybody knows. We, in the preparation 162 THE LORE OF CATHAY of our tracts, can draw on resources that lie beyond the reach of native authors. In addition to the inestimable treasures of Revealed Truth, we have Geography, His- tory, Astronomy, Physics, to communicate, not to speak of our improved systems of Mental and Moral Philosophy. These sciences are not only powerful for the over- throw of superstition, they are essential to the under- standing of religious truth. Every new tract ought to contain more or less on these subjects; and some tracts should be entirely devoted to them, and to the religious applications of which they are so readily susceptible. Would it not be well for our Tract Societies to prepare a series not of text-books, for that task has been under- taken by another association but of primers, which, along with religious truth, shall impart the elements of science? By acting on this principle, our publications will be made in the highest sense an educational agency. They will command the respect of the better classes, and not only win them away from grovelling supersti- tions, but lead high and low away from their imperfect lights to Him who is the Light of the World. BOOK III Religion and Philosophy of the Chinese XI THE SAN CHIAO, OR THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA THE religious experience of the Chinese is worthy of attentive study. Detached at an early period from the parent stock, and for thousands of years holding but little intercourse with other branches of the human family, we are able to ascertain with a good degree of precision those ideas which constituted their original inheritance, and to trace in history the development or corruption of their primitive beliefs. Midway in their long career, they imported from India an exotic system, completing the triad of their authorized creeds. In their experience each of the leading systems has been fairly tested. The arena has been large enough, and the duration of the experiment long enough, to admit of each working out its full results. These experiments are of the greater value, because they have been wrought out in the midst of a highly organized society, and in connec- tion with a high degree of intellectual culture. In views and practices, the Chinese of to-day are poly- theistic and idolatrous. The evidence of this strikes the attention of the voyager on every hand. In the sanpan that carries him to the shore, he discovers a small shrine which contains an image of the river-god, the god of wealth, or Kuan Yin (the goddess of mercy). His eye is charmed by the picturesqueness of pagodas perched on mountain-crags, and monasteries nestling in sequestered dells ; and, on entering even a small town, he is surprised at the extent, if not the magnificence, of temples erected 165 i66 THE LORE OF CATHAY to Ch'eng Huang, the " city defender," and Wen Ch'ang, the patron of letters. Heaps of gilt paper are consumed in the streets, accompanied by volleys of fire-crackers. Bonzes, modulating their voices by the sound of a wooden rattle, fill the air with their melancholy chant; and pro- cessions wind through narrow lanes, bearing on their shoulders a silver effigy of the " dragon king," the god of rain. These temples, images, and symbols, he is informed, all belong to San Chiao (three religions). All three are equally idolatrous, and he inquires in vain for any in- fluential native sect, which, more enlightened or philo- sophical than the rest, raises a protest against the prevail- ing superstition. Yet, on acquiring the language and studying the popular superstitions in their myriad fan- tastic shapes, he begins to discover traces of a religious sentiment, deep and real, which is not connected with any of the objects of popular worship a veneration for T'ien, or Heaven, and a belief that in the visible heavens there resides some vague power who provides for the wants of men, and rewards them according to their deeds. Personified as Lao T'ien Yeh not Heavenly Father, as it expresses the Christian's conception of combined tender- ness and majesty, but literally " Old Father Heaven," much as we say " Old Father Time " or designated by a hundred other appellations, this august but unknown Being, though universally acknowledged, is invoked or worshipped only to a very limited extent. Some, at the close of the year, present a thank-offering to the Great Power who has controlled the course of its events ; others burn a stick of incense every evening under the open sky ; and in the marriage ceremony all classes bow down before T'ien as the first of the five objects of veneration.* * The other four are the earth, the prince, parents, and teachers. THE TEMPLE OF HEAVEN THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 167 When taxed with ingratitude in neglecting to honor that Being on whom they depend for existence, the Chinese uniformly reply, " It is not ingratitude, but rev- erence, that prevents our worship. He is too great for us to worship. None but the Emperor is worthy to lay an offering on the altar of Heaven." In conformity with this sentiment, the Emperor, as the high priest and medi- ator of his people, celebrates in Peking the worship of Heaven with imposing ceremonies. Within the gates of the southern division of the capi- tal, and surrounded by a sacred grove so extensive that the silence of its deep shades is never broken by the noises of the busy world, stands the Temple of Heaven. It consists of a single tower, whose tiling of resplendent azure is intended to represent the form and color of the aerial vault. It contains no image, and the solemn rites are not performed within the tower; but, on a marble altar which stands before it, a bullock is offered once a year as a burnt-sacrifice, while the master of the Empire prostrates himself in adoration of the Spirit of the Uni- verse.* This is the high-place of Chinese devotion ; and the thoughtful visitor feels that he ought to tread its courts with unsandalled feet.f For no vulgar idolatry has en- tered here : this mountain-top still stands above the waves of corruption, and on this solitary altar there still rests * Another tower of similar structure but larger dimensions stands in a separate enclosure as a kind of vestibule to the more sacred place, and here it is that the Emperor prays for " fruitful seasons." t Dr. Legge, the distinguished translator of the Chinese clas- sics, visiting Peking some years after this was written, actually " put his shoes from off his feet " before ascending the steps of the great altar. Yet in 1900 this sacred spot was converted into a barracks for British troops ! 1 68 THE LORE OF CATHAY a faint ray of the primeval faith. The tablet which rep- resents the invisible Deity is inscribed with the name of Shang Ti, the Supreme Ruler ; and as we contemplate the Majesty of the Empire prostrate before it, while the smoke ascends from his burning sacrifice, our thoughts are irresistibly carried back to the time when the King of Salem officiated as " Priest of the Most High God." The writings and the institutions of the Chinese are not, like those of the Hindus and the Hebrews, pervaded with the idea of God. It is, nevertheless, expressed in their ancient books with so much clearness as to make us wonder and lament that it has left so faint an impres- sion on the national mind. In their books of History it is recorded that music was invented for the praise of Shang Ti. Rival claimants for the throne appeal to the judgment of Shang Ti. He is the arbiter of nations, and, while actuated by benevolence, is yet capable of being provoked to wrath by the iniquities of men. In the Book of Changes he is represented as restor- ing life to torpid nature on the return of spring. In the Book of Rites it is said that the ancients " prayed for grain to Shang Ti," and presented in offering a bullock, which must be without blemish, and stall-fed for three months before the day of sacrifice. In the Book of Odes, mostly composed from eight hundred to a thousand years before the Christian era, and containing fragments of still higher antiquity, Shang Ti is represented as seated on a lofty throne, while the spirits of the good " walk up and down on his right and left." In none of these writings is Shang Ti clothed in the human form or debased by human passion like the Zeus of the Greek. There is in them even less of anthropo- morphism than we find in the representations of Jehovah THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 169 in the Hebrew Scriptures. The nearest approach to ex- hibiting him in the human form is the ascription to Shang Ti of a " huge footprint," probably an impression on some mass of rock. Educated Chinese, on embracing Christianity, assert that the Shang Ti of their fathers was identical with the T'ien Chu, the Lord of Heaven, whom they are taught to worship. Paul Hsiu, a member of the Hanlin Academy, and cabinet minister under the Ming dynasty, makes this assertion in an eloquent apology ad- dressed to the throne in behalf of his new faith and its teachers. There is no need of an extended argument, to establish the fact that the early Chinese were by no means desti- tute of the knowledge of God. They did not, indeed, know him as the Creator, but they recognized him as su- preme in providence, and without beginning or end. Whence came this conception? Was it the mature re- sult of ages of speculation, or was it brought down from remote antiquity on the stream of patriarchal tradition? The latter, we think, is the only probable hypothesis. In the earlier books of the Chinese there is no trace of speculative inquiry. They raise no question as to the na- ture of Shang Ti, or the grounds of their faith in such a being, but in their first pages allude to him as already well known, and speak of burnt-offerings made to him on mountain-tops as an established rite. Indeed, the idea of Shang Ti, when it first meets us, is not in the process of development, but already in the first stages of decay. The beginnings of that idolatry by which it was subse- quently almost obliterated are distinctly traceable. The heavenly bodies, the spirits of the hills and rivers, and even the spirits of deceased men, were admitted to a share in the divine honors of Shang Ti. The religious sentiment was frittered away by being directed to a mul- i ;o THE LORE OF CATHAY tiplicity of objects, and the popular mind seemed to take refuge among the creatures of its own fancy, as Adam did amidst the trees of the Garden, from the terrible idea of a holy God. The worship of the Supreme Ruler, grand as it is, is in the present day like a ray of the sun falling upon an iceberg, so far as its influence on the public mind is con- cerned. It is limited to the emperor and to a few re- markable and august manifestations of public ritual ; but you do not find it in the household. You do not find it on the lips of the people. You do not find that God in that form has taken up his abode with men. He is still far remote, on the summit of an icy Olympus, as it were, although to a certain extent dimly perceived by the mind of the Chinese nation. In order to understand the mutual relations of these three systems in other words, to understand the relig- ious aspects of China at the present day it will be neces- sary to give separate attention to the rise and progress of each. We begin with Confucianism. The Confucian system did not originate with Con- fucius. He took the records of remote antiquity and sifted them, in such wise, however, as to exert in a most effective manner the influence of an editor, giving to the readers of all succeeding ages only that which he wished to produce its effect on the national mind. We conse- quently date Confucianism from the beginning of his records, from the time of Yao and Shun, his favorite models of virtue, twenty-two centuries before the Christian era. There are two classes of great men who leave their mark on the condition of their species those who change the course of history without any far-reaching purpose, much as a falling cliff changes the direction of a stream ; THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 171 and those, again, who, like skilful engineers, excavate a channel for the thought of future generations. Pre- eminent among the latter stands the name of Confucius. Honored during his lifetime to such a degree that the princes of several states lamented his decease like that of a father, his influence has deepened with time and ex- tended with the swelling multitudes of his people. Bud- dhism and Taoism have both fallen into a state of irre- trievable decay, but the influence and the memory of Con- fucius continue as green as the cypresses that shade his tomb. After the lapse of three and twenty centuries, he has a temple in every city, and an effigy in every school- room. He is venerated as the fountain of wisdom by all the votaries of letters, and worshipped by the mandarins of the realm as the author of their civil polity. The es- timation in which his teachings continue to be held is well exhibited in the reply which the people of Shantung, his native province, gave to a missionary who, some fifty years ago, offered them Christian books : " We have seen your books," said they, " and neither desire nor ap- prove them. The instructions of our Sage are sufficient for us, and they are superior to any foreign doctrines that you can bring us." * Born B. c. 551, and endowed with uncommon talents, Confucius was far from relying on the fertility of his own genius. " Reading without thought is fruitless, and thought without reading dangerous," is a maxim which he taught his disciples, and one which he had doubtless followed in the formation of his own mind. China al- ready possessed accumulated treasures of literature and history. With these materials he stored his memory, and * Since that date a change has come over the people of Shan- tung. Ip no other province has Christianity met with so ready a reception. 1 72 THE LORE OF CATHAY by the aid of reflection digested them into a system for the use of posterity. Filled with enthusiasm by the study of the ancients, and mourning over the degeneracy of his own times, he en- tered at an early age on the vocation of reformer. He at first sought to effect his objects by obtaining civil office and setting an example of good government, as well as by giving instruction to those who became his disciples. At the age of fifty-five he was advanced to the premier- ship of his native State ; and in a few months the improve- ment in the public morals was manifest. Valuables might be exposed in the street without being stolen, and shepherds abandoned the practice of filling their sheep with water before leading them to market. A singular circumstance led him to renounce political life. The little kingdom of Lu grew apace in wealth and prosperity ; and the prince of a rival State, in order to prevent its acquiring an ascendency in the politics of the Empire, felt it necessary to counteract the influence of the wise legislator. Resorting to a stratagem similar to that which Louis XIV. employed with Charles II., he sent instead of brave generals or astute statesmen, a band of beautiful girls who were skilled in music and dancing. The prince of Lu, young and amorous, was caught in the snare, and, giving the rein to pleasure, abandoned all the schemes of reform with which he had been inspired by the counsels of the Sage. Disappointed and disgusted, Confucius retired into private life. Thwarted, as he had often been, by royal pride and official jealousy, he henceforth endeavored to attain his ends by a less direct but more certain method. He de- voted himself more than ever to the instruction of youth, and to the collection of those monuments of ancient wis- dom, which form the basis of his teaching. His fame THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 173 attracted young men of promise from all the surrounding principalities. No fewer than three thousand received his instructions, among whom five hundred became dis- tinguished mandarins, and seventy-two of them are en- rolled on the list of the sages of the Empire. Through these and the books which he edited subsequently to this period, there can be no doubt that he exerted a greater influence on the destinies of the Empire than he could have done had he been seated on the Imperial throne. He won for himself the title of Su Wang, " the un- sceptred monarch," whose intellectual sway is acknowl- edged by all ages.* Confucius understood the power of proverbs, and, in- corporating into his system such as met his approval, he cast his own teachings in the same mould. His speeches are laconic and oracular, and he has transmitted to pos- terity a body of political ethics expressed in formulae so brief and comprehensive that it may easily^ be retained in the weakest memory. Thus, chiin ch'en, fu tze, fu fu, hsiung ti, p'eng yu are ten syllables which every boy in China has at his tongue's end. They contain the entire framework of the social fabric the " five relations " of sovereign and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, brother and brother, friend and friend, which, ac- cording to the Chinese, comprehend the whole duty of man as a social being. The five cardinal virtues benevo- lence, justice, order, prudence, and fidelity so essen- tial to the well-being of society, Confucius inculcated in the five syllables jen, i, li, chih, hsin. The following sentences, taken from his miscellaneous discourses, may serve as illustrations of both the style and the matter of his teaching : * For an account of his family see Note II. at the end of this chapter. i 7 4 THE LORE OF CATHAY " Good government consists in making the prince a prince, the subject a subject, the parent a parent, and the child a child." " Beware of doing to another what you would not that others should do to you." " He that is not offended at being misunderstood is a superior man." " Have no friend who is inferior to yourself in virtue." " Be not afraid to correct a fault. He that knows the right and fears to do it is not a brave man." " If you guide the people by laws, and enforce the laws by punishment, they will lose the sense of shame and seek to evade them; but if you guide them by a virtuous ex- ample, and diffuse among them a love of order, they will be ashamed to transgress." " To know what we know, and what we do not know, is knowledge." " We know not life, how can we know death? " " The filial son is one who gives his parents no anxiety but for his health." Filial piety, Confucius taught, is not merely a domestic virtue, but diffuses its influence through all the actions of life. A son who disgraces his parents in any way is unfilial ; one who maltreats a brother or a relative, forget- ful of the bonds of a common parentage, is unfilial. This powerful motive is thus rendered expansive in its applica- tion, like piety to God in the Christian system, for which, indeed, it serves as a partial substitute. It is beautifully elaborated in the Hsiao Ching, the most popular of the Thirteen Classics. Virtue, Confucius taught with Aristotle, is the mean between two vices, and this theory is developed by his grandson in the Chung Yung, the sublimest of the sacred books. THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 175 The secret of good government, he taught, consists in the cultivation of personal virtue on the part of rulers; and the connection between private morals and national politics is well set forth in the Ta Hsueh, or Great Study. This brief tractate is the only formal composition, with the exception of an outline of history, which the Great Sage put forth as the product of his own pen. " I am an editor, and not an author," is the modest account which he gives of himself, and it is mainly to his labors in this department that China is indebted for her knowl- edge of antecedent antiquity. The spirit in which he discharged this double duty to the past and future may be inferred from the impressive ceremony with which he concluded his great task. As- sembling his disciples, he led them to the summit of a neighboring hill, where sacrifices were usually offered. Here he erected an altar, and placing on it an edition of the sacred books which he had just completed, the gray- haired philosopher, now seventy years of age, fell on his knees, devoutly returned thanks for having had life and strength granted him to accomplish that laborious under- taking, at the same time imploring that the benefit his countrymen would receive from it might not be small. " Chinese pictures," says Pauthier, " represent the Sage in the attitude of supplication, and a beam of light or a rainbow descending on the sacred volumes, while his disciples stand around him in admiring wonder." * Thales expired about the time Confucius drew his in- fant breath, and Pythagoras was his contemporary; but the only names among the Greeks which admit of com- parison with that of Confucius are Socrates and Aristotle, the former of whom revolutionized the philosophy of * Since reading this passage in Pauthier, I have myself seen this picture in a native pictorial biography of Confucius. 176 THE LORE OF CATHAY Greece, and the latter ruled the dialectics of mediaeval Europe. Without the discursive eloquence of the one or the logical acumen of the other, Confucius surpassed them both in practical wisdom, and exceeds them im- measurably in the depth, extent, and permanence of his influence. It is not surprising that when missionaries attempt to direct their attention to the Saviour, the Chinese point to Confucius and challenge comparison ; nor that they should sometimes fail to be satisfied with the arguments employed to establish the superiority of Jesus Christ. But the thoughtful Christian who has studied the canonical books of China can hardly return to the perusal of the New Testament without a deeper conviction of its divine authority. In the Confucian classics he detects none of that impurity which defiles the pages of Greek and Roman authors, and none of that monstrous mythology which constitutes so large a portion of the sacred books of the Hindoos, but he discovers defects enough to make him turn with gratitude to the revelations of a " Greater Teacher." Disgusted at the superstitions of the vulgar, and de- sirous of guarding his followers against similar excesses, Confucius led them into the opposite extreme of scepti- cism. He ignored, if he did not deny, those cardinal doc- trines of all religion, the immortality of the soul, and the personal existence of God, both of which were currently received in his day. In place of Shang Ti (Supreme Ruler), the name under which the God of Nature had been worshipped in earlier ages, he made use of the vague appellation Tien (Heaven) ; thus opening the way, on the one hand, for that atheism with which their modern philosophy is so deeply infected, and, on the other, for that idolatry which nothing but the doctrine of a personal THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 177 God can effectually counteract. When his pupils pro- posed inquiries respecting a future state, he either dis- couraged them or answered ambiguously, and thus de- prived his own precepts of the support they might have derived from the sanctions of a coming retribution. Thus in a remarkable discourse reported in the Chia Yu a col- lection the authority of which is not, however, above sus- picion he says, " If I should say the soul survives the body, I fear the filial would neglect their living parents in their zeal to serve their deceased ancestors. If, on the contrary, I should say the soul does not survive, I fear lest the unfilial should throw away the bodies of their parents and leave them unburied." We may add that, while his writings abound in the praises of virtue, not a line can be found inculcating the pursuit of truth. Expediency, not truth, is the goal of his system. Contrast with this the Gospel of Christ, which pronounces him the only freeman whom the " truth makes free," and promises to his followers " the Spirit of Truth " as his richest legacy. The style of Confucius was an ipse-dixit dogmatism, and it has left its impress on the unreasoning habit of the Chinese mind. Jesus Christ appealed to evidence and challenged inquiry, and this characteristic of our religion has shown itself in the mental development of Christian nations. Nor is the contrast less striking in another point. Illius dicta, hujus facta laudantur, to borrow the words of Cicero, in comparing Cato with Socrates. Confucius selected disciples who should be the depositaries of his teachings ; Christ chose apostles who should be witnesses of his actions. Confucius died lamenting that the edifice he had labored so long to erect was crumbling to ruin. Christ's death was the crowning act of his life; and his last words, " It is finished." 178 THE LORE OF CATHAY It was a philosophy, not a religion, that Confucius aimed to propagate. " Our Master," say his disciples, " spake little concerning the gods." He preferred to con- fine his teachings to the more tangible realities of human life; but so far from setting himself to reform the vulgar superstition, he conformed to its silly ceremonies and en- joined the same course on his disciples. " Treat the gods with respect," he said to them, but he added, in terms which leave no ambiguity in the meaning of the precept, " keep them at a distance," or, rather, " keep out of their way." A cold sneer was not sufficient to wither or eradi- cate the existing idolatry, and the teachings of Confucius gave authority and prevalence to many idolatrous usages which were only partially current before his day. Confucianism now stands forth as the leading religion of the Empire. Its objects of worship are of three classes the powers of nature, ancestors, and heroes. Originally recognizing the existence of a Supreme personal Deity, it has degenerated into a pantheistic medley, and renders worship to an impersonal anima mundi under the leading forms of visible nature. Besides the concrete universe, separate honors are paid to the sun, moon,, and stars, mountains, rivers, and lakes. Of all their religious observances, tKe worship of an- cestors is that which the Chinese regard as the most sacred. As vEneas obtained the name of " Pious " in honor of his filial devotion, so the Chinese idea of piety rises no higher. The Emperor, according to the Confu- cian school, may worship the Spirit of the Universe, but for his subjects it is sufficient that each present offerings to the spirits of his own ancestors. These rites are per- formed either at the family tombs or in the family temple, where wooden tablets, inscribed with their names, are preserved as sacred to the memory of the deceased, and THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 179 worshipped precisely in the same manner as are the popular ido's. The class of deified heroes comprehends illustrious sages, eminent sovereigns, faithful statesmen, valiant warriors, filial sons, and public benefactors Confucius himself occupying the first place, and constituting, as the Chinese say, " one of a trinity with Heaven and Earth." Like Confucianism, Taoism is indfgenous to China, and, coeval with the former in its origin, it was also co- heir to the mixed inheritance of good and evil contained in the more ancient creeds. The Taoists derive their name from tao, reason, and call themselves Rationalists; but, with a marvelous show of profundity, nothing can be more irrational than their doctrine and practice. Their founder, Li Erh, appears to have possessed a great mind, and to have caught glimpses of several sublime truths ; but he has been sadly misrepresented by his degenerate followers. He lived in the sixth century B. c., and was contemporary with, but older than, Confucius. So great was the fame of his wisdom that the latter philosopher sought his instructions ; but, differing from him in mental mould as widely as Aristotle did from Plato, he could not relish the boldness of his speculations or the vague ob- scurity of his style. He never repeated his visit, though he always spoke of him with respect and even with ad- miration. Laotze, the " old Master," is the appellation by which the great Taoist is commonly known, and it was probably given him during his lifetime to distinguish him from his younger rival. The rendering of " old child " is no more to be received than the fiction of eighty years' gestation invented to account for it. Laotze bequeathed his doctrines to posterity in " five thousand words," which compose the Tao Te Ching, the i8o THE LORE OF CATHAY Rule of Reason and Virtue. In expression, this work is extremely sententious ; and in the form of its composition, semi-poetical. It abounds in acute apothegms, and some of its passages rise to the character of sublimity; but so incoherent are its contents that it is impossible for any literal interpretation to form them into a system. Its inconsistencies, however, readily yield to that universal solvent the hypothesis of a mystical meaning under- lying the letter of the text. The following passage ap- pears to embody some obscure but lofty conceptions of the True God : " That which is invisible is called yi. That which is inaudible is called hsi. That which is impalpable is called wci. These three are inscrutable, and blended in one. The first is not the brighter ; nor the last the darker. It is interminable, ineffable, and existed when there was nothing. A shape without shape, a form without form. A confounding mystery! Go back, you cannot discover its beginning. Go forward, you cannot find its end. Take the ancient Reason to govern the present, And you will know the origin of old. This is the first principle of Tao." Some European scholars discover here a notion of the Trinity, and, combining the syllables yi, hsi, and wci for which process, however, they are unable to assign any very good reason they obtain yihsiwei, which they ac- cept as a distorted representation of the name Jehovah. Laotze is said to have travelled in countries to the west of China, where it is supposed he may have met with Jews, and learned from them the name and nature of the Supreme Being. It is an interesting fact that native THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 181 commentators, though knowing nothing of these conjec- tures, recognize in the passage a description of Shang Ti, the God of the Chinese patriarchs ; and the three syllables of which the acrostic is composed are admitted to have no assignable meaning in the Chinese language. Here we find a connection between the degenerate philosophy of after-ages and the pure fountain of prime- val truth. In fact, this very Shang Ti, though they have debased the name by bestowing it on a whole class of their dii superiores, is still enthroned on the summit of the Taoist Olympus, with ascriptions more expressive of his absolute divinity than any to be met with in the canonical books of the Confucian school. At the head of their Theogony stands the triad of the San Ching, the " Three Pure " ones ; the first of whom is styled " The mysterious sovereign who has no superior ; " " The self- existent source and beginning ; " " The honored one of Heaven." He is said to have created the " three worlds ; " to have produced men and gods ; to have set the stars in motion, and caused the planets to revolve. But, alas! this cata- logue of sublime titles and divine attributes is the epitaph of a buried faith. The Taoists persuaded themselves that this August Being, wrapped in the solitude of his own perfections, had delegated the government of the universe to a subordinate, whom they style Yii Huang Shang Ti. The former has dwindled into an inoperative idea, the latter is recognized as the actual God ; and this deity, who plays mayor of the palace to a roi faineant, is regarded as the apotheosis of a mortal by the name of Chang, an ancestor of the present hierarch of the Taoist religion. It is not unusual, after discoursing to them of the at- tributes of the True God, to hear the people exclaim, " That is our Yu Huang Shang Ti." 1 82 THE LORE OF CATHAY In its philosophy, this school is radically and thoroughly materialistic. The soul itself they regard as a material substance, though of a more refined quality than the body it inhabits. Liable to dissolution, together with the body, it may be rendered capable of surviving the wreck by undergoing a previous discipline. Even the body is ca- pable of becoming invulnerable by the stroke of death, so that the etherealized form will, instead of being laid in the grave, be wafted away to the abodes of the genii. It is scarcely possible to represent the extent to which this idea fired the minds of the Chinese for ages after its promulgation, or to estimate the magnitude of its con- sequences. The prospect of a corporeal immortality to be conquered by a laborious discipline; an immortality which was not the heritage of the many, but might be- come the prize of a few, had for them attractions far stronger than a shadowy existence in the land of spirits ; and they sought it with an eagerness amounting to frenzy. The elixir of life became a grand object of pursuit witness these lines which I render from a well-known Chinese poem, which illustrates at once its spirit and method : " A prince the draught immortal went to seek And finding it, he soared above the spheres. In mountain caverns he had dwelt a week, Of human time, it was a thousand years." Alchemy, with its foolish failures and grand achieve- ments, sprang directly from the religion of Tao.* The leading principle of Taoism, of which their dogma concerning the human soul is only a particular applica- tion, is that every species of matter possesses a soul a subtile essence that may become endowed with in- * See chapter on Alchemy in this volume. THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 183 dividual conscious life. Freed from their grosser ele- ments, these become the genii that preside over the vari- ous departments of nature. Some wander at will through the realms of space, endowed with a protean facility of transformation ; others, more pure and ethereal, rise to the regions of the stars, and take their places in the firmament. Thus the five principal planets are called by the names of the five terrestrial elements from which they are believed to have originated, and over which they are regarded as presiding. They are not worlds, but divini- ties, and their motions control the destinies of men and things a notion which has done much to inspire the zeal of the Chinese for recording the phenomena of the heavens. A theogony like this is rich in the elements of poetry ; and most of the machinery in Chinese works of imagina- tion is, in fact, derived from this source. The Liao Chai, for example, a collection of marvelous tales which, in their general character, may be compared with the Meta- morphoses of Ovid, is largely founded on the Taoist mythology. In accordance with the materialistic character of the Taoist sect, nearly all the gods whom the Chinese regard as presiding over their material interests originated with this school. The god of rain, the god of fire, the god of medicine, the god of agriculture, and the lares, or kitchen gods, are among the principal of this class. A system which supplies deities answering to the lead- ing wants and desires of mankind cannot be uninfluential ; but, in addition to the strong motives that attract wor- shippers to their temples, the Taoist priesthood possess two independent sources of influence. They hold the monopoly of geomancy, a superstitious art which pro- fesses to select on scientific principles those localities that 184 THE LORE OF CATHAY are most propitious for building and burial; and they have succeeded in persuading the people that they alone are able to secure them from annoyance by evil spirits. The philosophy of Tao has thus not only given birth to a religion, but degenerated into a system of magical impos- ture, presided over by an arch-magician who lives in al- most imperial state,* and sways the sceptre over the spirits of the invisible world as the Emperor does over the living population of the Empire. As a religion, Buddhism seems to enjoy more of the popular favor than Taoism ; though the former professes to draw men away from the world and its vanities, while the latter proffers the blessings of health, wealth, and long life. It is rare that we find a Buddhist temple of any con- siderable reputation that is not situated in a locality dis- tinguished for some feature of its natural scenery. One situated in the midst of a dusty plain, not far from the gates of Tientsin, seemed to us, when we first visited it, to present an exception to the general rule. Subsequently, however, a brilliant mirage, which we frequently saw as we approached the temple, furnished us at once with the explanation of its location and its name. It is called the temple of the " Sea of Light ; " and its founders, no doubt, placed it there in order that the deceptive mirage, which is always visible in bright sunny weather, might serve its contemplative inmates as a memento of the chief tenet of their philosophy that all things are unreal, and human life itself a shifting phantasmagoria of empty shadows. Sequestered valleys enclosed by mountain-peaks, and elevated far above the world which they profess to de- * This is not quite true of the present High-priest, who is so reduced in circumstances that he sometimes leaves his residence in the Lung Hu mountains to raise money in wealthier regions. THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 185 spise, are favorite seats for the monastic communities of Buddhism. But it is no yearning after God that leads them to court retirement; nor is it the adoration of na- ture's Author that prompts them to place their shrines in the midst of His sublimest works. To them the universe is a vacuum, and emptiness the highest object of con- templation. They are a strange paradox religious atheists! Ac- knowledging no First Cause or Conscious Ruling Power, they hold that the human soul revolves perpetually in the urn of fate, liable to endless ills, and enjoying no real good. As it cannot cease to be, its only resource against this state of interminable misery is the extinction of con- sciousness a remedy which lies within itself, and which they endeavour to attain by ascetic exercises. Their daily prayers consist of endless repetitions, which are not expected to be heard by the unconscious deity to whom they are addressed, but are confessedly designed merely to exert a reflex influence on the worshipper i. e., to occupy the mind with empty sounds and withdraw it from thought and feeling. Ta Ma, one of their saints, is said thus to have sat motionless for nine years with his face to the wall ; not engaged, as a German would con- jecture, in " thinking the wall," but occupied with the more difficult task of thinking nothing at all. Those in whom the discipline is complete are believed to have entered the Nirvana not an Elysium of con- scious enjoyment, but a negative state of exemption from pain. Such is the condition of all the Buddhas, who, though the name is taken to signify supreme intelligence, are reduced to an empty abstraction in a state which is described as pu sheng pu mich " neither life nor death ; " and such is the aspiration of all their votaries. Melan- choly spectacle! Men of acute minds, bewildered in the 1 86 THE LORE OF CATHAY maze of their own speculations, and seeking to attain perfection by stripping themselves of the highest attri- butes of humanity! As a philosophy, Buddhism resembles Stoicism in de- riving its leading motive from the fear of evil. But while the latter encased itself in panoply, and, standing in martial attitude, defied the world to spoil the treasures laid up in its bosom, the former seeks security by empty- ing the soul of its susceptibilities and leaving nothing that is capable of being harmed or lost i. e., treating the soul as Epictetus is said to have done his dwelling-house, in order that he might not be annoyed by the visits of thieves. It dries up fhe sources of life, wraps the soul in the cerements of the grave, and aims to convert a living being into a spiritual mummy which shall survive all changes without being affected by them. This is the spirit and these the principles of esoteric Buddhism as enunciated by those members of the inner circle whose wan cheeks and sunken, rayless eyes indicate that they are far advanced in the process of self-annihila- tion. In their external manifestations they vary with different schools and countries, the lamas of Tartary and the sarmanas of Ceylon appearing to have little in common. To adapt itself to the comprehension of the masses, Buddhism has personified its abstract conceptions and converted them into divinities; while, to pave the way for its easier introduction, it readily embraces the gods and heroes of each country in its comprehensive pantheon. In China the Nirvana was found to be too subtle an idea for popular contemplation, and, in order to furnish the people with a more attractive object of worship than an unconscious deity, the Buddhists brought forward a Goddess of Mercy, whose special merit was that, having THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 187 reached the verge of Nirvana, she declined to enter, pre- ferring to remain where she could hear the cries and suc- cor the calamities of those who were struggling with the manifold evils of a world of change. From this circum- stance she is called the Ts'e Pei Kuan Yin, the " Merciful Hearer of Prayers " of men. This winning attribute meets a want of humanity, and makes her a favorite among the votaries of the faith. While the Three Buddhas hold a more prominent posi- tion in the temple, she occupies the first place in the hearts of their worshippers. Temples of a secondary class are often devoted especially to her; and in the greater ones she almost always finds a shrine or corner where she is represented with a thousand hands ready to succor human suffering, or holding in her arms a beauti- ful infant, ready to confer the blessing of offspring on her faithful worshippers in this last attribute resembling the favorite object of popular worship in papal countries. From which, indeed, there is reason, to believe she was derived. In the Sea-light Monastery above referred to, she ap- pears in a large side hall, habited in a cloak, her head en- circled by an inscription in gilded characters which pro- claims her as the " Goddess whose favor protects the second birth." This language seems to express a Chris- tian thought; but in reality nothing could be more in- tensely pagan. It relates to the transmigration of souls, which is the fundamental doctrine of the system ; and in- forms the visitor that this is the divinity to whom he is to look for protection in passing through the successive changes of his future existence. Within the mazes of that mighty labyrinth, there is room for every condition of life on earth, and for purga- tories and paradises innumerable besides. Beyond these 1 88 THE LORE OF CATHAY the common Buddhist never looks. To earn by works of merit which play an important part in the modified system the reversion of a comfortable mandarinate, or a place in the " Paradise of the Western Sky," bounds his aspirations. And to escape from having their souls pounded in a spiritual mortar, or ground between spiritual millstones in Hades; or avoid the doom of dwelling in the body of a brute on earth, constitutes with the ignor- ant the strongest motive to deter them from vice those and a -thousand other penalties being set forth by pictures and rude casts to impress the minds of such as are unable to read. Buddhism was little known in China prior to A. D., 66. During an eclipse of Confucianism that lasted two cen- turies caused by its proscription, on political grounds, the Emperor Ming Ti sent an embassy to invite priests from India, and the triad of religions was completed. He is said to have been prompted to this by a remarkable dream. He had seen, he said to his courtiers, a man of gold, holding in his hand a bow and two arrows. They, recognizing in these objects the elements of Fo the name of Buddha as it is written in the Chinese language expounded the dream as an intimation that the Bud- dhist religion ought to be introduced. The story of the dream is evidently of later growth, but it is interesting to speculate as to what the condition of China might have been if the ambassadors, instead of stopping in In- dia, had proceeded to Palestine. As it is, the success of Buddhism demonstrates the possibility of a foreign faith taking root in the soil of China. The San Chiao, or Three Religions, have now passed in revision. We have viewed them, however, owing to the limits of our space, only in outline, neither allowing our- THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 189 selves, on the one hand, to follow up those superstitious practices which attach themselves to the several schools like the moss and ivy that festoon the boughs of aged trees, nor, on the other, to enter into a minute investiga- tion of those systems of philosophy in which they have their root. The fact that each takes its rise in a school of philosophy is significant of the tendencies of human thought. The Confucian philosophy in its prominent character- istics was ethical, occupying itself mainly with social re- lations and civil duties, shunning studiously all questions that enter into ontological subtleties or partake of the marvelous and the supernatural. The philosophy of Tao as developed by the followers of Laotze, if not in the form in which it was left by their master, may be characterized as physical. For the individual it prescribed a physical discipline; and, with- out any conception of true science, it was filled with the idea of inexhaustible resources, hidden in the elements of material nature. The Buddhist philosophy was pre-eminently metaphy- sical. Originating with a people who, far more than the Chinese, are addicted to abstruse speculations, it occu- pied itself with subtle inquiries into the nature and facul- ties of the human mind, the veracity of its perceptions, and the grounds of our delusive faith in the independent existence of an external world. These three philosophies, differing thus widely in their essential character one being thoroughly material, an- other purely ideal, and the third repudiating all such questions and holding itself neutral and indifferent yet exhibit some remarkable points of agreement. They agree in the original omission or negation of religious igo THE LORE OF CATHAY ideas; and they coincide no less remarkably in evolving each, from its negative basis, a system of religion ; and in contributing each its quota to the popular idolatry. Confucius " seldom spoke of the divinities/' and taught his disciples to " keep them at a distance ; " and yet the forms of respect which he enjoined for deceased ancestors led to their virtual deification, and promoted, if it did not originate, the national hero-worship. Like Comte the modern apostle of positivism, who professed to occupy himself wholly with positive ideas, he was unable to satisfy the cravings of his spiritual nature with- out having recourse to a religion of humanity. The Buddhist creed denies alike the reality of the ma- terial world and the existence of an overruling mind ; yet it has peopled an ideal universe with a race of ideal gods, all of whom are entities in the belief- of the vulgar. The Taoist creed acknowledges no such category as that of spirit in contradistinction from matter ; yet it swarms heaven and earth with tutelar spirits whom the people regard as divine. We see here a process directly the reverse of that which certain writers of modern Europe assert to be the natural progress of the human mind. According to them, men set out with the belief of many gods, whom they at length reduce to unity, and finally supersede by recognizing the laws of nature as independent of a personal administrator. The worship of one God is the oldest recorded form of Chinese religion, and idolatry is an innovation. Even now new idols are constantly taking their place in the national pantheon ; and so strong is the tendency in this direction that in every case where philosophy has laid the foundation, idolatry has come in to complete the structure. It is incorrect to assert that any one of the San Chiao is a State religion to the exclusion of the others, though THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 191 the Confucian is sometimes so regarded on account of its greater influence with the ruling classes and its marked prominence in connection with State ceremonials. Not only are they all recognized and tolerated, but they all share the Imperial patronage. The shrines of each of the Three Religions are often erected by Imperial munificence, and their priests and sacred rites provided for at the Im- perial expense with impartial liberality. Not only do they co-exist without conflict in the Em- pire, but they exercise a joint sway over almost every mind in its immense population. It is impossible to ap- portion the people among these several creeds. They are all Confucians, all Buddhists, all Taoists. They all rever- ence Confucius and worship their ancestors all partici- pate in the " feast of hungry ghosts," and employ the Buddhist burial-service ; and all resort to the magical devices of the Taoists to protect themselves against the assaults of evil spirits, or secure " good luck " in busi- ness. They celebrate their marriages according to the Confucian rites; in building their houses, they ask the advice of a Taoist ; -and in cases of alarming illness em- ploy him to exorcise evil spirits. At death they commit their souls to the keeping of the Buddhists. The people assert, and with truth, that these religions, originally three, have become one ; and they are accustomed to sym- bolize this unity by erecting San Chiao T'ang, Temples of the Three Religions, in which Confucius and Laotze ap- pear on the right and left of Buddha, as forming a triad of sages. This arrangement, however, gives great offense to some of the more zealous disciples of Confucius ; and a few years ago a memorial was presented to the Em- peror, praying him to demolish the San Chiao T'ang, which stood near the tomb of their great teacher, who has " no equal but Heaven." I9 2 THE LORE OF CATHAY The effects of this coalition may be traced in their litera- ture as well as in the manners and customs of the people. Of this, one example will suffice, though we might go on, if space permitted, to show how freely the later works of each school appropriate the phraseology of the others, and to point out the extent to which the general language of the country has been enriched by a vocabulary of relig- ious terms, chiefly of Buddhist origin, all of which are incorporated in the Imperial Dictionary and pass as cur- rent coin in the halls of the literary tribunal. In the Liao Chai, a collection of tales, there is a story which owes its humor to the bizarre intermixture of ele- ments from each of the Three Religions. A young nobleman, riding out, hawk in hand, is thrown from his horse and taken up for dead. On being con- veyed to his house, he opens his eyes and gradually re- covers his bodily strength ; but, to the grief of his family, he is hopelessly insane. He fancies himself a Buddhist priest, repels the caresses of the ladies of his harem, and insists on being conveyed to a distant province, where he affirms he has passed his life in a monastery. On arriv- ing he proves himself to be the abbot; and the mystery of his transfiguration is at once solved. He had led a dissolute life, and his flimsy soul, unable to sustain the shock of death, was at once dissipated. The soul of a priest who had just expired happened to be float- ing by, and, led by that desire to inhabit a body which some say impelled the devils to enter the herd of swine, it took possession of the still warm corpse. The young nobleman was a Confucian of the modern type. The idea of the soul changing its earthly tenement is Buddhistic. And that which rendered the metamor- phosis possible, without waiting for another birth, was the Taoist doctrine that the soul is dissolved with the THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 193 body, unless it be purified and concentrated by vigorous discipline. It is curious to inquire on what principles this recon- ciliation has been effected. Have the three creeds mingled together like the three gases in the atmosphere, each contributing some ingredient to the composition of a vital fluid ; or blended like the three primary colors of the spectrum, imparting their own hues in varying propor- tions ; but all present at every point ? It is not a healthy atmosphere that supplies the breath of the new-born soul in China ; not a pure and steady light that meets its open- ing eyes. Yet each of these systems meets a want; and the whole, taken together, supplies the cravings of nature as well perhaps as any creed not derived from a divine revelation. The Three Religions are not, as the natives thought- lessly assume, identical in signification and differing only in their mode of expression. As we have already seen, it is hardly possible to conceive of three creeds more totally distinct or radically antagonistic; and yet, to a certain extent, they are supplementary. And to this it is that they owe their union and their permanence. Confucius gave his people an elaborate theory of their social organization and civil polity ; but when they looked abroad on nature with its unsolved problems, they were unable to confine their thoughts within the limits of his cautious positivism. They were fascinated by mystery, and felt that in nature there were elements of the super- natural which they could not ignore, even if they did not understand them. Hence the rise of Taoism, captivating the imagination by its hierarchy of spirits and personified powers, and meeting, in some degree, the longing for a future life by maintaining, though under hard conditions, the possible achievement of a corporeal immortality. 194 THE LORE OF CATHAY With the momentous question of existence suspended on this bare possibility, Buddhism came to them like an evan- gel of hope, assuring every man of an inalienable interest in a life to come. It gave them a better psychology of the human mind than they had before possessed; afforded a plausible explanation of the inequalities in the condition of men ; and, by the theory of metempsychosis, seemed to reveal the link that connects man with the lower animals, on the one hand, and with the gods, on the other. No wonder it excited the popular mind to a pitch of enthusi- asm, and provoked the adherents of the other creeds to virulent opposition. Taoism, as opposed to it, became more decidedly mate- rial, and Confucianism more positively atheistic. The dis- ciples of the latter especially assailed it with acrimonious controversy denying, though they had hitherto been silent on such questions, the personality of God and the future life of the human soul. Now, however, the effervescence of passion has died away the antagonistic elements have long since neutra- lized each other, and the three creeds have subsided into a stable equilibrium, or rather become compacted into a firm conglomerate. The ethical, the physical, and the meta- physical live together in harmony. The school that denies the existence of matter, that which occupies itself wholly with the properties of matter, and that, again, which de- nounces the subtleties of both and builds on ethics, have ceased their controversies. One deriving its motive from the fear of death, another actuated by a dread of the evils attendant on human life, and the third absorbed in the present and indifferent alike to hope or fear, all are ac- cepted with equal faith by an unreasoning populace. Without perceiving their points of discrepancy, or under- standing the manner in which they supplement each other, THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 195 they accept each as answering to certain cravings of their inward nature, and blend them all in a huge heterogene- ous and incongruous creed. It may help to reconcile ap- parently contradictory statements to remember that each of the three systems appears under a twofold aspect first as an esoteric philosophy, afterwards as a popular religion. Thus a chief object of the Buddhist discipline was the extinction of consciousness. Yet the Chinese embraced it as their best assurance of a future life. What the philoso- pher was anxious to cast away, the populace were eager to possess. It would be interesting to inquire, had we sufficient space, what have been the intellectual and moral influ- ences of these several systems, separate and combined. They have, it is true", given rise to various forms of de- grading superstition, and, supporting instead of destroy- ing each other, they bind the mind of the nation in three- fold fetters ; still, we are inclined to think that each has served a useful purpose in the long education of the Chinese people, and that each represents a distinct stage in the progress of religious thought. Buddhism vastly en- larged their religious conceptions. Their ideas, to borrow a mathematical illustration, were limited, prior to the in- troduction of Buddhism, to two dimensions, to some- thing that may be described as a " flat-land," with length and breadth, but no height. Buddhism gave it height, soaring up to the heavens and developing a view of the universe, the grandeur of which, perhaps, nothing can exceed. Is it possible that, after this universe of three dimensions, we shall have one of four dimensions ? There is, in my view, room for the fourth dimension, or (to drop the figure) there is room for a fourth stage in the progression, one which China is waiting for. Christi- anity alone can supply the defects of all the systems, and 196 THE LORE OF CATHAY present one harmonious unity. They are now offered a better faith one which is consistent with itself and ade- quate to satisfy all their spiritual necessities. Will they receive it? The habit of receiving such contradictory systems has rendered their minds almost incapable of weighing evidence; and they never ask concerning a re- ligion " is it true? " but " is it good? " Christianity, how- ever, with its exclusive and peremptory claims, has already begun to arouse their attention ; and when the spirit of inquiry is once thoroughly awakened, the San Chiao, or Three Creeds, will not long sustain the ordeal. NOTE I THE EMPEROR AT THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN THE Roman Emperors always associated with their other titles that of Pontifex Maximus ; and the Sovereigns of China have from time immemorial acted as High Priests of the empire. It was in that capacity that His Majesty Kuang Hsu officiated at the Temple of Heaven on the 22nd December, 1887, for the first time, on the occasion of the solstitial sacrifices. On the previous day, he proceeded to the Temple with great pomp, accompanied by the grandees of the Court, three elephants harnessed to as many chariots appearing in the procession. Having prepared himself by a night spent in fasting and meditation to approach the presence of the King of Kings, he prostrated himself nine times before a tablet inscribed with the name of Shang Ti, and offered an ox, the bones of the victim being consumed in a furnace. As to the herd of common gods, the Emperor can make THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 197 and unmake them at will. He even assumes to decide whether a living Buddha shall or shall not have the privi- lege of re-appearing in another body ; but in the presence of Shang Ti, the master of China's millions abases him- self in the dust, and confesses himself a subject of law. When the Taiping rebellion was at its height in 1853, the Emperor Hsien Feng repaired to the Altar of Heaven, confessed his sins, and implored on behalf of his suffering people the compassion of the Sovereign of the Universe. By this act, he acknowledged that he ruled by delegated authority, and that he was answerable for its proper use. The same idea is impressively set forth by a row of iron censers, ranged around the foot of the altar. In these, it is not strips of mimic gold that are consumed, nor sticks of incense, but long lists of the names of crim- inals condemned to death, the smoke and flame rising up to Heaven, appealing for ratification or redress to the Supreme Court of the Universe. The Emperor is a monotheist, because there is only one God sufficiently exalted to be to him an object of worship in the highest sense; for, though he does worship at the shrines of other divinities, to none but Shang Ti does he employ the humble style of a servant, and he, if not the only worshipper of Shang Ti, is the only one who is per- mitted to make use of the prescribed ritual. For any one else to presume to imitate that ritual would be an act of high treason, as it could have but one meaning, that of an intention to usurp the prerogatives and to seize the throne of the sovereign. The only instance of this which we have on record except in cases of overt rebellion is that of the Prince of Ch'in erecting an altar to Shang Ti, some 2,500 years ago. The act betokened a disposi- tion on his part to seize the falling crown of the Chous, which one of his descendants actually accomplished. The 198 THE LORE OF CATHAY Chou Emperor in the meantime tolerated the abuse, be- cause he lacked the power to punish so great a vassal. The antiquity of this Imperial rite is not the least in- teresting of its features. It goes back to the first of the Three Dynasties, to a date when Melchisedek combined with his kingly office that of " Priest of the Most High God." In that day, there was no Buddhism, no Taoism ; but, whether that primitive worship connects itself with a purer form of partriarchal faith, or whether, as Emerson expresses it " Up from the heart of nature came, Like the volcano's tongue of flame " I shall not undertake to determine. The idea of the offerings on this occasion is that of a banquet, in which the spirit of the Supreme condescends to accept entertainment at the hand of a mortal. He is accompanied by eight imperial guests, the ancestors of the officiating sovereign, who, like Wen Wang in the Book of Odes, are regarded as favored guests in the Court of Heaven. The august pageant is withheld from eyes profane ; and of course all foreigners in Peking are officially invited to be absent. I do not, accordingly, profess to give you the observa- tions of an eye-witness ; though I have perhaps as good a right to do so as certain war correspondents have had, to depict a battle-scene, when they have viewed the smoke at a distance. I have seen the altar; and I have at this moment the ritual of the day before my eyes. But it would not add much to the interest of my readers to have a libretto of the nine pieces of sacred music, or an in- ventory of the subordinate offerings which accompany the Fan Niu, or ox of burnt sacrifice. THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 199 NOTE II THE DUKE OF K'UNG SUCCESSOR OF CONFUCIUS THE Peking Gazette contains the following obituary announcement, in the usual form of an Imperial decree : " The Duke K'ung Hsiang K'o, lineal successor of the Holy Sage, has departed this life. Let the proper Board report as to the marks of Imperial favor to be accorded in connection with the funeral rites." The Duke was about twenty-six years of age, and a descendant of Confucius at a remove of more than sev- enty generations. The last on the family record published in the last century was the seventy-first. Of his personal character we know nothing, save that he once admitted a company of foreigners, the Rev. Dr. Williamson and others, into his presence, and treated them with great urbanity. What interests us more, and furnishes the sole reason for chronicling his death, whether in these lines or in the still briefer notice in the Peking Gazette, is his representative character. K'ung Hsiang K'o was head of the Confucian clan, and as such he enjoyed the dignities and emoluments of a noble of the first class. Hereditary rank makes so small a figure in the ad- ministration of the Chinese government that we some- times hear it asserted that there is no such thing in China. Now, those who hazard this assertion, not only leave out of view the feudal organization of the Manchu and Mon- gol races, but forget the sonorous titles prefixed to the names of some of the leading Chinese statesmen of the present day. We can scarcely take up. a number of the Peking Gazette without being reminded that Li Hung Chang is an earl, of the first grade ; and a few years ago 2OO the title of marquis, was made equally prominent in con- nection with the name of the late eminent Tseng Kuo Fan and his equally distinguished son. In a word, all the five degrees of hereditary nobility which were in use three thousand years ago are to be found (by searching) among the Chinese of to-day ; but with this important difference, that they no longer imply the possession of landed estates or territorial jurisdiction. Leaving the secular peerage of China proper, as well as that of the dominant race, to be treated by some one who has leisure and inclination for the subject, we propose to devote a few paragraphs to what we venture to denominate the sacred heraldry of the Empire. Many years ago, in the course of an overland journey from Peking to Shanghai, the writer turned aside to visit the tomb of Confucius. It was an impressive spectacle to see the heads of the various branches into which the clan is divided performing their semi-monthly devotions be- fore the tablet of their illustrious ancestor. Many of these discharge official duties, and constitute a kind of priest- hood in the temple of the Sage; their appointments, whether hereditary or otherwise, are duly recorded in the Red Book, or official register. The chief of the tribe is known as Yen Sheng K'ung, the Duke of the Holy Suc- cession a succession which is older in generations than most aged men are in the reckoning of years. There are Jewish families who can boast a longer pedigree running back, perhaps, to the return from captivity, B. c. 536; but where, out of China, shall we look for a family whose nobility has a history of twenty centuries? The first hereditary distinction was conferred on the senior member of the house of K'ung by the founder of the Han dynasty, B. c. 202. The title was at first the THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 201 vague designation of chun, prince, and coupled with the charge of the ancestral temple. This was exchanged for the more distinguishing title of hou, marquis, by order of Wu Ti, of the same dynasty. The later Chou, A. D. 550, substituted the title of K'ung, duke ; but in the next dynasty, that of Sui, it reverted to marquis, and so con- tinued through the three centuries of the T'angs. At the accession of the Sung, the heir of Confucius was again raised to the dignity of duke a rank which he has re- tained without material variation for more than eight centuries. In the topographical and genealogical histories we are favored with biographical sketches of the individual links in this long chain; but through them all there runs a thread of dreary monotony. In earlier ages, the house of K'ung did indeed produce a few men of exceptional eminence in letters and in politics. They are not, how- ever, always found in the line of primogeniture, and, in the rare instances in which titled heads have distinguished themselves, we have to recognize the stimulating influence of court life, from which they were not yet excluded. Under the existing regime, the succession presents us no name of note; a result more due to want of oppor- tunity than to any deterioration of race, for, according to some observers, the blood of Confucius continues to assert itself in the superior development of his posterity. But what are we to expect when a family is rooted to the soil of a cemetery but that it should become as barren as the cypress that overhangs it? The Dukes of K'ung are strictly relegated to the vicinity of their sacerdotal charge, and are not at liberty to visit the capital without express permission from the throne. We recall the late Duke's application for leave to pros- 202 THE LORE OF CATHAY trate himself before the sarcophagus of the Emperor Tung Chili, certainly the last and probably the only oc- casion on which he ever entered the walls of Peking. The family estate, it must be confessed, is large enough to gratify the ambition and employ the energies of an ordinary mortal, amounting (for it is not all in one place) to an area of not less than 165,000 acres. And as for honors, the country nobleman has much to console him for the privations of provincial life ; the Governor of. the province, it is said, being required to approach him with the same forms of homage which he renders to the Son of Heaven. Numerous offices of in- ferior dignity are conferred on other members of the clan, constituting it a kind of Levitical order; but it is pleasing to remark that these tokens of a nation's undy- ing gratitude are not limited to the lineage of Confucius. Around the grand luminary there moved a cluster of satellites, which drank in his beams and propagated his light. The chief of these Yen, Tseng, Sze, Meng, as the Chinese concisely call them, and a few others, continued to be honored in the same way, though not to the same degree, as the Sage himself. Inseparable attendants of the Sage, in all his temples, at least one of which exists in every district of the Empire, each of them enjoys the honor of a separate shrine, and some of his posterity de- rive their subsistence from the charge of it. In the city of Chii Fu, a conspicuous inscription points out the spot where Yen Hui, in the midst of poverty, presented a face ever radiant with joy, because his soul was filled with divine philosophy. Hard by stands a magnificent mausoleum to the man who never wrote a book and never performed any great exploit ; but who embodied in his own practice more perfectly than any other the precepts THREE RELIGIONS OF CHINA 203 of his Master. In the adjoining district of Tsou Hsien stands a temple to Mencius, the St. Paul of Confucianism, who, though he entered the world too late to enjoy the personal teachings of the Great Sage, did more than any other to give them shape and currency. Not far away, in the same city, stands a somewhat dilapidated temple of T'ze Sze, the master of Mencius, and the grandson of Confucius. Though in the direct line, the Chinese have not been willing to merge his name and fame in those of his ancestor; but have taken effectual measures for testifying to all generations their reverence for the author of the Chung Yung, or " Golden Mean." The whole region surrounding the temple of Confucius is dotted over by the tombs of ancient worthies ; and it is touching to see with what sacred care their descendants cherish the fire on their altars. Under various designa- tions they have discharged these offices for more than seventy, and in one instance for nearly a hundred, genera- tions ; but their present titles date from the Ming dynasty. The founder of the Mings, an unlettered warrior, who never read the Four Books until he was seated on the throne and had Liu Chi for a teacher, conferred certain honors on the descendants of Yen Hui and Mencius. His successors ordered that representatives of fifteen of the disciples of Confucius should be enrolled in the Hanlin College, and invested with the office of professors and curators of the Five Classics. Nor is it only the Great Sage and his disciples who enjoy the distinction of a memorial temple, a State ritual, and an hereditary priesthood ; all these are accorded to the Duke of Chou, whom Confucius revered as a master and imitated as a model. Chou Kung died more than five hundred years before the birth of Confucius; but the later Sage not only professed to have caught his inspira- 204 THE LORE OF CATHAY tion from the earlier, but in one of his most touching speeches he gave it as a mark of decaying nature that he had " ceased to dream of Chou Kung." It is not surprising, therefore, that the family of the virtuous Regent of China's typical dynasty should have some small part in the cloud of incense which China offers to the pioneers of her civilization. Their claim to it was eloquently advocated by one of his descendants when the Emperor Kang Hsi visited the " sacred soil of Lu," and promptly recognized by that enlightened monarch. None of these venerated shades is regarded as exercising a tutelar guardianship over the Empire, or over any part of it. Their temples, though vulgar superstitions have gathered round them, are essentially memorial, and the worship wholly commemorative. It is thus that China has sought to mould her children into one family and to secure the stability of society by binding it to the tradi- tions of the past. The representatives of these families, as we have said, are a priesthood rather than a nobility ; but so closely are the two ideas associated in the Chinese mind that a writer of these family histories finds in ancestral worship the origin of feudal dignities. His philosophy is at fault; but it is gratifying to observe that, while the feudal lords of China have gone under in the struggle for existence, the only vestiges of the ancient nobility (the secular are all new) are those which cluster round the memories of the wise and good. XII THE ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE CHINESE WIDELY as the Chinese have departed from the meagre outline of a religious system left them by Confucius, they have generally adhered to his moral teachings. Developed by his followers, re- ceived by the suffrages of the whole people, and enforced by the sanctions of the Three Religions, the principles which he inculcated may be said to have moulded the social life of nearly one-third of the human family. These are nowhere to be found digested into a scientific form, but diffused through the mingled masses of physics and metaphysics which compose the Hsing Li Ta Chiian, En- cyclopaedia of Philosophy, or sparkling in the detached apothegms of " The Sages." Happily for our convenience we have them brought to a focus in the chart, a translation of which is given below. We shall confine ourselves to the task of explaining this important document, as the best method of exhibiting the system in its practical influence ; though an independ- ent view might afford freer scope for discussing its prin- ciples. This chart is anonymous ; but the want of a name de- tracts nothing from its value. The author has no merit beyond the idea of presenting the subject in a tabular view, and the pictorial taste with which he has executed the design. Of the ethical system so exhibited he origi- nated nothing; and the popularity of his work is due 205 2o6 THE LORE OF CATHAY mainly to the fact that it is regarded as a faithful synopsis of the Confucian morals. The half-illuminated sphere prefixed to the chart is a mere embellishment having scarcely more connection with its subject-matter than the royal coat-of-arms stamped on the title-page of some editions has with the contents of King James's Bible. It represents the mundane egg, or mass of chaotic matter, containing Yin and Yang, the seminal principles from whose action and reaction all things were evolved. Part I. is an epitome of the Ta Hsileh, the first of the four chief canonical books of the Chinese, and the most admired production of their great philosopher. Voluminous as an editor, piously embalming the relics of antiquity, Confucius occupies but a small space as an author; a slender compend of history and this little tract of a few hundred words being the only original works which emanated from his own pen. The latter, the title of which signifies the " Great Study," is prized so highly for the elegance of its style and the depth of its wisdom that it may often be seen inscribed in letters of gold, and suspended as an ornamental tableau in the mansions of the rich. It treats of the Practice of Virtue and the Art of Government; and in the following table these two subjects are arranged in parallel columns. In the first we have the lineaments of a perfect character superscribed by the word Sheng, a " Holy Sage," the name which the Chinese give to their ideal. In the other we have a cata- logue of the social virtues as they spread in widening circles through the family, the neighborhood, the State, and the world. These are ranged under Wang, the " Em- peror," whose duty it is to cherish them in his subjects, the force of example being his chief instrument, and the cultivation of personal virtue his first obligation. The ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE 207 I THE LORE OF CATHAY ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE 209 a i* o S. *5 *** c 1* s ss is .* x EB (S O a 1 2.3 ,d '* S I 1 *** jili If! -o^ g ., ,^ 1*3 * -d < W c o d g- -E^ 05 B3 oo-- u . g SO p S g * M K^isa ^ IlltfSf 3 ^i u *--C A + Illl?~|28 B O >B oS .Jg^-ls^-g r i >. o'?--d (S |J* d S^^3^ "9^^ S i g-2 d .H-c j otfo gJ: 3^ o ^S to *?iWJ^ s a BGiSsliSa^-iS *| o'S-Sllgs^Jg&'g 35 9 '3.S *-3S S^S-- s 5 lis 1 !! $d "3) d * I/ * -*J 03 jj O*Tl B-4 W ! i !I: 11 fl >> CM t, >, >- -f. J3 ** l^illl- ao^is?* a>i&s-a s -3 g 2 s s g jj s a ^-i Jr J ^ ^ tn j*a *it 9 iiMii , Iliillllp . "5 * ,*':=! fe JJ h S C " ^3 ^ a> i * i S^Q^k A.49 , 3^^0.2-3*3 C * 3 d O O 5*^3 ti ?>d g I I lal wPi1lll^ s a| LSj^SS! 18 ^ ^o^ 3 g S o-d^ ISI 3 111 ^ 1^5 210 THE LORE OF CATHAY i M .5 t* 5l 'o- d ' g S o-W -itvd Ss^^S illllglfisi E|lHf5!!h * - 2 :|I|||1|| jj | ; rei.Sf?'g^ Is J M rfJSfi"!!* UlliS^I rrl' of til 1-2 -2 :Z S * 3 S 1 " o i- - >i '* J o ' .-9. * 5 x a -3 6ff2 j-g Ss ^5 ^ 4*^3 i o Sfija x i.flioSLrsSa.g^jpa '"8*5 KJ 3 1ST *5 dp . '"^ca^* j ''^r-*-'w llsl||i!|; 'wytiw la rP-Sgee-s pt'd ^d 5 s c'r; 2 ^ a j^r* 5 rX 'i? o ~s v-pi hb su-si i a S -2 & o s| c csJJ S'fc t-3 o e-a a 08** 2*-c 2 o o *flg Ps a S ^ssftS-a -jj^ o .a 1 Q g3| w.~-3 - S a-d > y es .a a< a o, k * -2| a ps .-^r -*- v rs *i-i " -J*sg moral tendency, and wholly passive under the plastic hand of education. A discussion arose between them, a frag- ment of which, preserved in the works of Mencius, will serve to exhibit their mode of disputation, as well as the position of the parties. " Nature," said Kaotze, " is a stick of timber, and good- ness is the vessel that is carved out of it." " The wooden bowl," replied Mencius, " is not a natural product of the timber; but the tree requires to be de- stroyed in order to produce it. Is it necessary to destroy man's nature in order to make him good? " " Then," said Kaotze, varying his illustration, " human nature may be compared with a stream of water. Open a sluice to the east, and it flows to the east; open one to the west, it flows to the westward. Equally indifferent is human nature with regard to good and evil." " Water," rejoined Mencius, " is indifferent as to the east or the west ; but has it no choice between up and down? Now human nature inclines to good, as water does to run downward. The evil it does is the effect of interference, just as water may be forced to run up hill. Man," he repeats, with rhetoric slightly at variance with his philosophy, " inclines to virtue, as water does to flow downward, or as the wild beast does to seek the forest." A few years later, Hsiintze, an acute and powerful writer, took the ground that human nature is evil. The influence of education he extolled in even higher terms than Kaotze, maintaining that whatever good it pro- duces, it achieves by a triumph over nature, which is 217 taught to yield obedience to the dictates of prudence. Virtue is the slow result of teaching, and vice the spon- taneous fruit of neglected nature. Yangtze, about the commencement of the Christian era, endeavored to combine these opposite views; each contained important truth, but neither of them the whole truth. While human nature possessed benevolent affec- tions and a conscience approving of good, it had also perverse desires and a will that chose the evil. It was therefore both bad and good ; and the character of each individual took its complexion, as virtuous or vicious, ac- cording to the class of qualities most cultivated. In the great controversy, Mencius gained the day. The two authors last named were placed on the Index Expur- gatorius of the literary tribunal ; and the advocate of hu- man nature was promoted to the second place among the oracles of the Empire for having added a new doctrine or developed a latent one in the Confucian system. This tenet is expressed in the first line of the San Tze Ching, an elementary book, which is committed to memory by every schoolboy in China Jen chih ch'u hsin pen shan " Man commences life with a virtuous nature." But notwith- standing this addition to the national creed, the ancient aphorism of Shun is still held in esteem ; and a genuine Confucian, in drawing a genealogical tree of the vices, still places the root of evil in the human heart. To remove this contradiction, Chu Hsi, the authorized expositor of the classics, devised a theory somewhat simi- lar to Plato's account of the origin of evil. It evidently partakes of the three principal systems above referred to ; professing, according to the first, to vindicate the original goodness of human nature, yet admitting, with another, that it contains some elements of evil and thus virtually symbolizing with the third, which represents it as of a 218 THE LORE OF CATHAY mixed character. " The bright principle of virtue," he says in his notes on the Ta Hsiich, " man derives from his heavenly origin ; his pure spirit, when undarkened, com- prehends all truth, and is adequate to every occasion. But it is obstructed by the physical constitution and be- clouded by the animal (lit. jcn yil the human) desires, so that it becomes obscure." The source of virtue, as indicated in the chart, is t'ai ho " primordial harmony ; " and vice is ascribed to the influence of um hslng " gross matter." The moral char- acter is determined by the prevailing influence, and man- kind are accordingly divided into three classes, which are thus described in a popular formula : Men of the first class are good without teaching ; those of the second may be made good by teaching ; and the last will continue bad in spite of teaching. The received doctrine in relation to human nature does not oppose such a serious obstacle as might at first be imagined to the reception of Christianity, though there is reason to fear that it may tinge the complexion of Christian theology. The candid and thoughtful will rec- ognize in the Bible a complete view of a subject which their various theories had only presented in detached fragments. In the state of primitive purity, it gives them a heaven-imparted nature in its original perfection ; in the supremacy of conscience, it admits a fact on which they rely as the main support of their doctrine; in the corruption of natuje, introduced by sin, it gives them a class of facts to which their consciousness abundantly testifies ; and in its plan for the restoration of the moral ruin, it excites hope and satisfies reason. The doctrine of human goodness, though supported by a partial view of facts, seems rather to have been sug- gested by views of expediency. Mencius denounced the ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE 219 tenets of Kaotze as pernicious to the cause of morality, and he no doubt considered that to convince men that they are endowed with a virtuous nature is the most effectual method of encouraging them to the practice of virtue. In the absence of revelation, there is nothing better. But while faith in ourselves is a strong motive, faith in God is a stronger one; and while the view that man is endowed with a noble nature, which he only needs to develop according to its own generous instincts, is sublime, there is yet one which is more sublime viz., that while fallen man is striving for the recovery of his divine original, he must work with fear and trembling, because it is God that worketh in him. Part III., the Chart of Moral Excellence as I have called it (or, more literally, of that which is to be striven after and held to), presents us with goodness in all its forms known to the Chinese. It is chiefly remarkable for its grouping, the entire domain being divided into five fami- lies, each ranged under a parent virtue. The Greeks and Romans reckoned four cardinal virtues; but a difference in the mode of division implies no incompleteness in the treatment of the subject. The Chinese do not, because they count only twelve hours in the day instead of twenty- four, pretermit any portion of time; neither, when they number twenty-eight signs in the zodiac, instead of twelve, do they assign an undue length to the starry girdle of the heavens. The classification is arbitrary; and Cicero makes four virtues cover the whole ground which the Chinese moralist refers to five. But while, in a formal treatise, definition and explana- tion may supply the defects of nomenclature or arrange- ment, the terms employed for the cardinal virtues, are not without effect on the popular mind. In this respect the Chinese have the advantage. Theirs are Jen, I, Li, 220 THE LORE OF CATHAY Chih, Hsin Benevolence, Justice, Order,* Wisdom, Good Faith. Those of Plato and Tully are Justice, Pru- dence, Fortitude, and Temperance. In comparing these, Prudence and Wisdom may be taken as identical, though the former appears to be rather more circumscribed in its sphere and tinged with the idea of self-interest. Tem- perance and Order, as explained in the respective systems, are also identical the Latin term contemplating man as an individual, and the Chinese regarding him as a mem- ber of society. The former, Cicero defines as TO irpen-ov, and a sense of propriety or love of order is precisely the meaning which the Chinese give to the latter. In the European code, the prominence given to Fortitude is characteristic of a martial people, among whom, at an earlier period, under the name of ap^, it usurped the entire realm of virtue. In the progress of society, it was compelled to yield the throne to Justice and accept the place of a vassal, both Greek and Latin moralists assert- ing that no degree of courage which is not exerted in a righteous cause is worthy of a better appellation than audacity. They erred, therefore, in giving it the posi- tion of a cardinal virtue, and the Chinese have exhibited more discrimination by placing it in the retinue of Justice. They describe it by two words, Chih and Yung. Con- nected with the former, and explaining its idea, we read the precept, " When you fail, seek help in yourself ; stand firm to your post, and let no vague desires draw you from it." Appended to the latter we have the injunction, " When you see the right, do it ; when you know a fault, * Though politeness is the common acceptation of the term as expressing a regard for propriety in social intercourse, in Chinese ethics it has a wider and higher signification. It is precisely what Malebranche makes the basis of his moral system and denominates " the love of universal order." ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE 221 correct it. Neither yield to excess, if rich, nor swerve from right, if poor." What a noble conception of moral courage, of true fortitude ! Benevolence and good faith which are quite subordinate in the heathen systems of the West, in that of China are each promoted to the leadership of a grand division. In fact, the whole tone of the Chinese morals, as exhibited in the names and order of their cardinal virtues, is con- sonant with the spirit of Christianity.* Benevolence leads the way in prompting to positive efforts for the good of others; justice follows, to regulate its exercise; wisdom sheds her light over both ; good faith imparts the stability necessary to success; order, or a sense of propriety, by bringing the whole conduct into harmony with the fit- ness of things, completes the radiant circle ; and he whose character is 'adorned with all these qualities may be safely pronounced totus teres atque rotundus. The theory of moral sentiments early engaged the at- tention of Chinese philosophers, and particularly the in- quiry as to the origin and nature of our benevolent affec- tions. Some, like Locke and Paley, regarded them as * Cicero thus argues that there could be no occasion for the exercise of any virtue in a state of perfect blessedness, taking up the cardinal virtues seriatim: " Si nobis, cum ex hac vita migra- remus, in beatorum insulis, ut fabulae ferunt, immortale aevum degere liceret, quid opus esset eloquentia, cum judicia nulla fierent? aut ipsis etiam virtutibis? Nee enim fortitudine indi- geremus,*nullo proposito aut labore aut periculo ; nee justitia, cum esset nihil quod appeteretur alieni ; nee temperantia, quse regeret eas quae nullae essent libidines ; ne prudcntia quidem egeremus, nullo proposito delectu bonorum et malorum. Una igitur essemus beati cognitione rerum et scientia." He has failed to conceive, as Sir J. Mackintosh well suggests, that there would still be room for the exercise of love of benevolence. A Chinese, educated to regard benevolence as the prime virtue of life, would naturally give it the first place in his ideal of the future state. 222 THE LORE OF CATHAY wholly artificial the work of education. Others, like Hobbes and Mandeville, represented them as spontaneous and natural, but still no more than varied phases of that one ubiquitous Proteus self-love. Mencius, with Bishop Butler, views them as disinterested and original. To establish this, he resorts to his favorite mode of reasoning, and supposes the case of a spectator moved by the mis- fortune of a child falling into a well. Hobbes would have described the pity of the beholder as the fruit of self-love acting through the imagination the " fiction of future calamity to himself." Mencius says his efforts to rescue the child would be incited, not by a desire to secure the friendship of its parents or the praise of his neighbors, nor even to relieve himself from the pain occasioned by the cries of the child, but by a spontaneous feeling which pities distress and seeks to alleviate it. The man who thus vindicates our nature from the charge of selfishness in its best affections sometimes ex- patiates on their social utility. He does so, however, only to repress utilitarianism of a more sordid type. When the Prince of Liang inquired what he had brought to enrich his kingdom, " Nothing," he replied, " but benevo- lence and justice; " and he then proceeded to show, with eloquent earnestness, how the pursuit of wealth would tend to anarchy, while that of virtue would insure happi- ness and peace. An earlier writer, Meitze, made the principle of benevolence the root of all the virtues ; and in advocating the duty of equal and universal love, he seems to have anticipated the fundamental maxim of Jonathan Edwards that virtue consists in love to being as such, and in proportion to the amount of being. This led him to utter the rioble sentiment that he would " sub- mit his body to be ground to powder if by so doing he could benefit mankind." ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE 223 The doctrine of Meitze is rejected by the moralists of the established school as heretical, on the ground of its inconsistency with the exercise in due degree of the rela- tive affections, such as filial piety, fraternal love, etc. They adopted a more cautious criterion of virtue that of the moderate exercise of all the natural faculties. / 'irtus cst medium vitiorum et utrinque reductum is with them a familiar principle. One of the Four Books, the Cluing Yung, is founded on it. But instead of treating the subject with the analytic accuracy with which it is elaborated by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, the author kindles with the idea of absolute perfection, and indites a sublime rhapsody on the character of him who holds on his way, undeviating and unimpeded, between a twofold phalanx of opposing vices. Part IV. is the counterpart of the preceding, and is in- teresting mainly on account of the use for which it is designed. The whole chart is practical, and is intended, the author tells us, to be suspended in the chamber of the student as a constant monitor. The terms in which he states this contain an allusion to a sentiment engraved by one of the ancient emperors on his wash-basin : " Let my heart be daily cleansed and renewed, let it be kept clean and new forever." This part of his work has for its special object to aid the^ reader in detecting the moral impurities that may have attached themselves to his char- acter, and carrying forward a process of daily and con- stant improvement. To some it may be a matter of surprise to find this exercise at all in vogue in a country where a divine re- ligion has not imparted the highest degree of' earnest- ness in the pursuit of virtue. The number who practise it is not large : but even in pagan China, the thorny path of self-knowledge exhibits " here and there a traveller." 224 THE LORE OF CATHAY Tseng Futze, an eminent disciple of Confucius, and the Xenophon of his Memorabilia, thus describes his own practice : " I every day examine myself on three points. In exertjons on behalf of others, have I been unfaithful? In intercourse with others, have I been untrue? The instruction I have heard, have I made my own ? " An example so revered could not remain without imi- tators. Whether any of them has surpassed the model is doubtful ; but his " three points " they have multiplied into the bristling array displayed in the chart, which they daily press in to their bosoms, as some papal ascetics were wont to do their jagged belts. Some of them, in order to secure greater fidelity in this unpleasant duty, are accustomed to perform it in the family temple, where they imagine their hearts laid bare to the view of their ancestors, and derive encouragement from their supposed approval. The practice is a beautiful one, but it indicates a want. It shows that human virtue is conscious of her weakness ; and in climbing the roughest steeps feels com- pelled to lean on the arm of religion. In a few cases this impressive form of domestic piety may prove efficacious ; but the benefit is due to a figment of the imagination similar to that which Epictetus recom- mends when he suggests that the student of virtue shall conceive himself to be living in the presence of Socrates. If fancy is thus operative, how much more effectual must faith be that faith which rises into knowledge and makes one realize that he is acting under the eye of ever-present Deity ! It is one of the glories of Christianity that by diffusing this sentiment she has made virtue not an occasional visitor to our planet, but brought her down to dwell familiarly with men. What otherwise would have been only the severe discipline of a few philosophers, she has made the ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE 225 daily habit of myriads.* How many persons in how many lands now close each day of life by comparing every item of their conduct with a far more perfect " chart for self-examination " than our author has furnished ? f Next to the knowledge of right and wrong Confucius placed " sincerity of purpose " in pursuing the right, as an essential in the practice of virtue ; but as he expressed only the vaguest notions of a Supreme Being, and en- joined for popular observance no higher form of religion than the worship of the ancestral manes, a sense of re- sponsibility, and, by consequence, " sincerity of purpose," are sadly deficient among his disciples. Some of the more earnest, on meeting with a religion which reveals to them a heart-searching God, a sin-atoning Saviour, a soul-sanctifying Spirit, and an immortality of bliss, have joyfully embraced it, confessing that they find therein motives and supports of which their own system is wholly destitute. GENERAL INFERENCES. On this sheet (the chart above translated) we have a projection of the national mind. It indicates the high grade in the scale of civilization attained by the people among whom it originated, exhibiting all the elements of an elaborate morality. Political ethics are skilfully con- nected with private morals ; and the virtues and vices are * " Religion," says Sir James Mackintosh, speaking of Plato, " had not then, besides her own discoveries, brought down the most awful and the most beautiful forms of moral truth to the humblest station in human society." t There are many evening hymns in which the review of the day is beautifully and touchingly expressed, but in none perhaps better than in that of Gellert commencing "Bin tag ist wiedcr hin." 226 THE LORE OF CATHAY marshalled in a vast array, which required an advanced state of society for their development. The accuracy with which these various traits of char- acter are noted implies the same thing; and the correct- ness of the moral judgments here recorded infers some- thing more than culture it discloses a grand fact of our nature, that, whatever may be thought of innate ideas, it contains inherent principles which produce the same fruits in all climates. These tables indicate, at the same time, that the Chinese have made less proficiency in the study of mind than in that of morals. This is evident from some confusion (more observable in the original than in the translation) of faculties, sentiments, and actions. The system is, on the whole, pretty well arranged ; but there are errors and omissions enough to show that their ethics, like their physics, are merely the records of phenomena which they observe ab extra without investigating their causes and relations. While they expatiate on the virtues, they make but little inquiry into the nature of virtue ; while insisting on various duties, they never discuss the ground of obligation ; and while duties are copiously expounded, not a word is said on the subject of rights. The combined influence of an idolatrous religion and a despotic government, under which there can be no such motto as Dicu ct mon droit, may account for this latter deficiency. But similar lacunae are traceable in so many directions that we are compelled to seek their explana- tion in a subjective cause in some peculiarity of the Chinese mind. They have, for instance, no system of psychology, and the only rude attempt at the formation of one con- sists in an enumeration of the organs of perception. These they express as tvu kuan, the " five senses." But what ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE 227 are they ? The eyes, ears, nose, mouth ; and not the skin or nerves, but the heart. The sense of touch, which alone possesses the power of waking us from the Brahma dream of a universe floating in our own brain, and convincing us of the objective reality of an external world, is utterly ignored ; to say nothing of the absurdity of class- ing the "heart" the intellect (for so they intend the word) with those passive media of intelligence. This elementary effort dates from the celebrated Mencius; and, perhaps for that very reason, the mind of the mod- erns has not advanced beyond it, as one of their pious emperors abdicated the throne rather than be guilty of reigning longer than his grandfather. Another instance of philosophical classification equally ancient, equally authoritative, and equally absurd, is that of the five elements. They were given as chin, mu, shui, Into, t'u i. e., metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. Now not to force this into a disparaging contrast with the re- sults of our recent science, which recognizes nothing as an element but an ultimate form of matter, we may fairly compare it with the popular division of " four ele- ments." The principle of classification being the enumera- tion of the leading forms of inorganic matter which enter into the composition of organic bodies, the Chinese have violated it by introducing wood into the category ; and they evince an obtuseness of observation utterly incon- sistent with the possession of philosophic talent in not perceiving the important part which atmospheric air per- forms in the formation of other bodies. The extent to which they adhere to the quintal enumeration or classi- fication, by " fives " illustrates, in a rather ludicrous man- ner, the same want of discrimination. Thus, while in mind they have the five senses, and in matter the five elements, in morals they reckon five virtues, in society 228 THE LORE OF CATHAY five relations, in astronomy five planets, in ethnology five races, in optics five colors, in music five notes, in the culinary art five tastes ; and, not to extend the catalogue, they divide the horizon into five quarters. These instances evince a want of analytical power ; and the deficiency is still further displayed by the absence of any analysis of the sounds of their language until they were made acquainted with the alphabetical Sanskrit; the non-existence, to the present day, of any inquiry into the forms of speech which might be called a grammar, or of any investigation of the processes of reasoning cor- responding with our logic. While they have soared into the attenuated atmosphere of ontological speculation, they have left all the regions of physical and abstract science almost as trackless as the arctic snows. It would be superfluous to vindicate the Chinese from the charge of mental inferiority in the presence of that immense social and political organization which has held together so many millions of people for so many thousands of years, and especially of numerous arts, now dropping their golden fruits into the lap of our own civilization, whose roots can be traced to the soil of that ancient empire. But a strange defect must be admitted in the national mind. We think, however, that it is more in its development than in its constitution, and may be ac- counted for by the influence of education. If we include in that term all the influences that affect the mind, the first place is due to language ; and a language whose primary idea is the representation of the objects of sense, and which is' so imperfect a vehicle of abstract thought that it is incapable of expressing by single words such ideas as space, quality, relation, etc., must have seriously obstructed the exercise of the intellect in that direction. A servile reverence for antiquity which makes ETHICAL PHILOSOPHY OF CHINESE 229 it sacrilege to alter the crude systems of the ancients increased the difficulty; and the government brought it to the last degree of aggravation by admitting, in the public-service examinations, a very limited number of authors, with their expositors, to whose opinions con- formity is encouraged by honors, and from whom dissent is punished by disgrace. These fetters can only be stricken off by the hand of Christianity ; and we are not extravagant in predicting that a stupendous intellectual revolution will attend its progress. Revealing an omnipresent God as Lord of the Conscience it will add a new hemisphere to the world of morals; stimulating inquiry in the spirit of the precept " Prove all things, hold fast that which is good," it will subvert the blind principle of deference; and perhaps its grandest achievement in the work of mental emancipa- tion may be- the superseding of the ancient ideographic language by providing a medium better adapted to the purposes of a Christian civilization. It would only be a repetition of historic triumphs if some of the vernacular dialects, raised from the depths where they now lie in neglect, and shaped by the forces which heave them to the surface, should be made, under the influence of a new sunshine, to teem with the rich productions of a new literature, philosophy, and science. 230 THE LORE OF CATHAY -|^ *^li^?J& i-i/jrf i* r (PTy AOT-* JA.-J/ Of , ^, T^V^, ^g-S. -^^ -^p 4ti?Bt : m %Q5ii 1^ ~^*5* - tta:A^i^ tLi