4iM*MiWi*MM*MMM*ito*M««l II Hr l l i - mi ii n i i >i nmm ii mm « » W » i i Wi t > II H ill I (I m ii i i n «i l ll. 923-936- .. 936-947- » 947-951- „ 951-960. „ 960-1127, „ II27-1280, „ I280-1368, „ 1368-1644. ,. 1644- CHINA. ELEMENTS. o>»jo I. THE CHINESE MIND. THE CHINESE MIND. ' I "HE civilized nations of the West, subject for ages to -*- mutual friction and physical intermixture, afford very inadequate data for studying the distinctive capacities of races. They do not help us to determine how far . •' ^ A study in a separate ethnic growth can unfold the germs of Universal universal principles in philosophy and faith. But ^^'"p°"- in the Oriental world this opportunity is presented on a magnificent scale. The vast population of China, so uni- form in physical type that they seem free from foreign admixture, isolated by the ocean and by the loftiest moun- tain barriers in the world, have shaped for themselves a peculiar civilization, whose inveteracy proves it a genuine outgrowth of the race and soil ; while its startling contrasts with other Asiatic forms render such common aspirations as shall be found to underlie this difference all the more impressive signs of Universal Religion.^ In that division of the present work which treats of the Hindus, I have indicated their main difference General from the Chinese, by calling the mental quality distinctions of the one family cerebral, and that of the other, from muscular. There, we have an imaginative, meta- H""^"'=- physical race, who think away matter, and hate the physi- * For a better understanding of this term as used in the present volume, as well as of the scope and purpose of the whole work, of which the following pages form a second part, the reader is referred to the Introductory chapter of the preceding volume, on India. ELEMENTS. cal toil which develops its uses : here, apparently, a swarm of plodding utilitarians, sternly adherent to things actual and positive ; who insist that the world is the plainest of facts, and needs no explanation ; that it is purely a work- ing world, wherein a seventh-day rest would be an imperti- nence, — a world where every atom is intensely real and valuable ; where domestic and social uses stand for poetry, metaphysics, and religion. As we pass from Indian to Chinese architecture, we find the Bubble — symbol of the unreality of things — giving way to a pile of dwelling- houses, perhaps tents, each provided with roof, piazza, fini- cal pictures and bells. These pagodas tell the whole story of Chinese religion; It is domestic, tangible, practical. What a chasm we have crossed from Hindu Brahmanism and Buddhism ! There was the Brain, pure Thought : here is the Muscle, pure Labor. To do, not to think about doing ; to fashion the stuff of life, not to contemplate it ; and to do and fashion after the most obvious, commonplace, realistic, and persistent way, — this is what seems legibly stamped on those square heavy features, so slightly modifiable by time or space : the downward-drawn eyelid, the flattened profile, the unin- spired air, the somewhat plump, muscular, enduring phy- sique. Contrast this Chinese mould with the clear bright eye and rapid graceful motion of the Arab ; with the dreamy languor, yet exquisite nervous susceptibility of the Aryan Hindu ; with the prominent features, the col- lected, self-conscious, and expectant bearing of the Teuton or the Greek. It is the unchangeable image of the per- sistent mental type which corresponds to it, — so lym- phatic, so incurious, so fast-bound in things as they are and have been. The Chinese creative faculty remains within the plane of certain organic habits, failing to rise from the formalism of rules to the freedom of the idea. Its function is to maintain and multiply ; to reproduce, not THE CHINESE MJND. 7 to reronstruct. It buries itself in its materials, instead of going behind them. Hindu cosmogony makes the world issue from mystic thought; Manu forms the creatures by devotion. But the Chinese skips the question of origin, and says that the world has a self-shaping force ; or that the first man must have fashioned the world- stuff with hammer and chisel, himself and his tools being already a part of it. Speculation here holds fast by the actual and concrete ; takes the human for the divine, and positive visible work for the best part of the human. China does not grow metaphysicians in tropical luxuri- ance, as the plains of the Ganges do. It has been hospita- ble to Buddhist literature, but the higher speculative forms of Buddhism were not of native origin, and have not main- tained themselves among the people. The sublime ideal- ism of Lao-tse, instead of flowering out, as it would have done in any Indo-European race, into a rich cycle of mys- tical philosophy, — like the VedAnta in India, or Sufism in Persia, — rapidly faded into low forms of conjuring with spirits, elements, and spells. The rationalism of Confucius and Mencius holds fast to the solid ground of practical ethics and social organization ; while its philosophical in- terpreters, like Chuhi, guard carefully against separating essence, even in the idea, from material form. And the bewildering jargon of the " Two Principles," which circu- lates among the people in a great variety of shapes as a substitute for philosophy, usually winds itself up with the saying, that all this has inexpressible meanings which no one since Confucius has been able to conceive. The na- tional religion of China is essentially a political institu- tion ; and we shall realize the distance between the popular Buddhism and that absolute mental abstraction from things visible and conceivable, which distinguishes the original faith, when we consider how intensely and exclu- sively the Chinese mind holds to the reality of the phe- 8 ELEMENTS. nomenal world, and the validity of its familiar interests, sentiments, and pursuits. It would be quite wrong to infer from facts like these Relation of that we are dealing with pure materialists. Their abstract to significance may be better stated by saying that the Chinese the Chinesc do not hold ideas apart from con- Mind. ^j,gfg embodiment, so as to study them in their own right, and in their capacity for growth. As the Hindu could not easily get away from the abstract Idea, so the Chinese cannot get away from the embodied Form. This is perfectly illustrated in the written characters of their, language. There is an immediateness of relation between idea and embodiment, abstract and concrete, in their mental constitution, which has not only forced each primary complex of experience directly into the mould of a single syllabic sound, and thence into the still more con- crete shape of a visible written image, but has held it fast bound on this material plane. So that not only has sound failed to be analyzed into alphabetic elements, but the inner development of the idea itself, arrested at the outset, has remained unaccomplished, — the mind being busied, not in pursuing its lead, but in constant effort to modify and per- fect its visible sign. The paucity of ideas in Chinese civili- zation, the intellectual rigidity, the comparative absence of historical development, have long been suspected to be somehow owing to the too rapid crystallization of thought into written and even printed forms. Spoken language, as an intermediate stage in this process, has, in fact, re- ceived much less attention than written. Little effort has been made to bring the dialects of the Middle Kingdom into a common speech, compared with that expended on the grand achievement of a common script conveying the same meaning to the hundreds of millions of its population. Less than five-hundred sounds have been invented ; and these have been made by very primitive artifices of tone. THE CHINESE MIND. 9 position, and combination to do service for the forty or fifty thousand characters, which the love of working at this concrete end of the mental process has wrought out. The language itself is still a monosyllabic heap of atoms ^ after twenty centuries of existence. As in the lowest forms of animal life, so here, there is no separation of functions ; each word may serve for all parts of speech in turn, all specialization being effected by external devices only. The verb and the noun are not formally distin- guished. How could they be held apart, so long as the 'ideal and the actual were not mentally separated ? The fact standing there is the only reality ; and human action can only come to that, producing no essential change in things. Similar phenomena, however, may be found in the languages of realistic races of the highest culture. Ampere, many years ago, ascribed the inflexibility of Chinese words to the "curious accident of an ideo- iiuistrated graphic writing, invented at a primitive epoch and ^;'['^°„ always preserved." It was not, as we have just language. seen, a "curious accident," but a natural result of pre- dominant mental qualities. These oldest forms were the bare picturing of ideas by the concrete objects which really meant or symbolically suggested them. When a child learned an idea by the written language, it was only as an embodied fact. Thus, obedience was represented, not by a series of letters conveying no visible image and leaving the mind free to hold fast the abstraction, but by two charac- ters which painted the very act of obeying, — a child at the feet of an old man ; comfort, by a woman under a roof ; compassion, by a heart and blood ; fear, by two eyes placed obliquely and drawn together at the corners ; death, by a sepulchral urn ; succession, by one man behind another. Simpler forms are a sun and a moon, for brightness ; for 1 This statement must not be applied to its grammatical structure, as wil' bereaftei appear. lO ELEMENTS. darkness, a falling moon ; for old age, a man leaning on a staff ; for growth, a plant rising from the ground ; for culti- vated land, a crossed square. These ideographs were sim- plified, modified, and 'combined as writing became a fine art, until the original forms are for the most part lost ; but the intricate labyrinths of pencil-strokes which have supplanted them show that the process has still continued to be essentially picture-making. And although by far the large^st portion of the actual signs are phonetic, their forms are none the less distinctly associated with the ideographic processes from which they came, and with artistic con- ' structions of which they form a part. However arbitrary their use in composition, they indicate, almost as strongly as the earliest and rudest figures, the absorption of Chinese mind in concrete things. These remarks on the written language may serve to illustrate that central quality of the national type to which our attention must first be directed. This incapacity, if not for grasping ideas as such, yet The key to for holding them in solution for the tests of reason i'mnl'oba-^ ^""^ aspiration, — this necessity of letting them slip ity." down,. at once and in their very rudiments, into work- ing moulds that forbid their further growth, — is the key to " Chinese immobility." Progress depends on comparing the idea of a thing as it is with the idea of what it ought to be, or of somewhat better than it can ever be. For the Chinese positivist, what ought to be has already got perfect expres- sion : the idea had its perfect work long ago ; and he has nothing more to do with it but to show how obviously it is all contained in some crude diagram traced with Nature's simplest straight and broken lines. Therefore this im- mense civilization appears to be in many respects an ar- rested development, — an old man still in the cradle ; and the unconscious symbolism of its highest philosophy cele- brates a founder who has grown hoary with years in his mother's womb. THE CHINESE MIND. II It is the arrest of ideas by their own earliest concrete expressions, destined thenceforward to absorb the and child- whole working power of the mind, that explains i^hness. this childish side of an aged civilization, — the side familiar hitherto to Western races, who have made the utmost of its odd contrasts and infantile illusions ; apt indeed to overdraw the picture, as well as to misinterpret it. The Chinese boy " never becomes a man." He is under nursery disciplines from beardless youth to beardless old age. The State is but a larger nursery. Everywhere maturity is foreclosed, and the passion for toys and trifles is supreme at every period of life. Gentlemen in China fly kites, pitch coppers, cut pretty lanterns in paper, and pay for their mis- demeanors on their naked backs. When Lord Amherst's embassy were at Peking, a crowd of yellow-girdled manda- rins kept close about them, feeling of their dresses, taking liberties with their persons, making holes in the paper win- dows of their private apartment ; and were driven off at last, at the whip's end, like scared children.^ During the war with England, great images with goggle eyes were mounted on the walls to frighten the barbarians. On approaching a regiment drawn up in tiger-colored gowns, the English were surprised at seeing them fall on their knees with a dismal howl : this was a salutation of respect. The travelling players make a stage of bamboo poles, and go through a drama without change of scene. If a general receives orders to visit a distant province, he mounts a stick, snaps a whip, and capers round the stage with a bridle in his hand, to the sound of instruments of heartrending qual- ity : then he stops suddenly, and tells you he has arrived. Ghosts call out from under the stage that they are ready ; and men walk over it with a rolling motion to show that they are crossing a river. Yet this primitive acting is done in silk dresses of great splendor and very ancient patterns.^ • Bivis, Sietcies of CAina (hand. iB4s), IV. p. go. ' WlVA^ras's Middle Kingdom, 11.86. 12 ELEMENTS. It is far from true that the intelligence and culture of Dead China is cast in such childish moulds. Yet the Levels. repressed ideal element has been crystallized foi ages in rigid working forms, whose gravitation has drawn to dead levels of uniformity and routine. Every thing runs into ruts of habit, unchangeable simply because the ideal was at the outset buried in the actual, and cannot stand outside and judge it. A population of three hun- dred million souls firmly believe that the world has always gone on by virtue of the same maxims and methods. In all their history, full as it is of civil strifes and local rebellions, there has been but one real political revolution ; and that lasted scarcely a century. Never were annals so monotonous, crowded as they are with a whirling chaos of names and doings : and they reach through thousands of years. A roar of multitudes, toiling, struggling, working up rude material into innumerable forms of use, — yet to the ear of thought subdued to an endless ticking of the clock or dropping of sands in the glass. Not to the Hebrew preacher, but to the Chinese worker, belongs the experience that " there is nothing new under the sun." In this plane of suppression there is no irregularity of surface, because there is no free ideal. Things are unmodified, laid by the plumb and square. You may draw a line horizontally over a Chinese city, at the height of a single story, with scarce an interference save from a flagstaff or a Buddhist pagoda. The Emperor Kienlung, seeing a perspective of London, wondered if the English territory was so small that people had to pile the houses up to the clouds. In the language, every word stands stiff and stark in monosyllabic uniform, like a drilled private in his trainband : no initials to serve as corporals, nor punctuation for platoon divisions. Pict- ures are without perspective ; and, if you ask why the human face is drawn without shadows, you are answered that there is no reason why one side should be of different THE CHINESE MIND. I3 color from the other. History has the same construction : the effects of distance are wanting, its contrast of changing atmosphere, its differences of quality and relief ; the earliest fact is outlined as distinctly as the latest ; and both are of one value, because presenting the same motives, traits, and aims in the same way. The perception of emphasis seems wanting. This people lay up the old boots of a retired officer in their archives as carefully as they would build him a memorial gateway. A plodding, matter-of-fact temperament, without salient choice or special enthusiasm, makes the Chinese q^^^^^. push all work into infinitesimal details; just as the tedideais. opposite spirit impelled the Hindus towards abstract unity in all the products of their dreaming brain. In this amaz- ing minuteness of elaboration we see that the ideal element in their nature is not absent, but absorbed in positive and physical work-impulses. This Pegasus loves his harness, and grinds away at his mill with all the perfection possible without freedom. Out of this labor come exquisitely deli- cate manipulations ; civil and political structures of be- wildering complexity ; a system of written signs, in number and intricacy almost beyond conception ; a network of etiquette and secular ceremony surpassing in fineness any ritual elsewhere devised for the purposes of religion. The Chinese ideal is in a state of comminution. We cannot wonder at the pulverization to which the art of compliment has been reduced by this mincing process at work through so many ages. Its ingenuity is exercised in avoiding the use of plain personal pronouns, and substituting polite or self-depreciatory adjectives. As a branch of the ceremonial- ism which makes so important a part of Chinese life, these fine-spun courtesies serve to mark what grotesque transfor- mations may befall the higher elements of character, when absorbed by an intense interest in concrete details. We cannot help discerning the traces of benevolence and even 14 ELEMENTS. humor limping about with clipped wings, where people say "little dog" for one's own son, and "contemptible village" for one's native place ; while they have invented " your illus- trious house " as an euphuism for another's wife, and even " your respectable disease " for his ill health, — phrases doubt- less much transformed in spirit by an English garb. What ages of mutual deference are condensed into the flattering address on a visiting card, " Your stupid younger brother salutes you with bowed head ;" or into the host's obeisance to his caller, " How shall I presume to receive the trouble you give your honorable feet " ! From the oldest recorded times the duties of children to parents have been mechanized with a minuteness of prescription that would turn a less prosaic race into sheer hypocrites in the closest relations of life.^ In the Chinese, it seems but a sincere expression of the patriarchalism that sways every fibre of their being, and works with a kind of spontaneity at the production of these swarming human bodies, not more real and solid than they are loyal, age after age, to their unvarying type. And no mechanism can hide its genuine filial piety ; its full flow of reverence and tender devotion neutralizing the rigidity of these infinitesimal rules, though it does not quite melt them in fervent heat. "They say but little," observes an old traveller of the Chinese : " their compliments are in form ; one knows what he must say, and the other how he must answer : they never beat their brains like us, to find out new compliments and fine phrases. They never overheat themselves : they are like statues in a theatre, they have so httle of discourse and so much of gravity." ^ Is this as likely to make hypocrites as the other style with which they are compared .' Baron Hubner admired the " chin-chin " when he saw it performed by the natives, and recommended its use ' Yet it is not two hundred years since profound obeisances between persons of the same social rank were a part of civility in Europe, and children were taught all the outwanl forms oi homage to their parents. * Pire Lecorate (lyth century). THE CHINESE MIND. IS in the West as an antidote to the excessive familiarity of manners, borrowed from American hfe. The utter sincerity of this worship of petty ceremonial by a people who have so faithfully used their work- p^^o^ o* ing power to build up a vast industrial civilization, ideals, nowise wanting in the amenities of life, has certainly its pathetic side. How completely it absorbs the religious sentiment is shown by the simple amazement into which they are thrown by European irreverence towards their imperial fetich. Lord Amherst's embassy refused to "kotow" before the sacred curtain, but consented as a com- promise to bow thrice. Soon afterwards, to read the Celestials a lesson, they unveiled portraits of the British sovereigns, and made similar obeisance to them. " Where- at," we are told, " the imperial deputy was thunderstruck, and could scarcely recover himself." No wonder, since every loyalty of his nature was outraged ! The indignation of the Enghsh embassy pf 1793, at finding themselves es- corted to Peking under banners announcing them to all China as bearers of tribute to the Emperor, hardly allowed them to perceive that what seemed intended as humiliation was, in fact, the naitve symbol of a profound national convic- tion; — inability to conceive of any other relations between the " Son of Heaven " and foreign States being as positive a limit for Chinese vision as the institutions and traditions of Christianity are for that of the majority of Englishmen. It is as possible for the religious ideal to become arrested in some concrete finality at the later stage of its growth as at an earlier one. The pathos of this drudgery of the higher faculties in organizing the ideas of their own infancy is ex- ^^ pressed in a timeworn, serious, impassive air, as if making solemn earnest of minute and trivial things. Hence, probably, the prevailing impression of a defective sense of humor, and even of the ridiculous ; so that most 1 6 ELEMENTS. translators have thought themselves justified in making an intelligent people write and speak in a persiflage, wholly opposed to the compact and forcible genius of their language. A closer study has laid most of this absurd inflation at the door of the ingenious translator. The Chinese have really a very quick sense of the ridiculous, though its associations belong to the experience of an antiquated childhood, as strange to us as the language of tones entirely separated from feeling, which they have invented to aid the poverty of their vocabulary. They are singularly light-hearted, passionately fond of comedy, travesty, and banter ; and they have brought political lampooning to a fine art. Their aged and serious ex- pression does not prove absence of the play-impulse, but shows the repressive forces that have, as it were, crystal- lized it. The facts now indicated are very far from inclining me False and to beUcve with Burnouf, that " the organ of abstract truegrounds notions is Wanting to the Chinese brain ;" or with gresMve Bunscu, that "they wholly lack the idea of con- habits. scious mentality," if I understand his expression. Abstract and concrete tendencies coexist in their mental habit, but in too close combination for freedom of play. Meadows — one of the best observers of their character — even insists with much force, in opposition to the general belief, that it is not utilitarianism, but intense ideality, that most distinguishes this people. Certainly, their theory that government belongs to the fittest and best, their doc- trine of the excellence of human nature, and the fulness of faith with which they point to their whole history for four thousand years as justification for these beliefs, — indi- cate the possession of this quality in a remarkable degree. And we have only to remember the unchangeable moulds to which its manifestation has been bound, to recognize that the true statement of the relation of the abstract to the THE CHINESE MIND. I J concrete in Chinese mind is not that the former is absent, but that it is inseparable from some fixed actual embodi- ment ; that this conjunction, being organic, took place at an early stage in the growth of the ideal, or rather was one of its first conditions, and from thenceforth deter- mined its objects and methods ; and that the result of this chronic inaptness at lifting thought out of phenomena into free speculation is to deprive even the highest in- stincts of their proper power to criticise their own prod- ucts, so as to reconstruct them from new standpoints of progress. Mr. Fortune tells us that in many districts of China the art of ploughing consists in turning over a layer of wet mud only six or eight inches deep, which rests on a solid floor of hard, stiff clay. The share never goes deeper than this mud, so that the ploughman and his bullock find their solid footing just below the surface. The ideal element in Chinese mind so loves a solid footing close at hand, that it plods away age after age at a thin surface deposit, and leaves the hard pan undisturbed. What can come of such constant experience of limita- tion both in ideal and actual relations, but failure "The to recognize the infinite and absolute, — a perpetual c- S5-S9. * MiddU Kingdmm, I. 356. • A'ctts j^-J Qa^rus, II. Xo. a. THE CHINESE MIND. 2^ such that they succeed in duping themselves, and deceit is everywhere the order of the day." ^ Fortune had many adventures with robbers in the open country around Can- ton. Martin reports the Chinese police to be of corrupt and abandoned character.^ Williams says of the people generally, that " they feel no shame at being detected in a lie ; " but we must remember his opinion that " it would be a strange wonder in the world to find a heathen people who did speak the truth." ^ Others, however, less orthodox, agree with him.* The prevalence of freebooting and piracy in all ages of Chinese history is notorious ; but the cause lies ob- viously, not so much in disregard for rights of property, as in the famines, rebellions, and provincial wars of this enor- mous and crowded population. The English have been loud in their charges of political trickery against Chinese officials, during the wars by which the gates of the Middle Kingdom have been forced open ; but the effect of these charges is not a little weakened by the utterly demoralizing purpose which the complainants were pushing on, and by the fact that cunning is the only defence of the feeble against the strong. It is hardly worth while to insist on the adulteration of teas with sulphate of copper, a " medi- cine " provided by the native manufacturers, with smiles of wonder, to satisfy the special taste of the foreign barba- rian ; ^ nor on the infusion of Prussian blue, manufactured, the Cantonese say, by a process taught them by English- men.^ Upon the whole, this contradictory testimony need not confuse one who reflects on the interaction of opposite qualities already ascribed to the Chinese mind. It points to an average honesty in the masses, certainly not inferior to that which our best types of Western national character would present. But it also shows how utilitarianism offsets ' Voyage en Chine, p. 89. " China, I. 153. ' Middle Kingdom, II. 96. * Giles, pp. 123-126. » De Mas,, I. 754. » Notes and Queries, May, 1840. 28 ELEMENTS. or balances the love of truth and justice, so manifest in their ethics and their labor, with a poUtic shrewdness as regards personal interests, which is apt to pass into less creditable traits ; the two tendencies maintaining a kind of mechanical balance, instead of being fused, as they would have been in more ardent temperaments, into a definite type of character. This defect may astonish us when observed on so large a scale ; yet it really illustrates the action of familiar laws to which no people is a stranger. And our data prove that what it expresses is not an or- ganic tendency in the Chinese to practical violation of their own moral ideal, but the coexistence of tendencies which the want of a free contemplative study of the ideal has caused to fail of being solved in a higher unity. The result is neither the extreme virtuousness which their lit- erature would promise, nor the extreme insincerity which has so often been charged upon them, — but a combina- tion of honor and policy, each in a repressed form ; and, upon the whole testimony, strikingly creditable to an un- progressive race. Williams describes the Chinese as " a vile and polluted Personal pcople, among whom brutality and coarseness are Morals. covered by a mere varnish of manners."^ Yet he allows that " they have more virtues than most pagan nations ; " that there are no gin-palaces nor indecent the- atrical shows, and even that public opinion favors morality more than among their neighbors.^ The Penal Code has penalties for keeping a gambling house. Classic odes, imperial edicts, and moral precepts denouncing intemper- ance testify in all times to the prevalence of this vice, and to the strenuous effort to repress it.^ Alcohol in Western countries kills ten persons to one victim of opium in China > Middle Kingdom, II. 96-98. > Ibid. II. 14, 88; I. 435. » Liki, III. iii. ; Ibid., II. ; Shuking, V. v. THE CHINESE MIND. 29 Delirium tremens is unknown ; nor is opium smoking easily propagated, as it destroys the procreative force, having thus a natural check.^ The use of very small glasses and of weak and watered wine at entertainments is a very old and honored custom. The earnest efforts of the government to suppress traffic in opium gives evidence of the fearful demoralization this drug has produced since its introduction in large quantities by European traders. Yet in earlier times there appears no evidence of its use. It is otherwise with the social vice ; and recent statistics point to syphilis and an allied form of leprosy as prevalent in many parts of China. ^ The experiment of legalizing vices so deeply rooted in all large communities, under all forms of civilization, has been tried in China, as elsewhere, as a method of restraint. Doubt- less, Medhurst indicates a more effectual influence when he says of prostitution in the large cities that law and public opinion combine to keep it under a certain check, and that the practice of early marriage must also have a salutary effect in counteractiag it.^ The Chinese have carefully kept all immoral suggestions out of their literature and art ; and the classical Books of Instruction enforce the law of purity as springing directly out of the profoundest principle of the national belief. " As our bodies are in- herited from our parents, let us not dare to be negligent or base in our treatment of them."* No nation in the world, of whatever religion, possesses a literature so pure. It has been said that there is not a single sentence in the whole of the classical books, nor in their annotations, that may not, when translated word for word, be read aloud with propriety in any family circle in England. Not a sign of human sacrifice, of the deification of vice, of licen- tious rites and orgies, exists in China ; and not an indecent ' Giles's Sketches, pp. 104, 113. ' Morache, Peking, p. 130-131. • Foreigner in Far Cathay, p. 117. • Siaohicui, ch. ii. 30 ELEMENTS. idol is exposed in any temple.^ Are we to infer that the great number of immoral pictures on walls and teacups, observed by Erman at Maimachin, the great trading post on the Siberian border,^ were intended to meet a special demand of Northern and Western peoples ? The conclusion to which we should be led by these differing data on the morality of the Chinese, as well as by what has been said of their psychological qualities in general, is fully con- firmed by the testimony of Nevius : " The difference in the standard and practice of virtue between China and Chris- tian lands is certainly not so striking as to form the basis of a very marked contrast, or to render it modest or prudent for us to designate any particular vice or class of vices as especially characteristic of the Chinese." ^ This piece of justice loses none of its force from the fact that the writer hastens to inform us that, nevertheless, he believes " a high degree of moral culture to be consistent with the greatest spiritual ignorance and destitution " {i. e., as to the knowl- edge of Christ), and that "Satan has used this instru- mentality of a (good) moral system in China to keep the soul away from God " ! * Nevius further testifies, from ten years intercourse as a missionary with the Chinese, to the extremely low opinion which they have formed of the morality of Christian races ; founded partly on experience of their political and mercan- tile operations, and partly on the brutal and sensual habits Effects of °^ Western sailors in the Chinese ports. His evi- over-popu- dence shows that the native population are becom- ing demorahzed by this contact.^ It is no less certain that most of the charges brought against their moral character as a people are drawn from observations made in the great trading ports, and especially Hongkong which are of course subject to the worst influences, foreign ' Meadows, The Chinese and their Rebellions,-^. 396. » Erman's Siberia, II. 188. « Nevius's China and the Chinese, p. 290. * Ibid., p 291. 5 Ibid., p. 283, 284. THE CHINESE MIND. 3 1 and native. As to the interior, the testimony of travellers is almost universally favorable. The cities of China are probably the most densely peopled in the world : the poor in this oldest of empires have come to pack themselves more closely than any similar class in other countries. Such circumstances, aggravated by misgovernment and the lack of energy and progress, have produced effects which it would be exaggeration to describe as national habits and traits. One of these is uncleanliness, of which the large cities of the coast are doubtless dire examples. Yet these bad conditions do not greatly affect the lon- gevity of the people, who live mostly in the open air, dress comfortably, and are cheerful and social.^ While the city of New York counts one pauper for every fifty persons, and the proportion in the whole State is nearly half as large, we can hardly condemn Chinese civilization for fail- ing to diffuse the blessings of self-support. Excessive population has caused singular effects in some of the cities ; where beggars have become a recognized caste, with rights, it is said, of roving and pillage on certain days, and of organizing to levy funds for their support.^ The sale of children by their parents in stress of poverty involves less mischief than we should expect ; as the buyer is forbidden to sell the child again, or to use it for vicious purposes. This slavery is not perpetual ; nor are girls, bought for domestic service, excluded from ordinary femi- nine culture, nor from the best marriages.^ Mendoza (i6th century) says that in his time there was no beggary in China, all the poor being supported. But the most startling sign of poverty is the readiness with which a condemned criminal can obtain a substitute, who will give his life for the sum needed to support his family. Whether » Lay's Chinese as they Are, p. 260 ; Morache, p. 88. The Jesuit Fathers (in Alvarel, 1565) noted the neatness of their apparel. ' Fleming, p. 70. Morache, 108, 113. s De Mas, I. i32-i3S- Medhurst, Foreigner in Far Cathay, pp. 91, loi. 32 ELEMENTS. poverty alone explains this kind of mart)-rdom is doubtfol ; yet suicides arising from povert}- have recently amounted in Fiance to three thousand a }-ear.i Qf the dreadful excesses attendant on famines. — a common calamity- in China, owing to impertect internal transfer of produce, and the enormous population to be fed, — it is needless to speak in detaiL Infanticide, another clear result of poverty, is due in some desnree to the inabilirv cf nirents to pav the expenses requisite on the marriage oi daugnters.- But its extent has been greatly exaggerated. " The whole nation," savs Williams, " has been branded as systematic murderers of their children from the practice of the inhab- itants of a f>ortion of two provinces, who are regarded as among the most \"io!erit and the poorest in the whole eighteen." ^ There is eminent medical and other aathorit}' for sa\ing that the proportion of infanticides is not greater in China than in England, or America.* Chinese are quite as fond of their children as other people ; and though boys are more desired than girls, yet both are equally cherished.* It is a popular proverb, " Even the tiger does not devour his own young." Bodies of children are frequently found floating in rivers or lying on roads : but the fact is explained by the popular belief that formal burial is not necessary for the van.- young.- Public opinion is rapidly putting an end to it. even in Amoy, where remonstrances against it from the literary class have been posted in public places for a long period.' Government edicts and exnortarions have not been wanting, however incompetent, to abolish a practice more dependent on social conditions than on laws or desires. 1 De Mas, I. 13^139- ' CUmac R!i<:sitcy, Oct. 1S43 ! De Mas, I. 37. ' Witiirns, II. 260. ' Fmnpdlj, p. 161. Moradie, pt irt; Irissoo, Lz Ckixe Cttetmf^ p 53. 5 Medtirst, Frreiena- n> Far Cji^Ajv, pp^ 98, gg ; Dots, Skddia, p. 99; Mcrachs p. Its i GDes, Strtrhrit p. 157. « Medhnrst, p. 97. Dav-ls's Ctixat, 11. 119, 120. ' CItatex RtpKztrry, Oct. 1843. THE CHINESE MIND. 33 The order and quiet that prevail, especially by night, in Chinese cities have been noticed by all travellers, sodai The greatest harmony and tranquillity reign among "'■^"• the boat-population of Canton.^ The gates of cities are closed at nightfall, shops are shut, and the people resort to their homes, with little need of local police.^ The good temper and even courtesy of crowds are said to be equally striking ; long lines wait quietly, and there is no pushing.^ Hiibner describes the Cantonese as seeming to be made of cotton wool. When the British legation passed through Tien-tsin, " the streets were crowded for a mile's distance, yet the silence and respect of the populace suggested a sea of heads in a perfect calm." * The childish curiosity and familiarity shown in other instances give weight to this evidence of their power of self-control. The same orderly habits were recognized by the oldest writers on the Chinese. Pliny describes them as mild and reserved. Ammianus speaks of their quiet behavior, and unwarlike spirit ; " a still and gentle people, frugal and shy, and wonderfully self- restrained." ^ This peaceable civilization, a great still world of industry and resource, far off in the horizon of imagination, seems to have strongly impressed the Greek mind. The Arab travellers in the ninth century are not complimentary, and make severe charges against the relig- ion and life of the Chinese ; yet they too praise their admin- istration of justice and their social order.^ Marco Polo says that contentious broils are never heard among the people of Kin-sai ; and that those who inhabit the same street, from the mere circumstance of neighborhood, appear like one family.'^ In fact, " moderation, self-control, self-restraint, absence of excess, is the essence of Chinese virtue." * • Davis, II. p. 119. ' Brooks, Run, &•€., p. 274. ' Williams, II. 68 j Brooks, p. a66. * Davis, Sketclus, p. 42. ^ Pliny, I^aiural History t vi. 20. Ammianus, xxiii. 6, 64. • Renaudot's Version (1733) P- 73- ' Marco Polo, B. 11. ch. 68. • WiUike, Gesch d. Htidinth., II. 12S. 3 34 ELEMENTS. Assassinations are rare. The duel is unknown. The fear of public opinion and the ceremonial of manners enforce mutual respect. By nothing are they more shocked than by European customs that ignore or outrage the expecta- tions of others. De Mas having told his attendants to inform a visitor that he was out, they answered, " He will be shocked if you treat him so." " So much the better," said the Frenchman : " he won't come again." Whereat they whispered to each other, " This person has no education." The porters, waiting for him in the courtyard, would not ask for their dinners, because they were not invited.^ Per- haps the higher mark of real civilization is the disposition to resort to moral, rather than physical, modes of settling disputes, and to recognize the force of reason ; and for this the Chinese are conspicuous. Meadows says that a posted placard, exposing the unreasonableness of one's conduct, is as effective as such an exposure in an English newspaper, if not more so.^ They regard passion as indecent and vulgar, and "bear injuries with an equanimity that would make a European ungovernable." ^ They despise rudeness, instead of being enraged at it. A shopkeeper's patience and polite- ness are inexhaustible ; and stories are told of the endurance of discomfort and injury out of pure good manners, that prove this capacity to be of a heroic type. Lord Macart- ney'a embassy was impressed by the dignity, politeness, and good humor of all the officials with whom they had to deal.* For aggressive warfare they seem to have little taste. Peaceable- P^^Y^^S ^t soldicrs with lantcms tied to matchlocks, "ess. and painted towers constructed of mats ; labelling their troops on the back with boastful words, and arming them with rusty ineffective weapons, made more awkward by unsuitable dress.^ Their armies are ill-discipHned, and ■ Be Mas, pp. 140, 141. 2 Jfotes an Government, &=€., of China, p. 204. ' Ibid., pp. 202, 203. « Barrow, p. 186. » Davis, Sketches, pp. r4o, 156; Williams, II. 160. THE CHINESE MIND. 35 little better than " an unwilling mob of forced men." " The Chinese, of all men, " says Lecomte, " love best to sleep in a whole skin." Mr. Lay asserts that they do not know how to double up the fist, nor to parry blows. It is an old saying that, where the ground is wet with blood of battle, there springs up the will-o'-the-wisp.^ The old classic odes abound in lamentations over the evil fate of serving on distant expeditions, and the sorrows of families at these long separations. This tone of complaint seems to have been consecrated, as of peculiar moral and poetic value. Peace is indeed essential to the nation's faith in its insti- tutions as the established harmony of heaven and earth. Tranquillity is written on its edicts, and Heavenly Rest on its palace gates. Its very principle is Repose. As being already complete, holding all nations as its children and parts of its divine order, an aggressive policy on its part would seem impossible. The Imperial sceptre of jade is called, "Just as you will," and the nymphsea is carved on its upper end as a floral emblem of brotherhood.^ It is a curious fact that in the oldest governmental arrangements — those of Yu — as given in the Shuking, a department of war is lacking. Shun, the ancient ideal ruler, says to his followers : " Do well yourselves ; the barbarian then will submit to you." ^ " In no Chinese city," says Plath, " have I seen soldiers : mandarins walk in the streets escorted by axes and lances, but these are of wood, and a gong pre- cedes them. The word for war ( wu ) means simply ' to control anarchy,' and conquest {tcking) is merely 'to bring order.' " The emphasis laid by almost every Chi- nese moralist on the iniquity of war, and the subordination of the military to political and civil institutions, are familiar to all readers. And yet there is manifestly a reverse side to this pict- * Plath on Chinese Military Affairs, Bay. Ak. 1S73. 2 Davis, Chinese, II. 45. ^ Shuking, 11. 2. 36 ELEMENTS. ure. Self-defence was of course indispensable, and the There- oldest written signs are evidence of the use of verse side. .p^jj.ij}j.g weapons in primitive times. The first ware, according to the Shu, were not aggressive, yet they were undertaken at " the command of Heaven." The Liki says that in those times, on the birth of a male child a bow with arrows was hung beside the door. Every one was subject to military duty. All this is probably legend, but we know that China had standing armies in the seventh century. Foreign wars built the Great Wall, and domestic ones covered the land with fortified towns. The royal hunts were organized for military education, not from mere love of destroying game. The people are divided into clans, whose quarrels are constant, and frequently produce civil war on an extensive scale. The study of Chinese history has revealed the startling fact of an almost unbroken series of internal wars from the earliest to the latest times. Of the twenty-six dy- nasties that have covered a space of four thousand years, every one, except the T'ang, rose and set in revolution. The numbers recorded as slain in the perpetual strifes of petty princes and semi-independent States would be incredible, but for the well ascertained series of fluctuations in the population of the empire, which they only can explain.'^ The transition from feudalism to imperialism, in the third century b. c, is reported to have cost the lives of a third of the people. The triumph of the Han dynasty, three hun- dred years afterwards, was won by the slaughter of a mil- lion. Periods of many hundred' years have been spent in uninterrupted civil wars. The Han perished after a strife of thirty-five years ; the Tsin in an insurrection of twenty. Seventy years' struggle destroyed the Sung ; and the Yuen, or Mongol, its conquerors, after barbarous conflicts which I Plath on C*i«f« Military Affmrs, Bay. Ak. 1873; SacharoJ^ ArheUen d. Rust Simndsch. zu Peking; also Biot, y mental A siatijue, 1836. THE CHINESE MINU. 37 depopulated whole regions and drove great numbers into brigandage, succumbed to a native revolt that had lasted twenty years.^ It has even been sought to prove, from the incessant warfare that makes Chinese history monotonous, that universal and permanent peace is impossible.^ The desolation produced by the Taiping rebellion, and the pro- digious destruction of life that has attended it, are but a repetition of what we may read in the old annals of the wars of Tcheou, and the fall of T'sin.^ It would almost seem as if this swarming population illustrated Malthus, and that depletion by continual blood-letting was the na- tional necessity. We cannot overlook, moreover, a pror pensity to expansion that seems at variance with the peaceful traits and tendencies already described. They have been frequently at war with Corea, Japan, Thibet, Bucharia: and the Han were masters of a zone through Asia, from near the Caspian to Siam. Four times this per- sistent people have subdued Tartary, and their wars with the hordes of Central Asia have been incessant. We must note also the democratic excitability and disposition to re- bellion which are constants in their history. It is sufficient at present to observe of this tendency that it is strong enough to hold the imperial government in check, and to keep the national tone constantly up to a conception of public responsibility which excludes the very idea of arbi- trary personal power. Whether all this should lead us to pronounce the Chinese a quarrelsome people, is at least questionable. The General vast scale on which human nature appears in this '^^'^'■ great empire would lead us to expect proportionate demon- strations of every element of character. Its history in fact passes through most of the phases, and exhibits most of * Letter of Medhurst to Hon. Caleb Gushing, April 17, 1856. =• Chinese Repository^ March, 1835. » Pfizmaier, Sitzber. d. Wien. Ahad. July and Oct. 1869 ; also, Plath, Sitzier, d. Bayer- iuk, Akad.i Feb. 1870 ; Legge's Tchunisiev, of Confucius ; SacharofE. 38 ELEMENTS. the phenomena, of the life of Western nations, — gradual growth from small beginnings; leagues and strifes of petty States ; feudal subordinations and chieftaincies ; consolidations and dissolutions; plots and conspiracies, domestic intrigues and disputed successions, making and unmaking dynasties ; rivalries of religions ; outbreaks of local discontent under ambitious leaders ; invasions and border warfare without intermission. Such variety of ex- perience gives ground for expecting just that diversity of traits which at first seems so self -contradictory ; and we are warned against formulizing the capacities of such a people within narrow limits or one-sided negations. Such facts as these should forbid us to suppose them Courage. Wanting in courage. Their military .annals abound in brave leaders, bold censors, and heroic martyrs to public duty.^ Persistent defences of besieged towns, ending in the self-destruction of the defenders by thousands, illustrate the history of w^rs with Tartars and European invaders. The desperate courage of Manchu garrisons like those of Chin- kiang and Chapu, and the defence of the Peiho against the French and English fleets in the opium war, enforce our strongest sympathy.^ The northern provinces fell into the hands of the Mongols in the eleventh century, not from lack of native valor, but as a consequence of internal dis- sensions. After three centuries of rule, the intruders were expelled by the uprising of patriot forces under a leader who had been a servant in a Buddhist monastery. Two centuries of Manchu dominion have not quelled the national spirit, and the vast extent and prodigious energy of the Taiping rebellion would have perhaps resulted in the over- throw of the Tsing dynasty but for the interference of European arms. Fleming describes the soldierly qualities of the northern Chinese as fitted to make them a match > Pfitzmaier, Plath, Fleming, ei al. • Williams, I. 79, 86 ; II. 552 ; St. Denys, La Chine devant U Europe. THE CHINESE MIND. 39 for any other Eastern, people in war ; and Medhurst, de- scribing disregard of peril in the pursuit of an object as a national characteristic, instances the coolness of the native corps of the British forces in their Peking campaign in face of heavy fires, and the steady courage of Chinese troops under foreign officers in the Taiping war.^ A people who have erected nearly twenty-five hundred for- tresses, and surrounded seventeen hundred cities with walls, cannot be lacking in the faculty of self-defence. It is unquestionable that their courage is of a passive quality, and has its root in a wonderful power of . endurance, rather than in that love of military qualities. achievement which would have led to discipline ^'"^"'^""' and culture in the art of war. It is in suffering that the force of Chinese character becomes most impressive. In those terrible massacres of hundreds at a time, which they call executions, the most cruel pains and the ghastliest antic- ipations seldom extort a murmur or a groan. The readi- ness with which whole multitudes resort to suicide, rather than fall into the hands of the enemy or survive defeat and disgrace, shows what insensibility to fears or suf- suiddai ferings this force of endurance can attain. It p™p™='ty- becomes a species of fatalism. In times of great public misery, instead of rising to the active energy demanded by the situation, they kill themselves and their families, with a self-abandonment in singular contrast with their patience in enduring physical sufferings. Suicide is common from the most trivial causes. It is probable that this despair is the natural consequence of the psychological quality to which we have already referred the main points in their character. They are so incapable of separating their ideal faith from the concrete facts of their social and political order, that they cannot exist when these are broken down. Their propensity to suicide is a species of insanity like that ^ Foreigner in Far Cathay, p. 177. 40 ELEMENTS. of animals removed from temperate to arctic zones, and deprived of the alternation of day and night on which theij instincts depend. "Man," says the poet Litaipe, "when things are not in harmony with his desires, can but throw himself into a bark, with his hair on the wind, and drift on the waves." But the impulse to self-abandonment is a characteristic of the yellow races, strongly indicated in their religious tendencies. Their fatalism, associated with fortitude in suf- fering and a patient stoicism, — alike in the Mongol and American tribes, — is not without its noble elements of self- command, and even heroic ardor. The Chinese generals who slay themselves after defeat, the scholars whose fre- quent self-destruction makes a tragedy of every great com- petitive examination, the officials who choose the harikiri of the Japanese, and so escape the religiously dreaded calamity of decapitation, — not only obey a keen sense of personal honor, but advance halfway to meet the destiny which they so thoroughly accept. The Japanese call the summons to harikiri the " Happy Despatch ; " they invest it with ceremonious politeness and respect, and refer it to a generous impulse on the part of one who has incurred disgrace, to save his property to his family and expiate his fault in the eyes of his sovereign.^ The approbation of suicide under depressing circum- stances in China may be said to amount to enthusiasm. Pagodas are erected to the "beautiful suicide of love."^ Honorary tablets are frequent to widows who have betaken themselves to their lost husbands. So fashionable became such suicides, that in the early part of the last century an imperial edict forbade this public reward. The reader of the "Peking Journal" will still find petitions for these tab- lets, especially in behalf of daughters who are described as models of filial piety, for putting an end to their lives in > Osborne's Japanese Fr,,gments (Lond. ,86i), p. .4. 2 Bowring-s Flowery Scroll. THE CHINESE MIND. 4 1 imitation of their mothers. Even the self-immolation of widows amidst crowds of spectators still occurs.^ The ex- planation of such a passion must lie in the peculiar traits of Chinese character already noticed, brought into emergen- cies by a social order so rigidly mechanized as to afford no other relief. It is mainly, we suspect, in this form that the disease of insanity manifests itself in China, since it is not only exhibited in such maniacal habits as putting oneself to death to bring disgrace upon others, but is to be associated with the singular fact that actual insanity is hardly recog- nized in that country except as an explanation of the most hideous crimes. Thus, by a well-known fiction, those who are guilty of parricide are usually designated in the " Peking Gazette" as lunatics. The Chinese are said to suffer little from nervous irrita- tion after injuries or surgical operations, and to Apparent exhibit much less sensitiveness than Europeans trdefactiVe to affections of the spine.^ It is but just to re- sensibility. fer to this constitutional defect of sensibility many traits which appear to imply extreme cruelty. It may help to explain the custom of treating rebels and banditti with- out mercy, and totally exterminating the families of those guilty of treason.^ The coast pirates showed no quarter to the imperial forces, and received none.* The Taiping war was a series of massacres and executions on a pro- digious scale. The " Five Punishments," as laid down in the oldest times, were modes of beheading, branding, and mutilating. A peculiar form of shoe is said to have been invented for the use of persons whose feet had been cut off by the law ; and a proverb hints the frequency of the punishment by saying that these shoes for cripples were dear in the market, when ordinary ones were cheap.^ The » Hongkong Daily Press for Jan. 20, 1861. ' Lay, p. 225. s Martin, I. 142. Meadows, Chinese and their Relellions, p. 454- « Chine Ouverie, p. 104. » Platli, Gesein u. Reckt in Alt. China {Bay. Ah., X). 42 ELEMENTS. whole family of the parricide was put to death. Cruelties were invented by tyrants ^ that would seem incredible, were we not familiar with similar ones in the records of sla very and intolerance in the West. Instances are recorded of burying servants alive with their dead masters in large numbers ; and this appears to have been not infrequent at some very ancient periods.^ But the Liki says it was against Chinese custom ; and it will probably be traced to relations with the Tartar tribes, who have retained the slaughter of men and women as a burial ceremony in honor of their Khans, down to recent times.^ There are legends of its abolition in China through the shrewd proposal to substitute the wife and children of the prince for his ser- vants, as still more necessary to his happiness in a future state; as also, of the further substitution of figures in straw and wood, and finally of paper ones, as now burned at funerals.* Dark pictures have been drawn of cruel- ties practised in Chinese prisons and by arbitrary man- darins ; but these do not appear to be approved by the government, nor to be true of penal administration in gen- eral, though punishments like the " cangue " and squeezing the fingers are still in vogue.^ Navarete found the prisons cleaner and more orderly than those of Europe. There is a custom of administering drugged wine to criminals before execution, to diminish the pains of death.® It is said that the criminal has the benefit of a moment's relaxation of the cord about his neck, — a well-meant interruption, to enable the soul to escape the body ! It should seem on the whole that as the older barbarities do not materially differ from those which appear in the history of European States, so the later severities are neither better nor > Plath, Geseiz u. Recht in Alt. China {Bay. Ak., X.). • Shiking, I. xi. 6. Plath, Ztsch. d. D. M. G., xx. 4SU. • Instances in Wuttke, I. 232. * Plath, pp. 480, 481. • Williams, I. 409, 411. Lockhart's Medical Missionary, ch. II. ■ China Review, II. No. 3. THE CHINESE MIND. 43 worse than such as have prevailed in the most civihzed countries down to the present century. ^The harshness of the Penal Code will hereafter be seen to be much mod- ified by humane provisions, — such as the commutability of penalties, — and the more brutal features are practically abolished.^ The present period of civil wars and other complications is exceptional, and affords no proper test of the spirit of Chinese jurisprudence. But the vast and permanent civilization of China is itself ample evidence of socially constructive and Human- humane tendencies, infinitely more powerful than ^''^=- the barbarism interwoven in the structure. I shall not here enumerate the benignant precepts that crowd her ancient classics and modern literature alike, and constitute the invariable norm of all political and social duty. The practical results are as impressive as the persistent theory, — such as orphan asylums in almost every city, and fre- quently in villages ; societies for aid to widows ; free day- schools everywhere, supported by the rich ; public asylums for the sick, old, and poor, sustained by the government, — and, as these are apt to be ill-provided, support by the clans, of their own poor ; a general belief in the meritorious- ness of almsgiving, and in the inauspiciousness of sending beggars away empty ; gratuitous distribution of medicines, and of books of moral edification.^ Not less numerous are societies for aiding indigent persons in paying marriage and burial expenses ; for distributing second-hand cloth- ing ; for establishing granaries ; for building roads and bridges to facilitate industry ; for saving drowning persons, and furnishing biers for the drowned ; for taking care of foundlings and lepers.^ There are no hospitals for the in- sane, for deaf mutes, cripples, or the blind ; yet not so many ' Williams, I. 415 ; Giles's Sketches^ p. 136. * Nevius, pp. 214-225. Morache, p. 118. » Doolittle, II. 193-196. De Mas, I. 273, 274. Chinese Repository, A'jg. 1846. Speer, p. 636, 637. Williams, II. 2S2. 44 ELEMENTS. of these unfojtunates are seen in Chinese cities as in European. It is generally admitted that lunacy is ex- tremely rare. Mutual-aid Associations have their bureaus and halls in the cities ; and in California they not only pro- vide for the poor, but send back the sick and dead to China. It is common for wealthy people to furnish great jars of tea under canopies, for travellers and wearied laborers ; and especially on the mountain roads. ^ There is a college at Ningpo to aid the poor in getting educated, deriving its income from lands and products, and founded two hundred years ago.^ Many reports from sanitary institutions in Chinese cities indicate great defects in their management during the present century: they have suffered severely from the agitated and depressed condition of the country; and the extreme pecuniary distress of the government has, of course, caused its benevolent activities to fall into decay.^ Yet in all prosperous times the imperial bounty has flowed out in fixed channels, to relieve the miseries arising from local floods or famines, and to secure the comfort and happiness of the people. The patriarchal theory makes it a prime duty of the ruler to provide for their physical needs, and especially in the matter of food. Hence granaries have been maintained from earliest times on the frontiers, at the capital, and in all the departments, in which the abundance of favorable years has been stored up for years of famine ; and edicts exhorting to private benevolence abound at all periods. Every device for re- lieving the burden of taxation and public service is ex- hausted in the older legislation, which is extremely minute and explicit on the duties of government in times of popular distress.* The family relation is theoretically expanded • De Mas, I. 273, 274. « Milne in Chinese Repositcry, Jan. 184,. » Girard, La France en Chine., pp. 170-180 (Paris, iSSg). Williams, II. 283. Chinese Recorder, Feb. 1870. Chinese Repository, Jan. 1844. Lockharfs Medical Missionary gives a very favorable account of the native institutions in Shanghai. * Blot's Tchemli, IX. 31-33. Mencius, I. ii. 5. THE CHINESE MIND. 45 even to remotest nations subject to the emperor as their common father. And serious effort has always been made to carry out this Chinese analogue to the Western idea of brotherhood, into every branch of public and private con- duct. The universal good is distinctly proclaimed as the one principle on which lands have been apportioned, occu- pations regulated, crimes punished, office bestowed, educa- tion diffused, rites instituted, manners prescribed. In old feudal China, the care of the poor, of widows and orphans, was specially commended by the king to his chiefs, who were expected to provide for these classes by local institu- tions.^ " Remember," says the Shuking, " the proper end of punishment is to make an end of punishing." ^ " Only the good should determine criminal cases." ^ " Deal with evil as if it were a disease in your own person, and with the people as if you were guarding your own child." * " Bet- ter run the risk of error than put to death an innocent person." ^ " Rewards, not punishments, should descend to one's children."® Principles like these, pervading the classics that form the basis of law, indicate at least the powerful hold which humane instincts have taken upon the national mind and conscience. The Tcheouli ^ pre- scribes the teaching of eight leading rules and nine ties of mutual benefit, as essential for guiding the people and pre- serving them in harmony. The first of the eight is family affection ; the second, reverence for age ; the last, kindness to strangers.^ It prescribes also, as points to be aimed at by the Minister of Instruction, the diffusion of love for the young, care for the old, succor for the distressed and bereaved, pity for the destitute, consideration for the sick.' All current works of popular teaching are full of a similar 1 Plath, Verfdss. «. Verwalt. d. Alt. China [Abh. Phil. d. Bay. Akad., X). = Shuking-, P. y., B. XXI. 9. s Ibid., B. xxvil. 21. « Ibid., B. IX. 9. " P. II. B. II. 12. « Ibid. ^ An ancient code ; ascribed to the 12th century b. c, but without sufficient authority. « Biot's Tcheouli, B. 11. » Ibid., IX. 34, 35. 40 ELEMENTS. spirit ; and the same may be said of the odes, proverbs, toy-books, tales, most widely circulated in the empire The Penal Code itself opens with a distinction between nominal and actual punishments, which leaves a wide margin for humane administration. These are not the institutions of an inhuman people. Even the religion of the Chinese is domestic, and cen- . tres in the natural affections. Like that of the Domestic . , affections Mongolian races in their whole extent, it consists a religion. p^^Linly, as is well known, in reverence for ancestors ; while the forms in which the cultus has been developed by this eminently social people are more genial and bene- ficent than those which characterize the nomadic life of the races of Central and Western Asia. Their family gather- ings at the terriples and tombs are as pleasant as they are pure, and probably as productive of kindly sentiment as any religious festivals or social reunions in the world. The tablets in which the souls of the departed are supposed to dwell are a perpetual admonition to concord within fami- lies, as well as for the millions who at one and the same period of the year are moved by a common impulse to pay devotion at these shrines. Ancestral halls are often built by associations of families, and the prohibition of marriage between persons of the same name expands the circle of sympathy. The relation constantly maintained with un- seen relatives is that of mutual care and help, in minute and tender superstitions ^ whose influence reaches through social life, and pervades it with innumerable delicate forms of mutual -service. Among these, the tenderness required of children towards their parents is to be mentioned as a school of sympathy. The Book of Rites teaches that the young should visit the chambers of their parents in the early morning, and perform every possible service witk gentle looks and affectionate inquiries, never failing in any ' Doolittle, I. 169, 173, 179, 185. THE CHINESE MIND. 47 attitude or gesture of respect ; that at meals and at evening they should observe similar rules, anticipating every want with self-forgetful devotion.^ Even if hated, they must not be angry ; and, when admonished, never contend.^ Men- cius declares that one's love for his parents should take precedence of his love for his country.^ There are numer- ous significant ceremonies and customs in honor of mothers, and for their benefit, — such as those which celebrate the arrival of girls at the age of sixteen, by a festival of spe- cial thanksgiving ; and those performed to save the parent from supposed evils resulting from death soon after child- birth.* In the rule that makes one's virtue redound to the honor of his parent, the Chinese have recognized the laws of hereditary transmission and given motive-force to sexual purity. Their social ideal consists in disciplines of devo- tion to certain personal relations, whose claims are inhe- rent.^ These relations are so defined as to keep self in the background, and the thought of subordination and respect- ful regard constantly prominent. Their prescriptive for- malism must have weakened the force of spontaneity ; but this constitutional propensity to work by fixed rules and in prescribed channels, while it represses the freedom of humane instincts, at the same time, after a Chinese man- ner, permanently organizes and applies them. The very games of the populace are of a comparatively refined and delicate nature, and never approach nearer the coarse and brutal spectacles of Western races than in matches, of crick- ets or quails. The same ideal refinement is apparent in the special industries to which the people are devoted. Their peculiar passiveness must appear in the tone of all forms and institutions of benevolence, not less than p^f^^oj in other products of the national character. This motive heart worships a fulfilled ideal. It entertains no im- ^°'""' ' Liki, XII. « Ibid., XXXV. > Mencius, VII. i. 35. * DooUttle, I. 196, 197. * SiaohiaOf ch. ii. 48 ELEMENTS. pulse to radical changes, and is defective in motive-power to meet great public calamities with salutary precautions and improvements for the future. Chinese humanity amelior- ates, but does not reconstruct. With its abounding charities, it does not establish reformatory prisons, nor institute meth- ods of restoring the degraded to social opportunity and diminishing the extent of beggary. It has an apathetic and languid air, and does not rise to enthusiasm ; which perhaps we have no right to expect anywhere in Chinese life. More than any thing else, it must suffer from the end- less pedagogy of moral precept, and from those assumptions of attained wisdom and of the all-sufficiency of words, which are to no small extent involved therein. Still, Chi- nese humanity is genuine ; and we cannot ignore its im- mense influence in maintaining this vast productive and coherent civilization. We must judge it by its fitness to meet the wants of that temperament to which it belongs ; and may well ask whether it has not on the whole secured to China a social order as favorable to personal happiness and mutual service as any Western civilization has been, down to our very recent and still most immature epoch of scientific discovery. Nor must the lack of reconstructive tendencies be too strongly stated. More than twenty dy- nastic revolutions ; two great intellectual revivals, one after the destruction of literature by the T'sin, and another when the invention of printing had prepared the way for the literary glories of the second Sung ; a total change in the land tenure and relation of the States to the central government, since early times ; the Taiping revolution, in- volving striking religious and social changes ; and, finally, the readiness of the people to profit by their recent lessons in war, and to accept European cultures and arts, — afford no slight guarantees for the adoption of reformatory meth- ods in dealing with social vices also, and for a more effec- tive system of public benevolence. THE CHINESE MIND. 49 The "immobility" of the Chinese type is, in fact, counterbalanced by a peculiar alacrity, within its sodaiL> limits and conditions, of the social sentiments and *™*5' bai- ances this attractions. Those lethargic, almost melancholic, inertia, features veil a lively sense of humor and a genial tone of feeling. With all their plodding and routine, these people are fond of festivals and merry-makings ; and, when they break away from task-work, their hilarity is unbounded. They delight in bright colors, gay processions, social re- unions, garrulous gossip, friendly discussion ; in clubs and associations ; in good-natured games of chance and the pleasant excitement of divination and fortune-telHng. They elaborate their taste for ornamental work in writing, paint- ing, horticulture, and the domestic arts, with a minuteness which is the surest sign of the enjoyment they find in it. Their passion for burlesque was notably shown in the cari- catures of Europeans by travelling actors at Macao in the time of Ricci,^ and in the placards posted on walls during the late wars. That curious mixture of crudeness with luxury, of the silken robe with the rude bamboo stage, of strutting heroes with men on all-fours in painted frames, — which serves them for dramatic entertainment, — is at least a popular enthusiasm. Itinerant comedians are hired by the rich for pleasant domestic occasions, and street crowds will endure all weathers for days, while watching the progress of these rude shows.^ The feast is cheered, like the Greek, with music ; like the Saxon, with toasts and compliments : and the tea-house with lecturing and story- telling. Chinese religion is too genial to disdain the comic ; and plays are frequently performed in the courts of temples.' Dances were prescribed in the Tcheouli as part of the religious service, varying with the occasion, and accompanied by corresponding styles of music* There are ' Hue, Christianity in China, II. 150. » De Mas, I. 94; Knox, Overland to Asia, » De Mas, I. 93. • Tcheouli, XXII. 4 50 ELEMENTS. five great Festivals, all of a social and joyous character. The Festi- One grccts the new year with ten whole days or ^i^- more of mutual congratulations and exchange of gifts, good wishes, and respects. Another welcomes spring with jocund processions and official breaking of the ground, when the farmer feels common interests and hopes with the emperor and the nation. A third rejoices for fifteen days over the harvest; and the people, male and female, crowd the theatres, bent on amusement from phantasma- gorias, cosmoramas, and other light and merry shows. A fourth sets the land ablaze with lanterns of every size, hue, shape, and adornment, and vexes the air with a rain of fire in pure love of jollity, — nominally, in honor of the first full moon of the year ; really, a feast of homes. And a fifth, in early April, brings all with one accord to honor the tombs of their ancestors, and deck their tablets with willow boughs, in token at once of unseen guardianship and of a historic deliverance from great peril in the old time.^ Then there are feasts of birthdays, and of old age, and of dragon-boats for children, and of ornamented eggs, and for congratulating the emperor at the winter solstice as their earthly sun, and on numerous other occasions and emergencies, — sprink- ling the works and days with shining spaces. Marco Polo describes their salutations as made with cheerful counte- nances and great politeness ; ^ and modern observers note the easiness of their good breeding, and the ready way in which ceremonious forms are thrown aside.^ Even the materialism of religious rites is genial, setting out tables for the dead, feasting these gods, transforming tombs into dwellings, and coffins into domestic gifts and treasures; and treating death as a mere transference of the friend into closer dependence on the affection and respect of those who remain in the ligl\f of day. > Doolittle, II. so. « II. nvi. ' WilUams, II. 69. THE CHINESE MIND. 5 1 But this vivacity of the social sentiments is not the only counterpoise to a constitutional passiveness and o*" immobility. Nature has her revenge on all repres- poileT sion of human faculty, and will not be cheated of '""''^ ... _ Natural ner balance by temperament or by laws. Some reactions. semblance of growth man must have. If free development be checked, he will caricature change by grotesque and petty artifices. The Chinese protect themselves against monotony by out-of-the-way devices in doing common things. The passion for whimsical variations, within the limits allowed by prescription, really measures their en- deavor to escape rigid mechanism and close confinement of the ideal. Europeans are fond of illustrating this passion by the oddity of a Chinese book, — printed on one side of the leaf only, and in perpendicular lines ; titled on the edges of the leaves, and opening at the back ; marginal notes at the top of the page ; table of contents at the end of the chapter ; binder's thread outside the cover ; every de- tail directly opposite to what they have come to regard as most natural and becoming. But these peculiarities really have their source in special requirements in the material used and the end proposed. Like the choice of white as color of mourning, or wearing the hat as mark of respect, they simply indicate difference of taste on matters more or less arbitrary. More to the purpose are the fantastic forms devised with endless ingenuity for their flags, pagodas, and lanterns ; and their application to horticulture and kindred arts of the principle of altering Nature at every point. " Where there is a waste they cover it with trees ; a dry desert, they water it with a river or float it with a lake ; a level, they raise it into hillocks, or scoop it into hollows, or roughen it with rocks." ^ They make Chinamen of trees, dwarfing them with such art that they seem hoary with age though only a few inches high, and distorting them * Lord Macartney's yourtiai. 52 ELEMENTS* into strange imitations of traditional animals and men.^ They twist flowers into monstrosities ; and plant bulbs upside down. They confine the circulation of sap, and divert it into paths it would not choose. They have learned to prick oysters with needles to obtain the diseased deposit of pearl ; ^ to compress the cormorant's throat that he may not swallow the fish he catches for man ; to cramp women's feet ; to plunge into gambling to escape ennui and make up for want of athletic games. They weave pictures into their clothing, and used to go covered with emblematic fig- ures of sun, moon, and elements ; of birds, beasts, snakes. They delight in exaggerated and misshapen forms in art ; and in manners avoid direct address, and heap up formal repetitions. The Chinese proverb puts "novelty in the garment" against "antiquity in the man." A stucfy of the older prints will show that, in such matters as dress, great changes have occurred in the course of ages : a progress even towards simplicity and purity of taste has been se- cured by these minute variations.^ The measured pace and imposing air, once believed a sign of worth, has disap- peared. So has the extreme minuteness of legislation in matters of food and dress and structure of houses, that we find in the old law-books,* and much room is left for indi- vidual tastes and caprices. The Christian monks of the Thebaid, renouncing every luxury, became extreme ascetics ; and then copied their Bibles in purple and gold letters, and invented the most imaginative border-ornamentations. Thus, in one way or another, Nature protests against systematic constraint, enforced routine, conformity to systems of prescription ; against uniformity of method and aim. The Chinese garden is symbolical. Bind a capacity from shooting freely upwards, it will work out sideways ; awkwardly and absurdlj ' Fortune, Wanderings, p. 83. 2 Montfort, Voyage en Chine, p. 21a » Tchemli. Plath, Bay. Ak. XI. « Ibid. THE CHINESE MIND. 53 enough, yet as it can. Open no great paths of progress to walk in, yet there must be exercise, and men will invent odd postures and movements within the space left them. Man cannot be wholly deprived of the instinct of growth. And like as young impetuous America, so inert custom-ridden China, dwells, like the nomad, in the fluttering tents of change. Here are Saturn and Mercury in one : the fixed and the fugitive, tradition and transition, curiously ^^ssioa combined. Such conjunction of adhesiveness fcr traffic, with social susceptibility naturally results in a peculiar talent for transacting business. " In China every thing is matter of trade, every thing for sale to the highest bidder." i These natural shopmen surpass most races in shrewdness and diplomacy, and the finesse of traffic. They are sharp observers of character ; however heavy and indifferent they may appear, they show no lack of knowledge in their esti- mates of those with whom they have to deal. " They easily undo by stratagem what the European powers force them to concede at the cannon's mouth." ^ They have a passion for statistics, as for all minute details ; and, for all matters within the scope of their trades and interests, their itiner- aries furnish close and complete descriptions of the eigh- teen great provinces of China.^ Not less strong is their love of calculating chances, of combining numbers : the mysteries of banking and insurance are familiar to them. In all the great cities the former function is fulfilled by respectable merchants, who afford facilities for commerce, payment of taxes, and the administration of the State.* Mercantile credit is everywhere sustained by mutual in- surance companies, by which aid is given in business diffi- culties.^ So universal are mutual-loan societies, that, out 1 Courcy, p. 470. ' Speer's C/iina, p. 6S5- » CAixese Repository, March, 1842. * Courcy, p. 472. ■> La Chine Ouverte, p. i65. In this direction they greatly surpass the more ardent ind impetuous Japanese, who have always placed the merchant low in the social scale (Smith's 54 ELEMENTS. of twenty millions of people, scarcely a thousand will be found who are not in the course of their lives associated.^ Neither this nor any other form of joint-stock company was ever reached by the ancient Greeks. There is no class in China that cannot rise in this way to high posi- tion. Honest management of such interests is a point of honor.^ Such faculty for organizing, such art in managing, such Faculty persistcnce in work and in purpose is combined for organ- with their realistic sense and alertness of observa- ""^' tion, that they easily master the opportunities of trade and commerce wherever they go, and oust all compet- ing Eastern races in these fields, on the continent of Asia and in the islands of the Pacific, by the peaceful suprem- acy of practical mind.^ In all forms of competition that depend on sustained endeavor, their muscularity or work- power, their cheerful temperament, their fortitude in trying times, and their comparative insensibility to pain insure their success. They have been called the The Anglo . ■' Saxons of Anglo-Saxons of Asia ; and the story of their enter- ^^^ prise and energy is yet to be told. This mighty empire, with its boundless resources and its enduring vitality, was not builded without paying the price. The Chinese has no genius for royal roads to success. He is no wild Babel-builder : neither is he a coral insect in human shape. He is a practical constructive worker for humane and social ends ; and the accession his peculiar energies will bring to the development of industry on the vast material scale now opening at this opposite pole of the Ten Weeks in yapan, p. 261) ; although financial and commercial aspirations are believed to have had much to do vvith the recent revolution, which has made the empire of the Rising Sua a zealous pupil of Western civilization. (Congris Intern, d' Orienialistes. Paris, 1873, I. p. 133.) Not less here than elsewhere the "deep things of finance" are in the hands of the Chinese. (Gri£Gs, Mikado's Empire.) » Simon, N. Ch. Br. R.A. Soc, Dec. 1868. ^ Giles, Sketches, p. 51. » Brine, Taiping Retellion, pref. p. ix.; Speer, p. 465 ; Brooks, p. 113 j Martin, I. p. ijo Pmnpelly, p. 426. THE CHINESE MIND. 55 temperamental, as well as of the geographical globe can- not easily be overestimated. The taste for social friction and competition stimulates co-operation. Chinese cities abound in travellers' Tastefor clubs and mercantile corporations, and in halls for competi- conversation . and discussion on trade and adminis- "'"'■ tration, on local interests and public rites. Secret societies — benevolent, political, religious, and of all qualities of aim — honeycomb the national life, as vigorously as they did France on the eve of her great Revolution, or as they do America in the present day of political and social tran- sition. In this way these suppressed democrats gratify a taste for subtle disputation and intrigue, which is continu- ally resulting in conspiracy against the provincial or even the general government; as well as protect their local interests and cherished traditions, by keeping alive the sense of a common good. The end, however, is not mere Celtic frenzy and revo- lutionary destructiveness. In this excitability on Respect topics of business competition and political differ- °^i^„^, ence they are not afloat on a high sea of unlimited ditions. desire, where the bearings are lost for want of faith in the past or the present : they hold fast everywhere to solid ground, anchored in mutual understanding and ancestral order. The son of Han is a sharp stickler for his rights. He lampoons officials, and derides edicts. He is a demo- crat, and believes fully in the " vox populi, vox dei ; " which is in fact the oldest maxim of China, and the burden of statesman, sage, and scholar through her whole history, His imperial proverb is, " The bowstring, drawn with vio- lence, will break ; the people, pressed hard, will rebel." He suffers no rule of caste nor arbitrary compulsion to con- trol the disposal of his property or his choice of work. Yet he by no means sets up his own caprice as his ulti- mate rule. Volitions and inclinations acknowledge an 56 ELEMENTS. immutable order, the firm-set granite of the ages ; which is constant in temperament, instinct, ideal ; enforces itself as public opinion, sways emperors and people alike. And this rests, as he believes, on nothing else than the order of Nature, — the inherent harmony of the universe with man. It is not arbitrary, nor transitional; but cosmical and eternal: so conservative is the setting of all this passion for contrast, transference, and interchangeable detail; so loyal in essence this love of license in petty change. Politics were never separate in China from this higher law; they were from the beginning its concrete form : as if Nature repeated her successions, alternations, seasons, polarities, in human institutions which could have no other basis, and follow no other track. Here then, in man, we have a piece of the sun and moon, of the orbits and the elemental laws. In such conservatism we may be sure that nothing is conserva- suffcrcd to bc lost. All this ephemeral flutter of N^hin unrest, this destructiveness of lives, this mobility lost. of aims, is but an inner molecular movement with- out substantial change. This dissolving glare of lan- terns, rockets, and burnt paper marks not the loss but the transmutation of forms. The spirit of economy overrides the whole, and its chemistry is amazing. All soils and substances utilized, all droppings gleaned up, all decay made tributary to growth ; no written word suffered to perish ; the whole literature of the past forced to survival, again and again restored, as nearly as possible, after de- structive fires ; every pretension to antiquity heard, com- mented, sifted ; the records of ages reproduced, if not in fact, at least in faith, reviving, phoenix-like, in some form from the ashes ; all breaks in continuity closed. An Old Mortality who never dies, China spends microscopic labors on renovating her inscriptions of belief and conduct, words and deeds ; turning them over again and again, as her THE CHINESE MIND. 57 farmers turn the clods of a land already full of graves. A scientific faith will trust progress as inherent in that dy- namic law, which preserves the phases only in their results ; but this careful, anxious economy of conservative China must gather up every minute detail, and make the most of it as of a child that cannot go alone. But there is no melancholy in this secular life of the miner, apparently in the dark and among the dead, cheer- As the shadows in which he shrouds his ancestors *"i°=^ do not sadden his ancestral feasts, so there is for him no element of gloom or decay in these tracks of the old wis- dom of precept and institution, in which he is for ever plod- ding. He is not bent like a grim theologian over his medi- aeval creed ; he is erect and cheerful, and genial in his toil. For the past and the present do not need to be joined by painful straining to span a chasm, while one picks at its gulf ; since all the ages are continuous with the undoubted validity of the same set of truths. But he lacks the im- agination that would traverse these vast spaces of historic time with a sense of awe, and ponder over their mysteries of human experience. His strongest emotion is a plain- tive and patient wonder at the transiency of things. This unfailing Methuselah, to whom a thousand years are as a day, wrinkled and hoary as he seems at first sight, senti- mentalizes like Horace on the swiftness of time. His earnestness has its focus in the moments ; he is utilitarian and acquisitive, and holds fast every shred of their gift. His art in making the best of failure, and carrying off defeat as if it were victory, is sublime. It is said that the emperor indem.nifies his dignity for the refusal of certain invincible tribes of the west to accept his government, by conferring the title of imperial official upon the chiefs whom they have elected. A high officer, refusing a pass- port for Peking to a friend of Mr. Lay, the English consul, 58 ELEMENTS. and being informed that he would then proceed thither without pne, at once replied : " I do not choose that this foreigner should be guilty of breaking the laws. Here is the passport." ^ It would not be strange if the very coil of these rigid ■ , wires of time and fate around him should pinch Causes of r • 1. 5hy, sharp his sharp wit to that subtlety and petty craft with pract;c. ^jjj^]^ i^g jg credited, by races probably not less gifted in this Hne. Adroit management doubtless does something to offset the constraint of routines that cheat his powers of their natural play. But it is late in the day to bring special grounds in Chinese human nature to account for faults which, whether truly or falsely charged upon it, the Anglo-American conscience, at least, must blush to refer to heathen blindness or inferiority of race. Thus it is charged with a sharp practice, a want of integrity, which is said to have defeated every attempt to carry out laws against opium or gambling ; and with special pro- pensity to act from interested motives, and to turn high moral ideals into incentives to the love of gain. We may be permitted to doubt whether this habit, however con- spicuously it may appear in the schoolboy competition that forms so large an element in their educational and political methods, really exceeds similar faults arising in Western races from quite different causes. Chinese policy does, not suffer by comparison with the morality of Paley and '' Poor Richard ; " nor Chinese exploitation of noble maxims with the egotistic pretension to official rewards for party services, with which we are more familiar, or with our neglect of natural disciplines and right subordinations for lofty phrases about patriotism and public duty. Proba- bly the celestial appeal also is extremely apt to be made to terrestrial motives, and the idea of right to revolve about the poles of covenant or bargain. • Hiibner, p. 475. THE CHINESE MIND. 59 This love of gain is to be distinguished from a mere thirst for monopoly and accumulation. The habit Nature of of the Chinese is not so much to heap, as to dif- f^'^^ fuse, the materials of comfort. As a people they gain- sim- are not luxurious, and the life of the masses is Jirif^ remarkably simple. The women are less given to ^^'^^^ ornamentation than in any other Asiatic race except the Japanese. The laborer subsists on small means, sweetened by industry. Clothing, house, and food cost but little. For a few " cash " he dines sumptuously, even in the city. The greater part of the country population in northern China have their little houses and farms, which support them with content.^ With its floor of earth, paper windows, plain cooking utensils, and small brick range that serves for fire-place and bed, " the house keeps itself ; " ^ though, it must be allowed, with not so much regard as might be for sanitary laws. Fortune, in describing this country sim- plicity and want of healthful conveniences, says " there is no people so contented and happy ; none in which there is so little of real misery and want." ^ With all the brill- iancy of such centres of art and wealth as Canton or Hangchow, the national ideal of dress and living is frugality and self-restraint. This is constantly urged by the Board of Rites, who determine the fashions, but is conformed to by the people as part of the unwritten natural law.* The wise men of the Confucian and Mencian books are Stoics, or even Cynics. " How admirable was Hwuy ! with a single dish of rice, a single gourd of drink, and living in a narrow lane, what others could not have endured did not disturb his joy." " Shun [afterwards emperor] ate his parched grains as if he expected nothing better his life through." "A scholar whose mind is set on truth, and who is ashamed of poor clothes or food, is not worthy to be » Fortune, IVanderings, pp. 190, 191. ' Notes and Queries, July 1868. » Fortune, Wanderings, pp. 68, 190. • Mikadoes Emfire. 60 ELEMENTS. conversed with." "The wise man," says the Shu-king, " understands the painful toil of sowing and reaping, and how it conducts to ease." The Chinese in California are allowed to be an admirable illustration of such maxims as these. Their sturdy labor, apt for every kind of service, — quiet, orderly, temperate, persevering, unambitious of future indolence, — already lends such aid to American enterprise and morality as well compares with that of any other class of immigrants. " They glean after the whites in the gold-fields ; they are content with small returns ; " they love work too well not to be satisfied to work for such wages as they can command.^ In Japan, they are the most industrious nationality. Tastes in food, as well as in dress, are regulated in China by rules believed to be rooted in Nature. The Liki shows that they must be har- monized with the seasons : the five elements are related to the five colors, and these with the five sorts of taste. Manner and form of eating are laid down for the rich, and the royal institutes of cookery and diet given in the Tcheouli with crushing minuteness. At the ancient feasts, where drinking was common, the rules provided for small goblets to prevent excess, and multitudes of gestuies intervened between the draughts. Rules for self-regula- tion and restraint, that seem to have grown up out of the national tastes, were spontaneously prescribed and applied in profusion to every pleasure and task. And we find in this fact some explanation of the very high, and in many respects unsurpassed, attainment of the Chinese in the arts and amenities of domestic life. To these helpful elements we must add the affirmative spirit which leads them to accept and imitate whatever they see to be of use, with rare aptness and fidelity. There is much error current on this point in their character, and abundant testimony to refute it. " The Chinese laborer," * Bowles, Across the ContirUTti ; Speer, p. 526; Pumpelly, p. 252. THE CHINESE MIND. 6 1 says Morache, " does not look with indifference on things : talks much ; tries to instruct himself ; has not the pride which hides ignorance, like the literati." i It will be seen in our account of their industrial arts, and of the history of their commercial relations with the West, that even their wonderful skill in manipulation has not surpassed the interest which they have shown in greeting the achieve ments of other nations, and, after their own way, in profit ing thereby. Such the active qualities of persevering cheerful indus- try, of social constructiveness, competitive ardor, summary economic method, and assimilative power, that "^'^''^ emmently nt the Chmese to enter mto the spirit dendes. of the present age, and to work in its paths as a ^f,f'°" ^ to Western twofold force of moral conservatism and industrial needs. progress. Not less do they serve to warn us by the stunted state of their imagination and ideal faculty, by the lack of free individuality and original force, of the dangers of mechanism and uniformity in culture. And this is timely service, in view of many similar educational ten- dencies that begin to flow already in America from the jealous assertion of a universal equality of minds, and of every one's capacity for all functions ; an unlimited power being expected from prescribed methods and the machinery of drill. Many prejudices will be removed, and wider con- ceptions of the unity of races will prevail, when our grow- ing acquaintance with this great people shall bring us to do justice to their democratic instincts and affinities, to their local liberties, to their universal aim in education, and to that grand theory of office as a function of knowl- edge and virtue, which they have so persistently striven to embody with more or less success, while free America, by general confession, has of late most perilously thrown it aside. ^ Morache, p. 83. II. LABOR. T LABOR. HE Chinese must be judged, not by what they have thought, but by what they have done. Their speculative performance cannot be seen apart from oftheciu- their practical, nor understood till this has been meas- ""^ '° !"* ^ ^ studied m ured. For them the ideal means a concrete fact, a their visi- positive product. Their religion, technically a wor- *''' ^°'^ ship of spirits and elements, is really a worship of uses achieved, of relations fulfilled. We must approach the study of their philosophy and faith through the' visible civilization in which they have embodied their qualities, so as to test whether they have manifested that earnestness and devo- tion which would constitute their use of these qualities a religion. On the gates of the " Celestial Kingdom " is very legibly written : Do not ask here what mysteries have been fathomed ; but behold what realities have been achieved. The three obvious traits of this muscular type, or work temperament, have at first view an unpromising aspect. They are its instincts for plodding labor, obvious for dead-level uniformity, for minute fidelity in de- j"J'^°^ tails. Looked at from their grotesque side, these mianype instincts are familiar to the Western mind as a "-^ "" kind of antiquated babyhood. But the steady plodding has recorded itself in a wonderful industrial development ; the S 66 ELEMENTS. dead-level uniformity, in systems of universal education and democratic habits of thought ; and the minute con- formity to conditions, in a complex poHtical mechanism for appointing to public oflfices those who are fittest to fill them. Each of these great results we shall examine in detail. Of all Mongolic races, this alone has shown the persist- chinese ent working-faculty to create an enduring civiliza- ",ty''a3^d|^'"tion. The crude Turanian energy that so often tinguished swept the great steppes in predatory warfare, and itfo^goUo followed Tchinggiskhan and Tamerlane through the '"'=• length and breadth of Asia, overturning and fusing empires, " like primitive convulsions of Nature " or a storm of inorganic atoms, — only to disappear as swiftly as they came, — developed into permanent wonders of agriculture and manufactures in the great Eastern plain by the sea. Here the " hundred black-haired families " settled in remote ages, and forthwith began another sort of raid, — to drain off the floods, to burn up the wilderness, to expel the wild beasts, to portion the land into farms. Their industrial achievement has given them, as it progressed through the ages, the commanding place they hold in modern civiliza- tion. It has been estimated that they perform from six to seven tenths of the manual labor done in the world. May I not go behind the more obvious traits of the Turanic type, all of which would leave this record an unexplained excep- tion, — and ascribe it to a constitutional necessity of the type in question to bury itself in the actual and concrete, conceiving only in the very act of executing ? All testimonies agree that the Chinese as a whole are Practical what the sway of such realism would make them, — orthiT' cheerful, observant, keen of wit ; earnest, abound- (acuity. ing in the virtues of patience and self-discipline. LABOR. 6^ No people better understands the uses of organization ; and it has been observed that their business-like character and habits of laboring for common ends suggest resemblance to the French and the American much more than to the races of Southern Europe.^ " They are equal to any climate," says Medhurst ; " and nothing else is needed but teaching and enterprise, to convert them into the most effective work- men on the face of the earth." ^ They astonish foreigners by the apparent ease with which they perform what we re- gard as the functions of beasts of burden. Labor, in fact, seems to have been brought to a sort of science by their habit of relieving it with frequent intermissions, and thereby maintaining an independence in it which is probably neces- sary to their constitution ; the result being, that, notwith- standing the inferior quality of their food and their appar- ent lack of blood and muscle, they perform an equal amount of work with Ehropeans in a given time.^ Women are said to work no harder than corresponding classes in other coun- tries ; yet families are provided for, and absolute destitution is more rare than in England.* The force of this impulse to industry is seen in the fact that they seldom exert themselves for any other purpose. Their work is work, and their rest is rest. Walking, even riding, for health or pleasure is said to astonish them, and they stand agape at sight of it.^ Reaction against a phys- ical strain so constant and organic is natural enough, and exhibits itself in such habits among the richer classes as letting the nails grow long, in proof that the wearer has escaped into a rare and crowning leisure. The passion for elaboration makes Chinese art pre-raphaelite in its minute- ness. An object is valuable according to the amount of labor expended on it, apart from the mere question of cost • Davis, II. 67. > Foreigner in Far Caihaoi, p. 183. " Julien's iTuhistr. d. VEmp. Chin., p. 216. * Giles's Chinese Sketches, pp. 11, u '' Meadows' siV^iJ^^ J, &'C', pp. 220, 222. 68 ELEMENTS. Where we should exclaim, " How beautiful it is ! " in Canton they would say, " How much work there is in it ! " ^ The old Chinese lived close to Nature ; took on them- selves her tasks, made the most of her gifts. They Agriculture. • i j had supenntendents of the mountams, the woods, the streams, and the lakes ; they worshipped gods of the land and grain. From oldest time, the ruler, as represent- ative of the national religion, has paid annual honors to the spirits of the land, holding the plough and opening the first furrow of the year, in presence of the people. The earliest king in the national legend, except Fo-hi, who revealed the primitive forms of Nature, was Shin-nung, the divine Hus- bandman. The Athenians too, a very different people from the Chinese, rendered homage to the plough and the oldest husbandry ; tracing their own origin to agricultural deities and laborers.^ Nature is man's mother, as Spirit is his father ; and his first aspirations are the groping of his infant hands for her bosom. The 'oldest form of laws recognized by the great races of antiquity seems to have been what the Greeks called thesmoi ; meaning that natural order, preceding all human statutes, which governed the seasons and blessed the toils of men. Their thesmophoria were probably anal- ogous to the Chinese festivals in honor of the first husband- man.^ The mythologies of the Hindu Ramiyana and the Eleusinian mysteries alike centre in the sacred Furrow of the Plough ; signified by both names, Siti in India, and Kore in Greece. The vast systems of irrigation that chan- nelled the plains of ancient Babylonia and Southern Arabia were doubtless as old as the Hamite or Cushite populations, whose physical mass-power and industry resembled those of the tribes who were fertilizing the opposite side of Asia. Even the Shemites, a pastoral race, and psychologically as * Arh. d. Ritss. Gesandsch. z. Peking;, I. 252. 2 Duncker, Gesch. d- AUerih., HI. 93. ^ Cf. Burnouf, L^gende Athknienne, pp. 136-143. LABOR. 69 far as possible from the Chinese, go back to legendary labors of the same kind; and their dyke of "Lok-man" re- minds us of the pioneer toils of Yu.i At the same season, the labors of the other sex in China were religiously opened by the empress with her attendants, entering on the delicate task of breeding silkworms in the palace park.^ Of this industry one of her first predeces- sors was, in the same way as Shin-nung in agriculture, re- garded as the inventor. It was held from the beginning that man could not be- come good nor happy until he had enough to eat and drink ; and the great care of Government was to see that provision was made for the security of labor in the enjoyment of its earnings, and for the employment of the poor. This piety toward labors upon the earth was symbolic of the national character. In the first traditional organiza- tion of China there is a Ministry of Public Works ; ^ and the last chapters of the Tcheouli-Institutes contain prob- ably the most elaborate record of industrial rules and pro- cesses in ancient history, — including at least a hundred trades. A Shi-king Ode celebrates the primitive virtues of an ancestor of the dukes of Tcheou : — " Kong-lieou, our prince, did not shrink from toil : He sought neither pleasure nor repose. Devoted to husbandry, busily portioning the lands, With harvests he filled his granaries every year. He went over the country, and saw peace and content ; Ascended the hills — laborers were tilling their summits ; Descended into the vales — they too were peopled. He measured the fields, dividing each into nine lots. The central lot to be tilled by the common toil, for the State, — Regulating the labors of farmers and fixing the tithes of the harvest. Resting on a height, he had mats spread, and on them were stools, On which his officers took their places. * Of. Lenormant's Amient History of the East, Ta. 297, 299. « Tcheouli, B. vii (13). * The Yukung chapter of the Sku-king. 70 ELEMENTS. He sent to the herds ; he took swine from the pens, And poured out spirits in gourds for liis attendants, — They, eating and drinlcing, acknowledged him their lord." ^ In these institutions, land was made the civil and politi- cal basis, — a sure sign that the old Chinese knew indd"""" how to lay foundations of a great empire, and that time. tj^gjj. ]^(.gj- success was no accident, but cumulative incomes wisely earned. Husbandry, in Europe slowly devel- oped after the age of Charlemagne, was here the first and earliest thing : special officers stimulated it ; its inventors were honored ; vagabonds punished ; taxes levied on the idle ; unimproved lands resumed by the State. The in- terests of agriculture have always taken precedence of those of war, and have never ceased to be regarded as the foun- dation of political economy. The labor of the farmer is emphasized as the root of productive industry, in all pubhc announcements bearing on the subject of national resource. To exhort to this form of industry, as well as personally to do it honor, is a traditional function of the emperor. In the "Sacred Instructions" of Yung-ching, for instance, read at stated times throughout the empire, it is said : — "When a man ploughs not, some one in consequence suffers hunger ; when a woman weaves not, some one suffers cold. In ancient times the Son of Heaven himself directed the plough, the empress planted the mulberry tree. " You, O soldiers, ought to consider that to the cultivation of farms and mulberry trees you owe every grain and every thread by which you and your families subsist. " The late emperor [Kang-hi] ordered representations of the arts of weaving and husbandry to be engraven for distribution, that the people might be stimulated to the culture of their lands." The laws followed the rule tfiat " they who will not work ^ Shi-kinSy III. ii. 6. LABOR. 71 shall not have." No outer coffin for those who planted no trees ; no silk garments for those who raised no silkworms ; no full morning dresses for those who did not spin ; no animals nor plants to be offered by any one which he had not raised.^ Alvarez (i6th century) says no traveller is allowed to stay more than three or four days in a place where he has no occupation, and every one is obliged to exercise some function.^ That none be publicly supported who can maintain themselves is still the law of the land. Fortune tells us that nowhere in the world are the farming popula- tion on the whole in better condition.* They have small estates, freehold but for a small tax paid the crown ; under laws of primogeniture indeed, but practically divided at death in equal shares among the male children, since all can remain thereon with their families : and the ties of kindred are thus enlisted in development of the land. It has been said by Plath, one of the most devoted stu- dents of Chinese history, that this people were in ancient times " organized as a great industrial army." And if we read the minute regulations for such purposes in which all their old governmental systems abound, we shall hardly think the language too strong.* It would seem that these mechanical arrangements by imperial authority are but the natural flow of popu- Love of lar instinct. The busy life of the modern Chinese ^^^y^^ street, where crowds, however close, fall spontane- proces«s. ously into good order and mutual deference ; the ease and grace with which their movable workshops come and go ; their conformity to nature and good sense in closing their shops at nightfall, and resorting without curfew to their ' Plath, Xel. u. Cult. d. Alt. Chin. [Denkschr. d. Bay. Akad., IX. 867.) GingeU's Tcheou Laws ; Tckeou-li, B. xii. ; Mencius, V. ii. 2. 2 Hakluyt Soc. ; Mendoza's History of China. 8 See also Lay, Chinese as they Are^ p. 268. * See especially Mencius, V. ii. 2 ; the Yukung chapter of the Shu-king; and the land lirangements of the Tcheau4i. 72 ELEMENTS. homes ; their proverbial punctuality in work ; that economy of time and means which is no less than a form of genius ; that delight in labor which makes the Californian immi- grant cheerfully hold on for eleven hours a day, and which draws the highest compliments alike from manufacturers and railroad contractors, — indicate that the great indus- trial civilization of this people is the fulfilment of a psycho- logical destiny, and that to ascribe it to the force of rules and laws imposed by the State is to mistake effect for cause. Nature's Nature has here framed her own journeyman out own jour-' of her seasons and conditions, continuities and neyman. j-outiues ; out of the fidelity of her laws, and the persistency of her processes. These are his element: though he cannot report, he can as little escape them. He is productive as the sun, and finds it no harder to create material values by steady toil than the sunbeam to travel onward without rest. Montfort,^ describing the working season in Fo-kien, says Labors of that " men, women, and children poured out into kf F^kkn the fields of sugar-cane ; and the noise of their im- &■:• plements was mingled with the murmur of Chinese syllables like the monotonous cry of the cricket." " When near Nan-king, I could hardly take a step in the country without hearing the whirr of the shuttle, and whenever I entered a peasant's cot I always found the family at work ; sometimes, even in miserable huts, three looms were going at once." Six hundred and fifty millions of acres are undei Vast pro- cultivation in China alone, independent of her colo- ductive nies.2 The hundred million pounds of tea exported capacity. . n .-- i .1 r m 1846 were but a twentieth part of the annual product in that article ; and so vast is the amount of this that a sudden failure of the whole Western demand would scarcely affect the home price.* The tonnage of the coast •■ Voyage en Chine, pp. 199, 247. J Notes and Queries, July, 186S. 8 Fortune's Wanderings, pp. 207, 214, 215. LABOR. 73 and river craft alone exceeds that of all other nations to- gether.i Mountains of silk are produced every year. The manufacture of porcelain at King-te-chin has employed a million of workmen ; and the light of its furnaces by night resembles an immense conflagration.^ In all fine work- manship for literary or aesthetic uses the industries of Nan- king, previous to their desolation by the Tai-ping war, were equally productive. What nation has pubHc works on such a scale .' China is veined with roads ; with rivers navigated to their springs ; with canals of irrigation. Hundreds of thousands were often busy on this kind of labor at one time, as in the T'sin and Ming periods. The mammoth of canals belongs to China, six hundred and fifty miles long ; its bed cut down in some places seventy feet, its banks twenty feet above the country, and a hundred feet thick. The leviathan of walls is here, one thousand two hundred and fifty miles long : very unequally built indeed of earth enclosed by brick and cement, but resting on granite blocks, and containing material enough to girdle the globe with a thread several feet in thickness.^ Here are imperial palaces encircled with six miles of wall ; temples thousands of feet in circumference ; artificial lakes and mountains, of great size. It is a people with whom only the Aztecs and the Egyptians are to be compared for physical toil ; and who seem to have worked sometimes, indeed, under com- pulsion, yet from an innate love of labor, and usually for ends in which, — as for instance in the great protective wall of the T'sin dynasty, — they must have had the same interest as their rulers. Almost all labor in China is human. The few beasts of burden, starved and overworked, apparently exist Exclusive- but to show how the teeming population grudges ly human space and food even to man's most efficient helpers 1 Williams, II. 24- ' Girard II. 316. ' Hue II. 177 ; Fleming, pp. 319, 342. 74 ELEMENTS. in his heaviest tasks. Here all processes are but forms of human agency. Man is beginning, middle, end of Nature's circle. He is the consumer of the earth ; and he only, its compost. He eats all things, and he repairs all things. Filial piety itself is not strong enough to turn the plough- share aside from ancestral graves. " Suffer not a barren spot to remain a wilderness," says the Sacred Edict, '' nor a lazy person to abide in the town." All materials are utilized in the service of life. Hills are terraced to their tops ; millet is sown between rows of mulberry trees, cotton in just reaped cornfields.^ "Not a weed nor a waste yard," says a traveller in Northern China ; " not a hedge nor fence to steal space from the limits of an unsurpassed frugality." The plain of Shang-hai is perhaps the richest in the world. The laborer uses no complicated machinery, but has most of the simpler tools employed by us ; and the multitudinous hands are probably more effective than any machinery, in the finer processes of agriculture. Every part of the cotton plant is used : the wool is woven into clothing ; the seeds yield oil ; the stalks are fuel ; the ashes are manure, and fresh crops are planted before the earlier ones are removed.^ Preparations of vegetable ashes are in use for expelling insects ; and the old law books abound in strange prescrip- tions for agricultural uses, many of them more valuable to us as signs of zeal than of science, but others undoubtedly the result of experience in a pursuit which has absorbed the interest of the nation from earliest time. With a wisdom unknown to the Celt, imperial instructions have often urged a twofold industry ; that, when one failed, the other might preserve the people. " Let the farmer attend to his grain, and the women to their cloth ; and the superabundance of the one will supply any defect of the other." ^ Simon, • Williams, II. 103 ; La Chine Oimerte, pp. 163, 164. ' Fortune, Wanderings, p. 277. For the uses to which the bamboo is put in China, sn Grosier, II. 381. » Martin's China, I. 87. LABOR. 75 sent by Napoleon to report on the Chinese system of agri- culture, stated that in no other part of the world had he seen such results as were here produced by manual and personal labor. The Northern provinces are said to yield two crops annually ; the Southern, five in two years : and this has continued for ages, aided by skilful processes of sowing and rotation.^ If China or Japan followed our methods of tillage, famine and death would soon destroy millions.^ With such success do they apply their instinct for cyclic movement to the art of restoring to the soil all ele- Economic ments that have been withdrawn from it, that China, processes. alone among civilized countries, has preserved her acres from exhaustion. A thousand years of culture make as little change in their productiveness as time has wrought in the physical and mental type of her people. So wonder- fully pulverized is the soil by incessant handwork, that not a clod can be found, after a long rain, in some cultivated dis- tricts.^ No spendthrift throwing aside of old soils, as in America, to scratch the surface of new. Agriculture here reflects the moral laws and noble conditions of human growth. " Better manure your old land than buy new," says the national proverb. Agricultural treatises have abounded in all times ; and two great encyclopaedias, issued in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, cover this branch of industry with a fulness that proves unabated interest in the development of the soil.* The distribution of this immense industrial product is on a proportional scale. On the vast network of rivers, „. ., ^ ^ ^ ^ Distnbu- the movement of boats bearing the sugar, oil, and tion of rice of the South ; the tea, silk, cotton, and crockery p™^"'^''- vf the East ; the grain and medicines of the North ; the > Julien and Champion, /ftdusir. de V Empire Chinois^ p. 176. 2 Sfniiksonian Rep. on Agric, ,1862. s Cooke's Chitta, p. 247. • Plath, Die Landwirthschx/t d. Chin. u. Jap. (1874). 76 ELEMENTS. metals and minerals of the West, — is described as prodigi- ous. The swelling population has overflowed into the rivers, and built out another continent for its surplus productive energies upon their oceanic tides. The postal service car- ries letters two hundred miles a day, to offices in all the important towns, at the cheapest rate.^ Many imperial high- roads in Northern China, now in partial decay, are seventy feet broad, set with five rows of trees, with signal towers every few miles, and excellent inns for couriers and travel- lers. Cartroads are innumerable. The graveyard question will stand less in the way of introducing railroads into China than is often supposed : the depredations of rebels alone will have nullified this objection.^ Horticulture is a passion, and the vegetable garden is the Horti- Chinaman's paradise. Four or five crops easily culture. come of his acre, per year. Every elegant mansion has its ornamental grounds. A French -wrriter says the English have found their models in this line in China, and the French have followed them.^ Chinese parks are vast free gardens pointing b"ack to periods of liberal thought and culture.* The arts of grafting, pruning, dwarfing, enlarging, and varying species, and the laws of selection, have been well understood for ages. Of the tree-peony alone hundreds of varieties have been cultivated, some for more than a thousand years.^ The Dutch embassy in the seventeenth century observed that farmers put their fruit whole into the ground, and then set out the shoots at good distances apart ; so raising great trees in a short time.^ Odes of the Shi-king and elaborate treatises on floriculture' testify to a constitutional delight in flowers, like the taste • Giles's Sketches, p. 6i. ^ Williamson, N. Chin. Br- R.A. Soc, Dec, 1867. ' Girard, II. 10. See also Lord Macartney's enthusiastic description of the imperial parki >t Gehol. * Koch. Varies. Hi. Dendrol. (Berlin, 1874, 1875). ^ Darwin, Animals arid Plants under Domesiicaiion, II. 248. " Dutch Embassy, II. 67. ' Wylie's Chin. Lit., p. 120. LABOR. J-J of the country people for having their rude hills covered with the beauty of the white azalea, with the honeysuckle, clematis, and brilliant shrubs. " This love for flowers," says St. Denys, " is a real worship, a mystic affection." Travel- lers descant on the charms of Chinese inns, set in a frame- work of asters, roses, and amaranths ; on the splendor of the flower boats ; ^ on wide areas of pleasant villages and culti- vated fields; on the patriarchal simplicity of farm-life in portions of Northern China, where, as in Swiss villages, good wishes and counsels are inscribed on the doors.^ Romances deal largely in sentimental meanings of flowers ; effusions of lovers are hung in conspicuous places under the title of " Flowery Scrolls." China is itself the " Flowery Kingdom," and the splendor and perfume of our New-Eng- land gardens are specially due to shrubs from old Cathay. Utilitarian limits are escaped in this line, and even with a protest ; for the mulberry is banished from the gardens of the rich because it is industrially profitable, and useful trees are admitted only when they yield perfume, fine foliage, or exquisite table fruit.^ We might indeed expect that so spontaneous a force as Chinese industry would exhibit ideal tendencies, j^^^^^.^ A wonderful refinement of perception and delicacy Gifts. of handling here supplies the place of those grander forms of art which require abstraction and contemplation. The aesthetic gift of the Chinese is a fine sense of touch. The tender and watchful art required for protecting their silkworms, and for preserving the vitality of continually exfoliated trees ; the frequent removal of leaves by careful selection ; the perfect stillness, so needed for the whole process that the worms are kept apart in quiet groves ; the similar delicacy of their tea-culture, of porcelain manufact- ure, and of their lacquer-work, so guarded from dust that > Fleming, p 174; Fortune, p. i47- ^ Fleming, pp. 107-109, 115, 17S, 179, 185. 8 Montfort, p 252. 78 ELEMENTS. the workmen do not enter the rooms in their clothing ; their paper, too delicate for press-work, or made of softest pith resembhng rice ; their damasks of royal tints and strange intricate pattern ; their screens and scrolls, too fine for furniture ; their rosewood chairs with silk cushions ; their fanciful lanterns, curiously-wrought cabinets, and variegated vases, — are all instances of a delicate, if not fully cultured, aesthetic taste. No importations have been so refining to European civilization as the tea, silk, porcelain, embroidery, which Chinese industry has contributed. Musa, the Saracen conqueror of Spain, is recorded to Mechanical havc Said, that when Wisdom was sent down to dexterity, men, she was lodged in the head of the Greeks, the tongue of the Arabs, and the hands of the Chinese. The strokes made by the fingers of a good Chinese writer with his camel's -hair pencil, and his rapid changes from the use of one finger to that of another, are almost beyond following. Barrow saw complicated European furniture taken in pieces and put together again with wonderful dexterity, by natives who had never before seen their like. One reason for the popular reverence for written paper is that writing is not a mere utility, but the most attractive of fine arts. What aesthetic progress, if we compare the Shu-king descriptions of public and private buildings, — wooden frames filled in with earth or stones, a rude art still prevailing in the interior of China, — with the modern Chinese mansion ; its rich vases, gay satin cur- tains covered with scenery and animal painting, quaintly carved furniture of ebony and rosewood, trellis-work in galleries, tiled walks, marbles, stuccos, scrolls, delicate pen- cil-work, and writing materials. The primitive tent-shape is scarcely suggested by the infinite modifications to which it has been subjected, — rising to their perfection in the threefold azure roof and the exquisite trellis-finish of the vermilion Temple of Heaven, lifting tent above tent from LABOR. 79 its three marble terraces, out of nearly a mile square of groves and lawns. The temples are apt to be most like garden retreats or country residences : such happy love of art is expended on their surroundings. This daintiness is often replaced by a taste for the rude and colossal, as if the life of the steppe and forest had survived ; as in the stu- pendous rampart that toils along a thousand miles of mountain and plain, and in the fifteen memorial halls of the Ming emperors, described by Pumpelly and Hiibner, one of which is ninety feet wide by two hundred long and fifty high, and supported by rows of columns, each a teak timber of eleven feet circumference. But seldom does Chinese architecture indicate a desire to leave enduring monuments ; this love of work is too well satisfied in it.s own present relations, to pay homage to the future. Painting and sculpture are not favored by the sages, and there have been Confucian statutes against paintbg the latter art as savoring of idolatry. The mon- andscuip- archical Sernite does not repel image-worship more severely than these prosaic rationalists, whose State tem- ples are as bare of such symbolism as the Mongolian steppes. Even purely human statues do not often stand free, — the Chinese not apprehending individuality as the Greeks did, — but rest on a background of wall. Yet China is sprinkled with popular statuary ; mainly of sym- bolic Buddhist or other imagery, generally in grotesque or exaggerated forms. For this over-realistic people make of their religious art an escape for their repressed ideal, whose reactipns break forth too crudely and spasmodically to be. true to nature. Their allegorical sculpture is de- scribed as no less charming than it is in appearance bur- lesque ; its lions and tigers certainly suggesting the fact that these creatures do not frequent the Chinese empire. But, like every other product, it is almost without Umit in amount and elaboration. Bastian saw stone figures of men 80 ELEMENTS. and animals at intervals all the way to Kal-gan. The Ming tombs are approached by lines of colossal monoliths in marble, for half a mile. Similar avenues are not infre- quent, as approaches to tombs.^ Jesuit letters of the six- teenth century speak of statues in the temples, of very great size, and covered with beaten gold.^ Even more astonishing is the quantity and quality of minute sculpture. The great pagoda of Nan-king was beset with' innumerable images. The Chinese are elaborate workmen in ivory, horn, mother-of-pearl, jade, and bronze. The cutting of many a jade vase must have cost the labor of a lifetime, and this toilsomeness, hinted in their mak- ing jade the emblem of all virtues, enforced at last the substitution of their equally beautiful porcelain.'^ Without perspective, shadows) or emphasis in tone, — all of which are rejected as optical illusions, — their paintings excite our wonder by skilful management and intense pur- ity of color ; whether heightened by the soft hazy texture of their pith paper, or imitating the primal greens, golds, and blues of earth and sky on their pagoda roofs. There are descriptive accounts of celebrated painters, one of which enumerates fifteen hundred names ; and full treat- ises on painting as an art* Their devotion to ornamental work is mechanized by the use of classic books of conven- tional forms, and each workman gives his whole attention to one kind of pattern.^ So much is art a matter of me- chanical dexterity, that the painters have learned a won- derful sleight in managing two brushes at once. Artists lecture to crowds by the blackboard, and execute pictures of birds and beasts with their finger tips, with great address.® Paintings from Buddha's life in the recognized attitudes cover the temples. * Girard, II, 87 ; Pumpelly ; Hiibner. 2 Alvarez. * CJiefs d'CEuvres 0/ Industry, p. 132. * Wylie, Chinese Literature^ pp. loS, iia * Che/s d'CEuvres, p. 146. 6 Lockhart, Med. Miss., p. 105. LABOR. 8 1 The older Chinese painters showed a vitality in forms akin to the wonderful Japanese art. The Arab ^ . ^ Compared travellers in the ninth century, not very good critics with jap- probably, declared that Chinese painting surpassed ^°°'° ^"^ that of any other race. Painting has embodied the na- tional history quite as earnestly as writing ; and the figures on porcelain show so admirably the changes of manners and costume that it is much to be regretted that antique vases in this kind should be so rare ; few, it is now said, going back beyond the fourteenth century.^ The early art has the advantages of a less minute mechanical formalism, and of greater freedom of conception in the workman. But in general, pettiness and confusion of details, defect of dramatic grouping, isolation of forms, absence of pettiness shadow and perspective, a constant and rigid turn "details. of portraits to face the spectator, with other ever-recurring childish traits, show that the fine arts are stunted by con- stitutional absorption in concrete things. Probably the vigorous genius of Japan was stimulated in this as in almost every other sphere, by the potent Japanese initiative of the Chinese. Much even of their mod- ^• ern work, especially in Suchuen, is said to be very sugges- tive of that wonderful style which is now bringing the Western nations to the confessional of art. And their degeneracy, as a whole, while not unnatural in an old civil- ization of fixed routines, is certainly due in large degree to the demand of Western materialism and display for cheap mechanical products. Japanese art, for us a timely correc- tive of this, is too imperfectly known as yet, and too much aside from our theme, to receive in this place more than a brief reference. The enthusiasm it has excited is proof of a recall to spontaneity and truth, as needful in our tastes as ' Revue des Deux Mandes, LXX. 720. The bronzes are probably much earlier i many are claimed to belong to the oldest dynasties. This would be earlier than any bronzes from either Assyria or Egypt. 6 82 ELEMENTS. in our religion ; a moral tonic to our civilization, and well suited to turn the tables on its contempt for the infantile heathen. Such the gift for which the maturity of science and trade have to thank this " Paradise of Babies," as Japan has been recently called. It represents the genius of a race, organized for artistic enjoyment and power, instinct with intuitive sense of the laws of expression ; so that, unlike the Chinese, who are absorbed in the mere body of facts as such, they can seize on telling features, and discard needless detail, — a race, magnetic with the geniality in which their impassive neighbors are deficient. This in- sight of genius effects more than scientific knowledge. Defective in technical science, its painting of life and scenery is a more vital expression of their natural history than ours. Faults of perspective are controlled by mar- vellous feeling for the relations of parts to the whole, and for subtle gradations of color ; by an incisive force, and a selective tact, that even lift these defects into peculiar charms. Both Chinese and Japanese have mastered laws of chromatic relation hardly yet recognized in the West. But Japan has the added gifts of docility and expansion. Made masters of their resources by hereditary transmission of talent and method, and quite free of the conventional- ism of later Chinese work, her artists give full play to an unsurpassed imaginative power. Though their realism is too sharp and too robust for purely meditative interest, yet much of this element, especially in sculptures, has been added by Buddhism ; here, as elsewhere, by its very nature a guide to mystical art. An incomparable humor floods this strong realism, so that there is no tinge of the cynic in those torrents of exaggeration and caricature which they pour upon every attitude and aspect of common life ; ideal- izing ugliness itself, and turning aside the edge of evil. 'T is the glee of children, the zest of life, the keen criticism of intellect, in one. These fine fingers have not attempted LABOR. 83 painting on any large scale of size, nor developed it mto the use of the easel or of oils ; being withheld by an imagina- tive faculty which can produce effects of sublimity with fewest possible touches, and within the narrowest space. Its passion for the simple and real gives dignity to art, just as it produces the solitary instance in history of a court which abjures jewelry on the person, and the use of painted or varnished wood ; and of a popular taste that puts the agsthetic above the trading class, hates mere mechanism, and makes the common artisan an artist. Doubtless the temptation of Western example and demand will tend to produce similar degeneracy to that of Chinese art ; but the reaction will certainly be more powerful than there.^ We return to our view of the latter. Exception must be taken to all severe criticism of Chinese art in behalf of its wonderful porcelain ware. The po^„]3;n dependence of this product on human devotion is manufac- symbolized by the legend of the artist, whose strug- gles to produce an ideal description of glaze were vain, till in despair he plunged into the furnace, and mingled himself with his fires. It has been observed that the superiority of Chinese pottery over European consists in its being always a more or less capricious imitation of real objects, indicating definite study of the concrete fact ; which of course would be infinitely suggestive of fine details. This realism has resulted in some of the most exquisite figures in the world, far superior to Greek or Latin forms ; as well as in the strange and crude combinations expressed in their symbolic animals. The marvellous interfusion of palpitating tints and veinings produced by jets of heat are inimitable. China has thrown her whole soul into paste and enamel. Her porcelain is another Shi and Shu ; • See Jarves's Art Hints and Art of Ja^an; Lafarge mPu-mfell/s yourney ; yap- anese Fragments by S. Osborn (1861) ; Iniernat. Congr. d. Orient, 1873 ; Amp&e, Scienct en Orient ; Hiibner ; Richthofer, &c. 84 ELEMENTS. another China, history and legend, theatre and school ; plants, creatures, landscape ; life domestic and rehgious ; dainty tiles and proud pagodas ; public honors and private gifts ; mystery of her cunning and miracle of her fires ; rivalling gems and skies with arabesque of air-bubbles and lace-work of crackled radiance. The admiration of this porcelain in the age of Lous XIV. may well have made an era in Western ornamental work.^ And students are por- ing over the ceramic art of the old Etruscans, as well as of the Greeks, to find indebtedness to this far-descended product of the original genius of the Mongol.^ The combination of religious and moral ardor with crude performance, makes Chinese musical art almost a Music. burlesque. Music has been extracted from every thing, — skins, terra-cotta, metals, silks, wood, bamboo, gourds. Every thing was dimly suggestive of harmonies, as prosaic as those for which the fine ear of the Greek listened at every gate of Nature were poetic. The idea that musical relations are universal runs through the whole civilization of China, an inspiration alike of its philosophy and its song. Plutarch expresses the Greek conception, when he says that " the moulding of ingenuous manners and civil conduct lies in a well-grounded musical education." In China, too, music is the substance of virtue. The Shu-king says that Yu appointed a minister of this science "to teach our sons the ways of right conduct." ^ The Li-ki calls it " the union of heaven and earth, the abode of all their mys- teries."* Older poetry celebrates it as "the echo of wis- dom and mother of virtue, the way of divine knowledge ; not for charming of the ear, but to expel discord from the heart." Ma-touan-lin calls it the substance of government. The Chinese, like the Greeks, had typical forms of music, " For Chinese porcelain, see Jaquemart's Hist, of Ceramic A rt ; and Cht/s cCCEuvres of Industrial Art, p. J48. 2 On Mongolic relations of the Etruscans, see Taylor's Researches. ' Shit-king, II. i. 24. 4 Li-ki, ch. xvi. LABOR. 85 supposed to be endowed with specific virtues in the disci- pline of the passions ; and made them the peculiar prov- ince of the bhnd, as capable of more undivided attention than others to their meaning.^ Their Orpheus, whose touch of mythic stones tamed Savages and brutes,^ was an official, as we might anticipate, appointed to adapt melo- dies to the eight kinds of instruments. His music was of course a " middle path," making the young nobles earnest yet mild, strong yet modest, dignified yet courteous.^ But their true Orpheus is that wondrous rhythm of toil, which for thousands of years has here been building cities, and creating institutions on a colossal scale. In positive musi- cal art their failure is amazing. The octave is believed to have been recognized in very ancient times by means of tubes of different lengths, and divided into semi-tones.^ But the plaintive monotony, the confinement to one key and to the head voice, reveal organic defects that render the expression of feeling and taste impossible. Enthusi- asts have found in Chinese melodies resemblance to the Scotch, and even the Greek ; but the sense of metric pro- portion and recurrence is far cruder. Not even in music do these monotonists escape the rigid uniformity which makes their language a stream of monosyllabic waves. Yet travellers are impressed by the union of " cheerfulness with regularity" in the singing of sailors, keeping time to the movement of their oars.® " If any man," says old Isaac Vossius,® " should collect all that every nation that is, or has been, has in- inventive vented, the whole together would not be more ex- »'g«'""'y- cellent and various than what is exhibited by the Seres ' Tcheou-li, B. xvii. {Commentary.) ' Shwkittg, P., II. i. 24 ; ii. 9. * Tcheou-li, B. xvm. * Amyot wrote an absurd account of great discoveries in music by the Chinese, founded on " the relation of different terms of triple progression," from which he supposes the Greeks to have derived all they knew on the subject, possibly through Pythagoras. * Barrow, p. 81. " Description of Chinese Cities, 86 ELEMENTS. alone." The Arab travellers in the ninth century had a similar opinion. And Ibn Batuta, in the fourteenth, calls them most skilful artificers. Within the sphere of useful arts they have certainly been very ingenious ; though the antiquity of most of their inventions has been called in question, and they have failed to develop their possible uses. Their knowledge of the loadstone is doubtless ancient ; yet the familiar story of a ducal car that always pointed southwards, commonly sup- posed to refer to the magnet, is shown to be of compara- tively modern origin, even later than the Christian era.^ That gunpowder is a Chinese discovery has also been denied, mainly on the grounds that native writers ascribe it to the barbarians, and that it has been used almost exclu- sively for fireworks, and as a charm against demons.^ Yet it is admitted that the Chinese possessed the secret earlier than the tenth century.^ Tea was first manufactured in the fourth century ; linen paper in the third. Printing on wood belongs to the tenth, and was the oldest form of ster- eotyping. Designs, representing Buddhist deities, auto- graphs, and other figures, were taken from wood as early as the sixth, and perhaps as the third, century.* Printing from stone was earlier still. Copies of the Classics were made on copper for better preservation, a.c. 943. In the eleventh century, a blacksmith invented ■ movable types ; but these were scarcely suitable for Chinese characters, and the method has failed to pass into general use. Had Europe been in connection with China in the sixth century, it would have become acquainted with printing nearly a thousand years earlier than it did. Whatever their date, four discoveries of immeasurable influence on civilization — * Mayers, in Notes and Queries. ' Ibid. ; before N. China Branch of R. As. Soc. \ May, 1S67. 8 Amyot thinks it was used for military purposes as early as the Christian era. Mem. qf Miss, de Peking, VIII. * Chinese Encyclopedia. LABOR. 87 the compass, gunpowder, printing, and tea — are referable to China. Porcelain is on record as perfected in the third century ; but the earliest furnace mentioned belonged to the seventh.i Playing-cards are first heard of in the twelfth. The manufacture of ink from various substances is mentioned in many old works, and notices are given of a hundred and fifty persons famous therein.^ Paper sup- planted the bamboo tablet and the silk weft as early as the second century, b.c. Dyeing in sundry ingenious ways has been understood from remote times. Weaving and embroidery are arts of immemorial age. The most exqui- site gauzes, crapes, and silks have been produced with hand-looms of the simplest structure, and by the poorest of the people. Silk goes back to pre-historic time, and ushers in the name of the wonderful Seres to the Western world. Silken robes rustle through the oldest poetry, and suggest the still mulberry groves of a dainty art. Steel needles are an old Chinese invention.^ Horn is softened by heat, and thinned out into fine plates for lanterns, by means of pincers, a boiler, and a little stove. The bamboo has been put to all uses ; to the Indo-Chinese nations a real " staff of life." From the first, the Chinese have wrought metals for ornamental purposes ; they have also mined, but to little purpose, as they are wont to stop when they come to water. The arch was known to them earlier than to the European world. The admirable adaptation of their boat-building to the navigation of rivers and coast-waters is of very ancient date.* The art of supplying business facilities by banking is older in China than European knowledge of finance. It has been claimed that the first circulating notes and bills of credit were issued at Peking.^ Paper money is heard of as early as the ninth century. In ■ Davis, ch. xviii. ' Wylie, 117 ! Duhalde, II. 627. ' Lockhart, Med. Miss. ch. v. ♦ Davis, ch. x. * Knox, p. 332. 88 ELEMENTS. the twelfth the empire was flooded with it, and the conse- quence of such inflation was, of course, to make it worth- less. The Mongols issued it in 1236, and Kublai-Khan con- tinued to do so throughout his reign. Ibn Batuta describes it in the fourteenth century as the chief medium of busi- ness. After 1455, it is not heard of for centuries in Chinese history, and recent attempts to introduce it have wholly failed.^ Julien and Champion, in their admirable work on " Chi- certain ^^^^ Industry," ^ have instanced many original original inventions as yet unknown to our art ; such as inventions. ^^^ souorousness of their gongs ; the fine polish and perfect surface of metallic mirrors ; certain uses of mordants and dyes ; a marvellous green color, extracted from the bark of a tree ; a white wax, the secretion of an insect, scarcely known to our entomologists, to obtain which three kinds of tree are cultivated ; white copper, made from some unrevealed mixture of metals. The spe- cial inventions of China and Japan have so met the de- mands of furniture, dress, nutrition, and thought, as to be " always the core arid axis as it were of the commerce of the world." These obhgations to races that have been regarded as most isolated show that the destinies of a discovery are infinitely beyond the ken of the maker, and pay no regard to the limitations of the people whose func- tion it has been to contribute it to the improving hands of others. Of the disposition to adopt foreign arts mani- fested by the Chinese, I need only mention here the astro- nomical instruments which Ricci found in the Observatory at Nan-king,^ the introduction of glass for windows and lamps,* and of rock crystal for spectacles ; the brass can- non cast by Verbiest in the seventeenth century ; vaccina- • See Yule's JiToles to Marco Polo; and Ibn Batuta (tr. by Lee), ch. xxiii. • Industries Anciennes et Modernes de V Etnpire Ckinois, Paris, i86g. • Hue, Christianity in China, II. 121. » Williams, II. 115. LABOR. 89 tion,^ percussion guns, steamers, men-of-war of foreign • models and other improvements, readily accepted as com- pensations for the bitter experience of their recent wars with European powers. Many of their practical inventions have indicated good sense as well as ingenuity ; such as a curious, yet p^^tkai simple, instrument for mowing and reaping at i"ven- once ; ^ straw layers in brick walls to keep out damp ; ^ fire-walls, rising above the partitions of buildings ; fire-engines and their appurtenances. Their small ox- plough, and water-wheel worked by hand, however rude, answer their purposes admirably, and serve better than labor-saving machinery for a crowded population. They have sunk wells to obtain gas for salt-boiling, two thousand feet in depth.* They pjoduce a transparent substance like glass, of sulphur, lead, and various alkalis, and mould it into vases by a process similar to glass-blowing. They reduce silver, tin, and copper from the ore, and obtain steel by methods like our own. They have wrought magnificent bronzes, and attained the highest brilliancy of vegetable colors.^ The farmer carries his implements on his back, yet knows how to make them procure for him the best harvests in the world. They train the pigeon to be their living telegraph, and to carry broker's quotations and business news upon his wings. Yet with all this ingenuity their defect in inventive wisdom is shown, not only in a most imperfect i^, ^^^j development of many of their own discoveries, deveiop- but in the absence of even such an article as soap ; in slow travelling ; in the primitive condition of naval and military arts, of sanitary methods and materials. They try to make up by silks and furs for the want of warmth • Davis, III. 56. ' Fleming, p. 75. ' Fleming, p. 183. * Cosjnos^ I., netef 124. " Julien and Champion. go ELEMENTS. •in their houses. They sleep on brick ovens, and amidst the gases from . charcoal braziers.'' Their candles are offen- sive. Their healing art is based only on the study of the surface of the body ; and the Arabs, sharp-eyed in such matters, could not see that they had any resources beyond the use of hot caustics. These sanitary deficiencies seem to be a survival of nomadic habits, like the obliquity of the eyelid and the passion for fortune-telling. Other causes must be assigned for the singular failure to develop interests to which they have been peculiarly devoted. By what psychological defect in the powers of analysis can we account for the anomaly of a great people, devoted to industry and traffic, who have never maintained a currency of uniform value, either paper or metallic, and who make all large settlements in bullion ; a people, intensely absorbed in reading, writing, and printing their own literature for two thousand years, who have never invented an alphabet nor a printing press, nor metallic types ? The result indeed, apart from race qualities, must be in no slight measure ascribed to mechanical and automatic habits, and to the minute division of labor in this prodigious popula- tion ; the inferiority of whose later art teaches us how dependent is every element of integrity, originality, and beauty on the workman's perception of his product as a whole, and on his handiwork's expressing the love and freedom of his own ideal, not the treadmill round of a human machine ; — a lesson which equally mechanical methods of culture, growing out of very different causes, in American labor and art, are rendering of momentous import to the moralist, the artisan, and the citizen, I Morache, p. 41. III. SCIENCE SCIENCE. TN attempting to form a judgment of the scientific -*- capacity of the Chinese, we are met by the Diversity same extreme difference of testimony as on other oftesti- points of character. Davis, on the one hand, '"™''' asserts that they " set no value on abstract science, apart from obvious uses ; " and Meadows, on the other, that they are "idealists, who despise utility." Our inquiries lead us to believe that both are right, the race being re- garded from different points of view. Their actual per- formance is to a great extent utilitarian ; while the theories of Nature which they carry ready lonade, and impose upon the facts, suppress practical observation. It must be re- membered that such theories, however abstract in reality, are not held to be abstractions, but fixed and normal rules of practical utility ; and thus limit the perception of what is actually useful. The generalizations on which science depends require the separation of its elements from em- bodied facts and objects, to be treated abstractly and cor- related with one another to form new wholes, not existent in any actual form. And this abstraction and suspension the mental structure of the Chinese forbids. The Arabs, not- ing this defect of free speculation, denied that they Mental had any sciences whatever. Their pre-conceptions, ^^J^ nevertheless, have an ideal value, as originating science. 94 ELEMENTS. not in mere considerations of advantage, but in the recog- nition of sovereign law. The difficulty is that they are rigid, and applied to phenomena in moulds as rigid as themselves. The Chinese, for instance, share with the Hindus the idea of the unity of matter ; but instead of holding it apart for speculative development, as the Hindus treat ideal premises, they apply it immediately to phe- nomena; so that their studies become foreclosed in imag- inary transmutations of matter, as absolute as the idea itself. In the same way, the dualism of the Yin and Yang elements, hereafter to be described, is carried through nature, prescribing fanciful relations in place of experi- mental research in the various branches of science. Here is a practical tendency checked by idealism without free- dom ; and an ideal tendency fettered by the grasp of practicalism. Analogous conditions occur in Western thought, where they differ from the Chinese only in not being so organic, while quite as real : such as the long persistence of Semitic beliefs derived from the Bible, in prescribing the paths and results of science on such sub- jects as creation, development, moral and physical evil, death and birth, miraclt and law. While, then, both the ideal and practical elements of Ideal pre- Cliincse miud prompt to the study of Nature, and concep- to the home-sense of a right to its uses, it is obvi- ous that their mutual relations are far from favor- able to the natural sciences. It has immense industry in accumulating details on the one hand, but according to moral or philosophical preconceptions on the other. Yet But strong °^ ^^^ ^^ permanent and unchanging, its steady, sense of rcgular habit is clearly perceptive ; and this is the basis of its rationalism. It thoroughly bclici'cs in the essential harmony of the world iviih Jninian nature. The order of the heavens and earth is not divorced from the substance of human reason. That direful theologfical SCIENCE. 95 chasm, as hostile to physical and social science as to religious liberty, does not exist for the Chinese. The world is neither man's prison nor his curse. The actual is his home. Every thing his faculties can recognize is rational and true knowledge, and its truth is made for him to use ; nor does he doubt the reality and value of things, nor the certitude of his own perceptions. As little does he permit himself to forget what rules he has discerned ; he institutes them as binding methods of research and production. In some respects, therefore, Chinese science will be found superior to that of most other races, Semitic and even Aryan. It lacks the genius which depends on free- dom, and the depth which absorption in details forbids ; but in certain directions it attains a truth, fulness, and ingenuity not to be found elsewhere, and affords firm basis for the new scientific principles which are emanci- pating the thought of our time. It must have required no little ardor in the study of Natural History to produce the works called Botany. " Pents ao," or " Herbals," — not less than forty-two of which are known to have been composed since the fourth or fifth century. These are not mere descriptions of plants, but collections of data covering the whole range of life, though with special relation to therapeutic uses.'' An idea of their character may probably be derived from an analysis of the principal work of the kind, dating from the sixteenth century.^ Its great divisions are water, fire, earths, plants, animals, men. The inorganic world is dis- tributed into earths, metals, gems (including crystals), stones, and salts ; the organic, according to obvious dis- tinctions of place, form, and qualities. Several hundred * Schott, Ch. Liierai. p. 102 ; Wylie, p. 80. ' Schott J Williams, I. 288; Davis, ch. xx. 1 Kidd's China. 96 ELEMENTS. families are mentioned ; classes are formed on something like Linnaean principles, and objects arranged according to such categories as — where they live, what they are good for, what they look like, and on the sexual theory of Yin and Yang. There are water plants, stone plants, marsh plants, poisonous plants, twining plants ; trees are viewed as aromatic, lofty, luxuriant, or flexible ; insects, worms, and scaleless creatures are placed together ; so are lizards, serpents, fish ; then come creatures with shells, which are said to have their bones outside, — certainly a presentiment of real science ; then the feathered tribes, as of the water, the heath, the mountain, the forest. Finally, come hairy animals and man. A kind of unity is given all these data by constant reference to human, and especially to medical, uses. This interest in the healing powers of Nature is traced to the first emperors, by the legends ; but the whole class of kindred sciences, especially surgery, has in, fact been obstructed by the dread of dissecting, or in any way meddling with the dead.^ The theory that each organ is specially related to some one element of na- ture forecloses science, as it did in Europe in the Middle Ages. It is believed that thought proceeds from the heart, that the soul is in the liver, and joy in the stomach, also respiration. Such nomad fancies survive, as that the courage of brave men or fierce animals is imbibed by eat- ing their gall ; that memory is improved by the heart of a white horse, while the flesh of a black one is fatal. The Tcheou-li abounds in such prescriptions, besides dividing animals according to their coverings and such members as the neck, wing, or mouth.^ The test of physiological beliefs is their antiquity. The " Bible of Medicine " is a work ascribed to the pre-historic Hwang-ti, and certainly two thousand years old.^ ^ Mayers, however, mentions a dissector in the sixth century, B.c. > B. xLiil. 8 Schott, los- SCIENCE. 97 Yet the quantity of data collected is incalculable. The materia medica includes most of the substances used by ourselves, often with analogy in special applications.' The " Punts'ao " refers to eight hundred authors.^ A " Guide to Therapeutics " has two hundred and fifty dia- grams and twenty-one thousand prescriptions. The con- tents of such collections must be of very various quality. The Chinese cannot have toiled so long and so earnestly without important results ; nor can so vast and successful a civilization as theirs have grown up without extensive acquaintance with the relations of the human body to its environment. They are familiar with the medicinal effects of camphor, mercury, rhubarb, arsenic, salts ; with indica- tions of the pulse, the focus of their therapeutics ; ^ with acupuncture ; with the moxa. Julien finds that they used anaesthetics in the third century. The bamboo has been very skilfully applied for stays and splints in surgery.* Small-pox has been studied with attention, and inoculation practised for centuries.® No distinction is made between arterial and venous blood, nor is the special function of the heart, as the regulator and centre of the vital fluid, comprehended ; but the fact of a systemic circulation seems to have been recognized, and its rate measured.^ The existence and force of subtle fluids (called airs) in the body, as in the forms of nature, is fully perceived, though not scientifically developed. The spinal marrow is traced to its expansion in the brain, called " the sea of marrow." A current belief in the unity of man with Nature involved the discovery that he is a microcosm. That the Chinese are, as Medhurst says, " a quack-ridden ^ China Review^ Sept. 1874 ; Lockhart, p. 229. ^ Wylie, p. 80. 8 For their theory of the pulses, which they refer to the various internal organs, see Duhalde, History of China, III. 366. * Lay, p. 224. ^ Wylie, 80 ; Ath. Or. Soc. yournal^ May, 1869. Vaccination, introduced into Canton in 1805, has been widely practised ever since. Lockhart, p. 120. Girard, II. 329. 7 98 ELEMENTS. race," is obvious ; yet that they are more so than other races is not so certain. Medical instruction consists mainly in the study of a few ancient treatises ; ^ but the Pe-king " Gazette " protested against this system in the national col- leges of medicine, in 1866, and called for a better. The physician is apt to practise as he pleases, according to old receipts preserved in families,^ and finds his credit mainly in the length of his ancestral line of doctors. The literati have been wont to hold him in contempt, and most of the profession have been slaves or freedmen. For Itinacy the Chinese have no remedy ; they scarce attempt its treat- ment. In a sense, then, medicine is here in its infancy. Is it not- so everywhere .' When one considers how little light we possess on the treatment of the most common diseases and the most destructive appetites, with all our microscopic science and endless nomenclature, he cannot but think that some future day will look on our pretensions to medical wisdom, much as we now do on the Chinese doctor, who plies his old treatises of Hwang-ti, and drives his patient to "hug his own coffin for consolation." It would be hard to say of a people who have combined the finer forces of Nature in so many marvellous ways as the Chinese, that they are ignorant of chemistry. Yet their practical skill far outruns their theoretical knowl- edge. They have rich store of subtle and brilltant proc- esses ; but no minute analysis of elements, and no large generalization of results. These devotees of concrete labors are so absorbed in arts of manipulation, that no fresh speculative movement is possible. Their ideal chem- istry remains therefore, to a great extent, in the stage of alchemy ; and has been derived, in part, from Arabic and Byzantine sources, though greatly promoted as a native * See ReV' des Deux Mondes, LXX. 2 Dg j^fag, I. ^j. SCIENCE. 99 product by the growth of Taoism in the fourth cen- tury, B.C. The antiquity of astronomical science in China, as re- corded in the oldest classics, and asserted by the Tes- . . . . r . , . Astronomy. uit missionaries or the last two centuries, who are in turn endorsed by Biot, has of late been seriously doubted. The Chinese has not power of pure abstraction to pursue the mathematics into their relations to the laws of motion in space; His written language has not the definiteness requisite for mathematical expression. Astronomy is therefore still in its earlier stages, and an astrological scheme is annually put forth by the Astronomical Board at Pe-king, fixing times and seasons for every enterprise, rite, or task. But there was certainly a practical signifi- cance in the astrology of the primitive Chinese, who watched the stars while they tilled their soil, with a dis- tinct sense of close connection between the movements of the heavenly bodies and the seasons and products of the earth. It was an intuition of that unity of the cosmos, on which the largest theory and the most practical utility alike depend. Upon the whole there was a sobriety and truthfulness in their sense of these physical relations and laws, hardly to be found in any other ancient people. We may not believe a legend in the Shu-king, that the mythical emperor *Tao, twenty-four hundred years B.C., sent forth messengers to the four quarters of space, to determine the equinoctial and solstitial times, for regulation of the labors of husbandry, and the customs of the people ; ^ though to modern knowledge of Assyrian and Egyptian antiquity there is nothing improbable in the tale. It may not be proved that the precession of the equinoxes was noted by the public astronomers of those early times, and months • Shucking, Pt. I. ch. i. A passage which Julien supposes to have a popular astrcscmical sense. 100 ELEMENTS. intercalated to bring the solar and lunar periods into har- mony ; nor that the ecliptic was divided into twenty-four, afterwards twenty-eight mansions {sieii) to mark the daily progress of lunar revolution, according to a system well known in later Chinese astronomy, and on the origin of whose main principles in China, India, or Chaldea, there is now such warm discussion among Orientalists.-' The nam- ing of certain circumpolar stars, and the determination of the length of the year in days, are less improbable. But the fact that Chinese belief is unanimous in referring these discoveries back to such early periods is at least important as showing a national interest in such phenomena, which might well have resulted in much real knowledge at a very remote epoch. Biot's theory of these claims to early dis- covery on the part of the Chinese is, however, opposed by a stronger probability that they had not arrived at these important scientific data, till about the time of the Han dy- nasty, from the second century before, to the second after, Christ. At this time the native astronomy was recon- structed, partly from tradition and partly from fresh knowl- edge imported from Greece and India.^ The famous sixty years' cycle does not occur in early times.^ The meteoric falls recorded for a thousand years begin in the seventh century, B.C.* The mathematical science of the older works is very rude and undeveloped.® Four hundred and sixty eclipses are recorded (singularly enough, not one from 2169 B.C. to ^^6 B.C.) ; but most of them have failed of veri- fication, and the oldest cannot be identified as having been visible in China. The Tcheou-li, a work due largely, it is probable, to these reconstructions, reports of the old Tcheou 1 Biot, Journ. des Savants, 1849, 1861 j Weber, Trans. Bert. Acad., 1860-61 ; Whitney Jimrn. Am. Or. Soc. viii. ; Burgess, Ibid.; Carre, L' Ancien Orient. I. 488; Amyoti Miitt. d Miss- II- 104. ' Burgess, A mer. Or. Soc, 1866, p. 323 ", Chalmers in Legge's PraUg. to Shu-kine. ' Plath, Bay. Akad. 1867. « Cosmos, I. 118. • Tcheoupei tratis. by Gaubil, Lettres Edifiantes. SCIENCE. lOI dynasty a thousand years back, that it had a grand astro- nomical officer with a corps of service, whose function was to record the celestial changes, and divide the land into dependencies of certain asterisms.^ Writers, Jesuit and native, of the last century claim that the rotundity of the earth and the difference of diameters were known many centuries ago ; also the suspension of the earth in space : but these statements require proof.^ Biot has collected the records of comets from the seventh century B.C. to the seventeenth a.c, out of Ma-touan-lin ; and for all of them, down to those of the fourteenth century, these Chinese data have furnished elements to European calculations.^ But the data have not been tested, and their real value seems to be in their indications of a deep interest in celes- tial phenomena at a time when Europe was too barbarian to note any thing in comets but signs of ruin. The popu- lar belief in China and elsewhere that an eclipse was the effort of a monster to swallow the sun, who must be driven off with gestures and noise, was doubtless in part symbol- ical ; and must not cover the fact that there was always an Astronomical Board, noting the progress of the eclipse and computing its elements with rationalistic scientific interest. It is at least clear that the Chinese have been busy reg- istering facts of celestial observation during the greater part of their history. Their mechanical appliances must have been very imperfect ; yet they claim to have had ar- millary spheres as early as the second century, B.C., and to have constructed celestial globes, with water machinery to represent apparent movements, in the eleventh of our era.* Astronomical charts and atlases, too, were common, with distances of the constellations carefully marked.^ It is true > Tchemrli, B. xxvi. ; WuUke, II. 92. « Girard, II. 318; Wylie, p. 86. * Humboldt's Cosmos^ I. 92, note 42 ; and IV. 185, x86. * Wylie, p. 86. ^ Ibid. p. 104. 102 ELEMENTS. the Jesuits, in the seventeenth century, found them unable to measure the shadow on a sun-dial ; corrected their cal- endar, constructed instruments, and taught them scientific methods. But it was precisely their astronomical science that drew the attention of the Chinese government to these learned men, and secured them high positions of trust. Schaal found Chinese scholars ready to join him in draw- ing up a great work on astronomy, which however adhered to the Ptolemaic system.-' Later missionaries have taught them the ellipticity of the orbits, the sun's parallax, Kep- ler's laws, logarithms, — finding willing ears.^ Perhaps much of this teaching was anticipated ; at least the intel- lectual and official conditions of it were prepared, and even familiar.^ That they seem to have used a decimal system of notation at a very early period is no more than can be said of almost all other races ; counting by the hands and toes being the earliest stage of numeration. Of more importance are arithmetical works two thousand years old ; books of mensuration, trigonometry, and the elements of the calculus ; the extraction of roots to the thirteenth power, and the solution of unknown quantities by mathe- matical rules, five and six centuries ago.* Father Ricci was aided in his translation of Euclid by a native scholar (1608) ; and another during the present dynasty prepared a supplement on Geometry ; while a third was the chief originator of the recent completion of the Euclid by Mr. Wylie. Mr. Wylie's list proves how carefully the later Chinese have preserved their astronomical and mathemat- ical treasures, reviewing them from time to time, and crit- ically reporting their condition, in theory and practice. Of such reports a great Thesaurus was published in the reign ^ The beautiful astronomical Instruments, so well-preserved in the observatory at Fe-king^ and described by Duhalde and others, are memorials of the science and artistic taste of Father Verbiest. ' Wylie, p. 89. » Lockhart, pp. 342-352. * Wylie, p. 94. Mathe- matics. SCIENCE. 103 of Kien-lung. Elaborate collections of formulae for calcu- lation have been made down to the present day, when there is no lack of native mathematicians in China. It is, of course, no evidence of the contrary that the masses still believe the earth to be flat, bounded by four seas, and construct fanciful distances of the sun and stars down to feet and even inches.^ The current cycle of sixty lunar years is curiously constructed and named, combining twelve kinds of animals, five elements, five colors, and the male and female principles. But there were in old time three ways of representing the sky: the first, as a concave sphere ; the second, as a globe with stars on the outside ; and the third, as undefined space.^ It is far from true that the exact sciences are wanting in China, though there must be great hindrance to their growth, not only in the difficulty of expressing distinct and unequivocal ideas in the written characters, which have great scope of meaning, but still more in the ten- dency to formulize in sets of numbers unchangeably fixed and predetermined, so that science and mythology cannot be fully separated. Of historical data the pragmatic Chinese possess an un- limited amount; of the science of history a bet- ' . , . History. ter conception than most ancient peoples, since they have always carefully registered events in their rela- tion to causes and effects. But this correct basis is dis- turbed by being obliged to adjust itself to a theory that events proceed from the maintenance or violation of a pre-ordained harmony between earth and heaven, the fixed norm of which is a set of institutions established _in the earliest time. Behind all this mixture of history with fable, however, stands a very clear conception of moral ^ Chalmers, in Legge's Proleg. to Shu'king- * On the various estimates of Chinese Astronomical Science, see Stances du Congris Internat, des OrietUalistes (1S73), I. p. 290. 104 ELEMENTS. sequence, in national penalty and reward, according to un- changeable right. Full responsibility of nations and their governors to forces of moral and spiritual order as supreme is the ideal of historic justice. Of the complexity and variety of human relation and motive the uniformity of the national type allows less perception. Here as else- where, the main aim is to collect details ; and the passion for calendaring facts has kept historic documents nearer to sober truth than those of any other Oriental nation, with perhaps the exception of the Egyptian. The Annals, secretly drawn up during each reign, and making known at the opening of each the character of that which preceded it, — written by officials without fear of punishment and under solemn injunction, as a part of the national religion, to set down the truth about their rulers, — are the most valuable documents in ancient his- torical literature. The great historiographers were not mere annalists, but moralists and statesmen ; most of them had struggles with the government independent of their work as reporters, and the biographies of the prin- cipal men among them as drawn by Rdmusat are a won- derful record of heroic conduct amidst vicissitudes of fortune.^ The great work of De Mailla, published in twelve quarto volumes by the Abb6 Grosier, 1 777-1 783, is translated from a compilation of these Annals by the historiographer Sse-ma-kouang, and contains but a frac- tion of the whole. Sse-ma-thsian's " Historical Memoirs" (Sse-ki), compiled in the first century, are surpassed by the " Investigations " of Ma-touan-lin, thirteen centuries afterwards ; which cover thirty-seven centuries, and form the treasury whence have been taken, often without ac- knowledgment, almost all European accounts of Chinese history and archaeology, and of the races connected there- with. In this marvellous monument of historic labor all ' R^musat, Noml. MHanges Adatiques, Vol. II. SCIENCE. 105 the facts are classified, their sources indicated, the authors discussed, all related documents transferred directly from the original sources ; and not an important branch of the national civilization is omitted or lightly treated'.^ Twenty- four Dynastic Histories contain chronological records, memoirs on every department of science, and narratives, personal and ethnic.^ That of the Ming dynasty is in three hundred and thirty-two books ; that of the Sung II., in four hundred and ninety-six. Never had a people such materials for history, — vases, monuments, inscrip- tions ; official records, memorials, and State papers ; repertories of laws, treatises, criticisms ; biographies, lists, and registers ; libraries and catalogues without end. Never is lost a scrap of official writing, or the record of a fact ; and the incessant revisal and reconstruction has, in the main, been guided by a sincere desire to preserve the truth. The Chinese eye is in search of the actual ; even poetry must point to fact. The oldest odes of the Shi and the Shu claim historic basis, and the abundance of lyrical effusions in all periods testifies to a popular desire to celebrate the facts of actual life.^ Genuine criticism is by no means wanting. The ration- alistic spirit keeps watch on the mytho-poetic, and counteracts to some extent the conservative traits of literature. The study of the Classics has been a work of elimination. Confucius himself is believed to have set the example by reducing the hundred chapters of the Shu-king to fifty, and selecting for preservation only three hundred and eleven of the three thousand pieces of verse originally contained in the Book of Songs. The Li-ki has been reduced to one sixth of its former dimensions. The • Plath. Schule und Vnterricht hei den AH. CMnesen, Bay. Akad., Jwli, 1868; R^musat, Nouv. Mil. Asiaiigues, Vol. II. ; Schott, p. log-iii, 60. * Wylie, p. 12. ' The Romans also bad their Book of A nnals ; but it was not instituted till the third cen- tury, B.C. ; Mommsen, B. II., ch. ix. I06 ELEMENTS. authenticity of these Classic Books has been discussed, and by the keenest minds denied. Sse-ma-kouang in the tenth century rejected all the national traditions previous to Fo-hi. Sse-ma-thsian, like Herodotus, puts into his story all the old legends of useful inventions by primeval kings, but simply as historical traditions. ^ The fantastic fables about lines of kings previous to Hwang-ti, quoted by Pr6- mare ^ to discredit the historical value of Chinese records, are products of a mediaeval degraded form of the Tao-sse school, and rejected by the national historians ; though none the less accepted by many Christian missionaries, as vestiges of Biblical characters and events. Mere chronological calendars, like the early Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, are indeed the common form of annals ; but a more philosophical construction is not lacking, which fol- lows the order not of dates merely, but of events and principles.^ The scientific defect is absence of variety and development ; neither of which is possible, because all this recording is not pursuit of a free ideal, nor quest of fresh adventure and discovery in the world of mind, but effort to conform to a rule already ordained. To this rule nothing can be added ; from this nothing dropped. The best criti- cism, therefore, lacks the element of surprise. To find an old belief erroneous does not here mean, as with us, to become inspired with a sense of light wholly new, but to confirm a truth that is older and more obvious still. The narrow eyelid never expands with wonder before discovery. The new event is but another stone cast on the heap of instances under a prescribed law, as well known from the beginning to all men as the yearly rise of the Ho-ang-ho. Original and suggestive presentment of the facts is thus almost impossible. We honor the courage of the censor ' On the critical care and fidelity of Sse-ma-thsian, see R^musat Mim. del' Acad, da inscriptions^ vii. 4. " Introd. to P. Gaubil's translation of the S hit-king ; also see De Mailla, History, I. 17 ' Schott, Chinese Literature, p. 75. SCIENCE. 107 who writes down the truth regardless of consequences, and the critic who weighs with tact and skill the evidences of a record ; but the biographical result is after all, to a great extent, a monotonous and wearisome nebula of names and incessantly repeated situations, pervaded by a chronic wail over the shortcoming of the present in comparison with the past. Even here, however, the taste for biography has great value, — always the best basis for history. There is no end of Chinese Plutarchs ; and as the emperors receive a new name after death, so the great and the little men, — rulers, scholars, inventors, heads and disciples of sects, military and rebel chiefs, — live again in their collected conversations, plots, vicissitudes of fortune, held up for the gratitude or contempt of millions.-' We should expect that chronology would be found per- fected in Chinese literature. The effort to arrange chro- and harmonize details is here instinctive, and there °°'°^- is no history whose designations of time are more distinct for a space of at least twenty-five hundred years. Chron- ological tables are, in fact, abundant ; that of Kang-hi, issued in 1715,13 in one hundred volumes. It is curious however that the old Classics, though purporting to be historical, have no chronological arrangement. The cycle of sixty years — although ascribed in late times to Hwang-ti, and even to Fo-hi — is not found in the Shu-king, where the only cycle chronicles the days. In the old time, epochs were marked by names of sovereigns and length of reigns, of course often legendary, and based on astronomical con- ditions.2 Confucius and Mencius, careful students of rec- ords, afford the best data for periods that preceded them. The Tchun-tsieu, or " Spring and Autumn Classic " of Cciifucius, is a continuation of the Shu-king, and con- ' See Plath's analyses of many of these biographies, Bay. Akad-t Feb., 1868. • Legge, Proleg, to Shu-king^ ch. iii. 81. I08 ELEMENTS. sists of a very meagre list of names, events, and dates , whose value, if we may judge from Legge's careful com- parisons of the text with its best commentary, is mainly chronological. The uniformity natural to reports of events in a community so prosaic, and so careful of what is ascertained; the immemorial habit of registering facts at the moment, and connecting every record with the regular return of times and seasons, and with the notation of nat- ural phenomena, — give ground for great confidence in the main points of their chronology, even to remote epochs ; and while nothing can be more positive than their lists of dates commencing with the eighth century, B.C., — the opening time of the Greek Olympiads also, and of positive Hebrew history, — there is almost if not quite equal cer- tainty for such data, even relating to earlier dynasties, as are confined to names of rulers, lengths of reigns, and records of important events ; these being often confirmed by a great amount of independent testimony. Thus the existence of the Chinese people more than two thousand years B.C., the close of the Shu-king in 769 B.C., and the length of the great Tcheou dynasty, 1 122-249 ^■^■> ^-re posi- tive landmarks in this vast expanse of time ; and the lists of dynasties and their several kings, covering with perfect distinctness every moment of history, may reasonably be trusted for at least three thousand years. The ante-Con- fucian literature, however, rests on data which are ex- tremely unsatisfactory ; and with all our respect for the patient researches of Dr. Plath, we can hardly feel on safe ground beyond the opening of the Tcheou dynasty twelve hundred years B.C. The genius of the Chinese makes trustworthy chro- nology easy of construction, just as the opposite qualities of Hindu mind have darkened and confused that of India. Chu-hi strikes the key-note of their success when he bases the possibility of chronological science on the SCIENCE. 109 regularity of natural processes, and pronounces time to be man's conception of the movement of the universe. What chronology is for time, geography is for space. The passion of the Chinese for registering the ceog- physical features of their great empire has been '^p''>'- extremely productive ; but it does not amount to scientific genius. Their geographical descriptions are here but heaps of well-arranged facts, without reference to large relations, general ideas, or constructive laws.^ Yet in no department have they been more serviceable to science than in their careful observation of localities, their minute itineraries, their full descriptions of lands, productions, climates, races.^ Their researches on the mountain sys- tems of Central Asia greatly aided Humboldt in his study of that region.^ The records of the Pilgrims, Fa-hian and Hiouen-thsang, are of great interest. .Reports of officials and commissions to neighboring countries are generally models of compact, simple, business-like statement, and reach back for two thousand years. It is not easy to say when so industrious a people began to map out the features of the land they cleared and tilled. The Shu-king has a famous chapter descriptive of the nine provinces of Yu's primitive Chinese empire; ; their limits, products, natural phenomena, soils, tributes,* — per- haps in its details a " romance," but certainly very old, and pointing to the indispensable conditions of all Chinese industry, even from earliest times. The " Nine Vases of Yu," inscribed with charts of the empire, are doubtless another mythical expression of the same truth. A later work, the Tcheou-li, ascribes to the geographical depart- ^ Schott, 49, 50. * See especially *^ Notices sur les pays et les peuples Hrangires, tiroes des geographies ei lies annales ChinoiseSy^ by Julien {yournal Asiatique-t 1846-47); also for specimens, Bret- schneider, Chinese Mediizval Travellers (Shanghai, 1875). * Aspects of Nature^ p. 76. Shucking, Pt. III. i. I lO ELEMENTS. ment of this dynasty a corps of two hundred and twenty officers ! Ma-touan-lin used many early topographical works in preparing his great Cyclopaedia.^ Minute desctiptions of the different provinces have been revised and rewritten, some of them from ten to fifteen times. From the fourth century to the present time, all Asia to the borders of Persia has been under the patient and steady pencils of Chinese geography.^ The " Complete Survey of the Em- pire," in one hundred and eight volumes, printed in 1744, covers boundaries, climate, history, natural phenomena ; manners and customs, towns, edifices, canals, schools, and libraries ; area, population, official list ; mountains and rivers, antiquities, castles, passes, bridges, dams, monu- ments, temples ; distinguished persons, religious and offi- cial ; and productions of the soil, for every province and every dependency. In accumulating these materials, Chi- nese, Mongols, and Manchus have been equally diligent, and the researches of scientific commissions have gone hand in hand with military and commercial expeditions, down to the present day. Of the accuracy of the earlier geographies there is reason to doubt ; the first clear ideas of the form of the earth and the measurement of its sur- face being given by the Jesuits, whose survey of China, in 1 707-1 7 1 7, is still in high repute. Wylie, however, regards the testimony of Chinese books about China as in general unimpeachable, and even in their reference to for- eign countries as not more given to fable than our West- ern literature on kindred topics.^ They certainly bear very favorable comparison with the old Greek and Roman ge- ographers, who wrote of the far East ; with Ptolemy and Strabo and Ctesias and Pliny; with all map-makers and travellers during the Middle Ages, and even down to recent times.* > Schott, p. 80. * Ritter on Asia^ in Knight's Store o/KnowLf p. 172. ■ Wylie, p. 54 * Behaim's Map (Niimberg, 1492), placed Zipangu a short distance west of the Capa Verd Isles ; in later maps it was just beyond Cuba. SCIENCE. Ill But it is in the science of government that this race of organizers have done their best work, anticipat- ing the West by many centuries, both in noble definition of public duties, and in practical construction of the political and civil elements. It is a wonderful subject, worthy of all study, — this tribe of Mongolic settlers, bear- ing within them the prophetic gifts of industry and mutual service in a remote antiquity ; gradually transforming the flooded wastes and wandering races of Eastern Asia into a vast and orderly civilization, under more or less cen- tralized administrative rules ; and evolving steadfast con- ceptions of civil order, of equal rights, of law above personal caprice ; of official functions open to all competitors and due only to the best ; of personal responsibilities and pub- lic tests, instituted and maintained with greater or less fidelity while so much of the West was in a state of bar- barism. Here, at least, we cannot refuse the recognition of scientific capacity, even though deficient in the qualities that prompt to indefinite progress. Under the patriarchal system, government is father, teacher, preserver of the people ; yet not, as will hereafter be more fully shown, by divine right of kings to the absolute allegiance of the people. It represents the relation of the whole race to the universe, expressed in principles and laws higher than personal caprice. It originates in the moral needs of men, and in their spontaneous recognition of right. In the old time, it affirms, rulers wrought not by laws, but by example ; not by rules, but by instinctive per- ceptions. They laid down the maxim, even in dealing with rebellion or invasion, that doing justly would conquer an enemy more effectually than force of arms.^ This, of course, means that such was the aspiration which, in later times, this peaceable and civil race pursued, affirming its success to have been apparent in the divine and creative 1 Sku-king^ II. 2. 112 ELEMENTS. past. Through the supposed degeneracy of centuries it has endured, and is still visible in many institutions imply- ing the highest forces of moral culture, amidst the special laws that prove such forces far from available. In what ways, and how imperfectly, the actual framework of gov- ernment is adjusted to the strict demand for concrete insti- tution of virtue will be considered elsewhere. Works on judicial precedents, reviews of criminal legislation, records of causes cdebres, discussions of the theory and practice of government, abound ; and the law codes, whatever mixture of good and evil they may contain, are models of direct, practical, unmistakable dealing with the facts, and monu- ments of sincere effort to deal justly. They consist, it is true, of bald detail, though arranged with the utmost clear- ness. Thus the Tcheou-li ^ is an amazingly long, minute enumeration of official functions. The Ming published a description of their government in the sixteenth century in nearly three hundred volumes. The present dynasty has issued a still more comprehensive collection of laws, not only in their actual form, but in all the stages of their growth The Penal Code of the T'sing ^ is a compilation of extreme minuteness and reach, abounding in just dis- tinctions and noble equities. It is but here and there that startling anomalies, in principles and estimates, interrupt the great preponderance of mercy over severity. Its accomplished translator claims that, "if not the most just, it is at least the most comprehensive and uniform, and suited to the genius of the people for whom it is designed, perhaps, of any that ever existed."^ This review of the results of Chinese industry justifies us in claiming for such assiduity, patience, loyalty to con- ^ Translated into French by Ed. Biot * Translated by Staunton. ^ Preface^ Tci. SCIENCE. 113 ditions, and conservation of materials and uses, that it is no less than a Religion of Labor. These results are stupendous in amount ; their services invaluable to ti™re^s civilized life ; their elements organized in stable "}■ Chinese and productive processes with a fidelity nowhere " "^"^' equalled. The visionary splendors of Far Cathay for med- iaeval fancy are surpassed by the realities of her practical resource and splendid gifts to modern civilization. Her over-speed from head to hand, her absorption in the con- crete, her plodding conformity to fixed ideals, bid us pause to observe what moral and spiritual secret hides in an earnestness so effective on a ground so confined. Confined it surely is. In all this wealth and orderly construction there is defect of inner relation : of that power of combining phenomena to lafge results, which is requisite to science ; and of that openness to fresh maxims and formulas which is essential to progress. These fail- ings are so familiar in Chinese labor, that they have almost seemed to belong there exclusively ; and we are apt to for- get that they are precisely the obstacles which have beset science in the West, and which neither the friction of races, nor the supposed tendency of Christianity to eman- cipate the mind, had overthrown, or even shaken, as late as a hundred years ago. It is only within that period that we can find a basis even for the distinction drawn by Ampere, which allows the West the power to "apply and perfect" what the East " invents and preserves." In accounting for the unprogressive element in arts and sciences pursued with such devotion, we must re- member that, in so vast a population as the Chinese, o/'lJf "''^^ cheapness of labor will naturally foreclose the use progress- of machinery : an immense demand for employment '^™°^' does not favor the growth of labor-saving inventions ; and simple tastes and easy subsistence will maintain old proc- esses of industry against whatever tends to their disturb- 8 114 ELEMENTS. ance. But it is plain from our analysis of Chinese character, that we must go behind the statistics of popula- tion to solve this question. The physical circumstances of the masses, indeed, fail to stimulate them to progress; but the national type itself presents positive drawbacks to the charms of growth. What has been called the idealism of this people is not contempt for material things, but pre- occupation of the ground by fixed formulas and habits, held absolute and unimprovable. A primitive simplicity constantly taught and pursued ; adherence to conventional formulas of number on which every thing in the universe is constructed, and which predetermine the forms of analysis so that there can never be more nor less than so many elements ; intentness of a concrete habit on petty details ; religious objections fo the use of dissection, or other interfer- ence with the dead body ; and the inevitable plodding that must result from following prescribed rules, — are illustra- tions of this foreclosure of scientific progress. Behind all this is the great uniformity of the Chinese type itself, due to its comparative isolation. Moreover, though comprising many elements in its Chinese form, this Mongolic blood lacks the live chemistry of commingling qualities, and the mobil- ity of resources that need not to repeat their forms. To the physiological distinctness of the race has of late been added a deliberate withdrawal from the magnetism of com- mercial relations ; so that its progress, which with all these drawbacks was by no means insignificant, has been seri- ously checked. Japan, but a few years since more hostile to foreign influence than China, has a bolder outlook and swifter conversion. But the old inventions that illustrate Chinese labor must Prospects "°'' ^^ forgotten, nor the great and happy civiliza- tion that has been built on them, transmitting them to us also, and starting us on the track of many noble sci- ences and arts. "If the importers of silk," says Gibbon. SCIENCE. 115 " had introduced printing, already practised by the Chinese, the comedies of Menander and entire decades of Livy would have been perpetuated in the editions of the sixth centtiry. A larger view of the globe might have promoted improvement of speculative science ; but the Christian geography was forcibly extracted from texts of Scripture ; and study of Nature was the surest symptom of an unbe- • lieving mind." The time has gone by for regarding the Chinese as a hopelessly unprogressive race. Here is no dank moss-grown forest, where the falling leaves of cen- turies have lain undisturbed, only to be overshot with dead trunks of the trees that bore them. How decisively recent wars with European powers have opened the way for China to fresh interest in their cultures, and earnest efforts to stand abreast with them in social progress, will perhaps be more manifest after a short historical review of the relations of the Empire, commercial and social, with the outside world. IV. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. ' I "HE prevailing belief that the Chinese are an unsocial -*- people, who have always haughtily closed their ^^^^^t doors against foreigners, is at variance with the intercoutse facts of history. It proceeds from a misunderstand- ^^^ti. ing of the causes which led to a policy adopted by the Empire only in recent times. The Romans had simi- lar impressions concerning this remote, and by them scarcely visited, race. Pliny describes the Seres as " shun- ning intercourse, and awaiting the approach of those who would traffic with them." ^ Yet he admits that they sup- plied Rome in his time with greatly admired tissues, made of what he describes as carded wool ; with the best kind of iron ; with skins and silks.^ It impresses him with ad- miration at the progress of mankind, that "we should now be reaching the Seres to obtain our clothing, and the emer- ald in the bowels of the earth." ^ The " Serica vestis " was a luxury which had more than once to be abated by sump- tuary laws. The old Greeks knew only that from an unseen people at the borders of the world came a delicate mystery of fibre and color, to be wrought up by the looms of the .^gean into precious fabrics, which they called, now Me- dian, now Assyrian. By ample testimony we know that this reserved and silent sphere of civilizing powers was » Natural History, VI. 20. > Ibid. ; and XXXIV. 41. • Ibid. XII. i. I20 ELEMENTS. open, before the beginning of the Christian era, to Persian and other traders from the West.^ Such interest was felt in these relations that somewhat later Chinese annals re- cord numerous embassies from Ta-tsin (or Great China), bringing tributes, as they express it, and asking the benefits of trade. As early as the second century, M. Aurelius turned to China from his Parthian conquests, to secure the nobler unities of commerce ; binding the ends of the known world by interchange of courtesies and gifts.^ Ref- erences to Indian and Persian relations in much earlier times than any of these might be given,^ but the details are of doubtful value. The Chinese must have been too much occupied in guarding their borders from barbarous tribes, and in developing their own immense territory, to seek intercourse with distant countries. A vast rim of desert intervened on one side, an ocean on the other. It is not strange that their earliest records make no mention of distant trading marts, nor that we are indebted to the eager and inquisitive Arabs for the first important notices of their commercial relations with the West. Their very name, old as it must be, is of unknown origin ; by some supposed to be the native Tsin, by others the name given the empire by the Hindus, who connected it with the An- namese peninsula (Cochiti)} Nevertheless, it is certain that their industry was the first to open up the wilds of Central Asia, and to civilize its wandering hordes. It is the glory of their Han emperor — Wuti — to have established a secure commerce with the opposite border of the conti- nent in the second century B.C. ; with one hand suppressing predatory tribes, and with the other protecting the regular movements of trading caravans to more distant lands. • For early relations of China with the West, see Lasnn's Trtd. A lUrih. II. 606-620 ; Ntitt and Queries^ June, 1870 : Gih^im, ch. xl. ■ Pauthier, Relai. Polii. tie la Chine av. ies Puiss. Occid. p. 17-18. ■ Ibid. p. 14; Martin's Ckina^ I. p. 257. • Mayers in Chin. Rev., May and June, 1875. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 121 This adventurous spirit, so rare in Asiatic monarchs, was rewarded by the arrival of one of his generals, if not at the Caspian Sea, yet near the Persian Gulf, whence the vine, true symbol of social unity, was carried to China ; whose exchange for the gift came some centuries later, when the silk-worm, symbol of productive labor, was brought to Con- stantinople by Nestorian monks. From the date at which Ma-touan-lin begins his notices of Indian relations, religious and commercial,! — not far from the Christian era, — two, and probably three, great lines of traffic were fully organ- ized across the continent. One high-road is described by Ptolemy as coasting the desert on the south from Bactria to the Western sea ; another led from Samarcand to the northern pi^ovinces of China. In nine months the cara- vans crossed from sea to sea; and the Romans met these returning land-galleons at the fairs of Armenian and Persian towns.^ So wide-reaching were the attractive powers of industry in an age when the present centres of civilization ° ^ Chinese were a wilderness, and railroad and ocean-steamer interest in beyond the world of dreams. But the persistent ^°''"s'^ ^ ^ countries. faith of the Chinese in their own cosmopolitanism has recorded much earlier intercourse with the nations immediately in contact. The Shu-king records tributes to the great Emperor from foreign as well as native States. Hospitality to guests is one of the eight "principles of government " laid down for the earliest kings. ^ The Tcheou-li describes the reception of foreign embassies at court, in those remote ages which it professes to represent : they were not interrogated at the borders, but greeted with cordial ceremony by officers despatched thither for the purpose, escorted to the capital, and lodged at the public > yourn. R. As- Soc. VI. 457 ^ Gibbon, ch. xl. ^ Shu-king^ v. iv. 7. 122 ELEMENTS. expense.^ Interpreters were charged with the duty of teaching them the customs of the kingdom, and facilitat- ing intercourse ; an institution now expanded into that of the " Ninety-six Translators," who mediate between the empire and all the languages of Asia.^ Treated as the children of their host, strangers were expected to conform to a ceremonial indispensable to his position and functions. " The Emperor," says the Li-ki, " without ceremonial, can- not exercise hospitality." Not less were this great people, grown from a tribe of nomads, disposed to seek distant countries, than to accept their allegiance and tributes. As early as the T'sin dynasty, in the third century or earlier, all Tartar races to the borders of Turkistan were subject to their sway.^ Stanislas Julien gives account of nearly thirty books on the Si-yeh, or countries west and north of China, from the fifth to the eighteenth centuries, by official persons on em- bassies political or religious.* Nine books of Ma-touan- lin's geographical researches (thirteenth century) relate to native, twenty-five to foreign, locahties. Cosmas tells us in the sixth century that the Chinese brought their silks and sandal-wood to Ceylon, where they were met by traders from the West.^ Here was, perhaps, initiated the extensive commerce carried on by the Arabs with China for lld^r^ many centuries, not only by sea, but across Persia and Thibet ; and it has become more than probable that many of the inventions supposed to have been intro- duced by them, such as paper and the mariner's compass," were brought from the Pacific shores. In the seventh century these masters of the carrying trade start into 1 Tcheou-U, B. xxxix, 43-44 ; xxxni. 6r. 2 Pauthier, p. 12. Also Prejevalsky, Mongolia. (1876) I. 67. ° Chinese Recorder, January and February, 1876. • Chinese Repository, 184S. For mention of Western Lands, Neumann's Pref \aChu mse Pirates; and Bretschneider, " Chinese Medixval Travellers!' " Knight's Commerc. Inierc. with China (Cyclop. Use/. KnowV). " Draper, Intellectual Development of Europe. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 23 prominence in the Chinese annals. The attention of the Government was called to large numbers of Western trad- ers settled in Canton. They are described as " dark-bearded men, who take no wine and use no music ; but are brave because their heaven is promised to those who shall die in battle." One of their embassies refuses to fall down before the emperor, as wont to bow to God only. By and by came the Arab travellers, Wahab and Abuzail, famous for bringing back the first substantially authentic account of this veiled and mystic land.-^ When they wrote, in the ninth century, the Moslem were but traders in Asia, not yet conquerors of India. They met no form of exclu- siveness worse than the warehousing of trader's goods in the ports for six months and a duty on them of thirty per cent, taken out of them in kind.^ They were free to trav- erse, open-eyed, the wondrous land ; saw its customs and productions, its marvellous social order, and civil adminis- tration ; the " majesty of its tribunals," always rendering justice; its offices held by "men of experience only."^ They tell of the judge's proclamation, repeated thrice daily, that if any one had been wronged by the king him- self he should have immediate justice.* They describe the strangely pictured dresses, the copper money, passports, registration of travellers ; the drums at the official gates, and trumpets sounding the hours, and bell-rope reaching three miles {sic) from the governor's head, that all might get at it who had been wronged ; the light taxes, the severe laws ; the eunuchs, the penal rod, the revenues from salt monopoly, and from tea, which they praise as cure for all diseases.^ Alas, we fear good Ebn Wahab stretches a point when he reports the emperor as saying that he honored the King of Irak as king of kings, himself being ' Transl. by Renandot ; our references are to a very rare old English version (1733). • Makom. Travellers, die. p. 21. ' Ibid. p. 23, 73. ' Tbid. p. 74. » Ibid. pp. 18-26, 34, 48, 74. 124 ELEMENTS. only the second ; while the King of the Indies, or of Ele- phants, was the third, and the King of Greece, or of come- liest men, the fourth.^ But the story proves how liberal a spirit this foreigner found in the Chinese government ; as does his tale of a eunuch, high in position, who was de- graded for cheating a Persian merchant, and sent to penal service for life.^ He reports, admiringly, that the poor and rich alike ever}-where learned to read and write ; that wars were not made for conquest ; that works in art were so per- fect that other nations could but faintly imitate them.^ After aU this we are hardly prepared for the charge that this highly civilized people were cannibals, eating all who were put to death !* Then come toiling across the steppes indomitable Cath- The Cath- ^^i'^ priests, — Carpini and Ruysbroeck and Oderic, oiic Mis- in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, — sent Eionanes. ^^ convcrt the Great Khan, or get his infidel aid against the infidel. They too are hospitably received. Carpini finds a " very courteous and gentle people ; " even ibn fancies they worship Christ.® Then roving Ibn Batuta. Batuta of Tangier, hunting up Moslem friends at the ends of the earth, sails over sea from the Sunda Isles to this land " without parallel " for products and resources ; " for its fruits, agriculture, silver, gold." He sees the poor going clad in silks ; the porcelain, the painting not to be surpassed ; marks the strict rules of registration in full use for vessels in port. He finds a town for Mahom- medans in every province ; and in one chief city great numbers of Jews, Christians, and Turks, "whose great men are exceedingly rich." " The care they take of trav- ellers is surprising ; for these 'tis the safest of countries and the best." Innkeepers take one's property in charge ; are held responsible for it ; provide aU he can want He • Mahom. Trav., p. 53. » Ibid. p. 72. » Ibid. pp. M, 33, 50. ♦ Ibid. p. 33. 6 Hakluyt CoUectum. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 125 is himself everywhere honorably entreated, even in the prodigious capital, three days' journey long ; feasted at the houses of very high officials, who invited his fellow Mahom- medans to meet him.^ Then the two Venetian Marco Polos, not following after commercial gain, but in ^°'°- pure desire to see the mysterious Kitai, stretch away thither from Bokhara to find the great Kublai so inter- ested in the West and its faith, that he sends them back for a hundred teachers of Christianity, with respectful message to the Pope. Then with papal dignitaries in tow they make another yet wearier stretch of three and a half years through all seasons, whose perils prove too much for his Holiness's show-men ; but reach at last the gates of Clemenfou, where grand rejoicings are their meed. For seventeen years young Marco acts as ambassador in every part of China, commending himself to public service by learning four languages. Our " Middle Kingdom " opened the Eastern hemisphere to this earlier Columbus, as she was by and by to draw the later by her beckoning hand to explore the Western sea. In his charming narrative, to which, as to old Herodotus, every year adds fresh authority, he describes the frequent arrival of caravans, on whose cargoes the prices were fixed by experienced officers, fair profit being allowed ; and reports that the Government issued paper-money, made exchangeable for other articles, or for bullion at the mint, — a charge of three per cent, however, being made for all renewals of worn- out bills ! ^ A thousand horse-and-cart loads of raw silk entered Pe-king daily ; " to which city every thing most rare and costly from all parts of the world finds its way." ^ There are strange things about this old opener of the Orient ; such as his having so greatly improved the maps of the world, though without science ; and his not men- * Ibn Batuta, ch. xxiii. * iVTirco Polo, B. II. ch. xviti. (Wright's Ed). ' Ibid., II. xvii 1 26 ELEMENTS. tioning tea, printing, the written characters, and com- pressed feet, while noticing so much that was far less remarkable. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese found Arab merchants quietly settled in the chief cities of China, in Reception full frcedom of traffic. In the seventeenth. Father of the Avril enumerates as many as six or seven great Rulsilnr. routes of Chinese trade across the continent.^ In Navarrete. 1658, the Dominican Navarrete, sharp of eye for " heathen idolatry," bravely penetrates into China without help, " destitute of all human dependence ; the first," he is assured, " that ever ventured among these heathen in this nature." Deceived by Christians, whom he has en- gaged to attend him, he finds " an infidel, who conducted me with very good will and at a small charge." His expe- rience is worth noting. Uncivil Christian soldiers robbed him of his money and church stuff. " I was on my guard against infidels, but not against Christians, which was the cause of my misfortune." Three native soldiers sailed up the river with him, and "could not have been civiler. All the way I never gave any man the least thing but he re- turned me some little present ; and, if he had nothing to return, there was no persuading him to accept a morsel of bread." Tired one day with climbing, he was kindly led into a guard-house by the captain, who "showed com- passion to see me travel afoot and weary, was sorry my things had been stolen, and took leave of me with much civility and concern." Nieuhoff, Dutch ambassador in 1654, found at Pe-king envoys from the great Mogul, Tartars from the West, Lamas from Thibet. Jesuit Father Schaal sat in white- haired reverence in the cabinet, and the Khan graciously studied the geography of Holland, and admitted the claims of this political atom, which might have been dropped into * Ckifuse Reposilot-y June, iSat EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 27 a Chinese province and lost there, to national dignity ; treating her envoys with extreme liberality and respect.^ They failed only because foiled by Portuguese priests.^ The reception of the later Dutch embassy by Kien-lung, in 1795, was none the less gracious for the new foreign policy which made their mission of small effect. Special officers were appointed to see that they had every atten- tion that had been bestowed on any other embassy, and that their time was occupied as pleasantly as possible ; and a letter was sent by the emperor to the Dutch gov- ernment, announcing that he made no distinction in his paternal love for all the nations, being entrusted by Heaven with the common care of all.^ The Russians were re- ceived disdainfully in 1650 ; for they not only refused obeisance, but were busy in securing territory on the Amoor. Yet prisoners from their defeated army in 1680, taken to Pe-king, were permitted to build a church and a college. In 1689, a caravan trade was opened by them to the capital. In 1728, a Russian spiritual mission was established at Pe-king, the terms of whose charter have been faithfully adhered to by the imperial government, and which has obtained some of the most valuable infor- mation on China thus far accessible to the Western world.* Down to the close of the eighteenth century, boundary disputes have interfered with the natural relations of trade between these two great , empires ; till, in 1 860, free com- munication with Pe-king was conceded to Russia, together with a large portion of Manchuria. The first Portuguese comers in 15 17 were kindly re- ceived, though expelled soon after for good rea- of the sons. Occupying Macao, their commerce was i'°rtu- developed through the seventeenth century, till * Chinese Repository^ August, 1844. * Nieuhofif, Embassy (Ed. 1673), p. 139. 8 Pauthier, Hist, des Relai*^ &c., pp. 51-71. * Erman's Sideria, II., 168-170; also. Ahhandl. d. Russ. Gesandsch* 128 ELEMENTS. they succumbed to Spain ; since which time Macao has fallen into deserved decay, not so much from Chinese opposition, as from its vices and obsolete ecclesiastical institutions.^ America cannot complain of her relations with the Cen- of the tral Kingdom. Our earliest trade to her ports was Americans, jj^ (-jjg f^j-g pf ^jjg sea-ottcr ; opened by the discov- eries of Captain Cook, it became at once one of the most lucrative fields of traffic then known. Owing to the failure of furs in Siberia, this peltry of the Pacific coast, and especially fox-skins, brought such incredible prices in Canton, that in 1792 there were twenty-one vessels, mostly Bostonian, trading on that coast for cargoes, to be exchanged in China for cottons and teas.^ The results of the first opium war with England facili- tated the Cushing treaty of 1 844, at Wanghai ; in which full freedom of religious teaching was ac- corded in return for the just promise of the United States to give no countenance to the opium trade. After the war, in 1857, these provisions were renewed. Mr. Bur- lingame's appointment, in 1867, to direct an institution for instruction in the arts and sciences of the West, and as Minister Plenipotentiary of China to the Western world, was an event of the highest significance, as the immediate results revealed. Mr. Seward's Treaty of July, 1868, while it secured for China eminent domain over her own land and waters, and consulates in American ports, guaranteed perfect freedom of faith in both countries, the right of emigration, penalties for illegal and treacherous trade in laborers, and permission for the youth of each nation to attend the schools and colleges of the other ; at the same time leaving naturalization laws an open question, and proposing aid in constructing railroads and telegraphic ^ Montfort*s Voyage en Chine^ p. 60. • \Trai.^% Astoria^ I. 32; Silliman's jFtmrnalj 1834. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 29 lines. Similar treaties with England, France, and Prussia made the epoch one of universal meaning. These details give evidence of a recognition of international interests and duties, not to be explained by Christian diplomacy, cannon, nor creed. The Chinese have held more intercourse with foreign nations than any other Asiatic race. McCulloch , . , Proofs says they are "a highly commercial people, and that the the notion of their contempt of strangers is utterly Chinese ^ *^ •' are not unfounded. Nowhere can cargoes be bought and naturally sold, loaded and unloaded, with more business-like ^'"='"^"'=- activity than at Canton." ^ The ever advancing line of their limits reached at last, a thousand years ago, the western borders of Asia.^ Later came quaint pieces of Mongol diplomacy, laid up in the French archives, written from the grandson of Genghis Khan to Philip the Fair.^ During the Tartar dynasty distinguished Mongols visited Rome, and a Frenchman was archbishop of Pe-king. Peter the Great sent agents to China to obtain knowledge of the science of government, and learn the art of building.* Russians, Hungarians, Flemings, lived in Tartary, and a Tartar was contractor for helmets in the French army. Genoese, Pisans, Venetians, made the round tour with interpreters through Central Asia, returning by way of Russia ; and Mongol cavalry was offered for the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre.^ What Oriental religion has not been freely admitted to take root in China .'' From what neighboring language have not her scholars translated its volumes .-' Into what one of those tongues have they not, to this day, translated her own .'' Her vocabularies and dictionaries are in Man- * Commercial Diciionary, Article on " Canton.*' * Amp&re's account of R^musat's Essay on this %v!a\&c\.{ScUnce en Orient.^^. 79-8 ■). * Pauthier, Religion^ &c. * Pallas and Klaproth, Mem. rtl. a VAsie^ I. 4. ^ Amp&re. 9 1 30 ELEMENTS. churia, Corea, Japan, Thibet, Tartary, Siam, and the Pacific Isles. Of all Central Asia she made the earliest charts, and protected the oldest commercial roads, and inspired the busiest enterprise. Acts and policies of exclusion towards foreigners have not been wanting. How long is it since any thing ^du!iOT ^i'^^ freedom in trade began to exist between the of for- States of Europe ? Such procedures, however, on signers. ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ China were far from being due to in- hospitality or incuriosity, and had to contend with the strongest natural inclinations. They have mainly arisen from two causes. The first is the refusal of foreigners to comply with the national ceremonial, especially the kotow. kotow ; which, like all State forms, is a constituent part of Chinese religion. The kotow is not pecul- iar to the Chinese. Prostration was the demand of the old Persian monarchy, and history traces it back to Cyrus.^ Many instances are recorded of the refusal of Greek am- bassadors and officers to degrade themselves by such a performance ; not however on religious grounds, but from personal and national spirit. Timagoras, the Athenian, was put to death by his indignant fellow-citizens for submitting to it. The Tartar I^hans made similar assumptions. In all the great empires of the East prostration and adoration were the symbols of allegiance. So far from being of Chinese origin, the kotow does not appear in China at all in early times. It is not in the older classics, nor is it recognized by Confucius, nor even by the Tcheou-li ; . and it may have been introduced with the centralization of the monarchy by Chi-hwang-ti, as late as the third century, B.C. The emperor himself must perform it at the great sacrifi- t • See the quotations In Brissonius de Regno Persarum, p. 22 ; also Herodotus VII. 136 and Pauthier, Hisi. des Relat. &c., p. 219; Arrian (Alex. IV. 119) and Xenoplion (Cyrop. VIII. 3) speak only of adoration, not of the kotow specially ; but this is undoubtedly meant EXTERNAL RELATIONS. I3I ces ; and even to his mother. The symbol, therefore, is not considered as centring in his personal claims, but includes him as a worshipper. This adoration is for the patriarchal idea, and is held to be the due of whatever- represents that sovereignty : the kotow is even made to the imperial cur- tain. Napoleon, it is well known, did not share Greek and Saxon scruples, but sharply criticised the Amherst embassy for refusing to recognize this custom of a court, of which they were the guests. Many other European diplomats have acted on the idea, that those who are seek- ing the benefits of trade should not ask the added privilege of setting at nought the laws of the people they solicit. Kang-hi himself set an example of international respect, by instructing his agents in Russia (1712), if invited to court, to conform to the customs of the land.^ The jealousy of the Chinese court for the honor of this ceremony has been irritated by such insta'nces as that of the Siberian, Baikov, who remained six months in Pe-king, in 1655, refusing to conform to the rules, even to those for presenting his letters.^ With rare magnanimity, Kien-lung dispensed with it in the case of Lord Macartney, the first English ambassador,^ who simply bent his knee, as to his own monarch ; of course a precisely analogous perform- ance. No embassy was more honorably treated than this. Of the rough dismissal of Lord Amherst in 18 16, the kotow question was not the only cause ; there were many mutual misunderstandings, brought about mainly by the hostility of Chinese officials.* Mr. (J. Q.) Adams ascribed to arrogant demands for the kotow the origin of the Brit- ish opium war.^ But sufficient proof to the contrary is af- forded by two facts : first, that Lord Napier violently broke through the rules which prescribed that all foreign com- * Dudgeon in Chinese Recorder, May, 1S71. ^ Ennan, II. 166. * Staunton's account of the Macartney Embassy, ch. x, * Davis's Sketches, p. 74-81. <• See his Lecture in Chin. Repos., May, i84». 132 ELEMENTS. munications with the government should be made through the Hong merchants, persisting in direct intercourse with the governor, and in going up the river to Canton, just as Com- modore Perry afterwards forced his way into Japan ; and second, that the Dutch, who sedulously submitted to every ceremonial demand, were quite as unsuccessful in obtaining satisfaction as the English who did not. Four Dutch and Portuguese embassies kotowed with small effect, except to add to their own humiliation.^ In fact, without of course denying that such claims ought to give way, as they have already done, to a larger knowledge of mankind, we must admit that these questions of etiquette have been compli- cated by a previous state of suspicion and dislike on the part of the Chinese towards foreigners, arising from long experience of their worst habits.^ This is the second cause of exclusiveness which I shall mention. It has occasioned a positive change of of Europe- policy, commcncing in the seventy-third year of an visitors ^j^g Man-chu dynasty ; but now, in part through physical force, abolished. Kang-hi, in 1685, pro- claimed free trade with all nations in all the ports of China. But the Chinese have had good reason to dread the for- eigner, and to label him "barbarian." He was not shut up to Canton till the eighteenth century, when the Man-chus, surrounded by enemies domestic and foreign in the land they had conquered, very naturally set up defences on the seaward as well as on the landward side. But experience had its lessons as well as fear. The doubling of the Cape ' Barrow's Travels., pp. lo, ii. 2 The vehement Japanese have carried their dislike of foreigners much further than their neighbors. They forced Dutch commissioners to crawl between their own gifts for the en- tertainment of the court, and even to trample on the cross. See KHmpffer, P.. v. xiv. Oppo- sition to the liberal policy of the Siogoon toward England and America, on the part of power- ful daimiob, produced civil war in 1864 ; and the fanatical patriotism of their retainers was shown by continual murderous attacks on foreign traders and officials for many years. See Mossmao*' New jfapan, (1873). EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 33 was no sign of promise to China, for it brought the Portu- guese with their lust of slaves and gold. One of the Andradas, their earliest traders with China, '"'^' was a pirate, maltreated the native merchants, and carried off women and children.^ Pinto, also a Portuguese, plun- dered the tombs of Chinese kings. The humiliating treat- ment of foreigners commences with the first Portuguese embassy, immediately afterwards.^ The Macao settlement, made up of Portuguese convicts turned pirates and smug- glers, had not existed forty, years when the native popula- tion were obliged to wall it out from the mainland to protect their children from being kidnapped. The slave trade, supplied from all regions around, was carried on extensively at Macao. " True believers did not scruple to abduct children for education by the Jesuits, to purchase them, or to conceal them when carried off by kidnappers." ^ In 1606, the Chinese were led to believe that the Portuguese of Macao were about to attempt the conquest of the coun- try, and that a Jesuit Father was to be made its ruler ; in consequence of which, armies were raised and sent to the neighborhood. The shores of China were the scene of con- stant contentions between the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and English.* The harshness of the Spaniards towards Chinese in Manila is said to have provoked that system of commercial espionage by the Hong in Canton, which gave the English so much trouble in 1842.^ Previous to this, the quarrels of the Dutch with the Spaniards, and their severity towards native laborers, had brought on their expulsion to Formosa, in 1624. The Jesuits — who had been received with delight, and raised to the high- Political est posts with perfect liberty of teaching, by Kanghi '"'=*"■- ♦ ' Neumann, Preface to translation of Chinese Hist, of Pirates (Oriental Fund, 1831). It was the same m Siam and in Japan. Koeppen's Relig. d. Buddha. !• 470. ' Davis. I. 13, 15. * Lyungstedt's Hist. Sketch, quoted in China Review, July and August, 1873. * Knight's Cyclop. o/Knowl. p. 140. *> Williams, II. 437, 134 ELEMENTS. (1692) — were soon involved in \'iolent quarrels with the Dominicans over the theological issue whether native beliefs desened toleration ; and the Government, finding that the question was whether it or the papal new comer should determine the faith and laws of the iliddle King- dom, chose the part of expelling the intruder. On the arrival of the EngUsh, they were at once slandered by the Dutch ; and these contentions embroiled them with the natives. In 1605, the depredations of a trader turned pirate caused trade with the English to be suspended, and they continued for many years to be the most disliked of aU Europeans. In 1637, Weddel forced his way to Canton against the rules of the Empire, and brought on a conflict made more mischievous by Portuguese intrigue. These experiences alone would seem to have given some color of justice to the Man-chus in maintaining that " the barba- rians were like beasts, and could not be ruled on the same principles as ci\"ilized men." ^ The first British embassy reports, that the court and people alike had been led to believe that English soldiers had aided the Xepalese against them in 1791, and that no contradiction of the story could get to the authorities at Pe-king.^ Hatred of the Europeans was spread through the provinces by accounts of outrages perpetrated by them at the ports ; the central government having no system of control, and the justice of the consular courts being ex- tremely lax.2 We shall not defend the assumption of su- periority to all other nations, nor the frequent treachery of officials ; it may well be questioned whether these faults have prevailed more on one side than on the other. But it is pertinent to ask whether her ver)- exclusivencss may not be all that has saved China from the fate of Western Africa, of INIexico, and of Peru. We cannot deny that her ' Davis, I. 49. J Staunton's Macartmey £mi., dt ii. » Pumpelly, p. 3+1- EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 35 suspicions of foreign intentions have generally been well founded. That they were so in the case of Catholic mis- sions is certain ; and even Davis, complaining of the dis- trust shown towards Lord Amherst, confesses naltvely that he himself, on his journey inland, had a constant eye to favorable points for future invasion.^ The history of the opium war of itself proved a suffi- cient justification for the fears which had led to the policy of the Empire. But it was hardly needed for that purpose. " These merchants," said a Chinese councillor to the Russian legate, " come here to make themselves rich, not us ; we do not care for commerce with Russia." Clearly fj^^^J"^^ seeing the interested motives of their visitors, the self-sufficient hosts have felt the full sense of their own su- periority, as bestowers of bounty or rejectors of suits. The Chinese contemn emigrants, as such ; since it is their own lowest class that emigrate, letting themselves to pay their passage, or support. The mandarin considers the trading class of foreigners in the ports as adventurers of similar quality.^ It is as certain that unprejudiced observers of the late wars have recognized a real disposition to justice on the part of the Government, as it is that such disposition belongs to its theory of universal fatherhood, and to its earlier prac- tice.^ The causes of acts which seem to imply the contrary are not far to seek. After the slaughter at Ning-po, Milne observed the horror with which the native caused by population regarded an Englishman ; " women bolt- Europe- ing into houses at the sight of one, and barring the doors ; men seeming to wish to shrink into a nutshell, as if his stick contained a spring-gun." * How natural that the native timidity of such a people, brought into sudden > Sketches^ pp. 52, 177. > DeMas, II. 371, 372. > Davis in Chin. Repos., February, 1^43, p. 78; also the proclamation of Ilipu, urging good treatment of the English in Canton. « Chin. Repos., January, 1844. 1 36 ELEMENTS. Strife with an Aryan race, should be quick to feel these panic terrors ! Montfort says ^ " the sight of a Europear overturns them ; discomposes their faces in a moment, and sometimes produces real disorder in the animal functions." Analogous alarm approaching panic, in view of the grow- ing strength of European powers, notwithstanding their apparent self-exaltation, has probably had great influence in determining the foreign policy of the Man-chu rulers. The Chinese would not suffer the Portuguese to ap- proach at first nearer than thirty leagues, being terrified with remembrance of their former calamity from Tartar invasions. Soon their fears were increased by seeing the Portuguese ships, like floating castles, with armed men and thundering guns. And then the Moors who resorted to Canton reported that these were Franks, — " people of prodigious valor, and conquerors of whatever they designed, the unknown borders of whose empire extended to the brims of the universe." ^ Subsequent experience has prob- ably taught the mandarin mind that Portuguese valor and sway were but trifles, compared with the power of foreign trade to sweep away all their institutiohs in a tide of strange inventions and destructive beliefs. With the nervous dread of an unknown foe is combined the self-sufficiency natural to a nation of such mag- assert uitudc, SO full of rcsourcc, so self-sustaining, and their self- gQ uuiquc. It IS not strange that China should be adequacy. ^ , . , , . . . aware of this adequacy ; nor yet that m its rela- tions with suitors for its surplus products the State should specially exploit its patriarchal faith ; that with naive be- nignity Kien-lung should announce to the Government of Holland his having found nothing in the language or spirit of its messengers inconsistent with the deepest veneration 1 Voyage en Chines p. 278. 2 Relation 0/ the Etnbassies o/ihe United Provinces to China in the Seventeenth Cen tnry^ published in two ponderous volumes, with quaint engravings; Pt II.-pp. 172, 173. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 37 for his person. The impression was a natural one that the Europeans were not only by the laws of Heaven and Earth made subject to the Central Kingdom (for the Chinese may as well have their "manifest destiny" as the Anglo-Saxon his), but .that they could not .exist at all but for the pro- ductions so eagerly sought by their ships ; so that during the war the Emperor recommended the non-exportation of tea and rhubarb, the one as indispensable to the " bar- barians " for food, the other for medicine. The imperial commissioner at Canton thus addressed the Queen of England : ^ " Of the exports of the Middle Kingdom there is not one but is profitable to men. Our teas and rhubarbs you could not do without for a single day. Were we to grudge them these, and show them no pity in their distresses, by what means would these foreigners prolong existence ? But for our raw silk you could not carry on manufactures. As for our sugar, ginger, cas- sia, and articles of common use, such as silk piece-goods, porce- lain, and the rest, which are indispensable to you, they exceed enumeration. On the other hand, the commodities here imported are all fit for nothing else than to look at or play with, "and whether we have them or not is a matter of no moment with us. Were you not to traffic in opium, these gains would never exist. How then can you bear to seek gain by means of an article so injurious to man, and without compunction of conscience ? We have heard that you, the ruler of your honorable kingdom, have an expanded heart ; and you must therefore be unwilling to do to others what you would not desire to have done to yourself." ^ The strength of the moral argument here happily rein- forces the weakness of the material ; — an application of the Golden Rule which might at least be possible for a Christ- endom which looks down on tnis Confucian form of it as merely negative and imperfect. ' February, 1840. ' Portfolio Chinemis, a collection of Chinese State Papers (Macao, 1840). 138 ELEMZXTS. Chinese political economy is the result of a long devel- . opment of simple tastes and habits among a vast pUdty of population. " Foreign commerce," it says, " car- ^mS^ ries off our products, and makes them dearer ; ano we have no need of "European silver. The more chariots for the rich, the more people who go afoot ; the more dainties on their tables, the more people who have nothing to eat" ^ The idealism of Plato and the industrial- ism of Yao and Shun are agreed in a jealousy of foreign intercourse, arising from fear of the corruptions of trade. In the earlier stages of the nation's growth simple tastes and fixed routines had been the path of prosperity, and the fruits of these methods were not lightly to be exposed to bold manipulation by strangers of questionable virtue and ver)- manifest irreverence for age and forms. So the court appointed that a body of native merchants should take charge of foreign commercial relations, with direct resp»on- sibility to itself ; hoping in this wa}- to avoid the dreaded irruption of foreign inventions, manners, and vices. The recent isolation of the Chinese and their ignorance M.i3iai of our civilization forbid cordial intercourse. This Scu^Ke io^orance is reciprocal. The European comes in and Euro- dircct coutact with servants mostly, and the lan- ^'^^^ guage is an insuperable barrier. \Mien Macartney's embassy went out, in 1792, no man capable of serving as interpreter could be found in Great Britain. In 1 856 prob- ably not fifty Chinese in the Five Ports were able to read and write English.^ A total inability of the whole staff of custom-house officials to comprehend European habits or speech was at last remedied by the appointment of foreign- ers to this function in all the ports.^ Unwillingness on the one side to submit to Chinese decisions in dealing with the frequent brawls between sailors and natives, the tradi- 1 Girarf, II. 439. ' Meadows, Jfaiet, 6^^ XVII. 3 Medhnrst, Poreiffner in Par Caihay^ p. 56. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 39 tional rule on the other of interpreting every concession as a tribute, — and treachery developed through mutual ignor- ance and suspicion, — are all natural incidents of the anom- alous situation in which an ancient, proud, and shrewd people are confronted by new-comers from a remote and utterly strange civilization, little recking of means in the pursuit of their ends. Amidst frequent wrongs perpe- trated on both sides in the trading ports, many instances of real justice by native officials are on record ; together with the admission that " Europeans resident there have found their property as secure, in general, as in any other country in the world." ^ On the whole, the facts are probably here much as they would be elsewhere. China is a civilized empire, resting on its laws and manners ; and its relations with visitors doubtless depend to a great extent on their behavior, being regulated by social necessities beyond any special dispo- sition of the government or the people. The custom of conducting business through the medium of a comprador, or commission-agent, has led to an impression that nothing like a system of commercial rules exists in China. But more careful study reveals well understood principles of trade, — the obligation to provide goods precisely according to the sample ; the necessity of earnest-money to the va- lidity of a bargain ; the joint responsibility of broker and merchant ; the binding nature of a verbal guarantee.^ The Chinese make a distinction between the Russians and other foreigners, perhaps from a sense of nearer affinities in race.^ All important questions are settled ; and the Muscovite advance is undisturbed along the lev- els of Central Asia, — threatening collisions, not with China, but with England, who is moving on the opposite line. Against other States there are special grounds of grievance. • Davis, II. 9 Letter of Jannaiy 30 (C«»i. Refos^^l. 353). See also Blade's C*wa; Amer.EeUc- tic, I. 305, note on Opiom War; Nenmann's Ost Asiatiscie GexUcUe, p. 10; CH mse Repos^ VI. 341. - Jannaiy 36, 1S37; Ckimse Refos^ May, 1842. » Williams IT. 385, 386. • Davis, III. aog. » HoiadK, p. loi. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 43 Government, in 1837, the presence of armed vessels to pro- tect it.^ The warehousing ships, kept at anchor during the whole period from 1821 onwards, — a constant refuge "for absconders," and for the " fast crabs " that plied between the native dealer and the foreign supply, — were denounced by the Council of State as the main support and defence of the traffic.^ The cultivation of the poppy is prohibited by edicts, incessantly renewed, though greatly evaded.^ Prince Kung more than once declared that, if opium and Christian missions were withdrawn, there was no concession which the Government of China was not prepared to make in furtherance of legitimate commerce.* " This traffic taken away," said Sir R. Alcock, " no locus would be left for the continuance of troubles." ^ But the high-water mark of English official morality was advice to have the importation legalized. The court was memorialized by a very able native paper to this effect, and Elliot wrote Palm- erston that he could not but think the hoped-for legalization would afford his Majesty's government great satisfaction. But petitions to the contrary poured in from every province, and the measure failed. Historical justice demands a stronger statement. Whatever reasons may be alleged for the terrible lesson in British military power that followed, — such as treacheries, insults, cruelty to shipwrecked sailors, official durance. Hong monopoly,^ all of which are at most secondary, — one fact stands as overwhelming proof that the war was waged for the right to violate native law in the intei^est of traders in opium. The treaty extorted from China in 1842 exacted full compensation for the twenty thousand chests of smuggled opium, justly delivered smug- up on compulsion to the Chinese commissioner at ^^^^ Canton. This compulsion was described by Elliot exacted. ' February 3, 1837. ' July 14. ' Peking Gazette, 1874. * Letters to the Parliament Commission. " Ibid. * Pottinger's Declaration of Reasons for the War, Chinese Re^os., 1842, p. 511. 144 ELEMENTS. as forcible spoliation, because efEected by his personal duress ; although it was employed to put down " a trade which every friend of humanity must deplore." ^ Upon the ground that England was fighting the battle of international rights and duties, such indemnification for failure in the attempt to violate them was a self-contradiction. It is equally certain that, but for the determination to push this shameful violation, the troubles might have been settled. Davis wrote Lord Palmerston, in 1835, that "the desire of the Chinese Government to ameliorate the condition of British traders at Canton is no less sincere than that of England," — quoting an imperial edict to the effect that the extortions of native merchants may have occasioned the ill-feeling, and that such proceedings must be severely pun- ished. Elliot, whose efforts for justice were unwearied, was permitted to go up to Canton as soon as the peculiarity of his official position was comprehended by the local authori- ties. He had the good sense to admit that they had acted in entire conformity to the laws of the land in firmly resist- ing Lord Napier's demands for direct communication with the higher officials.^ As early as 1837 he had pointed out the real source of danger ; and the probability that hun- dreds of armed and lawless men would, within less than a year, be carrying on this illicit traffic " in the heart of our regular commerce " was urged, in his note to Palmers- ton of the date of January 2, 1839. His humane and con- ciliatory policy was ridiculed, and the vehement resentment of the envoy, who utterly forgot that he was in the waters of a sovereign State, made peaceful settlement impossible. The British defence of the indemnity clause rests on the .j^^ plea that it was an outrage for the Chinese Govem- British ment to compel the surrender of goods, in which defence, g^jj-jgjj subjects had been tempted to invest by its * Letter of April 6, 1839. • Correspondence with Ki-shen {Chinese Repos.^ November, 1843). EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 145 own long-continued connivance at their importation, con- trary to its own laws. But such a plea does not justify interference by a civilized State for the benefit of smug- glers. Two things seem plain : first, the duty of a Gov- ernment to refuse to stand sponsor for any violation of the import laws of other States on the part of its own subjects, and to warn them that they will not be defended in such proceedings ; and second, the full right of a Government to enter at once, at any moment, on the thorough execution of its own import laws, without regard to previous neglect or failure. By both these plain rules the claim of indem- nity is condemned ; and his assuming responsibility for the payment of the confiscated values was the one point in which the commissioner seems to have transcended his rights. Doubtless the native police were venal ; but that connivance of the constable is to alter the nature of a tres- pass, is a species of equity of which we may well desire as little extension as possible. We may add that, however ill-executed the laws, a very large proportion of the Chinese people are wholly opposed to the manufacture or importa- tion of opium, — the great success of the Tai-pings, who forbade it, being an illustration of the fact.^ That the Government has sometimes appeared to encourage its home-growth is probably explicable as an attempt to make the best of an enforced evil, and to keep the profits at least from the hands of the stranger. The plan adopted by the authorities, of compelling the delivery of the contraband goods by imprisonment of Brit- ish officers and merchants, was not such as would have been chosen by a European government ; but it has as much to recommend it as an administration of affairs which had left not a single armed ship to protect the British mer- chant from such aggressions, if aggressions they were. The " British and Foreign Review," after setting up the ^ MeadowS) Chinese Rebellion^ p. 489. 10 146 ELEMENTS. plea just discussed, closed its argument against China by proposing to invade that country on account of the seizure of the opium ; to summon the rebel societies, and dethrone the Government without delay ! The Chinese argument stands on three charges : ( i) the persistent determination of the English to hold direct intercourse with the viceroy of Kwan-tung, contrary to law, ^, ^,. but in accordance with the express command of The Chi- neseargu- Lord Palmcrston from the outset, — and the violent '"™'' official movement up the river; (2) their encour- agement of the trade by storeships off the coast ; and (3) their forcing the Hong merchants into a false position and unjust responsibilities. To these must be added their pro- tection of native criminals against penalties incurred from the Chinese Government, and their resentment at the inflic- tion of such penalties, as an insult to British dignity. Ac- cording to Elliot, in 1837, the court had formally yielded its principle that officers should not reside in the empire ; the right to send sealed communications to the governor was conceded ; mistakes involving derogation were recti- fied ; and a disposition was manifested " to devolve on me in my official capacity the adjustment of all disputes, even between Chinese and my own countrymen." ^ It is indeed difficult to imagine what grounds the Chi- Reflections "^^^ could have had for maltreating a power from whose trade, apart from opium, they had at least some profit to expect : while the English envoys, on the other hand, burdened with the protection of interests admitted to be not illegal only, but to the last degree de- structive, could not possibly avoid occasioning just offence. The cannon that afterwards poured slaughter and the des- peration of suicide through the astonished militia of Cha-pu and Chin-kiang-fu, and the horrible excesses which attended the sacking of these towns, were doubtless messengers of ' Letter to Palmerston, Dec. 4, 1837. exterStal relations. 147 knowledge as well as power; but the responsibility of choosing precisely such heralds of civilization must rest on those whose " knowledge " does not prevent them from en- forcing vices that involve the selection. The authors of this state of things were the British East India Company, the great opium dealers of the Eastern seas. Their Indian politicians were im- j^^j^ ^^' pressed with the importance of " bringing this mag- company's nificent country within the pale of the European ^^^^ " family," and their efforts to that end, by trafific in such products as afforded themselves the highest profit, were untiring. " Sometimes they frowned, sometimes flat- tered : they made gifts of money and wines to the manda- rins, and put heavy cannon in their factory to bring the provincial authorities to terms in granting privileges." ^ " The Directors," such their defence, " would gladly have put an end to the consumption of opium if they could, in compassion to mankind, so repugnant to their feelings was the trade ; but they cannot do this : and as opium will be grown somewhere, and largely consjimed, they can only do as they do." ^ How alike, the world over, are the trans- actions of conscience with gain ! How similar their con- sequences also ! The British wanted Hong-kong, and they took it by force of arms. Amoy followed, Ning-po, Chu-san, Nan- Treaty oi king. Four large cities were burned or sacked, '^'*''- and large stores of private treasures confiscated as booty. The Chinese fought with heroism, and learned the art of war in impotent struggles to defend their homes. The treaties of 1842-45 opened five new ports to foreign trade, with a consulate in each ; ceded Hong-kong island to Eng- land ; and gave certain personal rights of internal travel and lease-holding in treaty ports : all which changes are manifestly predestined in modern civilization as effectuated 1 Chinese Repository, March, 1842. ^ Williams, II. 496. 148 ELEMENT^. by the right of the stronger. But to these provisions is added that master proof of the animus of the war, — six mil- lions of indemnity for losses of British smugglers, which the necessities of civilization did not predestine, but the barbarism of trade. Since 1842, the annual importation of opium has averaged seventy thousand chests. To the weak was left their one resort. The Chinese committed the fresh crime of paying off the indemnity by heavy charges of storage on teas, assessed by the Hong merchants, and by them handed over to the Government. The war of 1856 was based on the seizure of a native smug- gling vessel by the Chinese authorities. Yeh surrendered the crew on demand of the British officials, but claimed in return that foreigners should not sell registers to native vessels. In 1856 Lord Elgin and the American ambassa- dor insisted on the opium trade,^ and it was legalized at Fu-chau, a British port. The bombardment of Canton, on account of the opposition of the town-council to the open- ing of trade, was followed by the advance of France and ^England to Tien-tsin, where the second treaty (1858) was dictated, toleration of the opium trade enforced, and the drug admitted with a duty. Fresh fruits of civilized pre- Treaty of destination : four ports on the Yang-tse, a diplo- Tien-tsin. matic mission to Pe-king, free travel and toleration of Christ, the epithet "barbarian" to be suppressed, and indemnity paid to the allies ! The attempt to force a passage to Pe-king, in order to ratify this treaty, contrary to the arrangements of the court, was met by a resistance which proved how rapidly the Chinese were learning warfare from their foreign teach- ers. The French protested aigainst the proceeding, judging it at least premature. Respectable journals in England denounced it. But heathen "treachery" was the ready answer to all rebukes.^ ^ De Mas, II. 135. ^ St. Denys's documents in La Chine devani P Europe, EXTERNAL RELATIONS. I49 The Chinese on their part had their barbarism. It is their custom to predestine the death of unsuccess- ful officials ; and, in this case, the illustrious Key- dviiUa- ing was the victim. It is also Chinese to commit *'°"^' great cruelties when under the influence of panic. An outrage of peculiar atrocity, perpetrated on agents of the allies by a bitter enemy of concession, but without sym- pathy from the people, was punished in a manner which showed that civilized revenge can be more severe than heathen terror. Pe-king was invested (i860) ; the magnifi- cent Summer Palace (or " Hundred Palaces ") sacked ; the hoarded treasure of a line of kings destroyed or scattered ; while Kung was taught his inferiority to the English offi- cial, and Tien-tsin opened to Europe and the opium trade. Doubtless the subsequent moderation of the allies in spar- ing Pe-king and treating the people with humanity may have helped to remove the dislike to Europeans, besides giving political strength to the party of Prince Kung, who were inclined to a liberal foreign policy, — an advantage enhanced by the admission of foreign ministers to direct ^ intercourse with the Government. The co-operation of Western powers, since i860, in urging better provincial ad- ministration, as well as in aiding the rulers to suppress the Tai-ping rebellion, has had the further effect, for a time at least, of consolidating the unity of the empire, — a point of the first importance. Whether this result is too dearly purchased, remains to be seen. In one respect, certainly, the fears of China are con- firmed. A new era comes pregnant with change c^^jj;. for a time-hallowed system, under which is com- anityand prehended the whole national organism, moral, in- tellectual, social, and physical. The Aryan ideal of prog- ress triumphs, and its work of creation through destruc- tion begins. Inflowing Christendom is thus far known chiefly as the bringer of a gift most conspicuous and most 1 50 ELEitEXTS. terrible. Less than a century ago opium was used only as a medicine in China. To-day it enters through the breaches opened by Christian cannon, by the six thousand tons a year,^ at a total profit to Christian merchants that has al- ready reached seventy millions sterling. In the ears of these sleepers England thunders, "Awake, thou slug- gard ! " while with her right hand she reaches to their lips the stupefying drug. But the heart and sense of England made protest Two hundred and thirty-five merchants and manufactu- Protests _ -' in Erg- rers admonished Peel of the great harm the crime "^"^ would do to English commerce. Gladstone called the war of 1856 a defence of smuggling. Lawrence advised a heavy duty on the export from India. The powerful logic of the London Times assailed the arrogant business pretensions by which the outrage on a foreign civilization was upheld.^ An enlightened statesman and official. Sir R. Alcock, has urged the sincerity of the Chinese Govern- ment and the justice of many of its demands. Is it strange that fresh outrages in China should prove Later that hostility is not yet effaced, when we consider ^=^ how utterly such remonstrances have failed to pro- duce a change of policy ? The Anti-Opium Society, styled by an earnest writer " the last uncertain flicker of national conscience on the subject of this great wrong," ^ has even proposed free trade in opium. The same writer presents more recent facts with much force. The oflicial correspon- dence on this question for the last ten years is " free from any taint of moral considerations." Government has even instituted inquiries into the " means of extending opium culture in the north-western provinces." An increase in the duty, consented to by Alcock in 1869, caused great dissatisfaction to the Indian Government, and was aban- > N. Chhta Herald. = ,&,l • Mr. E. Fry, in Ctmuimparary Revieao, for February, A]ft, EXTERNAL RELATIONS. I5I doned. Ample proofs are given that China is ready to suppress the home growth, if England will put an end to the trade with India ; and that, this obstacle being removed, the country would be freely opened to commerce and to progress. China's grievance from Spain and Portugal is the " Cooly Trade." The term is inexact ; " coolies " being jj .j,^^ Hindu porters of low caste, while the Chinese emi- Cooiy grant on labor-contract, however poor, is untainted by the caste system. But the Cuban trade in Chinese labor, which began in 1 860, was an unmitigated slave-trade. Treachery, intimidation, and brutal force suppHed the hu- man material. The centre of this traffic, as of all other evil-dealing with China, was Macao ; to whose barracoons the clan-fights and man^hunts aided by native officials, and the misery of the lowest classes, afforded abundant supplies. Besides involuntary, there were other, victims ostensibly voluntary.^ Mr. Julius Palmer^ stated that he had seen copies of a hundred depositions by men taken from differ- ent ships, who alleged that they were "got on board by seizure, by promise of fabulous wages to do a day's work, by narcotic cakes, and by the power of woman." The con- tracts were such as no one who comprehended their mean- ing could possibly sign ; bartering away every right without one security. Many were " forced to affix their names by torture or starvation." This kidnapping was followed by such treatment aboard ship as well deserved to be called the " Horrors of the Middle Passage," — often resulting in the death of half the number, as well as in the dreadful self-immolation of firing their prisons in mid-ocean.^ Fi- nally, the condition of the victim on Cuban plantations, or * China Review^ vol. n., No. 3, and Reply in No. 4; in whicli the main facts arc admitted, though the Portuguese Government is strongly exculpated. ^ Lecture in Boston, Dec. r4, 1870. s China Review^ 1873. 152 ELEMENTS. in the guano beds of Peru, was worse than that of veritable slaves would have been, since the employers had not a life- interest in the laborer. In less than two years a hundred thousand Chinese were imported into Cuba alone. Of the same number taken to Peru within twenty years, less than ten thousand were living at the end of that time.^ They were driven by the whips of overseers to bring to the shutes of the Chincha islands so many tons of guano a day, to be shipped for English and American ports.^ The bar- barities of the trade caused the importation of labor to be regulated by the Peruvian Government in 1856, and a new treaty (1876) makes provision for the rights of the laborer. But in Cuba it has continued in the old form, under British and American flags. The Chinese Govern- ment, which had prohibited the trafiSc, entered into con- vention with the French and the English to suppress it, in i860 and 1866; and the United States forbade it in 1862. The convention of 1866 estabUshed provisions for the protection of the emigrant, to be inserted in the con- tract ; to which a voluntary assent was to be given in pres- ence of a Chinese official, while the agents were to be respectable persons Hcensed by the Chinese authorities ; and the list was finally to be inspected by the foreign con- sul. But even these provisions are criticised^ as inade- quate to protect the ignorant against cunning and greedy speculators; to thwart the keen scent of native man- hunters, of whom there are at least thirty thousand ; * or to hold agents to due responsibility. Protests have not been wanting from the respectable classes in Chinese ports against this exploitation of the Protests ignorant and needy by native- and foreign mis- «g^i°St ^ T-> T . ., it. creants. Dr. Legge, a competent witness, ascribes ' Cooper's Letter to Garrison, i6th, zd mo. 1870. 2 Weekly TrihuTie for June 30, 1855. 8 China Review, Sept. and Oct., 1872. * Ibid., September and October, 1873.' EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 153 the offence against strangers, in part, to this cause ; and explains the greater cordiality of Japan by the fact that in matters of this kind we have given her less " reason to fear and hate us." ^ Against Americans the only grievance of China is the treatment of her free emigrants to our Pacific m. iveat- Coast. The new gold regions, opened here in the "™' "' ° o ' i emigrants nineteenth century, conquered the strong local at- toCaU- tachments of the Chinese, as the New World had ^°™^' roused the Spaniard to a spirit of adventure in the six- teenth. El Dorado was now the western, as it had been the eastern, shore of the continent ; and the swift steamers brought more yellow Mongolians across the Pacific than the heavy-sailing galleons had borne of dark-browed Cas- tilians over the Atlantic. Both races were drawn by the sheen of gold, which knows no difference of race ; but the hope of the one was in conquest, that of the other in hon- est toil. The Spaniards represented an age that was pass- ing away, the Chinese one that was opening. The one was a barbarizing, the other a civilizing, force. Beginning with three hundred in 1849, the number of Calif ornian Chinese had risen in 1856 to forty thousand men and three thousand women, and in 1869 to ninety thousand persons, — more than a fifth of whom returned. At present their numbers are about one hundred and twenty thousand. An organ- ized importation of labor, through agents, appears to have been in the main honorably conducted, on free and fair contract ; not, as was charged, by the sale of families on security, — a practice which would be regarded as criminal in Chinese cities just as in our own. These immigrants smuggled no baneful drug; they hurled no cannon-balls at the great Republic ; stirred no • Ckina Review, November and December, 1872. 1 54 ELEMENTS. Strife for putting down the idolatries of Christendom ; Indus- made no attempt to proselyte in the names of *^* . Kung-futze and Fo. They brought what was block in most needed for the development of a new and free '*°'^"'^' comm'unity, and willing hands to apply it as their employers should prescribe.^ But they were imported by invoice, on demand, and their want of individuality was like an influx of live machinery. Their strange aspect and speech, their habit of herding, and their share of the low morals which are so apt to accompany the first stages of immigration, naturally made them objects of suspicion. Perhaps many of the better class of citizens dreaded fresh experiences, like those which came of the first rush of native lawlessness to the land of gold. Such elements of the situation may help to extenuate the subsequent treat- ment of the strangers. But other motives were more po- tent. These people had few wants, and could afEord to work at low rates. They were " heathen," who knew nothing of " Bible revelation," and could not appreciate the " offices of Christ." They invited persecution by their weakness, as exiles in a civilization utterly unlike their own. For these and similar reasons, their very virtues seemed to rouse a spirit against them in the free State of California, strikingly similar to that of the Slave Power towards its victims. Contempt of the rights of weaker races is an unlovely national trait which we have scarcely begun to control. Many of the colonists of the Pacific States sprung from the bosom of slavery, or else of that moral paralysis of the North which was its consequence, and whose in- stinct it was to sacrifice humanity to the interests of traffic. The cry of danger to American labor was raised, in face of the American claim to have superseded all oppressive sys- tems of the Old World by free competition for the rewards " Hubner's RamlU Round lit World, p. 156. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. ISS of honest toil. It seemed easier to put down Chinese cheap labor by '•'hoodlum " legislation and brute force than Barbari- to trust America to the spirit of hospitality and the "^^ '"^ law of justice. The lowest vagabond learned to treat these guests of Industry as if they were horse-thieves or mad dogs ; and the very boys were set upon them by the cry that these " barbarians " were stealing their chances of employment. They proved the extent to which a repub lie can assume the nature of a despotism. They had come from China to America to learn the possibilities of cruelty in government. They were burdened with legalized wrongs; paid license taxes for the right to work abandoned mines, and a special police-tax, pronounced illegal by the judiciary ; their testimony against whites was refused ; they were out- lawed by the courts, as incapable of respecting the {Chris- tian, not the Chinese) oath. They were free game for rogues and pretended officials. They were stoned, beaten, worried by dogs, mobbed, and murdered with impunity. Secret societies were formed to suppress them. Their employers were persecuted ; mills, breweries, hop-kilns, fruit-stores, were destroyed to punish the courage that withstood these outrages on free labor. Even churches were torn down because opened on Sundays to Chinese pupils. Unquestionably the mass of this emigration was of the lower class. It was almost wholly from Canton, or The tes- rather from the British port of Hong-kong, ship- """"y- raent to our coast being a result of the opium war of 1844.^ Mostly adventurers, seeking to better their fortunes and return, the laborers brought with them neither wives nor children. A foreign world offers no inducement to a Chi- nese married woman. But there was foreign demand for the sex in less worthy capacities, and a corresponding class • Testimony of Rev. O. Gibson before a committee of the State Senate, in 1876; also, Letter of Dr. Williams to same. 156 ELEMENTS. of speculators in China was ready for the opportunity. These men bought or stole women of the lowest class at home for prostitution in San Francisco ; and the disease and demoralization spread thereby was, as usual, ascribed to this imported supply rather than to the vicious tastes which beckoned over and fed a degradation from abroad, because the native sort was not sufficiently bestial ! The Senate testimony of 1876 presents the spectacle of an elaborate effo'rt to fix upon the Chinese, as a whole, the odium of such degradation in every form as called for instant suppression of this foreign element by the State ; while the evidence shows that the feeders of Chinese gamb- ling arid prostitution were, to a large extent, native Ameri- can ; that the laws were not executed ; that the police took bribes to cover the offenders ; that the Chinese com- panies had no interest in these vices, and could not prevent them. It was even admitted that the first serious effort to suppress the nuisances had been so successful that the gambling dens were closed, and the importation of lewd women had ceased.'' On the one hand, officials reported all Chinese to be liars and law-breakers ; while it was gener- ally confessed that the difference of language and customs formed an impassable barrier to mutual understanding, and to the application of any thing like justice in their case.^ They are described as living under a reign of terror ; yet the statistics of crime did not bear out the statement, the proportion of Chinese in the State Prison being but little above the ratio of their numbers to those of the population as a whole.^ Whatever vicious elements exist in the Chinese quarters of our coast cities can certainly be eliminated by righteous laws, applied to the importation and distribution of the im- migrants, and executed in good earnest. Political rights ' Testimony of G H. Gray, Surveyor of Customs; of McKenzie, Gibson, Bovee, &c. ' Testimony of Ellis, Chief of Police. = Report, p. 173. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 157 should depend for this class, as for all classes of our popu- lation, on the ability to read and write our language, — a rule which will doubtless be furthered by the aid of the better informed among them, while it should form an important part in the educational system of the State. - Equally in- dispensable are trained interpreters. The churches will make themselves more useful in such kinds of instruction than in the vain attempt to proselyte for Christian doctrine in this field. Some of the immigrants are cultivated men, and good public speakers. Mr. A. D. Richardson wrote, in 1869, that as male servants the Chinese are superior in morals to any other race. No Chinese beggars were seen in the streets, and the first of the race unable to read his own language had yet to make his appearance in Califor- nia.^ Dr. Williams says the emigrants are superior to the average Chinese in enterprise, education, and skill.^ Indus- trial reports prove them to be all employed ; and, if sup- planting white labor, it must be by greater fidelity, as well as frugality. If their work is merely mechanical, its value will not, in the long run, compete with labor that is more skilled. As for its general effect, at present, many intelli- gent witnesses believed that there were more white per- sons employed in California than there would be without them.^ Spite of persecution they have continued to arrive, win- nowed in by Western breezes through the Golden Gate. A patient race, inured to hard lot, they have ^1^°' ' done the work that waited for them and needed them ; pjows Ws by all accounts, the most efficient and least trouble- ^^ork. some laborers on the Pacific shores. Eight thousand strong, they opened the mountain-passes for the great rail- way that makes the continent a political unit. They proved the most orderly sailors on our Pacific steamers.^ They » Atlantic Monthly, Dec, i86q. ' Letter to the Committee, s Testimony of Gibson, Brooks, &c. ' Hubner, p. i86 158 ELEMENTS. were invincible because they met wants stronger than human will, and were an indispensable element in the devel- opment of a contineftt. They were not enriched by crMits mobiliers, but their toil made all after-times their debtor. They were ready for all functions, independent or menial ; did the laundry work and the gardening, and gleaned after the whites in the gold-fields. They taught how to organize mutual-aid. Six great companies, under elective officers of high character, watch over all their members, aid them in difficulty, find them occupation, and send home the dead. As elsewhere, from day-laborers they have become capital- ists, advance all forms of enterprise, and serve all indus- trial uses.^ Their immigration is a national blessing, not only as productive force, but as stimulant to the morals of industry. Their cheap labor is a test of our theoretic and practical liberty ; their inaptness for Christianization our school of religious universality. Many voices have been raised against the barbarous race-prejudice under which they have suffered ; advocating their admission, under proper provisions, to that- equality in civil and political rights which our republican theory dictates, and every consideration of wise policy demands.^ A native Protective Association was formed to screen them from outrage, and counteract the cruelties of the laws. Not less ably have they argued their own cause. Their " Remonstrance," written by a young Chinese mer- chant, is one of the most impressive pleas against cruel and dishonest legislation upon record.^ The pubHcation of " The Oriental," edited in part by a Chinese, and with the help of Chinese associated companies, did good service in repeahng the acts passed in 1854 for reducing this unoffend ipg race to peonage, or expelling them from the soil.* * Pumpelly, p. 252. 2 Atlantic Monthly, Dec, 1S69. Also Mr. H. C. Bennett's excellent Address at Sat Francisco in 1870; and Pumpelly, p. 265. ' It will be found in full in Dr. Speei's work on China. * Speer, p. 660. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 59 The dread of "cheap labor" is gratuitous. For many- reasons the Chinese are not Hkely to come in ^ -' Fear of swarms. They do not, as a people, love to emi- "cheap grate ; few women have crossed the ocean, and '*''"■" these not of the better class ; no people feel such moral pressure to return and be buried with their fathers. The increase of immigrants is slow ; not more than twice, as many come yearly as came twenty years since. " Under good systems of mining and railroads, Chinese laborers would all be wanted at home." ^ They will come to our Western shores as fast as they are needed, and no faster. They in fact increase the amount of native white labor ; the productive result immensely exceeds the value of earn- ings carried home by those who return. As for cheap wages, their natural shrewdness will not overlook financial opportunity, and their special aptitudes will command special value in a free market. Labor combinations to exclude individuals or classes from the fair competition which all alike demand afford a poor justification for the claim of the Saxon to superior culture, and for the right he assumes to supersede an industrial civilization like that of China even on her own soil. What can be their effect on the Chinese but to add new grounds to their distrust of a " barbarian " Christendom } Notwithstanding these causes of offence, there has been an openness to foreign art, science, and policy, which confutes the old theories of voluntary isola- of Chinese tion. The minister Wen-siang said to Mr. Burlin- 'ofo™g" . {. . teaching. game on occasion of a presentation of pictures from Washington : " Our maxim is to inquire in every thing for the best method, and to adopt it for our own, wherever it originates." It was natural to import the sugai'Cane, spices, and fragrant woods from India and the * Minister Seward, in Public Documents on Foreign Relations, 1876. l6o ELEMENTS. isles ; to accept improvements in glass and bronze work ; to admire Swiss watch-making ; to build steamers and mer- chant-ships, as well as armed craft for coast service, on European models ; and to skip the stages in gun-making In com- between the old arquebus and the modern per- merce, war cussiou-lock. A bolder step was to put their armies *° ""'■ into the hands of British and American officers for the suppression of the Tai-pings. They repudiated the proceedings of a British agent for the purchase of war-ships, as being in conflict with their laws ; yet have not hesitated to charter foreign vessels, and to invest in steam navigation of the Yang-tze on a large scale. The great avenues to the heart of the empire are thrown open to these revolutionary heralds. Steamboats of large tonnage are owned in China.^ In 1872, there were eigh- teen United States steamers on that -river, running six hundred miles inland,^ and an Oregon line was being built. The American river and coast tonnage is already put at thirty thousand tons. Mr. Burlingame introduced the terrible telegraph ; and, though the Government cancelled its agreement with one company, there is a school of tele- graphy, and soon the native merchant will consult the wire for market values, and the delicate Mongolian hand touch it in " Frisco " without fear. A magnetic observatory sends its reports from Shang-hai. Prince Kung is at the head of the administration. The Government has adopted a con- sular system. Emigration is free. The foreign customs- office is directed by foreign residents of good culture, under an inspector-general of remarkable administrative faculty. So ardently have the new commercial opportu- nities been seized, that the balance of trade is on the native side, and the competitive energy of the people has quite overturned the business monopolies of the past. The first Chinese railroad (1876) is but fifty years behind * Knox. * Brooks, p. 138. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. l6l the first English one, and is engineered by the son of one of the first movers in applying steam to travel. The Japanese already go by rail from Yedo to Yokohama. Nor can it be long before the electric stream will bind to- gether all Eastern Asia, and the iron horse push his new mysteries through the broken spells of Fung-shui and the ravaged sanctities of ancestral graves. In August, 1872, the China mail announced the first number of a newspaper issued under native direction, on a progressive and anti-obstructive basis. The appreciation of Western therapeutic science by the Chinese, ever since Dr. Parker opened his noble ophthalmic hospital at Canton in 1835, forms by far the most interest- ing chapter in the history of European relations with the Empire. The doors of Drs. Parker, Lockhart, and Hobson were crowded by thousands of patients of all classes, whose gratitude was most earnest and enduring.^ Works of medical and anatomical science were eagerly studied by native youths. In twenty years, more than fifty thousand patients had been entered on the records of the Canton hospital. Other similar institutions were planted with like success. The heroic humanity of the English and American surgeons, who shrank from no personal peril, was respected by all parties throughout the barbarous conflicts of Triads, Tai-pings, and Imperialists for the possession of Shang-hai, in 1853-54.^ The visit of Pin-tchuen to Europe resulted in Shang- hai College, with its European staff. An English j^^,^,^^^.^. school was founded in 1862, and raised to the rank of a college in 1866, for advanced native pupils.^ ■ Lockhart's Medical Missionary in China (London, 1861); especially the Memorial of Thanks presented Dr. L. by more than fifty native merchants and gentlemen, p. 283. " Lockhart ; also Williams, II. 346-351 ; Brine, p. 59 i Martin, II. 493 ; Nevius, p. 341 ; Dr. Parker's Reports in Chin. Repos., 1841-1843. For Chinese tributes to the works of Dr. Dudgeon, see Chitia Review, May and June, 1875. ' Chinese Recorder, June, 1871. II l62 ELEMENTS. The Pe-king University, founded by Kung in 1867, for completing native education by studies in foreign lan- guages, after some opposition and much discouragement was revived by the arrival of Dr. Martin, its president, from America (1869), who was cheered by the unexpected cordiality of the mandarins, and has written favorably of its prospects.^ His translation of Wheaton's International Law has been adopted as a classic by a commission ap- pointed by the Prince. A hundred and twenty Chinese students are now (1876) preparing in America for func- tions in the military and foreign service of the Empire, and large numbers are in the literary institutions of Europe. The desire of the Government to preserve cordial re- lations with Western powers has been shown by vari- ous acts that would once have seemed impossible. The Tien-tsin massacre, caused by popular suspicion not un- like the delusions of mediaeval Christendom about the Jews, or the later witchcraft mania, was atoned for to the full extent of its power by execution of twenty-one persons, banishment of twenty-five, and an indemnity of 3,500,000 francs, for losses by fire, and for the families of the dead.2 " In other countries," says Dr. Williams, perti- nently, " this would be considered reparation ; but it is much the case that, in China, nothing the people or government can do is regarded by the majority of foreigners as right." ^ Mr. Seward's reception by the court was most cordial ; yet he found that the Shang-hai people "talk of the Burlingame treaty only to declare the utter absurdity of expecting any good thing to come out of China except through blockade and bombardment."* The dissatisfac- tion thus prevailing at Shang-hai is a natural result of the new aspect of trade, involving smaller individual gains and greater freedom of competition than before China ^ Am. Or. Soc, May, 1870. « yourmU OfficUlde Paris, Nov. 25, 1871. ' Am. Or. Soc, May, 1871. • Seward, pp. 114, 160, 184, 185, 216, 217. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 63 was opened to the spirit of the age,— a change in effect- ing which the natives themselves have been a very impor- tant element.1 A minister has now been appointed to the United States ; and China is on purely international grounds. All this recognition of the outside world may seem tame, compared with the brilHant expansion of progres- sive Japan within these few years ; but it may be all the surer for its moderation, so fully in harmony with the genius of the people, and for the natural show of reluc- tance with which official China accepts the ominous rails and wires of a new order of things. Let us do them the justice to remember that the instinct which prompts them to resist the sudden transfer- ence of Occidental consolidation and its forces of ^'^''""■of ... Chinese in machinery into a vast civilization, which has been resisting developing itself from the oldest times by methods ^^1 precisely opposite, is one of wise foresight and proper self-defence. The issue of such forced discontinu- ity and reconstruction de novo would be fearfully destruct- ive ; and no language can express the dismay of intelligent Chinese at the prospect. Our own scientific principle of evolution should teach us to respect the jealous conserva- tism of a system that has grown so slowly and normally as this. It is a sign of wisdom in the Japanese that they are already substituting home-education of their young men for training in the ill-related schools of the West. And it surely becomes us not to force too eagerly a for- eign policy which it requires all the statesmanship China can muster to conduct to fortunate issues against race pre- judices, and their long experience of the selfish motives and conduct of European traders.^ Let us fully recognize 1 Hiibner's Ramble^ &c.. p. 469 ; also Western Review, Oct., j868. ' For an admirable instance of full understanding of these motives, and a liberal policy ot Intercourse, see the Secret Memorial of Tsen-kwo-fan, Governor of the Two Kwang, Westminster Review iryc Oct., 1868. 164 ELEMENTS. the truth, so well stated by the " Westminster Review," as early as 1 868, that " China has already reached, so far as foreign relations go, a normal condition of peace and pro- gressive concession, and inaugurated a state of affairs in which vindictiveness and cruelty are buried, and good faith and forbearance are prominent." And we cordially en- dorse the statement of one of the latest writers on the Far East, that no Western nation has shown itself capable of so extensive a change of policy in the same number of years as China. The exclusiveness of Japan, continued for two and a half centuries, from causes similar to those which rrfom.^ determined the policy of China, was forcibly broken up by Commodore Perry and Consul Harris, after the British had captured Tien-tsin. In 1857, the Sio-goun, resisting a strong conservative party, made treaty with America and England. The new and free relations with Western powers were originally rather matters of necessity than desire ; the leaders of the revolution being at first apparently opposed to foreigners, but finding themselves obliged, from the dissolution of ideas they were produc- ing, to seek outward means of reinforcement, and not less moved by strong desire to participate in the profits of foreign trade.^ The recent revolution has abolished the right of the nobles to levy taxes or issue money. The currency is made uniform ; railroads, telegraphs, and mails are in operation ; a university for advanced culture employs nearly fifty teachers ; hundreds of students have been sent to Western schools ; and European science is applied to the army and navy, and to opening the resources of the country. The heir to the throne put on a par with other boys at school ; court officials in dress coats of marvellous cut ; the Mikado suddenly exposed to public view ; the daimios self-suppressed ; the long steps taken towards uni • Mossman's New Japan. EXTERNAL RELATIONS. 1 65 versal education, — form a picture of radical change of which no Asiatic people was ever deemed capable. Here is ap- parently a total absence of prejudices. Kido, leader of a clan, said that three years would be sufficient to remove hereditary rights and change the habits of the people. This is a step beyond the Confucian estimate of the trans- forming capacity of good morals. It remains to be seen whether an Eastern civilization can be unmade and remade by edict, as it were in the turn of a hand. In order to appreciate the resources of the race whose leading characteristics have now been described, and to recognize its power of sympathy, — in other words, to reach the elements of universality in this Religion of Organized Work, — we must note the composition of the Chinese peo- ple and the nature of its habitat. ETHNIC TYPE. ETHNIC TYPE. " I ''HE startling Linnsean description, — Homo monstrosus, -*■ macrocephalus, capite-conico, Ckinensis, — can hardly be said to prepare us for the commonplace and prosaic. Yet such is the uniformity of the Chinese type, ^he chi- that sculptors use one model for hundreds of faces, "f^^ ^th- It is like the homogeneousness of an undevelo.ped °'° ''^^' order of life. To eyes accustomed to the mobility of Aryan features this placid platitude seems almost inorganic, and these accumulated living atoms are like dust of iron or heaps of sand. But their lack of individuality would natu- rally allow freedom of combination ; and it may be the result of a corresponding precedent fusion. It is f^"^J™ °' a well-recognized law, that the resources of a great civilization depend on the crossing of race^. And such is the extent of this fusion in all developed communities, that some physiologists have denied the reality of race distinc- tions, as mere theoretic solutions of problems too compli- cated for analysis.^ A people who have shown themselves competent to such constructive force as the Chinese can hardly be an exception to the rule, — a pure, unmixed variety. Yet, as was stated in the outset, the elements are limited, and the result is unique among nations. There has been an intermingling of Asiatic, chiefly Mongolian, tribes, whose > Bastian*s^A«ff/(?^/>, pp. 24, 25, 29. 170 ELEMENTS. marks are clearly visible in the varieties of the national character. Nevertheless, the race-type as a whole is, as we have said, the most distinctly individual in our existing civilizations. Distinct as he is, the Chinese seems to touch the ethno- logic world at a great variety of points. In hint and shadow he is a kind of Middle Kingdom. By his black eyes, thin beard, high cheek bones, coarse lips, and impassive air, he resembles the American race ; by his facial angle he ap- proaches the Aryan ; by his flattened nose, the negro. He has Mongolic features softened as by a feminine element, and bleached as by some Samoyede or Siberian infusion ; his half-wild expression suggests the Greek satyr ; and the apparent obliqueness of his eyelids, owing to the very slight opening of their inner angles, points to his origin in those high latitudes where Nature is observed to protect the lachrymal structure of ruminants in the same way.^ Thus widely related in form, the Chinese face is capable of much dignity and beauty. The conventional Quality of Qhinaman on Canton ware is a caricature. I have the type. myself seen a large collection of photographic por- traits,^ in which the phrenological and aesthetic development is fully equal on the whole to the European. Williams observes that Chinese women resemble the Europeans, more than Hindu or Persian, in preserving their vigor after child-birth.^ The beauty of the maidens is celebrated by Fleming, and their healthy development and delicacy of manners by Courcy. Whether the difference between the natives of northern and southern provinces is as great as has been represented is doubtful ; but the muscularity and shapeliness of the peasantry in general is beyond dispute : and in this respect, at least, they deserve the name of the • Smith's Natural History o/the Human Species, p. 284. • In possession of my friend, Mr. T. F. Hunt, of Salem, Mass. • Middle Kingdom, I. 37. ETHNIC TYPE. I7I " Anglo-Saxons of Asia." Owing partly to causes in the climate, and to their industrious habits, they are superior in physique to the surrounding races. Their Mongolic relation is shown in a certain slow rate of maturation, — a prolonged infancy ; full stature not being reached till the age of twenty-five, when trata^"'"*" the first shoots of the beard appear.^ Many old nomadic traits adhere to the Chinese by reason of this inertia, lasting through all changes ; such as the habit of sprinkling drums, and even doors, with blood ; sacrificing the horse ; imbibing valor by tasting the flesh or blood of dead braves, even of criminals ; ^ divining ; placing the house door so as to look southward ; sitting on mats ; drill in archery ; great hunting expeditions in the opening of winter ; paying service to dead ancestors, and to the ele- ments ; using the rod on criminals ; holding the first wife in special honor ;^ making generals responsible for the de- feat of their armies, or for the death of princes ; toleration of beliefs ; and claim of universal sway. Their physical endurance also has, perhaps, a Mongolic origin ; all accounts describing the Tartar as having " brown skin, large high shoulders, immense neck, bony hands, short legs, spread nose, black oblique eyes."* Not less striking the connection of their strong local and clan in- terests with the tribal organization of the Mongols. The annals of feudal China constantly suggest the " twenty-four tribes and forty-nine banners of Inner Mongolia, each com- prising two thousand families, and under hereditary prin- ces." The predaceous spirit of these tribes, — the Turk in them, — which caused the Christian world to regard them as demons sent to scourge mankind, has but a dim and faint survival in many familiar elements of Chinese char- acter. Carpini's description of their features differs but * Morache, p. 149. ' Marco Polo (P'm/*?), !■ 61. • Ibid. I. SI. * Courcy, p. 30. 172 ELEMENTS. little from those of the modern Chinese. " In habits," he says, " they are more obedient to their lords than any other people ; they honor one another exceedingly ; they return carefully beasts that have gone astray ; towards foreigners they are insolent ; they are intolerant exactors, covetous possessors, and niggardly givers." ^ We can hardly wonder at this hard judgment, when we consider the sufferings of the old monk in wintering on the Tartar steppes. But it is easy to recognize in the traits he notes qualities of char- acter very commonly ascribed to the children of Han. With these Mongols of Inner Asia the Chinese have been in constant contact, by war and by trade, with Ethnic . . ' -' / ' relations alternate invasion and retreat, and frequent con- mm 'oit qiisst by both sides, from very early times. Eight centuries before Christ, — perhaps earlier, — they ravaged Northern China. Chi-hwang-ti drove them out, and built the Great Wall to exclude them. The rulers of the Han dynasty (a.d. 202-255) bribed them to quiet by giving their own daughters in marriage to their chiefs. In the T'sin (264-420) they divided the empire. Hordes of Neutschin, Kitan, Kin, followed each other, moulding its destinies. Military colonies came and went on both sides. Large numbers of independent kingdoms were founded by Tartar conquests, even within the empire. At last, in the thirteenth century, Kublai conquers China, and a Mongol dynasty holds it for nearly a century. After the succeeding glories of the native Ming come the Man-chus, whose end is not yet. With the exception of the Man-chus, who are in many respects of a higher type, these Tartar, or rather Mongolic, races seem to have supplied inorganic elements, to be vitalized by structure only in the Chinese organization. Elsewhere they are gathered up and swept on as by whirlwinds, and perish in their birth. At the word of Tching-gis Khan they spring into being, instinct ^ Hakluyt Collection, 1599. Vol. 1., p. 60. ETHNIC TYPE. 173 with the dream of universal conquest ; they sweep across the field of history on their wild horses, and as suddenly dissolve : without special faith ; without enthusiasm for uses ; without permanent result ; not organizing empires, but overriding them, and terribly destructive. Their cry was, " One World, one King ! " and they aimed at the re- motest bounds of space. R^musat counts fifteen embas- sies sent by them to European potentates,-^ during their short career, most of them claiming absolute submission. This instinct of universal sway has found its civilized development in Chinese institutions, while its cruder stages survive in the manifold forms of childish self-sufficiency peculiar to that people. The extreme simplicity of the Mongolian mind is further represented in Chinese frugality and fear of innovation. The Man-chus, intermediate between Chinese and Mon- gols, represent the constructive, as the Mongols do w'uhthe the inorganic, elements in Chinese character. They "^"^'""^ are of Tunguse origin, lighter in complexion than the Chinese, have more prominent features and fuller beard, and are endowed with an elasticity and love of humor in striking distinction from the qualities of other Mongolic races.^ Rising to national importance in the fourteenth century, and rapidly appropriating Chinese culture, they mastered the empire in the seventeenth, after enduring many aggressions ; ^ and have held their ground, like the Turks in Europe, ever since. From them have come govern- mental capacity, largeness of plan, organizing power : they had the art of setting others to work, and bringing order from chaos by forces of discipline. Their name means mas- ter,^ and they are in fact the martinets of China. Their power of assimilating elements of constructive force had > Milnnges Asiatifues, I. 407. ' Erman's Siberia, II. 367. » Chinese Repas , iS^i; pp. 592-614. * Arieiiend. Riiss. Gesellsch., I. 385. 174 ELEMENTS. enabled them to absorb literature, social organization, edu- cation, and religion from China ; so that their Bochai had become a " land of enlightenment " before the conquest.^ Three times these Tunguse tribes have founded empires in Upper Asia, whose record has been written by Chinese hands.2 The Man-chu language, which is alphabetical, is remarkable for simplicity and directness, and free from the ambiguities of expression so common in Chinese.^ The Tunguse, of which it is a dialect, much modified by the Chinese, has also a much greater organic development of grammatical forms than the latter language.* In its abun- dant literature the ethico-political proverbs are especially attractive.^ During their dynastic periods of two centuries, the Man-chus have given China the completest national organization it ever possessed, and the characters of their great emperors, Kang-hi and Kien-lung, will bear compar- ison with those of any rulers of modern time. Separated by national prejudice and patriotic instinct from the con- quered race, they have nevertheless, to a certain extent, coalesced with them in ties of blood. The Thibetans contribute Hindu elements, — a reli- withtiie gious temperament, a theological literature, a Thibet- priestly government, the thread of contemplation that is interwoven with this rationalistic and utili- tarian warp, and appears in the philosophies of Buddha and Lao-tse. They have furnished an important part of the rich ethical wisdom of Chinese literature.^ A native Thi- betan fetichism, a cultus of elements and spirits opposed to Buddhism, and called the " Bon," '' or Master, corresponds ■ Upgorski, ibid., vol. II. s Plath, Gesch. d. Ostl. Asiens. ^ Chinese Repos.^ Jui^e, 1S44. * Lucien Adams, Grammaire de la Langue Tungottse (Paris, 1874). " Sentences MarUclumx et Mmtgols, par L. Rochet (Paris, 1875) ; Wollheim's Nation. Liter, der Vdlker des Orients, II. 663. Ibid, p. 767. ' Csoma, in ymnuU R. A. S., of Bengal, I. 124 ; Hodgson, ibid., XVIII. 396 ; Schmidt'l Sanang-setzen, p. 351. ETHNIC TYPE. 175 with the popular superstitions of China. The relations of the Chinese with Thibet have been very intimate through frequent conquests and incessant travel, so that much in- termixture of the races must have been effected. Through the more or less independent aboriginal tribes (Miau-tse),^ whose origin and affinities are as yet but ^■^^^^ ^^^ little known, there must have come continual infus- Abong- ion of a natural energy, much needed by the artificial civilization of China. These tribes hovered over it as the barbarians over the later Roman empire, though without similar resources or equal result ; and their perpetual bor- der warfare has helped to counteract the enervation that threatens it. In this "classic land of freebooters" whole armies have been swallowed up, and ages of strife spent with but little conquest. More effective means of fusion were the markets and fairs, where they were feasted by the national officials. They were not without organiza- tion. One of their ancient States is recorded to have contained a host of villages.^ Some of these tribes are supposed to be in possession of books, written in the oldest characters and carefully kept from the common eye. They show respect for age, similar to that of the Chinese ; but while many industriously till the soil, others are nomadic and predatory. Their customs are described as cheerful and cordial, and their fetichism as free from grossness or barbarity. Their religion centres in ances- tral rites and spirit intercourse, as well as in the custom of carefully saving up the bones of the dead, — a kind of primitive relic worship from which the Chinese have mainly freed themselves. The sexes are equal, and the daughter inherits her father's rank whenever the male children are held unfit to do so ; while in some of the tribes women ' Williams, I. 37, 147; Martin, I. 80; Chinese Refos. , March, 1845. » St. Denys, from Ma-tonan-lin, Seances du Cong. Intermit., 1873, PP- 36°, Zbi. 176 ELEMENTS. seem to have the energy to maintain a higher position than men.' It has been a Chinese fancy that their own ancient rites were preserved among these barbarians, on whom their ancestors had bestowed language and writing ; and that, if lost in China, the sacred lore could be recovered of the Miau-tse races. Confucius, when told of their ignorance, said, " Where the wise man dwells, ignorance cannot con- tinue." Thus the term barbarian was not used of these tribes in contempt, though many of them are described in the Li-ki as blackening, their teeth, wearing long unkempt hair, painting their bodies, and dwelling in caves. They were familiarly named according to the quarter of the heavens where they bordered on the Central Kingdom, and according to their color, as red, white, black, and yel- low ; 2 and described as " baked " or " unbaked," according as they were, or were not, converted to Confucius." Tra- ditions show an intimate connection with these aborigines, and their gradual civilization by the patient labors of the " black-haired families of Han." In thus recognizing the diverse race-elements combined jj ^^ in the Chinese type, I do not assert that its corre- sesasto spondcnt qualities were wholly derived from the ongin. intermixture ; nor do I see evidence to establish De Rosny's theory of a connection of the yellow Asiatic race with Egypt ; nor the likelihood of explaining by this, as an intermediate family, the traits of the white races.* As little proof is given us of the conjecture that the North- ern Chinese were anciently influenced by the invasion of some white tribe. We do not even know that the " hun- dred families " * descended from the Kwan-lun,^ or that they 1 Lay, chap. otv. • Ma-touan-lin, tiansL in Atsuma Gusa. ' Cimgr. Iniernat, 1873. * Conferences at Paris, 1869. * The Annals explain this name, by Fohi's having regulated marriage relations upon sock a division, which has ever since been maintained. De Mailla, I. 5. * Biot and Kauffer. ETHNIC TYPE. i;f combined in one the Turanians of the north and south ; but as the Hoang-ho is fabled to rise "in a hundred springs, shining hke stars," so nearly every form of Asi- atic nationality, except the most westerly, has its limited expression in this strangely uniform Chinese type. Dif- ferences which do not appear in the written language come out in the dialects of the empire. The many partially absorbed elements in this hospitable mediative civilization constitute minor distinctions and contrasts. Pe-king is described as in this respect peculiarly suited for researches into the anthropology of Asia, so complete is the conflux of typical races.^ Here is a floating population of Mon- gols, Thibetans, Turcomans, and Lamas, of every tribe. Here are political and commercial legations from most Asiatic States : ten thousand Mussulmans, dating from the ancient times of Arab traders ; five hundred Russians, whose ancestors were transported hither in 1688, and who have adopted many Chinese customs ; Jews also, and even Zin- gari, the " wandering Jews " of India. The Man-chus in Pe-king, locally apart from the Chinese, frequently inter- marry with them, though till very recently a law forbade the relation ; ^ and concubinage has been a fruitful source of fusion. Monuments in various parts of China bear wit- ness to the extent of race intercourse on the soil. Bastian mentions an inscription, in six languages, on the wall of a mountain pass.^ The Mongol rulers in the twelfth cen- tury poured through China their whole vast assemblage of Central Asiatic tribes. The Hanlin, during this cosmo- politan dynasty (Yuen), contained members from all im- portant races of the East. * Morache, pp. 72-75. * Notts and Qutries, September, 1S68. » Ptkine, p. 3SS. VI. RESOURCES. RESOURCES. I "HE land has as composite a structure as the people. -*- With its eighteen provinces, and its Thibetan, Mongolic, Turkic, and Manchurian dependencies, the Chinese Empire fills a circumference of twelve thou- sand miles, and covers an area of five million square miles, — nearly twice the extent of the United States, exclusive of the lately acquired Russian possessions. It includes the whole plateau of Central Asia, the hive of nomad conquerors, the head-waters of all the great rivers of the continent, and the ancestral shrines of its beliefs. A natural pride in this vast territory is expressed in the names, " Middle Kingdom," " Heavenly Flowery King- dom," " Earthly Heaven ; " just as Pliny describes his Italy as " chosen by the gods to render heaven itself more glorious, and become the mother country of all nations." Within this area is every form of climate, scenery, and product. A colossal mountain girdle ; a central des- ng^ari. ert with moving sands ; an immense plain densely ous eie- peopled ; endless variety of shore-line, archipel- "^ ^' ago, reef ; four-fifths the country hilly, and mainly fertile. Two great rivers, as opposite as Yn and Yang, — the one passionate and destructive, the other calm and creative, — symbolize the national character. The Hoang-ho, without an affluent, unnavigable, follows its wild instincts and ca 1 82 ELEMENTS. prices, often breaking all bounds in disastrous overflows, like sudden outbursts of Chinese passion. The Yang-tze-kiang, of " Golden Sands," — most serviceable and orderly of high- ways, most readily influenced by navigation, opening free access to the interior, and leading by its tributary streams even into the recesses of the mountain world, joining this heart- of China to London and New York, fifty miles broad at its mouth, by its tides the "Son of the Sea," lined with flourishing cities for hundreds of miles, — is the type of Chinese industry, of all mediative and produc- tive powers.^ The social and organizing genius of the people finds its symbol in an unsurpassed natural drainage and intercom- munication by water ; and even their superstition has free play in the solitude of wide-reaching deserts, where spirits are heard whispering or calling from afar, and lure the traveller from his way.^ The climate varies from the extremes of northern and southern, through alternations, of the Pacific Coast and strong winds of the plains, to the equability of the hill country and the dryness of Thibet. The soil affords immense supplies of salt, marble, sulphur, and coal, and abundance of metallic treasures. The wonderful diversity of local scenery, the exquisite beauty of the cultivated plains and river courses, verdant terraces mounting to the hill-tops or crowned with acres of white camelia, wide ex- panses of domestic comfort and rural prosperity, endless variety of trees and flowering shrubs, seas of vegetation sweeping up into recesses of majestic mountains, — all this would hardly be credible had it not its vouchers in de- scriptions by such eye-witnesses as Williams and Davis, Fortune and Fleming, Montfort and Barrow. » Magaillans voyaged through China from Pe-king to Macao, in 1656, for six hundred leagues, with but a single day's journey on land ; and all along the Kiang passed trains oi boats "that would make bridges it would take days to cross." * Marco Polo, I. xxxvi. RESOURCES. 183 The same diversity of character is to be noted in the great cities of China. Pe-king, the city of Kublai, is a crowded Tartar camp, in the whirhng sands of the steppe, with selenite water, heaps of offal, decayed hospitals, and army of beggars licensed to pillage and mob : yet also a confluence of races around an ideal of universal sway ; a vast religious symbolism crystallized in political forms ; a huge fortress, with walls fifty feet high and equally broad, and a circumference of twenty miles ; with such monuments of splendor as its colossal Temple of Heaven, its watch-tower with the Drum of Equal Justice, its mountain of stone coal, its enormous Gate of Lions, and the ruins of the most superb of summer palaces, sad monument of Christian revenge. Nan-king is the city of arts and letters, the Florence of China, " where six kingdoms rose and fell ; " girded with its seven leagues of wall, entered by high arched gates, and crossed by immense parallel streets ; its tombs of kings, reached by avenues of statues ; its soil thick with debris of old civilizations ; its Tartar city apart from the native population, and, though now empty, not touched by them, because their patriotic hope has reserved it to re- ceive, by and by, the returning glories of the Ming ; twenty years ago a brilliant city of half a million inhabitants, then the stronghold of the Tai-ping rebellion, at last a melan- choly ruin, yet still a centre of hopes for letters and arts. Hang-chau, with its prodigious population, busy indus- tries, wealthy stores, and well-paved streets, is the Kin- sai of Marco Polo, his " celestial city, the grandest and most beautiful in the world ; " whose vast extent, innu- merable bridges, stately squares, and splendid palaces, as reported by this old traveller,^ helped to get him the nick- • B. II., Lxvni. Navarrete also describes it as a day's journey through for a sedan, from suburb to suburb, having broad, stone-paved streets and arches, as curiously wrought as any at Rome. 184 ELEMENTS. name of Messer Millione with the incredulous merchants ol Venice. Its environs are still a paradise, amidst which rises, fourteen stories high, the Tower of Thundering Winds. Kai-fung is the old city of the legendary Fo-hi, and the cradle of the monarchy, the type of its vicissitudes and its permanence, — fifteen times inundated, eleven times be- seiged. Its great dike against the dangerous Hoang-ho was pierced by a patriotic general, to save it from the in- vading Man-chus, at a fearful sacrifice of life. Ning-po boasts its Tower, four hundred years old, and a hundred and sixty feet high ; and Yao-chau blazes, with its five hundred porcelain furnaces, night and day. Su-chau-fu was, before the civil wars, the metropolis of industry, and common centre of the lines of canal, both great and small ; famous for the pacific spirit of its thriv- ing traders, rivalling Nan-king in a national admiration, which " holds nothing to be beautiful, graceful, or elegant but what comes from one or the other of these cities." It was the " Chinese Capua." " In heaven Paradise, on earth Su-chau." In one vast plain, at the junction of the Han with the Yang-tsz, stand side by side three great cities, surrounded by waters ; a Chinese inland Venice, crowded with wealth and population. Lecomte (seventeenth century), who trav- elled over China with eyes wide open, tells of seven or eight cities as large at least as Paris then was ; of eighty equal to Lyons, and more than a thousand of lower grade, besides innumerable villages. Of the great ports which sprinkle the immense coast The ports. ^^"^ ^^ ^^^ "^^^^ Canton, perhaps the finest in the world, whose beautiful river archipelago, surrounded by an almost tropical wealth of woods alternating with rich gardens and villas, reaches up towards the far mountains one way, and down to its bright city of painted boats and RESOURCES. 185 floating flower-gardens the other way ; Shang-hai, gate of the Empire, and its fur-trade station, unrivalled for in- ternal communications, closely connected with the great productive centre Su-chau-fu, and destined, as Fortune thinks, to be the " port of the future East ;" and Hong- kong, traditional d^pdt of foreign trade. There are islands of peculiar value to China, — Tchu- san, her Holy Isle, whose rocks are covered with the name of Amida Buddha, and with convents J^^^^^^ and temples of his faith ; and Formosa, her gran- ary, as Sicily to Rome, on whose rice crop depend the lives of millions, while it is still partially in the hands of abo- rigines, and has but recently been wrested from bands of pirates and rebels, — at once a nurse of industry and a nest of strife. The most careful estimates of population correspond with the Chinese census of 1812. This made it three hundred and sixty-two millions, which, at the usual lotion, rate of increase, must now be raised to four hun- dred and fifty millions. The numbers involve a ratio of two hundred and sixty-eight persons to the square mile, or ten per cent, more than that of England ; and the density of the Eastern provinces, four hundred and fifty-eight to the square mile, is greater than that of any other known community. The organizing genius of the Man-chus has given a value to their census returns beyond most that have preceded them, — placing every street, and even house, under official charge, and requiring every family to keep its register of members.^ In all times the numbering of the people has been held a sacred duty ; but no effort could secure accurate statis- tics from such elements of uncertainty as the frequent civil wars, and the vast extent of vagrancy and transloca- tion that attended them ; the sudden fluctuations in revo- 1 Williams I, 216, 227. 1 86 ELEMENTS. lutionary periods, amounting sometimes to loss of half the population in half a century ; treachery of officials ; and the habit of numbering by families instead of individuals, — different numbers being counted as a family at different periods.^ Biot has faith enough in Ma-touan-lin's traditions to put the population, in the old wonder-days of Yao and Shun, at thirteen millions (!) ; which is like believing in the ages of the patriarchs as given in Hebrew tradition. The " ten thousand vassal chiefs " of their great monarchy of dream- land vanish in proportion as we approach historic times. The immense fertility of this human seed requires all the cultivable soil for its support. An empire of Its pres- ^ ^ ^ sure on four hundrcd millions, without an acre laid to the land, gj-g^gg I -pheir poorer soil is full of graves, and the insatiable demand of death for the spaces beneath their feet is met by removing the ashes from older coffins into urns, and replacing them with the newly dead. Man has converted the very earth into his doings and his dust, till even this supply fails ; and the Malthusian therapeutics of war and famine are confuted on their own ground, where they have had full play. The " strife for survival " in these ci^owded cities has been an application of Darwinism on the largest human scale ; but the " natural selection " has not resulted in that adaptation of man to outward con- ditions required by the theory, so much as in the conver- sion of Nature itself into the strange likeness of a peculiar race of men. The human causes of this prodigious increase of popu- lation are manifold. Honor to agriculture, and te^owth. taxation according on the whole with values, have made the cultivator feel at his ease. Emperors have exhorted to frugality. A long peace from the begin- ^ SacharofPs careful review of the population of China in Arbeiien d. Russisch. Gesandsck ri. pp. 192, 193 ; also Biot in yourn. Asiat. 1836. RESOURCES. 187 ning of the eighteenth century preserved the vital forces of the country. The universality of marriage ; the custom of betrothing in childhood ; laws and manners on the whole fa- voring monogamy ; the requirement that even female slaves shall be provided with husbands, and shall not be separated from them ; mutual-aid societies ; laws discouraging emi- gration, especially of females ; the comparative retirement of wives during critical periods, and the constant adoption of homeless children, — all have contributed to produce a high rate of increase. And it should be noted that most of these laws and customs form parts of a deliberate system of incentives to secure an abounding posterity, which is inherent in Oriental life, and is the reflex of its patriarchal traditions. On the other hand, China has been subject to special drawbacks to the growth of population. Besides wars and far expeditions to the bordering wastes, which in almost all ages have swept off great multitudes, ignorance of physi- ology has made infectious diseases prevalent and destruc- tive. The estimate that forty millions have perished during the last eighteen years by war, pestilence, and famine must be excessive, and serves only to indicate the great scale upon which depopulation from these causes is admitted to be going on in the empire, in an age which some have imagined to be the period of its final decay.^ Opium has slain its hosts. Suicide has often, in times of public ca- lamity, become a mania, and probably on a scale unprece- dented in human history. From many great cities, if we may judge from their actual tracts of ruin, emigration must have been very extensive, and much of it to far coun- tries. The laws against expatriation are easily evaded. The inhabitants of the coast are bold, lawless, and enter- prising ; especially in Fo-kien, whence most of the movement of emigration proceeds. The world beyond sea beckons these insatiate work-seekers to India, California, Luzon, the 1 Kiiowlton in Notes and Queries^ Aug., 1868. 1 88 ELEMENTS. Pacific islands, especially to Australia, and to service in merchant ships. Yet over-population must add its stimulus to effect the sundering of local ties which are probably stronger than those of any other people. And the vast population of China was in fact never so impressive a phenomenon as it is to-day. What enormous resources have repaid these swarms of laborers, in whom labor is not only an organic in- rfOriir stinct, but the substance of religion ! Mark what force of civility is shown in the fact that this con- centrated mass-power has not hurled its Mongolic passion for universal sway upon the minor races of the continent ! What other people has ever attained such predominance in material force without making itself a terror to weaker nations, a conqueror by physical and destructive means ? China has preferred to teach labor and letters ; to build empires, to convert its very conquerors to peaceful enter- prise. Is it from inherent want of power to use the strong hand .■' If Christendom pursues its past methods, it will perhaps find that it has chosen for itself the mission of endowing this patient, plodding giant with a new and fatal fire. What armies he could organize, what fleets build and man, what services command from European science in the arts of war! On these endless coasts, whose hardy tribes are amphibious, and divided between piracy and traffic; on these mighty rivers and these inland seas, — what materials for the rapid growth of an inexhaustible na- val power ! It was Napoleon who warned England against her Eastern policy. " The worst thing you have done is to go to war with an immense empire like China. These people will imitate you, build fleets, arm them, and in time defeat you." Napoleon's point of view was that of the di- plomatist and soldier. The Religion of Humanity finds in these indubitable relations of Christianity to Heathenism fresh argument for insisting on its own new and noblei faith, beyond them both. STRUCTURES. o}«o I. EDUCATION. EDUCATION. /^F the three traits we have mentioned as characteristic ^-^ of the Chinese muscular type of mind, the first — its plodding persistence — has made its record in the wonderful industrial development already described. The second — a dead-level uniformity — is now to be traced through those systems of popular education and that democratic tempera- ment, by which it also has justified its existence. As was %aid of Chinese industry, so we may say of this second trait, that its elements of universality, and its thor- oughly organic and earnest quality render it a positive religious fact, a form of the concrete national ideal. " Most beneficent," says the Koran, " is the Lord, who hath taught the use of the pen." ^ Christianity, like Islam- ism and Judaism, worships a Book. China adores that which constitutes all books ; not a written of^J^ Word, but writing itself : Thought in the most concrete, fixed, visible form. Writing, for her, springs straight from the elements and forms of Nature, and rep- resents man's unity with natural order ; it is the first reve- lation, — on the sands, on the tortoise and the liver-horse, in the tracks of birds, in the starry heavens, — to Fo-hi, primitive teacher of mankind. This reverence for the familiar and constant instrument of thought forbids the > Sura, XCVI. (RodweU's Tr.) 192 STRUCTURES. exclusive authority of any one Book: it is a germ of Universal Religion ; the cultus of a permanent, inevitable process of the natural method of mind. China is a vast open volume. Every thing is stamped with the written words of man. Walls, doors, pilasters, are but the bearers of felicitous mottoes, apothegms, original or proverbial. Apartments are covered by " flowery scrolls " hung in pairs, artistically devised to express in elegant sentences, — ethical, amatory, dramatic, enigmatic, — con- trasted or corresponding images of feeling. Temples are books of wise sayings, oracular responses, divine names, which spill over on the surrounding rocks. Lanterns are scribbled ; dresses are not only worn, but read. A good sentence well pencilled is the most dainty of gifts ; a shop front is a public gratuity of scribbled pufFs and cards of invitation ; a house-door sighs in the name of its owner, " May I be so learned as to hide ten thousand volumes in my mind," or announces that " by hterature the people become great." As the Hebrew would not tread on paper, lest the name of Jehovah might be written on it, so for our Chinaman all written words are sacred ; and he has a double motive for gathering up every morsel of paper : first, for the sake of economy, to recast it into new supplies of a material in such unlimited demand ; and, second, for the sake of the characters, of whatever purport, that may chance to be inscribed on it. European treatment of this god amazes him. " Be respectful to written paper," say the urns placed by waysides for its reception. Appliances for writing have been pursued by the Chinese as other races multiply and perfect the materials of trade or war.i Tablets made of every available substance, bam- boo, metal, bark, pith, flax, silk, straw ; the use of style, » DuAaUt, Vol II. EDUCATION. 193 pencil, brush ; typography invented fifteen hundred years ago; elaborate researches into the history of the art of making ink ; a great number and variety of styles in form- ing the written characters ;i a marvellous adroitness in ex- ecuting the strokes of which they are composed by rules of calligraphy which they honor with the name of " ever- lasting ; " ^ minute inquiries into the theory, structure, and uses of written signs, — all bear witness to the happy ear- nestness of this service of recorded mind. Like the Norse runes, these mystic characters are called "eyes of the wise;" and he who does not respect them shall be born blind hereafter.^ Here their routine-bound habit escapes into the geniality and individuality of fine art. Of all feti- chism, this is surely the most promising. How it bridges over the ages of human progress in the evolution of speech, the conservative loyalty of the East inviting the diffusive science of the West ! Even in its Oriental phase we shall see it seizing, as by a divine instinct of logical sequence, the great idea of universal education. By her invention of printing, and of good material for diffusing it, China out- stripped the Roman world, — which was reduced to the use of palimpsests, and the consequent ruin of much of its own work. Every thing is recorded, hastening to the written sign as to its final purpose. The whole thirteen books of the Classics are inscribed on stone tables of mas- i^^^t^re. sive granite at Pe-king. At Singapore there is a similar stone library.* Before a temple in the capital is a " Forest of Tablets," containing the list of all who have attained the highest doctorate, — sixty thousand names m all.^ The "Public Annals" (Shi-lu), secret records of the doings of each emperor and his administrative boards, • Wylie, p. 117. ' Lay's Chintse as they Are, cli. xx. ' Doolittle, II. 16S. • Chitiese Recorder, Sept., 1871, p. 88. " Ibid. p. 87. 13 194 STRUCTURES. written out by official hands day by day, are by law depos- ited and kept inviolate till the end of the reign ; at which time they are brought forth, — like the Judgment-Day Books opened in the Egyptian, Jewish, Mahommedan, and Christian religions, — to decide the historical destiny of the past ruler, and for warning or example to the new one.^ Every three months the name of every functionary is recorded in the official almanac, with the designation of his place and work. Of the annual calendar of works and days, of astronomical phases and modes of divination, more copies are printed and sold than of any Bible in the world. The accumulation of books in libraries is, of course, prodigious. Kien-lung's select classical collection alone consisted of ten thousand five hundred works, and its cata- logue gives fourteen hundred and fifty commentaries on the Yking, and three hundred and three encyclopaedias. The " Catalogue of the Four Libraries " is in one hundred and twelve octavo volumes, of three hundred pages each, and contains an account of twenty thousand works. The provincial topographies are exhaustive ; one of them fills one hundred and eighty-two volumes. A single modern collection of Chinese books in possession of the East India Society can show two hundred volumes of plays. Five great catastrophes by fire have done nothing towards de- stroying the enormous treasures of a literary industry of three thousand years. It is Chinese immortality, this phoenix of letters. It is the analogue of Western science, as entire persistence of force. The " Collections of Re- prints," as described and in part analyzed by Wylie, surpass all other records of literary conservation in human history. Separate anthologies embrace more than a thousand au- thors. Chinese encyclopaedias are to ours, for size at least, ' De MaSy p. 257. EDUCATION. 195 as plesiosaurs to lizards. One of them contains extracts from seventeen hundred works, and fills fifteen hundred volumes. The Ming emperors set, at one time, one hun- dred and fifty compilers at work on these collections ; at another twenty-two hundred ; and then the vast result was destroyed by fire. New commissions and new ordeals of flame succeeded ; till at last a " Liber redivivus " stands in four hundred and fifty books, comprehending more mate- rial than ever. Kang-hi leaves Solomon in the distance. He wrote one hundred and seventy-six books of Literary Recreations, and two hundred and eighty-nine poems. Kien-lung compiled a body of thirty-four thousand poems from works produced during his own reign. The quality of all this is not for us at present to estimate ; but we may note the strong utilitarian bias of the imperial House of T'sing. Kang-hi kept eighty scholars at work for seven years on a dictionary of those prolific elements of litera- ture, the written signs, and wrote an excellent preface to this new classic. The Chinese are the most patient and thorough bibliog- raphers in the world. There are public libraries in every provincial capital, and nearly three hundred celebrated ones. Circulating libraries, new in the West, are in the East immemorial. Thousands of light publications issue continually from the press. Standard works of history, law, and letters are published by the Han-lin (Royal Acad- emy), and distributed to the learned world, — which in China consists of at least two millions of scholars.^ In no other nation has such honor been rendered to lit- erature and to literary men. Academies are at the ,,_. , ,,.. . .. Honors to summit of the State, and public instruction is its culture. first requirement. The number of colleges of the first and second orders is more than two thousand. Revo- lutions turn on the destruction of books. All this enthu- ^ Medhunst. 196 STRUCTURES. siasm and faith deserve no less than to be called a Relig- ion. A nation of four hundred miUions falls at the feet of a philosopher, and burns incense to the tablets of scholars. An old description of the Chinese in Hakluyt^ says that " their literature is in a manner infinite" The Chinese leg- endary prophet is a resolved youth, who fastens his hair to the ceiling when he studies ; or reads by the light of glow- worms ; or puts sticks for a pillow, to keep off sleep ; or says, " I will cease from literature when I have made a hole in this iron inkstand with grinding my ink." Mencius's mother cut the web she was weaving, to show him the folly and mischief of giving up his studies. This more prosaic passion answers, in the son of Han, to the spirit of Hebrew seers, who smashed tiles to foreshow the wrath of Jehovah, or ate little books for a sign that what is sweet in the mouth shall be bitter in the stomach. Martyrs to litera- ture in China have numbered hundreds to one as compared with those whose blood has sealed the Hebrew faith. The peaceful examinations in every great city of the Middle Kingdom rouse an ambition whose toils and disappoint- ments more frequently result in the sacrifice of human life, than the exciting appeals or denunciations of Jehovism. In every revolution, loyalty to the rights and duties of the lit- erary class has issued in the suicide, banishment, or mas- sacre of large numbers. The soul of Chinese patriotism and piety is identified with the claims of culture, — in the name of its divine origin, its ethical purity, and its univer- sal spirit of equality and diffusion, — to rule the State, Learning takes precedence even of age. The literary per son, ever so young, is a " venerable, father ; " like the Hin- du Brahman, but with a widely different social meaning. Learning in China is more than wealth. There are no property entails, but the descendants of great scholars are ennobled. > II. 564. EDUCATION. 197 So spontaneous is this Religion of Culture that its ele- mentary work is not subjected to an organic rule or system, but is left, safely enough, to the force of ionsponta- public sentiment, the incentives of social and po- "™"' ^^ \ ^ earnest. htical aspiration. " A youth," says Confucius, " is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future may not be equal to our present ?" ^ This instinctive recognition of the right of education even supplies the place of our colleges and universities, with its enthusiastic competitive examinations. While there is not, properly speaking, any public-school system in China, yet proba- bly a larger proportion of the population have acquired those elements of knowledge which fit them for pursuing the further disciplines requisite for position and distinc- tion, than in any other nation in the modern world, except perhaps Switzerland and Prussia. A groundwork for universal education is secured by the public reading of Kang-hi's " Sacred Edicts " every half-month in the towns ; to which are added the Edictl"' comments of the Emperor, Yung-Ching. These sixteen Shing-yu are apothegms of public and private duty covering the whole ground of Chinese ethics, and the comments expand them into applications historical and social. The custom is as old as Chinese traditions run.^ This national rubric, however, not being enforced as of su- pernatural authority, its ethical excellence can appeal far more directly to the free conscience than the stated read- ing even of the Decalogue or the Sermon on the Mount in Jewish and Christian schools. In fact, while sufficiently circulated by political regulation to keep good ethical prin- ciples and public interest before the popular mind, this offi- cial proclamation of virtues is open to much laxity in its stated performance from the absence of ecclesiastical sanc- * Lunyu, IX. 22. ' Biot's Tcheou-li; and Plath, July, 1868. 198 STRUCTUKEa tions, — a freedom which may help to counteract the dead- ening effect of its pedagogy and routine. The educational impulse, thus encouraged, expresses it- self in the small private schools which are every- Sdwols. ^ , where supported by the people, — day-schools in the poorest country towns, and evening schools for mechan- ics in the cities,^ — the teachers being usually graduates oi higher schools, who have not been able to secure official posts. It is probably the great difference between the numbers of written characters learned by different classes and at the different schools, that leads to the widely-varj- ing estimates, now before us, of the munber of persons in the Empire who can be said to " read and write." Two facts are beyond question. All classes are admitted to the schools without distinction,^ and the price of tuition is very low, — parents in fact paying according to their means. Persons of almost every class make efforts to send their children to schooL^ " All parents," says Brine, " deem placing their sons at school a matter of first importance ; and I have seen agricultural laborers and boatmen save as much as possible from their small earnings from the day of marriage, and look forward to the time when the boy could be sent to pick up the small amount of learning so requi- site for his future success in life." * " Every one," says De ilas, " reads the bulletins on the walls : the poor can read what characters belong to their occupations. Often in the British Consulate, when British sailors have to make their mark, Chinese will be able to write and sign their depositions." ° This open opportunity applies only to the elementary schools, since the expenses of competitive examinations must shut out large numbers from the higher grades. The » WBliams, L +27 ; Fleming p. 130. » Ckiiua Kepos^ July, 1835, !>■ "*• • Nevius, p. 62. * Tai-fixg RebeU-, p. 13. ' Dt Mas, r. 255. Giraid, ir. a6 ; Lockhait, Medical Mhsitntary ix Ckaca, p. 6 XiOndoc, i86r. EDUCATION. 199 masses are taught those written characters mainly which represent ideas and objects of ordinary use ; but the num- ber of years spent at school is naturally determined by the resources of the parent. A very large proportion of the schools at least direct the mind to the classics and the his- tories, and teach the composition of sentences. The es- sentials of practical business are learned in offices and shops, to which the young people are transferred at an early age. Their entrance to the gates of wisdom would seem to be no path of roses. School hours are from six a.m. to five P.M., with an hour or two of recess, and without vacation except at New Year, and a few holidays. No outward comforts commend the dull routines ; and the masters being usually disappointed men are not likely to prove encouraging guides. The nature of the language requires that primary edu- cation should consist mainly in committing char- . Nature of acters to memory, bounds and forms must come education, first, and without regard to meaning. These char- ^^'"°''- acters are not the alphabet of Chinese literature, — they are the substance of it : every one means a sen- tence, an idea, a concrete fact. Words are studied, not in their elements, but as ready-made designations ; and there is little room for analysis or composition, or for the proc- esses that initiate philosophical thought or simple reflec- tion. It is but appropriation of the concrete material of speech, provided ages ago for the uses of life. On the other hand, this rote-learning, — which has the advantage over our a b c work that it deals directly in real wholes, and does not require to be unlearned in forming these, — is the main necessity ; for philologist or for child there is no other way to Chinese wisdom. The object being to re- member, not to comprehend, the text-books are generally beyond the reach of the faculties ; and being held, like the 200 STRUCTURES. individual characters which compose them, indispensable to knowledge, are also committed to memory with great zeal, like Bible texts in Christian lands : the little puppets " back the books," which means reciting passages with the back turned to them.^ Next to memorizing, the chief object of this training is to acquire a mechanical handiness in writing the rafwrit' characters. First of arts is penmanship, learned bg and as a purely imitative process ; first discipline in that conformity to rule and law which is the pith of Chinese virtue. Large red characters are first traced in black, then through increasing thicknesses of paper, till the sight has less to do than the memory ; at last, the original being taken away entirely, the triumph of mechan- ism is complete.^ Chu-tsze defines learning as imitation, — conformity to a prescribed standard ; and in these schools even organization holds an inferior place to the mere act of "repeating after the teacher, each by himself, in a shrill voice, rocking to and fro." ^ This perfect image of automa- tism is not without resemblance to the arrangements into graded classes, so much admired in our Western school- systems, and to those arts of "reading in concert" which are believed to have such virtue in our democratic culture. It would in fact be difficult to imagine a better outward symbol of the mental status produced by these Analogues _ . . . • t i in the processes ot an excessive organization, so widely American admlrcd in the public schools of America. They schools. •' tend to destroy all possibility of original force. Reading, for instance, is becoming reduced to as purely mechanical a conformity to prescribed tone, time, and em- phasis as the Chinese custom of repeating words after the teacher has produced without any organization whatever. Chinese boys, rocking out their parrot tones, eagerly copy 1 Doolittle, I. 378. 2 Girard, II. 70. 8 Morache, p. 84 ; Brown, in Jimrnal Am. Or. Soc, II. 174. EDUCATION. 201 ing the master or " backing the books," do but openly con- fess, in their noisy rout of imitation, the mental slavery which our prevailing system disguises under the varnish of " drill." " Reading in concert " has played its part in the Chinese system also, with effects upon voice and manner which we need not cross the hemisphere to find in full operation. Concerning " imitation " as a principle of culture, let us add that, false as it is, its moral quality at least is Dangers higher when it follows, as in China, a type that frommech- 1 • 1 anism does not change with human caprice, than when it inteach- is subject to arbitrary crudities and idiosyncracies '°^' imposed on the pupils by individual teachers. In both cases, however, the real ultimate reference is to an all- powerful authority in that public sentiment and common belief of which these educational systems are meant to be the expression. And when this public control has become all-pervading, as it steadily tends to be, whether as Chinese tradition of ages, or American fashion of the hour, its effect through imitation, in levelling and trimming young minds into a dull, self-satisfied uniformity, is indisputable. In the course of ages it has cast all Chinamen in one mould, and made their intellectual productions as monotonous as their physical type. The warning is for us, even at the opposite pole of social and political character. There are signs that the amount and the mischief of this endless rote-learning are not unperceived. The noble Japanese maxim, "True study is that which oese aware one pursues in order to direct himself," is thor- of'^ese dangers. oughly in the spirit of Chinese didactics, and prob- ably derived from them. Nothing is more common in the text-books than advice to avoid mere rote-knowledge, and to lay to heart what is read.^ A popular writer on educa- ^ Davis, I. 270. 202 STRUCTURES. tion advises to " read much, keep commonplace books, and practise undistracted attention." ^ Confucius says : — " When a man does not ask, ' What shall I think of this and of that ? ' I can do nothing with him. Learning without thought is labor lost ; thought without learning is perilous." ^ As if to compensate for the lack of individuality, a pa- tient endeavor to comprehend what is studied is constantly urged. " The attention should be exerted as intensely as that of a general at the head of an army, or judge in a criminal court." " Do not fear being slow; fear only indolence." "Con over the best compositions till you feel their spirit.'' " Better have but one book which you make wholly your own than a library of ten thousand books, which you keep only to look at." " Something is learned every time a book is opened." " Who swallows quick can chew but little." ' " Do not imitate useless men, nor read useless books, nor speak useless words." "The good bee sips not a fallen flower." "Instead of asking from others beg from yourself." " The wise man is not a talker, nor the talker a sage." * And it is but just to these efforts to secure mental free- dom and force, that we should reflect how thor- L^r"^ oughly original the culture of the Chinese really chjDese is, and how much they have actually achieved by ^^^ strenuous application alone. Rote-learning, as the natural method of a constitutional idolatry of the past, is of course much more spontaneous in Chinese than in Western civilization. Of such mental habit the memory is of course the chief instrument ; and the immense part which this faculty plays in culture is intimately related to religion, resulting in a prodigious amount of oral tradition, and in feats in the transmission of formulas and texts of which we have but slight conception. It is said that, if the Four Books of Chinese Classics were destroyed to-day, there > Waiiams, I. 425. » Lnnyn, XV. 15, II. 15. • Pavis, II. ch. xvi * Morison*s Dictionazy. EDUCATION. 203 are a million persons who could restore the whole to-mor- row. What imagined miracle of biblical conservation could compare with this natural inspiration of the memory, as proof of authority in the symbols of a faith ? Or if labor in memorizing texts be a sign of religious ardor, our best-booked Bibliolater might well learn earnestness at the feet of the Chinese Doctor of Letters. But the religious element in this educational system is not shown by its earnest culture of the memory only. More prominent than rote-work in the pro- ^^^^^ gramme of the school system is respect for moral moral eie- laws as eternal and divine. Modesty and humility ; ^'"ure" reverence for the old ; the evil of war and the wick- edness of cruelty and conquest ; the love of truth, purity, and self-restraint ; delicacy of feeling, devotion to duties, fidelity to functions, — are the burden of this popular teach- ing, the very substance of text and precept. I believe, not only that the whole series of reading books used in the schools of China does not contain a single impure precept, but that there is scarce one noble conception of duty and humanity that cannot be found represented in the daily recitations of these children of a grand ethical literature, who are taught to prize it, not with slavish superstition, but for the naturalness of its ideal. Nor does this textual teaching fail of a practical basis in the home. It would be difficult to find any treatise on home education more admirable than the Instructions of the Sacred Edict, whose; utilitarian wisdom is here overflowed by tenderest sentiment. The regular text-books for younger children are the Siao-hiao, or "Guide of Youth;" the Tsien-tsze- wan, or " Thousand-Characters Classic ; " the Hiao- ^^l^^ king, or " Book of Filial Duty ; " and the San-tsze- 204 STRUCTURES. king, or " Trimetrical Classic." The pith of all these is morality, taught by precept and example. The Siao-hiao} supposed to have been compiled by Chu-hi in the twelfth century, circulates the life xhesiao- of Chinese faith through every artery and vein of '''»°- the 'nation. It opens with the principles of education. " The children of the people are taught to love parents, respect superiors, honor teachers, select friends ; fundamental principles in governing self, regulating the family, ruling the State, tranquillizing the world." Then come duties prescribed for the different epochs of life, and for the " five great relations," — father and son, king and minister, husband and wife, elder and younger, and friendship. Their definiteness of concrete detail leaves no room for doubt nor for choice of method ; the ready- made ideal is just to be put on and worn. But the moral- ity is humane, gentle, even tender. Oriental subjection, as of a child to its parent, or a wife to her husband, is tem- pered by precepts implying mutual sympathy and devotion. If the son shall keep even his own wife, only by and during the parental consent, he is also to " Warn his father and mother if they do wrong, and to love what they love.'' " If he loses them, he should think of their death when winter winds blow, and of seeing them again when spring is warming his heart. When he looks at their tablets, let him feel that he sees them, and believe that they hear his sighs of regret." Filial piety is thus his teacher of immortality, as well as of reverent love. " However poor, let him not sell the vessels of his ancestral wor- ship ; however cold, let him not put on the dresses that belong to it, nor cut down trees on the hills where his parents are buried, to build his own house." * Translated by Pdre Noel, in his Can/ucioH Classics, into Latin; thence into French by I'Abb^ Fluquet. EDUCATION. 205 " Let him care for his own body, avoiding negligence and base uses, as for a trust committed to him by them." ^ The spheres marked out for husband and wife in Eastern society are to be equally respected by both. The husband should not speak in loud or harsh tones in the female apartments, nor use gestures of contempt. Woman, sub- ject of course to man, yet has her " empire in the inner apartments ; " nor may she be divorced, if she have no parents to receive her, or if she have mourned with her husband for his parent's death ; or if she has gaine'd part of the common stock of means.^ Respect for older persons is to be shown by the bearing, and by modesty in asking questions. If one meets an old man carrying a heavier load than one's own, he should assume it all, or as much of it as he can bear.^ " Take only such friends as will advance you in piety and virtue. Friends must give each other good counsel, and animate each other to the love of goodness. Do not exact from others that they love you as much as they can and ought, but exact this love from yourself for them. Reprove and warn your friend, but if he is not tractable, de- sist ; do not disgrace yourself." * Under the head of " Care for One's Self" are given very proper rules of good manners, which would be as pertinent to Western as to Chinese society. " Do not thrust out your ear to listen, nor answer in loud tones ; nor wag the head like an empty person ; nor strut ; nor sprawl the legs in sitting ; nor laugh at others ; nor speak precipitately ; nor maintain your views with obstinacy." " Honesty and equity will appear in the movements of your body, in sweetness of countenance, in kind words, in decent commands." ' Temperance as a part of decent behavior at meals is enforced by reference to ancient drinking laws, so careful of excess " that those who observed them could drink all day without intoxication." ^ ^ Siaa-hiao,U. i. = Ibid., II. ni » Ibid., II. iv. • Ibid., II. V. » Ibid., III. • Ibid., III. 206 STRUCTURES. Then follow examples of ideal characters, of which this literature knows no end ; and their frequent extravagance is often relieved by practical wisdom. A whipped boy cries for fear that his mother will weaken herself by the effort to punish him ; a princess keeps her faith as if married, after her lover's death ; another stands fast by her betrothed when he is stricken with contagious malady, saying, " his disease is mine ; " a foolish youth of high family reproves his mother for spinning, as an igno- ble employment, and receives in reply a lecture on the nobility of labor, ending thus : — " It is because I am concerned for the honor of our family that I often counsel you not to tarnish, by a useless life of pleasure, the noble record of your father." ^ Next come admirable maxims from various sources; such as the dying words of an emperor, to his son, — " Never allow yourself to do a wrong thing because it is a trifle, nor to neglect a good action because it seems mediocre ; " and the aphorism of a wise minister, — " He who is reckless of his own reputation dishonors his parents : from this flow the great vices ; " and the advice of another to a nephew who beset him for an office : — " Maintain in yourself always a sentiment of fear mingled with respect, and be assured that great application, and study of manners and government, are the real essentials to high position. Avoid every thing that would cause you to blush when you pay to others the respect that is their due : seek public good more than your own advantage. Beware the love of wine that has been the downfall of kingdoms. Speak little. Do not fall out with friends for a word. The ancients held flatterers in horror. You see me at the summit of grandeur, and on the brink of an abyss : pity me, and do not add to my burdens. Live retired ; fly celebrity and power. Heaven gives honors : wait its time. He who runs too fast, loses his labor. An old book says, ^ Stao-hiaoi IV. EDUCATION. 207 ' The whole day is not sufBcicnt for a happy man's power to do good, nor f(ir an unhappy man's to do evil.' " Sects are severely criticised for pretending to know the nature of spirits, and explain all phenomena. Here is a bit of theological common sense: — " Deluded men believe that presents to idols save them from hell, and open heaven j and that in hell people are cut to pieces, and burned ; not reflecting that at death the body is dissolved." The characteristic work-impulse is encouraged, and guided into patient conformity to the real conditions of success. " Learn one thing to-day and another to-morrow, and in time you will know an infinity of things ; discuss one thing to-day, and another to-morrow, and in time you will have fathomed an infinite number ; underl.ilco one hard thing to-day, and another to-morrow, and in time you will acquire constancy in meeting difficulties. Thus you will learn to love reason, and enjoy the delights which it has earned." " Wlicn Yao-kam, governor of Quan-chen, had nothing to do, he carried two bricks out of the house in the morning and brought them in again at evening, to keep himself in habits of work. Formerly, he said, the Prince Yu feared to lose a minute : should not a common man grudge it even more ? Seeing mandarins neglecting their duties for dice, he overthrew their tables, and flung their dice into the river." There are tales of hard-working men, who left their children security and ease instead of trouble and danger, teaching the wisdom of earning their way instead of seek- ing office ; of self-denying sons, heroic women, humane statesmen ; rich men who preferred making others happy with their wealth, to leaving it for their children as a bur- den or a snare. And the ethics of self-culture rise to a manly tone in such instructions as these : — " The most stupid people are wise in censuring others ; the most sharp-sighted are fools in censuring themselves. Change this method : m.-irk your own defects as you now mark those of other men, and their 208 STRUCTURES. defects as you now mark your own. But do not despair if you do not equal men who have raised themselves to lofty virtue." ' Its complete expression of the qualities of Chinese mo- rality, built into a permanent educational ideal and diffused throughout the Empire, renders the Siao-hiao a very sig- nificant element of culture, and must justify our extended analysis. The HiAO-KiNG is traditionally compiled by one disciple of Confucius from his answers to another.^ But The Hiao- jj-g j-q^I author is unknown. For at least a thou- sand years it has been a school-book of the Empire. It teaches the sco^e of " Filial Piety," which covers far wider ground than in any other system of faith ; and its philosophy, — based on the regulative harmonies of Nature, on the law of imitation, on reciprocal duties between those above and those beneath, and on the force of example, — is, in relation to Chinese social life, what the order of celestial movements and the exhaustless productivity of the earth are to the visible universe.^ In shojt, we have here the rationale of patriarchalism, and the simple, easy evolution of those beliefs and institutions that flow from the idea. The ethics of the nation are justified to the mind of its youth, while a deep rehgious element appears in the child-likeness of its faith in its own principle and law. Pan-kou, a great scholar, says of the Hiao-king, — " It is the Book of Heaven, the duty of Earth, the rule of action for peoples : every word elevates the heart." A few extracts will convey its substance. " Of filial piety the first principle is to preserve, in integrity and force, the bodies we have received from our parents ; its perfection is » Siao-hiao, V. VI. * Its eighteen short chapters are tran^ ated by Noel into Latin, by Fluquet into French, and by Bridgman into English. Chinese Repos. for 183s ; also La Chine Ouverie, pp. 257-259 Wylie, p. 7. 2 Hiao-king, ch. vii. EDUCATION. 20g in cultivation of virtue, and earning a name which does honor to their memory." " Its model is th? constancy of the heavenly bodies in procuring what is needed by the earth, and regulating the actions of men." " Of all virtues it is the greatest ; of all vices, none so great as the lack of it." " The kings of old, fulfilling it, would not dare despise an old person or a widow, nor one famed for wisdom or virtue. Prefects, following tiieir lead, failed not of good manners to their humblest servants. And domestics, won by this treatment, entered with joy into rites in honor of their own parents. Hence the whole Empire enjoyed peace." " One virtuous king draws after him a whole people. In honoring one, he makes an infinite multitude happy. Let a king therefore fear, as if walking on thin ice. Let fear of harming the memory of your parents have the first thoughts of your dreams, and let not sleep drive them away." The TsiEN-TSZE-WAN 1 is a quaint conceit of literature, con- taining just a thousand different characters ; teach- ing by its very structure the dainty love of manip- tsze^-wan!"" ulating these symbols, which absorbs so much of the national mind. Composed as a literary feat thirteen centuries ago, it has kept its ground as a text-book by rea- son of combining most elements inherent in Chinese char- acter. Concrete, prosaic, pedagogic, it backs unexceptionble moralities with practical examples, and treats the relations of natural phenomena to human life in an industrial in- terest quite suggestive of Hesiod's " Works and Days." Of course a Poor-Richard quality of motive runs through it, a take-care-of -ones elf virtue ; yet not without intima- tion of something higher. " Leave behind you only purposes of good, and strive so to act as 10 command respect. When satirized or admonished, examine your- self. And do this the more thoroughly when favors increase." " Let your step be even, and keep your head erect." " Command your thoughts, that you may be wise." « Translated in Chinese Repos. September, 183s; also Williams, I. 533. 14 2IO STRUCTURES. "Sounds reverberate through deep valleys and re-echo through vacant halls. Even so misery follows vice, and happiness virtue." Its bare enumeration of natural routines breathes the tranquillizing spirit that attends acceptance of orderly law. "The -heavens are sombre, the earth is of yellow hue. The whole universe was once one wide waste. The sun reaches the meridian and declines ; moons wax and wane ; In divisions and constellations are the stars arranged ; Heat and cold alternately prevail ; Autumn for ingathering, winter for hoarding np. Music harmonizes the two principles of Nature," &c. It is an acquiescent reassuring calendar of natural times and seasons ; the image of Chinese routine, of rotary, piv- otal motion. Enumerations are made in a true spirit of positivism, stating facts and relations, without seeking causes or dwelling on hidden powers. Similar is the Sax-tsze-king, compiled by a private The San- tcachcr six hundred years ago, and a school ,sze-idDg. text-book ever since.' Opening vrith a philosophy of imiversal education, — " All men, at birth, are by nature radically good,* But, if not educated, the natural character is changed," — It exhorts to study with undivided attention : — " As jade unwrought is imperfect material for vessels, so a man without education does not know what is right" Then follows the long list of things everybody should know, — the obvious facts of nature and experience strung on a thread of numerical categories, forms and elements being arranged for convenience to the memory, like our almanac doggerel about the length of months. ' Translated by Malan (1855), by Neumann (German) 1836, and by Bridgman. Ctsua Refm. Vf. ; also WDliams, I. 430. ' Or "sascepdbleof goodness*' (Neumann). EDUCATION. 211 The natural facts laid down, next comes a list of books classical, moral, historical, philosophical, the names of which are to be committed in view of future study ; then a summary of the national history, epitomizing the thirty dynasties for a similar purpose. " Have them in your mouth and recite them ; in your heart, and ponder them. In the morning be at the work, and in the evening also." The usual list of old sages and wonderful boys is brought out to inspire emulation, by their marvellous feats of per- severance and endurance, — the martyrology of learni7ig. Obvious analogies from nature are used to enforce the love of study ; and the whole argument points forward to final rewards of effort, in public advancement and the power of doing good. " Study in youth, and act in manhood ; you will approach the king, and bless the poor ; you will honor your own name, and shed lustre on your father's, and exalt your descendants'." " Some men leave gold to their children ; but I give them instruc- tion, and leave them a book." " There is merit in diligence, but no profit in idleness ; therefore I warn you to do your best." The same exhortation to make the most of opportunity and pay the honest price for success is the burden of the horn-books, books of proverbs, and children's rhymes that circulate in the schools. They are but versions of the Tri- metrical Classic. " Do not say your families are poor. Those that can handle the pencil, go where they will, need never beg for favors." " Civil and military office is not inherited, and men must rely on their own efforts. In all the world nothing is impossible; only the hearts of men want resolution." " Polish the mirror, and light is reflected ; sift the sand, and gold appears : And they who wish to learn must put forth all their powers." ^ * Chinese Repository^ 1835, P* 287. 212 STRUCTURES. Williams criticises the Trimetrical Classic, as well as Chinese school-books generally, as unfit for begin- christian ncrs bccause unprovided with sanctions, and com- Maienary pgtent Only to serve in a system of rote-learning. But let the reader compare its simple details, histor- ical, ethical, practical, and its every-day illustrations appeal- ing to the sense of duty, the love of culture and humanity, with the theological manual which has been constructed by a Protestant missionary on the same outward plan and un- der the same title, to supersede it.^ Here are propounded the mysteries of the Fall, of total depravity, atonement, resurrection, and final judgment ; of the efficacy of prayer and of divine grace, — abundantly supplying what our good missionary would call " the want of those powerful motives which the Bible contains as the sanctions of its precepts.'' Conceive of the experience of a Chinese child in reach- ing, by the path of paradoxes utterly inexpressible in his language, after the repulsive dogmas of man's nat- ural hatred of good, the impotence of human reason, and the wickedness of the heart, — the pure contradiction of every incentive and association capable of leading him to moral endeavor ! Somewhat more spiritual, as well as more comprehensi- ble to Chinese faculties, is the " Trimetrical Classic " The of the semi-Biblicised Tai-ping rebels ; ^ a curious Classic, farrago of Shemitic and Chinese theism, of Chris- tian personages transmuted by Chinese dress and traditions, of Old and New Testament mythology sketched in the dull gray color of Chinese concreteness ; Jesus, elder brother of the Tai-ping-wang, wived and domiciled in a Chinese heaven, and sent to frighten impish spirits. But the national taste intersperses even in this many simple and excellent moralities. * Chinese Repository^ 1855. * Ibid., 1855. EDUCATION. 213 How largely the moral element enters into the ideal of Chinese culture will appear from passages in which study is mentioned in the Confucian " Lun-yu," study as first of the five books which contain the teachings Confuoiua. of the " Great Master" and his disciples. The ex- tracts are not selected for their special excellence, but as forming the substance of what is there said about study, and presenting fairly the spirit of the Classics on the subject. Confucius describes the true scholar as one who, in per- formance of public duty, is " ready to sacrifice his life." "When the opportunity of gain is presented to him, he thinljs on virtue. He is reverent in sacrifice ; in mourning, absorbed in the sor- row he should feel. He who cherishes love of comfort is not fit to be a scholar. The main object of study is to unfold the aim ; with one who loves words, but does not improve, I can do nothing. The scholar's burden is perfection : is it not heavy ? It ends but with life: is it not enduring ? " ' "Learning is like raising a mound: if I stop with this basket of earth, it is my own fault. It is like throwing earth on the ground ; one basket at a time, yet I advance." ^ " The true scholar is not a mere utensil." " Leaving virtue without proper culture ; failing thoroughly to discuss what is learned ; being unable to move towards the righteousness of which knowledge is gained ; and being unable to change what is not good, — these are the things that (in my scholars) give me anxiety." ^ " If a man keeps cherishing his old knowledge, so as ever to acquire new, he may be a teacher of others." " I marked Yen- Yuen's constant advance ; I never saw him pause." " Often the blade springs, but the plant does not go on to flower : often the plant flowers, but pro- duces no fruit." * *' Having completed his studies, the scholar should devote himself to official functions. He should say, ' I am not concerned that I have no place : I am concerned how I shall fit myself for one. I am not con- cerned at not being known : I seek to be worthy to be known.' " ' > Lmyu.XIX. i; XIV. 3 ; IX. 23; VIII. 7. ' Ibid. IX. 18. • Ibid. II. 12 ; VIII. 3. * Ibid. II. 11 ; IX. 20, at. » Ibid. XIX. 13 i IV. 14. 214 STRUCTURES. Nothing can be manlier or humaner than the ethics taught the people by public reading of the " Sacred Edict " fte*"wd of Kang-hi with the commentary of Yung-ching.^ Edict. it-g counsels are worthy of Epictetus or Aurelius. A few sentences will suffice. " In every afFair retire a step, and you have an advantage." " Seeing men in haste, do not seelc to overtake them." " Each grass-blade has its drop of dew. The wild birds lay up no stores ; but heaven and earth are wide. Strange, indeed, if you can- not rest in the duties of your sphere.'.' " If you reject the iron, you will never make the steel." " To starve is a small matter, to lose one's virtue is a great one." " Covet not an empty name." " If treated rudely, return it not, but examine yourself." " The modest gain, the self-satisfied lose." " The more unlikely I am to be successful, the more diligently will I study. What have I to do with fate ? " " Teach children that in friendship one should be one, and two, two ; there must be no deception." " Let the root be good, and the fruit shall not be evil." " Culture in manners will make the blustering soldier view the Shi and Shu as his coat of mail." " Becoming manners shall bring back the lovely unity of ancient virtues. Do you think that, by bearing with insulting persons, I shall fall into dishonor ? " "Should right principles be separated from right manners, they would no longer be right principles. But without sincerity manners are mere apish bowing and scraping.'' " They who say conscience may be good enough, but it does not sup- ply one with food, are fit materials for the cord and the bamboo." " Set not others at variance. Suppress slanders, and protect the innocent. Frame not indictments to defraud and oppress." "Maintain a love of harmony, that throughout your families the common speech shall be, ' Let us help one another.' Then shall the world be at peace." " Let young and old be as one body ; their joys and sorrows as of one family. Let the instructed lead the way by example. Let the unity of the Empire extend to myriad countries, and spread harmony through the world." ' Translated by Milne, 1817. EDUCATION. 215 " Though at the height of fame, you ought in the watches of the night to lay your hand on your breast and ask yourself, ' Have I cause of shame, or not ? ' " These may serve as hints of the quality of the " Edicts," whose enlightened definitions and precepts cover every sphere of life. Their rationalistic spirit will he treated elsewhere. The drawback of a pedagogic and prescriptive manner is of course not lacking, and submission to impe- rial wisdom is their beginning and end. As the moral relations are expressed in a concrete ideal, in which no change is supposed possible, so they are embodied in rites and ceremonies v}\Ai^ share R>tesand their sacredness. As the child learns ideas in the ais."^ °'°"' form of actual written characters, so he conceives duties in the form of strictly regulated actions. Hence the prime importance of the " proprieties " in education. They are not affectations, but recognized as the natural order of conduct, the virtue of behavior. The Li-ki, or Book of Rites, says of music and ceremonies that " the one reforms the inward, the other the outward man. Whoso is thus perfected has joy in the heart, respect in sen- timents, sweetness in manners."^ The Li-ki has p«if basis been for ages the hand-book of that ritual or for- order. mal order, which is the reverse side of the moral order, as the latter rests on the cosmical. For the au- thority of fixed rules of behavior, while scarcely more absolute than that of fashion in Western society, is not, like fashion, detached from the highest law of ethics and faith, but strictly identical with it. To the Chi- nese, their ceremonial is simply man in his manifold rela- tions.^ Its minute rules, which appear to exhaust the possibilities of prescription, are believed to express man's « Li-ki, VIII. * The wide extent of tliese ritual relations is- unfolded in the Tchtou-li chapter on " Minifr try of Rites." 2l6 STRUCTURES. normal relations to the universe. They seem, in fact, to have historically grown out of the national consciousness of these relations, instead of being imposed by arbitrary authority or transient will. What they correspond with in Western life is not our etiquette, red tape, or religious formalism, but such conformities as are admitted by all of us to be natural and proper to all right performance of functions, and therefore of highest import. These con- formities would of course differ from those of the Chinese, being based on more complex relations and wider knowl- edge of nature, and hence more open to changes of detail ; but their ethical ground is really the same. Thus the mi- nute ritual of Chinese filial piety consists in routines of conduct which are recognized as beyond all question the best, and indeed the only, ways in which an ideal love and reverence can be fulfilled. It is sufficiently clear, from the spirit of these prescriptions, that this minuteness itself is simply an endeavor to inspire the whole of domestic life with real reverence and love. For the Oriental mind the very permanence of the form imports, not its rigidity, but the absoluteness of moral relation, and the pure content involved in whatever harmonizes with the constitution of (Oriental) man. "Ceremony," says Pan-kou, "is in no sense arbitrary ; in its establishment, men found their proper rules, and checked arbitrary force." We have here an exact opposite to the oppressive constraint of rites and observances imposed by a religious law in recognized antagonism with human nature, and revealed as alien to reason. So far, it is a form of evolution ; while the other is a form of subjugation. No Chinese boy is ever taught that the ceremonial is purposely enforced against his innate tendencies ; nor is the ground of its authority placed in mere antiquity, nor in arbitrary appointment or divine choice. It does not com- mend itself by the destruction of natural self-respect, but by EDUCATION. 217 its appeal to the highest assurances and aspirations of his social life. Let us cull the soul of the Li-ki, for it has a soul ; and Chu-hi says : " He who would study rites need only theLi-ki. glean from the Li-ki passages of sound morality ^phy of°^" and practical wisdom." ^ Upon this work it may ^'t^s. fairly be said that the State religion is substantially founded. Laws, according to this philosophy of manners, are of diverse origin. Some are copies of natural forms ; others (religious) proceed from the cultus of ancestors, breathing humanity and justice ; others {local), from mountains and rivers ; others {family), from the five domestic relations. *' Rites proceed from the one great Principle of all things, distin- guishing them, some for heaven, others for earth. When pro- claimed, they are called commandments ; but they are always copied from Heaven." ^ Here is no hint of a purpose to legitimate personal, even imperial, sway. The ceremonial goes behind what is ^ More than a thousand commentaries have been written on the Li-ki, three hundred of which remain, all dating previous to our age ; besides others continually added (Gallery). It is classed among the canonical books, and supposed to be founded on the I-li, or Ritual of Man- ners^ ascribed to the great Tcheou-kung, reputed author of the Tcheou-li, 1120 b.c. (Wylie.) These works, however, have faded out of sight, while the Li-ki still stands, having been, though without adequate proof, associated with the teachings of Confucius. Gallery's charge, that it puts unworthy sentiments into the mouth uf Confucius, Is not very well sustaiend ; and his con- clusion, that it was written from notes and fragments of his sayings, has as little proof as the old legend that seventy disciples compiled it from his own manuscripts. More probable is the suggestion that its diversities of style imply a slow process of accretion. It is a multifarious work, and deals in every thing relating to Chinese life. The I-li, Tcheou-li, and Li-ki may have drawn from common sources. The last can be traced with certainty to the Han revival of letters in the second century b-c, in which it figures as one of the recovered works of great value. But this was much larger than the present Li-ki, whose date must be about the com- mencement of the Christian era- It has ever since been regarded as a classic or Kin^. The history of its growth is given by Pauthier, from Pan-kou, in the Journal Asiatigue (Septem- ber and October, 1867); %^^ ?\%o Mk moires cone, les Chinois, II. 71-73; Schott, Entwurf, &C.,p. 17; andPlath, 5ay^A. Jan. 1870. It has been translated into French by Callery (Turin, 1853), who studied and spoke Chinese for twenty years, passing a long period as missionary in that country. He thinks the Li-ki " the most complete monograph that the Chinese have given to the world." Plath calls it "the most important of the old institutes." Williams thinks "it has had more effect than any other work on Chinese life." * Li-kif eh. viii. 2 1 8 STRUCTURES. called " divine right " of kings, or peoples, to the freedom of nature. Its inmost being is identical with that of man himself. " Man emanates (for moral part) from the virtue of Heaven and Earth ; (for physical) from the union of the two principles Yn and Yang ; (for spiritual) from the union of spirits and gods ; (for his proper form) from the subtlest essence of the five elements." i " Rites must be in harmony with the seasons, related with the pro- ductions of the earth, and accordant with the sentiment of man ; treat- ing all things according to their special nature." " Their symbolism, then, does not follow arbitrary beliefs, but the order of the universe. It is the record of an im- memorial moral loyalty, an organized conviction ; and the Li-ki devotes much space to the physical and moral signifi- cance of each observance, — such as attitudes towards the quarters of heaven, gradations according to age at feasts, archery, the use of jade, the marriage rite.^ Thus, "tak- ing the virile hat " is the " beginning of rites ; " since " It is not till fihal piety, fraternal regard, fidelity, and loyalty arc well estabhshed, that one is truly a man : and only when he is a man can he govern others." * '' " Confucius said, ' Why should I speak so confidently (about rites) ? Because I know perfectly the way of acting suitable to each enter- prise.' " 5 " Rites are ways of regulating things : the wise has always a way for all things in life ; the wise does nothing without rule." ^ " Without rites, virtue and justice are not perfect, nor is education in manners complete. Nothing is sincere or grave in prayers, sacri- fices, worship of gods or spirits, without observing them." ' " By rites, nearness or distance of relationship appears ; doubts are solved ; true and false set in clear light." ^ Thus their morality is not formal only, but real. "To practise rites without justice as basis, is to labor and not plant." ' ' Zi-ii, ch. Tiii. ' Li-i{, ch. ix. » Ibid., chs. be, x., xvi., xxjc-xnT. * Ibid., ch. XXX. ' Ibid., ch. ix. « Ibid., ch. xxiii. ' Ibid, ch. i. » Ibid. • Ibid., ch. viii. EDUCATION. 219 " Think you that to prepare tables, offer wine, or drink health is to be called a rite ; that to march about with staves, striking bells and drums, is to make music ? To speak, and (then) act accordingly, that is ritual ; to act and find joy therein, that is music." 1 " Confucius said, ' Return we to ourselves.' The wise has no need of affectation to appear modest, nor of severity to appear grave ; nor of speech to inspire respect ... He will blush to have speech without the virtues that correspond to it, or to have these virtues without putting them in practice. It is for this reason, that when he is clothed with a mourning dress he looks sad ; and when he wears the helmet he has the air of one whom it will not do to offend." ^ The highest morality is spoken of in direct line with the observance of rites, as if they were but the reverse side of the same ideal. " Wen-tze, Minister of T'sin, had a modesty which made him assume a bended attitude, as if wanting strength to hold up his dress. His words were measured, as if he was tongue-tied. He raised more than seventy persons to high office in finance, yet in his whole life he never took a bribe." ^ " Compose your exterior ; listen with respect. Do. not appropriate the sayings of others, nor blindly accept all you hear. These the wise maxims of our oldest kings." * " The frince must respect the old ; he must remain outside his chariot till he has passed where the great dignitaries sit." ' Respect for the lowly and for teachers, care for comfort of the poor and of colonists, and for the rights of farmers to rest from government-work in hard seasons, filial piety and well-ordered feasts for old men, speaking truth and making peace, — are prescribed in this Book of Ceremonies as the ritual of royalty. " A good emperor uses the justice and order established by the rites to rule human passions." * So the sage's composure is simply the air natural to his self-respect. > Li-ki, ch. xxiii. ' Ibid., ch. xxvi ' Ibid., ch. iv. « Ibid., ch. i. = Ibid. ° Ibid., ch. viii. 220 STRUCTURES. " The wise man carries an empty thing with the same calm move- ment as if it were full ; enters a place where no one is with the same gravity as if there were people there." ^ A part of his ceremonial is independence. " A sage has said, ' A great virtue is not absorbed by a single pub- lic oiRce ; a great capacity should not be limited like a utensil ; nor a great loyalty be bound down to terms of contract ; nor a great epoch to such and such seasons and events." ^ " The wise respects all men, but most himself ; obeying the measure and limits of right." " What is it to attain perfection of the person ? Nothing else than to maintain one's self in duty." ^ Education itself is reduced in the Li-ki to so definite a system of rules, that it seems to fall fairly enough tocher within the scope of a " Memorial of Rites." But andpupu. these rules have a natural basis. " All study should be directed towards learning what properly be- longs to the function one is to fulfil : if it is letters, the true prepara- tion is no othef than virtue." " Of old, examination was made the first year to discover the amount of intelligence in the pupil ; the third year, to learn what occupation he enjoyed and what company he liked ; the seventh, if he could discuss what Le had learned, and who were his friends, — this secured a lower grade of rank ; the ninth year his knowledge of relations, his insight, and the firmness of his principles were tested, and this opened the higher grade." " Young pupils must be taught to listen, but not ask questions beyond their stage, nor jump from class to class : the teacher can vary methods according to capacity, and the ability to do this wisely makes the good teacher, who is equally fit to be a ruler, since the wisdom required for both functions is the same." " In higher schools the great art is to prevent vices not yet apparent, by seizing the proper moment and profiting by time : the true stimulants are to restrain over-haste in passing from grade to grade, and to let the pupils note each other's progress." ^ On these generalities are based the Rites of Instruction, whence is deduced a truth, still unappreciated, even in our * Li-ki, ch. xiv. 2 Ibid., ch. xv. ' Ibid., ch. xxii. * Ibid., ch. xv. EDUCATION. 221 own school systems, that the choice of teachers cannot be 00 carefully made nor the function too highly honored. A prince's deference to his teacher is homage to virtue, and the people are taught to respect study. In two cases, as to the treatment due the representative of ancestors in religious rites, and the teacher in the exercise of his function, the prince should not act towards men as sub- jects.i To teachers certain forms of etiquette at court are remitted. Religious rites are founded in the same respect for moral laws. " Only a man of eminent virtue can properly sacrifice to tlie Su- preme ; only the pious son to his parents." ^ " Sacrifices are for him who has made good laws ; to him who has suffered through his zeal for the public good ; to him who has borne much toil in giving peace to the Empire ; to him who has prevented a great calamity." ^ " The pious son walks to the sacrificial rite with timid air, as fear- ing his filial love is not great enough. In the libation he bends his body as if he would speak to his parents, and drives away all wander- ing thoughts. After sacrifice he moves away slowly, not suffering his eyes and ears to stray from his heart, nor his thought from his father and mother. Respect and love must show themselves in all his per- son." * We do not enter into the details of ceremonial forms, because it is more important to vindicate the prin- ciple of moral fitness and natural order on which Educated , in mutual they are based in the national mind. However respect. childish and commonplace these minute prescrip- tions may appear to us, they are its direct inference from this principle, and are accepted as absolute types of the allegiance of mankind to this law. Many of them, as in instances already given, really approach that value ; and, notwithstanding the pettiness and formalism involved » Li-ki, ch. XV. ' Ibid., ch xix. ' Ibid., ch. xviii. ' Ibid., ch. xix. 222 STRUCTURES. in all ritual performance, must serve to educate a delicate mutual consideration and social respect, — the absence of. which is poorly compensated by any form of "liberty" that recognizes no law of manners beyond individual caprice. But there is another aspect of the Rites. It is best in- Distinction dicated by those passages in the Li-ki which point between ^^^ ^-^^ distinction between Rites and Music, the rites and music. third great element of Chinese education. " Music makes unfty in the sentiments ; rites establish distinctions between classes of persons: unity produces affection; differences, respect ; — in rites the noble are distinguished from the common, but in music accord is effected between them. Music has harmony, like that which exists between heaven and earth ; rites have gradations similar to those which exist between different beings therein. All beings having different modes of existence, rites were instituted. The unceasing mutual movement of heaven and earth gives birth to all things; hence springs rnusic. Related to music is humanity ; related to rites is justice. Music answers to heaven, rites to earth. When both are rightly combined, heaven and earth move perfectly, all things grow, and all creatures are blest." ^ This definition seems to point to the ceremonial as a means of maintaining social subordinations : the differ- entiating element in nature, human as well as cosmical, finds expression in its forms of obeisance. But we must mark the immense difference in meaning from the corre- sponding Hindu principle of castes, or the fixed hereditary classes of feudalism. China recognizes neither of these. From the palace to the hovel the doors stand open, and there are no essential distinctions between men. But the son of Han believes in the sacredness of social organiza- tion, and in the permanence of those distinctive functions which are founded on natural relations and on the theory of civil and political life. And it is these differences of function, — not claims of persons and permanent classes, — that rites are supposed to maintain in their integrity. * Li-kU ch. xvi. EDUCATION. 223 Music is the complement of rites.i based on harmonies as they are on diversities, — representing humanity as they represent justice. It should seem, therefore, to be more fundamental, as unity is more essential than differences. In fact the Li-ki expressly declares that " Rites are from without, music from within. As rites hold the place of finite beings, so music holds the place of the great Principle of all things (Tai-ki), in knowing which the knowledge of rites is involved." ^ "Both possessed together constitute virtue, — which means pos- session, and gives power to do all things without effort." ^ We have here a Chinese expression for the freedom of one whose faith and works are from one root. For this prosaic people, also, music is the world of the ideal. " Only the wise comprehends it." * It sig- nifies the power of sentiment, the inward mystic Chinese force that blends all differences of outward rela- muL° tion in a common humanity. This is the sub- stance of the Memorial Chapter of the Li-ki, devoted to the subject. " Rites are justice ; music is humanity." As with the Greeks, so here it played a large part in the theory of education, — especially as the divine method of harmo- nizing passions and guiding the whole emotional nature ; and to this end the airs suited for different moral effects were not only carefully distinguished, but, as in the Tcheou- li,^ subdivided with a characteristic minuteness that could have had but little bearing on actual life. The virtues thus made dependent on music are those which make the Chi- nese ideal, — observing the just mean, concord, veneration for spirits, respect for superiors, filial love, and friend- ship. Modes of musical conversation ; musical dances, with strange barbaric titles ; the six perfect (Yang) and six * Commentary to Tcheou-li, B. xvtli., 44. * Li-ki, ch. xvi. * Ibid. So the Tcheou-li, B. xviii. ; see Comment, on Sect. 43 and 44. * Li-ki, ch. xvi. » Tcheou-li, B. xxii. 224 STRUCTURES. imperfect (Yin) tones ; the eight sounds produced by va- rious substances ; the nine grand airs suited for bringing man into close relations with spirits, with animals, and stars, so as, Orpheus-like, to move their powers ; and the styles suited for saluting the different seasons, for the feasts of old men and husbandmen, for great public occa- sions of all kinds, — all under the supervision of the Court Minister of Musical Instruction, — make up the extraordi- nary picture of music which the unknown authors of the Tcheou-li ^ have constructed to match some national idea, which it is impossible to verify as historical institution. The representation is, however, interesting, as a sign of the earnestness with which the idea of harmony as a human force was traced through every realm of nature and society. " The ancients were ashamed of the disorderly expression of joy ; hence chants were devised to regulate it, so as in different ways to move the human heart to good." ^ The Li-ki traces the relations of music to bodily evolu- tions ; and Confucius explains its effects by defining it as an " image of actions and events." The inevitable want of spontaneity and moral energy is less apparent in the Chinese ceremonial, on ac- Form^Xm. couut of these relations to essential morality. The tone of education, of which it forms so important an element, is, nevertheless, as "we all know, to the last de- gree pedagogic. This matter-of-fact race moves in ruts of predetermined purpose. Their ideal is a disciplined con- formity to precept. Reaction of the mind on the materials given it, reconstruction of the past in the light of fresh experience, and sense of creative force, are unprovided for Result of in the system. Patriarchalism does not contem- ^aiTC"' P'^te emancipation from parental care, in this life or in another. Thus its idea of a teacher is not of ^ Tcheou-li, Bb. xxii. and xxili. ' Li-kif ch. xvi. EDUCATION. 225 one who brings forth true manhood from the child by right suggestion, but of a providence that feeds him with infusions duly prepared ; just as its idea of a ruler is that of a protector. Government is defined as " providing for the wants of the people without indifference or neglect, tracing for each person his duties, according to position, and not needlessly multiplying his obligations." The peo- ple, though of supreme dignity, are for ever a little child. State and school alike represent the effort to meet man's need of conformity to a higher law than private r . , . , . Chinese rancy, caprice, or power ; but without recognition education of the equal necessity for personal liberty to test, "■«<:°6pi2es -^ universal doubt, choose, as to the special mode of fulfilling laws be- such higher law. This liberty, which is man's edu- ^'^^p;^- _ ^ ^ vate will. cation in the meaning of duty, is buried under reit- erated maxims of antiquity, assumed to carry this meaning with them in its perfected state. All possible cases being settled by rule beforehand, a deliberate appeal to reason in unlooked-for emergencies becomes impossible, and the plodding routine is vexed by any sudden violation into helpless panic, and even a kind of madness ; whence the violent outbreaks that surprise us in so peace-loving a race. But the suppression of spontaneity by these perpetual didactics is even worse than the suppression of deliberate search and choice. The vitality of the moral sense depends on impulse and direction from within. How much more readily we spring to a duty that is conceived by ourselves or only hinted by another, than to one that is stated and prescribed ! It would not be strange if the Chinese were specially deficient in the very virtues most forced on the jaded attention by rote-and-task work. It is not in China only that ears grow dull to precepts, and limbs are hardened against the goads of law and gospel. Even in China, were there no reaction, that great civilization could not have endured. Elsewhere the protest is more trenchant. The '5 226 STRUCTURES. most cherished systems, the highest names, having become prescriptive ideals enforced by organization, routine, text, are giving way to new types and symbols, simply because we demand fresh associations that time and authority have not spoiled. Such spiritual life as is not paralyzed by their incessant repetition forsakes them, and no galvanic shocks nor rallying slaps can make the dead body live. For heathen, Jew, Christian, the same law of character holds. Old rituals and symbols must give place to new gospels. In Church, State, School, incessant blast of law and text suppresses the natural heat, or else drives it to reaction against their mechanism, — which is of course the only result consistent with health. The schools of America and of China alike demonstrate that the danger of doing too much is quite equal to overfeach- ^^^^ *^^ doiug too little, in the way of instruction, ing in the Our science has broken up much traditional routine. West alike, ^-^d its stimulus to frccdom can hardly be overrated. But science is as perilous a master in education as any other. The inconceivable heaps of detail and phrase- ology, the rote-work of rapid processes assumed to be the best because rapid, the applied mechanism of culture aiming at effective exhibition, as seen in drill and concerted per- formances, reduce the reading, writing, speaking, thinking in our public schools to a set of uniformities, as destructive of individual genius as the old jejune Chinese routines. The importance of the idea justifies repeated reference. In the plethora of knowledge, as well as its poverty, 'lurks the old snare of patriarchalism. There is the same attempt to read into the child's mind the accumulated wisdom of maturity, while leaving no room for the play of his own faculties. Here the same tyranny of method folds him, with ancestral care, in a rigid machinery of discipline, in the interest of educational and social economies. EDUCATION. 227 I* Rules must be imparted ; but the passion for imparting rules is the bane of education. Schools must have organization ; but the sacrifice of personality to The pas- organization is the return to barbarism.- The child fo°m.dL must learn the laws of Nature ; but let him model its forms with his own hands, and feel the sense of dis- covery, and even creativity, whenever he learns a law. A pure conformity to laws, felt as producing truth and beauty under one's own self-conscious will, is the inspiration of culture ; but it is the feeling that makes this conformity to be life rather than death. The didactics of a theology that repudiates nature would have proved at least as suppressive of freedom and progress in Europe, as the didactics of a natural w°7tes-° morality embodied in educational routines have capes ex- been in China, but for the secular influences of fu- didactics, sion among bold, ardent, and enterprising races in love not with the old but with the new. The long reign and development of Christian dogma made indispensable an emancipation of European thought ; which came by trade and science, and the renaissance of classical culture. Science itself is subjecting us to the perils of a peda- gogic phase, as prescriptive religion has already done. But for East and West alike, great contrasts and contacts of differing civilizations, with revolutions in religious thought, prepare the antidote, whose scope will be as wide as its process is effective. The Chinese will wonder at our assumptions and rou- tines'as we at theirs, and the revelation of dangers „ ' =". Mutual and duties will perhaps be mutual. Meanwhile, heip-ofthe we may profitably notice the entire absence of theological exclusiveness, and even dogma, from the Chinese school system. Education is as secular as pos- sible ; and those controversies are escaped which coricern not the essence of morality or religion, but the authority of East and West. 228 STRUCTURES. supernatural dogmas, persons, and books. Instruction in China was never in the hands of monks or priests. As the only pure example of secular education on a great scale, it deserves our close examination. Chinese culture is a process of evolution, whose germs are iA the town and village schools, and expand The com- ° ^ examina- tions. petiiive into detailed adaptations to pubUc wants through a graded series of competitive examinations ; the ultimate point being the supply of civil and pohti- cal administrative force. This is the motive power of the process. Its severe tests are a constant sifting of faculty under the law of " survival of the fittest ; " and the limited number of public functions, compared with the number of competitors in these examinations, makes them a fair illus- tration of the laws of "natural selection." It is thus a kind of applied Darwinism, in which Chinese " immobility " sup- plies the place of the immutabilities of Nature. Whatever its defects, it is a singularly original and profound concep- tion of the Chinese mind, and one of the greatest contri- butions to the philosophy of education in human history. It elevates the school to the place of chief corner-stone in civilization, makes popular culture the basis of government, and carefully tested fitness the ground of official position. No pains have been spared to make this process of selection thorough, and even to utilize the failure of individuals to meet its tests. Its principle of securing the best men for public office, so elaborately wrought out, is the grand justi- fication of our third main element in Chinese character, — its minute fidelity to the conditions of right work. Of this most interesting system, brought substantially to its present form during the period between the eighth and twelfth centuries,! we shall now sketch the main features 1 Neumann, Lehrsaal d, Mittelreiches, p. 6. EDUCATION. 229 I. The bachelor's degree, Sin-tsai (Flowering Talents), is the reward of success in three examinations, 11 ■ 1 ■ The three held annually in the district capitals, after pre- Degrees, liminary visitation of the schools by officials who prepare and pass up hsts of candidates. It is conferred by the literary chancellor of the province, who is usually a member of the Han-lin, or of a governmental Board at Pe-king.i The perquisites of this degree are a certain posi- tion and badge, immunity from corporeal punishment and right of trial for offences by a literary tribunal ; but its chief value for the aspirant to public life is that it qualifies him to be a candidate for the second degree. The impris- oned competitors write essays on themes appointed by the chancellor, and but few reach the bachelorship awarded for the best handwriting and style. The standard is kept at a level by limiting the number of diplomas obtainable in each district.^ II. The next stage is the rank of Ku-jin (Promoted Men), conferred on success at triennial examinations held in the provincial capitals before two imperial commissioners, and simultaneously in all. The occasion corresponds to our election days in its national character, exciting the highest interest, and concentrating personal and patriotic feeling. Crowded cities testify eager sympathy with the competi- tion, which has so direct a bearing on the future of the whole community. The number of candidates in each province will average six or seven thousand, and sometimes amounts to thrice that number.^ The trial lasts nine days, proving at once the earnestness of the system and the tre- mendous forces of competition when organized on a national scale. It is by far the severest of the three trials for hterary honors. The harshness of its solitary confinement day and night within narrow cells, exposed to wind and rain with- out a single article of comfort, and its intense mental > Doolittle, I. ch. xv. ; Williams, I. 437. ^ Doolittle, I. 332. * Brine, p. 2i. 230 STRUCTURES. concentration, especially on the memory, resemble the asceticism of Hindu or Christian monks, — a literary as theirs was a religious enthusiasm, — and result in frequent cases of exhaustion, paralysis, and death, especially among the old.^ As monachism was mostly the creature of an ecclesiastical police, so this competitive system is under the strict watch of officials, who search the candidate when he enters his cell, see that he does not leave it on any pre- tence, and bring out the victims, if such there should be, for their friends to carry away. All ages, as well as ranks, participate in the intellectual struggle. Dr. Martin men- tions a list of ninety-nine successful competitors, in which sixteen were over forty years of age, one was sixty-two, and another eighty-three ! ^ The successful cannot num- ber more than a tenth of the whole, and disappointment at failure often ends in suicide. Proclamations and military salutes greet the victors ; runners and carrier-doves are in waiting, and boatmen lie on their oars, ready to compete for the rewards of spreading the news of their success. Like the Greek athletes, these more peaceful conquerors are honored with olive boughs borne in procession by boys. Thanksgivings are paid to Heaven and Earth, an- cestors blessed, and living relatives put on festive robes.^ Of these licentiates, 1,300 to 2,000 are created triennially. HI. A triennial examination of Ku-jin confers the mas- ter's degree of tsin-tsze. This diploma, awarded in larger proportion to the number of candidates than the rest, se- cures introduction to the Emperor, and the three highest on the list receive special official rewards at his hand.* From 1 50 to 400 members of this literary knighthood are created every three years. Many are selected for special functions »r tasks desired by the State ; and most receive district or ^ Meadows's Ckitiese and their JieSel^ionSt itp. 405-6; Lockhart, Mgd. Miss, in Chintz- p. 16. * Article on Chin. Compet. Examinations {N. A . Rev. 1870). ' Doolittle, I. 413, 414. « Williams, I. 445. The Han- lin. EDUCATION. 231 provincial offices, distributed by lot. The examination lasts thirteen days,^ and is conducted by the highest officials. Finally, the tsin-tsze compete for admission into the Im- perial Academy, the highest literary body in the State ; whose labors are pursued under the direct supervision of the Emperor, and represent that supremacy of literary culture among the elements of na- tional life, on which Chinese civilization rests. The Han- lin, or " Forest of Pencils," received its name from the employment of a host of scribes in the transcription of books, by the emperor Tai-tsung of the T'ang dynasty, 1,200 years ago, before the invention of printing ; constitut- ing but a portion of the tasks assigned by this scholarly and liberal prince to his ablest literati, of which this Academy was the result.^ Its members are the national historians, poets, translators, and commentators ; encyclopedists, lexi- cographers, compilers on a great scale. They frame docu- ments for public uses, patents, titles, addresses, and prayers, inscriptions on state seals and on public monuments. They are the Emperor's councillors, censors, recorders of his daily doings, and assistants at his studies, reading and expound- ing the classical writings ; high examiners in the provinces, publishers of the best essays there produced, and general managers of education. All their functions are, however, under supreme direction ; and their numerous branches, composed of Manchu and Chinese in about equal propor- tions, are organized with much care for the purposes of national centralization. A place in this literary House of Peers, whose active members number but about seventy, is of course the highest goal of personal ambition, especially as it is a result of open competition, and the reward of real ability. The examination is triennial, and held in the palace in presence of thfe highest personages of the realm.^ • Flath. " Martin, N, A. Rsv. 1874; Bazin, yourn. Asiat., January, 1858. » Ibid. 232 STRUCTURES. The culmination of this pyramid of national endeavor is The lau- the choice, every third year, of a literary laureate, reate. the symboUc glory and crown of the Confucian institutions, who receives honors second only to those of imperial dignity itself. We complete the picture of competitive culture when we add the trials in archery, horsemanship, and strength intro- duced by the present dynasty among the imperial troops. They are of a very primitive character, and imply no sys tematic military education whatever.^ Of the scope of studies comprehended in these examina- tions we may at least say that the term literature The ma- is cocxtcnsive with the objects of public spheres study. and functions. The themes of the common-school programme are taken from the Confucian books. The main object being to learn how to write and compose, the first reward is given to the best essayists on matters suggested by the study of these works, which illustrate in a great variety of ways the duties and opportunities of the State. There is but little teaching in branches of special science outside these and other similar compends of moral and historical principles. The arts and sciences are taught in China only in their actual manipulation, on which the youth enters without preliminaries. Their principles are studied only in the concrete process. But if the old adage be true, that " he who knows the powers of ten thousand written characters is qualified for the degree of bachelor," the task of attaining this honor will certainly bear com- parison with the labors of students in the lower schools of other countries. It must bring training to the eye and to the memory, and enforce the association of forms with facts, of names with things. 'Williams, I. 446; Doolittle, I. ch. xvi. ; Chinese Repos., 1835; Plath, i'£'Aa& ana Unierruht\n Alt. China (Bayer. Akad., Juli, 1S68). EDUCATION. 233 At the higher schools a broader range is taken, and the examination for Hcentiates adds the Five Kings (or Sacred Classics) and their commentaries, embracing the whole substance of Chinese thought in all times. ^ The scholars are invited to show all they know on astronomy, topog- raphy, the political divisions of the Empire and the history of changes therein, as well as on questions of literary criti- cism and the schools of commentators ; on the treasures of the libraries, their collection and destruction ; on the his- tory of military rules, hydraulic and agricultural achieve- ments, and the currency.^ Penmanship figures at the end, as at the beginning, of the series. The length of time and mass of literary records covered by these questions demand of the essayist great research. The critical faculty is brought into ex- 1^^^^ ercise, and within the limits set by Chinese rever- brought ence for the past there is a place for original "se.^''^'" judgment and for fresh combination of the old materials to new suggestions. The bounds are set rather in mental organization than in the nature of the questions, which are of the widest bearing.^ The concentrated rev- erence brought to bear on literary treasures as such, and the practical application of them to governmental affairs, are themselves an education in refinement and taste which places China among the first of nations in the scale of civilization. That extreme regard to precise and perfect expression, which has prescribed minute rules for the struc- ture of these competitive essays, cultivates, like Greek letters, many delicate moral and aesthetic qualities which offset their mechanical ton*e, and which are less conspicuous in the freer literature of the West. On the one hand, the highest merit of these essays is to contain abundant cita- • Doolittlo's Account of the Fu-chau Colleges, I. 378. ^ Brine and others. s In Meadows, Chinese Rebellioits, p. 404, there is a paper from the Shanghai Almatuu iescriptive of these questions. 234 STRUCTURES. tions from classical authorities ; and the specimens we have at command are exceedingly commonplace, ringing verbal changes on the power of example, the expansive force of virtue from the man to the mass, the prince to the people, the importance of the national virtues of polite- ness and mutual deference, the adaptation of qualities to functions, and the sacredness of filial and fraternal piety. But, on the other hand, we shall not do justice to this end- less moral iteration if we do not weigh well its persistency, its enthusiasm, and the faith of three hundred millions in the all-sufficienty of its eternal basis to preserve the State. Nor has any other known system come so near to practical success in securing the best talent of a people to the public service. In its strict adherence to the national classics, this Chi- nese curriculum may be compared with the regula- £rom°^'" tions of the rigid Christian Emperor Justinian for Christen- the study of Roman law, after he had reconstructed the Corpus Juris in the sixth century. No com- mentary was allowed the student, who must study the Digests alone for five years. ^ The " Trivium and Quadrivium " of the mediaeval col- leges were quite as jejune as the Chinese programme in respect lof positive science, though comprising rhetoric, logic, grammar, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, music Seneca mentions the same, all but the first two, as the sum of Roman teachings, in his day. The Chinese course yields at least an acquaintance with the whole, history of public administration, from abundant records, for more than two thousand years. The* way is certainly opened here for engrafting as broad a scientific training as the more expanded social experience of the West imparts. The abuses of the competitive system are perhaps not * Hadley's RoTnan Law, p. 19. EDUCATION. 23s greater than so vast and complicated a mechanism — so beset with incentives to private ambition and self- Abuses o£ aggrandizement — of necessity involves. They are p"^,;^^"' bribery of the examiners and of the attendants ; system. forgery of diplomas ; purchase of honors by subscription to public works ; brains of poor but able scholars loaned to write essays in the name of rich and stupid ones ; betting on the chances of candidates ; and the sale of degrees by Govern- ment whenever its financial resources fail, — as especially during the last half century of wars, rebellions, and public calamities. The last-mentioned vice is in such utter viola- tion of the whole spirit of the system, so incompatible with its very existence, that it -must be exceptional.^ Strong protests have in fact been made to the Emperor, showing how cruelly it deprived real licentiates of their just earn- ings. In 1822 it was urged by the censors that five thousand' doctors and twenty-seven thousand licentiates were waiting employment. What a hive of discontent is here! A bad case for Chinese political virtue is set forth by some of the missionaries who have detailed these abuses ; ^ but after our American experience it will hardly be maintained that the sale of "button-scrip" in China is an anomaly in political history, or a special result of heathenism. It is scarcely fair to reckon among the abuses of the system the gift of offices properly the perquisite of licen- tiates, for patriotic services, and for conspicuous talent and fidelity. This is rather a proof of its power of expand- ing beyond formal routine, to recognize noble and saving work outside the schools. It supplements the purely ht- erary element with practical checks and balances of obvi- ous advantage. Williams, by no means a partial witness, allows thai » Lockhart, p. 6. ' Especially by Doolittle. 236 STRUCTURES. " the highest officers carry on the unwieldy machine Its moral wlth 3. degree of integrity, patriotism, industry, results. ^j^j good Order which shows that the leading minds in it are well chosen." ^ Public opinion compels a reasonable fairness in the conduct of these literary camps,, whence issue every three years a band of well-drilled, ready-witted, and enlarged statesmen of the Chinese stamp.2 These have the self-respect of persons conscious of having earned their positions by fair and open competi- tion. We may well believe the statement of Dr. Martin, that they are the best specimens of the educated classes, and that they are held by public opinion to a high stand- ard of ability, as well as of devotion to the general inter- ests of education.^ The Han-lin scholars, whose science has its share of delusions, and whose memoirs are but a meagre and trivial record of imperial doings, adminis- ter public and provincial affairs with energy, publish a vast amount of literature, and exhibit the fruits of their training in a wonderful development of memory, acute- ness, and literary taste, which is wholly at the service of the State. Mandarins who have bought degrees are not treated with respect.* Those who ride into office on the paid work of others are styled " siu-tsai on the crupper." Forged diplomas are against the pecuniary interest of the examiners, and the crime is apt to be severely pursued and punished.^ The law has strong precautions to prevent collusion between examiners and students.^ The students are equally interested in fair-dealing, and frequently rise in concert against injustice on the part of the State offi- cials in charge of examinations.^ That there is compar- atively little corruption^ in the general management is but ' Middle Kingdom, I. 451. » Chinese Repos., July, 1835. ' North American Review, 1870. * De Mas, II. 334. * La Chine Ouverte, p. 224. " Doolittle, I. 427. Williams, I. 453. • Martin, in yourn. Am. Or. Soc, May, i8C)9. EDUCATION. 237 the natural result of these causes. The President of the Board of Examiners at Pe-king was recently put to death for issuing fraudulent degrees.-^ To debase this system is to overturn the very corner-stones of Chinese opportu- nity and faith. Even the disappointed competitors flung off by its relent- less mechanism serve to strengthen it ; for Chinese culture knows no refuse, but returns every thing in some form back to the soil. These victims of the system are provided for. They are the village schoolmasters, the private in- structors, the petty officers without national weight. They are also the protestant element, that helps save the system by revolt against its pedagogy and its merciless rigidity of grasp. Most rebellions in China, safety-valves to its conservatism, originate in disappointed literary ambition, the efforts of defeated candidates to make themselves a career. Beyond question this educational system, so centralized and so uniform, is the real unitary force that over- comes local differences and natural barriers over ^'4^^^°'^^^^ the vast area of the Empire, by giving every man an equal interest in the whole nation. The Chinese could never have fallen upon it by chance, or by the inventive genius of any man ; nor indeed by any other fact is it explicable but the marvellous force of solidarity which resides in this self-organizing race, whose central motive is never in the individual, but in the whole. By its steady circulations, the philosophy of life and duty adherent to the national type becomes a common treasure in its high- est and fullest meaning, — a heritage of all generations ; literature and patriotism are identified, as soul and body ; real study absorbs the youth, to the exclusion of political manoeuvre ; an ideal test and standard animates all effort, ■ Martin, in ymrn Am. Or. Sac, May, 869. 238 STRUCTURES. incessant and inevitable ; a democratic principle of free competition counteracts the absolutism of patriarchal gov- ernment, sifting out the energy, talent, and devotion of the masses ; offices are filled from the ranks of those who comprehend the public needs. In a word, the school-house is a nursery of public duties and national aims ; nor are there wanting records of its being used for public meet- ings, in which free criticism of the Government found utterance. These are, each and all, profoundly important elements of national good. So far as the unprogressive round of Chinese experience permits them to go, they are real powers, protective and directive ; and so vital and supreme over personal caprice that they may be regarded as supplying what we shall venture, at some risk of being misconceived, to call Xhe constitiitiofial charter of Chinese free- dam. It seems to have been a gradual result of the sense of national unity, which followed the abolition of feudal- ized States by the Chinese Charlemagne, Chi-hwang-ti, in the third century, b.c. We shall hereafter have occasion to study more care- fully the actual influence of this constant supply of OSes. tested officials to the public ser\'ice, in securing so long a lifetime to the Chinese Empire. At present we need only point to the equity of the s)'stem and its universal opportunity, to its appeal to the natural tests of character, to its stimulative qualities, the scope of the interest it awakens, and its reach down to that best principle of administration, the right of those alone to official position who have earned it by discipline and fit- ness. These grounds suffice to excite our admiration at the wisdom that created out of the patriarchal absolutism of the East, without scientific or external aid, such a polit- ical system of rational economies, as well as of checks and balances to control despotism, as this. They prepare us to listen with respect even to the enthusiastic testimony EDUCATION. (239 recorded by competent observers of its working results. Speer was so impressed by the jubilee with which the suc- cessful candidates are greeted, as to shed tears at the thought that no such sublime and delightful spectacles were witnessed in his own country.^ " Whatever imperfections may attach to her system," says Dr. Martin, " China has devised the most effectual method of encouraging effort and rewarding merit. Here is at least one country where wealth is not allowed to raise its possessor to a seat of power ; where even the will of an emperor cannot bestow its offices on uneducated favorites ; and where the ca- price of the multitude is not permitted to confer the honors of the State on incompetent demagogues."^ The most serious defect of this system is its exclusion of woman. The prejudice against female educa- tion universal in the East might even seem to be offemai'es! intensified in China, by an absorption of the whole educational idea in the interests of that one sphere which has been in almost all ages monopolized by the other sex. The term political disfranchisement is hardly applicable in China ; but the absence of what is embraced in polit- ical education suppresses of course the most powerful stimulus of the intellectual life. The educational condi- tion of the poorest class of women must be deplorable, as it is in every country of Christendom : yet such statements as Bridgman's, that not more than one in a hundred females can read, and Morrison's, that no poor women can read, and but few rich, can hardly be accepted on such author- ity,^ — missionaries, although in some measure acquainted with the language, being naturally almost wholly excluded from female society in China. We may even say that the * Speer^s China^ p. 540. * North American Review, 1870 ; see also Meadows's Notes, Sec, XI. » See on the other hand De Rosny, Stances des Orientales (1873), I- p. 154 ; Gilea^t Sketches, pp. 11-13. 249 STRUCTURES. obstacles to equal opportunity arise here from the politi- cal purposes of all teaching, not from prejudice against the pursuit of knowledge by the female mind. In fact, public opinion has hardly any more to learn on this last point in China than in Europe or America. The contents of Chinese novels, their wide circulation, and the universal habit of post- ing scrolls, placards, and mottoes, prove that the supposed illiteracy of half the population is an exaggeration. We may draw the same inference from the " letter writers " compiled for the use of women, and the pride taken by girls in showing their knowledge of letters. The education of the favored classes consists mainly in embroidery and painting on silk, with music. After these, however, accord- ing to the " Female Instructor," come rearing silk-worms and preparing food and sacrifices, — then, "study and learn- ing can fill up the time." " Some women are school- teachers, who instruct in needle-work and domestic duties ; and ladies are to be found who are learned in ancient law, and who make verses." ^ Not only have educated women had fame in China, but the highest honors are represented as paid to female paragons of classical and poetic culture by the emperor himself in the most admired works of fiction in the Empire.^ The Tcheou-li (VII. 32) mentions a class of female annalists who registered matters pertaining to the empress. The heroine in a popular novel is usually well versed in literature, and the plot is apt to turn on the sym- pathy of the sexes in the honors and pleasures of literary pursuits. Memoirs of eminent persons, in which China abounds, invariably treat literary women with respect, and commend the careful training of girls in all branches by parents and teachers. In no other country of the East is there so much respect for female scholarship as in China, or so much desire on the part of literary persons to have their daughters noticed as musicians, poets, and classica. ' Chinese Repos., Sept., 1837. ' i„ Jeunes Filles Leitries, translated by Jtdien. EDUCATION. 241 Students, for the sake of the family name.^ Long lists of distinguished women are given ; one compilation of me- moirs, made in the second century, B.C., fills one hundred and twenty -five volumes.^ The "Precepts of Pan Hwi- pan" (a.c. 80) are in high repute, serving as foundation to many similar works. Lu-Chau's "Instructor" ascribes good manners to the influence of woman, as well as orderly home disciplines. A brief sketch of the history of education in China will show the depth of its relation to patriarchalism, and History reveal a universal element in that root principle of ° *^. , ^ ^ educational the national religion. system. From this relation comes its political aim and function. The State is the embodiment of paternal cares and ^ . . . ■^ Ongin in duties, and education is its minister for their accom- patriarch- plishment. In the idea of governmental care for *''™' the people this public instruction originates ; in govern- ment administration, for a similar purpose, it terminates. Confucius and Mencius trace it back to Yao and Shun. " If men are well fed, clad, and lodged, without being taught, they become like beasts ; for man possesses a moral nature. This was Shun's anxious care, and he appointed a minister of instruction to teach the relations of humanity, — how between father and son there should be affection ; between sovereign and minister, righteousness ; between husband and wife, regard to their separate functions ; be- tween old and young, proper order ; and between friends, fidelity. To him the Emperor said ; ' Encourage, lead them on ; rectify them ; straighten them ; help them ; give them wings ; causing them to be- come possessors of themselves.' " " That so noble an impulse should proceed from the oldest social system in human history, the patriarchal, ^^^^^_ suggests certain questions, too large to be here tionfor discussed : for example, whether we, who have "^^^ "* outlived its infantile theory of the origin of authority, > Williams, I. 453, 454- * Schott's Entvmrf, &c., p. 77. > Mencius, III. pt. i. iv. 8. 16 242 STRUCTURES. have as yet vindicated our transfer of this principle to the self-governing power of the masses, by free choice oi equally noble ends ; whether the majority-rule in our own public-school system is not practically as absolute as the patriarchal in the Eastern world, in dealing with its com- plex interests ; whether the indirect influence exerted by current political motives and methods upon the spirit of this American institution is not rendering it as subser- vient to the political sphere as the Chinese system ; and, finally, whether it at present embodies the genius and desire of the people more fully than the latter does a national faith, of which we can hardly conceive a more consistent expression. We trace the theory of governmental duty just quoted Records through all the standard records of Chinese belief, of the in the different epochs of its history. " A disciple EOTern- asked, ' Since the people are so numerous, what mental more is needful.''' Confucius replied, ' Make them towLds well off.' ' After that what else .' ' ' Instruct them,' schools. replied the master." ' The Li-ki urges popular instruction as the first of governmental duties. It de- scribes imperial visits to the provincial schools, to offer sacrifices to famous teachers, and to proclaim the principles of natural ethics to the people.^ In the Tcheou-li, which claims to be much older, imperial functionaries read the laws and precepts to the masses, inquire into the conduct of officials, select the best graduates, and advance them to pubhc posts. The Shu-king itself mentions triennial ex- aminations of merit, the promotion of deserving persons after three competitions, and the appointment of a superin- tendent of music, as artiong the institutions of the great Shun.** Confucius says that the essential constitutions of the first three dynasties were the same.^ It is interesting to • Lunyuy XIII. 9. • Li-ki-ch. Hioki. * Shu-king^ P. 11. I, 27, 24. * Lnnyuy III. a. EDUCATION. 243 notice that the Shu-king describes the substance of tuition at the beginning of the national history as included in " The Five Instructions : " a phrase which has continued to cover the whole educational ground in the same way down to the present time ; embracing the ethics of man's natural rela- tions to himself and to others, — the unchanging Chinese ideal. A chain of documentary harmonies like this renders it extremely probable that the general educational . ^., principles and methods now prevalent in China ofchinesp go back to a very remote date.-^ Yet it gives us ^"^ °° ^' little information on the details of their popular develop- ment. Even if we accept the Tcheou-li as representing a period many hundred years before Confucius, we find that its references are mainly to special schools for the young princes and nobles in the feudal period of China, and teach us nothing about the people. It is somewhat different with the Li-ki, which speaks of district and town schools as universal.- Mencius, whose authority on ancient mat- ters is slight, refers to graded schools in the first three dynasties.^ What is reported of pupils in the Tcheou period, with so much definiteness, — their study of writing, numbers, and domestic duties at the primary schools, from the age of eight years to fifteen ; then of rites, music, and customs, civil and political, at the higher ones ; their academic course in the principal provincial towns ; the presentation of the best to the Emperor for official educa- tion, after examination in rites, morality, and exercises of war ; the inquiries made of the people as to their opin- ion of candidates, — all this is manifestly a later theo- retic construction. The practical method of conducting such arrangements is nowhere given ; their execution was plainly impracticable in the then condition of China ; and • See Plath. • Ch. xv. > Mencius, III. pt. 1. ill. 10. 244 STRUCTURES. the Tcheou-li itself is far too minute in its whole structure to represent any actual governmental organization. Its elaborate details of education in the royal schools, with programme for every year of the life and subdivisions of studies for every season, are open to the same objection. There is in fact a serious defect of evidence as to the extent and character of the school system in very Defect o£ ancicut timcs. We shall hardly find grounds for evidence. J o Biot's positive belief that public schools existed under Yao and Shun, since they are probably mythicaL monarchs, analogous to the first Hebrew patriarchs, and are referred back to twenty-four centuries before our era.^ The Li-ki's enthusiastic laudation of the primitive Chi- nese and their perfect institutions throws discredit on its statement that in the oldest times each street had its " halls of instruction," each canton its schools, each department its colleges, each principality its learned academy. It is not only contrary to the laws of human progress that such completeness of organization should have existed so early in the life of a nation, but the feudal States of China, down to the age of Chi-hwang-ti, were full of wars and jealousies, and nothing like a central government, with powers ade- quate to such results, could possibly have existed. The most that can be inferred from the testimony of the Chi- nese books to a great uniform system of public instruction in the primeval past is that the educational impulse is so deep and earnest in this people, that even in early times it must have had some definite expression, that sions."' schools of somc sort were open to the people dur- ing most of the Tcheou epoch (1200-250 B.C.), and that the immemorial ideal of governmental duty would have closely connected them with ofificial stations. The political theory of moral qualification, as condition of ad- ^ Public Education in China. EDUCATION. 245 vancement, may well be held to have already lasted more thaji 3,000 years. The Shu-King is certainly at least as old as Confucius, and probably embodies what is even much earlier. It describes this substance of good govern- ment in terms that have not since been improved, in the charge of Shun to his twelve mou (pastors of the people) : " Cultivate the abilities of those near you ; give honor to the virtuous ; put confidence in the good." ^ And Yu is charged by his own minister : "In employing men of worth, let no one come between you and them." ^ The Tcheou-li further defines the six tests of public capacity, one and all, as combinations of integrity with special distinctive traits.^ Whatever elements of unity China may have possessed at an earlier period than the eighth century, B.C., 1 . . 1 /• Historical the demoralization which steadily advanced from origin of that date onward must have speedily destroyed *'=^*<'°' ^ -^ "' system. them. In the feudal discords that disintegrated the Empire, Ma-touan-lin tells us, schools were neglected, offices became hereditary, and competitive examinations under the auspices of the literati were no longer held. But a reaction came two or three centuries later in Confucius and Mencius, who, in the depths of this degeneracy, revived the national idea ; reconstructing and practically creating those classic books by which the materials were supplied for a national system of popular instruction. But the wars of rival chiefs and States grew more desperate ; and anarchy raged, with a violence that perhaps has never been exceeded, down to the third century, B.C. The peaceful ideal of- the prophets could only be accomplished by the sword of a conqueror. The combatants were mastered by the prince of 1^^^,^^^^ T'sin, and China became a centralized monarchy, ofchi- The new military hero, it is averred, brought '*'"'^'*'' the barbarism of the West to sweep away every ves- » Shti-king, p. II. I. 16. 2 Ibid. II. 6. = Tchem-li, B. III. 24. 246 STRUCTURES. tige of the literary spirit of older China ; his first acts were to burn the classics and silence the teachers, mas- sacring the recusant among them ; apparently resolved that China should date her history from himself.^ What he did with the schools is not clear. But it seems hardly probable that a ruler who opened public roads, achieved great national works, gave landed rights to the people, and reduced ideographic writing to unity and simplicity,^ — and one of whose generals invented paper and the use of ink and brush, instead of the style on bamboo plates, thus opening a new era in literary progress, — should have abolished popular education. But all Chinese literati agree in describing him as a barbarian, and relating atrocities that would go near to proving a Caesarian insanity .^ What else could they do with the radical reformer who dared to strip China of her sacred past .' It is probable that the military spirit, essential in that epoch of disintegration to national consolidation and de- velopment, found the pacific and pedagogic character of the literary class in its way, and was compelled to suppress it for the time, by forces stronger than personal ambition or the interests of a class. It was significant of this higher meaning that the great invention which initiated popular literary progress, the use of the pencil upon paper, came from the military sphere. This at least T'sin Chi-hwang-ti did. He organized a great Empire in place of utter feudal disintegration. And only out of this ferment of germinating forces, and his final solution of it, could any thing like a per- manent uniform system of public education have emanated. That this was the almost immediate, though unintended, effect of his conquests proves the prodigious force of the national bias in this direction. Thirty years after the death of the great innovator his dynasty was overthrown, to be • Mhn. des Missionaires de Pekin^ III. 269-70. " De Mas, 366-368. a pfiumaier, H^itn. Akad. October, 1859. EDUCATION. 247 thenceforth a byword on the lips of the nation. The Han, as famous as the T'sin is infamous, re-established the old laws, recovered the books, re-created the and" S" libraries, restored the political supremacy of the ""phsof I 1 f> 1 1 • 1 t • . the system. learned, bo short-hved was this suppression of the great idea of honor to the wisest and best. China, say the historians, was at once filled with schools and colleges, and Confucius received divine honors. Here was probably the true beginning of the great educational system. Buddhist kings succeeded, opposed to the literary prin- ciple ; eunuchs, powerful at court, persecuted its adherents ; Taoism on the throne and in popular superstitions, it is said, discouraged it; ^ anarchy threatened it. But the brill- iant T'ang dynasty completed its renovation ; perfecting the school system amidst the Augustan age of China. The competitive examinations for public office, originating in the seventh century, are believed to have been fully organ- ized during the eighth, and the Great Academy was in its glory at the head of the literary life of the nation t^ the middle of the tenth ; furnishing not imperial poets and his- torians only, but directors of instruction and examiners of the schools. During the same period the Tao sect accepted the system, and the eunuchal power, hostile to literature, was crushed. In the twelfth century, invited to aid in subduing a re- volted tribe, and then turning against his allies, came Tchinggis Khan with his rovers of the steppes, to sweep all the old stabilities like dust before the blast of their speed. They began by making pastures of the provinces for their herds ; a few years pass, and they are sitting at the feet of Yao and Shun, fulfilling the peaceful disciplines of the schools. This latitudinarian Tartar dynasty invited the literature of all races. They renovated the ethico-political theory of teaching, built temples to Confucius, translated 1 Bazin, jfourn. Asiatigue, 1858. 248 STRUCTURES. his works into the Mongol tongue. When they -dropped off from the national ideal, they were dethroned and ex- pelled. The patriotic Ming encouraged letters. The Han-lin was reorganized, with a bureau of legislation for discussing projects of laws, and other special committees for trans- lation, science, history, and letters. As the crown of the educational system, it passed its members through ten years of study before bestowment of public functions. Last of all came the Man-chus, present rulers of China, entering as pacificators, and reatly carrying out the insti- tutions of the conquered dynasty. While fastening certain marks of degradation on the subject race, they have re- spected the ancient " rules of Yao and Shun." The com- petitive examinations have supplied their civil list, and the Great Academy has probably published more volumes, such as they are, than all the learned bodies of Europe combined.-* Its decaying halls in the now impoverished capitcfl, as recently described by Dr. Martin, afford no indi- cations of its real efficiency as a civil and political force. The corruptions of the politico-literary system, that have grown out of the disturbed state of the Empire, and its financial distresses during the last half-century, have been confessedly great. But they have not impaired the con- fidence of the nation in the principles of its system, which still overrides all differences and underlies all desires. Here then is a spectacle for the nations. A political system founded on competitive disciplines in the nifirance best historical and literary resources attainable, — of this this material substantially moral, and this culture istory. .^ theory, and to a good degree in practice, peace- ful, philanthropic, democratic; — a political system like this taking precedence of war, policy, trade, subsisting at * See for list, Bazin, youm. Asiat., January, 1858, pp. 65-104, EDUCATION. 249 the very least for two thousand five hundred years, perhaps much longer, through all changes natural and civil, control- ling wild nomads and bringing hundreds of millions into a single whole, as uniform and orderly as it is complex and refined. Is there any essential quality of religion that is wanting to this record of China's fidelity to the principle that the authority of knowledge and virtue is the only foundation of a State .■' Making due allowance for the peculiar form under which Chinese idealism appears, his- tory will be searched in vain for a parallel to this testimony to the persistency and vigor of a moral conviction, the all- sufficing strength of an ideal faith. Admit that it is formal, unprogressive, — the fond at- tachment of a routine-bound people to the lessons of their infancy ; admit that if more freedom in pursuing and unfolding the abstract principles of social science, in place of crystallizing these in their earliest expression, had been according to the Chinese mind, it would have said and thought less of this "exclusively moral" culture; admit that the construction is artificial, mechanical, overstrained, — nevertheless it is conscience ; it is benevolence ; affirm- ing their intense vitality, century after century, in the soul of the least ardent, the least speculative, and apparently the most materialistic of civilized races : an impressive fact, that will lend its weight on the side of human nature against many hopeless and exclusive dogmas of theolo- gians. Where else in the history of States shall we find a per- manent national endeavor to give practical effect to the theory that government properly belongs to 1^ct°Z the wisest and best persons > Plato theorized : " Not for a child only, but for a man also, it is better to be ruled by his better than to rule." ^ His affirmation — though capable of being misconceived, to the disparagement of * First Alcibiades. ^50 STRUCTURES. y^'^-government, or of government by principles indepen- dently of persons — really gives the corner-stone of political ethics. His " golden, silver, brazen, and iron souls " are re- alities, and the oracle in his " Republic'' tells very palpable truth where it says, " Whenever iron or brass shall hold the public guardianship, the State will perish." But the Platonic wisdom provided no practical method for accom- pUshing its ends, and no Grecian State ever made serious attempt to adopt it in the form of disciplines or institu- tions. Paul predicts that the saints shall rule the earth ; but Paul's " saints " were worshippers of Jesus, a body of spiritually " elect " persons in the first century of the Christian faith, as far as possible removed from practical or political wisdom, or even from belief in the capabilities of the natural world for continued existence as a political sphere, even for a generation. In classical heathenism the grand abstract truth of the right of the wisest and best to rule was held to be Utopian : in Christianity it held itself to be supernatural only. Men shrank from the hopeless task of determining its positive conditions, of marshalling the social elements to its control, of applying its tests and instituting its disciplines. It was for the plodding, matter-of-fact Chinese, obeying their instinct of bringing the ideal at once into concrete and permanent form, to put that truth straightway into governmental administration, with a heartiness of faith that has seemed imperishable. All great religions have ideally announced it. The human conscience affirms its " Higher Law." But only the beard- less Mongolian ever set steadfastly about making it the real and positive law. The civilizations have said, " Poli- tics and morality are distinct spheres." " Not so," say the far-descended State-builders of the tribes of Han ; " politics are morality, or they are nothing." The difficulties do not appal them, the fearful failures in practice do not quench their faith in that eternal principle. It stands as absolute EDUCATION. 25 1 as the faith of the older Hebrews in their doctrine that suffering is always the consequence of sin, and happiness the sign of virtue, — which they cherished through all prac- tical refutations and rebuffs for ages, with the simple rev- erence of primal human conscience for what seems to it a self-evident ethical law. B«t the Chinese ideal of positive government stands fast for mankind, while the Hebrew theory of evil yields to wider experience of spiritual laws. For the Chinese man in his concreteness had a presenti- ment of science. He instituted a method of testing the virtue and knowledge required for political uses, and com- mitted himself to that method without reserve, staking upon its truth all his patriarchal ties, traditions, hopes. For thousands of years he has found that method adequate. It has been his substitute for what other races call enthu- siasm, inspiration, progress. The largest science- of the nineteenth century has no better method to offer than his. Unquestionably the principle it embodies will have to enter into political institutions in a form, nobler than any ever yet conceived. But the Mongolian realist, led by natural conscience, not forced by terrible retributions as the West is, at least did his best to enact it as the one thing needful, — he alone. The ancient Persians were said to have taught their children virtue as other nations taught theirs letters ; but nothing like the vast organized machinery for that purpose, which China has maintained, ever existed in Persia or anywhere else. Make what deductions we will ; allow that the man or the nation, whose very selfishness, having separated politics from the conscience, has yet by its own ofthe penalties forced the maturer powers to reconcile ''*'='"• what Nature forbids to put asunder, stands far in advance of the child who has never dreamed of the separation, — when we have granted al'. that is herein implied, the 252 STRUCTURES. long reach of this Chinese record of moral vitality does not lose its impressiveness. It is not pretended that history is a degeneration, nor that we are worse off than the Orientals were centuries ago. Higher possibiHties have come with social growth, whether well or ill improved. None the less do these busy liiechanicians rebuke us with their endless endeavor, under conditions in many respects primitive, to establish a virtuous commonwealth. Their obvious shortcomings in practice do not contra- vene the steadfast appreciation which has adhered to such a theory through the vicissitudes of ages, while so many empires have come and gone. Nor must these defects be exaggerated. Tricks of petty Canton traders it will hardly become those who study human nature in the columns of the American daily press to judge with rigor. The probity of leading Chinese merchants will not suffer by comparison with the mercantile houses of any Christian State. Spite of Confucius, China has had its full share of border and civil wars. What shall we say of the war debt of England, or of the military history of the American Union in its dealing with slavery, with the Indian tribes, with the ele- ments of discord on its borders, and in the half-met issues of its civil war.' Spite of the theory of honor to merit, corrupt officials pervert justice in China as elsewhere : it is no easy matter to give the saints their political and civil rule ; but at least the Chinese have never learned to mock at the idea of such a thing. They not only firmly believe in its possibility, but stake their political existence on the steps to it. It has been theirs to show to what lengths men can go in an evidently honest assertion of belief in the power of the conscience. Probably the most signal instance of such belief on record is the deliberate relation of the three hundred and ninety criminals, whom an em- peror of the T'ang dynasty sent to their homes to attend to their affairs, on parole, and who, every one, returned at EDUCATION. 253 the time promised to receive the death penalty, — of course being thereupon pardoned, in view of such an example of truth. Similar is the legend of the youth who offered to suffer death in place of his father; and who, when the life of the latter had been spared, refused public honors at the Emperor's hands, lest they should remind him of his father's crime. The passion for such tales of ideal virtue, which abound in their annals, is not mere garrulity and bravado of self-righteousness, but the expression of a faith in personal character which ages of instituted culture have rendered instinctive and constitutional. The preceding account of Competitive Examinations, with view to official function, as .conducted in ^-., . , . . . Contrast China, suggests the inquiry, as pertinent to our «-ith own public experience at this time, whether that a™™":™ , . methods. Empire of the past has not herein a gift for the free States of the present of more value than her tea, silk, or porcelain, and more creditable to her practical genius than her precedence of us in discovering the compass, gun- powder, and printing. The Chinese competitive system, in its general idea and in its adaptation to the people who constructed it, is probably the best organized system for securing character, culture, and ability to the service of the State ever devised by man.^ Contrasted with the utter lack of arrangements for this purpose in our own institu- tions, at least till the very recent and short-lived experiment of the Civil Service Commission ; with the prevailing theory of an unconditioned right in every person, by virtue of a natural equality, to hold any official post, at however critical a' moment, which he can succeed in obtaining, and of his adequacy to fill such post ; with the entire absence in this scramble through the gates of office of any noble conditions * In Meadows's admirable work on Chinese Rebellions^ an elaborate system of competi- tive examinations on the Chinese plan is offered to the public as the best method for " The Improvement of the British Executive and the Union of the British Empire." 254 STRUCTURES. to be fulfilled, of any higher tests than the art of gratifying personal or associated interests, or of any recognized rule of moral accountability or ideal demand to make politics a culture and a faith instead of a scandal, whose daily phases are a diet of foul garbage, a mere function of ferreting out corruption by corrupt means, — as contrasted with these ideas and policies, the Chinese principle of making office the reward of victory laboriously and honestly earned through recognized tests of knowledge and virtue has surely a heaven-wide superiority. " What the wise call equity," said Confucius, " is that in the Empire every one have his own work." ^ That func- tions should be filled by the fittest, that the law of " every one in his own place." should reign in public as well as in private spheres, is valid for all ages and races. The patriarchal Empire transmits this first-born word of practi- cal wisdom to the latest democratic Republic, as a father's counsel to his child. But the principle is not valid only : it is indispensable that we accept and obey it without delay. The so-called " practical statesman " may shrug his shoulders at its idealism. But as things now stand duw'°^'^"' (^^7^)' common prudence might suggest that it is high time at least to make a beginning in this di- rection of aiming at moral guarantees in civil and political functions. Every social right is sheathed in a correspond- ent duty : to assume the right without accepting the duty that covers and limits it, is the brandishing of a naked sword in a maniac's hand. How long can a people whose claim of political rights is of the most ideal description safely de- lay the stringent self-disciplines and responsibilities that balance them "i A people without a master, — either king, prelate, lord, traditions, institutions, or authoritative faith, — harnessing nature to its will, shaping its own destiny by ' Li-ki, XXVI. EDUCATION. 255 sheer majority rule, may with impunity refuse the self-con- trol that makes the less wisdom and virtue know how to yield precedence to the greater, when gross saurians can live in the refined atmosphere that feeds the lungs of man. Such liberty is but the right of self-destruction. The need of competitive examination as a test of fitness for functions of public import is now widely recog- • 1 i.,.r. ,r. Thecom- mzed ; and it has its forms in most modern States, petitive In England it is successfully applied to the East """''■"^ India Administration, and to many other branches of civil service, as well as to military schools.^ In Prussia, an educational diploma of this nature is a rigid condition of holding office, and even of professional practice.^ Our own Civil Service, whose departments had become " asy- lums of incompetents," as well as nests of intrigue and dictation, under the recent Act purported to be filled, with the exception of the higher grades, by competitive proc- esses ; and we may well hope for a future sustained de- velopment of the system, as the only way to a reformation of evils grown intolerable. Mere pass examinations have been found wholly unfit to secure impartial tests of capacity and character. They were abandoned in England for the competitive method after fifteen years' trial, in 1870 ; and similar experience in this country led to the adoption of the Act of Congress in 1871. It was framed with so much forethought and skill, that it seemed a first step in the right direction which should not need to be recalled. In place of the service familiar ruts of private greed and party expediency, -'^"^'" °' . Congress. of venal patronage and a scandalous use of local offices to control elections, its open, impartial examinations promised to provide a manly and honorable path of admis- sion to lists of candidates for the use of the appointing power. It promised to abolish the mischievous interference ' Printed Report on the British Civil Service for 1872. ' Matthew Arnold's Higher Schools and Universities in Germany ^ 1874. 256 STRUCTURES. of members of Congress in the choice of civil functionaries, — a hot-bed of corrupt influence and dictation, from which only here and there a representative has the courage to stand off, and which can be broken up only by positive withdrawal of the right of patronage itself. It sought to give unity to the public sense of rights and duties. It sought to lift politics to the level of an educational sphere for the moral and intellectual force of the nation. As in imperial China such methods have served to balance the central authority by a steady influx of the best life of the people, so strong as almost to justify describing her as a constitutional State, much more in a Republic like our own would they protect the people from executive usurpa- tion, and give tone to local self-government. The growth of an aristocracy, even of culture, is farthest from their purpose. Both in England and America they have pro- ceeded from the most radically progressive element, and embody its deepest faith. Their very definition is the unity of liberty with loyalty, of character with institutions, of public safety with public faith. Without large infusion of these guarantees, representative government can hardly be any thing but farce and fraud. Practically, too, every competitor would be on picket-guard against partiality and corruption, while devotedly laboring to do his best. The requirement, in all ordinary local ofifices, of good vouchers for character and capacity at home would raise the educa- tional standard of the whole country, and help to sift out the baser element that infests all political centres. Testi- monials from the great majority of our higher officials had already (1874) confirmed these promises, and opened the hope of an ultimate moral purification of our national' capital by means of this system, as well as of placing its benefits, at slight expense, at the gates of all oflSces where it is needed.^ f- The admirable Report of the Commission (dated April 15, 1874) affords an elaborate view of the theory, method, and results of this mensiire- The sincerity of Prebideiif Grant's EDUCATION. 257 It is obvious that the Chinese system cannot be applied to American institutions without important modifi- cations. The competitive method cannot with us '"^""° - ^ the corn- absorb all departments of public administration, to petUive the exclusion of other methods of choice. For the fy='™" inadequate. whole political as well as civil list to be determined, as in China, by competitive examinations would be sub- versive of the direct action of the people, and would in fact abolish representative government. The only ground for such exclusiveness would be a false presumption of some unchangeable rule of choice which the popular voice is never, except by revolution, to transcend. An intelli- gent and free community may indeed be conceived as bind- ing itself to require of all candidates evidences of a certain standard of education and good purpose, as essential for all civil and political spheres. But it will hardly abdicate the right of going behind any system of machinery for eliciting such evidences, and of supplementing all rigid forms by the direct use of its own selective judgment upon the whole body of the citizens. There must always remain a margin of this sort for what may be called the free intu- ition of the public mind. We may, therefore, easily expect too much from this as from any other organized contrivance. There are obvious limits to the power of competitive tests to ^J^^^" secure moral guarantees, however strenuous and impartial the process of applying them. The " good mor- als " that yield a fair repute are not equivalent to the clear- sighted integrity and self-respect that we demand of a pub- lic guardian. Purity of this sort is to be discerned only by the pure mind. A representative body is not likely to be found, under any form of selection, upon a higher moral unsuccessful effort to enforce it is not questioned by the present writer, who firmly believes that in all our recent national emergencies he has left a noble record of public service, which will find more and more grateful appreciation as historic justice shall bring into clearer relief that *' iron nerve to true occasion true." (March, 1877.) 17 258 STRUCTXJRES. level than its electors. It will be quite as unreasonable to expect the article of fitness to be provided us, upon the mere security of diplomas, under any system of tests what- ever, as it would be to deny the very great value of a good competitive system as an aid to earnest public sentiment in its search for tJie best men. A free people cannot escape the condition of depending for freedom on its own undele- gated wisdom, its own direct perception of personal char- acter. Even as a test of capacity, a competitive examination is by no means conclusive : it is a result of sudden strain and skilful cramming. The Chinese avoid these, in part, by the long space of time through which their preparatory disciplines extend. In any system culminating in such tests, what the State needs to emphasize is, after all, not the ultimate trial itself, but rigid proof, however secured, that the candidate (or pupil) has really passed through such continuous and thorough disciplines as make the result of the special trial comparatively unimportant ; a mere inci- dent, which may or may not do him justice. Xo mechani- cal contrivance of school-boy marking up and down can afford adequate guarantees in so complex a system of pub- lic duties as ours. While making the most, then, of competitive tests, a Conditions further basis of right selection of oflBcials in the ^^. Republic wiU probably be found in the four follow- vi*^ ing conditions : — 1. Provision in the common-school curriculum for as thorough instruction in the nature of our political institu- tions and in the practical duties of citizenship as is pos- sible, — as well as for teaching our youths to regard public office as a momentous task and sovereign test, and to be infinitely more concerned in discovering the fittest men to meet its duties than in pursuing it as a prize for them- selves. 2. Schools for special departments of public service, or EDUCATION. 259 provision- in the universities for voluntary study of these branches of administrative science. 3. Recognition, by public opinion, of a general rule of preference for those who have shown aptness and diligence in pursuing such studies ; affording the student of politics guarantees of due appreciation analogous to those afforded by imperial selection in China. 4. Substitution of the habit of advancing tried and experienced public officers, and of retaining them where they are needed, for the current passion for what is called " rotation" whose least mischief is in its turning the public service into a feeding-Sitall, where every creature that can creep or push into it may claim to take his turn. The last of these conditions was met perhaps, as far as is practicable for a system, by that provision of the Civil Service rules which forbids direct admission by examina- tion to any but the lower grades of service, — in order that fresh men may not supplant more experienced ones. But all requirements must be more or less results of public intelligence and virtue. They belong to a republican gov- ernment in distinction from one of prescription and me- chanical routine, like the Chinese. Again, the stimulus of competition without drawback inevitably runs, with us, into excess. It is well fitted to rouse the lymphatic blood of the race of competi- Han, and they have fallen on a real incentive to ''™'1 l>atriotism in its democratic equality, which off- sets their patriarchal rule of one man. But the American, unchecked by the past, urged by a boundless thirst for dis- tinction and an undefined opportunity, is goaded by the competitive stimulus into frenzy. Already his very play is but a strife for mastery ; all its spontaneous „"^°" impulse is lost in the dead earnest of " champion- ship ; " the heartiness of boyish sports is foreclosed by the 26o STRUCTURES. premature rivalries of men, and their natural healthfulness by strenuous toils ; every motion put on record, with a technical precision ; the boy's muscle paraded like a drill corps on training day ; and every goad to an egotistic and reckless strife for victory plied at once by the press, by an exacting demand for " science," and by the gambling of excited spectators. Everywhere in American life we note this drift towards exaggerated competition. It is made master of evei^y field by the perversion of our republican principle of equal opportunity for all, into the selfish false- hoods of universal equality in personal claims, and of un- conditional right to equal powers and trusts. The preva- lence of these absurd conceits throws all upon a common level of expectation and desire, with no alternative but strife for common goals of victory. All relations run to this, intermunicipal, intercollegiate, interorganizational, in every form. The victor, not the principle, is in honor. " Show us a champion," is the cry ; nor is any tie so sacred nor any emergency so private but its hints of discord are exploited to gratify that zest for personal antagonism which in darker times fed on gladiatorial games, now superseded in the lowest strata by the prize-ring, or, more happily, by the peaceful contests of the hippodrome. Even the mechanism of our common-school system is charged with a similar driving force, which over- 'n schools. . . , ., . rides the nobler motives while it stirs many un- worthy ones. The human atoms are concentrated on one common competitive plane, where all are urged forward to a common goal, under sanctions that reward the ready brain and mortify the slow one. That our prescriptive mechanics of school drill must suppress individuality is obvious, — not only from the nature of things, but from the character of these public exhibitions of easy mental legerdemain and formalized writing and speaking in which they culminate, and to which previous reference has been EDUCATION. , 261 made in this volume. Never was there greater need of recognizing that the proper limits of the emulative method in education contract in exact proportion to the. dignity of the aims with which education is pursued. Ignoring this law, it must exclude the higher elements of personal cul- ture, pressing all young minds, without regard to differ- ences of gift or bent, into a dead-level race in prescribed grooves of conformity, under mutual inspection and con- trol. The remedy is of course to be sought in real educa- tion ; in evolution of the special forces which reside in each boy or girl, — making our school system the producer of thoughtful, self-reliant mind, and not of manufactures to be sold by sample and on warrant, to suit the public taste. As it is, the drift of republican education is not without its suggestion of Sir Thomas More's Utopians, who all wore the same kind of clothes, and knew, every man, just what he was to do all the time, as a piece of the public machinery. After all deductions and warnings, it may well be urged that a tendency so powerful as emulation should be . . ,. . , How far utilized for the general good, especially m those competi- /«iJ/?V spheres where it must inevitably come into tionisuse- effective play ; -and that the reduction of it to a system, in- which a course of real study should take the place of crude haste to snatch the official prize, might even serve to mitigate present perversions of the natural ambition to excel. It may be further maintained that the recent Civil Service rules, properly administered, are a long step in the required direction. And all this is probably true. The competitive passion would be tempered by dif- fusion over so large a field, and by moving in regulated channels. It would be ennobled by association with the habit of honestly earning the right to public honors. Its stimulation by the greed of immediate gain would be re- strained by the indirectness of its path, the examinations 262 STRUCTURES. I sen'ing merely to supply lists for the selective judgment of the appointing power. Nor can. these examinations become so absorbing with There- "^ ^^ ^° supplaut all othcr avenues to official life. served Thc appointing power cannot, any more than the yonrau clective, be superseded by Examining Boards. It systems. ^.^ retain a certain discretionary right ; as is illustrated in the recent rules, which provided that a Ust of fifteen successful candidates in each series of exaui- inations throughout the country shall be submitted to the executive for the exercise of its free choice, and enjoining the advancement of persons already found competent in preference to new ones fresh from the examining board. In cases of promotion, it seems peculiarly fit that a discre- tionary power should be vested in the heads of departments ; and it is probably at this point that, the rules will require readjustment, complaints of their working having been mainly confined to this class of appointments.^ But the supreme reason for maintaining a certain freedom of direct choice by the elective and appointing powers is the supreme necessity that they should possess the combined virtue and intelligence which justifies such freedom, or at least should practise the art of pursuing it ; that they should be competent to survey the whole field of national capacity, selecting the best material it affords for filling the more important functions of government. The safeguard of a free people is a public opinion that knows so well how to place men at their true work, that it can trust itself to select its own highest agents, and then trust these with a reasonable freedom in the choice of their subordinates. This public insight, while it freely uses the aid of compet- itive tests where direct knowledge is impossible, must be competent, in respect of the largest responsibilities, to go behind all systems of machinery whatever. Care of the ^ See Report as above. EDUCATION. 263 individual by the sifted capacity of the land is the ultimate aim of the Chinese State. Development of the individual to the power of judging both who should represent him, and how the representative fulfils his task, is the aim of the Republic. In China, public administration is the chief final cause and motive force of education. The classics are mainly devoted to the moralities of government, of the free The superior man, even in Confucius, sighs when p='^™=' em ideal. out of office. The teacher, while bound to main- tain iniependence of character, must yet seek public em- ployment as the highest path of man. Literature, while loved and even worshipped for its own worth, finds that worth in being identified with civil and political service as its central sphere. Confucius, indeed, affirms that all pro- ceeds from the individual outwards. But, instead of devel- oping what is involved in this abstract principle, he passes it directly over, Chinese-wise, to its earliest concrete expres- sion ; namely, that the individual is an atom in the mech- anism of the State. Thus the grand object of culture is constantly to supply the best men for public functions. There is with us a corresponding and even intenser con- centration of interest on political life, though with very different aims and results. In both cases, literature, made convergent to politics, lacks independent being ; fails of its full purport, which is to serve, not civil and political admin- istration alone, but high ideals of culture and faith. These are our most pressing need, for these are the roots of pub- lic sanity. Political purification can come only from moral inspirations in the public conscience, and in that public sentiment which is the atmosphere of manners and the tribunal of conduct. Of these inspirations the real school and the main guarantee is a devotion to self-culture for love of the noble society both of universal ideas and of the 264 STRUCTURES. best men of all times ; for the sake of the beauty and liberty of truth, and the dignity of generous, life-ennobling tasks : — and the presence of men and women thus devoted, whether in public or private life, is the magnetism that lifts a nation to the level of its best opportunity. The Chinese find such moral inspiration as they possess, in their organization of immemorial routines, whose service is their virtue, and whose rewards enlist all their love and faith. But with the Aryans, or rather the coming republic they are to share, inspiration must be found, not in the routines and their rewards, but beyond them, and flow in upon them from a free pursuit of the ideal, as a power of growth for the actual and concrete ; as product of no pre- scribed mental drill or moral gymnastics, but of pure home and school cultures that shall quicken self-giaidance and self-consecration into spontaneous habits, and domesticate mutual deference and helpful aims. The institutions we seek to purify can be reformed only by a sense of respon- sibility to ideal law, embodied in the popular mind and will. II. GOVERNMENT. GOVERNMENT. H EGEL defines the State as the ■' concrete realization of all the relations that refer to the idea of good." Confucius and Mencius describe Government in TheCH- terms of equal scope. But the Chinese conception ""e poUt- differs from the German in these respects, (i) Its defined " State " is not an ideal concrete, but a concrete ^""^ '=™" ideal ; this totality of all elements of good being believed to have actually existed, and from the remotest times. (2) It is not the ideal of a special State, but the one only real State ; its relation to the idea of good includ- ing allegiance from all nations and races to its own exclu- sive authority. That unity which Catholicism affirms for its one church universal, the Chinese idea asserts of its one State universal, as the sole expression of the relations of Heaven and Earth. The ground of this exclusiveness, however, goes back to another distinction from both Ca- tholicism and Philosophy. The conjunction of ideal and actual, of Heaven and Earth, which in all three constitutes the authority of the State, finds its centre, for Christian- ity, in a special miraculous revelation at a given epoch ; for Philosophy, in a process of development, by which it is becoming realized ; for Chinese Imperialism, in the de facto inherent concreteness of the ideal itself. Such are the postulates to which these three forms of universal author- ity appeal. That form which Christianity claims comes 268 STRUCTURES. by supernatural grafting on z. fallen nature. That on which modem philosophy stands comes in free realization by man of an inalienable nature by laws of growth. That which Chinese Government asserts comes by an actual and inviolable unity between the nature of man (which it expresses) and the nature of the world. ^ According to this theory, man was never outside the true cosmic order. He has not this order yet to discover, nor to fulfil. His relations to it are inherent, obvious, revealed from the beginning. Thus the exclusively Christian State (in theory) would despotize over Nature ; the philosophical would reiarion (rightly, wc shouM say) divide it into many phases withNa- |^£ growth and differences of form; the Chinese would neither despotize nor divide, because re- cognizing nothing outside itself : it claims to be coextensive and identical with Nature, the very concreteness of real being ; and so it runs back of man through inconceivable time to find its beginning in the origin of the universe. Like the highest science, it holds Nature to be all in all ; but unlike science, it describes Nature as a prescribed and perfected concrete. Its universality is therefore the unity of undeveloped instinct : it is the unlimited self-assertion of a child. Yet the child's universality, reading his realized ideal everywhere, and adoring its sway, is not mere primitive homogeneousness and senseless social plasm. It is presen- tient of that identity of ideal with actual, of thought with act, of the One with the Whole, which is the real meaning of Nature ; and the political structure, however imperfect, in which it has sought to embody these identities, may well have stood fast through the ages, just as its appeal to nat- ural authority, and to that only, unites the whole of prog- ress with the beginning. * See the Chuns-Yung, ch. i. ; Meoc., VII. n. 34. GOVERNMENT. 269 The Chinese poUtical system gives universal meaning to the Family, and to Patriarchalism as its earliest social T?-' i~« r Based expression. Kmg Seuen of Tse asked Teen Kwo, on the " Which is most important, a parent or a ruler .? " '^^™^y- Kwo replied, "A parent." The king asked angrily, " How, then, does a man leave his parents to serve his ruler 'i " Kwo replied : " If it were not for the ruler's land, he would have no place for his parents ; not without the ruler's pay could he support them. All that is received from the ruler is that it may be devoted to our parents." The king looked disquieted, but gave no reply.^ " People," says Mencius, " have this current proverb : ' The Empire, the State, the Family.' The root of the Empire is in thie State : the root of the State is in the Family : the root of the Family is in a person." ^ This ideal of a natural relation interprets for the Chinese the whole order of Nature, and is identical with it. The Emperor is Heaven, the people Earth. He is the active principle Yang, it the passive principle Yin. The fatherhood on one side and the filial piety on the other, which the State implies, are so inter- ^^ j^t^^. woven with cosmical processes that, when they are pre'ation rightly fulfilled, these pursue harmonious paths, cosmlcai there being but one law for the two realms. As °''''"- the patriarch is the centre, in whom reverence and author- ity meet, — the line of the past and the line of the future, — so the Emperor is at once the Son of Heaven and the Father of Men. He solemnly invokes the dead, and instructs the living. He represents the unity of the patriarchal household as image of universal Nature. "As there is one xhe Em- Heaven above and one Earth below, so there is perora but one relation of prince and subject," says the ^'™ °' Li-ki. " Heaven," said a Chinese official, taken prisoner * Handling's Illitstraiion qfthe Sh-u-king^ translated by Legge. * Menc, IV. 1. 5. Compare Ta-hio (text of Confucius) 4lh par. 270 STRUCTURES. by the Man-chus, " cannot have two suns, nor earth two emperors," and killed himself in despair at the anomaly. Even the Tai-ping rebels regarded their king as lord, not of China only, but of the world. The Emperor recognizes that impersonal supremacy which resides in the enduring law of the family as the root of man's continuance, by an allegiance in apparent contradiction to his authority as sovereign of men. Placed in the sacred centre between rights and duties, obedience and command, he symbolizes the ideal " mean " between these antitheses of Nature. Thus identified with cosmic order, this centre and pivot of human order means the absolute and universal. And so in the imperial pomp, on great occasions like the reception of ambassadors, are gath- ered up all symbols of splendor and power known to the strange Mongolic history of the nation, as to their focus of meaning,^ — umbrellas, pennons, lines of kneeling men on marble steps below the throne, and of white horses on either hand ; the crack of whips, the wild barbaric music of the steppes. The Emperor is the summary of history ; enduring type of the mystery of its origin, and image of the holy seed that makes a nation out of a man. This is Abraham on the throne ; the patriarch faithful to his household when it has grown into a mighty multitude. And as the patriarch is absolute, so the Emperor's authority means that right of the father to ownership in the person of his offspring which underlies the old laws of Rome as well as China, and forms the primary stratum of political history. But we must distinguish this sway from the absolutism The idea °^ ^ personal will. The Emperor, whose dress in of the the old time was covered with emblematic figures State the , , , , . . reaisov- 01 sun and moon, dragons and insects, mountams ereign. ^nd Streams, a composite type of all powers, has • ' See a description by the Dutch Embassy (17th cent.), Relation, &Ci P. II. p. 326. GOVERNMENT. 2/1 this universality purely as symbol of the State ; which means, after the ideal of the family, providence and obedience in their simplest and broadest sense. Under this form, it embraces morality, politics, faith, all in one : it is the beginning and end of culture; it is the only church; and its ancestral rites embody the initial mystery of faith. It is not objective to thought and feeling, but their main constituent, the proper personality of the China- man ; whose national character reports its inworking in a curious mixture of pride and submission, each member of the State at once rejoicing in the assured sense of possess- ing a perfect law, and bowed to the earth in conformity to its command. He realizes in the form of instinct Dr. Johnson's theory of political relation, that " there is a reciprocal pleasure in governing and being governed." "The slavishness of the Eastern Asiatics," says Neu- mann, " causes them to name themselves from dynasties ; and so China has had as many names as the thirty-four dynasties have chosen to give themselves." But the term " slavishness " is far from conveying the meaning of their pride in a perfect patriarchal order as represented in the im- perial office. The adoption of the imperial name by the na- tion is simply symbolical, and proceeds from respect for the majesty of the State, which absorbs his personality. The Emperor must drop his family name, assuming a dynastic one, consonant with this transcendence, — such as Hia (splendor), Ming (light), or Tsing (purity) ; or he may transfer to his line the name of his province, as aggran- dized by having given it a founder (Han, Tsin, T'ang). For himself, he loses even his "milk" name in this absorp- tion, and instead of taking a borrowed one like the pontifi- cal "Peters" and "Pauls," is simply designated as Sovereign Throne, Son of Heaven ; the high-sounding titles by which he is known to Western nations being either names given to his reign, — such as Kang-hi {prof ound peace), or Kien-lung 2/2 STRUCTURES. {heavenly protection), or Tao-kwang (light of reasoti) ; or else posthumous tributes, like Tai-tsou {great ancestor), or VVu-ti {warrior prince)} So strong is the force of social cohesion and organic unity in the Chinese, that they have brought patriarchalism to perfect political unity in their emperor ; while neither the Romans, who likewise instituted its absolutism in their family and civil laws, nor the He- brews, who based their nationality on its traditions,^ ever organized it in any corresponding way. But this fact does not imply enslavement to the imjjerial person. It is the symbolism of the State that rules. The silence into which the individual monarch withdraws before this invisible idea is as perfect as the stillness of his people when he passes through their crowds. As they fell on their faces at every refrain of the great Birth Ode, sung by hosts in honor of a sixty years' prosperous reign, — " Bow down your heads, all ye dwellers on the earth, before the great Kien-lung," — so did this great Khan prostrate himself before the ideal of the State, to which this long retrospect called him to account It is a popular proverb in China, " To violate the laws is equally criminal in Emperor or private person." ^ \Mien the Emperor is congratulated, upon the failure of an expected ecUpse, that Heaven has dispensed with the event in order to lend a fortunate omen to his reign, it is to the State, as identical with cosmic order, that the tribute is paid. \Mien all oflBcials in China bow down, or kneel, on a certain day in each month, before the boxes which contain their seals of ofl&ce received from the Tien-tse, it is the State, not the' individual, that the worship recognizes as its end. 1 See R^miEat, Nt€B. MOangex AiiatSqua, U. pp. 5, 7; SdwCt, CJumaacke Sfmi Ukre, p. L4^ ^ Hie Hebreir^ wfao&y Sacked cohesxre power to derdcp &e patnardial Tmily into poEs. icsL Their nide sway of jodges aodbibaldu^ followed by a sbott^iTed tlieociacy, pased into royahy, wliose s^ieedy ci^repdoD issued in the destmcdoi: of the State- For the inflnpnrp af the p ei -Jslnit earryuig oat of patiiaidialian in the tennre of Reman estates upon the gimA oC poreity, d^it, and slavery, see De Coolai^es^s Imt, PtL de la Praatce, pp. 151, 20S. * MoriscHi's Dicfutwarj, GOVERNMENT. 273 The mineral symbol of this absolutism of the State is jade, a silicate of magnesia, " indestructible as dia- ns sym- mond, and nearly as hard." As the toughest of ''°''^'"' minerals and one of the rarest, it has always served the most important purposes known to its users, from the building-tools of primitive Swiss lake-dwellers to the scep- tre of the Chinese ruler.^ Here its meaning is the strength of unchanging sway.^ The astronomical symbol of the State is the Calendar, annually prepared by the Board of Rites, with specific tables of lucky times and ceremonial occasions, and sold in enormous quantities throughout China. The imperial copy is carried on a gold litter, enclosed in case of gold, and borne by forty footmen in the imperial yellow ; others in different symbolic colors, for princes and officers, are received with reverence and distributed with ritual forms. The adulatory forms of address to the Emperor have their familiar analogues in Western monarchies, . ^ and are only more elaborate here than elsewhere. inWesterE We need but mention the praise of Nero by Lu- ^'^"'' can,^ of Alexander by his generals,* or of Louis XIV. and Napoleon by the French Academy, — one mem- ber of which apostrophized the latter as " having a destiny grander than Nature," and as one who " cannot belong to time ; " while another hailed him as a deity ! ^ These were tributes exacted from courtiers by individual rulers of great power. The doctrine of the divine right of kings, as held in Western nations, has often led to attitudes even more similar to the Chinese worship of an ideal State than these. The resemblance seems to have been sometimes formally " Notes and QiuruSf II. No. a. • The word is used in compounds to describe any thing strong, beautiful, or desirable, as jade-sound" for the voice of the Emperor; " jade-brother " for true friend; "jade-juice'' for wine. (See Julien*s Circle of Chalk,) > Pliarsalia, I. 37, 38. « Chassang, Hist, du Roman • M^snard, Hist, de V Acad. J^ran^., pp. 348, 242. 18 274 STRUCTURES. perfect, as in the results of ages of such influence on the French mind of the eighteenth century, — of which Morley has said that even in its clearest social expression it " never rose to a higher conception of national life than the su- preme authority of a benevolent monarch giving good gifts," ^ — and in opinions like that of the Academician Fontanes, in the time of Louis XVIII., that " the mild and regular movements of a paternal monarchy will give to talents the security they need." Such statements would be perfectly natural from the lips of a Chinese statesman ; but the " divine right of kings " does not reach the root of the Chinese political idea. That vast concentration of reverence on a central sovereignty, which combines hun- dreds of millions of souls in homogeneous experience, is something more radical and organic. The patriarchalist of the Middle Kingdom believes in the The duty right to be governed atidthe duty to be led. His look to be led. is to a superior care. His faith is undoubting that the world has been so ordered as concretely to provide for this right to be well governed, this duty to submit to the best leading, — not by a supernatural volition, which might or might not be, but in the very necessity of nature ; not as min- istry of gods and angels, but by methods essentially human and familiar. It is a providence of superior men ; to them are due the inventions that have lifted him from barbarism, the institutions that reflect the order of the universe. No- thing is possible to man but through the exercise of his own faculties : the only divine laws are the positive laws of body and mind, reaching out through heaven and earth ; expressions of perfect intelligence and will (Shang-te), and incarnated best in those benefactors of the race who have founded society and endowed it with practical processes and powers. These are the patriarchs, fathers of man- ^ Life of Voltaire^ p. 79. GU\'^ERNMENT. 2/5 kind ; and it is the " will of Heaven," or the meaning of the world, that the Emperor shall concentrate and repre- sent these primal kings of men. That he should not rep- resent them is contrary to nature, and to the nature of government. As he is Heaven and the people Earth, the Emperor as such, — that is, the good Emperor, — must make the people happy. Hence an absolute confidence in the power of official virtue to govern with perfect success. It has all -^^^^^^^ nature on its side, and all humanity. "The peo- political pie," says Mencius, "turn to a benevolent rule as "p'™'^™- water flows downward, and as wild beasts fly to the wilderness."-^ Confucius claimed that he could perfect the fallen State in three years, if he were given full control of affairs.^ Of such assurance Chinese literature is full. Its terms may be called the Chinese syllogism, analogous in its scope to the inductive process, considered as the in- strument of modern science.^ Given a ruler who rules himself wisely, his household imitates him ; the high offi- cials follow ; capital, provinces, cities, towns, hamlets, house- holds, individuals in millions, — all feel the inaugurated harmony of heaven and earth, and are blest. For what has the just ruler to do but permit the operation of the just governmental law ; which already exists, with all its arrangements around him, a pre-established order .' What more easy than for him, as Mencius says of Wu-ti, " to hold the whole kingdom in the hollow of his hand .' " If, how- ever, he be not good, equally inevitable is the perversion of this whole process of natural evolution. The duty to be led fails of support by the corresponding right to be gov- erned. This man, out of his place, which belongs to virtue and obedience, is not Emperor. Heaven wills his over- throw, and the people must effect it. The facts of Chinese history so well bear out this ' Mencius, IV. i. g. * Lunyu, X[1I. ra 3 See especially Ta-hio, ch. 5, and its Commentary, x. i. 276 STRUCTURES. theory of correspondence between the character of the Theoretic Empcror and the moral condition of the people, omnipo- ^jja^^ y^Q aj-g almost impelled to trace the phenome- tence of ,.-... , . - , ruler for non to the peculiarly imitative quality 01 the race. good. j^^^ |.Q ^.j^jg special ethnological cause we must add the rapidity and force of example in so centralized a mon- archy, holding its officials under close inspection and con- trol. But even in China the relation is far from holding good in the absolute sense claimed by the theory.^ Such entire confidence, not only in the right of virtue to rule, but in the certainty of universal happiness as the immedi- ate result of virtue in the ruler,^ in fact seems to belong to Similar to the Same class of convictions as the Hebrew belief Hebrew j.]^a.t loug Hfc is the sure reward of righteousness. earthly Both retained their hold unweakened, in spite of retribution, repeated contradiction, as if resting on a deeper basis than experience. We may call them superstitions, but their permanence is to be explained only by the power of a moral ideal to overbear transient experiences, by reading them in the light of a validity accordant to its origin in the conscience. It was the ethical force of patri- archalism that made Old Age the divinity of Hebrew faith, and Organized Government that of Chinese. The reliance of the latter race on the efficacy of right Sponta- ruling does not rest on law-books, nor on special neous force dccrees, which neither in the West nor the East of right . , - in human cau explain, as they certainly do not create, any great nature. social convictiou. It goes behind them to a percep- tion of the inherent force of goodness,^ acting under such * Mencius actually affirms that " there is no instance of the whole Empire being obtained by any one without benevolence;" Vll. il. 13. "Were any of the princes to practise the government of King Wan for seven years, he would be sure to be giving laws to the Empire ;" IV. I. 13. "Never," says the Ta-hio, " has there been a case of the sovereign loving benevo- ibnce, and the people not loving righteousness." (Comm. X. 21) ; so Menc, IV. I. 7. * See especially Mencius, VII. i. r3. * Mencius says, '* Never has there been one possessed of complete sincerity who did not move others." (V. i. 12.) And conversely (VII. 11, 9), "If a man do not walk in the righ path, it will not be walked in even by his wife and children." GOVERNMENT. 2/7 changeless conditions as the national conscience held to be its organic expression. In the oldest time, according to tradition, there were in fact no law-books, nor even laws, their use being foreclosed by the spontaneous obedience which virtue inspires. " The ancients," says a native writer,^ " prepared no law-books ; for laws make „, . * ^ Chinese people contentious, so that they can less easily be traditions preserved." "They administered justice by cus- "*"■ toms and preserved it by truth. They honored the peo- ple by humanity, taught them by uprightness, inspired them by example, served them with joy, watched over them with respect, governed them with power, judged them with strictness, put wise and true men over them ; thus trusting them, and preventing disorder and calamity." " A noble law was the Emperor Wen's virtue," says an old poem ; " daily it gives peace to the four regions. If that be so, what need of laws .'' I have heard that when king- doms are about to go down, they have many laws."^ " Let there be the men" says Confucius," " got by means of the ruler's character, and the government will flourish ; but without the men, the government ceases." " Shun selected Kaou-yaou from jmong the people, on which all who were devoid of virtue disappeared." * And this primeval norm of virtue is the only one to which such efficacy is, after all, ascribed. " It is not a benevolent heart alone that makes good government, nor laws alone, which do not carry them- selves into effect ; but to put in practice the ways of the ancient kings." ° This theory of a primitive government by force of char- acter alone, without aid from laws, is of course far „ * ' No very more valuable as an ideal faith than as a historical oia laws statement. But it is certain that no very old col- ections of Chinese law now exist ; and though the Shu- ' See Plath, Gesetz uitd Recht in Alt. China, Bay. Ahad., X. 682. • Plath (as above), p. 683. ^ Chuttg-yung,Y^.^ * i««ya, XII. 22. ^ Menc-, IV. r 1,^. 278 STRUCTURES. king, while making- mention of many old laws, speaks so indefinitely of them as to make it probable that the reference is only to edicts. The Tcheou-li, which purports to be the oldest code, but is probably of late origin, refers mainly to the royal domain. The deep ethical loyalty of the Chinese may well have ascribed a great force of con- science to their earlier efforts to institute the State, which is their ideal good. Beyond this, there is room for explain- ing their disparagement of laws as in part an expression of their faith in the right to be governed, and the duty to be led, by the highest virtue alone ; for which the open study of written laws or constitutions would have seemed likely to substitute discordant popular interpretations of a book or a code. " For the people is a child." Whether in old Rome or The people oldcr China, the patriarchal idea made the son, a child. however mature in years, a minor and instrument so long as his father lived. Aryan energy mastered this subjection in Europe, but Chinese conservatism made it a basis of the political ideal. " The people," says Con- fucius, " may be made to follow a path of action, but they may not be made to understand it." ^ fKing Woo, in the Shu-king; counsels his brother K'ang to act in government " as if watching over an infant." ^ " The saint," says Lao- tse, " considers the people as a child." ^ By the theory, the prince is the father, teacher, high-priest, all-director of the permanently immature life of his vast family. Laws are his resort only when the people fail of the sense of duty to be led ; both prince and people recognizing their neces- sity as signs of their own • inferiority to the norm of con- duct, which was realized in the primeval days of Yao and Shun. But though laws are secondary to these natural condi- tions, there is a Law higher than the wisdom of princes • Lunyu, VIII. 9. = Shu-kin^, Pt. V. o. ix. g. » Tao-teking, II. 49. GOVERNMENT. 2/9 or the weakness of peoples, — a principle, on which rest the rights and duties of both ; namely, the Uni- universal versal Good. This is the real basis of government ^°°^ "'^ basis of in the Chinese theory, conceived as conferred by govem- Heaven on the people without distinction of class, '"™'" as those who have a right to be led in the best way. To sustain, to tranquillize, to educate, to harmonize the whole people, — this is the sacred mandate that princes and dynasties must obey. Hear Confucius announce it : — "The requisites of government are sufficiency of food and military force, and the confidence of the people in their ruler. ... If the people have no faith in their ruler, there is no standing for the State." ^ " Precede the people by your example, and be lab"orious in their affairs ; do not become weary in these things." ^ " That is good gov- ernment, when those who are near are made happy, and those who are afar off are attracted." •■• " Heaven and earth are parent of all creatures. Sincerity and wisdom become the sovereign ; for he is the parent of the people." * One passage from the Shu-king suffices to give the pur- port of all the classics on this theme. " Yue, having received the presidency, said to the king : ' The founding of States and setting up of capitals, and the appointment of kings and high officials, was not designed to minister to the idleness and pleasure of one, but for the good government of the people. Heaven is all-wise. Let the ruler take it for pattern ; his ministers will accord with him, and the people will be well ruled.' . . . . ■ " The king said : ' O Yue, your words should indeed be followed. If you were not so good in counsel, I should not have heard these things for my practice.' " Yue did obeisance with his head to the ground, and said : ' It is not the knowing that is difficult, but the doing.' " * This upward look, this trust in right leading, coupled with the humanity which sees the good of each to depend on the good of all, is the fact of import to aiism and universal religion in these embrvotic methods of "^j^fMi religion. , ^he patriarchal State. Before us, on a colossal I Lunyu, XII. 7. » Ibid., XIII. i. » Ibid., XIII. 16. * Shu-kins, v. B. i. 3. = Shu-king, Pt. IV. B. vill. 1, 280 STRUCTURES. scale, stand the enduring elements which justify patiiarch- alism as a stage in social construction, — its germs of the liberty of obedience, its participation in the substance of religion, morality, science. The peculiarities of the Mon- golian race, in their Chinese or typical form, have elected them to serve as a permanent record of its significance, — little individuality, great centripetal impulse, a plodding- temperament, slow to self-assertion, and submissive to The oldest the Steady operation of organic laws. These are positivists. Q^j. oldest positivists, who combine with Comte's theory that man is to be governed as much as possible an ideal of spontaneous obedience to the law of his nature, which corresponds to Spencer's anti-Comtist doctrine that he is to be governed as little as possible, — though taking this perfect state to be the primal fact of history, not, as he does, only the final result of its evolution. They made social order their religion, and had perfect faith in it as the end which all human forces pursued. Disobedience to the wise who led the way to it was against nature. " It is better," said Confucius, " to be mean than to be insubordinate." We have presented only one side of the Chinese political idea, — the duty to be led. There is also the right to be governed. We must emphasize that word right. China is loosely called a despotism ; and of all forms Govern- °^ dcspotism the Oriental is supposed to be the ment of most opprcsslve : but the judgment is superficial. adrapot- Taking the term in its modern sense of arbitrary ism. personal government, it is scarcely applicable to the great Eastern systems at all. The Hindu priest, the Chinese emperor, are subject to restrictions such as no written constitution could impose on a great Western con- queror or on a slave oligarchy. Rdmusat observes : " If by despot is meant an absolute master, disposing at will of the property and life of his subjects, using and abusing a bound« GOVERNMENT. 28 1 less power, I can see none such in the East." If this view be correct, it is plain that the transition of patriarchalism from the domestic to the political stage was a real step of progress, involving the gradual dropping away of the father's unconditioned right over the life and death of his offspring. Such a step is in fact manifest in the imperial " absolu- tism ; " which, in theory, appears a complete negation of public liberty, but in fact is qualified by important limits and responsibilities. Hegel's formula, " In the East, freedom is for one ; in the antique world, for several ; in the modern, for all," is misleading. The Emperor is farthest imperial re- possible from an autocrat. Caprice does not enter stnctions. into his definition. He is the creature of a formal and ceremonial determinism as strict as the modern doctrine of philosophical or theological necessity. Master of the world and Son of Heaven, he cannot without sin go out of his round of etiquette, nor interpose an impulse of caprice into the prescription of times and ways, nor escape his palace, nor choose his food, nor use a fan. To all that enters into the concrete norm of the traditional State, this type of Heaven, this representative Father, is responsible. I. The basis of authority is, first of all, religious. To " Heaven," whence he receives his function,^ he is j^^ ^^^_ accountable for its record and results. If the peo- biUty to pie suffer, it is his fault, and he must atone by prayer, sacrifice, and repentance, as a disobedient son. Hear the ancient emperors : — " The crimes of the people are all chargeable on me. How much more, when the report of them goes up so manifestly to Heaven ! " ' " I, who am a little child, am filled with fears. I have oifered sac- rifices to Shangte, also to the earth ; and now I lead you to execute Heaven's penalty on the tyrant Chow. If I subdue him, it will not be my prowess, but the virtue of my dead father. If he subdue me, it will not be my father's fault, but because I, who am a child, am not good." •" > Menc, v. I. 5. ' Ciing in Shi-king, Pt. V. B. ix. ' Woo in Ibid., Pt. v. «. .. 282 STRUCTURES. " It is given to me, the one man, to give tranquillity to your States and families ; and now I know not whether I may not offend the powers above and beneath me. For the evil in me I will not dare to forgive myself. I will examine all things in harmony with the mind of God." ' Here is the prayer of a recent ruler in time of drought : " I, the minister of Heaven, am placed over mankind, and am re- sponsible for keeping the world in order. Trembling with anxiety, I remember that the cause of this dire calamity is the enormity of my transgressions. I am impelled to imitate my fathers, and examine whether I have failed in sacrifices, or suffered pride and prodigality in my heart, or been remiss in the duties of government ; or violated equity in rewards and punishments ; or distressed the people by costly tombs and gardens, or by appointing unworthy officers ; or refused the appeal of the wronged, or persecuted the innocent, or pursued war for the sake of gain. Prostrate, I implore Heaven to pardon my ignorance and folly, and grant me self-renovation ; for myriads of innocent people are involved by me, a single man." ' This excess of responsibility is but the reverse side of To the cor- the divine powers with which the imperial office is relation o£ supposcd to be cndowed. It is a natural develop- withdu- ment of the custom, which is found to prevail ''=^- among rudest tribes, of holding their chiefs ac- countable, with their life, for the consequences of that entire faith which has been reposed by the people in their authority to rule.^ The official fetich, like the carved or moulded one, is made answerable for the failure of his powers to effect the promised good of his worshippers. The correlation of duties with rights, the soul of highest public culture, is thus traceable far back into the primitive stages or first essays of social construction, affirming the transcendence of the moral law to all personal pretensions. The Chinese emperor mediates with the higher powers by prayers, divinations, and the unremitting cares of gov- ernment ; strictly held to the standard of his theoretic ' T'ang in Shti^king, Pt. IV. B. in. ' Kea-king (1802); see Martin's CAi«(Z, I. 64. So Hien-fung, in the crisis of the recent civil war. * For curious illustrations, see Bastian, Das Bestdndige in den Menschenrassent p. 93. GOVERNMENT. 283 position, as the typical functionary, the best man in the best place. It is the recognition of a diviner than kings, — the universal law of justice. " Let not the Emperor set example of indolence or dissoluteness to the rulers of States ; but be wary, remembering that in one day may occur ten thousand causes of things. The work is Heaven's, and man but its workman." ' " Laws, rites, rewards, and punishments, all come from Heaven. Its will is to reward the good and punish the guilty ; and, when it punishes, neither great nor small escape it." ^ " One may occupy the throne, but if he has not the proper virtue he may not dare to make ceremonies nor music. But the good ruler pre- sents himself before heaven and earth with his institutions, and with undoubting confidence, showing that he knows Heaven." " What a force is the loyalty of a people that fall down, with tears and blessings, along the Emperor's track when he visits the tombs of his fathers, yet break out in rebellion when he violates the order of the State ! The records left by such rulers as Tai-tsung, Kang-hi, and Kien-lung in the heart of the nation, and in the empire that sprang from their virtues, make good all that Confucius taught of the power of the righteous king to transform his people to his own ideal. II. He is responsible to the earthly record of his conduct as well as to the heavenly ; to the remonstrances of a Board of Censors, and to the official register of his words and deeds, written in secret, and opened only when his death leaves the public judgment free to determine under what name he shall go down to future ages, — as the glory or the shame of his country. Egyptian ^° "f^^^f judges exhorted their kings to do justly and love mercy. Manu's law imposed a similar duty on the Hindu judge. The Roman censor could degrade any man from his rank or tribe for misconduct ; but the first and second of ' Shu-kingt Ft. II. B. III. 5. 2 Confucius in Chung-yungt 'XXIX. 8 Comment- to Ibid. ; quoted in Pauthier's transl. 284 STRUCTURES. these instances relate to what were, doubtless, largely mat- ters of ceremonial, and couched in formal phraseology. The jurisdiction of the Roman censor never reached over the imperial person, and the office was either set aside by the Caesars or else made a part of their functions. But the office of the Chinese censor was in no sense a formality ; he was appointed to maintain real watch over the daily and nightly doings of the Son of Heaven, and, in the name of morality and the laws, to remonstrate and reprove. His office was the sign that rulers were personally accountable, while ideally absolute ; personally imperfect, while theo- retically perfect. He mediated between the idea and the fact, — the common sense that checked and balanced idola- try of a personal symbol. The necessity was perfectly well understood, and something similar has entered into the structure of all Eastern States, with a real force to which its analogues in the less absolute monarchies of the West were far from equivalent. The freedom of the Chinese censors is very great.^ It goes back in tradition to the words of the Emperor Yu to his minister : — " When I am doing wrong it is yours to correct me : do not ap- prove me to my face, and when you have withdrawn talte up a different tone." 2 " He who restrains his prince," says Mencius, " loves his prince." ^ The record of the censorship is perhaps the most creditable thing in Chinese history. Though a recog- nized function of the State, its task was a perilous one ; and instances of martyrdom for the rights of the weak and the supremacy of law over arbitrary will are frequent. The Emperor Kang-hi published a collection of remonstrances, selected from all ages of Chinese history, — documents for the most part in a severely circumspect style, as of men ^ Duhalde, I- 71, 250; Le Comte's Ckina, p. 255. * Shu-kingi Pt. II. B. IV. ^ Mencius, I. 11. 4. GOVERNMENT. 285 who felt great danger, yet very clear and strong.^ A writer counsels the censor thus : — " The thunder issues from all sides of the throne ; a syllable may kindle it, and it may carry death to the Empire's end. Meditate day and night to write ten words of a remonstrance, and efface six of them." 2 This was not such advice as was likely to be given to a Hebrew prophet, but its prudence is strictly in accord- ance with Chinese reverence for form and office, and by no means inconsistent with heroic fidelity.^ The arbitrary rule of Tsin Chi-hwang-ti forbade criticism of the Govern- ment. But the next dynasty (Han) at once abrogated a law so contrary to the national traditions. It is always in order for the Emperor of China to be addressed by his counsellors in the spirit of the Platonic admonition : — " You are created for the sake of the whole, not the whole for the sake of you. Take good heed of the powers of justice, for a day will come when they will take heed of you." '' HI. The Confucian Classics take precedence of political or military authority. Confucius has been called Tothe the real Emperor of China. His disciplines have classical brought Tartar Yuens and Man-chu Tsings under the power of systems as remote as possible from their native Mongolic traits. The literary compilations of his school are studied by successive dynasties as the will of Heaven, and published on a scale of labor and expense unrivalled in the enterprises of monarchs. They are an imperial Bible, though not in the exclusive, supernatural sense which Judaism and Christianity have given to the word. Digests of their substance have been prepared for the private use 1 Girard, II. 307. 2 jbid., 308. 8 In the Peking Gazette for 1873 .will be found an instance of bold censorship punished, and yet repeated without delay, calling on the throne to humble itself on account of the public sufferings, and " to tremble with awe." See also a demand made by the censor for the degra. Nation of the high officer Ki-shen, in 1843 ; Martin, I. 113. * Plato, Laws. X. 286 STRUCTURES. of princes, and for imperial tuition, not only by the doctors of the Han-lin, but by literati, whose work is traceable as far back as the beginning of our era.^ The responsibility of a " Son of Heaven " to such a stand- ard as this is certainly an anomaly in " autocracy." Con- sider, for instance, Mencius's doctrine of the independence of ministers, and their claims on imperial respect : — " Superior men of old time, if received with the utmost respect and polite observance, so that they could say to themselves that the prince would carry their words into practice, would take office with him. Afterwards, though the polite demeanor might not cease, yet if their words were not carried into practice they would leave him." ^ Mencius himself came a thousand le to wait on a king, but " not finding in him a ruler to suit him, he took his leave." ^ The prince who does not listen to his ministers is " a robber and an enemy." ^ The Shu-king abounds in ministerial counsels to monarchs, and in recognitions of their authority by those to whom they are addressed. A king (of the Shang line) who had passed his time in silence, fearing that he should disgrace his function, says : " But while I was thinking of the right way, I dreamed that God gave me an assistant who should speak for me." Search being made, the great Yu-e is found, " a builder in Foo-yen," and forthwith installed prime minister, with exhortations like these : — " Suppose me a steel weapon, I will use you for whetstone ; sup- pose me a stream, I will use you for a boat ; suppose me a year of drought, I will use you for a copious rain. Open your mind and enrich mine. Be like medicine, which will not cure the patient if it do not distress him. Think of me as one walking barefoot, whose feet are sure to be wounded if he do not see the ground. Cultivate me ; do not cast me away." ^ " Paou-hang said, ' If I cannot make my sovereign like Yao and Shun, I shall feel ashamed as if I were beaten in the market-place."' 1 See Wylie's Account of Chin, LU.y p. 145. ' Mencius, VI. n. 14. » Ibid., II. u. 12. « Ibid., IT. n. 3. ' Shu-hing, Pt. IV. B. viii. « Ibid. GOVERNMENT. 28/ E Yin, retirmg from the ministry, thus exhorts the young Emperor on his accession : — " Make new your virtue ; make daily renewal. Let your officers be the right men, hard indeed to find. The only rule for virtue is to love goodness. No special characteristics can.be laid down for determining what is right ; it is found where there is conformity to principles. Do not consider yourself so great that you hold others to be little. If the people do not find opportunity to develop virtue, the prince cannot fulfil his proper work." ' The Emperor reads in Mencius that " good instructions are better than good government ; " that the business of the ruler is " to sympathize with the people ; " that the people looked to the great T'ang as men " look to clouds and rainbows after a drought ; " that the peace of the Em- pire lies in the performance by every one of his nearest duties.^ He is warned by Confucius that the ruin of a country is in one sentence, — "a ruler whose words are not good, yet with no one to oppose them ; " ^ and taught that "to govern means to rectify;" that every one is a ruler who discharges his filial and brotherly duties ; that he who cannot govern himself cannot govern others, and has, prop- erly, nothing to do with governing ; that they who are far from the good ruler look to him in love, and they who are near are never wearied with him.* Both the Shi-king and the Shu-king are one long enforce- ment, by history, legend, moral precept, sermon, and song, of the lesson that the virtuous ruler is the salvation, and the selfish one the ruin, of the nation, by supreme laws of retribution that know no distinction of persons, and never fail to " find the way to their mark." IV. These limitations do not execute themselves, and may, as personal restraints, be less real than theo- to the retical. But the responsibility of the Emperor to p^op'*- the people is real. It is a fixed principle of Chinese tra- 1 Shu-king, Pt. IV. B. VI. * Mencitis, VII. i. 14 ; 1. 11. 4; Ill.n. 5 ; IV. i. 11. » Lunyii, XIII. 15. * Ibid., XII. 17 ; II. 21 ; XIII. 13 j Chung Yung, XXIX 288 STRUCTURES. dition that he is not the master of slaves, but the father of a household which tests his legitimacy by his behavior. The end of government is the good of the people. For this the imperial power itself was instituted.^ Mencius even says, "The people are the most important ele- ment in the nation, the spirits of the land and grain the next ; the Emperor the least." ^ Royal functions centre in this final cause. To divide and redeem the land, to organ- ize its distribution for the common good, to fix times for all occupations, and to provide all persons with sustenance and relief, with work and education ; to care especially for the poor and the old, for orphans and widows, and right all injustice, giving ear to the humblest sufferer, — com- prise the sum of imperial duty in the oldest books.^ So distinctly does this fact lie in the national mind, that the earliest (mythical) monarchs were believed to have been elected by the people.* Further down, the son of Yu is made his successor by the choice of the chiefs.^ Later still, Mencius declares the universal law that, — " The Emperor can present a man to Heaven, but he cannot make Heaven give that man the Empire. Yao presented Shun to Heaven, and the people accepted him. Heaven does not speak. It simply in- dicated its will by his personal conduct and his conduct of aflFairs."6 Being the representative of Heaven only through his virtue, the Emperor is not properly a hereditary ruler ; and, though in point of fact the dynasties have followed that rule, it has been antagonized by the incessant breaks of revolution. The idea does not rest on birth. Yu calls together his best men to consult on the succession. All through the Shu-king the popular voice is the sign of divine approval. That the ruler must recognize this is the burden of instruction. » Shu-hing, Pt IV. B. viii. a. « Menc, VII. n. 14. " See also Menc, I., i. 7. • See Wuttke, II. 173. » Menc, v. 1. 6. ibid., V. J. 5. GOVERNMENT. 28g "Heaven hears and sees as the people hear and see. Heaven shows its approval or its wrath, as the people theirs : sucli connection is there between the upper and the louver worlds. How reverent ought the masters of earth to be ! " * " What one only desires cannot be executed ; to oppose the whole brings evil. When the masses are aroused, resistance is vain." ^ In the " Book of Poetry," it is said : — " Before the sovereigns of the Yin dynasty had lost the hearts of the people, they could appear before God. Take warning from them. The great decree is not easily preserved. This shows that, by gaining the people, the kingdom is gained ; and, by losing the people, the king- dom is lost." ' " When a prince loves what the people loves, and hates what they hate, then is he the parent of the people."* " To close the people's mouths is more dangerous than to dam the torrent." ' " Do not be ashamed to ask counsel from those who carry grass on their shoulders, and gather firewood." ° In the treatment of the people, the highest ideal of moral fitness, and the " Golden Rule," are the tests of imperial duty." No republic ever proclaimed a representative responsibil- ity more absolutely. Nor is the Chinese ark too holy to be touched by uncon- secrated hands. Yao chooses Shun for his successor, — a poor man who had been a common farmer, a potter, and a fisherman,^ who was son of a blind and bad father, and brother of a rebel. Yu and Tseih were husbandmen, and at- tained the Empire.^ " Yu lived in a mean house, and spent his strength on the water channels." ^^ The founders of dynasties by revolution in Chinese history are generally men of humble origin. " Yao and Shun," says Mencius, 1 Shu-king, Pt II. B. in. 7. » Plath, in Bay. Ai. X. 470. » Takio, X. i. « Shi-king, quoted in Tahio, X. 3. » Sseki, quoted by Plath. ' Old proverb; quoted in Shi-king, HI. a. 11. 10. ^ Takio, X. i, z. • Menc, II. I. 8 ; VI. n. 15. » Lunyu, XIV. 6. » Ibid., VIII. 21. 19 290 STRUCTURES. "were just the same as other men. All men can become Yaos and Shuns." ^ , The Tcheou-li mentions three cases in which the people are called to give advice : when the kingdom is in danger ; when a city is to be built ; when a prince is to be installed, an heir being wanting,'^ — all of these being emergencies that call for a return to the recognized sources of government. The Tcheou-li was certainly written in the bloom of Chi- nese imperialism, and the testimony to traces of popular sovereignty is therefore more valuable than any isolated facts to the same effect, which might have been exceptional. The same Institutes mention consultation of the people in order to determine penalties in cases of capital crime.^ In what ways the will of the people, thus affirmed to be authoritative, can be fully ascertained except by popular observation of their condition, the ballot being un- wuiisex- ]jnown, is not easy to say. But there has never pressed. ^ -' ^ _ been wanting such expression of it as could be given by speech of leading men, by satires, pasquinades, and popular demonstrations. An idea so fundamental to the State does not lack channels of communication. Re- monstrances and reproofs to Government by unofficial per- sons are as common as those of censors and mandarins.* Many satires, complaints, and indignant or pathetic appeals are preserved in the Shi-king. The protest against impe- officiaiin- "^^ caprice has been heard in the free speech of depeii- courageous ministers whenever there was need. There is probably no nation where history is more fertile in examples of such independence, in face of ex- treme peril, than China. Confucius was not prevented by his rules of obsequious bearing toward princes from insist- ing on proper deference to the person of the teacher, and > Menc, IV. 11. 32 ; VI. n. a. > Tcheou-li, XXXV. 17. > Ibid., 25, 16. * Pfitzmaier gives extracts from some of these, dating in the Han ; and Wuttke has sorat account of this branch of popular expression, Gesch. des Heidenth. II. 192. GOVERNMENT. 29I refused to visit a prince who neglected to pay him this 'trib- ute. According to the whole teaching of Confucius and Mencius, the official should only obey orders when they are right ; and, even if in danger of losing his head, must not forget his duty. " There is no one in T'se wlio speaks to the King about benevo- lence and righteousness. Are they silent because they do not think these admirable ? No ; but in their hearts they say, ' This man is not fit to be spoken with about benevolence and righteousness.' Thus they manifest the greatest possible disrespect. I do not dare to set forth before the king anyways but those of Yao and Shun. 'Let rulers have their wealth,' said the philosopher T'sang : ' I have my benevolence. Let them have their nobility : I have my righteousness. Wherein should I feel inferior to them ? ' Shall we say that these sen- timents are not right ? The prince who does not honor the virtues, and delight in their ways, is not worth having to do with." ^ " To urge one's sovereign to difficult achievements is showing re- spect for him. To set before him what is good, and repress his perver- sities, is showing reverence to him. He who does not do thus, plays the thief with his sovereign." ^ " One's principles must appear along with one's person. One's person must vanish along with one's principles. I have not heard of one's principles being dependent for their manifestation on other men."' "Once rectify the prince, and the kingdom will be settled. Only the great men can do this." ■• " Can there be loyalty which does not lead to the instruction of its object ? " ^ "Tse-Ioo asked how a sovereign should be served. The Master said, ' Do not impose on him, and moreover withstand him to his face.'" 6 " The man who, in the view of gain, thinks of righteousness, who in view of danger is prepared to give up his life, and who does not forget a promise, however long past, such a man may be reckoned a complete man (i.e. fit for a minister)." ' " The true scholar will sacrifice his life to preserve his virtue complete."' ■ Menc, II. n. a. » Ibid., IV. i. i. « Ibid., VII. i. 4a. « Ibid., IV. I. 30. » Lunytt, XIV. 8. « Ibid., Jj. > Ibid., 13. « Ibid., XV. 8. 292 STRUCTURES. "Men of principle are sure to be bold, though the bold may not always be men of principle." 1 In the Shu-king the same ideal is constantly presented. " E Yin, minister of a young Shang monarch, having dared to imprison him for a season for the public good, receives him on his repentance, with head bowed to the ground before the majesty of the office, saying, ' O King, do justly, and I shall respond to your virtue with endless devotion. Let the One man be greatly good, and the myriad regions will be righted by his endeavors.' " ^ " Tsoo E proclaimed to the tyrant Chow-sin (twelfth century B.C.) that his dissoluteness was bringing the line of Yin to destruction. ' On this account there is famine in the land and general disorder. The people cry, " Why does not Heaven send down its .wrath .' Why dees not some one appear with its great decree i What has this King to do with us .■"' ' The King said, ' Is not my life secured by decree of Heaven ? ' Tsoo E returned and said, ' Your many crimes are regis- tered above. Can you speak of your fate as if you had given it in charge to Heaven ? The end of Yin is at hand.' " ' Mencius denounces the rulers of his day in the broadest terms : — " Never was there a time farther than the present from the appear- ance of a true ruler ; never a time when the sufferings of the people from oppressive government were more intense than now."* " King Seu-en said to Mencius : ' May a minister put his sovereign to death ? ' Mencius said : ' He who outrages righteousness and love is a ruffian. I have heard of the cutting off of the fellow Chow, but I have not heard of putting a sovereign to death, in his case.' " ' " A sovereign who oppresses his people will be slain, and his kingdom will perish." ^ " When a prince endangers the altars of the spirits of the land and grain he is changed, and another is appointed in his place." ' Wan-te, in the second century, B.C., issued an edict, abrogating a law against freedom of speech, in which he says : — ^ Lunjfu, XIV. 5 ; Passages like XIV. 4, and XV. 6, intimating that in times when bad government prevails a wise man would neithertake office nor always express his principles in words, though in action he would be bold and straightforwaiti as an arrow, seem to mean sim- ply that common sense must choose the sort of protest most likely to be of use. 2 SAu-king'f Pt IV., B. V. 8 Ibid., B. x; see also B. xi. * Menc, II. 1. 1. « Ibid., I. II. S. « Ibid., IV. i. 2. ' Ibid., VII. 11. 14- GOVERNMENT. 293 "There exists a law severely punishing those who criticise the ruler. The effect is that the people and ministers dare not express their honest thought about us, and that we are thus prevented from being informed of our faults and errors. Ilow will superior men from foreign countries come to enhghten us with their counsels ? I abrogate that law.'' Practically, imperial responsibility to the people resides in the right of rebellion. This at once distinguishes . the Chinese theory of government from that of of rebei- " the divine right of kings," and shows that long ''°°' before representative systems, or the rule of the ballot, the caprices of arbitrary power were held in check by a well- understood prerogative in the interest' of the community. The ultimate source of rights and the final appeal against wrongs were in the whole people. " Stand in awe of the people," is the counsel of the Shu-king to rulers.^ The right of rebellion is not only always asserted in theory, but has been resorted to by the masses in all ages of Chinese history ; and the chiefs who have led in these insurrections against imperial despotism — Woo Tang, Lui-yu, Tai-tsu — are the heroes of national gratitude and praise. The Chinese have been called " the least revolutionary but the most rebellious of peoples." ^ Most dynasties have ended in this way. The miseries .of poverty and excessive taxation have been a fertile source of popular insurrection, — a phenome- non so frequent that nothing but the innate reluctance of the Mongolian mind to assume entire self-guidance can explain the absence of republican institutions from the history of a people so apt for democratic appeal. The very beggars of Pe-king have organized a right of revo- lution. The practical acceptance of this right is universal. Not only is China, like Turkey, undermined by secret associa- tions, — many of them aiming at the overthrow of the ex- * Shit~king, v. B. xir. 13. 2 Meadows, p. 25. 294 STRUCTURES. isting dynasty, — but the people are systematically educated in the knowledge of their reserved rights. The old songs and satires of the Shi-king, abounding more in dispraise of rulers than in their praise ; the legends and speeches of the Shu-king, enforcing the duty of Government to respect the people's voice and dread their indignation, — are constantly read in the schools. The great historical uprisings ; the appeals of insurgent princes to the people ; the overthrow of dynasties by shoemakers, scullions, school-masters, and monastery boys, — leading troops of ill-armed, famine- maddened peasants,^ — are treated in the examination themes as freely as the rest of Chinese history. The praises of tyrannicide stand in the text-books of law and ethics, which everywhere throw prince and people back of all dis- tinctions of rank, upon moral sovereignty and the instincts of humanity and justice, reiterating that the selfish oppres- sive ruler is no ruler, and that he must, in the very name of government itself, be overthrown. The prevailing notion of " Oriental autocracy," as pro- " Oriental *^^*^i"S ^^^ capriccs of dcspots against all manifes- autocra- tatiou of public feeling and every personal safe- '^^■" guard, breaks down on the fact that the right of rebelHon enters into the very texture of Chinese edu- cation, in forms so plain and direct that they would have involved death even to their theoretic supporter in any period or state under the rdgime, so long prevalent in Europe, of the divine right of kings. Hardly shall we find a national history in which there is so little unresisted per- manent tyranny, however cruel may have been the sudden outbreaks of power, as in China. Whenever foreigners have invaded the throne, the patriotic masses have given the intruders no rest. The late rebellion is no strange experience for the Chinese, who are used to resisting, not » See Pfitzmaier's articles on the Fall of the Tsin Dynasty, in Wien Akad., July, 1859. Chinese Refas., 1842, pp. 592-614, on the rise of the Ming ; Brine on the Tai-ping Rebellion. GOVERNMENT. 295. only the violation of the ancient rules on which thei» civilization rests, but the signs of incapacity in their Gov- ernment to uphold its own dignity and fulfil its proper functions. In tenacious adherence to their ancient liber- ties they resemble their European analogues, the laborious, conscientious, courageous Dutch. The Declaration of In- dependence issued by these patriots against Spanish rule, in 1581, reads like an extract from Mencius : — " If a prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not appointed by God for the behoof of the prince, but the prince for his subjects, — without whom he is no prince." At the same time the severest punishments are levelled in Chinese law and precept against treason, slaying or expulsion of a ruler, and all offences against, that sanctity of his person which only palpable moral unfitness can annul. In truth, the root idea of the Chinese State is a mutu- ality of rights and interests between prince and Mutuality people as the two terms of one divine order, neither r°i^"°„4 of which can fail of its part without defeating the people. whole. The primitive simplicity of this recognition of justice has not unfolded into those practical mediations which political experience has elsewhere devised for regu- lating and correcting the relations between ruler and ruled, and which have ultimately identified the two in pure self- government by the people. On both sides the corrective force is directly destructive of its opposite. The prince compels obedience by peremptory edict, without constitu- tional check or balance, and the people make resistance or compel justice solely by resort to rebellion, unmediated by elective processes or L.nitary laws. This statement must of course be qualified by the references already made to abiding instincts and forces, which serve a kindred purpose 296 STRUCTURES. with such mediations. But, on the whole, the method is as simplistic as it is sincere. It is the most direct path of a religious consciousness of the right to be governed and the duty to be led by the best, maintaining its ground against perversion, while as yet ignorant of the means by which changes can be made steady and constructive. These Contrasted meaus, SO far as they are now discerned, we sum with repre- yp under the term representative self-government, govern- They involve an analysis of the social body which °'™'' reaches to its ultimate molecules ; to the mdi- vidiial, his functions, duties, rights. In the East, society is still unanalyzed. Only the grand antithesis is recognized of unity in the ruling force and multiplicity in the ruled, but without the mediating term of individuality, through which the interests of both are harmonized in the justice that guarantees fair hearing and full opportunity for all. What concerns us most is to note the development, out of the oldest type of social life, and in democratico- of the Chi- monarchical form, of the idea of universal service nesepohti- fhrough government by the best, and the rule of fit- ness to functions as its practical interpreter. The association of this idea with responsibility to the people as a whole, seems natural enough, when we consider its truly prophetic intimation of that yet unfulfilled ideal of freedom to which the latest republic, as well as the earliest mon- archy, must aspire. I am therefore far from allowing that " there is, properly, The people no people in China," in the sense of a body-politic, ^fve"°^'dy ■^it'^ definite meaning and function, "but only a poutic." somewhat, crude and undeveloped, fitly represented in its written ideograph as a wild plant, vegetating with- out insight, and forming only the body of the State, of which the prince is the soul." ^ The rights already men- • Plath's Can/uciits. The current term for " the masses " is waTL-min, the myriai ■Kople. GOVERNMENT. 297 tioned, and the recognized responsibilities of the State, indicate not only that the idea of " the people" so dear to the classical writers and teachers of China, involves a vital force and real whole ; but that so completely do per- sonal distinctions merge in the sense of universal equality for the purposes of justice, as the soul of this idea, that the Emperor himself, the fountain of honors, cannot sub- stitute his own interest for the public good without a wide-spread protest, and all inherent and inalienable dis- tinctions like the ranks and castes of Aryan society are unknown. Offices, titles, temporary privileges, are inevitable, and represent the necessity for some kind of grading in the plane of social respect. Probably they are ^i"^"''- all the more conspicuous and complex because they alone represent it. The instinct is satisfied, without essential differences of class, by shadings of functional importance, under tests of fitness. In the old f^tes described in the Shu-king, no distinctions of rank are recognized, differences of station being referred to no other ground than utility and convenience. Nothing is commoner in China than radical protest against even these, by writers and philosophers, whose errors are usually confuted by the wisei: national creed, and the distinctions involved in social order recon- ciled with real equalities. Mencius, for example, replies to one who argued from the times when the Emperor ploughed with his own hands and prepared his own meal, like other men, while he carried on the government, — by convincing him of the necessity for a division of labor, and by putting the authority of government itself on this ground, in a sentence of profound and enduring meaning : — "Great men have their proper business, and little men have theirs. If every man must make his tools before he uses them, the whole Em- pire would be kept running about on the roads. Hence the saying, ' Some labor with their minds, and some with their bodily strength 298 STRUCTURES. They who labor with their minds direct others : they who labor (only) with their strength are directed by others.' " ' This characteristic logic goes far towards explaining the Absence of remarkable exception afforded by China to the '^'^- other great primitive civilizations, in its entire free- dom from caste. The fact itself seems at first to contra- dict that view of the origin of castes, which ascribes them to the force of conditions natural to the early stages of society. In the volume on India, I have defined them as the result ■ of an early effort at the organization of labor under the influence of the religious idea, considered as guide to a determination of the comparative values of func- tions for the general good. This given, the secondary agencies of conquest and tradition, and the powers of a separate priesthood, accomplished the rest. But religion in China, instead of influencing the organization of labor, has been absorbed in it and constituted by it. Work is not estimated and distributed by an ideal above itself : it is the ideal. The result is obvious. No contemplative class could be formed at the top of the social scale to hold a body of sacred traditions by supernatural right ; no contempt of physical industry could remand the industrial class to the bottom of ■ that scale ; no expansion by conquest made the soldier a higher power of national defence than the peace- ful pioneers of labor ; no separation of interests could arise in a commonwealth of industry to put the trader perma- nently above the farmer or the artisan. In place of the fiction of essential difference between classes, the realities of productive force were in honor ; the producer of univer- sal uses and economies could nowhere be ignored ; and if literary culture, which was held to be the culmination of ethical and social wisdom, was made the ground of highest social respect, it must be remembered that its substance was democratic, — the literary class being recruited from the * Menc. III. i. 4. GOVERNMENT. 299 people, — and that its gates were open to fair competition for rewards, which, as the fruit of honest toils, educated the whole nation in self-respect. The secret of this Chi- nese democracy is a religion of work. Labor and freedom go hand in hand. For society cannot escape the spiritual law, that liberty is only in patient conformity to the condi- tions of Nature. Hereditary rank is contrary to the Chinese social theory ; and even the prince, usually with the advice of ofhered- his ministers, can nominate his successor from ''aryrfght. among his sons. There have been periods when the he- reditary principle received great expansion ; but these pe- riods — and notably that of the later Tcheou, in whose feudalism it took root — are regarded as the product of a perverted state of society. It is traced by Chinese writers to the reduction of the people to a condition of dependence on great officials, who were paid, not from the total reve- nue, but in rights of attachment on the soil and its prod- ucts, to be levied directly on the laborer.^ The protest against the principle of entail is declared to have been con- stant and strong, even while the process of enfeoffment was going on. Confucius and Mencius, who belong to that epoch, insist that, in imperial succession, virtue must take precedence of hereditary right.^ The introduction of eunuchs into court offices is believed to have been in part a plan to get rid of the latter principle.^ Where it still remains, as in certain privileged classes, it confers no real power beyond a certain social respect.* Equally vain has been the effort to establish primogen- iture. It was prevented by Wu-ti in the second century, B.C. ; and the eldest son was allowed no more than half the paternal estate.^ Fortunes seldom descend in families, and all professions are free. 1 Biot, Mem. de la Consiii Polit, de la Chine au Xllme SUclfi pp. 28, 29. ' Menc. v. i. 6 ; also Plath, Bay. A had. X. 535. ' Biot, hom Maimaulin. • William.-.. I. 316. " Wuttke, II. 151, 300 STRUCTURES. If the old titles of feudal times which figure in the An- nals, and are quaintly translated by the terms, " duke," "count," "baron," "knight," have not quite disappeared, yet the rank of noble, as now dispensed, carries no perma- nent authority, nor even influence ; nor any immunities, other than such as may be specially granted as reward for public services or literary merit, or in view of the honor that flows so freely in the East upon children from the virtue of their fathers. Officials of distinction, wise and virtuous dead, and pre-eminently the family of Confu- cius, have been ennobled. Females as well as males receive this honor. It has been liberally conferred, and is naturally enough sold in times of financial distress. In the second century, B.C., the whole people were ennobled as a means of attaching them to the dynasty of Han.^ The ennobled classes are submerged in the general equal- ity. Wealth and ability determine influence in China as well as in America, and the highest posts are continually supplied from the humblest conditions of social life. The assurance that public good is the final cause of government is not disturbed by the grade of honor due to the special color of a mandarin's cap-button, or peacock's feather, or a flight to right and left before the official whip that precedes his sedan. In the ritual laws there are rules of social pre- cedence, based on estimates of the respective values of occu- pations, but nowise inclining to caste. And observe the order: (i) Literati ; (2) Husbandmen ; (3) Manufacturers; (4) Merchants.^ Again, among husbandmen, the producers of grains take precedence of gardeners or fruiterers. A few classes are specially marked with social contempt, such as jugglers, actors, executioners, police-runners, beggars, aliens, slaves ; but their disqualifications, however discred- itable to the community, are by no means crushing or radi- cal, and affect, after all, but a small portion of the body politic.^ ' Kidd's Chi?ia, p. 261. ' Davis, ch. viu. ' Williams, 1. 121. GOVERNMENT. 30I The difference of Chinese traditions of social order from those of Japan is radical. Japan has been aristo- j^ ^^ cratic, China democratic. Although so largely under Chinese influence for a thousand years, Japanese society fixed every man's condition irrevocably, and the government was a close corporation of nobles. It has been even called " a despotism tempered by assassination." No political reward was offered to literary attainment, and the military class was in a sense supreme. The abandon- ment of feudal rights by the daimios, in order " to enable their country to take its place by the side of other nations," the recognition of the right of petition, and of laws as the basis of government, are late revolutionary results, while in China these popular liberties are traditional. The earlier periods of Chinese history yield no signs of the existence of personal slavery.^ The earliest •' Slavery. mention of slaves (««) belongs to the twelfth cen- tury, B.C., at which time this class consisted only Cii public convicts, doomed to penal labors for such crimes as rebel- lion, or as prisoners of war.^ Old men and children were exempted. In the time of the Han, the number of such State convicts was from one to three hundred thousand, and em.ancipation was often a public necessity.^ The T'ang Emperors freed all government slaves, and we thenceforth hear only of persons condemned to banishment, — as the Man-chus send criminals to government forges and salt- works on the Amoor, their children, however, being given to officers as personal slaves. In the second century, B.C., after the terrible desola- tions of the civil wars, the founder of the Han permitted parents to sell their children. This seems to have been > See Plath, Bay. Akad. X. 688. ' See Biot's account, from Maimanlin, fourn. Asiat. 1837. * Martin. I. 218. 302 STRUCTURES. the first definite step to private ownership in persons' There were three classes of bondsmen : (i) prisoners of war ; (2) persons selling themselves, or sold ; (3) children of slaves. A long series of laws have prohibited child- selling as well as trading in the bodies of persons born free ; ^ and man-stealers are severely punished. Yet the former practice has been too deeply rooted in social dis- tresses to be extirpated by laws. But emancipation was never prohibited. Kwang-woo (first century, a.c.) deserves special honor. He enacted that every female sold should become the purchaser's legal wife ; released officers who had been reduced by poverty to selling themselves ; amnestied public slaves ; forbade killing or branding, and gave freedom to all branded per- sons. Edicts of emancipation have often been issued in times of distress, to increase the number of tax-payers. It is observable that the act is always immediate and com- plete. No gradualism complicates the evil. The great severity of certain penal laws in their bearing on slaves appears to be an attempt to give full validity to patriarchal absolutism, which could not be fully carried out upon free men. But, however severe the laws, the actual status of slaves Not of the '"^ China in no sense answers to that total absence Western of rights by which the term, in our usage, is de- ^'' fined ; and still less admits the cruelties of the old Spartan or Roman slave laws. "The Anglo-American," wrote Biot, in 1837, " resembling the Chinese in his love of gain and his practical spirit, is inferior to him in humanity as judged by the severity of his black laws, and the bar- barities he inflicts on his slave. In America, it must be remembered, the master is white and the slave black. In China they belong to the same race, and are intellectually equal. In China the master knows that poverty may re- » Plath and Biot. > See Wuttke, II. 153. GOVERNMENT. 303 duce him to the condition of his slave, as well as imperial anger or physical calamity. So he inclines to mercy and fellow-feeling towards him." ^ Other authorities are agreed that the treatment of Chinese so-called " slaves " is ex- tremely mild.^ We are told that they are wont to eat with their masters. If they are ill-treated, the magistrate must interfere. The romances represent them as confidants of their masters. Nor does Chinese history record any revolt of slaves. They often engage in trade and redeem them- selves from bondage. The marriage of a female slave makes her free ; while unmarried, she is treated like a hired ser- vant ; nor does slaver/ descend to female children beyond the first generation. The number of male slaves is small ; and their sons often reach official position and wealth.^ Yet it is in the male line only that the condition becomes strictly hereditary. There are recognitions of natural free- dom in such facts as (i) the punishment of the master and his whole family in case of his murdering a slave and theii concealment of the deed, as contrasted with the Roman custom, when a master was murdered, of putting all his slaves to death; and (2) the prohibition of a husband's selling his wife, even to be the full wife of another man, without her own free written consent.* It is a fair inference from facts like these that the so-called slave class in China, recruited mostly from the necessities of poverty, is continually being resolved back into the free community, through that democratic instinct which overrides the whole system of formal grades and dis- tinctions. The word liberty is said to be " unknown to the Chinese language." ^ This is of course applicable only to cunese the definition of liberty as pure and simple political ''''°'^" ' yournal Asialigut. = Wuttke, II. 153. ' Doolittle, II. an. « Doolittle, II. 209. » Williams, I. 331. 304 STRUCTURES. self-government. For inward freedom, for a higher law of conscience and reason as the ground of personal cul- ture, for the spontaneity of virtue, the classics have not only many terms, but a constant zeal. The whole purpose of the Ta-hio is to teach the origin of all power in the dis- ciplines of personal character. " The point of rest is in the highest excellence." ' " From the Em- peror down, the root of every thing is in the cultivation of the person." ' " Not to do what one's own sense of right tells him not to do, nor to desire what it forbids him to desire, is the sum of right action."' "He whose goodness is part. of himself is a real man."^ "Though poor, he does not let go his virtue, nor, though prosperous, leave his own path." ^ "A counsellor to the great Should disregard their pomp. Why should I stand in awe of them ? " ^ " Men have true honor within ; but they do not think of it. The honor men confer is not honor. Whom Cheou ennobles, he can make mean again." ^ This is the Platonic education, teaching " how rightly to rule, and rightly to obey." ^ " If a minister cannot correct himself, how can he correct others." ' '• A true man will sacrifice his life to save his principles."" " He is in the right way who naturally and easily does right : choosing and firmly holding what is good." 11 An instance will illustrate the scope of this possibility. A great ^^ ^^^ bccu Said of Ye-liu, minister of the family of minister of Tchingis Khan, and a Tartar with Chinese culture, that he was a " mediator between an oppressed race and their oppressor, his whole life being spent in pleading with triumphant barbarism for the cause of law, order, and humanity." He saved whole provinces of China from being depopulated to make pastures for the Tartar horse, and protected the cities from being sacked with all their arts and industries ; restrained the custom of filling the harem of the Khans with the flower of Chinese families ; obtained for the conquered nation the right of holding office ; pro- 1 Tahu), c. il. " Ibid., c. vii. > Menc. VII. i. 17. * Ibid., ii. 25. » Ibid., i. 9. « Ibid., ii. 34- ' Ibid., VI. i. 17. « Laws, B. I. » Lunyu, XIII. 13- '» Ibid., XV. 8. " Chune-yung, XX. GOVERNMENT. 30S tected many of their old institutions ; opened educational and civil rights even to slaves ; repressed corruption and exaction ; rebuked an Emperor's taste for strong drink ; and availed himself of an imperial sickness to procure a general amnesty. Charged with having enriched himself, at his death he was found possessed only of a few pictures and books. In brief, " he prepared afar off the revolution that sent the Mongols back to their deserts, and gave China a government founded on national manners and traditions." ^ In the first century, B.C., a governor in North-eastern China literally taught people to sell their swords and buy oxen, and brought banditti by amnesties to honest labor at the plough : whence the saying that in his province " men wore oxen at their waists and heifers in their belts." ^ Liberty, in the now too popular acceptation of the word, — as the unconditioned right to do as one pleases, Not "the — is no part of Chinese mental experience. All "ei"""^" A J^ as one freedom is associated with loyalty, either to the wiiis." ruler, the traditional institutions and ceremonial grades, or, when these lose their hold, to the inherent sense of necessity for being governed, which characterizes the race. This necessity, in the highest minds as elsewhere, takes the form of reverence for the moral and spiritual ideal, as is manifest in the whole tone of the classical writings ; while in ordinary experience it merges in typical rights of the people as suck. The validity of an ultimate appeal to the sense of the people subsists in spite of the absence of those methods of effectuating the popular will with which Western races are familiar. Though China is the inventor of paper and printing, nothing has existed, until the present time, more nearly approaching a popular press than the court bulletin of such events, petitions, edicts, honors, services, ordinances, as are thought fit for general ' See R^musat, Nauv. Mel. II. pp. 64-88. * Mayer^s Manual, p. go. 20 306 STRUCTURES. perusal. Nevertheless, the popular sentiment gets expres- „„ . sion in satires, stories, placards, remonstrances, dis- 1 ne voice j ' r ' j of the cussions, and in the secret societies whose germs people. ^^^ j^^ ^^^ older records of the nation.^ Legis- lative institutions in our sense are wanting ; but official conduct is ventilated in the town councils, and an unpopu- lar mandarin is frequently driven from his place. The responsibility for popular commotions being by law laid upon these government officers, their disposition is to avoid giving cause of offence to the community. But, after all, we must observe how entirely the interest of the indi- vidual is sacrificed to the ideal of public rights in the fact that those last, self-destructive resorts for the overthrow of unjust officials, suicide and oath-bound conspiracy, are ex- ceedingly prevalent.^ The imperial theory would hardly seem to recognize Local lib- local self-government. Yet the communal organi- viiiage zation in China, and even Japan,^ as in India, main- system. taius the idea of a popular commonwealth in many important ways at the base of the social structure ; and in the former States, far more than in the latter country, yields practical instruction in the school of liberty. In every part of China towns and villages abound, where the officials of government are scarcely ever seen, and affairs are administered by local authorities, selected on the basis of the national respect for culture, and forming bodies which direct affairs by open discussion, sometimes amounting to decision of peace or war between neighboring clans.* These municipal institutions, even in the poorer communes, rest on a kind of patriarch o-univer sal suffrage, to which all heads * See especially Hue's Chinese Empire, II. 83-86 ; St Denys, Poisies de V Bpoque dei Tkang (Paris, 1872), p. xxviii. * See Mcfarlane, The Chinese Revolution ; Meadows, p. 115. ^ Smith's 7V« Weeks in Japan. "The Japanese peasantis jealous of his rights and asserti them." See also Siances des OrieTttalistes, 1873, I. igg. * Meadows, p. 47 j La Chine Ouverte, p. 191 ; Chinese Rep., January, 1836. GOVERNMENT. 307 of families are entitled, or on choice of elders by lot.' Or- ganizations of the people, for the detection and punishnaent of robbers and other social offenders, are very common.^ The elders of town councils, even where government has its ti-paos, or mayors, possess very considerable powers ; communicating with the prefect through these latter offices, administering justice and directing the police, regulating ceremonies, settling disputes, and estimating taxes. They remain in office during the good will of the people. In dangerous moments, these councils unite for consultation, from fifty to a hundred combining for discussion in some central hall ; and their decisions are of great weight with the central government. Their power over State officials was seen in the resistance of the Canton city council to the opening of that port to the British in 1857. "There are customs, privileges, and laws in every province which the government dare not abolish, and which destroy that civil and administrative unity which Europeans have been pleased to attribute to this colossal Empire." ^ The habit of free discussion is further developed in the direction of an in- terest of prime value in China by the trade associations, which exercise immense influence, and in Canton alone make use of more than a hundred halls. In the East or the West, no institutions can prevent the tendencies of industry to diffuse freedom. The dialectics and narrations of Mencius often reveal a socialistic element, as apt to crop out in this soil of Chinese free discussion.* R6musat gives an interesting account of an effort of this kind on a national scale, led by Wang-ngan- che, a reformer of the eleventh century, who carried even the ruling prince along with him for a time, in schemes for introducing equality of property, abolishing monopolies by making the State the only creditor, in the name of the ^ Bazin, Recherches sur Jes Insiit. de la Chine, 1854 ; Plath, Landwirihsch. d. Chine- ten (1874), p. 40. > Hue, II. 82-84. ' Ibid., II. 49. « Menc. Ill . 14; VI. ii. 10. 308 STRUCTURES. working classes, and substituting for superstitious rites to remove disease and famine, earthquakes and droughts, those sanitary and other social duties that belong to a re- sponsible government.-^ That the crude mixture of sense and folly in this bold reform should soon break it down was but natural ; yet it is none the less impressive as a sign of opportunity to conceive and propagate principles of social justice. Not less effective sources of popular activity and com- bination are the clans, of which there are said to be The dans. nearly five hundred ; origmatmg probably m the old tribal divisions of feudal times, and in the large diver- sity of ethnic elements out of which the nation is composed.^ But the value of the clans, as schools of social organization, is fully offset by their disintegrative effects on the State as a whole. So violent are their contentions that they frequently interrupt trade and production, and defeat all attempts to execute the laws. As the clan is but a develop- ment of the patriarchal family, retaining in large degree the forms of that primitive system, it is natural to find in China, where those forms have undergone less change than in Aryan States, whole neighborhoods bound by ties of a common ancestry, and whole tribes united by recognition of common chiefs and elders. The law which forbids in- termarriage among persons of the same surname must tend to dissolve these family concretions. That the elements of political self-government, now mentioned, should not have been developed into Supposed J. ^ .. , absence of some form of parliamentary mstitutio.ns, will seem progress, inexplicable, till we reflect on the peculiar instinct of this people to bury itself in organization, without secur- ing freedom to the individual atoms, on whose self-asser- > N'owv. MeL AsiaU II., " Life of Ssemakwang." * These elements have not been clearly discerned, though several careful studies have bee« made on the Hakkas and some Miautse tribes. GOVERNMENT. 309 tion such progress depends. The want of progress in Chinese institutions has probably been exaggerated. The native writers, indeed, regard the later centralization as but return to a primitive perfect monarchy. But it may well be believed to represent the gradual working out of the demand for national unity inherent in Chinese nature. It took a decisive form in the great change effected in the third century B.C. from feudal anarchy to democratico- monarchical institutions. Not only were the hereditary chiefs of States absorbed, and their exhausting wars quelled, but the old aristocracy and its land tenures were levelled, the paths of distinction opened to the humblest classes, and a general application of the educational tests of fitness for public functions was made possible. These were the ultimate outcome of a revolution which seemed at first to be the subjugation of all existing local liberties under the sway of a single despot. It has certainly been a revolution in the interest of social order and growth ; and the result has been wrought out through long ferment of the elements, and at vast sacrifice of human life. It has been a triumph over barriers of tribal tradition and the rivalries of States and clans, that deserves to rank among the great facts of progress, and proves these not to be wanting in the patriarchal Empire of Repose. The immutability of China is a fiction ; though the vast scale and patient uniform pressure of the forces „ at work may almost remind us, in their power to immobility" disguise movement, of the molecular changes of ^° ^"°'' geology. There must be motive force in a nation which has passed through twenty changes of dynasty in as many centuries. Comparing the earliest and latest epochs of its history, we note the striking difference in land tenure, which at first was wholly vested in the State, but, since the great revolution just referred to, has been steadily trans- formed into private ownership. Freedom of locomotion, 310 STRUCTURES. however hampered by local causes, has advanced to that extent, that for the last few centuries no equal area on the civilized globe can be traversed by its own inhabitants, with so little interference from officials, as the two thou- sand miles square of Chinese territory. Immense changes in diet, dress, products, culture, organization, administra- tion, have slowly penetrated it.^ How vast, original, com- plex, and refined a civilization has been evolved from the rude tribes that descended thousands of years ago through the wildernesses of the Hoangho, and in a space of time which the prodigious ethnic scale on which it proceeds seems to reduce to a day ! The Chinese themselves, contrary to the general impres- Traditions siou, distinctly recognize progress. They begin of progress, ^jt^ a picture of their forefathers, as a race of men scarcely above the condition of brutes, without fire or dwelling, clad in skins, and eating roots and insects, but gradually lifted by wise and practical persons to that stage of development in which they could receive the normal institutions depicted in the Shu-king.* They have characteristically described these teachers of hut- building, cooking, and dressing, as well as of writing, music, medicine, agriculture, and historical construction, as princes ruling nations and forming long dynasties. Their series of inventions is as unscientifically constructed as the order of creation in the Hebrew Genesis ; yet the long period conceded in the mythology to this prehistoric development is a clear recognition of progress as a princi- ple in human nature, beside which the three or four thou- sand years of a supposed degeneracy which constitute their real history seems but a mere streak on the surface of an evolutionary deep of time. > See Hellwald, CuHwgtschichie (Augsburg, 1874), pp. 79, 80. ' Biot, yourn. Asiat. 1846 J also, the " Bamboo Books" of the Shu-king, and De M»il> la*s Hist. Gen. de la Ckinay I. i. GOVERNMENT. 3 1 1 Curiously combined with this positivist instinct is their reference of the ideal of government to a remote Pastpoiit- past, beyond recorded history. How far we accept ^^^i ideals. this firm postulate of Chinese belief depends very shun. much on the degree of influence we ascribe to the national habit of treating the ideal as existing only in an immediate concrete, an instant realization. While the tra- ditions and records from which Confucius compiled the description of the old monarchy, as contained in the Shu- king, could not possibly have been formed in his day, since they required a long period for their elaboration, — they must not, on the other hand, be carried back so far as to defeat this requirement on the other side. A central- ized government, ruling several principalities and parcel- ling out large domains by investiture, was never, even in China, brought to birth in a day. There is no question in Comparative Politics more inter- esting, as there is none more recondite, than the siowevo- process by which the Family Idea unfolded into a ''"'™ »* vast imperialism like that of China, without losing archai its essential character. This evolution must cover ^'^'°" many stages of the growth of nations in general ; but in China we may observe its normal course, because the supremacy of the idea has not been interfered with from without nor from within. That the patriarchalism of the Family has passed on into the Village Community or clan, and the authority of the Father into that of the Chief ; and that ties of blood have transfused their virtue into rela- tions of landed interest, and other great political and civil components, — are facts which have proved to be of widest application in the study of national origins and institu- tions. The subject has lately attracted much close inves- tigation, in which Sir Henry Maine and Mr. Edward L. Freeman have been especially prominent. The latter has called attention to the substantial identity of the " 761/0? " 3 1 2 STRUCTURES. of Athens, the "gens" of Rome, the "mark" of the Teu- tonic nations, the " Village Community " of the East, and the Irish "clan" as a transition from the Family to the Tribal Union, which in its turn is the basis of the City or the State.i The former has devoted a large section of one of the most remarkable works of modern times to tracing the effect of that " mental sterility " which confines nations in their early stages to the Family Idea, in expanding that idea, by a series of constructive fictions, " into the House, the Tribe, and lastly the State." Thus in races as distinct from each other as the Hindus, Romans, and Irish, the actual name of Family, with many of the associations thereto belonging, has been transferred to the results of personal adoption and assumption of new ancestral cults, to septs, guilds, religious bodies, as well as to the rela- tions of foster-parent and spiritual instructor.^ The grow- ing associations of natural relatives open their gates of privilege and safety to artificial membership ; and the State is formed before the nucleating conception of a Family Bond is lost. An element of equality in this con- ception is developed by the ownership of land into the village community ; and the patriarch becomes transmuted into the Chief or King by the natural effort to discover in whom the purest ancestral blood has descended, — a deci- sion made by the tests of fitness, so that election gradually supersedes birth. These researches of Maine do not cover the history of China, which will hereafter afford a vast field for such inquiries. Enough is already known to ena- ble us to bring this marvellous civilization, so long sup- posed absolutely unlike any other, into the line of these and similar universal laws. The patriarchal village community still constitutes the basis of Chinese society. The clan distinctions testify to the prodigious force of the family * Comparative Politics^ Am. ei 1874, pp. 102, 103, ' Maine's Early History 0/ Institutions. GOVERNMENT. 3 1 3 bond on which they rest. The earliest land systems of Chinese tradition, whose traces still remain, not in books only, but in the divisions of the soil, are evident efforts to adhere as closely as possible to the primitive equality of families. The princes of the petty States were separate nuclei of patriarchalism not yet absorbed into a whole. The tradition that the imperial office was originally elec- tive, the strange combination of its paternal authority with local liberties and instinctive equalities, and its responsi- bility to the test of fitness, are all readily explained as results of patriarchalism in its natural evolution. And this mighty witness to the self -perpetuating and productive force of the Family Bond, at the farthest pole of civiliza- tion from our own, adds weight to the urgency of its demand on us also for that special guardianship which properly belongs to the first principle of social safety and growth. We know not at what remote epoch the " black-haired " tribes first appeared on the soil of China ; but ^^^^^^ there can be no doubt that long stages, similar to stages of those of other nomadic or patriarchal tribes, pre- Chinese" ceded their political consolidation. The traces of History, these have not been wholly covered by later construc- tions. How very gradual must have been the extension of a centralizing force through wild regions and their barbarous hordes, is shown by the free spirit of these native elements with which it had to deal. Covenants are recorded between their princes (or sheikhs) and the people, in which the democratic instinct, so conspicuous in later times, shows a rude strength. " If you will not fall away from us, we will not force you to sales, nor beg nor extort from you." " We have believed and kept our covenant, to this day. If you exact aught from our traders you will teach us to break our faith." The consolidation of tribes of this temper under one 314 STRUCTURES. monarchy must have been slow. That their princes were ever the fiefless vassals of a great central power, such as the Shu-king describes, does not seem very credible. The old Chinese, whether an immigrant tribe or not, were at all events a settled community, engaged in culture of silk and grain, and expanding by the power of industry rather than by that of conquest. Yu redeems the wilderness and divides the cleared land for purposes of culture. The heroes of this march on Nature are busy hewers of wood and drawers of water. Wars with the aboriginal tribes are not wholly wanting ; ^ but Yu conquers the barbarous Meaou by withdrawing his army, and setting a good moral example. A chief of Lu, dissuading from war, said, " Do right : submission will follow. When the enemy is cold, clothe him ; if hungry, feed him ; be his true ruler in weariness and want, and he will of himself return to you."^ Confucius, Mencius, and Laotseu echo the strain of peace, and have no toleration for great conquerors, or expansion by force of arms. Compared with conquest, the agricultural ardor of the Traditions Chinese would be a slow process of territorial ex- of territorial pansiou, and hardly consistent with the traditions that Shun distributed fiefs to a great number of vassals;* that "ten thousand kingdoms held Yu's stones and silks in hand ; " * that eight hundred princes united under Woo-wang, founder of the Tcheou dynasty in the twelfth century, b.c. ; and that seventeen hundred and seventy-three feudal fiefs belonged to the early rulers of this line,® who are said to have absorbed and given away kingdoms by the dozen to strengthen themselves on the throne.^ The revolutions by which the earliest dynasties • Sku-king, Pt. II. B. n. ; Pt. III. b. ll. ' Plath, from Tscho-chi {Bay. At. X. 463). ** Bamiao Books 0/ Shu-king, < Sseki. » Matouanlin. a Plath, ut supra. GOVERNMENT. 3 1 5 (Hia and Shang) were overthrown, and the long-lived eventful Tcheou established, their warlike and generous heroes, Tang and Woo, and the great and good Duke of Tcheou, — the Joshuas and the Moses of Chinese tradition, as Fo-hi was the Abraham, — even if historical, must have filled a much smaller stage of action than the old books imply. Confined to the region of the Wei and Ho,i it embraced not more than a sixth part of the eighteen prov- inces now included in China Proper. The great empire of Yao and Shun, as a primeval rock which fell apart into the disorganized feudalism of the later Tcheou, and was re- constructed as far as possible after the monarchical con- quests of the T'sin in the third century B.C., can hardly be accepted as historically proven. More probable is the gradual absorption of the numerous tribes into the indus- trial civilization of the " black-haired " races, to which, as in Egypt, Babylon, Phenicia, and elsewhere, the centraliza- tion of monarchy, as an industrial convenience, was but a natural incident. Even Mencius says, " It would be better to be without the Book of History (Shu-king) than to give entire credit to it." ^ If we are right, the fact is valuable as confirming the conclusions of modern criticism for a largely mytho- logical origin of the Old Testament records, by the case of a people far more careful in preserving historical data than the Hebrews ; thus affording added evidence that these conclusions represent a universal law. The Shu-king picture, however, though needing to be much reduced in scale, and sifted of elements grow- 1 • 1 1 1 ^^ value ing out of later governmental ideals, may neverthe- of the less possess great historical value, as indicating the ^^^^ germs of imperial relations, afterwards more fully ' Plath ; also Legge's Prolegomena to the Shiking. The odes indicate this very clearljr. Ssemathsian speaks of inroads by barbarous tribes into Shantung, one of the oldest States, ai la^e as iioo e.c. 2 Menc, VII. II. ,. 3l6 STRUCTURES. unfolded, and may even deal with historical personages. It is too prosaically realistic and detailed to be summarily ascribed to the mytho-poetic faculty. Its minuteness of organization has an accordance with Chinese tendencies ; and the steady insistence on such early centralization, through all ages of Chinese experience, points to some antecedent germ which it is the function of history to trace. The early books of the Shu-king ^ may be called a Chi- Eariiest ncsc Declaration of Faith in the power of ideal shubooks. government to assume immediate concrete being, and possess the world. Their record of Yao and Shun, and of Yu as founder of the first (Hia) dynasty (2300-2200 B.C.), is, in our opinion, an effort to erect on the historical data afforded by the more or less primitive relations of a number of semi-civilized tribes an elaborate imperial organization ; and in such full harmony with the ideal of Chinese statesmen, that we actually find in it the whole substance of their perfected state. Observe its thoroughly practical character. All power proceeds from the Emperor, — who, however. The ideal consults his ministers in appointing his successor, monarchy, ^nd holds himself responsible for the condition of his people. Yao selects Shun as morally fittest to rule and by the general voice. Shun seeks to " see with the eyes and hear with the ears of all." He appoints twelve " pastors " of provinces (Mou), and bids them " sustain the people with food, treat strangers kindly, instruct the neighbor, appreciate the good, discountenance the evil,^ and so bring the barbarians into subjection." He allows banishment and money-fines in commutation of the " five great penalties." We have already the whip in the courts ^ The passages adduced in illustration of the Shu-king are of course drawn from the most authoritative translation of the classics which we possess, the invaluable labors of Dr. Legge. GOVERNMENT. 3 17 and the stick in the schools. But he says to himself : " Let me be reverent, and let compassion rule in punishment." Inadvertent offences are pardoned, obstinate ones are* pun- ished to extremity. His supervision over vassal princes is exercised (i) by the Mou ; (2) by requiring them to come to court every four years, receiving chariots, robes, and gems, according to their doings ; and (3) by tours of personal inspection every fifth year, — giving audience, arranging times and seasons, weights and measures, ceremonies, music, official rites to Shang-te, to the six " holy rulers," the hills, streams, and spirit hosts. These tours were a father's visits to his children, — who was also priest, judge, mediator, chief shepherd. An old proverb of the Hia says : " When the Wang does not make his appearance, how shall we have rest, how find help .■' " His administrative force embraces, in addition to Yu, as Prime Minister, a Chief of Agriculture, " to sow grains for the needy ; " of Moral Instruction, to set forth with gentle- ness the lessons of duty ; of Crime, of Works, of Forests, of Ancestral Rites, of Music, of Public Communication by Edict or otherwise. These nine, added to the twelve Mou, and a chief of somewhat uncertain functions, make the " Twenty-two " whom he exhorts to aid him in the service of Heaven. All, in true Chinese humility, decline their honors, but are forced to accept office.-^ Like the later censors these ministers are endowed with many prerogatives ; their advice and reproof, in all the earlier reigns, are given in very bold and lofty sentences, which are often received in humility. These counsels and confessions, and the frequent royal appeals to the people, are more than germs of later democracy. Even the com- petitive examinations are in full course ; every three years comes an inquiry into the merits of officials, and after * Canon of Shun; see also Plath, China vor 4,000 '^ahren. Bay. Ak.y June, 1869. 3l8 STRUCTURES. three such the undeserving are degraded and the deserving advanced. As Shun organizes the government, so Yu the land and the people. He surveys the territory, confines the floods, clears and maps out the soil. His nine provinces are minutely described, though not now identifiable,-^ and en- graved on Nine Vases, preserved as the national palladium for centuries, and believed to manifest coming changes in the State. He invests princes by bestowing on each a piece of sod of the color of the soil of his country.^ The princes, on their part, bring for tribute samples of the prod- ucts of their dominions, which are described in minute detail.^ The land is divided in a highly artificial manner, which reminds us of a nest of boxes, and seems devised to meet the characteristic national love of mechanical symmetry and distributive function. Five concentric squares consti- tute as many domains ; the imperial is in the centre, sur- rounded by four others ; the second is for nobles ; the third for education ; the fourth for punishment and restraint, reaching out to the wild tribes, whose domain is the fifth and last. Each, sends its portion of the public grain. The mutual dependence of prince and people is fully recognized. " Of all who are to be loved, is not the Emperor the chief ? Of all who are to be feared, are not the peoples the chief? If the mass have no ruler, whom shall they honor ? If the prince have no people, who shall guard his land ? "_* ' The Emperor is but servant of Heaven. " Let him not set example of idleness and vice to rulers, nor allow officers to be cumberers of their places. The work is Heaven's ; it is men's to act for Heaven. All duties, distinctions, ceremonies, are from Heaven." ^ " Laws, rites, rewards, and punishments come from ' The indications of the names are that the country was very limited. ' This is a governmental application of the theory of five elemental colors. » Yu-kang chapter. « Shu-king, Pt. II. a. n. 17. = Ibid., B. 11. GOVERNMENT. 3I9 Heaven : when it punishes, neither great nor small escape it." ' " Let none come between you and men of worth. Do not go against right to get popular applause ; do not oppose the people to follow your own desires." ^ His ministers are his " legs and arms, ears and eyes ; " to give effect to his wishes to support his people, whose will represents Heaven by signs of favor or discontent. It is theirs to correct him if he goes astray.^ On his official robes figures of all forms, elements, and creatures are embroidered ; and every good success is cele- brated by joyous rites that mark the genial spirit of these relations. " When the nine services have been performed, let the end be cele- brated by songs. Unite the people with gentle words, and correct them with the majesty of law. Stimulate them with song, that your success may never suffer loss." * Yu announces, even so early, that " Virtue is to hold fast the mean; for the mind of man is restless, and prone to error." * And Kaou-kaou has determined the exact number of vir- tues to be nine, each a form of mean between extremes.^ " Punishment should not descend to heirs, but rewards should reach to future generations. Rather than put to death one innocent person, run risk of irregularity and error. This virtue has penetrated the minds of the people." ' Moral suasion and forgiveness is the sovereign power over enemies. Yu proclaims his principle of conquest thus : — " Entire sincerity moves spiritual beings ; how much more this prince of Meaou ! " ^ The perfect powers of sincerity, however, did not suffice, any more than in later days ; and in the very next reign the Emperor K'e has to " execute reverently the punishment of > Old Commentary on the same. ' Ibid., B. 11. ' Ibid.. Pt. IV. b. vm. « Shu-king, Pt. H. b. n. » Ibid. » Ibid., B. in. • Ibid., B. II. ' Ibid. 320 STRUCTURES. Heaven " on the prince of Hoo in a great battle, and threaten rebellious princes generally with condign destruction.^ In less than a century from Yu a monarch appeals to " older statutes " to justify the immediate execution of great officers for " stupidly going astray " in the matter of observing and reporting the appearances of the heavens.^ But the oldest wars are not aggressive, nor for conquest, but to put down rebellions, in the name of a divine social order. The difference between this and other golden ages, con- Concrete- structcd in the past out of later experiences, is that nessofthe jt assumes uot an abstractly ideal State, with the license of mythical fancy, but a positive govern- mental organization in full detail. The Chinese ideal is a concrete government. It is a working order in public rela- tions ; no dreamland, but operating machinery. This char- acteristic of the race is the only explanation of the early Shu-king Books. The elaborate organization thus ascribed to the opening Probabiii- of the first dynasty implies a passivity in the ele- pureiy Weal mcnts, as Well as an ingenuity in the founders, character, quite incredible at so early a period even in the Chinese. The wonder increases when we look at the alleged Institutes of the Tcheou, several hundred years later, where the extent and fixedness of pre-arrangement is such, — down to dress, dwellings, eating, etiquette, and means and methods of every kind, — and the distribution of functions so inconceivably minute, as to resemble one of those intricate patterns wrought out by the cunning fingers of Chinese women, in many-colored threads. Such recep- tivity in the people, such shaping power in the rulers, is practically impossible. It is, more probably, the national ideal ; a bloom from the inmost heart of this people's faith in the self-organizing power of virtue and the necessity of being led from above while growing from beneath. Yu and » Shn-Uing, Pt. III. B. n. " Ibid., B. iv. GOVERNMENT. 321 Shun are the myth of the Child-People, who must have grown gradually to these elaborate formations of faith, though even in infancy indicating them in germs which we can in some measure discern. The advanced morality of the Shu-king is of course very much older than Confucius, with whom every thought is more or less traditional. The elaboration of it in speeches is doubtless largely due to him ; yet the materials must have been given in old facts and names, and in the far-brought national ideal which flowered in him and in his school. He himself declares that the remains of antiquity are inadequate, and that his statements about it cannot be attested.^ Between the putative age of Yu and the next great epoch of politico-ideal construction, the accession of the The Hia Tcheou, intervenes a space of a thousand years ^''^shang. (2200-1200 B.C.), embracing the whole period contemporary with Hebrew tradition from the Abrahamites to the Judges, as also with that of the Greek builders of cities and the Trojan war. Sixteen kings of the Hia and twenty-eight of the Shang, most of them known to us only by name, are followed by the overthrow of Chow-sin by the prince of Tcheou, at the head of a confederation of chiefs roused by the cruelties of that ruler. Two dynasties, each opening with a model prince, have ended in imperial degradation and popular misery, and in that appeal to the right of revo- lution which is so familiar to the Chinese race. The ideal has faded in the very first century after the death of Yu. The " songs of the seven sons of K'e " lament the failure of these institutions and the consequent ruin of their royal family.^ Already in Yu's time, alcohol has begun its rav- ages, and, though its discoverer is banished, brings about the ruin of both the dynasties. The astronomical chiefs of the third prince in the Hia line are put to death for drunk- ' Lunyn, in. 9. » Shu-king, Pt. III. u. ni. 322 STRUCTURES. enness, and his general must pronounce a serious temper- ance discourse to his troops.^ The merciful reliance of Yu's creed on moral forces yields to the maxim that " when sternness overcomes compassion, things are successful." But the ideal endures in great ministers, who teach nobly The first and reprove bravely, and in great emperors, who deliverer, represent the people and the throne in one. Four hundred and thirty years after Yu, arises a hero of the highest order, — " T'ang the victorious," — who renews the imperial glories, as founder of the line of Shang. He is a Chinese emancipator ; visiting Heaven's vengeance on a degenerate State, and appeals to the people, yet as their master : — " Come, ye multitudes, listen to me. Not I, the little child, dare undertake rebellion. But I dare not refuse to punish the tyrant, as I fear God. Aid me and I will greatly reward you ; but if you do not, I will put you to death, you and your children : you will find no forgive- ness." - He asserts, in the spirit of Mencius, the universality of conscience, and the duty of the prince to compel justice : " The Supreme has given a moral sense, even to the humblest of the people. If they conform to it, their nature is justified in them ; if not, it is the prince that must cause them tranquilly to follow its path. And now I know not whether I may not offend the powers above and beneath ; I am fearful and trembling. If you do any thing good, I will not dare to conceal it ; and for the evil in me, I would not dare to forgive myself." ^ His ministers are no less admirable. "What Shun was to Yao, and Yu to Shun, and Yih to Yu, that is E to T'ang." As tutor to the young prince, he teaches that "virtue begins at home, and is completed in the State," and that moral retribution is inevitable ; and when his pupil proves unfit to rule, he imprisons him till he reforms.* • Sku-kiKg-, Pt. III. B. IV. ' Ibid., Pt. IV. B. I. ' Ibid., B. iiL • Ibid., B. iv. GOVERNMENT. 323 " Heaven loves only the reverent ; the people cherish only the benevolent ruler ; the spirits accept only the sacrifice of the sin- cere." 1 Resigning his functions., he enjoins on the emperor mod- esty, humanity, favor to the best and fittest men, supreme regard to principles rather than formal precepts, love of goodness as the only rule of virtue, and recognition of the right of the whole people to full opportunity of moral and rational growth.^ Yu enters ofSce with the brave declaration that " States are not founded, nor rulers appointed, to minister to the pleasure of one, but for the good government of the people."® " Heaven is all-seeing, all-knowing. Let the wise king take it for pattern." " Before shield and spear are used, one should examine himself." " Indulging a consciousness of goodness is the way to lose it." " Boasting of ability destroys the merit it might gain." * " For all affairs let there be preparation." " Do not be ashamed of mistakes, and thus make them crimes."" The Emperor asking to be taught the best aim, Yu replies, — " If in learning there be an humble will, and striving to be earnest, wisdom will surely come. Follow the perfect ways of former kings, and you shall not err."^ A democratic ruler is Pwan-kang, who forbids the princes to " suppress the complaints of this people ; " rebukes " noisy talk which would silence the cry of the oppressed," and gives free audience to all men. " Think reverently, ye chiefs, of my multitudes." " I will not employ those who seek gain ; but those who labor vigorously for the life and growth of the people I will use and respect." ' » Shu-king, Pt. IV. B. v. • Ibid. • Ibid., B. VI « Ibid., B. vin. » Ibid., B. vm. » Ibid. ' Ibid., B. vn 324 STRUCTURES. There are great blanks in the story of the Shang dynasty ; but, as the vices of its rulers grow, it Shang. ° hastens to its fall. The wise minister lifts up his The Second voice to ccho the cry of the people to Heaven for Deliverer. . ■' , . 1 i . . deliverance ; the wise tutor advises the king s son, who sees with grief the dissoluteness of the court and the miseries of the masses, to flee from the coming storm. Chow-sin's barbarities rouse the great insurrection of Woo, whose whole army has the hearing of his explanations and excuses for that step, the most famous in Chinese history, by which all subsequent revolts against oppression are jus- tified. Woo is a model revolutionist. His victory shall " redound to his father's honor ; " his defeat " only to his own disgrace, as a little child, and not good." His speeches are always opened with wise proverbs, followed by rousing exhortations to battle for righteousness and the ancient laws, — like wild beasts, yet not harming those who submit, — by rehearsal of the crimes of Chow, and of his own duties as the instrument of Heaven. Woo is a great organizer as well as soldier. " He had only to let his robes fall down, and fold his hands, — after teaching the people the five great social relations, caring for their com- fort and faith, and honoring merit, — and the empire was in perfect order." ^ But a Chinese ruler is nothing, if not a philosopher. And Woo does not fail to inquire of his wisest man as to the real constitution of that human nature which he pro- poses to perfect. The Shu-king accordingly gives us what it calls the " Great Plan," ^ a numerically formulized de- scription of Man and the Universe with special relation to the ideal of right government ; which is a striking picture of the old Chinese mind, as well as perhaps the earliest • Shu-king, Pt. V. B. m. ' Legge ascribes it to the great Yu, and thinks it was, at all events, older than Woo. SIbh king, Pt. v. B. IV. GOVERNMENT. 325 attempt of the kind in history. We shall here draw atten- tion only to its statement of the eight objects of govern- mental attention, — namely, means of subsistence, materials of traffic, rites, public works, instruction, penalties, enter- tainment of guests, and the army, — and to its moral ideal of royalty, which is in the loftiest vein of Chinese political ethics. " The ruler, having concentrated in himself the five forms of happi- ness, — health, wealth, long life, peace of mind and love of virtue, and the crown of success in life, — and fixed his ideal of virtue, difiFuses these among the people ; who, resting in his perfection, enable him to preserve it." "Do not oppress the friendless or childless; do not fear the great. Cause people of ability to improve their powers, and the State will prosper." " Without swerving or partiality, without selfish likes or dislikes, pursue the royal path of virtue. ... If gov- ernment is wise, heroic men are eminent, and in the families of the people are prosperity and peace." Then we have the noble figure of King Woo's brother and grand councillor, the good Duke of Tcheou, .j.^^ who stands in- this far time an earlier Confucius, Lawgiver, with happier power to mould his age. This is the tradi- tional Father of Chinese Law, th6 ideal of Chinese politi- ical, as well as personal, virtue. He is introduced to us in the pleasing legend of " The Metal-bound Coffer," praying, mace in hand, to his great ancestors for the privilege of dying in the place of his royal brother, who is sick unto death to the great distress of the people. The king, how- ever, recovers, and the prayer is preserved in the archives of the State. On the death of Woo, the good Duke is shamelessly accused of treason, and goes silently into exile. -But a great storm arising, the coffer is opened,* and his fraternal devotion revealed ; together with the fact that he had enjoined on the officers not to make it known. The exile returns in triumph, and the penal storm with- draws.^ « Sku-king, Ft. V. b. vi. 326 STRUCTURES. Great is the wisdom of this Tcheou-kung, learned in his youth in the hard school of suffering for the sake of others, being punished for the faults of the young prince with whom he was brought up. He " teaches the king how to govern ; " ascribing the success of princes to the righteous- ness of their civil-service rules ; rebuking rebellious chiefs, while showing leniency to their offences ; and proving his principle of fitness to functions by making it the key to the whole national history. His advice to Prince Fung must be quoted : — " ' Deal with evil as if it were a disease in your own person, and the people will put away their faults. Deal with them as if you were guarding your infants. Do not cut off noses or ears at your private inclination, but let there be fixed laws for the proper officers to ob- serve. In examining evidences of crime, reflect on them five, six, yea ten days, or three months : then act boldly on your decision. See that the laws are righteous, not warped by your caprice ; even then you must say, ' perhaps they are not yet wholly in accord with right.' If you cannot manage your own household but by terror and violence, you set aside the charge of 'a king, and seek to rule in defiance of vir- tue." ^ " The ruin of States may be traced to criminal use of spirits. Love labor and youth, and indulge in eating and drinking only when you can observe decent limits. Warn your officials of this, O Fung, and sternly avoid intemperance." ^ And here are counsels to a minister : — " Remember that the end of punishment is to make an end of pun- ishing." "Be not passionate with the obstinate, but forbearing. Seek not every quality in one person." " Advance the good, that they who are not so may be led to follow their example." " Seek the judg- ment of the people about affairs." " Lay good plans before your sov- ereign, and ascribe their merit to him." ' . Mencius says of the great Duke that he sought to unite the virtues of T'ang, Wan, and Woo. " If he saw any thing in them not suited to his time, he meditated on it into the night, and when he had solved the problem, he sat waiting for the morning." * » Shu-king, Pt. v. B. IX. 2 Ibid., B. x. » Ibid., B. xxi. • Menc. IV. n. aQ GOVERNMENT. 32/ With the Duke of Tcheou, of whom Mr. Legge says, " I know not the statesman of any nation with whom ^he his countrymen need shrink from comparing him," Tcheou we enter on the second great political organization, ^™°' ascribed by the Chinese to very early times. It is declared to have been modelled on that of Yao and Shun, but is in fact much more elaborate. Certain new offices are to be filled " only when the men are found fit to fill them!' ^ The number of ministers is still six : but a department of War is added. The princes attend court with tribute and hom- age every sixth year, and the king's tours are every twelfth. But the bowed heads bring counsel as well as homage, and exhort him " to be reverent in his function, and preserve the heritage of our ancestors from harm." ^ At his inaugu- ration the king receives a symbolic cup and mace-cover from the minister of rites ; and listens to the testamentary charge of the last ruler to his successor, "to follow the rules of Tcheou, adhere to the laws and maintain harmony," read by the national annalist, — responding with self-depre- ciation and awe before the magnitude of his task.^ On the Grand Banner, besides figures of the sun and moon, and the dragon, symbols of authority, are inscribed the names of meritorious living ministers.* The Duke of Tcheou had declared the end of punishment to be "making an end of punishing." The prince of Leu " thinks with reverence of penalty, because its end is the promotion of virtue." " Gain got by penal decisions is no prize, but a heaping up of guilt, and will have its reward : stand in awe of Heaven ! " I will tell you, O ye rulers, how to make punishment a blessing. Hear both sides, and carefully adjust the case to its proper penalty. The dangers to be avoided are the being warped by power, or private grudge, or female solicitation, or bribes ; all of which make the judge's Bin equal to the criminal's at his bar. In doubtful cases, infliction of " Shu-Ung, Pt. V. B. XX. > Ibid., B. xxin. • Ibid., B. xxil * Legge's note to B. xxv. 328 STRUCTURES. punishment should be forborne. The chastisement of fines is short of death, but would produce extreme distress. Therefore only good persons should determine criminal cases. Settle them with compas- sion and reverence, and strike the proper mean." ' The further history of the Tcheou dynasty, as sketched by fragments in the closing chapters of the Shu-king, shows them at frequent war with rebel chieftains and with border tribes. During the long reigns of Ching and Khang, the vir- tues of the emperors secured profound peace, and, accord- ing to commentators, punishments were out of use for forty years ! Yet the Shu-king gives no details of this blessed period. King Muh charges his minister to make him no unworthy descendant of Wan and Woo ; also to remember the hardships of the people in the extremes of summer and winter. He " rises at midnight to meditate " how he can avoid the faults that beset him, and obtain help in " correct- ing his bad heart." But the path of the line of Tcheou is downward. Vicious monarchs, corrupted by their wives Fall of the ^"^^ f avorites, are set aside by popular revolts and Tcheou. by leagued nobles. Petty States are growing into power, and busy in repelling the inroads of free hordes, or absorbing their territory.^ We have select instances of personal loyalty like that of the Duke of Shaou, who sacri- fices his own son to save his prince ; and som.e of a less questionable virtue, as in Pih-k'in's orders to his soldiers on the march, not to injure cattle or horses by traps, nor to shut them up, nor to leave the ranks to pursue them, nor to fail of returning them, when astray, to their owners.* By the close of the period here gone over in patches (B.C. 620), the feudal empire of the Tcheou was in a fair way to dissolution, and the perplexing strifes of the rival States are further recorded by Confucius in his meagre annals, entitled " Spring and Autumn Classic." But the Shu-king fragments by no means represent the 1 Shucking, Pt. V. B. XXVII. 2 Ibid., B. xxviii. » Ibid., B. xxix. GOVERNMENT. 329 whole national indebtedness to that grand epoch of recon- struction which Chinese tradition associates with the name of Tcheou. The Institutes of Tcheou, imperfectly given in the Shu- king, are (ideally) presented in an elaborate descrip- xhk tion, in which the national passion for subdividing tcheou-li, r • 1 • 1 • rr- • t i • • "^^ Insti- functions, multiplymg officials, regulatmg minute tutes of details, in short for governmental manipulation and ^"f"",;^ care, is carried not only beyond all possibilities of ongm fact, but beyond the power of most American readers to conceive. The Tcheou-li,^ in its original form written, according to Confucius, on tablets of baniboo, and traditionally ascribed to the great Duke, purports to record the political and civil organization of China between the twelfth and eighth cen- turies B.C., as proposed by this statesman, and accepted by . the tribes after the overthrow of the Shang. There are many reasons, besides its important differences from the Shu-king, for believing it to be the construction of a much later period. Mencius reports that the princes, disliking the arrangements of dignities by the house of Tcheou, had made way with their records before his time.^ Confucius leads us to infer that the present Tcheou-li was not in existence in his time ; for he is far from having re- produced its rules, and never cites it in his works. Matou- anlin, accepting it as on the whole authentic, admits that, while it represents the laws of the first three dynasties, it could never afterwards be put into practice.^ Its internal characteristics are the strongest proof of its late origin ; and many adverse judgments on its historical value have been given by Chinese critics. A great hold on the na- tional faith has nevertheless been secured by the highly ' Translated with incredible patience by M. Ed. Biot, with the aid of Stan. Julien. * Menc. v. II. 2. * See'Biot*s Introd. p. 27. 330 STRUCTURES. ideal form in which it is cast. A judgment by the great critic and philosopher Chu-hi, in favor of its antiquity as a whole, added to its repute. It was a text-book in the great epochs of the Han and the Soung, and has been much commentated at intervals since. Kien-lung added it by edict to the canonical "Classics," in 1754.^ Its value for us is in its illustrating, more than any other work, the Chinese constructive ideal of imperial govern- ment as a ready-made, crystallized fact. Biot thinks it rep- resents the important epoch of transition from pastoral to agricultural life, and the permanent settlement of the tribes under a uniform administration. That this is the basis of the original work is probable enough. But it is scarcely possible to conceive that such refined and complex forces of organization on the one hand, and such extreme plas- ticity on the other, as its present form implies, could have existed at so early a stage of national progress. The land allows itself to be divided into three definite Mechanical classcs by pubHc survey, with such marvellous geo- Dmsions. graphical adaptation that a certain quantity of each class can be allotted to every family ! The cultivators submit to be divided into groups of nine families each, portioned with lots of equal size, symmetrically arranged in squares for purposes of irrigation, and each enclosed by a trench and path, with a centre lot for public uses ; the whole ten again surrounded by a larger conduit, and each hundred by a small canal and road ; and each thousand by a larger canal and highway ; and every ten thousand by a river with a great road beside it.^ How the rivers were squared with the watercourses, whose sizes and lines were thus fixed by rule, the world-shaping dynasty does not in- form us. But the limits of cities, cantons, principalities, also follow official measurements, made with the shadow of the sun.* • Biot's IntroA, pp. 31-35. » TchtauJi, B. xv., xvi. ' Ibid., B. xxxm. GOVERNMENT. 331 The territory is again divided into twelve sections, cor- responding to the twelve celestial signs ; and into nine concentric zones around the capital for regulation of trib- utes and taxes. And the whole population is organized by families for public labors ; also for mutual service in bury- ing the dead, supporting the poor, relieving the unfortunate, performing rites, and giving honor to good men. Groups of five and its multiples form sections, communes, cantons, departments, districts : each group having its elder (or patri- arch), as a centre of harmony, and all working to the com- mon good.^ The village system of government is in operation, but under the administration of- a " grand director," viikge who registers names, supervises lodges of mutual =y='™- aid, organizes sowing and reaping, fixes the corvee con- tingents, and collects the grain from the States' land.^ An officer determines what shall be sown there, and how the land shall be improved. Another determines when trees shall be cut and the pastures burned over. Others regulate taxes and labors by the good or bad for- tunes of the year, or by the quality of the land, and in inverse'ratio to faitfifulness of culture? The very markets are in squares, and attended by officers who determine prices, punish frauds, examine the quality of goods, and levy entrance and exit duties in port, for the benefit of the poor and old and the " children of the State." * Of course weights and measures are equalized, quarrels appeased, and virtue sped. A minister oversees the civil service for the promotion of worthy persons, according to three tests of Govern- ment: (i) the six virtues, {2) the six good deeds, mem and (3) the six sciences." As already stated, the masses )re convoked at the gates of the capital in times of national • Tchem-li. B. xi. ^Ibid., B. xv., xvi. • Ibid., B. XVI., XXXII., xni., xn. • B. xiv. " B. ix. 332 STRUCTURES. emergency and on the accession of a prince, and arranged, according to age and place, by their prefects. Their judg- ment is also taken in cases of capital offence.^ Passports are provided by the village elders, stamped with symbolical figures of creatures and elements.^ Every thing relating to individuals is officially recorded, down to their private character, their happiness and misfortune, health and re- source, for the Emperor's paternal use.'' A minister protects the people against oppressive chiefs, but no mercy is shown subjects who expel their prince.'' Disputes are settled by testimony of persons of the same group with the parties.® The great drum hangs at the palace gate for those who desire justice at the imperial hands.® Food is provided at the royal table for State orphans, old officials, the infirm and poor.^ Travelling officials bestow aid on the needy in the royal name.^ There are no other slaves than public ones, for crime, and these only of middle age. The aged and the young are also ex- empt from corvee, as well as strangers newly arrived.^ Every man must marry by the time he is thirty years old, and women before twenty.-^" The Tcheou-li Emperor, as in the Hia and Shang, is owner of the soil, installs princes and confers fiefs, ministra-. But the great vassals, the successors of the tribal chiefs, have received more permanent authority, for which they pay tributes out of the incomes of their States. The unity of the kingdoms is maintained by mutual visits and interrogations between the princes and by emissaries of the Board of Justice, who disseminate the imperial love and care. Every twelve years the Emperor makes the circuit of his States, "to harmonize and tran- > Tcheou-li, B. xi., , XXXV. » B. XI., xxxvin. > B. xxxviii. « B. XXIX. • » B. X. « B. XXXI. ' B. IV. • B. X. » B. XVI., 1 xxxvi. " B. XIII GOVERNMENT. 333 quillize." The intermediate years are devoted to consolidat- ing the Empire, each in some special way. Thus the first year is given to statistical and other reports ; the third, to their verification ; the fifth, to general examinations ; the seventh, to re-unions of interpreters to harmonize language ; the ninth, to meetings of blind musicians and annalists, who improve sounds and letters ; the eleventh, to unifying weights and measures, and verifying honorary tablets.^ In the opening of spring, the breaking of consecrated or public ground with the plough by the Emperor, who makes three furrows ; by his councillors, who make five ; by the feudatories, who make nine ; and by representatives of the people, who finish the field, — symbolizes the unity of the commonwealth on the basis of agricultural labor.^ The Prime Minister and his five colleagues are entitled Heaven, Earth, and the Four Seasons, as symbols Board of of universal government. They are supported by ^misters. a mighty host of subordinates, distinguished as graduates of three classes. Thirty-four hundred of these are j enumerated as in the Prime Minister's special P""= charge, with an indefinite number besides, busied in more than sixty sub-departments, whose chiefs have distinct titles. His government is an arithmetical mystery, employing six forms of administration, — eight of official regulations, eight of cantonal statutes, eight ruling prin- ciples, nine kinds of taxes, nine associative ties.^ One of his aids applies six principles to the investigation of official conduct, making his circuit with a little bell, crying woe to all law-breakers.* His Chief of Records reports the statis- tics of administration, personal property, families, lands, geographical features, and animal life, and audits the taxes. Finally, he aids the sovereign in performing ceremonies and rites. The second minister (Ta-sse-thu) is " Director of the » TcheoH-li, B. xxwrii. ' B. iv. " B. n. « B. la. 334 STRUCTURES. . "• Multitudes." He instructs them by twelve "rites," ' Director of , , . r r • a the Muiti- each teaching some lorm ot virtue. Among them tude. Yie inculcates the excellence of hereditary occupa- tions. He applies twelve rules for increasing population, by alleviating public burdens in times of famine, and six forms of succor to all needy people.^ He is grand sur- veyor, — measuring off the squares by the gnomon, — and regulator of agriculture, teaching how to multiply animals and plants, and to sow and fell to the best advantage.^ He groups the people and consecrates the fiejds to the genius of the land and grain.^ His department includes markets, village affairs, collection of grain, corvdes, marriage-laws, disputes, equalizing taxes and punishing idleness, distribu- tion of imperial gifts on periodical circuits through the country, music and dancing at the religious rites, censor- ship of morals in prince and people ; ^ and to these is added the care of the royal game preserves, where humanity to animals is enforced.* A third minister presides over forms of worship, and pays homage to ancient sovereigns by nineteen Ministerof kinds of Htc, classified according to their spirit or ^"°^' purpose.^ Here are elaborate details of sacrificial emblems, symbolical dresses, talismanic tablets borne by officials, or bringing virtue to places and occasions ; augu- ries, burial customs, invocations, and salutations, all of which are numerically regulated.® " The musical virtues '' and " musical conversation " are taught the sons of digni- taries by this bureau ; the virtues being concord, reverence for spirits, respect for superiors, fiHal love and friendship.' By its instructions in the twelve tones ayd the six dances, it brings into sympathetic harmony all forms and creatures, their " spirits " coming forth to bless occasions and unite » Tckeou-li, B. IX. " Ibid. • B. x.-3cvi. ♦ B. 3£VI. » B. xvm. • B. xvni.-xx., XXIV.-XXV. ' B. xxn. GOVERNMENT. 335 mankind.^ Sacred formulas for sacrifices, treaties, prayers, and thanksgivings emanate from this source.^ Under the same religious charge are the royal chariots and standards.^ Here too belongs the Grand Annalist, who registers all public proceedings, corrects the calendar for the regula- tion of labor, divides the land into dependencies of special asterisms, and preserves the oldest recorded traditions of the nation.* The Minister of War maintains obedience in the lesser kingdqms, fixes military contingents, presides over jy minute ceremonies that make royal hunting excur- Ministerof sions a kind of ritual.^ His department, besides military examination and instruction, has charge of be- stowing honors for brilliant actions, by inscribing the names of the doers on the royal standard, or endowing them with untaxed lands.^ It attends to sacred usages about fire, to the holy cup used at sacrifices, to the puri- fication of houses from disease, to the care of roads and the circulation of products, to the etiquette of chariots and the honors paid to the first breeder of horses, and to their presiding genii.'' It tames wild animals, destroys noxious birds, and provides young domestic ones for old men to raise, as symbols of renewed youth.^ It equalizes weights and measures, and receives tributes from foreign tribes.^ The Minister of Criminal Justice is at the head of the central court of final appeal, securing equity by tes- ^ j^_^ timony of two classes of officials, and, in capital ter of jus- cases, by the voice of the people.^" The parties bring a sum of money, if able ; but if poor, a complainant who has failed of a just hearing has but to stand, for three days (!), before the red stone, or strike the drum at the • TcAtou4i, B. XXII. » B. xxv. > B. xxvn. • B. XXVI. ' B. XXIX. « B. XXX. ' B. XXX— xxxin. ' B. xxx. • B. xxxin. i« B. xxxv. 336; STRUCTURES. palace gate.^ The penal code of the Tcheou-H has its muti- lations and other barbarities, all of which, however, are to be applied only after strict inquiry and within well-defined limits.^ Here belong elaborate rules for reception of princes at court, and their hospitable treatment on the way to the capital, with endless forms of " interrogation, invitation, consolation, obeisance ; " ^ also the facilitation of inter- course between the States by means of passports and gifts, and whatever conduces to make known the providential will and purpose of the sovereign, so that it shall not be disobeyed, but fulfilled by all.^ By the itinerant corps of this bureau is registered the moral and physical status of. every family and neighborhood, with all events that have a bearing on public and private happiness. Its officials over- see walking in the country ; clearing streets for the passage of the Emperor or army ; removal of criminals and mourners from the sacrificial rites, and destruction of certain noxious animals and plants.* The final section of the Tcheou-li on the Board of Public VI. Board Works is wanting. Great sums were offered for of Works, its recovery in the revival of letters by the Han, but it was not found. But a memoir on the functions of this ministry and the industries over which it presided, contributed at that time by the prince of Hokien from his famous collection, was added to the Tcheou-li in after ages. It is of great value as an ideal picture of labor- superintendence, as well as of the love and patience be- stowed by this assiduous race on every form of work. The " hundred artisans " are distributed among the fol- "TheAr- lowiug six classcs of laborers arranged by functions, tisans." thg vvord hundred meaning doubtless a great number : " To deliberate on governmental rules is the office of the princes ; to put these in practice is the office of prefects and graduates ; to ex- » Tcheou-li, B. xxxv. » B. xxxvi. » B. xxxvin.-xxxix. * B. xxxvn. GOVERNMENT. 337 amine the form and quality, and distinguish the uses of instruments of labor, is that of the hundred workmen ; to transport valuables to the four quarters of the Empire, that of merchants and travelling agents ; to increase the products of the earth, that of cultivators ; to work in silk and hemp for their perfect uses, that of the working women of the court." ^ Here follows a sentence of Labor-wisdom, still valid and needed : — " Wise men invent ; skilful men have combined what these began. They who preserve from agg to age the processes thus discovered are artisans. All the operations executed by the hundred artisans are the work of the wise. 'Twas they that forged metal to make swords, hardened earth to make utensils, built vehicles and ships. The heavenly seasons, the earthly emanations, the virtues of matter, the skill of the workman, must all be combined to form good work." i Then come minute rules for constructing chariots, accord- ing to a prescribed pattern, with symbolic signifi- j^^^^j^j cations for every part, based on universal relations ; the body of the car being earth, its dais heaven, its rayed wheels the sun and moon, and so on.^ Then the art of combining colors after rules drawn from supposed relations between them and the elements.^ We have prescriptions for making armor, drums, bells, tablets, goblets ; for cast- ing and mixing metals, alloying, dyeing, pottery, silk-making, painting feathers ; * for laying out a city, for surveying with the gnomon, and the use of the plumb-line.^ The exact proportions of parts in all manufactured articles, and minute adaptation of each to its function, are here ordained. Fifty-two pages of text and comment ^ are given to the construction of bows, in special adjustment to the body, the blood, the will, and the judgment of the user.^ Almost equal care is expended on the proportions of cart-wheels. We should suppose that all this formalism must be intended • TcheouJi, B. XL. Plutarch tells us that Numa distributed the laboring class in ancient Rome into companies, according to their arts or trades, and gave to each halls, courts, and ritei of its own. ^ » B. XL. ■ B. XLH. * B. xu. » B. XLni.-xuv. • Blot's Translation. ' B. xLrv. 22 338 STRUCTURES. only for the court artisans, did not the old commentator of Confucius ^ tell us directly from his master that in his day all over the Empire carriages had wheels of the same size. We may safely leave this analysis to tell its own story of signifi- the sources whence the Tcheou-li Institutes are de- ofThe rived. While conveying an admirable picture of the Tcheou-li. genius of the Chinese, and embodying a vast num- ber of their actual or historical institutions, the mechanism is too artificial and complex ever to have been imposed on a mass of living and laboring people, and quite as unlikely to have actually grown up out of their spontaneous self- culture. How it was transmitted, how it obtained credence, we cannot now determine : even Chinese lore cannot trace it beyond the age of the Han. But its existence and repute are proofs that, substantially, it represents the traditional faith and form of the Chinese State. And nothing can hide its transcendent testimony to the refinement and breadth of this antique civilization, the fulness of its development in labors and arts, and its aspiration to bring the order and harmony of cosmical movement into the social and indus- trial spheres. While the Shu-king and Tcheou-li describe a thoroughly rbla- organized imperialism at the outset of Chinese TioNsoF history, directing subject States by an elaborate States TO THE supervision, and dividing land and people by mathe- Empire. matical ratios and geometrical lines, — the stronger probability is that these structures are, at least in much of their detail, and even in their general plan, ideals of gov- ernment arising out of a mixture of history, tradition, and fact in later times, and teaching what ought to be, more than what had been. * Chung-yung, ch. xxviii. GOVERNMENT. 339 There is, however, no reason for rejecting the whole of Chinese tradition, and the recorded lines of rulers. Ea^y These point to some kind of central authority "mo"™- dating .from very ancient times, to which associated tribes paid an imperfect allegiance maintained by royal tours and feudal tributes, and which was really combined with many of those germs of democracy apparent in the Shu-king and the Tcheou-li. ^ How imperfect the allegiance of the chiefs must have been, appears by their warlike record, both in the Shu narratives and the Shi song^ and still more clearly in the extent of their independence at the moment of their emergence into the light of positive history. This occurs in the " Spring and Autumn " Classic of Confucius, opening with the eighth century, B.C. He describes the state of national disintegration as being such that nothing, in his judgment, could remedy it but a return to the old and lost institutions of Yao and Shun. This was but the natural advance — still more striking two centuries later, as we see in Mencius — of the self-destructive forces in- volved in that feudalism which succeeded the loose cen- tralization of chieftaincies in early times. The real unity of the State came later, out of the solution of these forces, little more than a generation after Mencius, by the victory of T'sin over its competitors, — the turning-point of Chi- nese history, — 250 B.C. The evidences of this gradual process seem clear. It began in the relations of simple patriarchal tribes, whose natural tendency was to expand the family idea mem of to larger and larger unities, and whose more or less """^' feudalized condition appears in the Shu-king tributes and wars.^ The princes were hereditary rulers at the opening of the Tcheou, a fact which is hardly consistent with a previous compact monarchy proceeding from the popular * See also the Li-ki ; and the Chung-yung^ XX. 14. ' Chuhi fully admits this in his comments ou the Shi-king Preface* » See the Yu-kung Chap, of the Shu-king (Pt. II. s. i.). 340 STRUCTURES. will, but would be perfectly natural to the semi-isolated tribes of the steppes. Under the Tcheou these princes, while paying tribute with heads bowed to the earth, and regulated by six royal guardians (Kung and Kow), still exhort the monarch, like the old Spanish Cortes, to be reverent and maintain the ancient laws.^ To reduce their rebellion required no less powerful a hand than that of the " Great Duke." If the monarchy was of such dimen- sions as to be able to distribute kingdoms by the hundred, as asserted in 4khe Shu-king, where Woo is said to have given eight hundred, and in Matouanlin who puts the num- ber of fiefs in the Tcheou at seventeen hundred and sev- enty-three,^ it is strange they should have dwindled in the Tchun-tsieu age to less than two hundred, and in that of Mencius to less than ten. Doubtless during the long thou- sand years of the Tcheou period, there was space for almost any amount of change ; but the figure of a central imperial- ism is very dim amidst this incessant movement of dissolv- ing views, that afford the eye no point of rest. Says the Chinese proverb : " As mountains become valleys and val- leys heights, so with rulers from of old." ^ As in the outset we have independent tribes, so from the eighth to the fourth century, B.C., we find a few powerfully organized States, under their own monarchs, paying slight regard to the central power. Whether this long process involved the falling to pieces of a vast empire, like that of Charlemagne, into local chieftaincies, and then the absorp- tion of these into a few great States, is a question we have no adecfuate data for solving, even in Chinese records. But the improbabilities of the theory are great. From Li-wang (842 B.C.) to Chi-hwang-ti (248 B.C.) is FaUof at all events the period of the Fall of Feudalism. Feudalism. " -j-jjg j-^jg bribes of the east and north have their 1 Siu-kiag; Pt. V. «. xxin. ' See also Plath, Vtrfass., <&•«■., Bay. i4t X. sot " Plath, Ibid., 561. GOVERNMENT. 34I princes," says Confucius, " and are not like the States of our great land, which are without them." ^ " In the Tqhun- tsieu," says Mencius, " there were no righteous wars." ^ The miseries of the people from famine, homelessness, and cold, from military raids and forced labors, are vividly painted by this greatest of Chinese prophets, born in the darkest time of his country's history, to denounce the rulers who " led on beasts to devour men." ^ "Their perils they count safety, their calamities profitable, and they have pleasure in the things by which they perish. If it were possible to reason with men so inhuman, how could we have such destruction of kingdoms and ruin of families .-'"* The wars that deso-= lated the States are ascribed to the vices of princes, to quarrels about succession arisin.g from the constant inter- ference of polygamy with the laws of inheritance, and to incessant revolutions, often bloody, in the ruling families, from the same or kindred causes. Plath, who' beheves in the great primitive monarchy, ascribes the fall of the Tcheou to its habit of freely scattering its domains upon chiefs and officials, who gradually reduced it to insignifi- cance.^ But we must remember that the greater States, like T'sin and T'soo, were in fact formed mainly out of the border lands, where independent chiefs could readily build up little empires ; and that the expansion of Chinese civi- lization through regions to the West and North involved a political weakening at its earlier centre, that would need no aid from the self-spoliating habits ascribed to the line of Tcheou. Before Mencius's time the imperial visitations had ceased, and vassal princes had grown into nearly, if not quite, co- equal powers with the sovereign. Mencius seems scarcely to recognize any actual difference.^ Seven kingdoms were engaged in constant warfare within the limits of China, • Lunyu, III. 5. « Mencius, VII. ii. 3. ' Ibid., I. i. 4. ' Ibid., IV. i. 8. » Plath, 543. » Mencius, I. i. 3, 5, 7 ; t. ii. 4. 342 STRUCTURES. each having its border barriers, where customs were levied and travellers stopped. Gradually certain of these princes had become independent sovereigns, under the name of Pa. They were chosen by lesser chiefs to rule in place of The feudal *^^ Empcror; assumed such imperial rights as ap- chiefsCPa). pointing tribunals, constructing calendars, drawing up systems of law. So completely had the old monarchy lost prestige that they took the names of Emperors of the East and West, titles which Confucius had refused them, calling them simply dukes. They often assembled the chieftains for consultation in these unsettled times, and caused them to swear peace and alliance ; usually declar- ing, perhaps for form's sake, — perhaps in the hope of calming the excesses of revolution, — their common allegi- ance to the Emperor. Some were barbarous, like Mu, who adopted the custom of burying men alive at funerals, from the savage tribes included in his princedom of T'sin ; others had a constructive spirit of the highest order, like Hwan- kung of Tsi, who set himself against the main sources of this social dissolution. " Of the five Pa the most powerful was Duke Hwan. At the assembly of the princes in Kwei-k'ew, he bound the victim nant!^"^°^^ and placed the writing upon it, but did not smear their mouths with blood. The first injunction in their agreement was : ' Slay the unfilial ; change not the son who has been appointed heir ; exalt not a concubine to the place of wife.' The second was : ' Honor the worthy, maintain the capable.' The third was : ' Respect the old and be kind to the young. Be not forgetful of strangers and travellers.' The fourth was : ' Let not offices be hereditary, nor offi- cers be pluralists. Select fit men for office. Let not a prince put to death a great officer on his own authority alone.' The fifth was : ' Do not make embankments to the injury of adjoining States ; place no restrictions on the sale of grain ; make no feudal investiture without notifying the chief of the confederation.' All then united in a league of amity." * * Mendas, VI. iL 7 ; see also Lunyu, adv. 18. GOVERNMENT. 343 This enlightened movement took place in the latter part of the seventh century b.c.^ Mencius adds, sadly : — "The princes of the present day all violate these five prohibitions, therefore I say that they are sinners against the five Pa." " Although a prince should have the empire given him, and yet pur- sue the paths of the present day, and not change its practices, he could not retain it for a single morning." ^ It redeems those barbarous epochs from entire condem- nation to find the record of such counsels as these of a leader in the State of Lu : — " It is not good, when a man of Pi is seen, to freeze him, but rather to clothe him ; if he is hungry, to feed him. Be to him a noble master, care for him in want and fatigue. Then Pi will come back as if to its home." 8 A prince of T'sin, withdrawing his army from a siege, said : — " Faith is the most precious treasure of a State ; it is the guardian of the people. If I win Yuen and lose my faith, how shall I protect it?"* The Tchun-tsieu, or "Spring and. Autumn" Classic, ascribed to Confucius, purports to continue the line of history, from the date at which the Shu- tchun- king record ends, to the time of the great teacher ■^^'^"• himself. It gives the annals of his native State (Loo) and its relations with its neighbors, during that period of ex- treme anarchy which elapsed between 722 and 480 B.C., and has always held very high, though not undisputed, reputa- tion as an authentic history .^ Though confessedly written in view of the degeneracy of the times, and for the purpose of reviving the national unity, no such design is apparent to us in its meagre outlines, which are utterly without hint of philosophical connection, or of any other principle of • Biot, yourn. Asiat., November, 1845. ' Mencius, VI. ii. 7, 9. • Plath, p. SS3. * Plath, Biy. Ak. 1873. • Translated in Dr. Legge^s Chinese Classics. 344 STRUCTURES. construction whatever, beyond that which the name of the work conveys, of making a calendar of events according to times and seasons. The native commentaries, however, — the principal among which, the Tso-chuen, made very soon after the appearance of the text, is a valuable historical record,^ — make both its silence and its speech significant of much that a foreigner would not discover ; and doubtless, if we may judge by analogy from commentaries on other venerated texts nearer home, of much that only the eye of a worshipper could discern. But whatever its purpose, its general acceptance for ages as edifying in the highest degree, as well as its manifest accordance with the spirit of its times, give great value to its decided afifirmation of the persist- ence of the ethico-political idea we have been tracing, even amidst the terrible demoralization of these intestine wars, not one of which, according to Mencius, was just. Its records consist of things commonplace and things marvellous ; relating to the weather and to the signs of events, famines, locusts, eclipses, rebellions, invasions, in- cessant wars, private feuds, and crimes by both sexes ; conspiracies, conferences of princes, combinations of States, marriages and divorces, — multitudes of petty details which have not even the merit of variety. Yet it is easy to select illustrations of the principles to which we have referred, in no sense at variance with the spirit of the whole. " The strength of the kingdom depends on the virtue of the sover- eign, not on the tripods. Heaven blesses the goodness of the wise : 'tis there its favor rests." ^ " The ruler is the host of spirits and the hope of the people. If he .straitens the people, and causes the Invisible Ones to lack the sacri- fices, of what use is he ? What should they do but send him away ? " ' " Heaven's love for the people is very great. Would it allow the one man to take his will and way over them, indulging his passiow and disregarding heaven and earth ? "* ' See Legge's Pro&j-iwfKxa • TciuH-isieUtVll. )■ ' Tso-chuen on Ibid., IX. 15. « Ibid. GOVERNMENT. 345 A well-managed State is described as one in which pun- ishment is justified as the suppression of rebellion, and virtue shown in gentle treatment of those who submit ; in which the calling out of forces does not interfere with labor, and the army is ready for any emergency without special orders ; where ofHce depends on fitness, and rewards are conferred according to service, and special kindness is shown the old ; where strangers receive privileges and exemptions ; where officials are distinguished by their dress, and each person comports himself with the position he holds in rank or class : ^ — " The defeat or death of a good minister is like an eclipse. He is the bulwark of the altars. To slay him is to give victory to the nation's foes." 2 " Superior men should labor with their minds ; smaller ones with their strength." ' " When an army has right on its side it is strong: when the expe- dition is wrong it is weary and weak." * Tsze Muh said : " If we get our will, what use is good faith ? " To which the Chief Minister replied : " How can one's will be got by casting away one's honesty ? It is by good faith that the purpose of the mind itself becomes realized."* Here is another effort by a covenant of princes to heal the evils of the time : — " All we who covenant agree not to hoard the produce of good years, not to shut each other out of advantages, not to protect traitors, not to shelter criminals. We agree to aid each other in disasters, to cherish the same likes and dislikes, to support and encourage the Royal House. Should any prince break these agreements, may He who watches over men's sincerity, the spirits of the land, our prede- cessors, the ancestors of the twelve States, destroy him, so that he shall lose his people, his family perish, and his 'State be utterly over- thrown." " " A struggle is not to be maintained by whitening the plains with bones to gratify our pride." ' 1 TcAHH-isieu, VII. 12. » Ibid. ' Tso-ckutn, to IX. 9. ' Ibid., VII. la. » Tchun-isieu, IX. 27. • Ibid., IX. 11. ' Ibid., * 346 STRUCTURES. To an officer who wished to lead an army against Tsin, the Earl of T'sin said : " Its ruler is evil, but of what have the people been guilty ? " ' Another chief in T'sin advised sending grain to the enemy in their distress, saying : — " To succor in calamity, and take pity on one's neighbors, is right ; and he who does so has the blessing." ^ Tsin was ungrateful and made war, but was defeated. T'sin treated it with kindness and sent it supplies, and the Earl said : — " I am angry with its ruler, but I pity its people. How can I ex_- pect to annex Tsin ? Let me meanwhile plant my virtue more deeply, and wait for a good ruler to arise there." ' The Marquis of Tse, invading Loo, said to Chen-He : — " The houses of your people are empty, there is no grass in their fields. On what do they rely that they are not afraid ? " Chen-He replied : — " They rely on the charge of a former King : ' From generation to generation let your descendants refrain from harming one another.' Thus Duke Hwan, assembUng the States, took measures for healing and relief in conforming with this ancient charge. When your lord- ship took his place all the States were full of hope, saying : ' He will carry on the good work of Hwan.' Therefore our poor State did not attempt to protect itself by force of men, and now we say : ' Surely he will not forget that ancient charge of his father.' On ^his we rely, and are not afraid." The Marquis of Tse returned home.* There was a great drought, and the Duke of Loo wanted to burn a witch and a very emaciated person. But Tsang- wan-chung said to him : — " That is not what it is needed in time of drought. Put your walls 'n repair, lessen your food, be frugal in expenses, and encourage people to mutual help. What have the witch and the lean man to do with ths matter? ■' ' Tchun-tsUu, v. 14. » Ibid., V. 14. » Ibid., V. 15. ' Ibid., V. a;. GOVERNMENT. 347 Best of all, the Duke followed the good advice. ^ Confucius asks, — " How shall a kingdom be ruled, when there is no distinction, no higher nor lower, among men ? " A strong sense of the necessity of rights and duties according to functions, and of functions according to pow- ers, is apparent in such sentences as these : — " Equal queens, equal sons, double governments (favorites made equal with ministers), and equal cities (large city made equal with small one), — all lead to disorder." ^ " It is only the perfectly virtuous who can keep a people in sub- mission by clemency. For the next class severity is the necessary way. To carry on a mild government is a diiEcult thing." ' The strife for hegemony lasted, as in the old Greek States, for centuries, — relieved by noble instances of self- ^ , , , ' •' _ End of the denial among brothers, of humanity and magnanim- strife of ity among chiefs, and darkened by unnatural hates, ^'^'"" till the final victory of T'sin over the six great States which had absorbed the rest. The great scale of numbers and space on which this triumph of concentrative force was effected bears witness to the national bias towards unity and order. In the quality of its special elements, the growth of T'sin to supreme power has been likened to the rise of Prussia, as the result of a patient and persevering policy of invitation to strangers, choice of best leaders, and furtherance of talent without regard to its origin, as well as of long disciplines by border wars with the surrounding barbarous tribes. Yet the record of its barbarities in war is monstrous, and, like analogous ones in the Hebrew Book of Chronicles, beyond belief.* T'sin Chi-hwang-ti was a reformer " who had learned to despise old paths and to subdue kingdoms," says j,^^ the Sse-ki with sharpness. He was in fact a dis- hwang-ti. ' Tso-chuenl.oV.ii. 2 Ibid., II. 18. 'Ibid , X, 21. « Plath on MilU. Affairs of Chinese. 348 STRUCTURES. ciple of the Tao-sse school, which despised history and re- acted against the whole spirit of Chinese culture. His cruelty, as the censors of the succeeding Han dynasty are eager to assert,^ caused a universal league against him, which perhaps did more than any thing else towards estab- lishing nationality on a firm basis, in place of feudal dis- union.^ The changes introduced by this short dynasty, which sweeps like a tornado across the track of Chinese history, have been already suggested ; the bounds of the empire widely extended to the south and west ; the people, freed from a warlike aristocracy, and their path opened to all public functions, as well as to ownership in land ; the edu- cational examinations, only temporarily suppressed by Chi- hwang-ti, to reach much higher development by means of the political institutions which he founded. The order and eificiency thus secured by unity in public adminis- tration readily commended themselves to a people so apt for peaceful association as the Chinese ; and it is from this epoch, which may be said to open with the reaction against feudal disintegration by Confucius and his school, that we may date the real history of the Chinese State. Since the T'sin monarchy there have been many changes Later in the relations of the States to the central power, of mlani- ^^^ provcrbial stability of Chinese life is hardly latidn. borne out by the history of these relations. Besides Shun's distribution into twelve provinces under the Mou, and Yu's into nine natural and five political divisions, in the old ideal monarchy, and then the Tcheou partition into twelve domains answering to the zodiacal signs, — Chi- hwang-ti is credited with substituting for the old feudal States thirty-six Kuen, or provinces, under guardianship of * Pfitzmaier, ^«w ^ ^^. , October i860, November, 1861. ' The reader will find resemblances in many of his institutions to those introduced int* English feudalism by William the Norman. Cf. Green's Hist, of England. GOVERNMENT. 349 prefects. In the seventh century, the T'ang made a new division into ten departments (tao) with new functionaries. On these followed a long line of changes rung on the titles of offices combining civil and military authority, ending in the present viceroys (ta-fu) ^ of eighteen well-organized States. We have seen (i) that the oldest tradition makes the Em- peror owner of the whole territory, distributing the l^nd land among the people, colonizing and organizing i'*™'- the cultivators according to their need, so as to secure as equal a division as possible of landed property ; and Early (2) that the nobles were supposed to have gradually '"='<"7' acquired proprietary rights, which were held in the time of the Tcheou on terms of feudal service and tribute. The historical fact is simply that, when we find these chieftains emerging into view, they have a quasi-imperial tenure of their territories : how long they have had this tenure, or whether it was original, is not within our knowledge. The old authors speak of a process as going on from early times, by which imperial officials, receiving their salaries in lands instead of money, acquired powers over the people dwelling thereon, who were therefore called their men? But the Tcheou-li embodies what the Chinese for ages regarded as the true land legislation : the soil divided as equally as pos- sible among cultivators, who pay tithes according to values of harvests officially estimated, with discrimination against negligent farming ; taxes lightened in hard times ; careful registers kept of every location ; minute supervision for increasing products, population, and stock ; for fixing the times of sowing and felling, and the kind of seeds ; and for protecting animals; — with other governmental arrange- ments tending to the security, comfort, and local attach- * Mayers in Notes and Queries^ III No. 8. * Biot, Mim. de la CoftstiL Pol. de la Chine au XII. Slide, &*€., p. 29. 350 STRUCTURES. ment of the landholders. To whatever extent this ideal was disappointed in the constantly disturbed and finally n,ands decadcnt epoch of the Tcheou, we find Mencius not of Mencius only familiar with what is best in it as theory, but orequ ity. ^^j^jy insisting on the broadest and most humane political economy consistent with it, as the right of a suffer- ing and even starving people. Mencius demands a return to " equal homesteads for all farmers, under their own mulberry trees," for sericulture, with such freedom from public labors (corvie) as would allow them time for the support of their families ; imperial inspection-tours to see justice done ; fixed tithes on land free of official caprice ; abolition of game laws ; free trade and commercial inter- course between the towns ; deliverance from devastation of the farms by armies on the march ; and from mockery of the miseries of the people by royal pleasure and hunting excursions.^ This demand of Mencius for the removal of custom-houses was very remarkable in an age so remote from the present, and in a country so disunited as China two thousand years ago. His idea of equalizing property in land was not so irrational as it would be in the poHtical economist of our day ; since it was based on imperial au- thority to construct social relations, and was the only pro- test left possible in the dreadful miseries which he depicts with so much sympathy. He earnestly advocates the old village system of " mutual aid," through common labor on a central public field by every eight families ; as well as through friendly offices between these members of a single agricultural section or square. This would enable the la- borers to pay their dues to government, as well as cause them to put the general good before private interest (since the public work must take precedence), and to live in har- mony and comfort. He contrasts this with the taxing of each person according to a fixed rate, which bore hard in bad ' Menc. B. I. i. 3 ; ii. i, 5 ; B. n. i. 5. GOVERNMENT. 35 1 years. " When the parent of the people causes them, after a year's toil, to be unable to support their parents, so that they proceed to borrow, till the old people and children are found lying in the ditches, where is his parental relation ? " ^ The T'sin dynasty neglected land regulation for extensive public works and military enterprises, the T'sin which bore harder on the persons of the farmers ^™^' than on their situation as tax-payers. It was probably due to this looseness of land administration that private prop- erty in land began to be recognized and developed, in place of absolute ownership by kings and nobles. Thus land be- came heritable in the fullest sense ; and so great was the revolution that ineffectual efforts were afterwards made to overthrow it in the name of imperial ownership itself.^ This change had in fact already commenced in the king- dom of T'sin in 349 B.C., before its accession to the empire, and was simply expanded by Chi-hwang-ti into national dimensions.^ The property rights of an industrial people are sure to assert themselves fully at last through its production of values that must be recognized as at the foundation of pub- lic good. The evil that lurks as a kind of irony, in every forward step of society, showed itself in the development of private servitudes out of the vast public works set on foot by Chi-hwang-ti, which drove multitudes to dependence on richer persons.* So that slavery and the free tenure of land grew up, as afterwards in America, under the same political institutions, and at the same epoch. But the free methods of such a people bear larger and more lasting fruit than its oppressive ones. It was otherwise in the indolent life of the Roman upper classes whose estates, held in per- petuity and cultivated by slaves, were the germ of sociaJ dissolution. > JIfmcms, B. in. i. ]. > Wvttke, II. 156. ' Matouanlin. * Biot, Journ. Asiat., 183&. 352 STRUCTURES. At present, in the tea districts of China, the farms are Present four or five acres in extent, and every cottager sup- plies his wants, after the Mencian ideal, from the ures m China. produce of his tea garden. The same may be said of cotton, silk, and rice farms. " Labor is a pleasure there, for its fruits are eaten by themselves, and the rod of the oppressor is unfelt and unknown." ^ The multitude of these small holders is like " a swarm of bees." " No feudal- ities or servitudes have burdened the land for centuries." The cultivator reaps the benefit of his own improvements, the government only taking its tax. For neglect of culti- vation both the cultivator and the head-man of the district are responsible.^ Second mortgages are forbidden, tres- passes and frauds in relation to farm property are severely punished.^ Officials are not allowed to own lands in their jurisdictions, but returning emigrants are assigned unoccu- pied tracts in return for their cultivation and payment of taxes.* And all this in China, while England is still largely under feudal tenures, and the condition of the agricultural population throughout most of the rural districts is to be learned from reports of an Agricultural Commission in 1868-69, of which the "Fortnightly Review" says:^ "A more piteous array of powerless poverty, a blacker catalogue of national blunders, national disgrace, and national crime, has probably never been produced by any civilized gov- ernment." ^ The Chinese believe that legislative sanctions were fully oldPenal established from the beginning of the State. Yu Laws. ^laA Said : " Control the people with gentle words, * Fortune's Wanderings, 1847 J PP* *9o, i9i» * Penal Code of China, xcvii. » Ibid., xciii., xcv., xcviii. * Ibid., xciv., nan. » July, 1874. * See also Kay's Social Condition of the People of England. GOVERNMENT. 353 but correct them with the majesty of law." ^ " The Five Punishments" are placed by the Hia under direc- Their ethi- tion of a Minister of Crimes,^ and a special domain "^^ '°"=- reaching to the wild tribes is set apart for penal restraints. The five punishments were cruel, but Shun appointed fixed commutations, saying that " compassion ought to rule in punishing." ^ From the first, penalty is referred to its higher ethical grounds. " Only virtue conquers vice." * Moral suasion is preached, if not practised. " Let rewards, not penalties, be heritable." "Risk error, sooner than punish the innocent."^ Obedience from love, not law nor fear, is made the germ of social order. The Sse-ki says : " Fo-hi and Shin-nung taught, but did not punish. Hwang-ti, Yao, and Shun punished, but without anger." The Shu-king explains that robberies compelled the use of penal laws in the Hia age, and that the barbarism of the Meaou, confounding good and evil, was met by the virtuous edicts of Shun. No better philosophy of penalty has ever been reached than that contained in the old Shu-king maxims, „ , ° ' Idea of some of which have already been quoted : that punish- " the end of punishment is to promote virtue ; " '"™'' " to make an end of punishing ; " to bring " blessing " by the just appreciation of guilt ; that " only good persons should be judges, because penalties may bring extreme distress ; " that " evil should be dealt with as if it were a disease in one's own person ; " that " none should be pun- ished whose guilt is in doubt." We may add from the Li-ki : — " Seek out the good side and pardon ; change criminality by hu- manity. For a deadly crime, the great thing is to convert the criminal to goodness." * " The good judge will study each case thoroughly. If it is doubt- • Siu-iittg-, Pt. II. B. n. • Ibid., B. i. » Ibid , B. i. lo. * Ibid., B. II. 20. » Ibid., B. 11. 12. • Sect. Ta-tai. See Plath, p 735. 23 354 STRUCTURES. ful, he will make it known to a number of persons ; and if they are also in doubt, he pardons." ^ " In trying cases, let not the judge Jook to his own profit ; treasures so won are no treasures, but a heap of sins tliat bring penalty." ^ " Penalties will be used with great caution by the wise ; because they cannot be retracted or undone." ^ Confucius and Mencius ascribe vice to bad conditions, such as want of certain livelihood, or occupation, not to evil intent. The remedy with both is "benevolent government." " To involve the people in crime through vicious conditions, and then follow them up with punishment, is to entrap the people."' " Therefore, a good ruler will observe regulated limits in his dealing with wrong." This wonderful theoretic wisdom of the Chinese is offset Its contra- t>y the prevalence, in these elder days, of some very diction in barbarous forms of punishment, which seem to show that their higher tendencies had to struggle against many elements inherited from the Mongol and the steppe. A large portion of these were, however, enacted by tyrants, and so were transient ; such as embracing a burning pillar, or being torn in pieces between chariots. While mutilation, at times very common, seems to have been, as with other Oriental races, ^ a permanent part of. criminal justice, we do not find torture or ordeal applied to elicit truth from witnesses or the accused, who are tested by observation of signs in their bearing and features. The employment of mutilated criminals in public labors stands side by side in the Tcheou-li with the less creditable exclu- sion of released prisoners for three years from the recog- nized population of the State.* The destruction of the whole family of a parricide, and adherence of penalty to the descendants of the offender, were incidents to rude stages of a patriarchal religion. Mencius tells us that Wen-wang * Li-ki, ch. J. > Mcnc, III. i. 3. • Lenonnant, Ane. Hist. o/East, II. pp. 106, 109. ♦ Tcluou-li, B. xjx. vii. GOVERNMENT. 35 S refused to permit that the wives and children of criminals should be involved in the penalty of their guilt.^ Finally, it must be observed that great care seems to have been expended on discriminating degrees of guilt, separating involuntary from intentional wrong, and taking counsel, in all important cases, of every class of witnesses, besides guarding the right of appeal. The actual Penal Code of China (Ta-tsing-leuh-le), of which we have a very careful abstract by Sir George thePe- Staunton,^ aided by an authoritative exposition from nal Code the Emperor Yang-ching, is of the highest value as embodying the results of the old national ideals we have been reviewing, as well as such practical institutions as have proved best suited to the character of the race. We find in it most of the substance of the Shu-king and Tcheou-li ; and, while enlarged by constant additions during the last two centuries, its thorough revisal every five years has brought it to a very compact and simple form, which may well be regarded as a model for codes intended to be read and understood by the people. It embraces seven divisions: (i) General Laws; (2) Civil Laws; (3) Fiscal, including laws relating to ns con- Land and Marriage, Public Property, Customs, Pri- '^"'s. vate Property, Sales, and Markets ; (4) Ritual ; (5) Mili- tary ; (6) Criminal, divided under the heads of Robbery, Homicide, Quarrelling, Indictments, and Information, Bribery, Fraud, Incest, Arrest, Imprisonment, Trial, and Punishment ; (7) Public Works. Kang-hi's definition of the objects of punishment, pre- fixed to the translation, is in the spirit of the old ideals. " Punishment is instituted to guard against violence and injury, to repress inordinate desires, and secure the tranquillity of an honest and well-conducting community." * Menc, I. ii. 5. * Published in 1810. 356 STRUCTURES. The Code abounds in applications of justice and be- lts Be- nignity. The progress of humanity is recon- nignities. cilcd with that Oriental reverence for what is written, which forbids expunging obsolete law from the statute-book, by the device of a distinction between nominal and actual punishments. Tables of pecuniary commutation are also drawn up, the amounts being pro- portioned to rank and position. Of humanities relat- Astothe ii^g to the Family, where we should expect the Family. most rigid rulcs, we may mention (i), concern- ing Women : mitigation of corporeal punishment by permission to wear a garment during its infliction (xx.), and by exemption from it for a hundred days after child- birth (ccccxx.) ; commutation of banishment by fine (xxi.), and permission to follow husbands into exile (xv.) ; bail in place of imprisonment, for all crimes except the highest (ccccxx) ; limitation of the right of a husband to divorce his wife, even on any of the seven legal grounds, when she has mourned for her parents-in-law for the appointed period, or when the family has become rich during the marriage by her aid, or when she has no parents living to receive her back again (cxvi.) ; severe, penalties for breach of promise (ci.) ; for lending wife or daughter for temporary wife (cii.) ; for degrading first wife to concubine (ciii.) ; for keeping two first wives (ciii.) ; for effecting a marriage contract by terror, resulting in death, suicidal or other (ccxcix.) ; and for accepting the wife or child of a debtor in pledge (cxlix.). (2) Concerning Children : equality of son and daughter be- As to chii- fore the law (xxxviii.) ; ^ right of succession in the dren. (.j.yg wife's children (xlvii.) ; adopted sons not to be abandoned nor sold by their guasi parents (Ixxviii., cclxxv.) ; laws against selling a child of free parents for a slave (IxviiL), and against cruelty to adopted children (cccxx.). (3) Con- ^ As in the patriarchalism of ancient Rome. GOVERNMENT. 35/ cerning the Old and Helpless : severe punishment for neg- lect of aged parents (cccxxxviii.), especially for leav- Astothe ing them for the purpose of holding office (ibid.) ; °^^ right of redemption from all penalties lower than the high- est, for the young, the old, the sick, and the maimed (xxii.). And (4) injuries, however severe, inflicted in defence of a father, held to be non-criminal (cccxxiii.) ; as also efforts of relatives to screen one another (xxxiv.) ; offenders under sentence of death who have sick or infirm parents or grandparents dependent on them for support, recommended to imperial mercy (xviii.). Passing from special family laws, to more general ones in the interest of humanity, we note provisions for ce„„ai the maintenance and care of poor widows and Human- widowers, when helpless and childless, by the mag- istrates of their native towns (Ixxxix.) ; mitigation of punishment in seasons of heat, and prohibition of capital punishment between the first and sixth moons of the year (appendix) ; limitation of a legal day's work to the time between sunrise and sunset (xli.), and of public labor (cor- v/e) to three days at a time (Ixxxvi.) ; right of defending one's house with arms against night robbers (cclxxvii.) ; penalties for depriving people of raiment in winter, or the hungry of food, or taking away a ladder from one who is climbing it, or a bridle from one on horseback (ccxci.) ; for cruelty to animals (ccxxvii., ccxxxi.) ; for damaging anoth- er's land or tools, or tilling his soil (xcvi.) ; right of appeal for the poor, when injured by taxation, to all tribunals in succession ; and, in general, right of all to impartial treat- ment in laying and collecting taxes (Ixxx.) ; death penalty for causing revolt by official oppression (ccx.) ; laws against annoyances in collecting the revenue (cxxxiv., ccxxii.) ; relations of deceased soldiers to be returned to their homes at public expense (ccl.) ; returning emigrants to be reas- signed their lands (xc). 35 8 STRUCTURES. Wise distinctions are taken in the same spirit, bearing Discrimi- oTi the administration of penal law ; such as that nations. between principal and accessory (xxx., cclxviii,, cclxix.) ; between attempted, and actually committed, crime (cclxxx.) ; between reckless killing or wounding, and the same acts where no sufficient warning could be given (ccxci.). No increase of punishment to enure from aggra- vating circumstances not known to the offender (xxxv.) ; designs punishable in one set of offences not to work the same effect in a different set (ibid.) ; limitations to the time within which one is responsible for the effects of a wound (ccciii.) ; just debts not to be recovered by violence (cxlix.) ; fighting punished according to the amount of injury done, and the question which party is in the right (cccii.). Pro- vision is made for punishing actions done contrary to the spirit of the law, though not breaches of any specific clause (Ixxxv.) ; and for determination of cases not coming within the statutes, by comparison with others and subsequent reference to the highest tribunal in the land (xliv.).i Interference of the military with the course of the law is The Courts strictly forbiddcn (cccxli.) ; statements of witnesses o£ Law. ^^g jjQ(. ^Q ^jg altered (ccccxxii.) ; examinations to be confined to the charges made (ccccvi.) ; offenders to be confronted with their associates (ccccv.) ; witnesses not to be imprisoned, nor examined with cruelty (cccxcvi.) ; testi- mony of interested parties, of the very old or the very young, not required nor received (cccciv.) ; magistrates known to be interested for or against the parties, not to try the case (cccxxxv.). Refusal to hear proper informa- tion, and acceptance of improper (cccxxxv.) ; conviction on anonymous information (cccxxxiii.) ; recrimination of offend- ers on innocent persons (ccccviii.) ; wilfully unjust sen- tences (ccccix.), — are all severely punished. Judgment is to be rendered according to laws and precedents, without use 1 For a similar principle among the Hebrews, see Deut. xvii., 8-13. GOVERNMENT. 359 of previous imperial edicts (ccccxv.). The Emperor is ex- pected to reverse any false judgment (ccccx.). The false accuser shall reimburse the loss of the person he has caused to be unjustly punished (cccxxxvi.). Unnecessary severity to prisoners is punished (cccxii,, cccxcv.), as also injuries by the police to offenders , , . ■' ^ ..... . Prisoners. who make no resistance to arrest (ccclxxxvni.). Prisoners are to be provided with food, clothes, and med- icines on application to authorities ; they may be released from fetters and close confinement when sick, or allowed to hold free intercourse with their families ; and jailers are responsible for refusing to make such application (cccci.). The right-of the convict to protest against his sentence is secured (ccccx.), and the execution of the death penalty for- bidden till after ratification by the Emperor (ccccxxi.). In the primitive spirit of domestic discipline, the criminal is tempted to confession by promise of pardon (ccxvii., xxv., xxix.). The minuteness of governmental supervision is made to subserve good aims, by penalties, for neglecting protective to interfere to prevent violence (ccci.), or to deliver supervision. up lost property within five days after finding it (cli.) ; for exciting litigation (cccxl.) ; for suppressing the discovery of stolen goods (cccliii.) ; for circulating immoral writings or keeping places of vicious amusement (ccclxxxiv.) ; for usury (cxlix.), monopoly (clvi.), and tricks of trade by false weights and labels (ibid.) ; for forming secret societies harmful to the public peace (appendix) ; for neglecting to cultivate one's land (xcvii.). For their ethical value we note laws against bribery (cccxliv., cccliv.) ; embezzlement (cxix., cxxv.), espe- other good cially of sums due to soldiers (cxxix.) ; dilapidation "^^s- of property held in trust (cl.) ; fraudulent land sales (xciii), and false appraisements (cliii.) ; second mortgages (xcv.) ; 360 STRUCTURES. partiality in examination of candidates (Hi.) ; kidnapping (cclxxv.) ; torture of old, sick, or young (cccciv.) ; black- mailing (cclxxiii.) ; non-burial of corpse (clxxx.) ; disturbing graves (cclxxvi.) ; defacing public monuments (ccclxxvi.), and injuring public ways (ccccxxxiv., ccccxxxvi.) ; sorcery and magic for malignant purposes (cclxxxviii., cclxxxix.). As tending to public security the strict responsibility .^ of officials is to be praised, though the laws are responsi- exceedingly severe. Thus, pretending to official "^' authority, and official interference without author- ity, are capital crimes (ccclx., ccclxii.). For recommending bad men, death is the penalty ; for falsification of an edict or counterfeiting a seal, the same (xlix., ccclv., ccclviii.); non-report of offences, non-prevention of crime where it is possible ; false appraisement, embezzlement, waste or con- cealment in collection of imposts ; non-recovery of escaped felons, or failure to secure culprits within a stated time; treating subordinate officers with contempt, or surrendered prisoners with harshness, — are all punished in various degrees, from banishment to castigation. Combined with these just or benignant statutes are Startling many startling anomalies. We find scales for esti- anomaiies, ujai-j^g guilt which are incomprehensible till we arising 00 r from vari- rcfcr them to the social traditions under which the ous causes. oriental conscience is trained. They may be clas- sified as proceeding, — I. From the patriarchal rule of honor to the old. — Pen- p^^^ alties are proportioned inversely to the relative honor to agcs of members of the same family. Even for such offences as stealing (cclxix., cclxxii.) or killing (cccxxxv.), as well as for extorting by threats (cclxxiii.), striking (cccxvi.), or disturbing graves (cclxxvi.), the pun- ishment of the elder is less than that of the youngel GOVERNMENT. 36 1 brother.^ Accusation of a father by a son, or an elder brother by a younger, is an offence, even if true (cccxxxvii.) ; a marriage contract by a son is to be given up, if the parents have arranged a different one (ci.). From this patriarchal principle come extreme severities, because intended as safeguards against crimes that threaten the very foundations of reUgion and social order. The pen- alty affixed to striking a parent is decapitation, the highest known to the law (cccxviii.) ; to killing, even by accident, a hundred blows and perpetual banishment (ibid.). A child abusing his parent may be put to death, if the latter enters complaint (cccxxix.). For killing one's own child, the pen- alty is but sixty blows, and banishment for a year (cccxx.) ! For killing a son or grandson who strikes him, one is not punished (cccxx.). These paternal rights were not greater than in ancient Rome, where a son could not only hold no property during his father's lifetime, but could be sold or slain, at his will.^ The Mosaic penalties for abuse of parents were equally severe.^ On complaint of father and mother, a rebellious son was to be given up to the people to be stoned.* The Egyptians burned the parricide alive, after torture.^ So inconceivably wicked was parricide to the Hebrew con- science that it is not even recognized in their law.^ Herod- otus says that the ancient Persians did not believe it possible. '^ 2. From reverence for the family bond. — Scale of pen- alties proportioned to nearness of relationship with the injured party. This rule, applied to criminal famUy intercourse (clxviii.), to assault (cccxvii.), and even ''°"''" to the treatment of slaves (cccxiii), is reversed in the case of theft (cclxix-cclxxii.). A.curious ethical satire is involved 1 So Plato. See the curious passages in his Laws^ B. ix ; also» Republic^ B. ni. * Hadley, pp. 120, 124. * Exod. xxi. 15, 17. * Beut. xxi. 21. ' Diod. I. 77. " SaalschUtz. Mosaiscke Reckij ch. 35. ^ Herod. I. .^37 362 STRUCTURES. in the law that punishes with whipping one who evades the duty of mourning for his relatives (clxxix.). 3. From marital authority. — A man may divorce his wife (with certain limitations already stated) for marital au- barrcnness, lasciviousness, disregard of her hus- thonty. band's parents, talkativeness, theft, bad temper, or permanent infirmity (cxvi.). If a wife absconds when her husband refuses to be divorced, the penalty is a hundred blows and to be sold in marriage ; and, if while thus absent she contracts a marriage, it is death (cxvii.). A wife strik- ing her husband is punished according to the injury done-; a husband striking his wife only exercises his right, unless he wounds her, when the penalty is two degrees less than in the former case (cccxv.). There is much inconsistency in these marriage laws. Thus a husband may put to death his adulterous wife and her paramour ; and, if he spares her, she is to be sold.^ Yet, elsewhere, if a husband kills his wife for abusing his parents, without accusing her be- fore a magistrate, he is punished with a hundred blows (ccxciii.). If a wife accuses her husband, even truly, she is severely punished, and the accused, if he plead guilty, par- doned ; yet an exception, immediately added, in favor of true charges relating to very serious crimes, and of real grounds of complaint in maltreatment of any sort, seems to rescind the whole law (cccxxxvii.). The apparent impartiality of the law on avenging adul- tery, as to male and female offenders, is proved fallacious by the entire absence of opportunity for the wife to protect herself from infidelities on the part of the husband, whose remedy against both her and her paramour, in case of hf being the guilty party, is in his own hands. 4 From Slavery. — Harboring a fugitive servant or From marrying one is punished in the same manner as slavery, ^.j^g slave himself (cxvi). A slave striking his mas- ^ By Hebrew law, both parties are stoned. (Deut. xxii. 22.) GOVERNMENT. 3^3 ter, or even accidentally killing him, is to be put to death (cccxiv.). A freeman striking a slave is punished one de- gree less than in case of equals ; a slave striking a freeman, one degree more (cccxiii.). Yet killing a slave is murder, and punished with death (cccxiii.). Nothing in Chinese slave laws equals in injustice the Hebrew statute by which illicit intercourse of a free- man with a slave is punished by scourging (not death) for her, " because she was not free ; " while he is let off with a trespass-offering for his sin.^ 5. From reverence for official or social position. — For wounding, the scale of penalties is graduated ac- p,on,og. cording to the nearness of the injured to the Empe- ciaireia- ror (cccv.) ; for assaulting officers, according to their rank (cccx.) ; for abusive language, the same (cccxxiv. cccxxvi.). Special indulgences are granted to persons of high rank or great services (ccccii., cccciii.). These distinc- tions have a certain justification for the Chinese mind in its rooted belief that rank is the reward of merit, and the earnest efforts of the nation to carry the belief into practice. Here belong the curious laws which embody the sacredness of the imperial dignity ; such as prohibit travel on roads that have been expressly prepared for the royal march (clxxxiii., clxxxv., clxxxvii.), or severely punish informalities in the use of the royal name (Ixiv.), or errors in transcribing royal edicts (ccclv.). By a law now designated as obsolete, imperial personages and high officials were not to be represented in theatres ; but fictitious characters, fitted for good moral effect, as just men, chaste wives, and obedient children, were permitted (ccclxxxiv.). Here, too, we class those provisions of public policy, vhich aim to secure the loyalty of officers by clothing them with strange and vast responsibilities to the central power ; for example, by forbidding them to form local ties in their ^ Levit. xix. 2a 364 STRUCTURES. own districts either b)' marriage or by real estate (xciv., ex) ; by exacting from them full report of all calamities and all misconduct, even their own (xci., clxxi.) ; by making them inspectors of each other's conduct, with penalties for con- cealing their knowledge (cxxx.) ; and by holding them re- sponsible for the remissness of their inferiors in detecting criminals, and for their oppressive dealing with the people (ccx., ccclxxxvii., cccxciv.). 6. From the peatliar nature of Chiiust religion as a From re- ciiltus of trlcnioifal /czocrs, h' the Head of the State. ligion. >jo private person shall perform rites to Heaven (cbd.), nor pretend to discover prognostics (ccclxiii.) ; * nor shall an optcial astronomer fail to announce such signs as really appear, on penalty of the rod (clxxvii.). As the ra- tionalism of this State religion is expressed in severe laws against sorcery and magic,- and even noisy processions with idols (cclxxxix., cclvi., clxii.), so its superstition is betrayed by making the stealing of articles used in religious rites, during or after their use, a capital crime in the first case, and next to capital in the second (cclvii.). W'e come finalh- to laws which express the intense hor- Punish- ror of the race for certain kinds of crime, for which mTOlmwis th^ highest penalty seems to be regarded as inade- crimes. quatc. Of these the most prominent are. of course, offences against the life of that Government which is the will of Heaven and the hope of Man. High treason is de- fined as "attempt to subvert the go\"eTnment or destroy the imperial palace, temples, or tombs," and the penalty for principals and accessories is to be " cut to pieces," which means killed in any cruel way that ma}" chance to be de- \'ised ; while all male adult relatives are to be beheaded, and all minors and females enslaved (ccliv., cclv.). Rebellion ^ So the Hebrew Law, (Deut xvtii. 20). * The Hebrews stoned both witches and conjurers of spirits. (Exod. xxiu iS ; l4ffit D. a?). GOVERNMENT. 365 defined as " attempt to violate the divine order," is punished by beheading, confiscation of property, and banishment of relations (cclv.). Sacrilege is a capital crime (cclvii.), as is all dealing in sorcery to compass death (cclxxxix.) ; and murder for magical purposes is pursued with penalties whose severity can only be explained by a half-believing horror of that great darkness of superstition which brooded over the rude Shamanism of the steppes whence the race had emerged, and which has always beset its better civili- zation. The criminal is doomed to die by slow and painfuj execution, and all inmates of his house to perpetual banish- ment. The idea involved in such now obsolete penalties, that the force of laws can exterminate the very seeds of unnatural crimes, is not peculiar to the intense faith of the Chinese in police-regulation and machinery ; and its com- bination, as here, with a superstitious belief in invisible powers of evil apart from the human will, has been devel- oped in the Christian world into processes of atrocious cruelty, infinitely surpassing any thing which has been pos- sible for the semi-rationalistic Chinese. The anomalies of this Penal Code, so startlingly combin- ing mercy and cruelty, enlightened principles and Expiana- barbarous applications, remind us of the heteroge- '""^ °* r /-\ ■ 1 /-. 1 ■ , anomalies neous composition of Oriental Codes in general, inOriemai whose characteristics have been explained in a for- '^"■ mer volume. It is doubtful if these inconsistencies of leg- islation are greater in the East than in the West. We should expect much incongruity in that of the Chinese, from their peculiar tendency to a balancing of unreconciled opposites, to a centre of indifference between poles, whether in emotion, thought, or action. The dualism of Yin and Yang finds its expression in jurisprudence also. It n?ust not be forgotten that these Codes, whether of 366 STRUCTURES. the Ta-tsing, Manu, or the Pentateuch, embody the laws customs, and rules of many successive.ages, gradually work- ing themselves free from the imperfection of the Family- Idea, and all preserved together with less regard to consist- ency or to possibility of execution, than to the conservatism that shrinks from disturbing the old records of the fathers ; while the need of progress is met by fictions of interpreta tion suited to the time. These venerated statutes only illustrate on a greater scale the defects attached to our own codes, of obsolete laws and impossible presumptions, lingering on through all revisions, monuments of the slow- ness of the human mind in arriving at clear statements of social relations and wants. Their continuance of course allows a certain play, where the spirit itself is narrow or harsh, or even barbarous, to those darker passi'ons which descend in the blood and brain of all races, and leap into unexpected power on occasions of social excitement and surprise. For this reason alone, a cruel or unjust principle should be utterly and for ever wiped off the statute-book the moment its applications cease to. be allowed by pub- lic opinion, with that alacrity which Milton, in his plea for a thorough Reformation, calls "shaking fire out of the bosom." ^ This is a necessary safeguard in the education of the mass of men, whose social life is largely instinctive and traditional, retaining, skin-deep, and ready for moments of temptation, the old passions and superstitions which should have been deprived of all educational prestige what- ever. In the Ta-tsing-leuh-li stand laws of paternal rights over life and liberty, as well as slave penalties, which we know to have no validity in the Chinese courts. A civilized sentiment has outgrown them ; nor do occasions arise to stir the fanaticism of such patriarchal and slave-holding tra- ditions in a community steadily emancipated by labor. But ^ The same is to be said of superstitions which stand in statutes long after they are out- grown by the enlightened conscience, and afford hold for the blind bigotry of unreasoning T)eople ; such as the Sunday laws of the New England States. GOVERNMENT. 367 what must, after all, be the effect of the barbarous pen- alties of the Shu-king and the Tcheou-li, as continually associated with names and books held in the highest honor, upon the popular conscience and conduct ? We are assured, by such authorities as Wells Williams, that " the inflic- tion of these penalties, still not uncommon in Persia and Turkey, is not now allowed nor practised in China." ^ Yet may we not in part ascribe to their currency in law codes and classic books, publicly read and taught, that propensity to torturing criminals in illegal ways which the same au- thor describes as rendering Chinese courts a real terror to the people "i ^ The ethical contradictions involved in transmitting the whole mass of codes, dogmas, and traditions, which Demorai- constitute a people's history, as one sacred canon, 0"^;^;".'^ make the Bible of every positive religion in the atry. world demoralizing to the popular conscience, in propor- tion as it is made a part of education to reconcile them in some way as portions of an authoritative record. That the Chinese penal code, commencing in reality not less than two thousand years ago, should contain much of this self- contradiction, is not more natural than that the same should be true of the Christian Old and New Testaments, which are regarded with far more exclusive reverence than is shown by the Chinese to their classics. Not only are they made mischievous to those who hold them to be one relig- ious law and rule, through their obvious mutual incongru- ities, but each contains within itself such opposite ele- ments that both alike have served for centuries to bewilder the moral sense, inspiring noble humanities on the one hand, and furnishing authority on the other for the un- matched barbarism that has grown out of belief in sorcery > Williams, I. 306. ' Ibid., I. 409. Mendoza, writing in the sixteenth century, describes Chinese capital pun- ishment as of the most barbarons character. {History of China, II. 116). 368 STRUCTURES. and diabolic possession, as well as anthropomorphic features that are little or no better. The cruelties of the Chinese code, in fact, compare very j,^_^ _ favorably with those of other races. In China, live mild- there has been no use of the ordeal, which has been Chinese Universal in the East and in all Christian nations Code. down to the thirteenth century, and was fostered for ages by the Christian Church. In China, there is no penal burning at the stake, so fearfully common in the West at the opening of the modern age. In China, torture was forbidden to touch the persons of the old and the )oung. The witchcraft persecutions in Europe and Amer- ica, down to the last century, directed their cruelties especially against old women ; and children of nine and ten years did not escape them. Torture was embodied in all mediaeval codes, in proportion to their origination in Roman law ; diffused over Europe by the Inquisition ; de- fended by minds like Bacon, resisted and abolished mainly by free-thinkers like Montesquieu and Voltaire ; not aban- doned in the principal European States till the close of the last century, and in some smaller ones lingering far on into the present. It is common to refer to such penalties as " pagan ; " but the most careful inquirer into their history says, without qualification, that " Christian communities have systematized the administration of torture with a cold- blooded ferocity unknown to the legislation of the heathen nations whence they derived it." ^ Two centuries have not elapsed since ten of the English regicides, condemned for high treason to the divine right of kings, were every one of them hanged, then cut down alive, disembowelled, be- headed, and quartexed by judicial sentence of the royal court.^ The forms of punishment employed by the Chinese are ' Lea, Sttferstition and Font, p. 3S9 j also pp. 379-387 i Lecky, Raiwnalism, I. 333- 349- * See IVesim. Rev.j January, 1873. GOVERNMENT. 36g similar to those of other races, — imprisonment, exile, death by strangling and beheading, or even by cutting in pieces ; ^ and last, the rod, applied in all ordinary cases on a scale rising from ten to a hundred blows. The Roman fasces and the Russian knout are familiar instances to prove the wide use of a punishment which only associa- tions peculiar to ourselves lead us to regard as specially degrading or cruel. The Hebrews used it in all ordinary cases of crime.^ The Puritans in America whipped men and women for not showing respect to a clergyman, and for staying away from church. On the widest esti- The death mates, the number of crimes punishable with death p™='"y- by Chinese law does not compare with that prescribed by the old English statutes, which the Massachusetts Puritans stripped of two-thirds their barbarity by reducing their death penalties to the Hebrew standard. Yet even these humaner codes doomed men to death for blaspheming the Trinity or the king, and even for profane swearing.* Sir Thomas More, who was humane enough to oppose the death penalty for theft, apparently preferred cropping the ears.* There is undoubtedly an element in the Chinese charac- ter to which these darker features of legislation The dark correspond. It appears in all times of excitement ^'5^°*^ ^ ^ * Chinese and panic, keeping its hold mainly through the character, singular insensibility of the Mongolian to physical pain. But, after all, the ideal, and in great part the practice also, are humane ; and if the Code be closely studied, it will be found to carry its own antidote to these destructive forces. Thus the distinction already mentioned as laid -p^^^ down in the outset between " nominal " and Mitiga- " actual " punishment, so that " where ten blows > Williams, I. 415. ^ Deut. XXV. (1-3). For the widespread use o£ this punishment, and its possible superiontj in some respects to other and severer penalties, see Cooper's HUt. of the Rod (Loudon, 1869). * See iVestm. Rev. , January, 1873, p. 61. * Utopia. 24 370 STRUCTURES. are specified four are to be inflicted," appears intended to cover the whole code, and of course gives room for neu- tralizing the severest features of the law. So with the tables of money commutations, and the abundant mitiga- tions provided for office, rank, virtue, services. Some of the harshest are obviously absurd and impossible, and evi- dently meant only to express detestation of crimes believed too horrible ever to be committed. That a child should be strangled for harsh words to his father cannot be seriously intended, as is evident from the punishment being made to depend on his parent's doing so incredible a thing as enter a complaint to compass his death (cccxxix.). That slaves should be beheaded for merely striking their masters is less improbable ; but the object of the statute was evidently to emphasize the unnaturalness of the action. Whether the laws against rebellion, sacrilege, and treason have been to any great extent carried out on the innocent families of offenders is questionable.^ They are the language of in- tense desire to root out the very stock capable of bearing such fruit. Instances of the banishment of whole families of noted rebels are, however, not infrequent. It was pro- posed to abolish this form of imputation, but imperial fears have hitherto resisted the effort. A highly reputed work, called " Advice to Officials," gives many humane provisions for lightening the painful- ness of bambooing, for exempting certain classes, — old, young, sick, hungry, naked, and those already beaten, — for suiting the time to the criminal's comfort, for using the smaller rather than the larger rod. The great point is to admit compassion, without which the end of punishment cannot be answered.^ Such considerations help to justify the remarkable state- ment of Staunton, that " one object much considered in the ^ Staunton, Inirod. to Trarul. of Penal Code^ xxviii. * Giles's Sketdiest p. 141. GOVERNMENT. 37 1 Code is to combine as much as possible severity in denun- ciation with lenity in execution." "With all its defects," he adds, " this Code is generally spoken of by thq, natives with pride and admiration, and all they seem to desire is its just and impartial execution." ' In external form, Chinese government is an imperial bureaucracy. It centres, not in the expressed will of the people, but in the organized authority of the cancerf official ; who looks for reward and punishment to '^'""=^^ ' ^ reverence a higher official, and he to a still higher board of forgov- officials, till the fountain of office is reached in the ^""11^ Emperor, and its form resolved into an earthly of right providence /br the people, instead of representing, as in a democracy, the people's allegiance only to them- selves. In substance, this idea of office does not ignore the authority of the people, but refers it to a higher principle than mere popular will. This is the important germ of political wisdom, folded in the crudity of Chinese official- ism, which we must assign to its bearings on comparative political science, and on the true idea of freedom. What is the special meaning of this childlike acceptance of a law higher than private will and embodied in official providence .'' Certainly it is not that pure self-government which performs the duties and maintains the rights belonging to an indi- vidual in society, without compulsion, because itself obe- dient to universal principles, ethical, social, spiritual. But it is at infinitely greater remove from enthroning individual desire and egotistic dreams. It is the opposite of the Celtic frenzy that would revolutionize and recreate institutions on the instant, imposing the unlimited self-assertion of leaders by force upon all mankind. It is equally opposed to the pseudo-American claim of absolute authority for massed ' Staunton, Introd., xxviii. 372 STRUCTURES. physical power, unity of numbers and wills, without regard to that higher right so often embodied in the minority, and still more often in the compacter and purer unity of a per- sonal ideal. In complete contrast with these, here is a social conviction, having the full force of rehgion, of the reality of a best for each and for all, which is not subject to the caprices of men or multitudes ; and which must find its expression in official authority, entrusted to the best and wisest persons. For the Chinese,' therefore, the secret of government is function, — function rightly fulfilled for the general good ; function, not as official routine to be put through for the mere continuance of government, still less to be pursued by all men as carrion, flung out for voracious beasts of prey, but as the root-fact in human nature ; the order, in whose right administration is involved the very existence of society. That this right sense of the value of functions is com- Causesof "^^"^^^ ^I'Co. an ovcr-intcnse faith in organization, over- explains the main faults of Chinese officialism ; o cia ism. ^]^j^]^ g^j-g^ — excessive pedagogy and management of details, extreme discipline and subordination, much inertia and repression in the life of the individual and of the State. The drift to organization hastens to merge the abstract in the concrete ; so that the idea of government is held fast in its own earliest moulds of function, in patri- archal sovereignty, in the sway of family and clan, the rule of the elder, the discipline of lower by higher members in the domestic circle. Political science is thus forbidden to develop into forms of progress, which require an unor- ganized realm of study in the free personal thought and imagination. To us, who are rapidly tending to an equally exclusive, faith in concrete values and organized sources of power, the typical form of this tendency in Chinese bureau GOVERNMENT. 373 cracy is a lesson whose significance we shall probably be forced to heed. What redeems these puerilities and this arrest of de- velopment is the relation of a true faith in function pajti, ;„ to its own ideal ; its aim to fulfil the best social truefunc- service without compulsion, through the power of personal virtue. That Chinese emphasis on function really has root in this ideal is plain from the constant assertion of it as the beginning of all real government. Self -disci- pline in the narrowest private spheres is the recognized ba- sis of power and right to rule the State. Every Chinese teacher refers the sanction of the highest powers in the land to the universal meaning of function, as accountability to the duties of the position ; and so treats the idea in a broadly democratic way. The oldest ideal monarchs, having been faithful in lowliest spheres, were called from the shop and the channelled fields to greater and the greatest spheres. Influen.ce flows from the person on his family, thence -on his neighborhood, town, country, mankind. It is so for the peasant, so for the prince. The productive quality of virtue is not of compulsion, but goes behind law, is the free flow of nature, the original tide-way of the faculties fitly em- ployed : this the source of law, of justice, of humanity. The grand first kings, who could reach out to find and use ministers like themselves, swayed mankind by noble ex- ample in their special duties, and laws were needless. This idealism of function reverses the apparent order of things, and derives authority after all from the peo- ultimate pie : so little does the external form of a gov- '^ thrpeo- ernment betray its secret quality. The Chinese, pie's good, referring functions to universal principles in human nature, declare that as the end of government is the good of the people, so its sanction resides in their love and content. This is its test. Their voice is sought on all momentous occasions, in all high penalty for crime ; the sovereign is 374 STRUCTURES. corrected by their sense of right, their murmurs of dissent ; officers who are expelled by them for oppressive conduct are put to death by the law for that cause alone.^ The secret is told, not only in the continued changes of dynasty by popular revolt, but by the great amount of positive self- government organized and constant in social life, — in the village communities, the local trade-unions and clubs for discussion, the institution of the censorate, and the freedom of appeal, in all cases of importance, to the highest court in the land. The two conceptions of government, as democratic re- sponsibility and providential care, are reconciled in this obviously imperfect way. The people having naturally right and power of self-government are incapable of exer- cising it ; do not know how to govern themselves, but do know when they are well governed ; do know when the functions they leave to their best men for fulfilment are well fulfilled. Hence their condition, as tranquil or dis- contented, is the constant burden of royal proclamation and official charge. Unsatisfactory to us. Yet it is plain that no government devised for enslaving the people would thoroughly and constantly proclaim its responsibility to them, — although this might be done, as in France, by a single ambitious and short-lived dynasty for momentary effect ; nor would it keep the path of advancement wide open to free competition ; nor preach the right of revolu- tion at the corners of the streets, and tyrannicide in the text-books of the schools ; nor submit to an institution like the censorship ; nor make its courts free to the appeal of the humblest person ; nor secure the best education the land affords to every one in the community who can afford time and means to pursue it. Obviously our Western ideas Df bureaucracy, as a rule imposed on the people, and our objections to a paternal government, are not easily applied ' Penal Code, CCX. GOVERNMENT. 375 to a nation in whose heart the ideas of service and sway are so fully reconciled as in China. And, if we would give them the benefit of our forward look and free aspiration, we must recognize the reverence with which they clothe the idea of government as the rule of the best, aware that nothing short of an homage to this eternal truth equal to their own can make us fit to become their teachers. These remarks are as applicable at the present as at any previous period. The Man-chus, though mas- ters of China by conquest, are pupils of her civil- Manchu ization, and fully acquainted with all its qualities. '"'^"^' Their preparation for ruling the empire has not been unworthy of the function. The Tsing has effected more than any previous dynasty, not only in organizing the State, but even in giving force to the traditional principles on which its institutions rest. The writings of Confucius have been the common culture of both races. Any collec- tion of Man-chu proverbs will be found very largely made up of his sayings.^ For delicacy and humanity as well as for close treatment of real life, even the original portions of such a collectioi^ will compare favorably with Chinese anthologies. The closest resemblance will be found in prudential and political maxims. The Administration of the Empire ^ is no artificial struc- ture, but has grown out of the demands of a vast • • • f 1 ... 11 . "^^^ Impe- civilization, for ages bent on utilizing all its re- rial Admin- sources for the common good, and working with '^'"''™- remarkable unity to that end. Just as its written language 1 See especially Rochet, Seniences ^antchoux Paris, 1875), extracts from which will be fouDd further on ; also Wollheim, Die National Literatur der Vdlker des Orients (pp.663, 664). * Fully given in the Ta-tsing^-Hwui-Tien, (64 vols. roy. octavo), the Manchu Blue- Book, which occupied the Han4in from twenty to thirty years in preparation ; it contains ininute descriptions of every department in forty-eight chapters. See Chin. Repos.^ Jan. 1843, Knd Aug. 1835. Also Martin's China, 1. 125; Franck, Etudes OrientaleSf p. 148; La Chita Ouverte, pp. 345-354' 376 STRUCTURES. has been made a bond of union for three hundred millions of people, and its educational system binds the remotest district to the capital by a common interest of the closest kind, so the same centripetal force of the race has organ- ized its various social interests in a central administration which has retained the same leading features since its ear- liest days. Thus the present Imperial Councils, cabinet and general, , Corre- Correspond to the consultations held by the early sponding kinsfs with their wisest men, and with the chiefs to the older ° regime. of tribes or States. The Cabinet {Nui-Koh) pre- pares opinions for the Emperor's judgment, its assistants being connected with the Board of Rites. The Genera! Council {Kiun-cki-Cku) comprises a large number of high personages, princes, chiefs of boards and courts, with other officials, selected by the throne. Its general func- tion is distributive, and includes issuing imperial edicts, regulating examinations and other national procedures, translating documents for general reading, and directing the affairs of Mongolia and Thibet. The Six Boards (Luh-pu) ^ of Civil Service, Revenue, ^i,g Rites, War, Punishment, and Public Works cor- Bureaus. respoud very nearly to the Boards of the Tcheou-Ii, and, though more concentrated, are not unhke those of Yu in the Shu-king. Their natural origin in social needs is indicated by the saying, " The Ly-pu is to govern the peo- ple, the Hu-pu to support them, — the Li-pu to guide; the Ping-pu to protect ; the Kong-pu to give them security and repose." These Boards are aided by a Colonial Office, a College of Censors, a Court of Revisions in capital cases, a Court of Petitions, and an Imperial Academy. There are also Boards of Inspection for granaries, and for transports of government stores of salt, corn, and customs. ' Called also Luh-fang (the six rooms), a familiar term for the administration. GOVERNMENT. 377 The College of Censors has six classes attached to the six Boards to supervise their action ; it takes part in reviewing all criminal cases coming up from the prov- inces, and in directing the police of the capital.^ A still more important function is to reprove and admonish the Emperor, of course with proper discretion and respect. The Court of Requests receives memorials, and trans- mits appeals made through the drum of justice at the palace gate directly to the throne. The Han-lin, or Royal Academy of Scholars, has been elsewhere described. To the early feudal States correspond divisions for ad ministrative purposes into provinces, departments, ^he and , cantons, whose subdivisions have their walled Provinces. towns of similar names to their own ; and these divisions are directed respectively by viceroys, governors, prefects, and sub-prefects, with treasurers, judges, and a great num- ber of subordinate officials, whose functions are too com- plex to be here described. By official espionagb from above and from below, by registration of all important facts, by transmission of every detail to the central bureaus, by reports, expected from all, of their own do- ings and misdoings, the administration of provincial affairs becomes, theoretically, known to the Emperor, as fount of justice and source of reform. The official list is filled from the records of competitive examinations by the Board of Rites ; and the control of foreign trade in the great port of Canton has been maintained until recently, by holding a company of merchants (Co-hong) responsible for the col- lection of duties to the higher government officials. The mandarin 2 holds his court as judge, jury, and bar, ' See Williams, I. 33S. i! The name " mandarin ' ' is probably derived from the Sanskrit " maniran " (counsellor), from mantra (wisdom) (Schott). Or perhaps, proximately, from the Portuguese muTtdar (te command). The Chinese name for a judge is kwan. 378 STRUCTURES. in imitation of the imperial rule, though under account- Mandarin ability in both directions to the government and Courts. ^jjg people. His court-house (Ya-mun) is de- scribed as a rambling fortress, garrisoned by officials, clerks, free agents, and purveyors to his interest, and police. The regular procedure is, however, without fee ; and rich and poor alike may prosecute their cause, enter protest against unjust sentence, and carry their appeal to higher courts. The number of official persons, of importance sufficient to be subjects of enumeration, amounted in 1845 to 20,000, with a proportion of one in five or six of the Tar- tar race.^ How does this vast regime of officialism work in practice .' Staunton says that, "for the repression of disorder in a Practical vast populatiou, thc Chinese laws are in general working of equally mild and efficacious; and that he traced these insti- '' tutions. almost universally the signs of a thriving and con- tented people ; " among whom " flagrant and repeated acts of injustice in any rank or station do not often escape with impunity." ^ Testimony to the same effect is given by Testimo- ^avis, Ellis, Meadows, Speer. Williams says that nies on the the Chinesc race has perhaps risen as high as is subject. possible in the two great objects of government, — security of life and property to the governed, and free- dom of action under restraints of law.^ Wuttke thinks " the humanity of the laws shames much of Christian legis- lation." * Neither of these writers is elsewhere disposed to be partial to Chinese character or institutions. Their accounts fully correspond with that of the Arab travellers in the ninth century. The entertaining Jesuit, Lecomte, who spent ten years in China nearly two centuries ago, is enthusiastic over the » See Brine. * Introd. to Pen. Code. » Letter quoted by Speer, p. 53J • Wuttke, II. 151. GOVERNMENT. 379 road-making energies of the officials, the good regulation of posts and couriers, the mode of collecting revenues, the small number of officials compared with France in that day, the careful registration of families and estates, and the good order of the people in spite of civil and foreign wars.^ If, notwithstanding the frequertcy of civil wars, dynastic overturns, popular commotions, barbarities arising compara- from panic, and cruelties by unjust officials, the 'i™Quai«J • r ,; , , r ofChinese testimony of travellers as to the general state of political society in China is still similar to the above, '■''""t- — though the last century has been rife in demoralizing influences from abroad, — there must be much inherent excellence in the established order of things. The sad pic ture of dynastic revolutions, imperial intrigues, and deaths by violence, which may be studied in Duhalde and De Mailla, Meadows and Martin, and even in the Trimetrical Classic of the Chinese schools, could after all be easily paralleled or even surpassed by a true account of almost any European monarchy during the last thousand years. Probably no nation has made more strenuous endeavors to restrain official abuses. There are imperfections inhe- rent in all devices for securing justice between men, and our boasted jury system is perhaps as far from immaculate as the Chinese mandarin court ; the point of moment is not the form of procedure, but the animus of the public opinion which it represents. Doubtless the best form for a right-willing community is the primitive and natural resort to chosen referees. In China, fear of the people, who keep well informed as to the laws, exerts perhaps as potent an influence for good as the very imperfect public sentiment which we bring to bear on our own courts of justice, and which makes the worth or the worthlessness of our special laws. ' Lecomte*s China^ pp. 304-311, 380 STRUCTURES. The Chinese have taken ample precaution against pun- Precau- ishing inHocent persons, especially in capital cases. a°^nst in- Three superior courts unite with the Board of Can- justice. sors to form a Court of Revision, and the cases are then sent up to the throne. The decisions of provincial courts of appeal are re-examined, and the Peking " Gazette " abounds in cases of resort to the censors to bar injustice. The statistics of capital punishment have recently shown an average of five hundred cases a year in an empire of three hundred millions, which is one in six hundred thou- sand, equivalent to two a year in the State of Massachu- setts ; a small ratio compared with those of many epochs in our own history. Under the great Emperors who have fairly executed the laws, population has enormously in- creased ; a fact which has its significance in relation to the adequacy of these laws for public security and comfort. This may be the place to ask how far the responsibilities Imperial theoretically laid on the Emperor, as the people's how°fiii- Father, have been practically met ? The foremost filled. of these, in the concrete logic of the Chinese, is to see that the people are supplied with food. This duty is the more emphasized since the population has become so vast, but it is natural enough to an agricultural race. The ^^ . location of public granaries, from the earliest times, is in no sense an expedient of despotism to keep the people quiet, as some have believed : ^ ease from self- supporting labor is the last thing a Chinese government would think of or desire for the people. It is only in times of distress, and by violation of the whole system, that " the provinces are drained so that Pe-king may be full." The granary belongs to the idea of irnperial care, as it has al- ways done, whether in Egypt, Rome, or Peru.^ In all times maintained as a vital part of imperial duty, granaries greatly increased in numbers during the native * Morache, p. 50. * See Prescott, I, 57. GOVERNMENT. 38I Ming dynasty. Provided on the frontiers for troops, and in the large cities against times of scarcity, their supplies are used for sacrifices, for the poor, for imperial wants, and the pay of officials ; and they make it possible to apportion taxation to the actual state of crops. As a balance-wheel for the mechanism of an agricultural State, they have vir- tues which China has never failed to appreciate. The Emperor of China is never suffered to forget that, as Frederic the Great said of himself, he is the charge of " procurator of the poor." Besides his govern- «he*poor. mental pawning-houses, poor-houses, homes for aged per- sons and vagrants, and the great drum of appeal for wronged parties at his palace gate, he has always been held to ren- der homage and help to labor by rites to the gods of the land, by symbolic assumption of the plough in the name of his people, by issuing the annual calendar for the farmer's guidance, and by providing for irrigation on a vast scale to facilitate the free labors of millions in a spirit far more democratic than that of those " Hamite " civilizations which covered the plains of Mesopotamia with canals constructed by slaves. Private petition is, theoretically at least, free ; and an entry in the Peking " Gazette " shows that the cen- sors have to this day no legal right to intercept such direct appeal when made under proper forms.^ The vices of Chinese administration^ proceed from per- versions inherent in the practical working of the Defect providential theory of government. The Emperor's ^"sing responsibility for the moral and physical well-being "'provi-* of his people is repeated in that of the mandarin ^="'"1" for the condition of the community under his spe- govern- cial charge, as well as for the conduct of his subor- '"^"'• dinates. The State is thus an embodiment of vicarious atonement, and justice an officialism in which every holder * September 15, 1874. ' Compare Peruvian Laws, Prescott, I. 42. See also Meadows, p. 170; Williams, I 378^381. 382 STRUCTURES. is responsible to the law for the sins of other men. The principle pervades Chinese legislation, and its presence in all ancient law codes and positive religions generally, ancient and modern, demands explanation. The basis jjf vicarious atonement as a dogma is partly in Idea of ^^^ instinctive ardor of sympathy which would re- vicarious move penalty from others by sharing or assuming it ; partly in observation, even at the early stages of social progress, of the law of moral solidarity, by which each "person does in fact become sharer in the common des- tiny, and really bears the burden, in one or another way, of all the vice and misery in the world ; and partly in con- necting this law with official function as an element of historical providence : thus making the supposed divinely appointed saviours and guardians of men suffer with the enemies of their work, even if they are not punished in their stead. But such official function, again, is the ready device for reconciling the vast amount of unpunished or unpunishable wrong-doing in society with the crude idea of justice, as a strict commercial squaring of accounts with the highest ownership. And this plainly sets aside the other, or sympathetic motive ; whereas nothing can be more vital than sympathy to all real and practical justice. When this unhappy divorce is widened by ascribing individual will to the highest appointing and retributive Power, the tracks are well laid for the extreme of injustice in the name and pursuit of justice. The official function of "saving men" becomes a form of responsibility which denies the very essence of morality, organizing a legal accountability in the good man, not to his own conscience, but to a want of con- science in all other men ; and as its corollary a right in each of these of shifting upon another the penalty for his own sins, personal or imputed. These vices, which most modern civilizations in great measure confine to the realm of their theological ideal, ap- GOVERNMENT. 383 plying a wholly different rule to their practical affairs, are organized by the Chinese, without theology, into positive secular laws and penalties ; thus, in this matter, enlisting freedom of will and strength of desire against that morality which in other respects is their manifest aim. It is a ter- rible violation of the rights of the person ; and though it is a natural deduction from their premises that, if virtue and vice in a ruler inevitably produce their like in his people, then the conduct of the latter is the direct consequence and sign of his character, yet it would seem scarcely credi- ble that even the Chinese should so confound abstract logic with concrete experience as to organize such a conclusion in the physical force of the State. Yet so it is, and the consequences are noteworthy. There are at first sight certain apparent advantages in punishing the mandarin for the undetected crimes • 1 • 1 • • • T • T • r 1 Its results. committed m his jurisdiction. It is ot course much easier than to investigate them. It leads to extreme efforts on his part to suppress offences. But since this is more difficult than to compound for them, the more common effect is concealment by collusion or for bribes, and the punishment of the innocent, either by outrage or by the singular custom of self-substitution for a price, — natural enough under a system of vicarious atonement. This cus- tom, aggravated by the poverty of large classes, is a start- ling sign of the demoralizing effect of the system on general manners. Moreover, the people, made responsible for each other, become afraid to prosecute justice. All this seems incredibly blind and barbarous. Yet it is doubtless only the imperfection of our sciences of Analogies heredity and psychological influence that prevents '" chns- us from seeing that we ourselves have organized in our legal processes the punishment of the innocent for the guilty on a prodigious scale ; holding poverty and ignorance responsible for crimes due mainly to the skilled tyrannies 384 STRUCTURES. and robberies of competitive trade, and seeking to extirpate vices like intemperance, propagated from generation to generation or enforced by the habits of society, by chas- tisement of those who are only their victims or their results. Minute mutual espionage is another degrading trick of The spy thcse pedagogic disciplines, fruitful of falsehood and system. corruption. De Courcy says that "to escape the tremendous power of this spy system a common under- standing seems to have been made to permit every form of abuse." Yet we must beware of reasoning too closely from the analogy of our own habits of self-government to the effects of what is here but a kind of monitorial system in an immense school. 'Tis a people who can, with simplicity of heart, accept the rule that a list of the merits and de- merits of all officers in the Empire shall be triennially submitted to the inspection of their great school-master, prepared from the mixed confessions and talebearings of these ushers themselves ! Espionage is in the East a recog- nized means of national consolidation. That huge heap of discordant atoms — the Persian Empire of Darius — was brought to unity in great part through official spies, called the " royal eyes and ears." And in Japan, where every one is liable for the good conduct of some class of persons, and every office is held by two mutual inspectors, the system passes for the " safeguard of the people," and travellers speak of it as " an important check on misconduct." ^ It is a tendency of civilization to subject the individual life to an ever-increasing inspection and control. Whatever be the power which assumes guardianship of the community, as soon as it gets well organized, it will, if not self-restrained by a respect for personality, of which only a small minority of men are capable, become an intrusive supervision, tend- ing to terrorism, and practically constituting a kind of public black-mail. Its democratic form is probably more » yapantse Fragments, p. 22 j Pumpelly, p. 117. GOVERNMENT. 385 invasive and exacting than any other can be. We may fancy we have escaped it, since we do not admit the right of government to supervise the whole conduct of life, and are far from respecting the spy in any form. But were we not lately dealing with the question of employing feed govern- ment spies in the revenue service as a necessary guard against our own officials } Is it probable that a Chinese mandarin was ever more keenly watched by subordinates for flaws in his conduct than the American official is tracked even by members of his own political party, who desire his removal (not to speak of " the outs "), and who may use Congressional influence for their purposes ? But, beyond these obvious forms of supervision, there is a deeper and more general kind. We, who reject bureaucratic govern- ment, find ourselves accepting the autocracy of public opinion, or the majority's right by divine sanction to deal with us as it will. This republican pedagogy has become as thoroughly organized in the power of the free press as the Chinese is in imperial espionage. And we are endur- ing the result in a supervision of private affairs by the correspondent and the interviewer, in the name of public rights, which recognizes no personal reserves, no life apart from inspection, no domestic sorrow nor sensitive wound sacred from the public eye. Excessive supervision will never 'purify the morals nor re- fine the sentiments of a people. Its very motive demoral- izes and counteracts its ostensible aim. In China, it does not appear to have protected the sea from pirates, nor the land from revolt ; and troops of wandering robbers have always infested the outlying provinces. It does not repress beggary, which is rampant in the cities, nor abolish the trickeries of trade. Probably on the whole it tends to in- crease these evils, though its influence is in large measure neutralized by the general character and habits of the peo- ple. Everywhere alike it illustrates the failure of organi- 25 386 STRUCTURES. zation to do the work of personal culture and of private aspirations to moral and intellectual freedom. Yet it is difficult, in the face of the vast data on which Chinese civilization rests, to believe, with Mr. Hart, that the whole civil and military administration is founded on a lie.^ No such age is to be found in Chinese history as that of Eng- land in the middle of the last century, when the statesmen were almost universally gross and immoral in speech and life, and the people ignorant, brutal, and uncared for to an extent now inconceivable. Of popular representation, it is sufficient to say that jobbers returned at that time all the borough members of Parliament, and only 160,000 out of eight millions were electors, while the king bought and ruled the members at his will.^ The multiplicity of functions filled by a single prefect or Mixed judge is another source of official malversation in Functions, chj^a. This too arises from the greater ease with which a central " providence " can be brought to bear on provincial administration through one functionary than through divided powers. With all their organizing faculty, the Chinese have not learned the importance of separating the various branches of administration. The district mag- istrate unites judicial, political, fiscal powers.^ De Mas says that when he visited Shang-hai there were only the mayor and two other mandarins, who yet employed two or three hundred subordinates.* The mandarin is supposed to be competent to all kinds of affairs ; so that, after all, the great educational principle of fitness for functions has in this respect serious detriment, and the mischievous results of false positions ensue. For this evil, also, our opposite form of government has its analogue, in the propensity of majorities to heap their » Quoted in Hfibner, pp. 642, 643, from his Memorandum to the Emperor. * See Gveen, English History^ pp. 717, 744. • Meadows, p. 79. « De Mas, II. 36. GOVERNMENT. 387 admirations ; to believe that a great leader in one sphere must needs be equally great in all ; to force now one de- partment, now another, to intrench on the independence of its coequals ; to disregard special fitness, for the sake of personal or party interests, and to expect every man to serve these in any capacity at a moment's notice. Political checks and balances are well provided in the division of our public departments ; but the fully organized public will overbears such political precautions, because it, and not political government, is the American " providence." Other vices of Chinese administration much dwelt on are the assumption of illegal powers by magistrates, other de- or by legates who are sometimes likened, though '^^"^' not very correctly, to Persian satraps ; ^ forgery of edicts, which cannot be frequent, the penalty being death ; ill pay of officials, resulting from bad times or public poverty, and offset by extortions ; imperial interference with the course of justice, since there is naturally some margin for caprice ; influence of cabals by eunuchs or others in the royal house- hold ; above all, the sale of offices, at last become a regular method of replenishing the State treasury in hard times. But this violation of the competitive system of examina- • tions is too unpopular to be suffered to go far, and is never without open protest from the censors and the regular graduates. Special examinations have been held for the purpose of weeding out incompetent officials who have purchased their posts ; and it is proposed to make these tests universal.^ The amount of petty torture in daily use in the police courts is probably considerable ; and the condition of pris- ons, if we may trust common report, could not well be worse than it is.^ Instances of arbitrary cruelty by jailers » Wlliams, I. 351. » Peking Gazette, June 21 and October 15, 1874. • Williams, I. pp. 409-416 ; Hiibner, p. 595. 388 STRUCTURES. and judges ^ are naturally not uncommon where a stick is the appropriate symbol of government, The arbitrary nat- ure of criminal administration where the same person is judge and jury is sufficiently obvious, even without the testimony of the whole body of Chinese romance and drama, so far as it has been brought before the Western public. Yet the keenness of these functionaries in the perception of truth and falsehood in witnesses is said to be remark- able.^ Notwithstanding these abuses and defects, even as in- tensified by the present epoch of transition and demorali- zation, there are, so far as we can see, no grounds for ex- pecting the dissolution of the Empire, or any profound revolution in its forms. The permanence of Chinese institutions is due to their growth out of the unimpeded genius of the people, the Per- They are not the product of conquest, like the abso- rfThe"*^' lute monarchy of Persia, or the Kshatriya kingdoms Chinese of India ; nor subject to continual change by the System, jjjflyx of forcigu races, like the Roman State. They are a form of the permanence of race qualities. So strong has been their centripetal force, so vital their hold on the patriarchal ideal in its concrete unity as State, that no • amount of local diversity, in the tribes and regions com- prised in this colossal country, has thus far been able to sunder the bond of nationality. It has withstood tremen- dous internal conflicts, and endured the yoke of foreign masters only to absorb them quietly into its unity. A pri- mal gravitation, stronger than any causes of repulsion, holds these unique tribes gathered about a common patriarch; through all changes of experience. Quite as powerful is the industrial spirit of their civilization. The aboriginal mountain tribes which it cannot conquer beat in vain against its calm, organic persistence, — rude fragmentary 1 Meadows, Notes, XIV. ; Lecomte, pp. 241-311. * Giles's Sketches, p. 85. GOVERNMENT. 389 impulses for ever flung back from the steadfast economies of social law. Again we are pointed to the mysterious secret of the history of the Mongolic Chinese race; its absorption in concrete fact, and failure to extricate the idea into a free- dom which would necessitate change. Government is an already fulfilled ideal ; its principles identified with an act- ual policy never to be dissolved. The earnestness of this faith constitutes it a religion; and its history casts no discredit on the philosophy that traces enduring things to the good and not the evil in hu- man nature. The motive forces to which it theoretically appeals are of a nature to insure the permanence of insti- tutions through all practical collisions which might seem to contradict their theoretic principles, and to make the inces- sant assertion of them almost absurd. It is the only key that will open this strangest of histories. I. Materialistic and servile as it may be imagined, Chi- nese civilization rests on the systematic preference . , . , r 4^, . . . Its Motive ot moral to physical forces. This is as true of its Forces. political method as of its hterary culture. Not only j j^^^^j are local rights left very much to their natural in- Suprem- fluence over the popular heart, while the sense of ^' justice is gratified by freedom of appeal to the central au- thorities, but government itself is constantly presented in the schools as resting on moral sanctions, the military arm subordinated to the civil, the military spirit disciplined, not to say systematically repressed, upon grounds of conscience. The duty of patient endurance of evils, and the virtue of laborious tasks in the interest of order and unity, are the substance of a national gospel, whose restraining influence on the passions is increased by a natural aversion to revolu- tion, or even to that private self-dependence which is so marked a trait of Teutonic character. The " Sacred In- 390 STRUCTURES. structions " urge upon all classes mutual interest, counsel, instruction, and aid — the spirit of civil unity and social har- mony — with a directness and force which render them, perhaps, the most remarkable document of royal political teaching in human history. The symbols to which the people bend are the gong, bell, and wooden axe ; not the Mongol wolf, nor the Teutonic bird of prey. The right of tyrannicide being at the same time recognized, the conservative values of order, harmony, and justice are the more strongly felt. 2. A second source of permanence is the industrial econ- II. Indus- oiiiy of the State. No land is permitted to lie idle. "T- No person is suffered to go about stirring up the unemployed to commit disorders. No one shall keep more land than he can keep productively. Large estates are thus prevented, and the national stability guaranteed by hosts of small land-owners, busy in creating their own bonds for the existing order. So long as the taxes are paid, the farmer is undisturbed. Such an act as the expulsion of whole counties of Scottish peasants from their holdings, that the acres might be converted to pasture, would not be tolerated in China, even were the conditions present to make it possible. One who improves unoccupied land ac- quires thereby a title in it.^ Permanent ownership is encour- aged by the right of emigrants on return to resume their old estates. Nor does thirst for foreign conquest agitate this busy hive of productive laborers. 3. The educational system which secures the State the III. Edu- service of its best and ablest men ; the union of cation. local with national interests effected by competitive examinations in every large city for honors proceeding from the capital ; the instruction thus given the people in polit- * Chin, Repos,, November, 1849. GOVERNMENT. 39 1 ical knowledge, and in the conditions of public security ; the direction of private ambition into this current rather than into habits of demagogical appeal or pushing for place ; the dissemination of laws, edicts, and exhortations, often carved in marble and posted in the streets, — are all forces of permanence and unity. 4. To these we may add respect for ties of family, and even homage paid them, under forms common to j^ ^^ the whole empire ; enforcement of early marriage ^pect for upon all, with its resulting advantages of settled "'°^^''''' aims and duties ; the sober routines, the well compre- hended relations, the ancestral works and ways ; and that love of association by families, neighborhoods, crafts, as well as for public duties, that marks the Chinaman both at home and abroad. 5. A number of peculiar expedients for maintaining con- trol over provincial administration, and preserving y. poii- unity in the national life, have become constituent °==- parts of the polity of the Empire. Old officers are called to Pe-king to serve as hostages for the good behavior of their sons in the provincial posts.^ Nepotism is not permitted, nor any tie, by marriage or property, with the place of one's official residence. The functionary of the Empire must separate himself even from his birthplace. The centre of official hope is thus always Pe-king: by that gate of imperial inspection each must pass to the place of his dignity. Official posts being held but for short periods, the frequency of transfer keeps atten- tion fixed on governmental interests rather than on local opportunities. That placemen are expected to confess their faults, and ' See Ciin. Rtpos., May, 1835, pp. 70, 71 j Lecomte, p. 278. 392 STRUCTURES. severely punished if detected in concealing them,^ and that every public personage from highest to lowest is under judgment of the Board of Censors may at least be sup- posed to exert a restraining influence on the spirit of inno- vation.2 The " Calendar," issued by the Astronomical Board, pre- scribing uniformity of times and seasons in all industrial or ritual matters for the whole nation, identifies these com- mon activities and aims with the regular movement of the State, as with pure laws of Nature.^ 6. Finally, the identity of religion with the concrete or- VI. Re- '^^^ 0^ things, in which all are alike interested and ligious urged to unity, goes far toward preventing theo- logical controversy, which is elsewhere a most fruit- ful source of political revolution. Nowhere is religion an outside interest, or an instituted oppression. There is no priestly caste nor class, no symbolic book, no enforced dogma ; the one universal cultus, that of ancestors, is the dictate, not of Church, nor of State, but of Nature. Such are some of the elements of perpetuity in institu- Conciu- tions which seem in the main to repeat themselves siona. through all dynastic and civil changes in the history of this persistent race ; not less wonderful, certainly, for their adhesiveness, though to thoroughly naturalistic paths, than the Jews for that intense self-concentration which has been mistaken by themselves and others for supernatural guidance. But, after all, these elements have not proved so effectual as might be expected in the direction of internal unity in this vast population. Its cohesion is not greater, by the testimony of history, thaln the powerful element of race. > Waiiams, I. 358, 368. ^ Duhalde, I. 71, 270. * See Marco Polo (notes to Yule's edit.), B. 11. xxxiii. GOVERNMENT. 393 in this case most powerful, would require. Numerous and destructive civil wars, and the very short epochs in her long history of four thousand years during which China has been united in a single empire, make us almost doubt whether the word unity can properly be used of this enor- mous number of beings aggregated by the force of race. Race is the invincible quality which impels every man and woman in China to seek organization with his like as the breath of his existence ; which teaches every one to revere patriarchal rule, as the ordainment of Heaven for the gov- ernment of men. The ideal of this race is the Family. For their vast schemes of universal empire, whether as sweep of Tartar conquest, or serene absolutism of Chinese polity, the logic is the same : As one Father for the Family, so one Ruler for the World. III. LANGUAGE. LANGUAGE. TT is one of the highest achievements of modern science ■*• to have rescued Language from the domain of Language theology, and traced its continuous evolution by Jl^Lnnor* the natural faculties of man. History, however, aninven- reminds us that this line of study vvas foreshad- natural owed by Epicurus and his school, and especially s"'^*"'- by Lucretius ; who wholly denied that speech was either a special invention or a divine communication, and indi- cated the steps of its gradual birth in such instinctive expressions as the cries of animals and the unconscious gestures of infants. After nearly two thgusand years of supernaturalism, we are brought back with new experi- ence to this old trust in natural laws. A prolonged depreciation of the human faculties had resulted in the last century in two extremes of theory on the subject. One of these was expressed in the phrase that speech was too amazing a product to have been wrought out by man's " unaided powers." The other pro- ceeded from that reaction to excessive self-confidence, which, especially in France, felt itself raised up for the reconstruction of the world by immediate human forces ; and this philosophy of patent machinery naturally enough referred language to the genius of some great inventor. Both the miracle and the mechanism are now set aside for good and sufi&cient reasons. On the one hand, that tran- sition of inarticulate tongue-gestures into distinct words, in which language begins, no more needs a special inven- 398 STRUCTURES. tor than the organic necessity of self-expression, out of which these primitive movements were born. And, on the other hand, the theory of a revelation in aid of the natural faculties breaks down on the fact that there can be no revelation except the manifestation of these faculties themselves, by whose stable processes alone we can know or act. Edkins, a zealous Orientalist, thinks that " the Biblical account of man's naming the animals proves the divine origin of language." But nomenclature belongs to the sphere of scientific research, not of theological dogma. The truth folded in that Hebrew legend is the natural sovereignty of man as mind. Human intelligence does, in fact, give names to all creatures and forms by its own necessary and sovereign laws of expression. And then science analyzes the process, thus poetically signified as a whole, into its natural stages. In the same way we may allow the theory that speech is an " invention," if we divest it of individual meaning ; since humanity everywhere reaches the use of its own powers by a continuous discovery, which is of the nature of creation. This theory, therefore, like the other, attains an imperfect sense of the spontaneity of spiritual forces as affirming themselves in natural law. The progress of knowledge consists in the degrees of perception that the highest of these forces are essential to the evolution of all beneath them, the whole to every part. Behind the various schemes of invention, inspiration, Its psycho revelation, evolution, thus pointing to a common bS^' truth, lies the fact that language is ultimately referable to the necessary unity of essence with manifestation, and the consequent law that every mental act is also a bodily movement. The highest law of the uni- verse works in the lowest stages of growth. What has been called an invention, or a revelation, is in fact given LANGUAGE. , 399 in the very existence of mind. Whatever may have been the nature of the first articulate sounds, they belong to the same organic and unconscious stages of expression with the still earlier language of gesture and feature. Vowels and consonants are not mere products of analysis. They must have been instinctively uttered in the infancy of man, long before they were combined into positive words. The " click languages " of Southern Africa represent a still more primitive expression. Through all such stages runs the one law that every bodily motion is the reverse side of a mental act. The inscrutable cosmic law of mind is essen- tial to the growth of every germ of speech. The capability of such primitive atoms of expression for development into conscious methods of commu- Q^^ture nicating ideas is seen in the great ingenuity of and feature deaf-mutes in holding intercourse by means of ^''^*^*' gestures before being taught to converse by strict system ; and in the preponderance of sign language in the eloquence of savage tribes. Such germs of speecS whether in gest- ure, facial change, emphasis, or tone, are retained through the whole course of human progress, and form important elements in the highest kinds of art. Language, however, in its technical sense, begins in the use of sounds for the more or less conscious pur- Mystery of pose of being understood. It is an ideal attrac- * beginning. tion. It involves social relations ; it is a form of that profound desire of communion which animates all human growth. Here again we are thrown back on a remoteness so far beyond recall, that Rousseau might well confess himself unable to decide whether a social order already formed was more necessary for the construction of lan- guage, than was a language already discovered for the construction of society. Such the eternal irony that defeats our science in every search into the mystery of origin. But while we should gain nothing by resorting 400 STRUCTURES. to a miraculous beginning,- we should thereby make all science vain. The phantasmal character of speech in these nebulous Continuity ^^^^S^s is in Striking contrast with the immense ofevoiu- periods of time which they undoubtedly mvolve. It is no more practicable to fix the moment when man became aware of using words for the purpose of being' understood, than to find the same moment in the conscious- ness of a child. Yet it is certain that the organs of speech- are long unconsciously directed towards that result. . Renan has emphasized the fact that these processes differ with different races. ^ But they are always prepara- tory to that epoch in the growth of every race when it con- ceives its own language as a whole, and^ deliberately sets about adapting it to its moral purposes : the birth-time at once of nationality and literature. And between the infancy of words and this entrance on their higher func- tion of carrying arts, sciences, and faiths, evolution is con- tinuous ; and in certain great respects the same for all races, however different the details, or numerous the points of growth. Systems have been devised to show that an organic relation exists between each of the simplest pho- Tlieories . . , r r ■ of organic nctic clements and a special form of emotion, or relations, class of conccptions.^ But the beginnings of lan- guage could hardly have dealt in states of mind so simple and clear as this correspondence requires. More probably they expressed a confused mingling of emotions which no analysis of ours can possibly unravel. 1 This is denied in Goldziher's Hebrew Mythology^ ch. i. (1877), from the stand-point of cosmical mythology ; but the argument appears quite iusuiBcient to disprove special psyehp- logical distinctions. 2 See Hegel's Theory of the Emotional Meaning of the Vowel Sounds, and Grimm's Scale of Sound and Color Correspondences, given in Bentew's AperQU de la Science Comfar. ies< Langites (1872), pp. 104, 105. Also the curious speculations in the Preface to Richardson's English Dictionary. LANGUAGE. 4OI For similar reasons I hesitate to accept the current opin- ion that the earliest form of words is the mono- primitive syllabic. Primitive speech must have been mainly '''"^"^se 'f ^ •' not mono- emotional or imitative. There seems to be no syiiaWc, good reason for excluding polysyllabic forms from ^^^^' the earliest interjections ; and it is impossible that sounds. imitiitions of animals should be other than for the most part polysyllabic. In every case, the length of the word would depend on the nature of the sound to be imitated, or the feeling to be expressed. African languages contain many imitative words in seven syllables.^ Many of the agglutinated sentences of the Red Race represent an ear- lier stage of language than the monosyllabic. The simplest words may have resulted from analysis, or they may be the scattered d6bris of complex wholes. In a masterly essay on the Origin of Language, Bleek has developed the state- ment that an interjection was the product of an entire state of mind ; each of these primitive words being a complex of what may be called grammatical germs, which after- wards, by analysis, appear as elements of the sentence, or " parts of speech." It is certainly natural that the mind should at first see things as wholes, and itself act as a whole ; that verb, noun, qualifying particles, subject and object, should all be comniingled in each effort at expres- sion. The rude instinct does not act as a body of distinct relations, but in instantaneous flashes of feehngs, habits, perceptions, which the later reason cannot analyze. How natural that it should agglutinate the syllables that spring to birth out of the mysterious correspondence which unites the organs of speech with the movements of mind ! Even the more abstract mental processes are involved in this rudimentary period of language : for the crud- ^ ^^ est gestures and signs are evidently interpreted by hensivness the hearers as expressive of divers classes of emo- ° ' ^°"°*' • Eleek, Origin of Language- 26 402 STRUCTURES. tions. The contents of such facial changes as physiog- nomical science is now tracing in the more advanced races indicate that an emotion, simple as it may seem, sways every feature to a special language, and combines these several syllables of expression in its single impulse. And why should not the language of the vocal organs have been equally complex with that of the facial ? Some anal- ogous actions must have produced that agglutinative form of words which opens the history of language in the proper sense of the word. It has been fully shown by Tylor that " the two great methods of stating verbal relations — namely, by metaphor and by S)Titax — belong to the infancy of expression, and are as much at home in the language of savages as in that of philosophers." ^ Thus the definition of languages as the " living product of the whole inward man " ^ is true even of the earliest, whose complex units of speech contain in germ all the generic forces that are to be unfolded in the future struct- ures of grammatical science.^ The derivation of languages from the simplest verbal forms, or "roots," so general in modern linguis- " Roots" . . ^ notthebe- tics, IS therefore likely to mislead us. "Roots" ginning of ^^^ hardly have been the first forms of speech, language, ... but a which properly begins in such combinations as are pro net. necessary for the communication of feeling. It is extremely doubtful if any of the root syllables to which we reduce a language belonged to the primitive stock of actual words. They are either products of analysis, reached by stripping off prefixes and suffixes, and by other systematic methods of reducing words to an ideal nucleus which was probably never in use by itself ; or else they result from * Prtmitzve Culture. * Schlegel. ' This must hold equally of the ethical element. Yet Goldziher {Heir. Mytkol.) attempt! to trace, not only distinct wr,rds, but even mythology as a whole, to an epoch in which he affirms this element to have been as yet non-existent. LANGUAGE. 4O3 the fusion of earlier polysyllabic forms (like the Saxon lord from hlaford, or the English wofit from will not). It is probable that the verbal deliquescence which we observe in later stages of inflected languages, dissolving out the pronouns and particles, tense and mood signs, that are imbedded in their grammatical forms, was equally active in melting down the combinations that made up the primi- tive words. Even such positively agglutinative structures as the Tartar and North American dialects mark distinc- tions between the syllables by emphasis, gesture, and tone, which are properly the beginning of disintegration. On the other hand, inflection also is but a finer and closer kind of agglutination, peculiar to certain race-qualities, and belongs probably to a much earlier stage than we are wont to suppose : nor is it necessarily preceded by a mono- syllabic formation. Thus the disintegrative and construc- tive processes, so readily recognized in later stages of linguistic growth, probably go on side by side in very early ones. Man, the centre of polarities, at once destroyer and builder, is true to his functions even in these infantile motions of his thought. Mind and body are but sides of one and the same incessant interchange of waste and repair; the dual movement whence harmony issues, the Yin and Yang of progress. Such processes of separation and fusion, going on to- gether, would obviously result in shortening words Forma- from polysyllabic concretions into simple con- u™^"^,,^ densed forms, with breathing spaces, as it were, separation between them. It is probably in this way that *" "^'°"" many of the monosyllables were produced which we have agreed to call roots. Is there sufficient ground for dividing languages into a monosyllabic, an agglutinative, and an inflected Doubts as stage > Do even the Aryan tongues afford the evi- 'j°*3?,"'^ dences of such a process .'' Humboldt has indeed languages. 404 STRUCTURES. pointed out certain Australian dialects as originally monosyllabic ; and, not content with stating that a great many African tongues are so, adduces the Shemitic to show that such simplest roots usually express the most primitive ideas and relations.^ But these data, so far as they are real, may be explained by the emphasis naturally given to such relations, which would tend to keep these terms apart from others, or more rapidly to concentrate their elements by fusion. Languages, supposed to represent the monosyllabic stage, are either found fully capable of combining syllables of sound; or their extreme simplicity proves to be a secondary result, instead of an original quality ; or else their monosyllabism, however stiff, is far from belonging to a low stage of linguistic progress. In fact, the steps by which speech shall be evolved Evolution in any people are in many important respects a a mattw qucstion of racc. A slow and difficult utterance, ofrace. coufined to articulations incapable of organic rela- tion and devoid of grammar, would prove a race to be en- dowed only with crude instincts but little above the brute. But such incapacity is hardly to be found in any language ; and the Chinese, which has been supposed to approach it most nearly, is, as we shall see, altogether out of the category. The derivation of speech from imitative processes alone Onoma^ has rcccntly been argued ingeniously by Mr. F. W. thlTo"urc°e F^^^rar. Onomatopoeia is offered, in accordance ofwords. with Aristotle's dictum that " names are imita- tions," as the source of all those "sensible images" by which thoughts are named. Certain practical objections to the theory are admitted in his argument, and especially the impossibility of ascertaining what words are originallyi imitative and what are not ; the same animal cry or othet * See Benlcew, Aper^Uf &c, pp. 16, 17. LANGUAGE. 40$ sound being, as we constantly see, expressed by very dif- ferent vocables for different minds. But a further difficulty lies in the fact that onomatopoeia is so often the result of a conscious word-building, which belongs to the latest instead of the earliest phenomena of language. It is a curious commentary on the theory bafore us, that words of imitative origin are actually less frequent in languages admitted to be very old than in others that are young, living, and productive. It abounds in German, and is scarcely discernible in Chinese. The lively Greeks used it most in ancient times, the older Shemites least. Ben- loew, after an extended comparison of tongues in this re- spect, even concludes that this feature is a pure result of civilization. For my own mind no theory can possibly be adequate which so imperfectly recognizes the nature and resources of spontaneity in the formation of words, as to refer them wholly to a mimetic tendency. But granting a fair amount of influence to this tendency in primitive speech, we find in it no evidence of monosyllabic origins ; the sounds of animals and natural phenomena being for the most part unsuited for human imitation in such simple ways.^ As a part of the natural effort to express thoughts and things by suggestive representations or images, so to speak, addressed to the ear, while words are as yet lacking, the mimetic tendency corresponds to picture-writing for the eye, and testifies to the primitive powers of imagination and creative art. Such peculiarities of the Chinese language as its rigid monosyllabism, admitting only a vowel preceded by supposed a consonant, and sometimes followed by a nasali- ino-^eanic ' -^ nature of zation ; ^ the absence of distinctions of number, gen- the cu- der, or mood in the structure of the words, and "^^'• ' The very large ground occupied by this source of words is shown in the Introductory ay to Wedgewood's Diet, of Engl. Etymology, • The only exception is singularly enough the word «»/ (" two," and " ear "^ 406 STRUCTURES. their grammatical homogeneousness and convertibility, hint- ing of the lowest forms of organic life, — have led to a general belief that it represents a primitive stage in the evolution of speech.^ Even Renan, who doubts the prece- dence of monosyllabism to agglutination, declares that the Chinese absolutely iacks a grammar, and that the only thing it has in common with Sanscrit, that perfection of inflected speech, is the end to be attained. The compara- tive fewness of words,^ supplemented by varieties of tone, and the great number of meanings for which many of them are obliged to do duty, have been regarded as so many dis- tinct proofs that we have here a language crystallized in its first stages, and transmitted unchanged. " The self- isolating quality of its sounds resists all attempts at com- bination, derivation, formal distinction of the parts of the sentence, or of the signs of grammatical relations,"^ Edkins believes that an original monosyllabic language, common to all mankind, preceded the " dispersion of tongues," and that the Chinese migration retained these older forms. That, even apart from Biblical deductions, the above It is not theory of the Chinese language will be confirmed ThTroIts ^y modern science, can by no means be regarded Bhowthis. as certain. Its very monosyllabism has been strongly disputed. Remusat denied it, and Meadows* asserts that nearly the whole spoken language consists of compound words. Each element of the composition is, it is true, a pure word ; but this aptness for combination at least allows the supposition that the elements themselves may have been fused from more complex forms. The lan- guage abounds in verbal coalescences, and in many the * Miiller, Orig. of Lang.^ p. 287. = Four hundred and fifty in the Mandarin (orgeneral) dialect, though in special proTindal »nes old endings and guasi inflections increase the number to nine hundred. (De Rosny GraTttTHar, p. 45.) * Schott, Ckinesische Spra£hlehre^ p. 9. * Notes ojt the Governmejtt and People of China (1847), P- i^J. LANGUAGE. 4O7 original words are not easily distinguished.^ Bazin, the pupil of Julian, at one time maintained that literary Chinese was the contraction of a polysyllabic vulgar tongue. What- ever estimate be put on these opinions, there are many reasons which make it difficult to believe that the actual root-sounds represent an early epoch of speech. There is nothing primitive about them.^ With few exceptions they neither suggest imitation of natural sounds nor typical relations of the human organs to special forms of natural feeling.3 It is perhaps true that it would require a more subtle physiology than we now possess to trace such rela- tions in Chinese words. But, on the other hand, instead of proving that to every elementary sound a special meaning is prescribed by organic law, the facts of language seem almost to indicate that every sound may become the sym- bol of every idea. " Why should the Chinese express greatness by the syllable ia, the Aryan, by ma, the Semite by £;a ? " ^ To all appearance, certainly, the Chinese roots are as artificial as can well be conceived, and their simple and regular structure strongly suggests elaboration for purposes of compact and terse expression.^ Such expres- sion is a marked trait of the national mind, and its influ- ence is everywhere visible in the history of the language as a whole. There is no reason why words should not share the impulse. Their uniformity is the strongest evidence that they are a product of national art. So strik- ingly do the supposed " roots " differ from the earliest voca- bles of other races, that they form a positive instance of that specialism in races, which is likely to be substituted for 1 Bastian, Peking^ p. 54. ^ Edkins ascribes the defect of consonantal endings to the falling o£E of certain final mutes during the last twelve hundred years in the North and West of China, which he finds still extant in Kwan-tung and Fo-kien, and in the old national poetry, ^Iniernat- Congr. of Oriental ists ; London, 1S74.) ' St. Denys is, I think, peculiar in his views ol the abundance of imitative forms. (FalHu ies Tang, p. 95.) ^ See Benlaw, p. rr8. ' The English language illustrates this tendency to simplify and shorten words. 408 STRUCTURES. the application of a single formula of evolution to all va- rieties of human speech. That the demands of so vast a civilization should have produced so scanty a vocabulary needs some other explanation than a supposed entire de- pendence on its primitive resources alone. -^ Quite as far as the vocables of the Chinese from an inorganic condition, are its grammatical forms, mar not Whether we accept or reject the prediction of Mr. inorganic. i^^y2 ^-j^at it will vcry soon be matter of surprise that any one should ever have doubted the identity of its structure with that of other tongues ; it is certain that in many of its apparent peculiarities this language bears witness to the universality of those logical processes to which we are wont to refer the laws of grammatical sci- ence. The use of one word for a great variety of mean- ings is common in the Sanscrit and Egyptian, and well known to all modern languages. Syntactical forms are Graramat- ^^^ Wanting to the Chinese, being represented by Jcai ex- the position of words in the sentence, and the tones ^ '™ ' of the voice. Even if it might seem that delicate shades of feeling and thought were not as expressible by such means as by inflection in other languages, we must remember that the national mind has here created an instrument suited to its own genius, and that it has per- haps left all the more room for the action of such powers as inference and association in interpreting its rigid words. But this' is by no means the whole. These expedients of position and tone are well known to linguistic types of a high order. The English readily marks in these ways the * Legge says that the language has so changed since the age of the Tcheou that the Shu-king rhymes cannot now be found. Edkins has shown numerous "letter changes" IQ the pronunciation of the roots, both in ancient and modern times. The actual diversity ol dialects in China indicates that the ingenuity of the people expends itself on these transform* tions rather than on inventing new words. * Chinese as they Are^ ch. xvii. LANGUAGE. 409 different uses of the same word for noun and verb : as in pronouncing the phrase, with riason do we reason thus ; or for noun and adverb thus, he does will who opens a well ; or for infinitive, imperative, and indicative, as in learn how to ledrn, by resolving that you will led,rn. The English also indicates by position whether a noun is subject or object in a sentence. It is a law familiar to grammarians that the inflectional stage of language is transient, and develops into another in which the structure of a sentence depends no longer on the mere forms of words, but on the logical relations of the ideas which they represent. Thus, in the later English, inflection has been reduced to a minimum : a word is in- variable, its special meaning and force being shown by its position, according to the natural syntax of the idea of which it forms a part. This structure, which' so closely resembles the Chinese, is in modern languages the sign of advanced intellectual growth ; and, as a result of the adap- tation of speech to the growing demands of civilization, it enables us to comprehend how large a scope of expression may be secured by the uninflected syllables of that appar- ently inorganic tongue. We may easily exaggerate the importance of inflection in the expression of the relations of thought. Some agglutinative languages, like the Qui- chua, are said to accomplish this by means of particles simply added to words, with more precision and compact- ness than the inflected European.^ Even the gesture-lan- guage of deaf-mutes, which has no " grammar," conveys ideas of relation with surprising ease. Speech is every- where but the instrument of a force beyond itself, and all grammatical forms hasten, as if gifted with insight, to subserve the spiritual demands for communion and growth, of which they are the product. The Chinese has special auxiliary words that mark its * Markham's Grammar, 4IO STRUCTURES. tenses. It distinguishes cases by prepositions, has a full supply of pronouns, three ways of denoting numerals, and a special sign for the plural, as well as the device of doub- ling words for the same purpose.^ For some of these ob- jects it has transformed certain verbs and nouns into par- ticles or qualifying signs, thenceforth called "empty" words, in distinction from these which retain their inde- pendent force, and are hence called " full." ^ It knows how to check the ambiguities arising from mul- Howam- tifold meanings of the same word. Many terms jguuies jj^yg distinctive force ; particles that always give a checked, negative, or a possessive, or a verbal sense to the word they qualify, — particles transitive or copulative. Even the pauses and end of a sentence are marked by words or sounds, analogous to our rising and falling accents. The special sense in which a word is to be understood is further indicated by combining a general term with the special one whose meaning is to be defined ; by bringing together synonyma to direct the mind to their common meaning, or by symbolic compounds, neither of which alone could express the idea, — as " head-eye " (overseer), "forest- king " (tiger). All these ways are familiar to English use. Determinatives are added to specify classes. Numbers are affixed to designate wholes; as "the four seas;" " the hundred grains ; " " the hundred families," or whole nation. These are all products of grammatical elaboration, and show how very far the language is from primitive and inorganic. Among such products we may count the expedient of Uses of the determinative tones, by which the four hundred "tones." ^j^jj fifty monosyllables are multiplied threefold, and materials afforded for combination to the extent of supply- ing with sounds the fifty thousand signs in the Kang-hi ' See Julien's Syntaxe Nouv. de la Langwt Chin. (1869) ; Summers's Ritdiments of On \.kin, Lang. (London, 1864). •HovecIacque,Za LinguUtiqut (1876). LANGUAGE. 4II Lexicon. This remarkable expedient stands almost alone among linguistic constructions, if we regard the nature of the attempt, or the scale on which it is applied. Such an immense and varied use of intonations which in other races are expressive of emotions, purely for phonetic needs, be- longs, of course, to China alone. It is difficult to accept any exact period for its beginning.^ We should say of the Chinese tone-language that neither Shemitic alphabet nor Aryan inflection is a more positive mark of continued culture than this artificial interweaving of the principle of separating tone from feeling with the whole speech of a people. Observe how entirely it is in accordance with the national genius for minute detail in all kinds of construc- tion. There are eight or nine of these tones in the Southern dialects, and five in the Mandarin. A natural expedient of monosyllabism, and generally found connected with it, tones are here worked out in so systematic a form as scarcely to suggest such simple relations ; and the result is a monument at once of national receptivity and art. Finally, the hearer supplies defects of grammatical con- struction by inference and association, based on a ... Divination common stock of traditions and customs. This is of mean- made necessary by an elliptical style deficient in "'^' conjunctive particles, which are the articulation of the body of speech. Thus linguistic divination has been elaborated to an extent which shows what a magnetic force may be reached by mutual understanding in a great and ancient people. Scholars like Julien admit the absolute necessity of minute acquaintance with national habits and history to enable them to interpret a sign-language which does but hint its meaning. There can be no evidence of maturity in a language more striking than the instinctive supply of its unexpressed logical connections, by long practice, out ^ The Chinese ascribe its introduction to Buddhist monks in the time of the Tsi and Leang dynasties (Schott, p. 49) ; but we cannot suppose it to have been imposed at a given pei^od fey Invention, and without root in the previous habits of the people. 412 STRUCTURES. of the associations of the popular mind. Humholdt has ingeniously suggested that the very meagreness of the grammar increases the keenness of instinct in recognizing these connections ; while a more elaborate syntax may tend to mystify or deaden such a sense.^ After all these expedients, there remains a large inor- inoiganic ganic element in the stiff isolation of Chinese words, elements, jt is in coutrast with the social fusibility of the race, and their defective individuality ; but it corresponds with the measured uniformity of their mental action, and the habit of seeing things in detail more than in wholes. It illustrates the tendency of mechanical routine to atomize the mind, substituting the mere succession or repetition of forms for the perception of relations. . The ways in which this defect is counteracted being so purely matters of na- tional feeling and education, our acquaintance with the literature must be of slow and difHcult growth. We have already noticed the imperfection of the Chinese Lack of sense oi sound. On that mystic world, intermediate interest in between thought and concrete form, the Hindu sound. pauses, allured by its far reaches and hints of the infinite. Notwithstanding his dislike of analysis, he has pressed to its ultimate elements and constructed his won- derful alphabetic speech. But the Chinese skips such spheres in his haste for the written sign. His interest in sound is confined to its moral uses on the one hand, and its concrete materials on the other. No people has so earnestly preached the educational uses of music, nor sought so indefatigably to make effective actual music. The number of instruments mentioned in their old books is astonishing.^ In this ethical direction is their ideal at- traction. Yet the study of the art and science itself is in its rudiments. 1 See also Bastian's Peking, p. 532. » Dennys's lecture in Journ. o/N. Ch. Br. of R. A. S., No. viii. LANGUAGE. 413 Sound has fared in its literary precisely as in its musical relations. The instrument, whether as written Causes the sign or musical invention, has received all atten- ^0^^°'^* tion ; while sound itself has never been resolved bet. into its elements, either as words or as tones. Vocal analy- sis has never reached an alphabet ; ^ though the words can hardly be called syllables in our sense, since they are not combinations of primary sounds. In what way they are associated with the meanings they bear, we as yet have little or no knowledge. The origination of words is far more obscure than that of written signs. Such primitive relations have been mainly effaced in the present language of the Chinese.^ As in their speech the imitation of natural tones is no longer to be recognized, so in their writing the rude Great mui- picture of the object has mainly vanished through of^^tten successive changes of form. Yet the meaning of signs com- these " ideographs " remains fixed ; they stand not ^wnesTtf for mere sounds, though so extensively employed w""^*^- as phonetics, but for realities also ; and every new idea re- quires a new combination of strokes, or compound figure, as it would require a new alphabetic compound with us. While therefore every old type holds its identity, subject only to such changes as art or convenience may dictate, great numbers have been added from time to time.^ This is the secret of their immense quantity as compared with the deficiency of words. It is harder for a Chinese to make new words than to paint new characters, partly because of his special propensity to hand-work, partly because the play of his organs of speech is limited more narrowly than those of most other races, and partly because the rigidity of the signs began at an early period to check that fusion ' The Buddhist alphabet for transcribing Sanscrit words is a special instrument for thai purpose, and is not in general use. (De Rosny, Chinese Grammar, p. 45.) ' Edkins has made interesting researches in this direction. See his Iniroductum. • Williams's greit Dictionary (1874) contains 12,000 characters. 414 STRUCTURES. and combination of the sounds they represented, by which alone the vocabulary could have been enlarged. To devise a new picture was a simple matter ; but the art of forming new monosyllables was a lost one. Therefore, with the exception of a certain amount of the fusion above men tioned, he takes merely the old stock of words to express the new conceptions. The word chi is employed for 212 signs, chingior 113, and fou for 138. This defect of syl- lables is wonderfully compensated, as we shall hereafter see, by the extended uses of a written language of endless resource. Before indicating these uses, I proceed to trace, as far as The Writ- I may, the universal laws and processes to which ten Signs, ^jjg Chinese graphic system invites our attention. The wonderful art of communicating thought by written Origin of signs has three stages, — the ideograph, the rebus, S^'eari"' ^^ alphabet. This process is a pressure of ma- stagesof terials from below, through attractions to an ideal Theideo- above. It begins in the instinctive use of the graph. nearest means for bringing thoughts to the eye. The savage not only cuts figures on bark to inform his tribe of his doings ; he tattoos himself with images of his totems, from the mere love of reproducing that for other eyes of which his own mind is full. On the Siberian rocks are found rudely-cut pictures of men, animals, arrows, huts, with other sprawling signs, some of which appear like a looped and cursive writing, though of no known class, while others, equally unrelated, are curiously enough mixed with Arabic numerals and Roman letters.^ This last fact ren- ders their antiquity very suspicious. More significant are the rude pictures of expeditions or exploits painted on buffalo robes by the North American tribes, which are reai 1 See De Rosny, Archives Palaegraphigjies, I. 143. LANGUAGE. 415 forms of inventive symbolism, and point to an instinct of interpretation akin to the fine scent and keen logic of the Indian senses.^ These are the hieroglyphics of the wild ; some of them as well done as the Egyptian, and far better than the old Chinese picture-signs. To these goes the complex experience of the nomad in definite wholes, fa- miliar to his fellows.^ These are his simple science and his intuitive poetry : their metaphoric meaning is his natural history, raised into the language of feeling and imagination, and the morality of fable. He has done more than picture objects : this is dramatic combination. To find mere copy- ing without conscious symbolism, we must, perhaps, go back to the " Stone Epoch," in which quite respectable figures of animals are found, though wanting afterwards in the " Bronze." ^ It is at least a poetic, if not positively historic, theory of the origin of the Gaelic alphabet, the let- ters of which were named from plants or trees, that these characters represented symbolical knots and ties formed from branching twigs, by which knowledge was conveyed, and which had been the mystic hieroglyph of the druid and the bard.* Many have questioned the opinion of Oppert, that all the cuneiform signs (as well as the Egyptian and Chinese) are transformed ideograms, on the ground that this would leave no room for the element of arbitrary in- vention ; but there is qniite evidence enough to prove that, as a whole, ideographic evolution is the main factor in the written languages of mankind. The quipus, or knotted cords, used in primitive China, and at a more advanced stage in Peru, are an appeal to * In the Indian petition to the President of the United States in 1849, the unity of pur- pose of the seven chiefs is expressed by lines passing from one to the others, and their per- sons by the animals from which their names were derived (Schoolcraft). Something similar is said to have been preserved in Egyptian inscriptions. ' Rude tribes of Central Africa communicate in tlus way. I>e Rosny, Ecritures Figuro' Uves, &c. (1870) p. 38. 8 Lubbock, Prim. Cond. o/Maft, pp. 28-30 (Am. ed.), * Logan, Scottish Gael, 4l6 STRUCTURES. colors for picturing thought ; of all methods of expressing grammatical relations the most imperfect, but curiously combining with' its limitations a species of arbitrary selec- tion which allies it even with the phonetic stage of written speech. We note in these earlier expedients of language the large function and discipline required of the memory, as well as of the imagination. The transition from imitative to phonetic signs is a very Transition great and rapid step : since it opens the use of the ics^'ThT ^^S"^ ^" "^^ P"'^^ service of sound ; that is, as Rebus. written speech in the proper sense; thus proving that the whole communicable life of man can be represented to the eye. This step, however continuous as respects the use of materials, is animated by a force of tendency for which no materials can account. It involves aspira- tions to a fresh ideal, and it is taken very early. In the New World, as in Egypt, it begins in the use of images of things to represent syllabic portions of personal names, for which of course no direct imitative signs were possible. Mexican picture-writing abounds in this element : figures of animals, flowers, stones, plumes, are placed beside a human head, their names yielding the syllabic sounds re- quired to designate the person intended.^ They are true rebuses ; picture-signs for sound, as ideographs are picture- signs of thoughts. Ruder than the rudest playing cards, and not unlike them, they reach the widest scope of poly- syllabism and the largest mnemonic uses. This step is perhaps involved in the growth of individu- ality to a demand for those means of personal designation which mere object-writing cannot supply. Sound, the har- binger of fame, requires its own special servitors. It would be worth inquiry, whether, as-in Mexico and Egypt, so also in China, where individuality is so feeble, the pho- netic sign began in these personal requirements. It began * See De Rosny and Kingsborough. LANGUAGE. 417 at all events very early to be associated with the ideograph- ic, as determinative of its special sound in the given case.^ All the great ideographic systems, when they first ap- pear in history, already contain a mixture of the combina- two kinds of picture-writing. To the Egyptian, '^of Japanese, and Chinese, we must now add the tkhtil older (Anarian) cuneiform characters of Western ^"'^-^'s^- Asia,^ as a wonderfully transformed system of picture- signs, with phonetic adaptations. It reached the same stage with the Chinese, having a syllabary, but not an alphabet; an interesting fact when connected with the possible origin of this system also in the Mongoloid, some- times called "Turanian," races.^ The proper name for these transitional systems would seem to be ideo-phonetic. What monuments of man's patient endeavor to combine and develop, as well as interpret, the forms of Nature for the clothing of his inner life ! The third grand step in written language, from pho- netic signs to alphabetic, consists in reducing the Transition great variety of such images to a select few, each '° '"'p''^''^'' appropriated to a special elementary sound. All upward movement involves ideal attractions. Man has listened to the instrument of his thought till he has caught its ulti- mate component parts, and must com.bine them freely for himself. His selection of signs, corresponds with the an- alytic nature of the process by which those ultimate ele- ments have been reached ; its principle being to use a sign 1 Champollion imagined that tlie " whole phonetic system of the East " was the invention of " some ingenious person, who thereby changed the face of the world and determined the destiny of mankind " t Probably the real relation to persons involved in phonetic signs was of a very different nature. 2 Wrongly called "arrow-head," the wedge-shapes of which they are composed being simply the convenient stamp of the graver's tool. In the older rudimentary forms this shape does not appear. (M^nant, JEpigr. Assyr. p. 48.) Maspero Iflht. Anc. de VOritnt, 1875) gives an interesting description of this writing. » See Lenormant, Anc. Hist, of the East, I. 433 5 M^nant ; De Rosny, Ecrit. Fig. The question of a "Turanian " origin is still open, and is being discussed with much warmth. See also Lenormant, Langue Print, de la Chaldke (1875). 27 41 8 STEUCTURES. of whose existing name the sound to be represented forms simply the initial or the end.^ This " acrological " process, by which the ideogram loses all of its correspondent sound but the opening or the close, has an intermediate stage before reaching the pure alphabet. Thus the Japanese, Mexicans, Assyrians, stripped it of its termination only, leaving the opening consonant and vowel, and forming syllabaries mixed with alphabetic sounds ; while the Egyp- tian and Shemitic languages struck away all but the simple initial — what we should call the letter sound — and formed alphabets proper.^ Yet all alphabets have not been the saDscrit result of this natural evolution. To the Sanscrit, ™.^.^''f' which is the product of an educated class, it has mitic al- ^ phabets. no application. Of the Shemitic, too, it has been strongly denied, yet by no means with equal force. Whether those mysterious Phoenician signs, mothers of the Hebrew and of so many other alphabets of the civil- ized world, are derived, as the most competent scholars now assert,^ from the Egyptian hieratic (or simplified pict- ure-signs), or were invented by some one or in some way not now known,* they were at least acrologically " baptized." They have received the initial sounds of the names by which they are known ; and these names represented ob- jects, of which the sign was either the altered image or the fancied resemblance.^ Renan goes further, and thinks that " the fact of the forms of these letters representing what their names signify is sign of a proceeding analogous to that of the hieroglyphic writings.^ ^ This is true also of the Egyptian, the Persian, and even the Buddhist-Chinese fortran- scribing Sansciit sounds. * See Congris Iniernat. cPOrienial. (1S73), II. 106-115; also, De Rosny, Ecrit Figur, ' See Lenorraant, Anc. Hist, of the Eastf II. 208 ; Maspero, p. 600; De Roug^, Acadt Fratif. 1874 ; Ebers, Egypten and die Biicher Moses, pp. 146-151 ; Ewald, Gesch. d. VtVtt Israel, I. 78. ♦ Wuttke, Zeiischr. der D. M. G., 1857. " Gesenius, Hehrew Grammar ; Furst's Hebrew Lexicon^ • Hist, des Langues Simitiques, \. p.112. LANGUAGE. 4I9 Of course the number of names suited for acrological use renders the choice somewhat arbitrary. It is Continuous here that writing begins to be conventional rather ^em T than organic, and so falls into the position of a ^''^s- ready servant to thought, instead of a controlling mould for it. The estimate of the pictures as natural copies of things must have become measurably lost before the purely conventional signs we call alphabets got constructed arbi- trarily for linguistic purposes, without regard to imitation. Here the way opens for inventors, and alphabets have in fact been constructed for semi-civilized tribes by ingenious men.i But this has usually been for a specific purpose. The formation of an alphabet without use of pre-existing forms must be rarer still, and its propagation extremely difficult.^ Ordinarily the alphabet is evolved from picture- signs. The primer tells their acrological secret : " A is an apple" &c. The whole art of writing is thus a continuous evolution, every stage of which as mystery of progress involves an upward, ideal attraction, — from the first tattooing or cut- ting of the human skin, to these fine products of analysis, the alphabets of civilized thought. As the phonetic stage continues in combination with the picture-signs, so it laps over into the alphabetic, as for a long period in Egypt ; but the tendency is for the latter to supplant it, as its perfected form. Whether that step in analysis, of which alphabets are the result, is taken or not, the ideographs themselves ideograph- do not fail of development under the shaping hands '° changes. of convenience or beauty. This can be checked only by an invention like that of printing, which would also tend to prevent the formation of a pure alphabet by holding fast ^ Mahafify, Prohgom. to Anc. Hisi., p. 119. ' The famous Moeso-Gothic characters of the Bible of Ulphilas were founded on Greek ind Latin letters. 420 STRUCTURES. the mind within the syllabic signs. The fact of such an invention may help to explain the failure of the Chinese to reach this final stage. But ideographic changes go on to a great extent, notwithstanding printing. The original figure gradually becomes effaced ; just as words lose their primi- tive interjectional or mimetic forms, and pass into more or less conventional syllables, whose origin is inscrutable without deep historical research. Thus the Egyptian hiero- glyph became first a hieratic, then a demotic or cursive script, the former being simply its characteristic part used for the whole, and the latter a still more radical trans- formation for rapid writing ; and these changes took place in remote ages.^ The Chinese cursive is analogous to the Egyptian hieratic, and, though much more complicated, sometimes even more fully effaces the rude ideograph than either of the later Egyptian styles covers the more elegant hieroglyph. The cuneiform writing is in a style analogous to the latest Chinese stage, but so utterly non-ideographic in form that, but for the recent discovery of some of the original picture-signs side by side with the nail-like images of them,2 it would not be believed that the latter could have originated in this way. The time and manner of the change lie far back in some unrecorded mystery of human demand and supply. Chinese ideography, on the other hand, can be studied in Can be all its phascs : so distinctly has the national genius the Chi-" ^°^ graphic art expressed itself, and so little has it nese signs, been chcckcd, even by printing, in the transforma- tion of its instruments.^ The living language, too, with its literary treasures, makes all stages of past construction an open book. And we are spared the long series of patient and minute studies which the genius of ChampoUion and ^ The demotic was in use in the time of Herodotus. 2 M^nant, Epigr.f p. 51. " Leitre de Pekin, a rare old book {1773), in which odd theories are expounded, vA specimens of all kinds of Chinese writing given. LANGUAGE. 421 Rawlinson would have found inadequate to open Egypt and Assyria, but for the famous trilingual tablets of Ro- setta and Behistun. If the acquisition of such a language of symbols requires more time and labor than we can expend upon it, we can yet recognize the ingenuity implied in the six classes into which these figures have long been divided. They repre- sent forms of objects and symbols of abstractions. They combine these images to suggest other ideas and objects. They vary the attitudes of the same figure to convey contrasts of meaning ; and they lend themselves immeas- urably to phonetic uses, both with and without explanatory additions. The startling discovery of this symbolism of a great civilization, two centuries ago, led Pdre Amyot to Effect of call it "the picturesque alphabet of the arts and "^^^'^'^ sciences." Its uniqueness has grown more evi- Europeans. dent with time. Of purely native origin, it is a genuine triumph of the concrete genius of the Yellow Race ; yet there is scarcely a system of ideography in the world with which the identification of these signs has not been attempted. The natural hope of connecting them with the oldest Egyptian proved a failure, in the fanciful analogies Theories of of De Guignes, Amyot, and Kidd.i ' The Chinese '^^^^°^; figures are more practical and less mythological ; they have pure allegorical combinations, and none that unite animal and human forms ; they are ruder than the hiero- glyphics, where ideography is in its bloom. All these dif- ferences point to the fact that the one system came from the art-culture of a priestly caste, and the other system from the practical needs of an industrial peopie ; though it is probable ' The Leiin de Pekin gives De Guignes's system. As he used the worthless authority of HorapoUo, so Amyot trusted a similar witness in Kircher. See aXsnIfotesand Queria; fCidd's CkiTuii pp. lo, 68. 422 STRUCTURES. that, in their more antique forms, the hieroglyphs were employed for the ordinary affairs of life.-* The very few ideographic resemblances of Chinese and cuneiform afford little ground for comparison. The exclusive use of the wedge-shape is of itself a radical distinction.^ The Chinese signs have been connected even with the Mexican, which have apparently more affinity with the picture-writings of imagina ^^^ Indian tribes. More marvellous still are the Biblical Christian antitypes traced by the Jesuit fathers in ^^"' these old mysteries of the illumined pagans of Ca- thay. Fouquet treated the whole Shi-king as symbolical of the life of Christ, and even found the cross and nails figured in the signs. Cibot classified them in the same interest as dogm.atic, ecclesiastical, typical, and prophetic. Amyot found the Trinity in the triangular sign for union, and Lucifer in that for evil, composed of two figures, meaning "lifted up" and "novelty;" a compound of mouth, eight, and a vessel referred to the number of persons in the ark ; " to show " and " trees " meant the Adamitic trees of know- ledge and life ; "death" and a " woman" was an allusion to the sin of Eve. All this typical writing was of course invented (or revealed) before the Deluge, and transmitted by Noah and his sons direct to Egypt and China. The assured belief of the author is disturbed only by the fear that his theory will be assailed on the ground of the " con- fusion of tongues ; " but not at all by any suspicion that the ideograph is too natural a form of primitive writing to require being traced to one centre for mankind, even though that centre be the all-sufficient family of " Noe." Our chief interest is to trace the finer aesthetic element that characterizes this art of expression by written signs in 1 Chabas in Lepsius's Zeitsck. JUr Aeffypt Spr., Juli, 1869. * Pauthier worked out an old theory that the cuneiform signs were simply the ChineBe, witi their lines turned from the upright to the horizontal. {Jour. As. Ap., 1868.) LANGUAGE. 423 all its stages, from the rude scratch on bark or skin, to the elaborate refinement of hieroglyphic painting, Esthetic cuneiform printing, and Chinese chirography. So Element. early did this element appear in China that the oldest known writing (even if we should accept the genuineness of the supposed inscription of Yu, which purports to be older than 2000 B.c.-^) has already exchanged the rude primitive figure for an arbitrary and selective sketch. In the tchouen style, ascribed to the eighth century B.C., these outlines are rounded and flowing ; an evident effort to secure freedom of hand without sacrificing the original image. Even the ancient vase inscriptions, referred by antiquarians to the Shang dynasty (1750-1110 B.C.), are very much advanced beyond mere picture-writing, and really have a kind of serpentine flow.^ Less rude than these, though in similar style, are the inscriptions descriptive of hunting and fishing on the famous " Stone Drums " of the Tcheou, preserved and copied several times with great care as national monu- ments, and placed at the gate of the temple of Confucius at Peking, in the fourteenth century. They were discovered, half buried, in the province of Shan-si ; and the earliest accounts of them, which belong to the seventh century, ascribe them to a period one or two hundred years further back. Chinese criticism is favorable to their antiquity.^ Writing on stone afforded little opportunity for freedom of lines, and we are the more surprised at the signs of prog- ress on such materia] at so early an age. In this point of view, the " Stone Drums " of Peking may well be held a national monument by a literary people, and are of great interest in the history of writing. • For the genuineness, see Pauthier (jfaurx. As. 1S72); against it Williams ; and Legge {Inirod. to the Sku-kinff.) ' See Thomas's plates and descriptions in Journ. of R. A. Soc, 1835 : also Schott, Spraehl., p. 100. Their real age is uncertain, but probably earlier than the Han. » The discussion is given in full by Mr. Bushell Cjfoarn. of N. China Branch, R. A., Boc. VIII., N. S.), who styles the Drums " a fossilized stratum of transition from hieroglyph to radical and phonetic." 424 STRUCTURES. Of course the development we have been tracing depended Its mechan- largely on the mechanical aids provided from age icaiaids. to age. The oldest writing was done on bamboo plates, or bark of trees, with an iron pen and a kind of varnish. The use of various woven fabrics, and of the brush, set aside this bamboo tablet, and led in the second century B.C. to the freer form of character called li, which was soon followed by the tsao (cursive) ; and this, aided by the invention of fine paper (first century A.c.) and by that of printing, issued in the present square style {kiai), in which fine and body strokes are traced with the camel's hair brush in great detail, and with an arabesque intricacy, fitly called " grain-in-wood " or " veins-in-marble." Chinese ideal analysis, but little interested in words or w,.; . ,„ sounds, found readier uses in the more concrete i^ ativc tin- aiysisofthe Sphere of Written signs. Not only have these been signs. referred to two hundred and fourteen "keys," or elementary forms ^ (in part at least reduced from the later compounds, and many of them no longer in use), but still further resolution was made for calligraphic purposes into six simple kinds of stroke, and the whole stock of radical signs are classified according to the number of these strokes in each, up to a seventeenth class, as a basis for writing all compound forms. This is the crown of Chinese refinement. It is the most remarkable simplification of graphic materials known to history, with the exception of the cuneiform, which sacrificed all character or historic meaning in its monumental printing to the convenience of the graving tool, using only the straight line, with slanting, horizontal, or downward stroke. The record of this calligraphic evolution is preserved as Caiiigraph- far as possible in its latest phase. Many of the meliT'"^ signs still contain as much of pictorial outline as * This selection was made by a scholar in the seventeenth century, whose work has been ►xepted in place of a much earlier and larger list. (Schott's Entwur/^ and Edlcins's Inirod., &c. LANGUAGE. 425 the' nature of the strokes allows : a crossed square for a tilled field ; an empty one, open at one side, for a des- ert ; a square without a covering line for a well ; three peaks for a mountain ; flowing lines for water and for hair ; stems with crossing or oblique Unes on each side for va- rious kinds of grain ; three open buds for spring ; a rude form of legs for man ; two trees for a wood. Many hint more sketchily, as by four parallel lines for legs, and a line twice bent backwards for a bow. Many are purely sym- bolic ; but in most, convenience and minute calligraphy have quite buried the original forms in a crowd of lines, points, and curves, which yie^d no aid to the student from natural association. Yet these, upon being traced back through intermediate links to the original forms of which they are the product, become often strikingly significant. Here at least the workman cannot be charged with inertia or im- mobility. Two-thirds of the actual signs are variants from the classic, and many are no longer to be analyzed, at any rate by the foreign eye. Of the two hundred and fourteen keys, a careful scrutiny will scarcely detect in more than forty any ideographic relation, though a number are dedu- cible from wider ancient characters, by much squaring of lines and chipping of parts. The rest even of the radicals, and the whole of the cursive, is a mystery of transmutation, through which a Darwin or a Tylor will be needed to trace laws of natural selection and survival.-^ The aesthetic value of the symbolic signs is more easily recognized, though often obscured by their doubt- poetieai ful origin and formation, and by their subtle literary Sy"'^°''=°'- association. The symbolism is ingenious and even poetic. By the combination of a picture-sign with a metaphoric one, the faculties of abstraction and imagination are seen ' Edkins has shown already how much the study of old fonns of writing is to do for th« lolation of these calligraphic riddles. 426 STRUCTURES. in direct relations with concrete things. The following are obvious types of abstract ideas. By a falling moon is signified darkness ; by two hands, greeting ; by two flags opposed, strife ; by a woman under a roof, content ; by heart and blood, compassion ; by an old man and a youth, piety ; by a man and a sign for two, or by a heart and a sign for thousand, philanthropy. Eye, plant, and heart mean thinking ; heart and white, fear ; heart with slave, anger ; with ear, shame ; with scholar or ten, completeness. Two hearts are friendship ; man and word, fidelity ; fire and water, calamity. A woman and child are tenderness; a heart between two gates, sadnesg, and under a field, thought. Other striking and poetic combinations are selected from Mr. Lay's very attractive volume. They show how express sive the picture-sign may become with meaning beyond itself. A sheep (as docile), combined with strength, sig- nifies authoritative instruction ; with water, it is the sea which feeds the clouds as sheep are fed ; with heart, it means following ; with mind, to cherish. A hand, with an eye, means meeting of friends. Circular movement, with a man, is regular routine ; with a hand, it is a functionary ; with speech, discourse. First rudiments, with erectness, mean a man of principle ; with man himself, a scholar. Heart, with the grain of wood, is mental bias ; with a re- volving wheel, mental concentration ; with a vassal, shame. Gazelle, with man, means conjugal union ; with female, beauty; with eyes, close attention; with the sun, bleached. Heart, with wilderness, is the maze of lovers' talk. " The heart," says St. Denys, " was the graphic root of almost all the original characters intended to represent metaphysical ideas." It is interesting to recall Homer's similar use of the same organ to represent all kinds of emotion. In their legendary accounts of the origin of written LANGUAGE. 427 signs, the Chinese naturally emphasize the imitative element. Letters are but a form of man's closeness to Cosmic Legendary Order. The eight trigrammes of Fo-hi {koud), to °"s>n- which they are traced back, and which represent the male and female principles of that order, combined in va- closeness rious ways, are sdid to have been taken from the " n^'""- dragon's back. But before substituting elements of writing, for knotted cords, Fo-hi has studied the visible lines of heaven and the products of earth. Of the six principles which he lays down as the basis of writing, the first three relate to imitation of objects, the fourth and fifth to expression of ideas, and the last to the relations of sounds. Hwang-ti invents figures from the shapes of clouds ; his minister, from bird-tracks on the sand ; his successor, from flames of fire ; and another, from the undulations of water. Kien-lung collected thirty-two different kinds of writing believed to have been used by the ancients, and all illustrate the absorption of natural forms into expressions of human thought. They do not all exhibit actual systems perhaps, so much as testify to the instinct for putting every thing in experience into written form. Vases, bracelets, serpents' eggs, precious stones, dragon's nails, willow leaves, ears of corn, are all represented. The Dutch in the seventeenth century notice the passion of the Chinese for imitative writing, and their expressing their apprehensions by nat- ural things, — birds, beasts, and insects.^ Figures 'of ani- mals, real and ideal, were embroidered in official garments, and official names given from the animal world : such as "dragon" for dignity, "swan" for respect, and "pigeon" on some equally fantastic ground. But the close relation of the signs to Nature haidly proves them to be good data for reconstructing primitive Chinese society. R6musat's enthusiasm went to the ex- tent of attempting this feat on palseographical grounds. • Nieuhoff, II. 759. 428 STRUCTURES. The effort is interesting, however unsatisfactory, as con- Attempts taining germs of a not unfair picture of the nation's to recon- character. Of the supposed primitive signs he finds primitive only scvcn referring to the heavens, and infers that faom^he ^^^ ^''^*- Chinese were not astronomical. He sees signs. no marks of metaphysics or theology, none of the abstract idea of God. No towers, gardens, city-walls, king, or soldier, but the figure of a man bent over, meaning either servility or superstition, and prefiguring the literate or the bonze ! He finds no musical instruments, no money, glass, or metal, but several kinds of weapons ; of domestic ani- mals, the dog, sheep, pig, and ox ; of plants, millet, rice, and herbs. The improbabilities of this picture in many respects are obvious.-' The two hundred and fourteen "radical" signs widely differ from it, though these can afford as little authority for suph primitive construction, Here are signs for metals, weapons, and city ; for the cereals and the plough ; for musical instruments and for pottery ; for silk, pencil, vase ; for the workman and for family ; for literature, spirits, and divination. Thus the " radicals," though recently selected, afford a not inade- quate idea of the tendencies of a race which regards them as the earliest forms of its written word. The merits and defects of this remarkable system must be estiniated by its relation to the character of the race whose wants it supplies. The comparative fixity of syllabic picture-signs was an Defects obvious chcck to grammatical analysis and con- andcon. structiou. Preventing the resolution of words straints. . , . _ . mto their elements, it forbade their free modifica- tion by variation of form and inflection ; it forbade their * Chalmers has made a similar attempt to reconstruct the primitive Chinese man from the oldest signs, and to reduce the ideographic language to ^plest terms. (Origin of iht CIA ne$e (London, 1868), pp. 3, 56-58.) LANGUAGE. 429 absorption through diminished or varied emphasis, and their articulation by means of the particles which such absorption tends to produce. The Chinese blocked their own path to such pliability in the instrument of language, and their nearest approach to it was the use of phonetics. These were developed in Egypt into an alphabet. In China, on the other hand, the laborious process was continued of making a new, or newly combined, character for every iiew thought, — a kind of labor which was more attractive to their tastes than analyzing the structure of words or thoughts. The effect of this peculiarity on the mental operations is obvious. The signs are suited only for ex- pressing ideas of a fixed and recognized meaning ; and the national mind must confine itself to these ruts of thought for which language is already provided and prescribed. But this is so conformable to Chinese temperament that ideography not only has never been thrown aside, but has been made susceptible of conveying very delicate shades of feeling. When the Chinese writes, his materials are of such a nature that it is not easy to see how he can be free Effect of to modify the stock of ideas which they already ""' f'sns •' -' -^ on litera- express. They stand for certain wholes, well-de- ture. fined by association, and his lines of thought are prescribed. There may be latitude of choice in these associations, and the structure of the sentence may present them under new aspects ; and on these refinements depend the subtle ele- gances over which the best translators are at fault : but in the substance they constantly reappear. It is therefore in beautifying the signs, rather than in multiplying the ideas, that the interest centres. But the large range of inference, allusion, association in the literary consciousness, ^^^^^^ which makes Chinese fine-writing such a mystery tion oj to the foreigner, is the atmosphere of the native "^ mind, the life of mutual understanding ; and of this the 430 STRUCTURES. written signs are the alphabet. Their forms are its ideals ; their tracing is " the dragon's flight, the serpent's dance ; " " the lotus bloom in the lake of ink ; " ^ their combinations are history and legend ; their rhymes and parallel phrases and manifold meanings are the miracles of taste ; learning hides in their intricacy, and in the subtlety of their transi- tions caught and carried on by rival songsters with the pencil ; they are the picture-book of the child and the art- gallery of the nation. In every sense, they are the happy rites of a religion. Doubtless the persistent use of picture-signs, and the Theirbear- interest in connecting writing with natural forms M^e°civiii- havc powerfully reacted on the concrete realism ration. which produced them, by aiding it to build up this immense industrial civilization with its wonders of pictorial art and delicate workmanship of hand. The life of every people is a whole, and its special tendencies can be judged only as a part of that living body. Manifestly, the plan of supplanting Chinese writing by some European alphabet which seems so easy to Western self-confidence, or even that of developing an alphabet from their own resources, is im- practicable. They are not an alphabetic people, nor able to recur to first elements, but a great race of ideographers, their emphasis for ever flowing to forms instead of sounds: the symbol of generalizing and synthetic, as alphabets are of analytic, qualities of mind. But this absence of necessary relation between the sign Their use and the sound, and the persistency of the symbolic diumTf'in- inis-gS) make the Chinese ideograph a suitable me- tercourse. dium of intercoursB between the Asiatic races. Unattathed to any special vocalism, it has not only fur- nished a common script for all the widely differing dialects * The poet manages the pencil with " the swiftness of the rain," and his ink " spreads likfl » cloud." Its motion is that of a " divine dragon." He writes a poem " on horseback," " ^"^ seven steps;* *'the spread of a lady's brush is the glory of letters." (Julien's /.« ^/^' LtUrics.) LANGUAGE. 43 1 of the Empire, read by every man in his own provincial tongue, but provided Corea, Japan, Annam, Manchuria, with signs for their still more distinct forms of speech, which are more or less arbitrarily connected with these developed images so readily separated from their native meaning. Buddhism, the great literary conductor of the East, carried them through Corea into Japan, associating in one free bequest an alphabet and a faith : and syllabaries were constructed from them ; one of which, made from selected portions of their forms, bears a name, katakara (fragments), that confesses its lineage.^ The full figures were also used phonetically, or with meanings now of Chinese, now of Japanese origin, the latter at last outnum- bered by the former.^ They are pronounced in different ways, according to the time of their introduction, or the part of China from which they came. The Annamites have taken them, likewise changing their meanings. Traditions say that the old Tunguse, or Manchu, was a contracted form of them. This adaptability to mutual intercourse is a mark of uni- versality that of itself redeems the Empire from contrasted the charge of self-isolation. Spoken languages ^'Ikenian tend to atomism. North Americaii tribes speak guages. hundreds of dialects. The Caucasus is a " mountain of tongues." The Aryan has spHt into a dozen families, and each of these into troops of mutually exclusive individuali- ties. But the rigid Chinese ideograph persists in its law, and within its own race-limits at least is as unifying as processes of Nature, while of course unfitted to inspire the progress of which the pliant and plastic alphabet is the symbol. De Rosny seriously considers their fitness for a universal language. ^ * De Rosny, Ecrii, Figur, ; Congr. Interit. ePOrientcU. (1873), II. 170. ^ Aster's yapaftese Grafnmar. The native authorities say this alphabet came earlier by three centuries, and De Rosny thinks there was a native system of signs still older. {Congris, &C', pp. 221, 229.) * Letter to Oppert, in A rchives Paliographiques, 432 STRUCTURES. They are a triumph of Mongolic genius, in many other respects so imperfect. They are also, as far as ' appears, a purely original product of the Chinese people ; and, while serving to carry the literatures of so many other races, seem to owe nothing to their aid. We may yet learn that a kindred race in Western Asia provided the common graphic medium for Persians, Medes, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Chaldeans. But the difficulty of learning such a script as this forbids jj any great extension beyond its present limits. In lateA their actual meanings, too, the Chinese signs offer so many obstacles to European students that the con- fessedly bad style of most translations, manifestly as poor Chinese as they are vernacular, is perhaps natural enough. It is a great mistake to hold these picture-signs, thus con- verted into alphabetic phrases, responsible for a pompous verbiage utterly opposed to the genius of the Chinese, whose speciality is terse, and even elliptical, expression.' This latter style is not only a result of the practical quali- ties of the national mind, but proceeds directly from the nature of the signs, whose relations to one another must be largely supplied by inference and common understanding, like the conversation of friends. With all the expedients devised for improving it as a DeEcien- nicdium of intcrcoursc, the Chinese language has "^^- inherent defects which nothing can remove. It has not the sounds of d, d, v, x, nor z. Many diphthongs are unknown to it. Certain consonants cannot be detached from vowels. Its power of syllabic change and growth is extremely small. The difficulties of representing foreign words in a language unanalyzed into letter sounds are very great.2 It may well be queried whether in the absence of alphabetic forms the Egyptians would have produced their > Williams, in yourn. Ch. Br. R. A. S., VIII. lo ; Meadows, Notes, &c.. pp. 23, 30, 39. ' Jntrod. to St. Denys's transl. from Matouanlin, in Aisuma Gusa, LANGUAGE. 433 vast historical and religious records. And we are thus forced to ascribe to the Chinese, — in explanation of their fertility in every kind of literature in spite of such defects in their instrument, — even greater productive energies than those of that wonderful people to whom the civilization of the classical world, and the shaping of its great literary instrument, the alphabet, are now primarily referred. 2S IV. LITERATURE. LITERATURE. npHE enthusiasm of Sir William Jones, when the treas- -■- ures of the Sanscrit began to reveal them- scope and selves a hunc^red years ago, was more than equalled quality, by that with which Abel Rdmusat, fifty years later, opened the critical study of the still more remote literature of China. His glowing description of this immense product of forty centuries, " this eloquence and poetry, enriched by the beauty of a picturesque language, which preserves to imagination all its colors,'' has in one respect certainly failed to be sustained by later research. Chinese litera- ture appeals to the imagination by it§ amount, but makes little use of this faculty in its constructions. A defective sense of the infinite excludes it from the sphere of sublim- ity. Such mental attitudes as depend on personal isolation, and on that sustained self-abandonment to awe and wonder which routine and prescription forbid, are here scarcely possible. The Chinese eye is too close to concrete things to get perspective or background of space. This brain is too absorbed in details to confront the vast problems of the free reason, or to dwell in mysteries insoluble by the practical understanding. This distinction of the Yellow Race from the Aryan and the Shemite is the more won- derful, when we consider what it has accomplished in spite of its inferior contemplative power. The practical achieve- ments found patked in these stiff, isolated signs, in this apparently stammering speech, make a marvel as startling as any enchantment of an Arabian tale. 438 STRUCTURES. Still more impressive is the continued fertility of a signifi- force that lacks the highest elements of creative cance. power. Here is no monumental literature, depend- ent on pyramid, tomb, or temple to hoard it up for ages beyond its natural life : the record is trusted to tissues whose evanescence is as close as possible to that of the spoken word. Its circulation, for all it seems to laqk ethe- real qualities, has grown wider and swifter with time, and it has freely assimilated with all social elements. It is the literature of a race still pregnant, in full possession of its peculiar gifts and its past achievements. After forty centuries of a strange experience, it has opened out from unpromising shells of graphic art and the stranger speech of three hundred millions of living souls upon the latest civilization of the globe, like the apparition of a fresh zone of continents, or of a planetary race: to us a new attitude of man ; a new form of genius, a type deficient in the qual- ities hitherto held by our traditional culture to be indis- pensable, yet coinciding with a tendency that is now assuming large proportions in the Occidental mind ; an unsolicited comment thereon, enhanced by its age, its mass, its variety, its historical weight, and, we may add, its orderly structure and normal growth. The time has obviously not come for a thorough study of the colossal theme ; but the resources already Resources. at our command comprise, beyond question, its most typical forms and forces. It would be from our pur- pose, were it in our power, to enter into the elaborate catalogues and critical analyses of Wylie and Schott. No such items could yield any definite idea of the spirit of this race of penmen ; though the mere list of titles and divi- sions of books we cannot yet read leave a vague sense of immensity and variety not without its charm or its use. Suffice it here to say of the whole that this cabala of signs is a perfect die by which the whole land and people LITERATURE. 439 has put itself into the form of written record, and that this record includes every description of secular memorial known to our own experience, elaborated by age after age of utilizing ^ort. Of this systematic and all-embracing construction for practical uses, the Cyclopcsdia is cydops-' of course always, there as here, the crowning "^'^' result ; and its compilation is a source of fame which em perors may well have coveted. The true imperial immor- tality may be said to consist in collecting libraries and securing the services of scholars like Ma-touan-lin and Sse-ma-thsian ; sometimes in even presiding, like Kang-hi and Kien-lung, over the whole process of literary enter- prises that vie in vastness with the dreams of Mongol world-conquerors, and infinitely surpass them in success. That a still intenser elaboration is applied to the language itself appears from the sixty dictionaries enumerated by Wylie; and prodigious stores of mathematical and astro- nomical data testify to the patient struggles of this people to master even those sciences for which they had no such natural gifts as the star-gazing races of Assyria and Egypt. Anthologies go back to the sixth century ; and have once flowered out into a collection of fifty thou- Anthoio- sand poems from a single dynasty, upon which two «'"■ thousand compilers were employed. Where every feature in literature is colossal, we are not surprised at the mountains of commentation that are said to have been piled, during single epochs, upon the songs of more living ages that pre- ceded them. Forms of ethical literature are exhausted ; and it may suggest thankfulness that the difficulty of mastering the language is likely to save us from the sud- den avalanche of didactics which the nibs of busy pens might bring upon our heads. But these snows from Chi- nese mountains would at least be immeasurably purer than the mud streams that pour from great sluices of the Western press. And if the vast record is a monument of 440 STRUCTURES. patience ratter than of genius, it is at least not the dead handwork of millions, directed by priesthood and caste, but the spontaneous life of a people. The revival of letters (150 b.c.) after the downfall of the Eittentof T'sin was the pivot, not of this whole literary his- ^°J^"^j tory only, but of the national life of China ; since Letters. it assurcd that supremacy of the literary class which is her motive force. Out of that purgation by fire arose the ethical and historical writings of Confucius in their enduring form. The history of their recovery will not be related here. It is evident, however, that the fires of T'sin were far from effectual in any department. The Catalogue of the Han revival gives systematic report of thirteen thousand works recovered or gathered in all branches, comprising those of nearly two hundred schools in philosophy, discussing many of our own problems in civil and social science, as well as covering the astrological and divinatory systems which the developed fetichism of the nation had produced. Pan-kou, the compiler, a ration- alist of the thinking classes, was not only without faith in these latter systems, but mourns over the degeneracy of his time amidst the wealth he records ; over careless hab- its of study, and neglect of the sages. He describes the nine leading schools as a reunion of sick people waiting a physician in a desert. This longing for the past is in the ordinary tone of Oriental philosophers, and no more conclusive against the value of the age he represents than the dissatisfaction of a modern critic whose eye is on an ideal future. Nothing can be more characteristic than his comments Pan-kou's Oil poctry, of which his lists could show thirteen Report, hundred books and a hundred schools. His studies taught him that he was living in a poor prosaic age, and he longed for the old days when the missives between States were couched in verse, and statesmen fell into disgrace when LITERATURE. 44 1 they did not put high imagery enough into their documents. Had not Confucius taught that the best study for a public man was the Book of Odes, and that a noble style was impossible to one not versed therein ? Alas ! wise men no longer used ametaphoric style vivid as the picture-signs ; the poet's song was empty and diffuse, and told neither the feeling nor the life of the people. Notwithstanding this plaintive strain, in which Pan-kou did but follow Confucius, there is devel- opment in Chinese literature. It is shown especially in the tendency to evolve and distribute the elements of social good. A brief sketch of the literary qualities of successive epochs will perhaps make this evident. The Literary Tcheou dynasty (i 112-256 B.C.) was the long and cw^""^"* stormy genesis of natural ethics, transmitting the Ethical eternal lessons and appeals of Confucius, Mencius, ''"*''■ and Lao-tse. The Han (200 B.C. -220 A.c.) gathered up the past into an epoch of historians. Here belong the clas- sic catalogues ; that vast cyclopaedia, the Sse-ki, covering fifteen hundred years ; the reconstruction of the recovered books ; the invention of paper, and the compilation of the old " root characters " for the better transmission of thought. A period of Tartar torpor followed in the north : but several southern dynasties collected large libraries, and the " Millenary Classic " was composed, spreading ancient ex- amples before the children of the people to promote their love of knowledge ; and then, after the Sui had prepared the way by reuniting the nation, and put the old treasures into more attractive forms of writing, came a fresh age of lyric poetry, the immortal days of the T'ang Lyrical (618-907), — the days when the State carried peace- =?"'=''■ ful sway put into the west of Asia, and learning bloomed within. History now began to be epitomized ; ^ the Uterary examinations were fully organized, the Han-lin installed at > Schott, p. 72. 442 STRUCTURES. their head ; the Hiao-king added to the national text-books ; and the diffusion and utilization of knowledge crowned the labors of a thousand years. The fragrance of this epoch exhaled in an outpouring of lyric poetry by a thousand bards.^ Buddhist monks carried classical works and impe- rial devotions to bordering lands ; and Japan had already the five King, the prayers to Buddha, and seventy other works from the " Central Land." ^ Next came the engraving of the classics on wooden phiiosoph- plates, so that copies could be circulated with icai epoch, cheapness and speed ; books were no longer arti- cles of " vertu," but open to all ; scrolls were superseded by folded sheets ; and printing was invented (tenth century). It was natural that this broadening of educational currents should bring an " Augustan Age " of letters, and especially of speculative philosophy. The history of the Soung em- braces Ma-touan-lin's great encyclopaedia, and the writings of Tcheou-tsi and Chu-hi, the chiefs of Chinese specula- tive thought. Here, too, we find a really philosophical his- tory, dealing in the causes and consequences of events.^ As a natural expression of this universality, followed the Dramatic cpoch of dramatic art. From the Mongol dynasty epoch. (Yuen) comes the national collection of the " Hun- dred Plays," from which the most popular pieces have al- ways been taken, and which we have ample means of study- ing in translations by Julien, Davis, Bazin, and Pr6mare.* This dramatic literature grew up against the influence of the mandarins, and purely out of popular impulses. Few or none of the higher classes have dared to claim authorship in these attractive pictures of common life and genial satire, interwoven with lyric snatches and a familiar use of the old poets that was for them wholly out of order. *■ Williams I. 573. * Ma-touan-Un's Border Countries ; tr. in Aisuma Gusa. ' Schott, p. 75. « For Bazin, see Vols. XVIL-XVIII. of Series No. V. of ymra. Asiai. For VtinOK, see Duhalde's Chi-na. &c. LITERATURE. 443 The Mongols brought their latitudinarianism to letters. The capital was alive with translators, and the provinces with linguists, constructing alphabets, collecting data, circulating books. Kub-lai's empire was the widest ever known : he was the patron of all races and all religions, and his Royal Academy was the combined culture of the east ; in some respects of the west also. At his instance a Buddhist monk (Pa-sse-pa) attempted a new set of alpha- betic signs ^ for transcribing literature into all tongues ; and they were introduced by edict into the schools and civil service of China. The people listehed more willingly to the exhortations in behalf of their schools, than to the transference of their literary interests to a strange body of signs. Pa-sse-pa's alphabet was a failure. The Mings signalized the recovery of the empire into native hands by gathering up the whole harvest of cyclopedic the past. An imperial library of three hundred epoch, thousand volumes contained histories of all the ^^^ ^'"^ dynasties,^ and a full consciousness of nationality busily resumed all the stages of literary achievement. It was the age of collectors and commentators, gifted with that minute- ness of detail study which sifts every mass into the atomic state most fit for currency and use. The best science and culture of Europe was welcomed in the Jesuit Fathers. The history of cosmogonic philosophy was compiled in the school of Chu-hi.^ The national code of jurisprudence was presented in full order and detail ; and the first great description of the whole Empire published from minute surveys (1587). So steadily had literature advanced to broader and more popular forms, when the terrible wars that brought the * Fronr the Hindu Devan&gari. See Pauthier on the Mongol Alphabet of Pa-sse-pa, in Journ. Asiat, Jan., 1862. = See ZeiUch. d. D. M. G. I., 117. * The TsingU-la-tsenen. 444 STRUCTURES. Manchus upon the land threatened destruction to all thLs Epoch of ^''ii't of the ages. But the Tunguse of the north difEusion. proved apt pupils of the civilization which had been their nurse from the beginning. No race in Asia would have been better fitted to comprehend and carry out the best elements of Chinese culture. The Emperors of the T'sing (Pure) line were for a century and a half among the best and ablest rulers that ever occupied thrones. Down to the strife and demoralization that have never ceased since the interven- tion of European trade and religion, they held China at her highest level. Three of them were in the foremost rank of scholars, and four were munificent friends of letters in the most practical forms. Such works as Kang-hi's Imperial Dictionary, a joint production of seventy-six scholars, a Universal History in sixty volumes, a complete description of China (1744), enlargements of the old cyclopaedias, translations into Manchu, and systematic Blue-books, are instanced as marks of the construction of materials old and new going on in the present dynasty, and show how universal are its aims. The record we have traced receives its crown in this tribute of a foreign master to the popular tendencies of letters in China. Converted into museum, academy, library, popular literature and social resource, and surrounded with all the dignity that the present can throw over the past, the noble national outfit presents itself with the appearance of the nation on the field of modern thought. This steady expansion of letters into more and more Stages of diffusive forms, this large respect for past stages progress, of growth, this persistent revisal and readaptation, combine with moral excellence to prove the normal and healthful quality of Chinese development. The elements of universality in the process will be brought out in the further course of our review : those specially relating to literature will now be considered in the light of iraterials already amply sufficient for a fair estimate. LITERATURE. 445 The simplicity and directness which would naturally characterize a literature expressed by pictorial xhe signs are very conspicuous in the Chinese dramas, deama. With laconic bareness the plot moves straight on, undis- turbed by the play of fancy or reflection ; sometimes with a rapidity that, for us, would turn tragedy into grotesque- ness. Scarce a line could be lost without breaking the thread, which is always continuous and clearly traceable, however complex the situation. The tracks are mainly prescribed. Certain prominent traits and classes in real life are constantly repeated, and the ruts in which medita- tions run seem to be their title to respect. Even the solilo- quy seldom leads to subtle springs of motive, or rises above the interests and facts in hand. Individuality, the fulness and flavor of the Western novel or play, is wanting ; and the scene is a level steppe, not mountain, valley, and in- dented shore. The pedantry of the academic essays, which has brought so much discredit on Chinese letters, has no place in the drama, and is not regarded with respect. The plain and earnest diction of the dramatic masterpieces is their real charm. They satirize pedantry as " gnawing let- ters and licking characters," or " putting sables on a dog's back." Under such sedate simplicity of purpose the ob- vious and commonplace itself becomes in a sense ideal. No nation has such a store of plays in constant use, al- though, from causes already mentioned, comedians have suf- fered contempt, and have even been persecuted by special edict. Many plays have been written by women, though the sex is forbidden to act, and the female parts are taken by boys. Dramatic literature has obeyed forces stronger than imperial edict or social prudery, and its productive hs pro- power went on increasing from the T'ang (eighth ''""mty. century) to its culmination in the You-en (fourteenth cen- tury), when the drama was cultivated by literary people of 446 STRUCTURES. both sexes.^ Still later, the great Manchu, Kien-Iung, did not share the prejudices of his scholars, who are said to have excluded plays from his library : he even took a player for a second wife. This passion for the stage has grown with time : the superstitions of Buddhists and Tao- sse have furnished machinery, and the history of China is quarried for material. Such is the force of nationality in the popular mind.^ Plays are the cheapest things circu- lated, and are even sometimes used as currency.* Troops of comedians are in demand, on all occasions, from rude coMntry fites to city dinners, court receptions, and public and private re-unions. The drama is still in the prose of narration, nor is coriiedy distinct from tragedy. Its structure is Structure. -' o y primitive, the personages not being brought out through the skilful play of action, but reporting directly to the audience their own traits and interests and the part they are to take ; often with absurd frankness. Unities of time and place are little regarded. The action, like the language, is elliptical, and leaves much to mutual understanding. Declamations by the hero, studded with quotations and invocations, take the place of dramatic evolution. Wher- ever feeling is expected, enter a singer ; if a hero is about to slay a villain or to commit suicide, he sings.* These rhymed explosions scatter allusions and associations, packed in the elliptic phrase as in a shell, which translators find it hard to crack.^ Chinese dramas have usually an ethical purpose. Like Ethical the histories and the political writings, they gener- purpose. ^jjy assert poetic justice. Elaborate villanies, of- ten woven into a complex web which betrays sad famili- ' Ampfere, Science eji Orient^ p. 227. Eighty-one liitirateurs 2Xb mentioned ns authois of four hundred and forty-eight plays. * Historical plays have always been specially popular in England, Germany, and Trance. • Girard, II. 301. « See especially Tht Orphan of Tcheou. » Yet Julieo (Introduction to Lei yeunes FilUs LettrSes) intimates that his predecessors have made too much of these difEcnlties, which arise often from the differences of style in diflfer- ent epochs. For an account of the Chinese theatre, see Girard's^r««« ei Chine, II.284-3oa LITERATURE. 447 arity with crime, are constructed so as by their natural consequences to justify the righteous side through whatso- ever sufferings they cause. The Penal Code says the end of the stage is "to offer true or supposed pictures of just men, chaste women, and obedient children, who may inspire the spectators to the practice of virtue." Nowhere is the marriage tie disparaged, amidst the satire that assails all classes and sects. The national reverence for those natu- ral relations on which society is based is always treated with respect. Gratitude, defence of the wronged, humanity, power of "the right way" to deliver from life-weariness and despair, are all enforced in special plays.^ These inventions throw familiar ethical light over the actual working of Chinese beliefs and institutions, The drama and suggest ideal relations in the dilemmas, incon- ^ '"™ °^ "^ popular gruities, conflicts of duty, freaks of circumstance, seif-mti- that .arise in carrying out established principles. ™""' These collisions are very ingeniously and. honestly treated. The Chinese drama is a thorough self-criticism by the social consciousness of the people. It prefers the materials of actual history to free creations of imagination. It completes the bald annals by giving the form and features of ages, whereof these yield only the facts and names. No pictures of manners can be more vivid than those in the plays of the Youen. The writers have a keen eye for the faults of classes and schools of ofificial and domestic life. In preva- lent forms of juggling and superstition, they find no end of comic situations and strange adventure. It was in the popular taste for burlesque and good-natured farce that the Chinese drama, like the Greek and Roman, found its first impulse. And this is the character of most plays previous to the Youen, when history became more popularized, and was treated on the stage in a more serious manner.^ The ' See Tie Deliverance o/T'sien-hao iyaurn. As., 1851), Dream of Lin-thong-pin, Ibid. * Especially in the San-koue-icki, and the Judgments 0/ Pao-tching, a collection oi Causes Cilibres; see Eazin, fourn. As., Feb. and Mar., 1851. 448 STRUCTURES. plots are apt to turn on criminal trials, and their contrasts of iniquity and equity. Comedies of intrigue open the secrets of the court and the harem, and all mazes of oppor- tunity for craft and crime in social life. Naturally little use is made of mythology, except in connection with the Tao-sse. A naive mixture of noble purpose with barbarous policy Naive com- oftcn testifics to fatal necessities involved in estab- binations. Ug^gfj customs and institutions, which is not with- out its analogy to the fate tragedies of Greece. In the " Orphan of the Family of Tcheou," a Chinese " Slaughter of the Innocents " by edict aimed at the destruction of a right- ful heir to the throne, results in a generous rivalry between two old faithful functionaries as to which should be given over to the Government by the other as guilty of secreting the prince, for whom the child of one of them is to be substituted and surrendered to death. It is finally decided that one of these heroes shall give his child, the other his life ; the true heir is then brought up by the survivor, sent in due time to court, adopted by the cruel minister who has full sway in the empire, and at last informed of the whole truth. The terrible duty of retribution laid upon him is immediately fulfilled. ^ The "Sorrows of Han" ''uses the custom of Eastern The"Sor- co'^iusrors to cxact from their rivals the tribute rows o£ of the most beautiful among their wives, as a set- "^°' ting for a striking picture of self-abandonment to loyalty and honorable love. A stronger protest against the degradation of woman can hardly be imagined "than is con- densed into the amazing terseness of this little tragedy. The ruler's effeminacy bringing the empire to the feet of its enemies ; the corrupt ofificial banished for having kept a maiden from her rightful place as queen of the harem, in ' This is said to have a basis in history ; the play is translated by Primare. See Duhalde. • Transl. by Davis. LITERATURE. 449 revenge for her father's refusing to purchase his favor ; his scheme for turning her over to the Tartar ; the arrogant demand of this chieftain for her person on seeing her por- trait ; the anguish of the Emperor, her self-devotion to save him and bring peace to her country ; her struggle with her affection, and his recognition of its worth ; her delivery to the Khan, and her death by suicide, calling on the name of her husband : " Emperor of Han, this life is over ; I await thee in that which is to come," — combine to show what moral appreciation can be maintained amidst tyranny and barbarism, to centre in womanly virtues. The simplicity of this play is suggestive of parables, or a child's story of what he saw and heard. The dramatic quality is another matter, and it is not easy to see how so rapid a movement and so meagre a show can at all interest an assembly. Yet the picture of the Tartar horde in the desert is effective ; and touches of nature are not wanting, as when the victim casts away her robes, remembering how close beauty is to bitter fate : " To-day in the palace of the Han, to-morrow given to a stranger ; " and when the wretched monarch, dreaming that she comes back and is again snatched away, awakes to hear the wild fowl's scream and asks : " Can it know there is one so desolate as I ? " The " Heir in Old Age " ^ sets forth family reconcilia tion at the ancestral graves, and traces mischiefs ^^^„j^ that grow out of the superstition that a male heir in oia is indispensable to these oblations, when it is ag- ■*^^" gravated by polygamic jealousies and intrigues. Popular superstitions are wont to show a half-conscious- ness of their own folly, and good-humoredly satirize them- selves in dramatic form. This is as noticeable in Chinese as in mediaeval Christian plays. " The Transmigra- Popular tion of Yo-cheou " ^ figures the machinery of the donTsatir. Tao-sse hells, with their oil-cauldrons -for boiling i«d- > Transl. by Davis. ' yourn. As., April and May, 1851. 29 4SO STRUCTURES. sinners, and the politeness of the officers to pious folk who intercede for them and get them sent back to life in other bodies, and the odd jumble and fracas that would come of transferring the consciousness of one person into the out- ward form of another. The " Love-sick One " ^ satirizes the two souls in one person, bodily and spiritual, of popular belief ; the one staying in the maiden's body at home, the other following her lover to the wars, and brought back by him as his whole wife, to the natural consternation of her other part ; to be appeased only by the equally amazing re-conjunction of the two souls ! In one play Sakya Buddha appears as a fat priest, who makes everybody laugh, and prints his doctrine on people's hands, in the word patience. In another, a youth caught by cannibals is released on parole, and, returning to be eaten, constrains them by philosophical demonstrations to let him go. A third brings the horse and the ass of a priest into pitying conversation over the lot of poor fel- lows who die insolvent : " 'Tis the reason," adds the horse, " that I am now carrying this priest, who is my old creditor." All the qualities we have noted are combined in the .^^ " Circle of Chalk," ^ where innocence is vindicated " Circle by the death of its persecutors, not through forms of law, but through appeal of laws to ordeals of natural feeling. It strikes at the domestic evils caused by polygamy. The heroine, lifted out of habits of prostitution enforced by her mother by reason of poverty, and becom- ing the second wife of a rich man, is hated by the first, who covers a liaison of her own by poisoning her husband. Charged by this vile woman with the murder, she is brow- beaten and tortured by the paramour himself into con- fession, and this by permission of the magistrate ; while ' ymrnal Asialipu, June, 1851. » Transl. byjulien. LITERATURE. 45 1 paid perjurers swear that she is not the mother of her own child. As usual, in capital cases, the matter is brought for rejudgment before a higher court, where an upright judge unexpectedly appeals to Solomon's test ; the rival claimants being bidden to drag the child out of a circle of chalk in opposite directions, the real mother is of course discovered, and all the criminals are put to death. The play deals freely with official misconduct. Arbitrary proceedings in one court are contrasted with the careful justice of the other; showing how entirely the issue de- pended on the character of the judge, not on the law. Torture is arraigned in the sufferer's cry : " Overcome by pain, I am forced to confess crimes I never committed." Nor is the marriage system spared : " Alas ! these legal wives," sighs the handmaid of the harem, " enrage their husbands against us, and sacriiice us to their anger and suspicions." Yet the difference between prostitution and legal concubinage in China is shown in the satisfaction with which the maiden contemplates her escape from the one into the other position, in a soHloquy whose language would equally serve for a person raised out of a life of deg- radation into recognized respectability in a Christian land. It has been said that all Chinese history has become the material of romance ; a compensation, we may ^^^^^ suggest, for the bald and monotonous character of its narrative. But the fancy clings to soUd special art ground of fact, and runs easily into didactics. As ^^^j^o^*^ in the dramas, so in the romances, rapid move- ment of situations and events works up a crowd of details into poetic justice and ideal good. The art of these story- tellers consists in making this purpose assume a provi- dential control, — building circumstances to suit itself, and curiously combining the naive and the conventional, old head and baby tongue. Their matter mainly concerns the 452 STRUCTURES. conflict of moral ideals with the practical working of Chi- nese society and institutions. The romances are a popular re-action on organized traditions, — on laws, customs, and social arrangements. They criticise social evils, generally with an evident faith in better foundations. Their frank confession of these evils, without bitterness or contempt, indicates a kind of higher assurance, preserved, with the force of a religious instinct, in the real substance of human nature and life. The inevitableness of penalty runs through the minutest net-work of intrigue ; and this moral judicial- ism, however prosaic, is as trenchant and thorough as Hebrew prophecy. It is a rationalistic faith which my- thology itself does not disturb. " The Family Portrait " shows a just judge using a pretence of supernatural know- ledge, but it is in order to detect a wrong by means of the superstition of the wrong-doer.^ These severe ethics are genial ; and, with all the preach- ing tone, each personage is suffered to tell his story geniality, in his owu Way, and stands in his own right. There Examples, jg ^q Jj^j,]^ q£ humor, and a finer sense of personal relations is nowhere to be found than in these blooms of Chinese life. The tale of the " Two Brothers of Different Sex" ^ is an idyl of love in every form, — of mutual affection between youths, ripening into a tenderness scarcely in- creased by the discovery that they can be united in a closer tie ; of humanity in an old couple, who pick up these waifs from wrecks, and give them homes and training ; of filial piety, rich in gratitude and loving cares, — the whole a charming comment on the patriarchal ideal. "The Visit of the Hearth God"^ enforces the lesson that outward conformities do not purify the heart nor save from evil. "The History of the Shores" is the great quarry of » Transl. in yourti. R. A. S., I. 308. > Transl. by Julien. * Transl. by Julien. LITERATURE. 453 genial humor. Its hundreds of intrigues and characters are all imaginary, though located in the age preceding the Mongol invasion, and its picture of manners is of the sharpest cut. The popular proverb, coupling it with another more historical romance of the Youen time, says of an ignoble age : " The young do not read the San-koue- tchi, nor the old the Chou-i." i The situations abound in oddity, and the satire is fully worked out ; as in the initia- tion of a burly rogue into the Buddhist priesthood, who, cheating the simple monks, yet comprehends nothing him- self, saying of the five rules : " Oh yes ! I am a good toper, and will keep them in mind." Even here the moral law is not forgotten ; and there are fine pictures of the strength of virtue, and its mastery over temptation and supernatu- ral terrors. The San-koue-tchi (" Three Warring Kingdoms ") is the heroic romance of China, which " every wise man The will have read, at least once;"^ crowded with "Thr" legends of the civil wars, and traditions of the King- witchcraft and spiritism of the Tao-sse, it is all "^o™." quite in contrast with the conventional structure most com- mon in the tales, where a few types, deficient in shadowing and balance, but representative of Chinese uniformity, con- stantly reappear, charming the national taste for recur- rence and repetition. " The Death of Tong-tcho " ^ turns on vicious adminis- tration and the terrible penalties of parricide and cruelty. Again we have the appeal for rectification of wrong- doing, not to the processes of law, but to shrewd plot and contrivance, by which alone criminals appear to be man- ageable. It is surprising to find the defence of innocence so dependent, in an empire of laws, on personal wits and sharp practice. The result is a lenient treatment of petty * Extended extracts from the Chou-i are given in Bazin's TabL Hist, de la Liii. de rVouen; your. As. 1850, 1851. > Introd. LIV., transl. by Pavie, 1845. ' Tr. by Julien from the San-koue-tchi. 454 STRUCTURES. « falsehood and trickery, when resorted to in self-defence or for good ends, while offences against the great social rela- tions are severely dealt with. In " The Fortunate Union," ^ two lives made for each ..The other are kept apart by a long series of villanous Fortunate plots, by legal and illegal means, all of which their Honorto pcrsonal qualities turn back upon the assailants. woman. ^jj ^]^g good and evil of laws and customs are brought fully into the struggle ; and the purport is to show that character must depend on its own mental and moral resources, not on these outward defences. In this fate- drama of the Chinese sort, the right of virtue to rule events is cast on a national scale. The worst abuses of legal and family authority, the exposure of reputation and safety to every form of assault, the power of institutions to victimize the weak, find their only antagonist in the energies of an ideal woman. " No match proved they for her intelligence : The calumny that hung upon her name Proved her of flowers the fairest ; she walked Firm and alone, without support or aid." Wile conquers wile ; learning refutes ignorance ; uncon- scious purity puts espionage to shame ; and calumny fades before a sensitiveness of personal honor that astounds the common experience. No severer criticism on the public management of personal rights can be imagined than the necessity laid on such a character to resort to small de- ceits to save its honor. " Where," she asks, " was the protection of the laws .' Where the restraints of public opinion ? Where the succor of nearest relatives ? " Her soUtary struggle, perhaps, comes as near to the morally sublime as Chinese literature has arrived. The story shows clearly that the marriage law in China is monogamic, and that the position of the " concubine " was * Transl. by Davis i^Hao-khUou-tchouen). LITERATURE. 45 5 secondary. The most profligate suitor does not pretend to attempt marriage without having his previous union set aside by law. Still more interesting is the hero's protest against marrying by the choice of his parents, on the ground that this is a union, not of friendship only, but " for life ;" and the heroine's question addressed to an arbitrary uncle : " Who shall compel me to marry against my wish .'' " Her father refuses to meddle with her right of choice ; and the bridegroom at the wedding treats her with venera- tion. The tables are curiously turned on " filial piety " by the hero's lecturing his father, an imperial censor, on offi- cial duties. It is refreshing to be assured, in China, that "old prescriptions were not made for those who can do right by force of their own minds;" and that "he who would let another perish, for a point of form, would be brutal ; " that " one may be content, if he can keep his heart free from taint," and that " virtue has its own lati- tude and measure." Under threats of legalized cruelty, the lady declares that " the Emperor himself could not force rectitude to degrade itself." The imprisoned censor is sustained by an inward witness that he is " clothed with integrity." " A single thought, unworthy the occasion, Had earned the censure of a thousand years." The young student, deprived of his betrothed, is re- strained from self-destruction by the thought that his mother would be left childless. " While the father's wish is still untold, the daughter's love already understands it ; as when, on the approach of spring as yet afar off, the Mei- tree puts forth a southward bud." She advises her lover to forgive his persecutor fallen into his power, in view of his possible provocation, and of his toils in acquiring his position. She sets him upon curing a boisterous demeanor, and charms him by showing herself not only a benefactor, but the wisest of counsellors. From her he learns self- 4S6 STRUCTURES. reliance and the love of serious study without ulterior ends. Her learning, prudence, delicate insight and wit, confound all enemies, and anticipate and solve every emergency. Her inviolate modesty is thus described : — " With faintly opening cup, its fragrance but half concealed, 'Tis like some half-told sorrow, drooping on delicate stalk." The sexes are equal in capacities and in dignity : " Where sense and spirit beam, they adorn each sex alike." ^ The daughter is entrusted with her father's affairs, and " supplies the place of a son." " Brought up in tender female seclu- sion, she is more delicate than a web of silk, but can show talent and resolution beyond many men." The novelist concludes that " Reason's highway is straight and plain, unlike devious paths of the wicked, Did not a faultless heroine sometimes shine, Virtue's great cause entirely would fail." "Ask ye why sovereign Heaven thus vexes mortals? 'Tis to try their hearts, like metal in the fiery crucible." .... " The unblown flower exhales no sweets ; the gem, unpolished, shines not ; Did not the winter's cold once penetrate its stem, how could the blossom emit such fragrance. " The protest against corrupt officialism and the barbari- ties of courts is startUng. The hero has to compel justice by breaking through all forms, thundering down the wicked judge, and arresting criminals with a high hand. But the purity of the higher courts is fully recognized as protecting the innocent, and rectifying all wrongs down to the least ; honors flow from imperial hands upon these protestants against all Chinese ills, and are reflected on their parents in national gratitude for bestowing such examples on the people. » The same idea pervades the Yotmg Female Scholars, translated into French by Julien, uid is common in Chinese novels. LITERATURE. 45 7 Lay has said with truth that Chinese stories abound in examples of love that knows no Hmit. ^ As we Love and might expect, there is abundance of sentimen- friendship, tality, and of desperate conjuncture from which suicide is the only escape ; results of a popular taste for extrava- gance like that which has given French fiction an equal currency in the West. But the high-wrought situations point to social defects, and are offset by a loyalty in love and friendship which assures us that these sentiments have stood unshaken. The influence of woman is usually elevated, and more productive of good than in correspond- ing tales of European origin. In the " Two Female Schol- ars," ^ the Emperor, presiding at the union of the two heroes and heroines, says : " Now that I have found two men and two women of genius, I have united them to show the happy influences of knowledge and peace : the desire of my heart is fulfilled." Even in the extravaganza of " The Flowery Scroll," ^ which glorifies the patriarchal system of marriage, the womanly virtues of guardianship and love are conspicuous. The woman is the man's good genius in all his works and ways. Its legend of the peach- blossoms driven on the wind, where the pilgrim following them crosses a stream and enters a primitive paradise, to which he forgets the way, and can never find it again, might well serve as a symbol of this ideal of polygamic love. The short stories, of which the number is immense, combine moral interest with fanciful belief. These shurt sto- generally purport to be historical, and abound in "j^i'pf^^ admirable maxims. The larger portion are of dence. Tao-sse origin, and embody the peculiar supernaturalism of this school. Spiritist machinery is exploited to the fullest ^ Chimse as they Are, ch. ii. ■ Transl. by Julien (Vol. II. 296). 3 Transl. by Bowring. 45 8 STRUCTURES. extent, in apparitions, resurrections, judicial remandings back and forth between the worlds, and transmigrations into human bodies, which bring the departed into as inti- mate connection with this world as the strongest believer in western stances could imagine.-' Scarcely more rational, though more refined, is the large class of stories which substitute a subtle special providence for the direct intrusion of genii and dead people into human affairs. Good actions, shaped in this way from above, with such manipulations as are familiar to the editors of Christian manuals and Sunday- school books, bring about shifts of fortune, preservations, deliverances, or justifications, highly agreeable to the popular taste for ethical finish. It is the imperium in imperio which belongs to virtuous maxims. Events are set in form of riddle for providential solution. The philosophy is of the " poor Richard " type, and never was honesty proved " the best policy " with more unshrinking inventiveness, which might even afford many shrewd suggestions to our own artists in this line. A merchant, finding money, restores it, and thereby recovers a lost son. With the reward received from the owner, he is about to make a religious donation ; but, reflecting that " saving life is better than maintaining priests," he offers it to any who would save a shipwrecked company : one of the rescued is found to be his own brother, returning from a vain search for him made at the entreaty of his wife. Further : the wife's fears for his safety have been aggravated by the persecuting suit of a relative, which drives her to attempting suicide. A curious turn of events foils this offender ; while the arrival of husband and long- lost son puts all to rights, and shows what blessings hang on a single honest or benevolent action.^ " Cast thy bread," &c. A dreadful series of misfortunes in which a poor scholar ' See PJath Bay.Ak. Feb. 1868 ; Chin. Repos. April, 1842 ; Dreams in Red Chamber Ibid., May, 1842. 2 Duhalde, Hist, of China, Vol. III. LITERATURE. 459 is involved by the craft of an enemy, to the point of death, is cleared away by providential skill ; whereat magistrates are warned to regard the life of a man more than that of a plant, and never to act as if at child's play, but as perform- ing the duties of a parent.-' The courageous and noble mandarin who shames the common practice constantly reappears. One such, Types of ordered to provide handsome girls for the Empe- u^ai virtue. ror's pleasures, replies that the Emperor must take his three daughters, if he will, but he knows of no others : whereat the rebuked messenger withdraws. Another refuses obedience, on the ground of the higher claims of personal example. And a third dies in poverty, and is buried in old garments, leaving only his memory in all hearts, and his dying hope that no poor man had through him been brought to loss. A fourth, poor because faithful, seeing a student lying dead by the wayside, covers him with his garment, sells his horse and rides an ox for cheap- ness ; then meeting a dying man, kills the ox to feed him. " Not to succor those in want is to have no virtue." These ' are but types of the whole class of Buddhist and Tao-sse stories ; in which the excess to which a special virtue is often pushed is attended by refinement of feeling. Extreme and a constant dwelling on the absoluteness of duty optimism, and love. We are told of a good man of such delicate regard for the feelings of others that he afflicted himself on seeing a poor relation steal a piece of silk, because he might have gone another way, and so spared her the morti- fication of knowing that he had seen her. He is comforted by the suggestion of his wife to pay her a larger price than usual, that she might not suspect the fact ! This is, however, an extreme case. It has a quality not unlike the parable of the Unjust Steward, and is probably quite as innocent of any immoral purpose. 1 Duhalde, Hist, of China, Vol. III. 460 STRUCTURES. Tchoo-tse deserves to be recorded by name. Anxious for his widowed and sick mother, he adopts an original way of treating thieves ; speaking to them softly, and offering to give them every thing if they would not disturb her. The proposal so amazes their burglarships, that they incon- tinently withdraw for shame ; and are out of sight, when he returns to fetch them a parting gift. How creditable to all parties concerned ! A Brutus-like father and mother refuse to petition for their son's pardon, who is under sentence of death, because the family would be wanting in fidelity to the prince. A son, whose mother feared thunder-storms, was wont to go to her tomb whenever one was coming on, and softly say : " Mother, I am here." In noticing the curious incompatibility of this high Ground of ethical purity in Tao-sse tales with the quality of ho^efami ™°tive to which they appeal;-' the quaint mixture tears. of Sakya and Lao-tse with Solomon and Franklin, and even with a Jesuit casuistry in the grading of rewards and penalties, — we must not forget that in all popular lit- erature in current use, economic questions of consequen- ces naturally enter largely, as constituting a large part of practical experience. These tales are not the careful constructions of philosophers, but spontaneous moralities of the masses. And every religion equally testifies to the hold of their method on common life, notwithstanding the incongruities they reveal. Their best didactics are wont to circulate about the not very disinterested motive, " With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." We cannot wonder at the Tao-sse Ananias struck by light- ning for withholding the property of orphans ; the false accuser killed by the fall of the pole to which his victim is bound ; the burner of holy books, to warm himself, ^ We shall refer to the subject hereafter, in speaking of the tales contained in the Kam ing-pien^ or Book of Rewards and PuniskTnents, used by the later disciples of Laotse. LITERATURE. 46I dying of pestilence ; and one who cuts out a pie's tongue, of ulcers on his own. But many tales are quite free of such defects, and relate illustrations of the Confucian precept to return good for evil ; of redeeming the wrong-doer to virtue by showing mercy ; of noble preference of the spirit to the form of conduct, from love of sincerity alone.-^ A community so ancient, vast, and social as the Chinese, so fond of finalities in speech and belief, and so pgovgRBs. apt to bring every experience to literary form and xheirsig- popular function, naturally possesses a prodigious niScance. number of proverbs ; embodying in them an impalpable inmost life, which can only in this way find true expression. A nation's proverbs are the ripe fruit of its character and history, its true confession of faith, its alphabet of manners, its outlet into cosmopolitan life. Not till adopted into the universal brotherhood of the Proverbs do the maxims of the wise wear their immortal crowns. Yet the recognized sages are seldom the proverb-makers in an original sense ; these are commonly unknown ; they live only in their winged words, and pass into the circulation of the popular heart, to which they supplied these mystic unappropriated vivaci- ties. A shy literature is the proverb ; its tracks hid in the infinite meshes of social magnetism and construction, by no human wit to be unravelled. In the sea of uniformity into which all Chinese individuality is speedily absorbed, we should hardly expect variety in the experience set forth by this form of expression, where the tides of ages would be apt to roll the pebbles into common shape and break off fresh fragments from the same old rocks. But precisely here, Nature justifies herself in her Chinese children by a remarkable diversity. I. In illustration, we select a few from a large collec- ■ For illustrations, see Davis's Sketches, Duhalde and Julien's Translation of the Katt. mg tien ; Wuttke, Getchichte d. Heidenih., II. 130, 133 ! Mayers in Notes and Queries, I. 462 STRUCTURES. tion,^ taken from temples, tablets, scrolls, and the current conversation of different provinces ; arranging them for the purpose, under different psychologic classes. I. Practical thrift and sense. — If you would pluck flowers in the moon, you will have to climb the sky. You cannot pick the Examples. . _,,.,. , t^ moon out of the water. Chanty begms at home. It you do not want a thing known, do not do it. To a sick man, medicine is better than prayers. Remember the past, if you would know the future. Prevention is better than cure. If you have money, the spirits will turn your mill. Speak only three-tenths of your thoughts : guard them as you would a city. The sage is not a talker, nor the talker a sage. Better earn one cash a day than have myriads at your bed's head. Get happiness out of calamity. II. Cautionary ethics. — Ill-gotten rice boils to nothing. A man is not beguiled by beauty, but by himself. Better suffer from ingratitude than be ungrateful. Judge not from appearances. Be always as care- ful as when you cross a plank bridge. Search the heart and see if you have reason to be ashamed. A quarrel may properly be ended, not begun. Think not lightly of crimes : every one has its penalty. You cannot shut off the sky with your hand. III. Personal character. — True gold dreads not fire. Deep roots fear no wind. A bond is paper ; but the heart is worth a thousand of gold. A good man may be slain, but his good name cannot be marred. The steel cannot behead the innocent. Sincerity moves the gods. Virtue wants no coloring. Nobility is hard to sell. Eyes of flesh see not men of worth. Do your duty and rest in your fate. Best knowledge is self-knowledge. Recede but a step, and the sky is high, the earth broad. The good bee sips not at withered flowers. The more one knows, the more he knows his ignorance. Three days without study makes one's talk insipid. A night's talk with the wise is worth ten years of reading. Better be without books than believe all that is in them. To starve is a slight matter, to lose virtue a great one. IV. Natural laws. — Life and death are destinies. Sesamd is sesam^, and beans are beans. Bitter gourd bears bitter fruit. Harm- ing others is harming self. The willow stuck in the ground without ' Doolittle's Chinese Oiciionary. LITERATURE. 463 design will grow. Innocence pierces to the sun. The dry tree buds again. Joy is on the surface. Man is not perfected without trials. Righteousness is the same for ever. Buddha's laws are without bounds. The old man is like a candle in the wind. The old shield wards off evil. May your old age, like the hills, ascend more and more. The virtuous shall live to be old ; the wicked shall be cut off. V. Trust. — For every grass-blade its drop of dew. Heaven is higher than the gods. As the helmsman guides the ship, so Heaven man. Above us are the blue heavens : God is looking down. Heaven turns no deaf ear to the distressed. The good rains know their season. The wild birds have no garners, but the wide world is before them. In time of trouble embrace Buddha's foot. Buddha is father and mother. The great Watcher is on high, compassionate savior of the sailor. The mercy-ship sails everywhere.' VI. The all-seeing gods. — Heaven sees what is invisible to us. In the ear of Heaven, whispers sound like the thunder ; in the eyes of the gods our secret thoughts are clear as lightning. The smallest desire to do good, unseen by man, is known above. VII. The soul. The spiritual essence goes everywhere. All are of Buddha's essence. To mind there is no far nor near. Mind is infinite. In one's fate is a saving star. VIII. Humanities. — Children are one's heart and life. The son pays the father's debts. A filial spirit moves heaven and earth. Two lotus-flowers on one stem ; the phoenixes in concert : marriage is or- dained in heaven. One's parents never do wrong : brothers are hard to find. Good men seek each other. Buddha's heart and a genie's hand. Preserve all who live : all hearts are alike, and all look upward. IX. Miscellaneous. — Nine women in ten are jealous. A woman's virtue and a wife's jealousy are without limit. The bamboo makes a good child. A rebel who succeeds is emperor ; one who fails is a high- wayman. Excess in politeness is sure sign of falseness. Three thou- sand laws and five hundred books ; but it depends on your free will > Compare sentences from the Hindu Hitofadtsa, &c , in the first volume of the present work, on India. 464 STRUCTURES. whether you are good or bad. The gods honor the sentences of the wise. 2. From " The Precious Mirror of the Heart " ^ we take the following : — I. Indolence comes easily to the poor, arrogance to the rich ; to the comfortable, extravagance ; to the cold and hungry, theft. When food and dress are according to thy station, and thou hast joy therein, why consult lots ? II. When all love you, try yourself; when all hate you, do the same. When you see good or evil in another, see if you have it : this is to progress in virtue. Better teach your son the classics than win yellow gold. First piety and love, then letters, is the student's true way. The successful who looks not for misfortune is blind. III. How shall not men withdraw from him who forsakes himself? He who knows his true place, and stands in it, shall never blush. He who bears musk is fragrant of himself : what need to place himself in the wind ? A pure mirror will not receive the dust of an antelope's foot. A great territory is not worth so much to one as the least of talents in his own person. He who drops his head, hearing praise, and is glad to be told of his faults, is a sage. A true officer fears not death. To give unpleasant advice to a prince, as to his duty, is to honor him. The official needs public spirit and pure hands. IV. To plan is man's, to accomplish is Heaven's. Whoso ap- proaches a pearl, becomes red ; or ink, becomes black ; or a wise man, becomes enlightened ; or a fool, foolish. Recompense follows good and evil conduct, as the shadow the substance. Heaven leaves none without income, as earth no plant without root. When the spirits of wisdom try the secret things, they send not good fortune in return for rich offerings, nor misfortunes on account of ceremonial neglects. V. Nothing can surpass piety. If it looks up to Heaven, wind and rain come in their seasons ; if it reaches out to earth, all things have prosperous ending ; if it go forth to men, one attains all riches. Pearls waste in using : piety blesses for ever. VIII. If thou seest another do good, publish it; if evil, hide it. Hearest thou of another's sins, be it as if thou hadst heard reproach of ' Translated by Plath, Bay. Ak. d. tViss., July, 1863. The arrangement by numbeni i« the same as before. LITERATURE. 465 tiiy father and mother ; the ear may hear, but let not the tongue speak it. Join not their company who speak evil of others. It is joy to see a good man ; to hear of a good deed ; to speak a good word ; to fulfil a good aim. Sweep the snow from thy own door : spy not at the frost on another's tiles. Hinder not the laborer ; insult not the good ; let the traveller have the roadway ; let the old carry no burdens ; hate contention ; help thy neighbor. The hate thou keepest for a day, a thousand years will not root out. To return hate with kindness is like throwing water on snow : to return hate with hate is like a wolf look- ing at a worm. Is one good to me, let me be good to him ; is he evil, let me still be good : how then can he hate me ? A beautiful word is like a poem that sheds glory : a genial word is like bells, harps, and lutes. Communion with the good is a fragrance of flowers that fills the neighborhood. 3. A few sentences may be added from other selections out of the same work by Davis and Williams.-^ Misfortunes issue where diseases enter, — at the mouth. What is whispered in the ear is heard miles away. The gods cannot help one who loses opportunities. Dig your well before you are thirsty. Swim with one foot on the ground. Forbearance is the jewel of home. A great man never loses the simplicity of a child. Prefer right to kin- dred (in patronage). He who soars not, suffers not by a fall. He who combats himself is happier than he who contends with others. The heart of man, at a foot's distance, cannot be known. Better not be, than be nothing. If the blind lead the blind, both go to the pit. One desires to hide his tracks, and walks on the snow. Correct yourself with the same rigor that you correct others : excuse others with the indulgence you show yourself. 4. These admirable sayings have been translated by Lister : ^ — Man has ten thousand plans for himself: God but one for him. man cries, " Now, now : " God says, " Not yet, not yet." A good Man protects three villages. Let your ideas be round and your con- duct square. Right heart need not fear evil seeming. God drives no man to despair. One day of wedded life deserves a hundred days of kindness. > Davis's CAiutsi, Vol. II. ; Williams's Mid. Kingd. I. 587. ' China Rtv., November and December, 1874. 30 466 STRUCTURES. 5. Kindred to these are the cheerful Foo-chow prov- erbs : — Heaven never turns a deaf ear to the distressed heart. In one's fate is a saving star. Fleshly eyes cannot perceive men of worth. A thousand pieces of gold cannot purchase one wish from the heart. Adapt yourself to the situation, and listen for Heaven. 6. The following dignify the utilitarian test : ^ — Do not imitate useless men ; do not do useless things ; do not read useless books ; do not speak useless words. If you recognize the limits of speech, your faults will be fewer ; of eating and drinking, your maladies ; of desire and fancy, your covetous wishes ; of rejoicing, your depressions. You may sit beside a man, while a thousand mountains hide his mind. He who follows craft and deceit is like the flower of a day. It is better to do good than to burn incense ; to dismiss hatred, than to seek escape from evil by repeating the name of Buddha ; to have nothing, than to steal in order to make gifts ; to be faithful in private relations, than to seek favor from men in power. If you have not passed the bitterness of starvation, you know not the blessings of abundance ; if not through the parting of death, you know not the joy of unbroken union ; if not through calamity, the pleasure of security ; if not through storms, the luxury of calm. 7. The ethical capacity of the Manchus should not be omitted.^ If you receive an ox, give back a horse. Act with kindness, but do Manchu not exact gratitude. A good word has heat enough for three proverbs, winters : a hard one wounds like six months of cold. To yield to Heaven is to save one's self Give by day, and your reward shall spring by night. If there is too much rice in the kitchen, there are starving people on the road. Help another helps yourself. Drink less and learn more. The spirits know your secret sins. The white clouds pass ; the blue heaven abides. Noble natures are calm and content. The song of a dying bird is plaintive : the words of a dying man are just. How can man reward the care of Heaven ? Mock not, O young man, at gray hairs ! How long does the opening flower keep its bloom ? The wise place virtue in thought. * From a Collection of Pearls^ by Nevius. ' See Rochet, SetUences Mantchoux ; Wollheim, Ziif/. Sdmma. Vdlk. des Orients, U 663,664. LITERATURE. 467 Think reasonably, be strong for virtue, lean on humanity, and in a\', things be content. Judge not by appearance : the sea cannot fee scooped up in a tumbler. The wise questions himself, the foolish others. When the prince goes to school, he is like other boys. The highest official is subject to the law. Whoso is too subservient to masters will reap shame. A good subject cannot serve two masters : lay not two saddles on one horse. A minister who fears death will not be faithful. V. HISTORY. HISTORY. A FAIR comparison of the modern newspaper with the ■^ monumental inscriptions of ancient races, as Ancient data for the discovery of historical facts, might ^'"^'"°'^- . , , ' o ern records result in a revisal of accepted opinions as to the compared. accrediting quality of our all-recording press. It would contrast the simple themes and the official character of those older archives with the bewildering complexity and irresponsibility of the material we are gathering for the future historian. It would mark what manifold interests are now at work to vary the modes of conceiving and representing the same events. It would observe not only the continuance of the old perturbations of human vision by myth-making desires and beliefs, by national prejudices and passions, and by theological dogmas, but also many new features in that ambiguity of human language which arises from differences of personal culture and experience, and increases with the number of classes who get expres- sion in writing and speech. We should, perhaps, find it difficult to state wherein the objective sense of historical truth is the gainer by the prodigious mass of details which we are accumulating with the full powers of the best re- cording machinery ever known. The fact seems to be that our advantage over the ancients consists by no means in the truthfulness of our records, but in the possession of a scientific sense which can sift out errors by the test of natural law. Our use of this matchless instrument is, however, far from being made 472 STRUCTURES. effective by a corresponding conscientiousness in the record of what most concerns our life. The progress of science within the last half-century, in deciphering and verifying the records of Oriental nations, has therefore far outrun its success in solving the still more difficult problems of modern history. Our documentary resources blind us, and we grope amidst conflicting illu- sions. In the abundance of communication there is equal scope for interpretation : the data become crowded, con- fused, indecisive. We claim to be " making history " faster than any age before us, because every act has unexampled breadth of immediate effect ; but we may as truly be said to unmake history in the obscure and untrustworthy data we leave for future decipherment on all questions, bio- graphical, literary, political, or social ; imposing a task more difficult, and perhaps less conclusive in its results, than the study of cuneiform tablet or hieroglyphic scroll. The real way in which epochs " make history " is doubt- History less in the transmission of their qualities as histori- transmits j,^] conditions, rather than in the record of definite qualities rather than historical facts. An unconscious revelation of ^'^' character is written on the products of an age or a people, and compensates us for all the difficulties that beset a critical study of details. To interpret this psycho- logical testimony is not the province of science, which can only bring the data into the best form for use by a higher tribunal. Interpretation belongs to moral intelligence and spiritual sympathy. Historical facts are no better than fictions till they come under the touch of these magnetic hands. The real interest of remote times and records is in their Its psycho- bearing on the progress of mankind. It is when logical they are regarded in this aspect that their psycho- valueisof , r , . , . ^. , , \,. primary logical meaning becomes indispensable. It is a importance, gj-eat satisfactiou to observe such achievements of HISTORY. 473 positive studies as the confirmation of Manetho's list of the Egyptian dynasties, and of the Chaldean series of Berosus ; the rich harvest of names, epochs, conquests, race-relations, religious and social institutions, opened by the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets ; and the hopes thus afforded that we shall obtain better knowledge than we now possess as to the credibility of the old Chinese records of similar aspect. But the facts thus proved or promised are insig- nificant, compared with the endless questions of fact they will bring into discussion ; while, as materials for estimat- ing the character of these races and their relations to the laws of human nature, they possess a value quite independ- ent of all such questions. Merely to know what is recorded is of more importance than to decide the more difficult question of its historical truth ; since it at any rate repre- sented what the age or people believed, which is more to our purpose than verifying the account of circumstances that came and went, and of which not a thousand mil- lionth part can ever be recovered. It is in vain that we seek to reverse this precedence of the spirit to the fact. Thus the pursuit of monumental studies in the hope of proving the infallibility of the Hebrew Scrip- tures in matters of historical detail is an illusion. It is not only liable to incessant perversion of the facts, but forgets that the presumed inspiration is itself contrary to all laws of mind, and would, were it possible, defeat that very uni- versality of law through which alone historical research can be of any use to us. What concerns us is to discover the human forces of which civilizations are the expression, the unconscious and slowly developing unities that bring their diversities of form into mutual service. While so much is now being brought to view by which these higher objects are furthered, we must, then, be con- tent to recognize the doubts that continue to hang around the details of ancient records as a part of the constant con- 474 STRUCTURES. ditions of human knowledge. Let us be at least as thank- ful for any light thrown on the psychological significance of what we do know of past times and races, as for the minute linguistic or other circumstantial discussions by which specific facts are pursued. What though we cannot see with bodily eyes the detail doings involved in what these old upturned strata contain .' There is no human record that does not reveal much more than what men say or do, in its witness to what they are. How interesting, for example, to note the unconscious imagina- fuuction of imagination in the construction of all s^crive™' S'^^^t civilizations ! No ancient people is so prosaic ofpre-his- as not to have antedated its history from a mythi- tonc times, ^^j epoch, usually of vast extent and under rulers of ideal endowments. The explanation of this fact lies probably in the mystery of unbounded time ; that vast and vague conception whose envelopment of conscious mind, as its proper space, is the condition of all human experience whatever. The shoreless sea of an unknown past, filled by science with the preparatory steps of evolution, must be peopled for unscientific races by forces adequate to produce what they most prize in their own civilizations. In thus presuming cosmic or personal powers,^ superior to the re- sults they are believed to have effected, the imagination is infinitely more logical than the supposed " science " which ascribes higher stages to the inherent force of lower ones — the oak to the acorn, or the mind to primitive plasm — as mej-e outcome and product. To that higher procedure of imagination, where science has not supplanted it with the still higher perception of invariable laws, there is probably no exception in the history of races. That such assertion of the national ideal, as having been in some sense master * According to recent comparative mythology, a cycle of " solar myths," impressions from cosmic phenomena, precedes personal- legends, which etymology shows to be their unconscious transformation. HISTORY. 475 of the world from the beginning, is involved in the first consciousness of national life itself, lends a dignity to the early stages of progress ; crowning them with the graces of ideality, creative thought, and loyalty to ancestral de- scent. Different forms are assumed by these mythic construc- tions of pre-historic time ; but the law itself is equally apparent, whether in the enormous periods of the oldest Indian, Egyptian, and Chaldean mythology, in the vast supernatural powers ascribed to the ante-human Buddhas, or in the milder longevity accorded by the Hebrews to their patriarchs, and the less florid style of miracle correspond- ing to their monarchical faith, and rendering their traditions inconspicuous among those freer blooms of the world- garden of myths. The matter-of-fact Chinese are no exception to the rule. Their rationalistic genius, however, is apparent, TheChi- even m the way m which they have conceived their exception, primitive history ; and in this respect, as in many y^' ?''°°" others, it brings them into nearer relations with here, the best modern science than belong to the other Oriental races. It is true they have fabulous dynasties, beginning with Pwan-ku, as first organizer of chaos, and reaching on for hundreds of thousands of years ; lines heavenly, eanhly, and human, all previous to Fo-hi and Hwang-te, mythical founders of the State.^ This primal world was peopled with grotesque, semi-human beings and elemental prodi- gies.^ But such fables originated in the later degenerate schools of the Tao-sse, and in books composed during the Han, or possibly as late as the twelfth century.^ They do not represent the national faith. Neither of the recog- * See Mayers*s CAin. Manual (1874) ; also Mint. cotu. les ChinoiSf Vol. XIll. ; Biot^ Jmrn. As., February, 1846. * For pictures of these mythical rulers, see Chin. Repos., 1842. * Cibot, Mitn. cone, les Chinois^ I. lor, 127, 158. 4/6 STRUCTURES. nized historians pretends to commence history before Fo- hi, 2,850 B.C., — a very moderate antiquity compared with the claims of Buddhist or Egyptian dynasties.^ No intel ligent Chinese believes in the Pwan-ku legends any more than we do in Jack the Giant Killer or Scandinavian troll- wives. Even the dynastic lists down to the eighth century, B.C., Soberness are far from being accepted by these historians historiTnT ^^ equally credible with the later annals. But their of China, soberness appears still more in their rationalistic treatment of history itself. R6musat said of Sse-ma-thsian, who compiled the Sse-ki during the Han, and who has been called the Father of Chinese History, that in his annals of two thousand five hundred years he never ad- mitted a fabulous account. It would probably be more correct to say that he admitted no miracles.^ The reader of the Tong-kien of Sse-ma-kwang,^ his descendant (elev- enth century), will be surprised to find in this standard history of an Oriental nation, written before the conception of history had dawned upon the Christian mind, a work as severely exclusive of miracle as Tacitus, — a work as secu- lar as Macaulay or Grote, as simple and direct as Herodo- tus, and as noble as Thucydides. The Shu-king, although hardly a historical authority. Of the and containing many incredible traditions, also shu-king ^yQjfjs miracle-legends : and three books, offered as belonging to it on the recovery of its text, and called " Natural Prodigies," have fallen away for want of repute. The " Bamboo Books," a very old chronicle, running parallel with the Shu, are also, in their original form, free from this element ; and the mass of fable which accom- 1 Czrre^ a L' A nczen Orienf,Vo\. I. The monuments place Menes 5,000 years B.C. Seo Brugsch, Mariette Bey, Owen, before Intern. Congr. of Orient., 1870. * His accounts of Yao and Shun may be legendary. Chalmers {Oriff- of Chinese) liken* them to Geoffrey of Monmouth*s account of the Britons before Cxsar^s invasion. » Translated by De Mailla, as Hist. Gin. de la Chine. HISTORY. 477 panics the text, probably from much later hands, is treated with entire contempt by scholars.-' Confucius and Mencius are equally sober historians, and no monarch previous to Yao is mentioned in their qi uter writings.^ Sse-ma-thsian's caution in receiving the writers. old legends is illustrated by his commencing his history at a period later than Fo-hi, in this point falling behind the faith of his people, — a national commission being ap- pointed somewhat later, which completed the annals from sources brought to light in the revival of old literature under the Han.^ A supposed copy of a lost history of the most ancient date (the Ou-fen) was set aside by these crit ics for want of evidence, though allowed to be mainly in accord with what was already believed.* The praises of P^re Amyot, contrasting the sobriety of the Chinese historians with the credulity of chroniclers in most other nations, who in similar case would have drawn up labored genealogies and made a wilderness of mythic fancies about Fo-hi and his predecessors, do not seem to be overstrained. These scholars were in fact ripened fruits of the institution of official historiographers. Their function was to study with care the national dy- ^^^[,15. nastic annals, recorded and sealed up from public torbgra- view by these officials age after age, and to com- ^ "^ pare them with other historical material, amply provided by the national tastes, — vases, inscriptions, astronomical records, and oral traditions. They recognized as fully as we do the distinction between legendary lore and authentic record, and are as fully on their guard against supernatural- ism as the critical European inquirer. The writers of the great Chinese histories belonged to a family famous for ^ See Legge, Prolegomena to the Sku, 106. * The Hitse, appendix to the Y-king, is now ascribed to a different hand from Confucius. The Kza^Uf which recounts fables in his name, is not received as genuine history. s De Mailla, Pri/., p. 25. * Grosier^s Prelim. Disc, to De Mailla^ p. 34. Other similar instances in the Letters ie Priret. 478 STRUCTURES. many generations for their achievements in this difficult function, a family whose reputation was a national trea- sure. The father of Sse-ma-thsian, consigning to him on his death-bed the task of continuing his great work, said : " Our ancestors have been illustrious in historical func- tions from the days of the third dynasty : study their writ- ings." Like the great Italians, these high officials were at once statesmen and scholars, wrote books and led armies. The "Grand Historiographer" was a man of the world, a magistrate, who had practical knowledge of the charac- ters of men and of the events of the time ; and was edu- cated in the closely criticised task of investigating the truth without fear or favor. The record of the family just Sse-ma- mentioned was very honorable. Sse-ma-thsian was aisian ; deprived of his office and condemned to death for Sse-ma- ^ kwang. taking the part of an officer defeated in battle, against Emperor, court, and public ; but the sentence was commuted, and he returned with greater devotion to his studies, holding the office of literary chancellor till his death.^ Sse-ma-kwang, quick-witted enough when a boy to save the life of a companion by breaking the vase in which he was drowning, and in manhood sagacious enough to suggest that an eclipse, turning out to be less than was expected, was not a compliment offered by the sun to the Emperor of China, but a sign of ignorance on the part of the astronomers, was also remanded to private life for opposing the imperial will. He too was reinstated and covered with honors, which he in vain sought to escape. His life was an ovation, his death a national grief; his funeral was honored by the closing of the shops, by kneeling of women and children around his bier, and by prostrations before his picture. By a curious turn, his honors were afterwards reversed, his tomb overturned, and his writings burned ; but reinstatement at once followed, ' Amyot; Ma-touan-lin ; R^musat, Nouv. Mil. Asiai., II. 132-146. HISTORY. 479 and his name was permanently inscribed in the temple of • Confucius as " Prince of Letters." ^ Ma-touan-lin (thirteenth century) resigned office for the sake of studies which resulted in his vast cyclopse- Ma-touan- dia, of which it has been said that " one has but ""• •to choose his subject, he can study it in Ma-touan-lin."^ From this work, as has been stated, the greater part of European information concerning China down to very recent times has been derived, not always with the proper acknowledgment. Ma-touan-lin called his work, " Profound Researches in Ancient Monuments." And its sources demanded critical studies that justified the title. The standard Chinese histories are results of repeated revisals of the older works. Sse-ma-thsian apparently had at his command, in the treasures of the ancestral temple of the House of Tcheou, every form of literary monument, except the modern popular journal.^ The literary resources of Ma-touan-lin must have been almost unlimited. The fact must be borne in mind that these men repre- sent the spirit of Chinese civilization, the best , . '- ^ 1 heir effects of a culture which made them quite as critical ca- competent to detect signs of popular ignorance as ''^"'^' the literary critics of England or America. And when we contrast this realistic culture with the inability of the Hindus and the older Hebrews to distinguish fully between fiction and fact, and with the inaptness of other ancient nations to write pure history in accordance with nature, we may be justified in the conclusion that the Chinese, above all these nations except perhaps the Greek, have been gifted with the " historic sense." They have clear consciousness of an objective basis, independent of constructions by fancy, and corresponding to the modern conception of scientific law. • R^musat, II. 149-165. * Ibid., 170. * Flath, IVun. Ak. d' Wissensch.^ January, 1870. 480 STRUCTURES. • We have observed that this rationalistic spirit has not Peculiar forbidden imagination to create its ideal pictures of form of prehistoric times. Yet the sense of a real distinc- ideaWion ^Jon bctwccn the naturally possible and impossible, °^ ^'^y and the reference of old records to the test of pres- ent experience in the laws of life, have prevailed in„ China as nowhere else in the ancient world. The monu- mental records of Egypt are distinctly historical ; but they are intermixed with a minute mythology, the work of a priesthood. The Assyrian exhibit more of the legendary element, the more their riches are revealed. Neither show any signs of the conscientious criticism displayed by writings like the Sse-ki and the Tong-kien. The Hebrew writers, from Genesis to Josephus, are uncon- scious of any test of current traditions by constant natural laws. And the same must be said of early Christian literature, and of the whole development of the " Christian consciousness " in relation to the life of Christ. This superiority in historic perception is partially due to the habit of referring every thing to concrete social and public uses, uncontrolled by religious classes or institutions. In the ideal picture given of the age of Fo-hi and his The age of succcssors, we find no nearer approach to super- Fo-hi and naturalism than the reference to a very early period kings. of what is properly the result of later growth. The Close reia- longevity of these patriarchs is so controlled by tions with , nature and good sensc, as in no case to exceed very much the "^"^ natural span of life. Their achievements are not wonder-working, but useful inventions, which reappear, wearisomely enough, in every picture of the mythic cycles, however remote and fanciful.^ Even Fo-hi's all-sufficient diagrams are a derivation of writing from natural forms. The utilitarian instinct, keeping close to positive knowledge, is lifted by the religion of patriarchalism into a force of * Mim. cone, les ChinoU^ XIII., pp. 176-214. HISTORY. 481 imagination capable of building with some freedom on « these fields of primitive life. What the Chinese throw back into this period is what most conduces to well-being and positive civility : they personify the main facts of this kind under such names as Shin-nung (Spirit husbandman), Tseih' (Grain), Se-eh (Writing), Hwang-te (Great Ruler). Letters, husbandry, cultivation ; marriage, music, rites, medicine ; weights and measures ; commerce and vehicles ; the compass and silk manufacture ; historical bureaux, as- tronomical studies, the cycle of sixty for measuring time, and the worship of Shang-te, the Supreme Ruler, — form a picture of patriarchal forecast for the benefit of mankind. In the order of development given to these useful arts, letters and governmental organization precede agriculture and even the use of weapons, which is the logical order of precedence in the national mind. Sse-ma-kwang, however, true to his clear sense, though beginning with Hwang-te, yet passes directly on to Yao and Shun, without wasting time on such minor questions as origin. Like Quetzalcoatl and Huayna- Capac in American tradition, Hermes and Thoth in Egyptian, Kadmus in Greek, Tubal-Cain in Hebrew, the fabled progenitors of Chinese arts and sciences show the form given to primitive patriarchalism by the loyalty of the industrial nations to their own past.^ The sober lives of these races are reflected in this construction of early history, as the unbridled imagination of more passionate and dreamy ones is content only with solar and lunar dynasties in gigantic play of gods and demigods with the elements and forms of Nature. Not less in contrast with the natural good sense of the ' Tseih, in the Shi-king, is born of a shepherdess who treads on a "foot-print of God ;" apparently an agricultural myth (III. ». u. i.) This ode is not regarded as belonging to the so-called "correct class." ' A precedent period of " solar myths" is not here discernible ; though such an epoch may be intimated for the " Turanian races " as a whole, by some of the Mongol and Finnish legends, especially in the Kalevala (see Gastrin, Finnische Mj/ihologU, pp. 52, 57, 274), or in the Solar Deity of the Japanese. Bumouf. Congr. Irtemat. d. Orient., 1873). 31 482 STRUCTURES. Chinese historians are the efforts of Christian mission- conirasted arics to bring these old traditions into conformity tknTt-"^ with their own scriptures and system of beliefs, tempts to Astonished at the evidences of an extended civili- thrBibie zation in China, at a period close upon that which and Chi- ^Yie Bible describes as having destroyed the tribes nese tradi- , tion. of the earth, and bound to reconcile Chinese certi- tude with Bible infallibility, some of them threw aside the Hebrew Scriptures for the Septuagint, where a different mode of counting the ages of the Patriarchs enabled them to carry back the deluge for some hundreds of years. The Jesuit Riccioli went so far as to intercalate in the Septuagint itself a space of five hundred years. The Fa- thers were divided between accepting these devices and rejecting Fo-hi and Chinese antiquity as anti-Biblical.^ Some thought Zoroaster the founder of the Empire ; others insisted that Ham diffused his "wicked doctrine" there: but, says another, " as Ham and Zoroaster were the same man, that makes no difference." "Dr. Paul," says Navarr6te, " thought the idolatry of the three Equal Ones (in Buddhism) was an emblem of the Blessed Trinity, which he might- as well let alone." ^ Another theory made the Chinese kings emigrants from Babel, and even Hebrew patriarchs, who had carried Noachic precepts with them, of which, however, not a vestige could be found. Types of the life of Christ were constructed in abundance. As late as 1837, it was asserted in the "Annales de Philosophic Chretienne" that the deluges of Noah and Yu were the same, and that the " Five (primitive) Chinese Rulers " were Adam and his family.^ Dr. Speer says: "Which of the solitary household saved in the ark emigrated to the Ho- ang-ho, no inspired chronicle relates ; but evidently Fo-hi is related to Noah, and Shin-nung is probably Shem" !* * De Mailla, 1. 175 ; Mim. cane, les Chinois^ XV. 261, XIII. 77. ' Churchill's Koj'iJa'M. ■ Carre I. 352. * Oldest and Newest Empire, 'pp. 3b, ij HISTORY. 483 Yet nothing can be more unlike the Hebrew and Christian myths of man's original Eden, intimacy with God, and fall, and of a ruined race restored andHe- by Incarnation, than the account of the original '"'''^ condition of mankind given in the serious old Chi- veiyuo- nese chronicles.-^ It foreshadows Darwin and mod- ''''°' em science, and is a curious commentary on the supposed inability of the Chinese to conceive of progress. The primitive teachers of mankind are shown in the picture books as semi-brute shapes, and improve ^„j,,ag, in their human aspects as we follow down the Darwin- series. ^ The first stages of the ascent are de- '™' scribed with much insight, as a change from roving to set- tled life, learning to make huts, to produce fire, to cook food, to worship and give thanks, to hold markets, and converse by knotted cords ; to drop promiscuous sexual relations and live in families. We have here mythic license itself recognizing the slow laws of growth ; the eternal necessity of conforming to conditions, and paying the price of what is obtained ; the right of reason over passion ; the indispensableness of obedience, mutual help, and religious belief, as bases of social progress.^ • In the Hebrew patriarchal tradition, Adam gives names to the creatures ; in the Chinese, Fo-hi teaches ^he cw- the art of writing. Life in Eden consists in tend- ""=> ^e- ,T 1 ... ,.r brew, and ing a garden planted by the Lord ; primitive life on Greek the Hoang-ho, in the art of sowing seeds and grow- ^<^s^°^- ing grains for public use. In the one legend, labor is a penalty for sin ; in the other, a germ of civilization. In the one, the rejected tiller of the ground kills his brother herdsman, and is cursed ; in the other, agriculture is the ground of social life. In the one, Abel, the transient (the > Se Matlla, I. p. i. " CAin. Repos., Feb. and Mar., 1842. • Compare the fine description in Juvenal (Sat, XV.) of the origin of society in instincts df afEection and mutual help. 484 STRUCTURES. nomad), inherits the promise ; in the other, the fixed in- habitant with his industry and social order. With the Chinese, the Astronomical Tower is the oldest public building; with the Hebrew, the first effort of men at mutual understanding and study of the heavens is toppled down upon their heads, and they are scattered by a God jealous of human knowledge. The glory of Abraham and Lot is to wander about with troops of camels and asses ; that of Fo-hi and the rest to redeem the wilderness for permanent uses. The pith of the one tradition is in cove- nants with the tribal god, in circumcision, in tests of obe- dience to uncomprehended commands ; that of the other, in intelligent invention, rational obedience, and social im- provement. The one set of legends disparages surround- ing races, and especially the settled tribes, and asserts their inferiority to the chosen seed ; the other, with less imagination, but greater breadth, makes the glory of the " hundred families " consist in absorbing other races into their own development of natural resource. The one lays its foundations in supernatural authority over human thought and conduct ; the other, in the right of the human to natural self-culture. The happy Greeks begin with a golden age, — life without labor, disease, or grief, on the free bounties of the cosmos ; followed first by a penalty for the gifts of fire and useful knowledge, and then by the destruction of all human blessings except hope.-* In the Hebrew legend, there is an intenser ethical feel- ing ; in the Greek, a more brilliant aesthetic interest : and both are serious efforts to interpret the human conscious- ness and the law of growth. But both fail of that sober reliance on self-discipline, and that conformity to the familiar facts of experience as significant of human good, on which at last civilization must rest. ' Hesiod's ProTtiethetis a-nd Pandora. HISTORY. 485 It is entirely in accordance with these ethnic qualities that Chinese authorities place the opening of au- ■ . , ^ ^ o OpeniQg 01 thentic history no earlier than the eighth cen- genuine tury B.C. This is the period at which Confucius (.?) t^feSi^ opens his " Spring and Autumn Classic," the oldest century pure chronicle now extant, though the evidence is strong that much older ones were extant in his day.-' No authentic inscription dates earlier . than the eighth century. Positive records of eclipses are traceable no further back.^ Late research arrives at nothing beyond approximate dates of the older dynasties.^ But all this, which is recognized by Chinese criticism also, does not warrant our dismissing their careful compilations, based, as they tell us, on official records of the States in early times. Such a ground-work of historical com- 3^, j„ positions cannot possibly be pure invention. We ="'■" may doubt that historiographers were appointed workcer- as far back as the Hia ; but that the office was '^'"■ of great antiquity, and preservation of comparatively faithful records probable, there seems no reason for de- nying in face of all the documents of the nation.^ Nor can they have been lost to the great historians of the Han and Soung. Even after the fires of T'sin a single century sufficed to show Prince Ho-kien in possession of several thousand volumes, and the lists of the Han cover every department of study with works that had survived the barbarian edict. Historical researches are believed to have been greatly stimulated by the materials brought together with immense industry during the period which succeeded the persecution of letters. * Tso-chuen ( Commentary on the Tchun-isieu). ' See Plath, Bay. Ak., June, 1867, p. 13 • Chalmers, in Legge ; Biot, your. d. Savata, April, 1840. For two thousand years before Confucius, there are but two recorded eclipses: one of which, at best, is uncertain ; the other {Shi-king-, II., iv. ix.) could not have been visible in China. * The earliest chapters of the Shu-king mention wntten authorities. The Li-ki describes the duties of these officials ; the Tcheou-li mentions annalists of the States and of the interior. De Mailla gives authorities for the antiquity of historical b\ireaus. 486 STRUCTURES. In fine, the assured and sober tone, as well as the great detail of the historians, persuade us that their work cannot but be founded on such documents as they claim to have used. What was thought of the nature of these sources may be illustrated by a conversation recorded of Tai-tsung. To his request to be allowed to see what the Board of History had set down about his government, the officer replied : — " No emperor has ever to this day been permitted to do that." "Would you write it down, if I did wrong?" "Prince, I should be filled with pain ; but could I, with such a function as mine, dare be false ? Nay, more ; this very conversation will itself be put, in full, into the Annals." ' The incessant critical study of his own literature shows Historical that thc conscieuce of the Chinese lay specially of th^"°" ^^ ^^^ historical sense. His pride in the control Chinese, of royal caprice by official recorders, and in the annals of the State, as seal of its continuity, was so great that it goes far towards guaranteeing fidelity in the record. The " Twenty-four Dynastic Histories," constructed on a uniform model, and preserved with care, prove the extent of the materials and a thorough system in the collection and use of them. Judging from Wylie's analysis of their contents, we should suppose they aimed at something like a photograph of the empire in all departments, — political, scientific, literary, biographical, — yet as registers, rather than constructed histories. Most of them are known to have existed more than a thousand years ago, in a single collection, and two have been added during the present dynasty. In three thousand books they cover the whole history of China, and though doubtless of unequal value, are subject to the constant revision of fresh scholars.^ * De Mailla, Pref., p. v. * Wylie's Notes; Schott's Besckr. d. Ch. Lit.; Kauffer (Z?m Chin, vor Ahrahanit Zeitt pp. 55-58), who endeavors to prove the certitude of old Chinese history. HISTORY. 487 It has been suggested at the opening of this chapter that, while what a people has actually done will hardly the shu- get correctly recorded, the substance of its doing '^^^^^ will inevitably appear in the quality of its literature, data. We have seen that, however free of the miraculous element the great Chinese histories may be, the politico-industrial ideal itself gave a mythical stamp to certain portions of the sober records. Yet their testimony is as distinct as possible as to the qualities of character which went to the making of Chinese history. And down to the Tcheou period at least, the value of the Shu-king, as now accessible to our study, consists substantially in this fact. Whether this work be, as Cuvier called it, " a moral and political romance," or, as Cibot asserted, " the oldest and most remarkable monument of antiquity that we possess," or whether the truth lies between these two judgments, it seems plain that its object is to provide an ethico-political norm ^ for educational purposes rather than to present a continuous history. It has no chronology. It is a collec- tion of old records, registers, maxims, edicts, royal and ministerial utterances, all tending to illustrate the duties of ruler and ruled. Records as late as the sixth century indorsed the state- ment of Confucius that he derived it from ancient docu- ments, inventing nothing. The first reference of it to him is four hundred years after his death. Its preface is no longer regarded as the work of Confucius ; and it is still open whether he did more than further its transmission from earlier times.^ Faber, on the other hand, finding no earlier reference to > It is so entitled by the Manchus. Observe, too, the titles of the chapters : " Canon of Shun," "Admonition of Kaou," "Great Edict," "Counsels of Yu." The word Shu- king means the Book of Records. 2 This is Pan-kou*s opinion, who seems to trace it back to the cosmos itself, and refers to Confucius merely the re-editing, as in the case of the Vking. (Pauthier in fmrn. Asiai. September and October, 1867.) 488 STRUCTURES. it than by the writers of the Han, doubts if it was based on ancient annals at all.^ Julien claimed that the diversities of style in the different fragments were the strongest proof of antiquity. Legge draws a similar conclusion from various matters of detail.^ The work itself appeals to earlier rec- ords, opening with : " They who have studied antiquity say." Plath maintains the validity of the whole, finding its substance in Sse-ma-thsian. The severest negative criticism comes from native schol- ars. Their keenness and candor has anticipated Western criticism, and thoroughly tested every chapter, with much damage to the reputation of many of them.^ Farther criti- cism has swept away the authority of Gan-kwo's older authorized text (Han), and he has acquired the title of " the false Kung." Nevertheless, Dr. Legge sustains it, as supported by the oldest authorities. He holds the narra- tive to be in the main genuine, with the exception of the prominence given to Yao and Shun in the earliest chapters, probably by additions made in the Tcheou ; and believes the work to be substantially the same as that known to Confucius and his school. On the whole testimony, the Shu-king seems to repre- its basis ^^"^ ^ ^'^'^y °^ traditions based on ancient records, in ancient though not by any means to be a verbal transcript of these. The mythology that has grown up around the " Bamboo Chronicle " shows how differently the Shu-king would have fared had it not been kept to the old simplicity by a regard for historic truth. In their original form, the " Bamboo Books " enable us to control the earlier legends of the Shu itself. They modestly detail the national growth from the simplest beginnings, and allow far less pretension to the monarchy of Yao and Shun than the Shu-king ; the Shu bears many marks of belonging to a period of histori- cal study. The references in Confucius and Mencius con- " Leire d. Con/uc. • Prolegomena, p. 50. 3 Legge, pp. 35-39 HISTORY. 489 firm its main outlines.^ Its oldest names have no mythical meanings, like Adam, Abel, Abraham, but are apparently historical. The possibility of written records at a very early period is shown by the very nature and growth of the written signs. In regard to the main details of the earliest chapters, the best Chinese authors agree. They accept the ar- xhe first rangement of the people by Yao according to the "Chapters of demands of agriculture, and with reference to the seasons ; the appointment of Shun on the ground of virtues proved by heavy family trials ; Shun's division of the State into twelve provinces, and his administration by Boards, tours of inspection, and the advancement of the best men ; the labors of Yu in leading off the waters of devastating floods ; and the tributes of vassal chiefs to a central ruler. The firm belief in these persons and events is of course no evidence of their reality, but its psychological testimony is none the less effective. The long speeches of kings and councillors may well be due to later times,^ while resting on ancient traditions and ideals of conduct. The famous tribute roll of Yu,'^ in which almost every product known to later China is entered, has been favorably viewed by most critics ; * though Legge regards it as a romance transmitted from the Shang to the Tcheou. The traditions of Yu's labors, read in the sober statements of the Shu-king, have nothing inherently improbable about them. We could not expect positive evidences of very early events in China, since the older literary records were on bamboo, not on 1 See especially iaw-j/B, VIII. 20, 21 ; XIV. 22 ; XX. i ; Menc. III. Pt. 11. ix. ; IV. Pt, I. ii. ; V. Pt. 1. iii. 9 ; VII. Pt 11. xxxviii- Mencius definitely carries back the monarchy to 2300 B.C. ' Biot, yourn. Ar., February, 1846. ' Shu-king, Pt. III. B. i. * Biot, ut ante. Bunsen, whose love of high figures assigns the Chinese fifteen to twenty thousand years of primitive history, considers the Yu-kung to be "as truly a contemporary document as the capitularies of Charlemagne." i^Egyp^s Place, &c., V. s. 287, Germ. ed.). Plath has a similar view of the tribute and the labors of Yu ; and R^musat thought the former AD "inestimable record of the geography of the Empire 2300 years B.C.'* {Nouv.MH. As., II 183.) 490 STRUCTURES. Stone. Antique vases throw little or no light on such questions, except as indicating, in case the opinion of their antiquity is correct, that the arts of writing and registering were, even before the Tcheou dynasty, in full use.^ The " Nine Vases," engraved by Yu to transmit maps of the prov- inces, were believed in later times to have been the safe- guard of the nation, but lost in the river Sse.^ Finally, the much-discussed " Inscription of Yu," supposed to have lain unnoticed on the top of a mountain for three thousand years, and then to have been copied over and over again, has certainly no claim to great antiquity.^ These various opinions illustrate the uncertainty that rests on the origin and age of the early chapters of the Shu. While their naturalism is in favor of their substantial truth, they show unmistakable signs of conformity with later ideals. Even if we allow these chapters the respect due to a chiefvaiue ^^^^^ °^ °^^ rccords, dating many centuries before is psycho- Christianity, their chief value is that of recording p^Mci^ profound elements of national faith. The Shu-king ethical is by no means strictly historical, but ethico-politi- cal : its purpose is to show by examples that the duties of princes to the people, rightly fulfilled, bring bless- ings from Heaven, and opposite conduct public misery and dynastic ruin. The lesson is enforced by wise kings and worthy ministers, in exhortations and warnings of the high- est ethical quality, as well as by tales like the " Metal-bound Coffer," which illustrates nobility in a ruler by his desire to die in place of a brother ; * and the " Hounds of Leu," which teaches the duty of a prince to refuse tributes that merely stimulate his love of pleasure.^ The gaps in the narrative show that no continuous account was aimed at • Pauthier, La Chine, I. 201-305. ' Plath, February, 1867. • Legge, Proleg.^ p. 70. * Shu-kinfff Ft. V. B. vi. • Ibid, Pt v. B. V. HISTORY. 4^1 \ The Shu is not the work of a historian nor of a poet, lit is not allegorical. It is preaching from history. i The deliverance of the State from debauched dynastieip by the heroism of T'ang and Woo, their recognitions ol' duty, their self-criticism on account of the evils of civil war! their appeals to the people in defence of the right of rebeli lion, convey the lesson that this last resort of a people must not be avoided when the offences of rulers are rank. \ Mingled with humility and self-watchfulness, as earnest [ as the energy of these model revolutionists, are exhorta-| tions to be generous amidst natural penalties ; to " add the | statesmanly head to the vigorous hand ; " to remember that 1 " Heaven helps only the good, and that all good acts alike I contribute to good government, all evil ones to disorder ; " " to give heed to the beginning by thinking of the end ; " " to follow the mean, not assuming to be wise, nor throwing the old statutes into confusion." ^ " Reverence " is constantly urged in the sense of a tender consideration for the ancient paths as leading to peace and good will ; for the nicely balanced order of great social relations ; and for the people's voice and good. " I will examine my conduct," says T'ang, " in accordance with the mind of God." ^ Every reign must illustrate the law that government de- pends on the choice of the best and wisest for office, and on studying to respect and imitate them. Thus is "All-wise and All-seeing Heaven taken as pattern," ^ and blessings, not penalties, descend. The religion of the Shu is in three things : faith in righteousness, in the people, in Heaven. A con- Religion Crete virtue: no abstract creed, no class nor caste "ftheshu. interferes from without with the movement of the political order ; celestial wisdom is embodied in institutions, includ- ing official rites as their safeguard and iilial bond ; the true 1 Shti.kine, Pt. V. b. xvn. ' Ibid., Pt. IV. ■>. iii. ' Ibid.. Pt. II. B. vm. 492 STRUCTURES. pirince comes, by the divine appointment of character, to emthrone righteousness ; the overthrow of an evil dynasty is/ the justice of a divine order, whose indications are ever at hand, shown indeed by divination to the wise, though the interpretation must rest with human judgment, rightly vireighing the facts.-^ The student of the Shu is supposed to be capable of reading and taking to heart any amount of didactics on ihese few and simple, yet on the whole very noble, strings. Now and then an elaborate detail of national resources, like the " Tribute of Yu ; " or an ideal construction, like the " Great Plan " of human nature, and the ends of govern- ■ ment ; or the exposition of an official system like the Tcheou, — bears witness to the manifold material to which this polit- ical philosophy could make appeal. Every thing indicates what need was felt of having conduct prearranged down to details to satisfy the love of obedience and steadfast orderly ways. The " Great Plan " ^ sums up the five true ends of living, as long life, riches, health of body and serenity of mind, love of virtue, and a happy death ; and the Six Evils, as misfortune, short life, sickness, sorrow, poverty, wicked- ness, and weakness : a list in which there must be shades of distinction not conveyed in the translation. All this is an early effort at philosophy, not unlike the old Vedic and Greek efforts in the same kind. At the base of the whole Shu-king is the characteristi- Basisintiie cally Chinese faith in an inherent moral sense in universal ^]i j^cu, whosc sauctions are not found in fears of moral sense. hell uor hopes of heaven, and whose acknowledged origin in the " nature of things " leaves no room for an arbitrary divine will. In proof of its distinctness, we may * Ibid., Pt. V. B. IV. Later critics call divination the supetstition of the Shang ; biA scarcely any have repudiated it (Legge, note^ p. 338). * Shu^km^f Pt. V. B. IV. HISTORY. 493 note that concubinage is fully recognized as a constant cause of public disorder, and together with intemperance as at the root of all great dynastic calamities.^ As we come down to the " Age of the Warring States," which ended in the destruction of feudalism, and character- the unity of the empire under the T'sin, a far greater ^"^^°'o^^ distinctness of details indicates that we are on solid of histoH- historical ground. The object of narrative seems ^^j°^™' here to be almost wholly biographical. The Sse-ki The dvU chapters are a gallery of war portraits,^ and the ™"^' accounts which have been drawn up from a host of author- ities^ by the German Orientalists, Plath and Pfitzmaier, give minute details of internecine warfare between the kingdoms. The total want of significance for us in Chinese names, and the monotony of the narrative, make the story of these wars very dismal reading ; and the effect is aggra- vated by its painful incongruity with the lofty teachings of the Shu-king. Yet it is no worse than the constant satire on the Christian beatitudes presented in the military history of Christendom. We are constantly reminded of Milton's abstract of the old chronicles of the Saxon Heptarchy, and of the strifes of the Hebrew tribes in the time of the Judges. In the compilation of the Tchun-tsieu, covering the period from 722 B. c. to his own days, Confucius (if he is '^"^ ' ■' ^ TCHUN- the author) must have used documents nearly, if not tsibu. quite, contemporary. Our expectations are height- ^^^^^_ ened by his choice of this work as the one by which acter. he would be judged,* and by the proverb that, "when ' Further account of the Shu-kixg will be found in the chapters on Govemment and Relig- ion. We consider it in this place only as illustrating the Chinese manner of conceiving history, » Plath, Feb. 1870, p. 224- » Especially from the Sst-ki and the l-sse,'m which worts Plath finds " a cUsrer ideaoC tie period than can be formed of many epochs of Western history." * Menc, III., II., iJL 494 STRUCTURES. Confucius wrote the Tchun-tsieu, the rainbow turned to pearls." This high-flown sentence really expresses the general reputation of the work. After this, we are hardly prepared to find such a string of meagre annals, almost without comment on their tiresome and often trivial data, covering only the history of the State of Loo and its relations with other States. Most of the petty kingdoms, we are told, were provided with similar chronicles. No one could have invented this heap of items. Nor does it seem worth any one's while to have altered the official documents. But Dr. Legge adds to our discomfort by charging Confucius with dishonesty from moral against cowardice, his versions- of the crimes of high pub- confucius. jj^ personages being often contradicted by the commentary of Tso. It is to be observed on the other hand that Tso himself has a very deep respect for his author. Plath argues that some of these instances are susceptible of very different explanations from those of Legge.^ If " the Master " had really shown such a spirit of compromise from fear of power, Mencius, the boldest of reformers, could hardly have used language like this : " Confucius saw the falling away of principles, the spread of perverse speaking, and oppressive deeds. He completed the ' Spring and Autumn,' and rebellious ministers and wicked sons were struck with terror." The Tso-chuen labors to show that the apparent glosses in question have well understood meanings, conveying the moral lessons of the facts more powerfully than direct denunciation.^ We have already referred to the absence of philosophical Was he its form in this singular record, which most resembles author? an almanac, and to the pettiness of its details. It is not strange that its authenticity has been denied by some native critics, on the ground that it really contains nothing * Lehen d. Con/uc., pp. 75-78. • Plath, p. 78 i from the Tso-chum. HISTORY. 495 that should " make villains afraid." ^ Yet, as early as the Han, five schools were discussing its meaning. Confucius, we may suggest in explanation, comprehended the taste of his countrymen for embodied facts, for narrative in the most concrete form, manipulated in a moral interest. Not less competent was the national mind to interpret those familiar arts of treatment by which the object was pursued. Our best sinologists can as yet hardly have fathomed the subtleties of a literary rapport to which centuries were busy in bringing a homogeneous people. The method and quality of Chinese historical composi- tion have now been sufficiently treated. They point How the to the way in which these people "make history," in «J^'°^ehis- a deeper than literary sense. Their permanent tory." character, as thus recorded, is a result of apparent inward contrasts, whose working will best be seen in a short review of their political history since the downfall of the Tcheou. The T'sin conquest, and the conduct of its leader, are apparently the main pivot on which Chinese history Tsin chi- turns. They were not, however, the thorough re- hwang-ti's action on the national lite that we might at first demands suppose them. They depended, like all seeming "'Visage. intrusions of new elements, on forces long at work, and simply show what existing social conditions were capable of effecting. Evolution is the law of nations, as of reli- gions ; and Nature abhors gaps and miracles. In T'sin Chi-hwang-ti the tendencies which we have traced through all the earher periods came to inevitable collision and struggle for supremacy, resulting in a reconstruction wholly in accord with the inner life of the race. Hence his twofold aspect. He is a barbarian ; fruit of those fearful civil wars which had shown the intense demand for con- * Legge's ProlegomeTia ; App. to ch. i. 496 STRUCTURES. solidation of petty tribes ; heir to the plans of conquest already pursued by his father to a point where retreat was impossible, and advance meant imperial power. Yet he was not, Hke Genghis or Tamerlane, made for hurling hordes of nomads upon surrounding States. China afforded no field for such a function. He embodied the solution which its civilization required. It was at that stage in national development at which Greece broke in pieces and went down. China showed in this semi-barbarian the constructive ability to pass through it into the unity of a great empire. What individual European States did in passing from feudal atomism to monarchical institutions was here accomplished on a continental scale. The result proved that the native aptitudes for mutual aid and social order, for loyalty and industry, were none the less real for the persistent civil strife which seemed to deny their exist- ence. It is one of the most striking facts in Chinese history, that great and destructive wars go on in this colossal empire without greatly deranging the invincible forces of industry.^ In early times, when China was much smaller than at present, the phenomenon is still more im- pressive. Even in these turmoils the literary class appear to have had sufficient influence to obstruct that military policy which the times required. The force of their criti- cism, sustained by the mass of literary precedents, may be measured by the cruelties of Chi-hwang-ti. The issue of this collision of deep-rooted elements was the triumph of a national democratic tendency which had been least regarded. But this was not at first apparent, nor even designed. Tching-wang became chief of T'sin, after his father had mastered the imperial domains of the House of His per- ^ ^ sonai his- Tcheou. He is said to have entered on the study '°'^" of his resources and functions while but a boy, with » Brine {History of the Tailing Relellion, p. 360) says tliis most threatening and destruo- live war did not disturb the progress ol commerce and trade. HISTORY. 497 a force of genius that was admirable.^ Possessed by the idea of nationality, he threw up walls to protect the bor- ders, and engaged in pther plans of like magnitude, such as building great highways and numerous palaces ; all of which were pursued without regard to their inroad on the comforts and resources of the people. Such were his ex- actions that " no one dared to use his own grain." His freaks of passion made it dangerous to oppose his will, and he resorted to treacheries and bribes. These are the vices of the Napoleons and Alexanders, to whom it is given to effect great social changes by military power. The deadly strife he was engaged in permitted no quarter to enemies, and no mercy to conspirators. Remonstrance and protest are official traditions in China, and Tching-wang did not escape them. Ming-tsao told him his misdeeds, and met his rage by calmly reminding him that it is not the way of a great sovereign to seize an empire and then destroy it.^ Tching-wang was subdued for a time, and promised amendment. A kind of insanity, caught in part from the times, set him upon searching out local deities and supernatural gifts, putting up monuments from frivolous motives in secluded places, sending shiploads of young persons to some imag- ined isle beyond sea in return for being endowed with the gift of escaping death, all of whom perished. He is reported to have bestowed a fief on a tree that sheltered him, and stripped a mountain of its forests in revenge for a storm, and put to death all the people of a district be- cause a star had fallen there, supposed to foretell his ruin. These may be calumnies, but there can be no doubt of his having put to death hundreds of the literati, burned the classical books, and ordered the burial of great numbers of living workmen in the mausoleum built for his final sleep. « Tmgkien, De Mailla, II., 370. ' TongkUn, II., 377, 378. 32 498 STRUCTURES. Confucian historians ascribe these barbarities to the savage habits of the T'sin, exceptional among Chinese States. On the other hand, his equalizing and consolidating work His con- ^^^ already been described as of the most con- flict with structive character. His persecution of the Con- fiidans"" fucians was based distinctly on charges that their natural. incessant opposition to his edicts made the people disorderly, and that they sacrificed the demands of the age to idolatry of the past. The conflict was between the right of discussion always popular in China, the loyalty of edu- cated men to an ideal past, and the humane traditions of Confucius, on the one hand, — and, on the other, the new idea of military reconstruction embodied in the ambition of a dictator, a temporary evil that was also a condition of national unity. The precepts of the teachers could not avail in this day of the sword. The best way for them to serve the future was to die for their faith. This they seem to have done ; the statement, scarcely credible any- where but in China, being that not one of the four hundred and sixty martyrs abjured his creed. The best proof of the charges against Chi-hwang-ti is the historical necessity of the times. Only such a nature as his could have taken the first step towards that compul- sory unity made necessary by ages of social misery and strife for power. A new departure must be taken ; no backward look was endurable. His intense self-confidence, his mor- bid hatred of the past and contempt for its sacred tradi- tions are in the order of things ; and in excepting from the doom of destruction books on agriculture, medicine, and divination, he showed himself still under the influence of some of the strongest national tendencies. The burn- ing of the books was the natural way of recommencing Chinese history with himself. Berosus says of Nabonassar that he destroyed all astronomical records in order that ex act chronology might begin at his reign. It is not specially HISTORY. 499 Chinese to believe that human society can be remade at a touch. The loss to Chinese letters was nothing in com- parison with that inflicted on the Greek by those Chris- tians who demolished the temple of Serapis in Egypt.^ The French revolutionists, in 1793, abolished the literary socie- ties supported by the State, and put to death their leading members. Two years afterwards these societies were re- vived, and formed the basis of an Institute of Arts ' and Sciences.^ Tching-wang displayed an overweening sense of personal importance, which but a few years were needed to refute. His own function was transitional. " He tion tran- thought his own wisdom effaced that of Yao and ^'"™^ ' Shun. He took the name Chi-hwang-ti (First Sovereign Ruler), and ordered that his successors should be called Hwang-ti II. and III. ; inventing new terms to describe his own acts." ^ But his dynasty scarcely survived him. His reign suggested the great demand, but did not fulfil it. Re- bellion broke out in all quarters ; for if the people could not rest till they were governed by one man, still less could they rest till they were governed well. The old strife for mastery took a new form. The movements were popular, not political ; not a war of States, but uprisings overthrow against oppression. Rebel chiefs rose from the T'sin. masses; day-laborers and peasants, at the head of multi- tudes armed with clubs, rakes, and poles, ill-fitted, as was soon evident, " to match the barbed lances of T'sin." But T'sin fell ; and then the rebel chieftain of highest repute was driven to despair by the prowess of a peasant — Lui- pang — who became master of China under the title of the Prince of Han.'* He forbade his followers to commit excesses, and abolished oppressions. • See Mixard, Polylh. Hellenigue, pp. 82-86. ' M^snard, Hist, de V Acad. Frxw., p. 183. • Tongk. II. 393, 394. ♦ Pfitemaier Wien Akad., 1859. 500 STRUCTURES. The old causes worked on. The Han were heirs, not to sio„ a united State, but to factions within and Tar- movement ^^r raids from without. Not for four hundred and mentsof fifty ycars were Southern and Western China ""''^' really incorporated into the empire. A great nu- cleus for unity had been formed ; but local autonomy was The Han. also 3. Tootcd tradition, and was slow to be satisfied : so secular are all great changes in this immense empire, which is of itself hardly less than a race. Neither the virtues of Wan-ti (180-157 B.C.), the patronage of letters and the revival of the libraries ; nor the military genius of Wu-ti and his long struggle with the Tartars ; nor all the glories of the Han, such as the invention of paper and ink, and the emancipation of slaves, — prevented the division of the empire into " Three Kingdoms," warring for a cen- tury (a.d. 168-265). The story is told in the San-koue- tchi, a historic romance in Homeric style, most popular to this day, because these national traditions have never been weakened by intrusive faiths or races.-' Scarcely was this strife ended by the accession of the T'sin, when the Tartars separated Northern from South- Umty real- ^^ . - . Ued under cm China, forming no less than sixteen indepen- the T-ang. ^jgj^^ Statcs withiu the former, and the imperial throne was transferred to Nanking. Two or three centu- ries later, the earlier T'ang monarchs saw the completion of that unity which had been slowly evolving for nearly a thousand years. The Tartars excluded, Tai-tsung estab- lished the educational system that now rules the empire and holds it fast together. But the later T'ang were de- generate, and the Tartar again divided North and South. To Southern China alone belonged the Augustan age of the Sung II. (960-1260), the great epoch of printing, spec- ulative philosophy and the later histories ; and the Mongols, » This romance, which gives the story of the great Yellow-Bonnet Rebellion of the second xntury, has been translated by Theo. Favie. HISTORY. 501 already at home in the North, followed this famous dynasty with a foreign rfegime. Now for a time were real- The Mon- ized the grandest dreams of national unity as well ^°iJ^n^^''° as glory. From this time forward there is in every ""ion. sense a Chinese nation. In a single century, popular pat- riotism substituted a native dynasty under the proud title of the Ming (splendor) ; opened by a deliverer, who, sprung from the laboring class and the Buddhist heresy, justified his origin by announcing that the glory of a prince was not in having sumptuous marbles, but in rul- ing a happy people, by great extension of the power and dignity of China, and by a code famous for its humanity and wisdom. Yet rebellion was still a constant of the national life. The Ming were divided.^ The sons of the founder were in perpetual feud. But Peking became the fixed metropolis, and the national code now in use was compiled. China opened its foreign intercourse in a style of condescension, betokening assurance of sovereign claims. Twenty-one histories were gathered up from as many dynastic annals into her archives. Great libraries and hosts of commentators concentrated the literature of the past, that nothing which had helped to form the nation should be forgotten. Not less worthy of record was the guidance of the State for a regency of nearly twenty criti- cal years by female hands. It is worthy of notice that, from the completion of na- tional unioii in the age of the Han, the exercise Adminis- of administrative powers by women has been a ^'™„;^ marked feature of Chinese government. In two China, instances of that period the Empress Dowager governed with great energy, if not with womanly virtues ; and this, although an old law pronounced women incapable of ruling. The Tartar line of Wei (northern China, sixth century) was governed by a woman, who led armies in the field. At ' See China Review, September and October, 1872. 502 STRUCTURES. various periods of the T'ang and Sung, the State was di- rected by rulers in the harem. The title of empress has been borne, once at least, for a long series of years.^ The chroniclers do not speak favorably of feminine managers of State : it is not to be expected that they should. It has been more fashionable, in China and elsewhere, to lay public demoralization at the doors of the sex than public blessings. The Ming was equally under female influence in the appointment of officials and the direction of its policy. In recent times the imperial authority has been exercised by two women, whose support has greatly aided Prince Kung in the liberal foreign policy which he has been engaged in inaugurating. The present line (Tsing) has maintained nationality through continued collisions of central and local The earlier ° Manchu interests. The Chinese were conquered less by emperors, foj-gign arms than by intestine strife. Introduced by the native feuds, obtaining mastery of the Southern provinces by a barbarous war, and contending with the mischiefs arising from bad administration and their own ignorance of many of the requirements of an old and com- plex civilization, the Manchus nevertheless found materials for organizing the best imperial government ever effected in the country. The transportation of the whole coast population of a department into the interior as a protective measure against piracy, though of doubtful policy and speed- ily retraced, showed great executive power in' a line just seated on the throne of an immense nation. The division of offices between the two races, and a generally wise treat- ment of old customs and titles, with systematic civil admin- istration rapidly consolidated the State. The earlier Tsing ' Chow dynasty, seventh century; see Mayers, Chin. Manualy p. 257. Women have governed in Japan more frequently than in almost any other State, and the Annals abound in allusions to conspicuous talents and virtues shown hy many of them in public functions Prejudices of the Pauline sort do not seem to have reached the *' Empire of the Rising Sun." HISTORY. 503 rulers were men of high abilities and virtues, and com- petent to any constructive achievement. Yet not xhe old an hour of this foreign rule has been free from internal local disturbances, which would have been the ruin n"sm?" of any empire of less cohesive power. Ming re- ""^i™"^- volts in the south ; pirates infesting the coast, and outlaws the provinces ; Mohammedan and Tartar rebellions ; com- motions on the accession of the profligate Kia-king at the close of the last century, till the palace was assaulted by armed bands, — transmitted a coil of domestic troubles to the thirty years' reign of Tao-kwang, whose solution de- manded all that was claimed in his lofty title of the " Light of Reason." To these were now added a prodigious in- crease of secret societies,^ the opium war with England, and private afflictions which reduced the ill-starred Disastrous monarch to despair. An edict, announcing in reigns of tender terms the death of a beloved wife who had anTnTen-^ shared the whole of his troubled reign, was speedily '^""s- followed by the proclamation of his own. His burden of a bankrupt and disorganized empire hopelessly divided on questions of foreign policy, with renewed wars and revolts, and above all the desolating Tai-ping rebellion, fell (1852) on the shoulders of Hien-fung ("Complete Abundance"), who, spite of his title, ended life in forced exile in less than ten years ; and the succession of a child fitly sym- bolized the impotence of imperial will to deal with these elements of dissolution. At this juncture, when the death of the Empire was con- fidently predicted by European writers and states- RecoveTy men, arose a new policy embodied in an unfore- p"?^^^ seen personal force, and testifying to the remedial Kung. resources of the national life. A regency, hostile to every ^ For an account of these secret associations, on which the Tai-ping leaders drew for their most efiBcient resources, see Macfarlane, CAi'n- RevelutioTtj p. io8 ; De Mas, La Chine^ I. 159, 160 ; Chin. Repos-, February, 1845. Gallery and Ivan say that "whenever three people ire together 'the Triad' is among them." S04 STRUCTURES. concession in dealing with foreign States, was overthrown by a combination of three members of the imperial family, — the widow of Hien-fung, his favorite queen (women of political tastes and capacities), and his brother. Prince Kung. If the sagacity of this statesman shall be success- ■ ful in directing the present critical transition, it will be owing in no small degree to the firm and liberal conduct of the two queens. Left by Hien-fung on his flight from Pe-king, and appointed to treat with the allies, Kung had the address to avail himself of the indignation of the em- presses at being abandoned by the weak sovereign, and to secure their aid in the coup d'etat which changed the face of public affairs.-' He put the customs under European direction, appointed regular ofificial fees, protected religious freedom, and, though assailed by a powerful reaction under lead of the famous general San-ko-lin-sin, set the boy prince (Tong-che) on reforming his government, and conducting affairs with clemency and wisdom. How the death of San- ko-lin-sin, the drought, and the disputes about Hien-fung's funeral rites became turning points of political change cannot here be specified. Kung's management of foreign affairs has shown no little dignity, especially in his opposi- tion to European aid in the Tai-ping war, and in preparing China to accept those inevitable changes in her relations, which, if too violently carried out, would have destroyed her. He has proved not only his own genius, but the force of unity at the disposal of the Empire in times of peril. The rebellions and secret associations which continually assail the State, and produce great destruction of Chinese » i- o rebeuiois life and property,^ never aim at national disunion. ftTissoir '^^^ Tai-ping princes sought to expel the' foreign tionofthe dynasty, but not to abolish imperialism. The title "''"'°' of the chief was imperial, and he assumed all the * Rev. des Deux Mondes, August i, 1870. 2 See Sacharoffs startling account of the fluctuation in population from this cause Arb, d. Russ Gesandsck. II. HISTORY. 505 dignities of Chinese sovereignty over the world. The whole network of carbonaristn that covers the southern provinces, — Triads, White Lifies, Yellow-Bonnets, Pure Tea and Solar Sects, — assumes the unity of the State.^ The organic vigor of this instinct renders feasible an ex- treme license of revolt. The Yellow-Bonnet slogan in the second century is significant : " The Gray Heaven is dead, the Yellow Heaven succeeds, a new (dynastic) cycle shall be the joy of the world." The persistence of these vital antinomies in Chinese political history, neither overcoming the other, but The bai- thriving by mutual reactions, is of great interest. '""^^ °f ^ •' ' o opposing Not only does the Yellow Race " make history," tendencies as they make all thought, by the mean between or,he°''' contrary forces ; not only does this dualism of Chi- state, nese nature — the two-fold diagram of Fo-hi, the continuous and the broken line, the Yang and Yin — organize itself in government, literature, and life ; — a larger generalization is to be suggested. A centripetal force of nationality apparent throughout a history of three thousand years, an instinct of solidarity as powerful to resist all atomizing tendencies as it is, powerless to destroy them, is a marvel- lous witness to the strength of those qualities that ^^^^ ^f constitute race. In comparison with this strength ^^^^ «'^^'" of race, special institutions and customs are trivial, its practical and may be exhausted by strife, while the great reserved force that has produced them shall stand without change of curve or angle in its immortal form. These are the qualities that explain history ; its philosophy is in their common laws. To them a thousand years are as a day ; 'tis the same sun is shining at even and morn ; the germ of the end is in the beginning. We can read our living Germany in Tacitus ; our France in Caesar ; the Feudal System, the Modern Codes, in Roman Jurists of the Em- ^ Macfarlane and De Mas. 506 STRUCTURES. pire; Greeks, Persians, Hindus, in the Aryan Rig\'eda ; the actual Chinese Empire, in the classic Shi and Shu. The lords that descend in blood and bone are stronger than the masters who build and destroy from age to age. They are deeper than governments, and transform faiths into their image. They are the meaning of titles and names, political and religious. Their secret strength must be respected in all efforts to introduce influences from abroad. For their apparent contradictions are parts of a more' subtle whole, to which each is essential, and helps to protect and balance the rest. Such oppositions may be traced in all races, in different Depth and forms which point to some deeper unity that is meaning of unorgauizablc and unseen. When the German lemtobe tribcs Scattered themselves over the Roman em- soived. pjjg^ ^.jigy were thoroughly comminuted by local wars ; but the cohesion of race has proved stronger, and makes Germany to-day the compactest of European powers. The petty warfare of States, which forbade India ever to become a nation under native rule, did not prevent a stamp of unity on Hindu life, which must be recognized in every effort to ameliorate or organize it from without. Panslav- ism, not religious conviction, is the force that precipitates Russia on the Turk, and summons the scattered members of a race out of wide dispersion and hostile relations at last. Similar facts of race have impressed us throughout these studies of Chinese history. The oldest form of these contrasts is in the hostile relation of those two tendencies which prompt men to settled and to nomad life. This hos- tility crops out in every state. It is Cain and Abel ; Iran and Turan ; Rome and the Barbarians ; strife of manufac- tures and commerce ; of labor fixed and migratory. It is the antagonism of rest and motion ; of equilibrium and irritability ; of central and local powers ; of unity and variety. It reaches down to the questions of Federal and HISTORY. 507 » State rights, not yet harmonized in the most advanced nations. It must work itself out to solution, both in the Chinese Empire and the American Republic, through larger experience of the mutual dependence and social harmony that lie predicted and demanded in the seeming hate. Neither side can be destroyed. This is our solemn admo- nition and sole guarantee amidst the problems of our day. We are liable to forget that these elements of construc- tion exist within a State, and must be developed imemai by internal forces. It is the current belief that Wstobe the Tai-pings were suppressed, and China saved, by foreign power. But rebellions are chronic in China ; yet there is a China still, and probably as strong now as ever. The Tai-pings were checked quite as much by their own excesses which made them intolerable, and by the opening of country dykes upon their armies, as by the forces of Burgevine and Ward, and the fleets of Europe. Three great foreign wars have not weakened this passive Chinese nationality. Perhaps the most important sugges- tion afforded by our review of its history is this. The incessant jealousy of centralized powers on the part of the people, and the ease with which rebellions are fomented, have really helped to nourish the instinct of unity. The evident weakness of the Pe-king government is its safety, since it forbids the suppression of a certain democratic element essential to Chinese faith in political obedience. A proverb says : " When the Empire has been long divided, it will certainly be united ; when long united, it will as certainly be divided." VI. POETRY. POETRY. " /^F all nations," says Ampere, " the Chinese seem to ^-^ be fondest of poetry. All the educated The pas- write verses. As the hero of their novels carries T'l^'-,. rhythmic the heart of the heroine by poetic skill, so in pub- expression. lie office it is almost a necessity that the talent for states- manship should be united with the gift of song." " In olden time," says Pan-kou, " the sages themselves did not compare with the poets in estimation." The occurrence of rhythm in the early laws of nations so different as the Hindus, Greeks, Hebrews, Celts, Chi- nese, is to be explained in part from the aid it affords in memorizing data not committed to writing. Rhythm is not allied to innovation, but is in many respects its ^ consei- antagonist. It has received in China a develop- vativeeie- , . , p ment. ment proportionate to the conservative element ot the national character : a love of orderly and periodic recur- rence. Life is here a series of returns on familiar tracks ; a chant of burdens and refrains, like those which look so childish in the oldest Shi-king odes. Numerical categories make up the science of cosmical relations, reflecting the mental structure of the race. Pythagoras, Kepler, and modern science are here foreshadowed on planes of instinct and habitual formulizing. Music was inseparable from poetry in the oldest time, and the pleasure felt in its re- current tones had much to do with the marvellous powers ascribed to it by the early Chinese. The Shi-king odes 513 STRUCTURES. reputed oldest are squared and rhymed, and later culture has tended to symmetry of meaning, a music for thought as well as ear. Rhyme-hunting is an antiquarian mania among these knights of the treadmill. The delight with which every ballad of the T'ang or Sung has been set to an air of its own is as intense as that of their fathers in their kin, or lyre of silken cords. Rhymed improvisation is a national amusement. The unmalleable square signs seem to yield to a secret dissolving spell, and flow into music as readily as rhythm in our clastic alphabet. Chinese work-power is as *''""*■ wonderfully illustrated by the laws of poetic com- position that had resulted from ages of incubation in the days of the T'ang, as by any of its industrial achievements. Probably no nation has such a mass of criticism on such an amount of native product in the poetic art,^ This love of recurrent form is shown in a trick of the older poets, who liked to use sounds without meaning, merely to emphasize this safe return to the same impres- sion ; as if we should add the mere sound, " alas," to every line, even where there was no reference to grief. Parallel- ism, beginning in the four-line strophe of the Shi-king, was extended prescriptively from a rhyming accord of accent and of tone to every word in the two successive lines of a distich; "full" and "empty" words must be opposed to each other, and the successive steps by which the idea of the verse must be evolved were defined by rule. In stormy times greater license broke forth, and criticism Rhythmic itself dcptecatcd such formal construction ; but the legislation, refinement of the T'ang carried rhythm-legislation to such a degree, that Chinese poetry has acquired the bad reputation of being a mere thing of mechanical cadences and measures. A native author says that " the parallelism should be such a chain, that not a line can be omitted with • • Wylie, pp. 203, 204. POETRY. 513 out altering the point of the whole poem."i An art at least of interfusing sound and sense. A curious form of this passion for parallelism is to hang corresponding rhymes side by side, or on opposite „ „ . ,, •-■J J ' rir Parallehsm. walls, on paper or wood, and always in pairs. Chi- nese gymnastics are feats of versification in this style ; 'tis a dainty civilization, whose amusement is capping verses and constructing measures. Even geographies march in rhyme. The " Two Literary Maidens " presents a literary tournament, in which one of the verses to be paralleled combined artfully the titles of the seven books of Mencius ; and most of the themes were questions in mythology or history. With the exception of the epic,' which implies ability to combine all experiences under inspiration of a great wide scope religious faith and national ideal, the Chinese have "^^^'^ ^ ^ ^ treatment worked up their syllabic signs and meagre rhymes into every form of poetic compositioii. In odes, '^'"°'=*- idyls, epigrams, ethical and didactic poems, proverbs, effu- sions of all moods, their fertility has equalled, if it has not greatly surpassed, that of any nation in the world. Do appearances deceive us, then, as to the fitness of the language for poetic expression .' Admitting an im- p^^imigj perfect sense of rhyme, Davis has pointed out the inthe numerous diphthongs that vary the form of the *"^^^^' monosyllabic feet, the varying accents and tones, the con- stant caesura, the absence of harsh sounds, and the fitness of the equal, unbroken words for parallelism. To these capacities he ascribes the progress which " makes the poetry of the T'ang as far beyond the Shi-king for har- monious verse, as Virgil is beyond Ennius, or Pope beyond Chaucer." ^ We have only to insert our connective particles between ' See St. Denys's interesting work on the Poetry of the T'ang {Paris, 1812). 2 Transact. Ji. A. Soc.y 1830. We hope the statement has a force independent of the value of this latter illustration, which to our own taste is quite an uufortunate one. 3.3 514 STRUCTURES. the vivid symbolism of the picture-signs to reveal real poetic meaning.^ Nor are these symbols reserved for poetry ; they belong to common prose, being crystallized in the signs : as if our alphabet were made of real images instead of conventional forms. Of course much of their meaning is lost in the attraction of interest to the written shape. The inspiration of these enthusiasts is probably less in their ideas than in their pencils. But, on the other hand, realism will keep their eyes more in contact with these object-pictures, and maintain a certain scenic interest, enhanced by the aesthetic habit of constructing them with elegance and suggestiveness of form. Every thing is thus brought to fixed symbolic meaning. „ , . , The animal world has functional relations with life. Extent of syinboUsm. The dragou, phoenix, ki-lin, and tortoise are com- mmas. pj^^ emblems of power, good fortune, and occult destiny, as familiar to domestic art as to mythic lore. The fox symbolizes official life ; the wild goose is conjugal fidel- ity, in songs, dramas, tales. Goose and duck hold the same place as the stork in German folklore ; and there seems no good reason why our preferences for lions and eagles should despise these less brutal images of perseverance, loyalty, and love. The magpie, a mystic newsbearer and Chinese Hermes, plays the part of prophet in the legends of royal and race origins. The wild-ox tail floats from the Manchu standard in wars and hunts. Clay figures of the cow are divided at agricultural fetes ; painted sea-monsters are guardian figure-heads for the junks ; boats resemble fishes. The peach-tree is undying truth ; its stone, long life ; its blossom, opening love. The fung-tree, of white flower, scented leaf, and healing gum, is the dwelling of genii ; and its autumnal splendor chants with hundred ' Thus man (of his) word is fidelity ; word-nail (ed) is a bargain ; season (of the) perfect number, antiquity ; rice (in the) mouth, comfort ; mountain (of) jade, the imperial voice i jade (like) sheets, paper ; platform (of) jade, the shoulders ; jade (like) person, a beauty. POETRY. 5 1 5 tongues the lesson that "beauty is most beautiful in decay." ^ The poets have found a bird that celebrates the changes of life, singing twice a year, when the flowers open and when they fade.^ And songs describe an enchanted ash in sym- pathy with national destiny, that moans when a dynasty is failing, and sings when heroic deeds are done.^ Colors are symbolic, and yield a pictorial register of offices and personal relations.* The Tcheou-li is a „ , digest of forms and ceremonies, in which every thing seems to be taken up into symbolism and gifted with a functional meaning beyond itself. Doubtless this taste for an inner sense in things adds suggestiveness to the ideographs, and gives charm to poetic composition with their visible types. A poetic impulse is apparent, also, in the national passion for floriculture, which often reaches delicate and Flowers, tender sentiment ; in the selection of proper names *'• from natural objects ; in the metaphorical shop signs ; in the flowery titles of books, and the scribbling of impromptu verses on every thing that will carry them. If this love of endowing things with human meaning does not unfold into high poetic power, it is because of a too close contact with concrete details. It spends most of its force its formal- in combining and varying given materials in recog- '™' nized ways and for routine experiences ; and memory is mistaken for fancy, and even for imagination. Tricks of sensational effect are required to give an air of invention and novelty. Hence subtle and mystified allusions to facts, traditions, customs, or classic books : ^ something is artfully left to be divined, a half light is turned on an object already we!' known, making a riddle or an ellipsis of its common- " Notes and Queries, III. No. z. * St. Denys, p. 175. » Stent's yade Chaflet, p. 49. * Red is virtue ; a red heart is the moral, a vermilion pencil the political, ideal. White it purity and mourning ; yellow, supremacy ; purple, for grandsons ; green, for princesses. " See the subjects given out for prize poems in Les yeuties Filtes Littries, I. 125 ; Davif, in preface to the Fortunate Unions 5l6 STRUCTURES. place ; even verbal or rhythmic analogies are exploited with an air of mystery. A large portion of Chinese descriptive poetry thus far Qualities translated is a reiteration of certain moods, reach- of Chinese ^^^ ^-^q same point of experience, but seldom trans- sense, cending it. The pervasiveness of these plaintive or happj moods gives a unity to detailed pictures of Nature, often of great beauty, which makes them effective pieces of art. But they lack the inspiration of a sustained sense of human relations with infinity. The sense is not wanting ; it is passive and unproductive. The Chinese poet feels the mystery of the world, is lost in the problem of origin and end ; but he is not lifted by them to think or imagine. He rests in reverie ; he sinks back from the vague feeling of helplessness before change and loss, into passive resigna- tion or sybarite self-indulgence. He finds sympathy in Nature with the exile's despondency or the lover's pain ; he invokes beauty and wine to offset the brevity of life ; he less often escapes from these concessions and commonplaces into manly protest or independent faith. Yet there is often a delicate impressibility in these elegiac appeals to Nature ; and in the happier moods it is quickened into a boldness of fancy which reminds us of the abandon of the Celtic bards. The besetting fault of weakness and sentimentality is counterbalanced by the astonishing compactness arid ellip- tical force of the language, and by a realism which deals directly with the facts of experience. A native good sense, fully awake to the dangers of the national temperament, shows itself in sound judgments and counsels on the poetic art. For example : — " Say common things in a simple and noble style : introduce his- Good torical allusions naturally." " Do not force your talent, counsels to Whether you would describe emotions with seriousness, or ""^'^ paint things supernatural and prodigious, follow freely your POETRY. 517 inspiration." " Let the thought go deep ; but let not the labor appear ; let all the parts harmonize, as by Nature." ' We must beware of inferring from the utilitarian reputa- tion of the Chinese an absence of sentiment or veneration emotional aspiration. The poet is for them the fo^the ideal of genius, and " primus inter pares " in the ''°^'' literary and governing classes. His gift has always been the passport to high office, and prince and people alike berid before the lines of his pencil. Kings engrave his sentences upon stone, invest him with royal robes, and when guilty of driving him into exile or to proud withdrawal have sought his forgiveness with pleadings and gifts. A not uncommon tradition of poets describes them as withdraw- ing into solitude to escape corrupt courts or degrading concessions, and composing immortal verses at home in conscious self-respect. This poetry of the exiled or dis- graced censors of imperial vices has a manly ring, and tri- umphantly refutes the prevailing impression of the poet's function in " Oriental despotisms." We have found no adulatory petitions, even in the tyrannical days of the later Han, degrading the masters of verse who have won a na- tional fame.^ The line of honor reaches through Chinese official history in notable examples of a martyr spirit whose natural vehicle seems to have been poetry,^ and its argu- ment the Socratic answer of Thou-fou to royal offers of forgiveness : " I have fulfilled my duty, and ought to be rewarded." We are not disposed to be severely literal in our reading of confessions by many Chinese singers of their The "To- dependence on inspirations of a lower kind. As p«^i'°^'^" when Thou-fou, himself comparatively temperate, describes * Poesies des Thang, pp. 99, 100. 3 Biot (Introd. to Tcheou-li) observes that no servile office existed at the court of the Chinese emperors. 8 Chaon-ke consoled himself in exile by writing Sottas of Adversity^ and commenting OB the books of Mendus, apostle of free speech to kings. 5l8 STRUCTURES. the Round Table of eight toper poets transformed into genii over their cups. Of this jovial crew was Li-thai-pe, the most admired poet of the T'ang ; a linguist and courtier in high honor, famous for literary feats. His modest re- spect for his art, which prompted him, on seeing the poems of another, to retire from the field and write no more, must be a pendent to his account of potations which brought, him a happy unconsciousness of the good and evil of life.^ If we may judge from the specimens of his verse scat- tered through the romance of the " Young Female Scholars," and the selections in St. Denys, the wine was not, in Li-thai- pe's case at least, of so highly stimulating a quality as to make him forget any recognized poetic rules.^ So little of extravagance disfigures the standard poetry of China, that we incline to ascribe this customary tribute to the wine-god to sentimentalism rather than actual devotion. Any mysti- cal meaning is excluded by the strong realism of the poet. The only frenzy shown by these favorites of the Muse is for the calligraphic art. The swiftness of the pencil measures the tide of inspiration. Allied to this is the passion for handsome prosody. The praises lavished on petty verselets of feeble significance in the romances, as scintillations of genius, point to some dexterity in matter of rhythm, too subtle for foreigners wholly to appreciate. But these defects in the poetic ideal must not hide its pe- Association culiar charm of refined and tender sentiment, the with"^"^ unmistakable sign of which is the special associa- woman. tion of poctic honors with woman. In the long lists of learned women, a great proportion are poets.^ Trib- utes to female genius are a commonplace of the romances. In the most famous of this class,* the heroine puts down ^ See A Spring Day, St. Denys, p. 32. 3 He inclines to dwell on the thought of death, and observes a refined mechanism in struct* ore ; qualities not of a very bacchanalian type. 3 Williams I. 453-548, Wylie, /awrwi. * The Two Literary Maidens, POETRY. 519 all competitors in poetry, receives a jade sceptre from the Emperor, and, in conjunction with another maiden of like gifts, exercises a sway to which all powers defer as to a di- vinity. These two dictators confound all pretenders, deal out satire, master the hearts of renowned youths by a su- periority before which the laurels of the prize-graduate, and even of the Han-lin, fade. A curioys mixture of self- depreciation with airs of inordinate assumption, common to poets in the romances, is carried by the heroines unchal- lenged to the height of vain glory ; an index, not only of the high esteem in which poetry itself was held, but of the recognition of a special aptitude in woman to wield its refining powers, — the entire title of the sex to engage in free competition in this highest branch of the highest sphere known to the Chinese ideal. Love-plots are apt to turn on mutual appreciation be- tween perfect strangers, through strophes and anti- "TheFiow- strophes posted in public places, usually in praise of '■'J'ScroUs." Nature or letters. We cannot say how far these posted challenges served the purpose of advertisements for lovers ; but they plainly mark a decided willingness on Cupid's part to settle into an humble waiter on the Muse. Cer- tainly a democratic freedom and self-confidence in the aspirant for poetic honors can no further go. Thus an ambitious poetess only twelve years old affixes her thesis to the monument of a sage, to the effect that if any should ask how she, a child, dared to rank herself among the great, she would reply with Confucius : " If you rub the jade you do not wear it down ; if you touch it with dirt, it is not defiled. Shun himself was but a man. I also am a part of humanity, and can resemble him." ^ Of two poet- esses who led their age, we are told tha; " they could not open their lips without dropping pearls ; that they spoke their minds before kings without flinching ; that ministers * The Two Literary Maidens^ I., 220. 520 STRUCTURES. were humbled before them, and great scholars mortified to learn to how little purpose they had spent their own studious lives." * Here is the poem that wins for young Chan-tai — "grave A Prize of ^'^j white-robed, without ornament, and serene " Poem. — honors that are not lavished on the statesman or the sage : — The White Swallow. " When the sun sets, white hearts are few : From the strife I flee to the blossoms of the pear. I depart pale, but should blush to take the raven's hue : I return thin, but only the snow shall fill out my shape. Coming back through the night, my shadow can be seen. Bearing away all the purple of the spring, my robes should still want no bleaching. How many bright-colored doves go astray ! Amidst all the jealousies, I alone return pure and unstained." That this dainty bit of natural painting should be chosen for such honor, and put into the mouth of a girl, intimates that tastes as refined as the handwork that nursed silk- worms, or drew the fine patterns of flower and leaf on bamboo tablets, presided over literary aesthetics in this highly developed civilization. The sympathy of Nature with human suffering is ex- pressed in a graceful little song, relating how a Sympathies ^ , , *= , ,. . *' , . , . with Na^ mother, condemned to die, is saved by a miracle in ""■'■ delicate accord with her sorrow : midsummer heat turned to winter snow.^ " Judge, guards, and headsman stand aghast ; while every head in reverence is bent Before the girl ; the snow-flakes falling fast, mutely proclaim that she is innocent." ' The Two Literary Maidens, I. 243, 244. • yade Chaplet, by Stent, p. iij. • POETRY. 521 So the plaintive strains of the flute by night, like " Annie Laurie" in the Crimean camp, steal away the sol- Music and dier's heart, and a homesick army leaves the field ^^"^^ on the eve of battle.^ " They must return : ere day broke, the foe sought them, and they were gone. The magic, the witchery of music, indescribable by tongue or pen ! The flute of Chang-liang, in that little space, had stolen the courage of eight thousand men. Best evidence of poetic capacity is a constant investment of Nature with hum.an expression. " O the pleasant little rain, that knows so well when it is wanted, Coming just in spring, to help the new life forward ! It has chosen the nighttime to come softly with favoring breeze ; Subtly and noiselessly, it has softened all things."^ " This year's flowers succeed the last, and not less fair : But last year's men are older by a year. Thus men grow old, and flowers die. Pity the fallen flowers : sweep them not away." * " Brave yellow, passing into tender green. The Willon The glory of the spring-tide's early day ; Blossoms. By eaves' side quivering, or in the sheen Of lake reflected ; every tender spray Dancing upon the wind, by silken thread suspended, Or sighing for the mellow eve and moonlit play ; — O sweet and fair, too young as yet to bear Plucking for love's last gift, with farewell ended. O wilding flowers, ye steal my heart away. The Eastern King, should he your beauties know, Will look with kindly eyes ; nor rain, nor snow Will send, nor any thing To mar the crescent spring, And breezes that your lengthening tassels sway." * ' fade ChapUt-p. 117. ' Thou-foii(from the French of St. Denys) ' Wang-tchang-ling (St. Denys). * Translated by Lister, in China Revieiu 522 STRUCTURES. " Yonder falls a precipitous cascade three thousand feet. Xhe Here the mountain touches the sky, and divides the orbs. Mountain Drifting snows fly amidst the thunder. oudook. J jj^ ]j]jg a white bird amidst the clouds : I insult the winds and invade the deep abyss. As I turn and look down on each neighboring province, The evening smoke ascends from the dwellings in blue specks." * " See the five peaks of yon mountain, joined like fingers of a hand, The Moun- Rising from the south as a wall midway to heaven ! tain Height By night it would pluck from the concave the stars of the and Peace. Milky Way: By day it explores the zenith and plays with the clouds. The rain has ceased ; the summits shine in the void expanse. The moon is up : it is like a broad pearl over the expanded palm. One might imagine the Great Spirit had stretched forth an arm From afar, beyond the sea, and was numbering the nations." ' " The mountains disdain the passions of earth : glory troubles not their peace.'" (l.) " The sun has crossed the high mountain chain to set behind them ; Woodland Soon all the valley will be lost in the shades of eve ; Home. The moon rises out of the pines, bringing coolness with her; The rustling wind, and the flowing brooks fill my ear with pure sounds." (2.) " The wood-cutter regains his hut, to repair his wasted strength ; The bird has chosen his bough, perched in motionless rest. A friend has promised to come and enjoy this lovely night: I take my lute and await him alone in the grassy paths." * " Men pass their lives apart : like stars that move, but never meet. A Mend This eve, how blest it is that the same lamp gives light to re-visited. both of US ! Brief is youth's day. Our temples already tell of waning life. Already half of those we knew are spirits : I am moved in the depth of my soul ! Could I have thought that after twenty years I should be again in your home? ' Davis [Sketches, p. 20). • Dans, in JourmilR. A. S,, 1830. ■ Wang-tchang-Iing (St Decys). * Mong-kao-jen (St. Denys). POETRY. 523 t To-morrow, mountains with cloudy peaks must sever us again, And for us two the future be again a sea without a bound, "i " I Icnow not how many generations the moon has shone upon. But I know these waves of the Kiang flow on, never to xhe long. return. ings of the As I sail, none knows me ; nor if the moon is shining on a ==?»"'"'• far-off home where they think of me. Sadly the wife too thinks of her husband : their thoughts seek each other, though far apart. Night comes: she dreams of fallen flowers. ' Alas ! spring half gone, he comes not yet.' The river flows, the spring ebbs away : the moon sinks into the waters. Into the horizon mists : the setting moon sends pangs to her heart."* Li-thai-pe and Thou-fou alike pour out their sympathy for the poor conscripts on their distant campaign. The Humani- latter, in almost Homeric strain, describes the de- '1".°^ ^". ' ' thai-pe and parture of the troops, the women clinging to their Thou-fou. garments, the questions of bystanders receiving but one reply : " It is our fate to be marching for ever from boyhood to old age." " Then the village chief bound their young brows with gauze ; The con- Now they return with whitened hair, only to set out again, scripts. Insatiable in his plans of conquest, the Emperor hears not his people's cry. In vain brave women have seized the axe and held the plough ; Thorns and briars cover the desolate soil. Ever war rages, regardless of human life as of the dog's or fowl's. ' Have we not come,' say they, ' to take the birth of a son for a disaster ? O Prince, you have not seen the borders of the Blue Sea, Where the dead bones are whitening and never gathered up ; Where the spirits of the lately slain importune the long perished : Dark the sky, cold the rain, in that drear clime, where groans for- ever rise. ' " ' » Thou-fou (St Denys). • Tchang-jo-han (St. Denys). • Thou-fou (St. Denys). 524 STRUCTURES. A favorite theme is the praise of solitude, the com- Praise of panionship" of Nature for the exile, the ascetic, or solitude, the renouncer of cities : — " I return to the hills to seek my rest. You will not need to ask me of new wanderings any more. Nature does not change ; the white clouds for ever last." ^ " The mountain is lone ; why stay you in this desert ? Deep thoughts are hard to reach, and I walk alone. I love the pure springs that wind among the rocks; I love my rustic cabin in its peace among the pines." " " Approaching the holy hermitage, I was kindly met by the aged saint. I entered into the principles of reason, breaking the ties of earthly desire. United in one thought, all words being exhausted, we fell into silence. I saw the flowers as still as we, heard the hovering birds, and knew the truth of truths." « " Have I not reached the purity of the wise ? Like flame borne by wind. My spirit will be detached from this inert body, and return no more." * The poetry of the T'ang abounds in a vague, melancholy Transient- broodiug over the transientness of things, and ness ofiife memorics of the lost : — " The flower fades and is swept away, but whither goes its per- fume ? " ^ " For friends I had immortal men ; in the glad eves we sailed the lake. My happy pen already drew the imperial eye. To-day my songs are sad ; my bleached head is bent with woe." ' 1 Wang-wei. • Ibid. • Song-tchi-onen. * Pe-lo-ye. » Tchin-tseu-gran. • Thou-fou's Auiumn Odt (St Denys) ; see the whole ode. Also Laprade, Le Sentinum de la Nature ava-nt Ze Chrisiianisme. POETRY. 525 The following is Horatian : — " Every day, alas, brings on the inevitable old age, " Car^ While every year sees happy spring return. Diem!' Let us enjoy ourselves while our cup is full ; If the flowers fade, let us try, O Friend, to ignore." * The Chinese, like the Hebrews, have their typical elegy on the vanity of life, the Li-sao,^ — a strange, sad -' . r TheLi-sao. poem, made up of faith in duty and unbelief in men, which marks the dismal epoch of the T'sin conquests, but outlived its fires, and has been in highest honor ever since, as the keynote of a favorite national mood. Its allegory takes the flowers for symbols of virtues and emo- tions, of experiences that the poet gathers up, or fates by which he is drawn. In disgrace for loyalty to the old paths of right, he explores all spaces and elements, the homes of gods and men, philosophy and magic, — vainly searching for sympathy, a good wife, a good prince, sustained only by the perfumes of the flowers at his girdle. Alas ! the ideal is not found : — " What is the sum of art and talent in this age of ours ? To turn the back on square and compass, to follow crooked ways as freedom ; To lay plots with evil means, and make them serve for laws. 'Tis all in vain : there is not one who knows me." On the luminous summits his heart gives out ; he will go no further. Filled with the thought of his native land, he " goes to rejoin Pang-kien," — in death. The civil wars following on the close of the Han brought out a spirit of knight-errantry, fruitful in Oriental Love and tninne-singing^ with such refrains as this : — ™" ^°°^ " A fair figure captivates men's desires, But the real perfume of a woman is modesty." > Wang-wei. * Kiu-youen. * Desc^ilied in D' Hervey St. Denys's charming volume on the T*ang. 526 STRUCTURES. " There is one of whom I think, a hundred mountain leagues away ; But the same moon, the same passing wind, is for both : I muse on our happy times." Less suited to the sentimental Chinese muse would seem to be the vigorous war-songs, of which the T'ang has many specimens : — " Behold the times return in which the chief of a band of a hundred Is in higher honor than a scholar of ranlc and talent." ^ " At ten paces he has killed his man. A hi*ndred leagues will not stop him. He has done it ; he shakes out his robes, and is gone. He leaves no sign of name or track. A hero's bones have the fragrance of fame. Shall not the cheeks of the mere scholar blush ? Who could win such name with bent head and whitening hairs over books ? " 2 Two companion ballads celebrate womanly sacrifice and Awoman's manly devotion with great simplicity and force. In devotion, jj^g flj-gj^ ^ queeu saves the infant child of her slain husband by another wife, and at the sacrifice of her own life on the battle-field, where she is left wounded and alone : — " The trembling Queen sat up ; — She saw the cold mist settling down, the beaten, withered grass : Caressing the Prince in her bosom, she saw he was silent and still ; Her color fled, and she gazed intently upon him ; — the little Atou had cried himself to sleep. Turning her face to the little one, she cried, ' Awake ! ' She saw the tiny hand unclose, the eyes slowly open wide ; His little face he in her bosom thrusts, and tumbles it in search of nutriment. She could but sigh, ' O bitter fate ! the babe is famishing, nor know I whither your mother wanders.' The little Atou, patient and good, never moaned . . . * Yang'kiong (St. Denys). • Li-thai-pflb POETRY. 527 The mists disappeared, the sky grew bright. Looking over the deso- late battle-field, She sighed : ' His father has wandered half his life, and borne this child alone : If I would prove my faithfulness to him (by rejoining him in death) this child will die. But when I reach the " Yellow Springs," how could I face the ances- tors of Lui's house ? ' " So she struggles on, " racked with her own deep wound," rescued at last by a hero, who fights his way through the enemy, bearing the two on his horse. To him committing the child, she anticipates her approaching death, and hastens away to heaven. The poet adds : — "The composition of my leisure hours has made me weep. The entrusted orphan's fate I've writ, that, ages hence, men should blush for themselves, and emulate a woman." The second ballad describes the gallop of the hero with the child on his bosom to its mother: — " What a glad shout did the brave hero greet, as he sprang from his horse and fell at her feet ! A man's. And cried, as exhausted he sank on the ground, ' Thy dead son is living ; he was lost, and is found." ^ We must seek the religious element in Chinese poetry in the seriousness of its interest in positive forms ^, The re- ef life and conduct, rather than in contemplation ligious of Infinite Being. There is indeed no lack of the ^''™"'*- fanciful anthropomorphism, which in every popular faith has peopled the world with genii, local and general, though the images are so vague and unstable as hardly to consti- tute a positive creed. The combination of Buddhism with the lower forms of Tao-sse spiritism brought fresh acces- « Translated by Stent, 3'ade Ckaplel, p. 22. 528 STRUCTURES. sions of the supernatural in times later than Confucius ; while of this there is in the older poetry, and especially in the Shi-king, scarcely a trace. Magical lore and the Pro- tean dance of transmigration found full scope in the fer^ ment of the national mind during the Han. A " storm and stress " school grew up at this period, ambitious of fantastic and bizarre situations, hinted in obscure phrases like that social twilight which it described. The Chinese themselves call it the Kouai (sensational) style.^ But this was transitory, and the later poetry of the T'ang is, as we have seen, as sceptical and rational as the later Roman, or the modern English, muse. Through all intrusions of asceticism, magic, and alchemical dreaming, the old simple rites to Shang-te and the ancestors celebrated in the Shi, and consecrating the labors and joys of real life, stood fast, — a poetry too deeply in unison with the organic life of the race to yield to objective changes of literary taste and construction. To this venerable record, the sum of the poetic ideal for near three thousand years, let us now address our- selves. The prosaic Chinese, as well as the imaginative Hindus, thr Shi- Venerate a collection of lyrics as the most precious KING. treasure of their past. The three hundred and eleven Odes of the Shi cover the whole period, more or less Probable than a thousand years, during which the old States ofthr"^ were formed and feudally related, down to the Odes. eighth century, b.c. The latest of them are thus beyond question from twenty-five to thirty centuries old. Confucius, it is believed, selected them out of three thou- sand as best suited for moral and political influence. But it is the reasonable conclusion of modern scholars that * St, Denys, pp. 25, 26. THE SHI-KING. 529 a Shi-king substantially similar to the present was in use and honor before his day.^ The Odes are not only evident products of special occasions, but indicate direct relations with old customs and institutions. They have followed the living movement of these as the recognized supply of blended music and song at marriage feasts, agricultural jubilees, court receptions, feudal assemblies, family re- unions, religious rites and services to ancestors, to great men, to the gods and spirits of the national faith. It is to be noticed further, that a considerable period of veneration for the book, as a whole, must have elapsed before the public and political headings that have been attached to the simplest effusions of private feeling in the earlier odes would have been possible even in China, being the product of their final symbolization in the interest of the State. Yet these superscriptions, analogous to those which Christian commentators have given to the old Hebrew Psalms, be- long to the oldest text of the Shi now extant, and date from a period at least as early as the Christian era.^ Whatever antiquity is thus made probable for the Shi- king as a whole, the collection must have been of slow growth. It must have required a long time to gather from so many of the old feudal States these voices of all impor- tant epochs of the protracted history of the Tcheou. The hoard would naturally increase with more or less rapidity, according to the fortunes of that imperfect imperialism, of whose centralizing power it was the fruit and the guaran- tee. But the dates of a large proportion of the The dates Odes are still undetermined by the free criticism unsettled. ^ Confucius speaks of the " Book of Poetry " as already familiar, and with an apparently traditional admiration for the work so designated. The present clarification of the Odes is mentioned in a book believed to have preceded the Confucian edition (Flath, Leh. d. Carifuc, II., p. 63). Many of them are cited by writers of his day, in different forms indeed, and under different titles from the present (IbidJ. He is asserted to have made changes according to his judgment. What he himself claims is to have re-arranged the principal odes and reformed the music {Lunyu, IX. 14). See also Legge's ProUgomena. * Legge on text of Maim, pp. 10, 33. 34 530 STRUCTURES. of two thousand years ; and though the best are as- cribed to the Great Duke, who is the traditional Solo- mon and Moses of the Tcheou, the real authorship of by far the greater portion is as inscrutable as are their dates.-' But the different forms in which they are quoted indi- Assodated cate the absence of critical labor in their earliest with music, compilation. This appears to have been of a mu- sical quite as much as of a literary character. Their words are supposed to have been twin-born with melodies of their respective countries and times. Many are such simple refrains as could only have sprung from the impulse to adapt words to a favorite air. Others are evidently meant to give body and positive associations to specific national styles of music. Confucius claims to have restored some of these styles,^ and the commentators attach great im- portance to them as true expressions of the moral con- ditions under which they were formed : thus fitted to teach right government and the regulation of the passions, or to produce the opposite effect.^ The simplicity of this old music is seen in the regular metrical structure of the lines, the syllables of which are generally equal in, num- ber. The rhyme rings changes on a few endings, accord- 1 The diflering judgments of our own sinologists hardly enable us to judge as to dates, which the greatest of native critics, Chu-hi himself, was obliged to pronounce indeterminable by any other evidence than the meagre and obscure allusions in the Odes themselves. Dr. Legge's views are intermediate between those of Plath, Edkins, and other advocates of high antiquity for all Chinese wisdom, on the one hand, and those of Chalmers, Mayers, and Eitel, who find nothing positive previous to the eighth century, B.C., on the other. The latter is indeed a striking historic starting-point, being that of the earliest data of positive Hebrew history, and of the first Olympiads, which hold the same position in the Greek. But the difficulties are obvious. The question of uniformity in the language of the Odes must be left to experts ; but the two centuries which elapsed between the eighth century and the time of Confucius are hardly sufficient for the growth of such a collection, or of such a reputation as the latter epoch awarded it- Mr. ^^hei [Quellen zu Confuc.) thinks there will be space enough if we begin the Odes at iioo B.c The very great antiquity of ideo-graphic literature in Egypt lessens our doubts of a similar phenomenon in China- That we must be content to wait in these matters is no drawback to the interest of the Odes for those laws of religious imiveisality with whicb the present work is mainly concerned. > Lunyu, III. 26, XV. 10. * See the Two Prefaces to the Ski; also Mencius, I. ft- ii. i. ; Lunyu^ VII. 13. THE SHI-KING. 531 ing to some authorities not more than twenty or even ten ! But this cannot be determined, since many of the rhymes are irrecoverably lost ; though the charac- The lost ters still convey the meaning, so far as this is dis- rhymes- coverable (by much "chiselling") through the obscurity caused by the use of different characters to express the same sounds.^ All that Chinese faith expects from the use of the Shi- king is the ethical and spiritual effect which would oniynatu- naturally result from their combined music and rai effects meaning. The Veda-worshipper ascribes super- fr^^he natural influences to the mere repetition of its °'^^^- hymns, and even to the breathing their most sacred texts without sound. But the virtues of the Shi are soberly practical. Its themes are the common objects of sight and sound, the common experiences of life, — labors of hus- bandry, duties of government, laws of social order, rever- ence of men for goodness, gratitude for public service, indignation at oppressive rule. And the music by which these themes are brought home to the emotional nature is an instrument as natural as themselves. However profound the function of verse as an element in the order of the world, so great as to move heaven and earth, spirits as well as men ;^ and though Chu-hi affirms that poetic inspiration reaches to the secret springs of human conduct, thus becoming prophetic,^ — these powers of song are referred to natural grounds, in accordance with the ethical and positive spheres in which they move. The Odes are provided by the ancient kings as examples by which men may be educated to virtue.* Though many of them are perfectly spontaneous expressions of moods, de- sires, or passions that might tempt to supernatural appeals, ' See Legge, Prolegometta, p. 12, who ascribes this confusion to tlie recovery of the Odes through oral repetition, from the memory of numerous persons, after the fires of T'sin. • The Great Preface. • Ibid., Commentary. * Ibid. 532 STRUCTURES. they scarcely ever^ break through the familiar limits of human experience. Where else in analogous forms of Contrasted literature shall we find such sobriety and construc- with other j.jyg realism ? No mystic personification and won- hymns. dering awc of the elements reminds us of the Rig Veda ; no ethic allegory, no cosmic mythology of the forces of Life and Death, of Strife and Peace, suggests the Edda ; no wonder-working God, lifting rewards and penalties out of the sphere of natural law into that of overruling will and positive command, the Pentateuch and Psalms. In place of these child-like ardors of imagination is a serious and mature acceptance of the order of the world and of the familiar uses of life, as matters both of fact and of oppor- tunity. In place of aspiration to speculative or miraculous gifts, to loss of self in the unseen, an absorbing construc- tiveness in the paths of social order. No restless effort to break away from human conditions into new heavens and earth in accordance with intense desires, but firmest faith in the unchanging ways of a Providence, revealed only in the blessings that must follow virtue and the penalties that must punish vice. The oldest monuments of Egyptian thought are marked Affinities by similar traits. Not till the eighteenth dynasty E^tian (eighteen centuries b.c. ) does religion enter the records. Nile sepulchrcs in any other form than a simple invocation, generally to Anubis as guardian of the dead.^ But we have, m pictures, the same civil and social detail, labor and marriage scenes, hunting and fishing habits ; the same interest in animals and plants, and the same patri- archal life which the Shi-king gives us in verse. The fact is of interest that the oldest hieroglyphic papyrus known is a moral treatise by a high official,^ the most striking feature ' An exception occurs in the legend of the birth o£ How-tseih, the father of agriculture. ' Mariette Bey's Hist. Egypt; also Carre's Anc. Orient. I. loo. ' Pthah-Hotep ; his work is dated by scholars in the earliest ages of the monarchy, from three thousand to four thousand years B.C. j see Carre, I. 98. It is fully described by Brugsclv Hist, d* Egypte^ p. 29-31. THE SHI-KING. 533 of which is its simple didactics of filial piety in a thor- oughly Chinese spirit. The Hebrews are not without similar literary elements. Judging from the extracts contained in the Penta- ,„. ^ ,. ° With the teuch, the Book of Jasher must have corresponded Hebrew in some respects to the Shi, but it has disappeared. ^°''^' The lyrics of the epoch of Judges, carefully analyzed by Fiirst,^ are found to have been constructed like the Chinese odes with much prosodic art ; and deal, like them, in praise of heroes, in national reminiscences, and in the details of popular life. Besides teaching how to regulate the passions and fulfil the social relations, the Shi-king had its intellec- intellec- tual function. " My children," says Confucius, |"„t*T " why do you not study the Odes .■• They serve the sw. to stimulate the mind to self-study. He who is ignorant of them is like one who stands with his face to the wall." ^ Their meaning he sums up in this : " Have no depraved thoughts." ^ He even tells his son that, if he did not learn them, he would not be fit to converse with.* " By the Shi- king the mind is aroused ; by the Li-ki, character is organ- ized ; by music, the whole is perfected." ^ Singularly enough, Confucius seldom quotes it ; not more than eight times in all. But his pupils, who Expansions edited the Chung-yung and Ta-hio, continually °^'^''^""°" refer to its texts. Mencius quotes it thirty times, later sages, always to fine moral or spiritual purpose ; showing the cus- tom of giving large human meaning to the most private passages of this Book of Good Counsel." Thus the praise of a ploughman, for refusing " to eat the bread of idleness," is grandly expanded to answer a caviller against superior men as useless consumers, with the argument that the noblest example of such refusal to be fed without return is • GescA. a. Bihl. Lit. II. 98. « Lmiyn, VIII. 8 ; XVII. g. » Ibid., II. 2. < Ibid., XVI. 13. * Ibid., VIII. 8, * See for examples, Menc. II., PT. 1. 3 ; IV., PT. I. 7, 534 STRUCTURES. found in those who help the rulers and the youth of a land to wisdom and virtue.^ Even the praise of a host for hos- pitality means that the' guests were filled with righteous- ness.^ The soliloquy of an owl who rejoices in the building of her house stirs Confucius to ask, "Did not he who made this Ode understand the way to govern States } " ' Mencius finely greets his master's interpretation of the passage that Heaven has annexed to every faculty and relation its own law, as proving his deep acquaintance with the constitution of our nature.* The philosopher T'sang, in his Comments on the Ta-hio, employs the Shi in every paragraph to enforce the idea of that little treatise, that all social and political good flows from personal virtue alone. The Shi-king is incapable of serving any purpose of Absence o£ cccIcsiastical or mental despotism. It knows no ^or'*^e rnythology, priesthood, ritual, nor caste. Note in scriptive proof of this the freedom of criticism to which it Fr^lriA- ^^^ always been subject. Dr. Legge's long list of cism. authorities on the text "indicate a great range of diverse judgment and critical independence." Chu-hi, the chief of them all, did not hesitate to make his own reason and judgment the final test of textual value. Nowhere, in the whole immense line of critics, is there one pretence of supernatural authority or absolutist commission to interpret this classic for the common mind. Its historical value must be of the highest order. No Its realistic primitive people have left so plain and full a record the°o?d°' of their common life in literary form. The earth- chinese. lined woodcu frames of their houses, the bamboo- posts, the pine and cypress timbers of their ancestral halls, the sheep and oxen of the wealthy farmers, the idyllic peasant-labors with plough and reaping-hook and manifold » Ibid. VII., PT. t. 32. » Ibid. VI., PT. i. 17. ' Ibid. II., PT. I. 4. • Menc VI., pt. i. 6. THE SHI-KING. 535 seeds and grains, the clearing of the wilds by their early chiefs, their love of their followers and its full return, the public granaries, the love of home and family and friends, the pains of distant service, the toils of officials, the feasts and rites, — all stand out in clear detail in the far perspective of three thousand years. 'Tis the photograph of concrete mind, the minute art of oldest realism. No Homeric wars absorb the hearts of these social builders : there is honor for heroes ; but ardor for conquests, for relations even with distant spaces, is transient at best. The affections nestle in the home, the sympathies, the iifelds of labor, the grateful trust in enduring ancestral care. The arrangement of the Odes, in four Books, is to a cer- tain extent chronological ^ and even topical, but j^^^ ^ mainly governed by motives of practical conve- mem of the nience and public advantage. It advances from common life to public biography, honors to ancestors and benefactors, national lessons, pictures of the results of right government and of its opposite. This last interest has dictated the collection, and governed the interpreta- tion as well as the arrangement, of the whole.^ A series of popular songs reveals the old civilization of those petty States which were merged in the rule book of Tcheou. Transmitted to emperors, or collected ^"'°'" by them on the periodic tours, these songs were ^."4"^ called /ung' (wind powers) ; either because moving staiei. ^ Dr. Eitel calls the chronology '* a rope of sand." 3 To the conscientious labors of Dr. Legge we owe the possibility.of any thing like trustworthy reading of the older Chinese classics. We have, however, availed ourselves also of the translations of what are called the " Correct Odes," by Pauthier, as well as of the Ear less valuable old version of the Shi-king, by P^re Lacharme (Bidl. OrUniale^ Tome II.). However inferior in point of literal fidelity even the former of these may be to Dr. L.'5 ver- sion, it is not without poetic merit, which the English translator would probably not desire to daini. The constructions of Riickert upon Lacharme's crude basis are, is translations, of no 536 STRUCTURES. with the freedom of Nature, or as indicating functions of government through their report of popular needs and de- sires.i That these simple ditties and fragmentary refrains should have been gathered up by powers interested in na- tional unity, to be used in its furtherance, we must regard as in itself a landmark in the history of civilization, — a sign of large sympathies and constructive aims. That the polit- spurious ical element, which in China is really the religious, titles. should have overborne the simple and popular mean- ing, and read these idyls as memorials of the great monarchs of Chinese hist(#y, is but an example of that "eminent domain " always assumed by the absolutism of organized social ideals over the natural mind. That the ruling force in this case is the national unity, the goal of the popular desire itself, must not be forgotten. It is doubtful if there are half a dozen pieces in this whole book, which have any relation whatever to govern- mental personages ; yet the titles announce royal harems, princes famous or infamous, and old State traditions, all foisted in by pure faith in the right of these public inter- ests to absorb every other. This is Chinese mythology ; this the form of idealism by which it justifies its claim to the imaginative faculty. But for us the picture of old- time China remains, — of the soldier, peasant, singer, in love and marriage, in labor at home and service abroad, in petty trouble and great duties, idyllic joys and bitter woes. The book opens with a marriage song, praised by Con- Domestic fucius for a singular merit, — its freedom from Odes. strong emotions ; and this briefest and simplest of all such effusions is, without the least apparent reason, value. While waiting for a rendering of these old lyrics of China in a form which shall com- bine the lyric feeling with verbal truth, we none the less recognize the vast debt which all future efforts in this kind must owe to the researches of Dr. Legge. The very recent metrical ver- Bion of the Shi, by this author, has been printed since these pages were written. ^ Chuhi. See Great Preface. They relate to a limited region about the Hoangho, and cover the period during, and perhaps preceding, the sway of the Tcheou. THE SHI-KING. 537 appropriated to the marriage of the great King Wan. In the love-songs figures the symbolic peach-blossom ; maid- ens pine for suitors, or caution them against unbecoming haste: there is vague melancholy and jubilant hope.^ Servants mourn the departure of the young wife from her father's house ; wives complain of unkind husbands, and scandals are denounced in song.^ The luxury of the fine lady is satirized, and the conceit of the dandy, and even the singer's own garments that do not suit his taste.^ Women gather plantain in bunches to adorn their girdles, and herbs to be laid by pure maidens on ancestral shrines. The swallow's flight sympathizes with the restlessness of grief.* There are mutual longings of separated ones ; the soldier on the bare hills hears his mother's voice calling him home. " O thou far blue heaven, when shall we return To our fields, and our offerings of grain, and our filial cares P"^ A sister protests against the rules which forbid her, as a married woman, to revisit her family home to assist her brother with counsel ; wives separated from husbands by poverty or by death sing their devotion ; sons strive to compose the heart of their mother ; and wanderers lament that they can call only strangers by the hallowed names of kindred.® There are pleasant pictures of domestic happiness : a husband sings his pride in his humble home and frugal living; and a woman is praised for her intelligence in poetic responses.^ A few obscure odes describe lovers' quarrels ; but what Confucius means by the licentious songs of Ching, does not clearly appear.^ The ideal prince rides by, with starry head-dress and lofty ' B. I., i. 6 ; ill. 9 ; ii. i2 ; iii. 14 ; vi. 10 ; vii. 15 ; vii. 20 ; xii. 10. " B. I., ii. II i iii. s; iv. a. ' B. I., iv. 3 ; v. 6; iii. 2. • B. I., i. 8) ii. 4; Si- 3- » B. I., vi. 2 J iii. 3 i vi. 4 1 X. 8 ; ix. 4. • B. I., iv. 10 ; vi. 2 ; iii. 7 ; vi. 7. ^ B. I., viii. 1 ; ii. 3 ; i. 10; i. 6; vii. 8; vii. 19; xiL 4. » B. I., vii. See Lunjm, XV. 10. 538 STRUCTURES. car, finished as by chisel and file, grave, magnanimous, gentle, and kind. The content of the poor, the pleasures of the solitary, the miser's self-neglect, the parsimony of the mean rich man, are not forgotten ; nor is a dirge want- ing to noble youth cut off at its flowering.^ The A'oice of the people makes itself heard against idle „, ministers, who are bidden go to the wood-cutter for The voice ' ^ of the instruction ; and against the horrible practice of peope. burying alive at the graves of chiefs ; against offi- cial extortions, " the gnawing of rats ; " against frivolous rulers and useless agents.^ The bond which ties a people to a true prince is described as " a knot which cannot be loosed ; " he is " a bird that tenderly hides her little ones in a thick covert of leaves." And the troops rejoice in the noble aims of their leaders to give peace to other States.^ Labor Thc sougs, of labor, characteristically detailing the ^°°^^' special tasks and trophies of every month, are too long to be quoted.^ We select the peasant song of the people of T'sin : — 1. "The cricket is already in the hall, and the year is drawing to its Peasant C'ose. song of If we are not happy now, the days and months will pass ^'*'"' away in vain. But let us keep in bounds : 'twill be sweet to have done as we ought. Sweet is pleasure, but with what is becoming must it be ever joined. Self -watchful is the good man, even in his transports of joy. 2. The cricket is already in the hall, and our wains are still. If we are not happy now, the days and months will pass away in vain. But let us keep in bounds. Let us be mindful of the griefs that may come. Sweet is pleasure, but with respect for goodness must it be con- joined. The good man is quiet and serene." * » B. I. V. i; xii. 3 ; V. 2; x. 2; viii. 11. ' B. I. ix. 6; id. 6; ix. 7! xiii. i; xiv. 3. B. I- xiv. 3 ; XV. 4. * See especially B. I. xv. 1. ^ B. I. x. 1. THE SHI-KING. 539 It is of course impossible for us fully to appreciate wherein consisted the poetic charm of these songs, to us so The secret bare and commonplace, so often childish, though thrsym. always direct and sincere. Some secret of sympa- boUsm. thetic symbolism, not yet penetrated, must hide in the favorite usage of opening them with figurative allusion to natural objects ; though the later microscopic treatment of plants and creatures is wholly wanting in these earlier effusions. The absence of speculative interest, the Ethical grasp on purely concrete aspects of things, are l"^"^^' counterbalanced by a depth of feeling which de- nestoess. serves the name of religion. A pensive, often complaining tone, a consciousness of hard lot and heavy burdens, are mingled with intense appreciation of the blessings of home, and with positively devout loyalty to moral laws, to filial and paternal sentiments, to the marriage tie. The very large proportion of these fun^;- odes which relate to domes- tic life, and are even composed by women, — covering all experiences of their sex, and fully uttering its demands, — impress the whole book with a certain refinement and delicacy ; a feminine element, unlike any thing in the memorials of Aryan or Shemitic literature. Woman can hardly be said to be oppressed. Polygamy must have been rare, and possessed but little ethical sanction. A high appreciation of married life comes alike from man and woman ; while the fact that in later times such tenderness and devotion is mainly confined to woman alone, appears to point to a subordinate position unknown to the day of the Shi-king. Very noteworthy in the Odes is their freedom of speech, which is praised in the preface as one of their Freedom highest merits ; the function of the y««^ being "f^peech. " not only to aid the rulers to elevate the people, but the people also to reprove the ruler." These early odes are distinguished as in a special sense "correct" perhaps as pro- S40 STRUCTURES. ceeding from the standard epoch of government. And we may regard it as very creditable to the Chinese that they have been made the fore-court of the national culture. From the manners of the people, the compilers of the Book Shi naturally hastened on to the " Affairs of the Second. Kingdom." Of this class of odes they constructed Minor two series : the first (Siao-Ya), relating to matters tiK King- of ordinary interest, being gathered in this second *""■ Book ; the other, celebrating the famous founder of the Tcheou, and recounting its fortunes in a more elaborate way in the succeeding one. Both belong especially to the royal domains ; unlike the fung, which were products of the feudal States. The first twenty-two pieces are ascribed to the Great Duke himself, but very little light seems to have been reached respecting their dates. Here begin the festal odes, in which the princely enter- ^ , , tainer celebrates his viands and his guests, and is Festal odes ... to ' atfamUy mct by similar greetings. Glad at heart to see his re-unions. j^Q^^jg mgn, he appeals to the creatures, the forest, and the plants of the field to symbolize his joy.^ Baccha- nalian feasts, sometimes lauded, are in other odes severely reproved.^ At family re-unions are sung the special praises of the old, and open feasts held, where all hearts turn to family joys. " Shall the birds sing to their mates, and man not have his beloved ones ? " 3 " Of all in the world, none are equal to brothers ; they feel with us in sorrow, seek us in exile, protect us from insult. Like the music of lutes is the love of wife and children ; but the accord of brothers assures that it shall last." * A mansion is dedicated by guests with good wishes fo* • B. II. i. I ; u. 3 ; ii. 7 ; vii. 2 ; i. 6 ; ii. 9 J iii. 1. » B. II. U. 3, 5, 7, 9 ; vii. 3i 6' » B. II. i. 6, 5. « B. II. i. 4. THE SHI-KING. S4I the builder and his children, with hopes that the diviners shall find in their bears and serpents good omens of sons who shall sleep on couches and play with sceptres ; and daughters who shall sleep on the earth and play with tiles (a distinction the ground of which does not appear) : the lord himself shall lie on his bamboo mat, and brothers shall live in mutual love.-' The tribe of herdsmen come before us with their wealth of cattle, black-lipped, flapping their ears ; of horned, peaceful sheep ; " they come down the hills and drink at the pools ; they lie down and roam about ; strong and uninjured, at the wave of the shepherd's hand, they go up to the field." ^ At ancestral feasts, the food goes round " in due form, every word and smile as it should be," with wishes for " myriad years of life ; " the youth who personates the ancestors announces the good-will, of the honored shades, and bears away the tablets to the sound of bells and drums." ^ " The offering of the red bull binds the services to the labors of the field ; and the " Fathers of Husbandry " are invoked.* The land-surveyor en- countiy courages the best laborers, "rejoicing in their task ufeceie- amidst the luxuriant grain," where " crops are thick as thatch, and stacks stand in mounded isles." ^ The farmer sings the beauty of his growing grain, and " the fruit that lies soft in the sheath." " It hardens healthily, free of weeds : from heart and leaf, from root and fruit, we pick off the insects that might harm the young plants. The dense clouds rise : may it rain first on the public, then on the pri- vate fields. Sheaves of the new grain we leave unreaped by handfuls on the ground, for the widow's share." ° Mingled with these idyllic notes are preludes of the dark days coming on degenerate Tcheou : warnings and The dark rebukes, hints of the ideal virtue demanded in evil '""=5 coming times. » B. II. iv. 5. ' B. II. iv. 6. • B. II. vL * B. II. vi. 6. « B. II. vi. 7- • B- H- vi. 8. 542 STRUCTURES. " Let every man have his standard for constant rule ; teach his children the right way. Even as one walking on thin ice is the man of uprightness : in imprisonment and torture let him be vigilant as one who descends a precipice." ' There is longing for the simple living and noble manners of the older time.^ Private troubles, too various to specify, have found their way by some fancied or real relation to War bur- pubUc affairs into these larger monitions of social ^^'^^ change.^ The war burdens press heavily. The lot of the soldier on the borders is not hid. " When shall we return ? When return ? The willows were green at our parting ; the snows will be falling in clouds ere we come back. Alas, the tedious marches, the hunger and thirst, The wounding of the heart, and none to know our sadness." * " How are we alone dealt with as if we were not men .'' As if we were rhinoceros or tiger, to be kept in these desolate wilds ! " ' Far away the wives are watching in vain : — " Lonely stands the pear-tree with its bright fruit. The days lengthen out ; my woman-heart is wounded ; yet he does not come."" While triumphal songs greet the general on his return, and royal hunts have their Pindaric odes,'' high officials on distant missions celebrate the anxious zeal with which they fulfil the onerous commands of the prince ; their " horses never halt ;" it is toil and plan without respite, "so long as the spine endures." * " When will his bad and crooked counsels stop ? We rush down like waters from their spring, and shall sink in common ruin. "' A bold critic charges the evil to choice of bad council- Propheric lors, and dares to put the name of the guilty in his warnings, indictmeut. ' B. II. V. 2. • B. II. viu. 1. » B. II. viL 5 J T. 6; viii. s i v. 5, 7, 8. « B. II. i. 7. » B. II. viii. 10. • B. II. i. 9. ' B. II. iii. 4, & «^ • B. II. i. 3, 2 ; vi. I ; iii. 3, 4 ; vi. 2. • B. II. v. i. THE SHI-KING. 543 " O pitiless Heaven, it is not right ! His mean relatives in high places ! Nor will he correct his heart, but resents the efFort to improve him." i Another prophet cries : — " Why was not this time before me, or after me ? The people will be reduced to servitude ; they look to Heaven, but all is dark. But let Heaven will, and none can resist. Does the great God hate any one ? You consult divines ; they all say, ' We are wise ! ' But does the male crow differ (in blackness) from the female ? We say of the heavens that they are high ; yet I dare not stand upright : of the earth that it is thick ; yet I must walk daintily on it. I have reason for my free- dom of speech. Alas for the time ! The majestic capital of Tcheou is perishing! The rich may survive it; but alas for the helpless and solitary ! " 2 " O great Heaven, how hast thou shut up thy love ! Compassionate Heaven, arrayed in terrors ! why revealest thou not thy care ? Leav- ing criminals aside, who have but paid just penalty, the innocent are involved in the same ruin. Why will he not listen to justice ? Why, O Officers, will ye not respect each other, nor stand in awe of Heaven ? Alas ! there are no words for it ; 'tis deeper than the tongue can speak. Words that can be spoken prosper. Artful speech flows like water, and the speaker dwells at ease. See how perilous is office. By advice given in vain, you offend the prince, — you offend your friends even. Painful are my inmost thoughts. I weep tears of blood." ' The best of the Hebrews, with far more poetic wealth, had no more devotion to justice and the people, no more valor in denouncing wrong, than tnese estnessand patriotic censors of the degenerate princes of the =°""'S'=- House of Tcheou. We cannot wonder that when ' Chi- hwang-ti wanted to play the master in China, and subdue the border tribes by means of merciless conscriptions, he tried to destroy this Book of peace, justice, and hu- manity. We have in these jeremiads full light on the procedures of those elements of the national character by which The jere- wars of aggrandizement, often doubtless even of ^^■ > B. II. iv. 7. » B. 11. iv. 8. ' B. II. iv. la 544 STRUCTURES. defence, are resisted. It does not well appear how empires could be reared, where such distaste for the sacrifices and methods involved in their support controls the people. In what other form this predominance of the anti-political element exerted its influence in times preceding the de- struction of Tcheou, we know only from the instances of Confucius and Mencius ; who do not point back to earlier itinerant councillors like themselves, but who must, never- theless, be outgrowths from other expressions of a ten- dency so powerful in the national mind. They were, at all events, genuine representatives of moral insights and restraints, which no force of political necessity has been able to silence, or even disparage. In this Book the feminine interest recedes before gov- ernmental figures and scenes which represent the inine eie- tortuncs ot the natiou as a whole. Yet the stram ment. gf woman's inseparable part in all these is not wanting ; and it is always of the humane, sympathetic, and admonitory sort which we have heard in the earlier odes. The " Greater Odes " (Ta-Ya) are a sustained judgment- BooK record of the House of Tcheou, tried by the high Third. Standard of religion and morals, from its rise un- Greater dcr Wau and Woo to the days of its degeneracy. the ^King- Again the principal are ascribed to the Great dDxt. . Duke, lawgiver of the rescued land, and brother of Wan. The first is an apotheosis of virtue : — " King Wan is on high : bright in heaven. He ascends and descends Divine °'^ *^^ ^^^* ^""^ "S^' °^ Shangte. honors to Full was he of earnest activity ; his fame is without end. virtuous His good gifts descend to a hundred generations.* "*' Born of pure father and mother, watchful and reverent^ with wisdom served he God, and won the blessing. » B. III. i. I. THE SHI-KING. 545 Below is required the illustration of virtue. The dread Majesty is on high." ' The people greet their deliverer, admiring his noble port, his splendor like the stars : his self-possession, his freedom from all crooked ways : ^ — " When alone he felt as when observed. Without admonition followed the right. Grown up men became virtubus through him, and the young went ever onward." ' In these and other odes are commemorated the civilizing work achieved by Wan and Woo ; their filial piety ; Their cmi- the virtues of their mothers and wives ; the love '™g™*- and gratitude of their people.* The fortunes of Tcheou are rehearsed out of the ancient legends, from the xhefor- days when its tribes lived in caves to the conquest tunes <>£ of the empire by Wan, and the obedience of the multitudes ; " drawn in part by his victories, in part by his protection of the weak against the mighty." ^ The older Chinese ideal of royalty is shown in the picture of Leou, sitting at meat with his officials, measuring the lands, building guest-houses, fixing revenues, and pushing cultivation along the Hoang-ho.^ The religion of agriculture has its curiously Messianic symbol in How-tseih, ^^ ^ . born of a pure virgin who has trodden in a foot- ™iturai print of God after praying for a child, and whose delivery is without pains ; exposed in a narrow place, where the oxen and sheep protect him ; in a forest, where the wood- men find him ; in the ice, where the birds cover him, and respond to his infant cries. Majestic even in his babyhood ; in childhood planting grains and raising pulse, wheat, and hemp, which he teaches the people to cultivate, that they may bear them home for an offering. To him it is owing > B. III. i. 2. ' B. III. i. 4, 5. » B. III. i. 6. • B. III. i. 8, 9 lo. » B. III. i. 3. « B. III. ni. i. 35 546 STRUCTURES. that the wine and meat are offered at the New Year's feast, well pleasing to Shang-te.^ A strange old myth in this locality, yet forcibly recalling those in which the Red Tribes of America celebrate the growing of the grain, and embodying ethical and spiritual symbols with which my- thology is wont to surround the birth and infancy of the most various ideals. We note throughout the book the providential aspect of history, the almost Shemitic tiaiviewof God, survcyiug the world, sending down his judg- History. nicnts, raising up leaders, holding the ages to his unchanging moral laws ; yet without a sign of national or tribal exclusiveness, nor hint of war on other gods.^ But dark omens of corruption call for closer dealing, The Dark and wc havc warnings and rebukes as stern as Omens. Isaiah's, increasing as we go on. " It is vain for you to scorn my words because I am your fellow- Prophets servant. again. It was said of old, ' Consult the gatherers of grass and fire- wood.' ' Tis the good that are the fence ; the people that are the wall. Stand in awe of Heaven, be afraid to dally and slumber, All your doings are seen above." ' " Alas, ruler of Yin ! you employ those who answer you with lies. Robbers are in your court; thence come curses and oaths without limit. Alas ! 'tis not Heaven that flushes your faces, that you follow evil, Turning night into day, carousing and shouting." •• " Upon every State, alas, the doom hurries on. The deer in the woods consort together : but here friends are false and help not each other. And the people say, ' We can go neither backward nor forward.' O my People, like a bird, wounded as it flies, I would do you good, but you hate me the more." ' Amidst these evil days the good reign of Seuen falls «B. Ill.ii, I. » B. Ill.i. 7; i.,,2. » B. III. ii. 9, 10. « B. III. Hi. I. » B. III. iii. 3. THE SHI-KING. 547 like a benediction, lasting nearly half a century. His self- reproaches and prayers for his people in time of The good drought ; his perception that, " in creating the mul- ^°s titude, Heaven annexed to every faculty and rela- tion its special law, and gave to all a normal love of right ; " the blessings of a humanity, that " insulted not the poor nor the widow, nor feared the oppressors of the weak," and bade his generals in subduing rebellion " not to dis- tress the people, but to open up the country to cultiva- tion," — are greeted by the poets of the time with fully appreciative strains.'' To the darkest time of all, the reign of Yeou, there belongs the saddest wail of this Puritan poetry ; ^^^ ^^ which some bitter experience of mis-government reign of has driven, we regret to say, into one of those dia- ^'°"' tribes against the intermeddling of women in public affairs, to which the literature of no nation is a stranger.^ More affirmative of good is the self-admonition of some Chinese Antoninus to self-watchfulness, humility, and noble manners : — " Be careful of your speech. A flaw in jade may be ground away : but a flaw in speecii is hopeless. Royal self- Speak not lightly. Say not, ' This is a small matter.' admonition. Words are not to be cast away. Every word finds its answer : every deed its reward. Shame not yourself before the light that falls into your private chamber. Say not, ' This is not public : none see me.' The coming of spiritual beings cannot be calculated ; The less should they be slighted. The soft elastic wood can have its silken string. The mild and rever- ent man has the foundations of virtue." * The value of these Odes is in presenting the times in which, as in a forge, the Chinese State was shaped, j,^^ ^^ in a clear historic record, free from mythology, and asm of 1 "NT Rulers. flowing through the emotions of the people. JNo > B. III. iii. 4, 6, 8. ■ B. III. iii. lo. ' B. III. iii. a. 548 STRUCTURES. Other race has a similar record : the memorial of ages of monarchy, yet thoroughly ethical and democratic, and at war with every form of oppression. No princely bribe or frown mars this perfect frankness. No Miltonic Areopagitica is needed. Behind these protests the question of free speech lies settled : the poets do not argue it, they act on the inward conviction and speak out. Not an ode is to be found sympathizing with the strong against the weak. Confucius has done his work thoroughly, if his it be. The earnest interest in humanity absorbs all praise of letters or art ; 'tis the common good that is enforced at every turn. Laying and testing the foundation of a great State A gospel . . of cLviiiza- is what thesc bards were busy at ; conscious or """■ unconscious of it, they are always serious and simple, like men detailed for a great service. In advocacy of the people, the Ya follow up the Fung. The Shi-king is a gospel of civilization. This is apparent in the final Book, for which is reserved Book the Completion of the political ideal. It contains Fourth, ^^iq religious honors paid by the State to its great- ficzai Odes ^st pcrsonagcs ; thanksgiving for the blessings of of Tcheau. Hcavcu ou its productive labors ; sacrificial odes for ancestral temples and to the spirits of the earth ; and There!!- congratulatious on good government and public of't'he'^™™" prosperity. These are Odes of the Temple and Shi-king. Altar (Sung), and mainly relate to sacrificial sea- sons. The older are of course ascribed to the Great Duke, but their real dates are unknown. In the "solemn stillness" of the Ancestral Temple Ancestral houors are paid to Wan, " of whom men will never honors°fo become weary ; " " whose statutes will endure for the good, ever ; "' " whose personal virtues, and whose loving care of later generations, are signs of the deep ordinances THE SHI-KING. 549 of Heaven." ^ Praise is given to Woo as " model in war, protector in peace." ^ A bull is offered by Woo, which Wan descends to receive, hearing the prayer, — " O great and august Father ! comfort me your filial son. To my most exalted Father and Mother I ofEer this sacrifice."" Jubilant the praises of the conqueror, bringing peace to the land.* Honors also to the " deep and silent virtue of Ching, who dared not rest idly on the foundations of Wan and Woo, but by night and day enlarged them ; " ^ " to How- tsieh, companion of Heaven, for the nutritious grains and the civilizing laws :"^ to ancestors, "for the well filled gran- aries, and the sweet wine for sacrifices."'' Thanksgiving Odes describe the peasants at their tasks : — " Sharp are their shares. They sow the various grain, each seed a germ of life. P^^aut With light splint hats they ply their hoes, and weed both Thanksgiv- wet and dry. "s^- The rustling grain before the reapers falls : the sheaves stand (up) firm and high. The hundred barns thrown wide, the granaries full, make wives and children glad. The muzzled bull with crooked horns we slay ; our fathers taught the rite." 8 Still further back, grateful memories celebrate T'ang, the earliest deliverer, who overthrew the dynasty of the Hia long before Wan and Woo dealt like judgment on the Shang.^ " O ye great Kings ! " cries the young Ching, on his ac- cession, " I will strive not to forget you : I, a little p^^^^ ^j child, on whom this unsettled State has devolved, achua day and night will be so reverent. I am solitary "°p""- > B. IV.i. I, 2, 3. 2 B. IV. iu. 8, 9. > B. IV.i. 7; U.7. * B. IV. i. 8. » B. IV. i. 6. • B. IV. i. 10. ' B. IV. ii. 4. » B. IV. ui. 6 ; also iii. j. » B. IV., pt. hi. i. i, 3. 5 so STRUCTURES. and full of anxious care. And you my ministers, teach me how to do right." ^ The praise of a good king and a happy reign, — where Final Ode. the pcoplc are held in respect, and justice is impar- tially rendered and without excess, and the building of an ancestral temple gives a home where the royal tablet shall forever abide, — fitly closes this dedication of ancient his- tory and ideal faith to the filial piety of a race. This fourth and last Book places the seal of religion on common life and simple sentiment, embalmed in the strains of thirty centuries ago. * B. IT., FT. I. iii. I. a, I. SAGES. RATIONALISM. RATIONALISM. A MAJORITY of those earliest Orientalists, the Ro- man Catholic missionaries, have bestowed Chinese ^ much praise on the Chinese for their monotheistic "Atheism." beliefs, some of them going so far as to find foreshadowings of Christian dogmas in their classical books. But a smaller party have insisted that they were " atheists," and devoid of spiritual perceptions. These extremes of opinion are natural. They are the differing results produced in different temperaments by palpable failures in converting the Chinese to forms of belief alien to their mental habits ; one class giving way to severe judgment, the other applying their fancy to the literature of the race to detect capabilities they could not so readily find in the men and women before them. If we take the term in its distinctively Christian sense, it is probable that the advocates of the " atheism " of the Chinese have come nearer the truth than their more idealistic opponents. The Protestants, more strict inter- preters of Christian dogma than the Catholics, and less inclined to see anticipations of it in the heathen, have in the ratio of their own orthedoxy been disposed to regard the sons of Han as " unbelievers in a God." The rise of free philosophy in recent times has given a clearer form to the charge. And since Rationalism became a recognized method of opposition to unquestioning belief in Judaism and Christianity, this (so called) " atheism " has been ascribed to the "rationalistic" qus^lities of the Chinese mind. 5 54 SAGES. " The philosophers," wrote Morison to his wife from China, " are atheists : as for the common people, O ye ra- tionalists, mark here the fruits of your 'reason.'"^ The good missionary had indeed up-hill work. Neumann says he went to see the six or seven persons for whom Morison held Christian services, and that he could not trace on their faces the slightest signs of religious interest in the doctrines set before them.^ Morison was asked by his Chinese teacher in London, whether Jesus was man or woman, — a question probably meant as a Criticism on the intelligence of the Christian God. Praying was equally unintelligible to him : it " led to nothing ; man must help himself." As for converting the Chinese, " it might as well be given up ; " they " had Confucius, and could dispense with idle fables." * Milne thought it worth his while to illustrate Chinese rationalism by a Confucian who distinctly " denied the depravity of the heart, and the doctrine that God could be worshipped by man." * According to Dbolittle, " they have great contempt for the resurrection of the body, and are fond of making sport of solemn subjects, like wicked men in Christian coun- tries. They ask if the bottom of heaven will not fall out, if so many enter it ; have no doctrine of vicarious atone- ment for sin, and deride the scriptural account of its entrance into the world, and do not admit the innate depravity of human nature. They believe in fate, not in an omniscient Being. Their sages have never been able to trace with distinctness the doctrine of the creation and government of all things, the originality of sin, &c."^ Father Lecomte (1698) says "their hearts rose chiefly against the Trinity and Incarnation : a God that was pene- trable and could die was a piece of folly; though the existence of a God eternal, supreme, and infinitely just « Zeitsch. d. D. M. G. I. loo. » Ibid., p. 115. ' Ibid., p. 107. • Chinese Refos., Jan. 1844. » Doolittle's Chinese, II. 391-401 RATIONALISM. ' SSS went easily down with them." ^ This father, according to his own story, frightened a native rationalist (who could see no difference between his own fables. and those of Christi- anity, and doubted both) into a terrible dream, in which he saw hell-punishments, and also heavenly rewards, " so that he was glad enough to be baptized." ^ Is all this illustrative of the national mind ? Doubtless it is. It means that Chinese are not theological, „ , ° ' What the like Europeans ; that mysteries which require that charge such natural faculties as reason and observation ^'s"'fi"- should be treated as incapable in matters of religion are to them simply absurd ; and further, that holding their minds directly to the tests of positive fact, they make no essential separation between the actual and the ideal, the world and its substance, Nature and God. However "atheistic " this may seem to the distinctively Christian consciousness, it is by no means necessarily so to the intuitive or the scientific. Rationalistic it certainly is. We must add that this ration- alism, doubtless exaggerated by the limited range of Chinese speculation in purely abstract ideas, is at precisely the op- posite extreme from the rehgion of the Christian mission- ary. He has his. system of faith, built on the peculiar study of the Infinite in itself ; inconceivable profundities, which, so far from being comprehended, are to be accepted by an act of pure abandonment to the impossible : infinite sin ; infinite penalty ; infinite distance of a creator from his work; infinite gulf between God and the soul; infinite atonement by an infinite being ; infinite inability in finite man to help himself. The Chinese, at the other extreme, finds this abstract and outside Infinite to be without relation to the facts of experience. Not only are his human faculties ^ery ob- viously, to his mind, the source of all his knowledge, and their active relations with the world their only real life ■ CAitm, p. 394- ' Ibid., p. 396. SS6 SAGES. but religion itself, the ideal world, means the ultimate perfection of things concrete, — namely, the State, which embraces the whole of human relations. The Shing-jin (saints) of China, and the kami (gods) of Japan, are men who have done it service. These cults are historical, a tribute to Humanity. It is the meeting of the positivist and the supernatural- Meetingof ^^'•' bctwcen whom mutual understanding is next to theposi- impossible. To the mandarin the missionary is a the super- ^oo^ i'^ perception ; to the missionary the mandarin naturalist, fg ^n idiot In religious faith. Doolittle mentions with complacency' that he turned his back on the tablet of Confucius to lecture the crowd on the sinfulness of "worshipping great men;" and doubtless then proceeded to teach them the duty of adoring Jesus as their God ! The innate rationalism of the Chinese is naturally most Rational- dcvclopcd in the cultivated classes, who are quite ism of the impcrvious to Christian dogma, though very open class in to Westcm science. The chronicles relate that China. Hwang-gan-chi, a minister of the Sung, opposed the idea that droughts and earthquakes were penalties for human crime. " Do you expect to change the order of Nature .■' Do you wish that new laws should be made for you ? " It is a significant fact that the Emperor yielded to his clear-headed adviser on a point where delusion has in all faiths and all ages been so prevalent. In the sleep- ing chamber of Tai-tsung was found a magpie's nest, which was popularly regarded as the happiest of omens. But the royal sage was ashamed of such fancies. " The omens that I trust are wise men who help my people." ^ Hung-wu, emperor in the fourteenth century, said : " The best augury for a prince is to lay aside his faults." ^ The Imperial Edict of Kang-hi enjoins on the people to avoid following I Doolittle, I. 368. « De Mailla, VI. S9 ; Wuttke, II. 61. > De Mailla, X. 73 ; Wuttke, Ibid. RATIONALISM. 557 miracles and mysterious dogmas, in place of the great nat- ural relationl" and duties of humanity.^ Hang-yu, states- man in the T'ang, protested against the worship of relics by a Buddhist Emperor ;2 and Wang-ching, a leading meta- physician, applied rationaUstic criticism to the whole body of Chinese literature, weeding out superstitions from the writings of every school.^ The " Sacred Edict " not only repudiates the relic-and-miracle worship of the Buddhist and Tao-sse schools, as well as that of the Christians, but describes their promises of future rewards for mere phrases and rites as delusions, contrary to the facts of law and life. Yung-ching's commentary on the " Sacred Edict " explains that the Chinese Government has employed the services of Christians purely on account of their scientific knowledge.* In the spirit of Tai-tsung's saying that " good and evil do not depend on the calendar, but on good or evil deeds," are many edicts denouncing magical rites, idolatrous cere- monies, and even prayers for rain. When Ricci brought Catholic images and relics, the Minister of Rites said : " The foreigner tells us these bones belong to immortal beings ; why did they not take them with themselves ? As for the images of Heaven and the Virgin, they are worthless." The Ming Annals record similar estimates,^ and the Penal Code punishes magic as an offence against public order. To Christian warnings of a Judgment Day • the reply is naturally that of the old Confucian, who said, with indig- nation : " If our great sage is in hell, then I wish to go there also." ^ A modern disciple of Chu-hi points out the super- stition of ascribing personal existence to the elements, and to Heaven and Earth, "as if these deities were enjoying viands and using utensils." These expressions in the old 1 Milne's Translation, pp. 132, 133. ' Mayers, CAin. Reader' s Manual, p. 50. " Ibid., p. 259- * Milne, p. 137. In 1812 only mathematicians were excepted from the edict of banishmei* against Christians. » Zeitsch. d. D. M G. I. 119. " Chin. Rebellions, p. 67. SS8 SAGES. hymns, he says, are " simply forms of veneration." ' The Tai-pings made no difference between da}^, denied the Trinity, set up no claim .to miraculous powers, and bap- tized themselves without a priesthood.^ So general is this education that it is said all the learned belong to the Yu-kiao (rationalist) school. They invariably demand the natural law and human principle on which a belief is founded. Their respect for human nature is shown in the exalted meaning given to the -word jin (man) ; which, like our word " humanity," transcends all other words and comprehends all valid beliefs,* It is purely as a man that Confucius in his temple-rites is called the pivot of knowl- edge and the Master of Ages ; nor can one be supposed to have possessed miraculous powers, who, after exalting the ancient kings as perfect models, declared that all men may become Yaos and Shuns. The strong realism, which refers all things to the tests Noexter- 0^ human thought and character, becomes an nai God. equally strong belief in the inherence of law and the eternity of the world. Both the one and the other are inconsistent with the conception of Divine volitions acting on the cosmos from without, or proceeding to its creation at a given time. The nature of things itself is order, wisdom, benignity ; and until these are perceived in the cosmical and human spheres, it is not allowed that these spheres are rightly apprehended, The Chinese thus avoid that rock on which monotheism splits, — the attempt at conceiving two infinities, God and his world ; and escapes the insoluble problem of reconciling evil with the definite purposes of a supremely good but anthropomorphic God.* Having therefore no word properly answering to the * Am. Or. yourn.., October, i86g. ^ Macfarlane, Appendix ; Meadows, pp. 425, 437. » See Chin. Repas., July, 1846. * It will hereafter be shown that the old classica, in their description of Shang-te, do not materially contradict this general statement of Chinese tendencies. RATIONALISM. 559 "Christian God," they are the object of an interminable dispute among Scripture translators h6w to put this con ception into their unsuitable forms of speech, resulting for the most part in their being consigned to the limbo of " atheism." i This reference of religion to human faculty, as the ulti- mate tribunal, is the natural result to which pro- ^^^^ ^^^^^^ longed culture has led every positive faith, marking faculties its transition to a larger form of experience. When "^mate' Buddhism and Christianity issue in putting a man ground of in place of God ; when Greek faith ends in the ^"^^essa^y Socratic creed that man is the one proper object of ■•"uitof human study ; ^ when Judaism interprets its Jeho- vah by the sentences of the Rabbins, and Mohammedanism its Allah by the mystical speculations of the free-thinking Sufis, — these phases of belief are fbreshadowings of an inevitable conviction, that all truth which comes to man comes by the operation of his faculties under their own laws. They are foregleams of three grand certainties : the firsi, of philosophy, that the analysis of these faculties is the ground of knowledge ; the next, of science, that the universe must be to man according as he perceives it ; and the last, of religion, that what man sees and knows and loves, that he inwardly is. When Confucius and Chu-hi refuse to look outside the universe for a Being unrelated to human reason ; when they fill heaven and earth with these human relations by which their race has lived for three thousand years, — they seem to me singularly prescient, with all their temperamental defects, of the truth to which thought is pointing in our day. In their somewhat crude naturalism, in their silence or reserve as to matters on which the familiar laws of life afford no solution, there is the germ of a true reconciliation of science and faith. 1 See, further on, chapter on Chinese Theism. * Xenophon's Memorabilia, I. i. 56o SAGES. In accordance with this rehgion of humanity, honors TheReiig- ^re paid to Confucius and other sages, as in the manity. school of Comtc to thc great men of all times. Honors to -pj^jg ^,^1^ jg gf ^ pubUc nature, and the official benefac- tors, hymns, libations, and incense represent national gratitude for universal gifts. Prostration before the tablet is the symboUc act of the State, the homage of politics to the ethical and literary ideal. Thus for the worship of an external creator, the Mongolian ih China and Japan substi- tutes grateful recognition of the inherence of character after death in the body and substance of the race. The principle is the same, whether in the ancestral rites to be performed "as if the parents were present," ^ or in- those other rites in honor of spirits of the land and grain, and of other elemental powers in the manifold combinations of the " two principles." All represent devotion to human duties, interests, and hopes ; and the relations with divine powers are all grounded in these. Thus when Mencius says, " If, after due sacrifices, there supersti- are yet destructive rains and droughts, the altars of tions con- jjjg spirits of thc land are changed and others set trary to the '■ national up, he IS illustrating the truth that these guardian culture. spirits and places are for the people's sake, not the people for theirs.^ So the apparent concessions of the State to popular superstitions rhust be regarded as nothing more than political expedients for the benefit of a philosophy of government which really lies deeper in the national mind than the delusions themselves. The Canton authorities in 1830 offered a reward to any exorcist who would bring rain. The trial was made by a priest of Fo, but one of any other reli- gion would have been as acceptable ; and it is not probable that these Chinese Sadducees, trained in the school of Con- fucius, expected success from any. Scarth tells us that in 1 841 the mandarins took Buddhist images and exposed " Confucius. ' Mencius, VII., Pt. ii. 14. See Legge on the passage. RATIONALISM. 56 1 them to fhc rain, to see how they liked it.^ " Will you give a god a bo'ty of molten gold, and build him a house to live in ? " asks the " Sacred Edict." " As soon as people begin to believe in monsters, devils, calHng for wind, commanding rain, their heart and morals are destroyed." " Even the Tien-chu (Christians), who talk of things without substance, have a religion that is unsound." In fact the reference of every thing to the interests of a regulated government utterly forbids the idea of Divine in- terference from without in the order of nature and society. And hence no form of official remonstrance has been more frequent than the charge against Buddhist and Tao-sse superstitions of imperilling social order. Even these, as the Chinese conceive them, rest on a kind of rationalism. No people are more addicted to divination ; and this rests mainly on the diagrams of the Y-king, constructed according to numerical rules, representing natural relations and laws. The popular terrors at eclipses are rebuked by the calm calculations of the " Mathematical Board," registering the phenomena as effects of law. Sorceries, divinations, and spirit-intercourse, and the universal belief in Fung-shui (occult powers in Nature), are all quite distinct from super- naturalism. Even the popular mythology indicates this inseparableness of the fancy from orderly familiar law. Pwan-ku, Their reia- the world-maker of the Tao-sse faith, is himself a ^'""^ part of the world he makes : this primal man is a uw. kind of human ape, has horns and protruding teeth, and wears an apron of leaves, while he hammers the rocks into shape, and works out the dragon and tortoise. Yet this Darwinian creature is a type of morality. He is humanly wise, just, rational, useful ; he teaches navigation, opens the mountains, and is a good Chinese producer. His world-making is evolution from chaotic matter through the > De Mas, p. 86. 36 S62 SAGES. inherence of the Yin and Yang. Around this human demi- urge are gathered marvellous ideal creatures which com- bine the bestial and human elements.^ His work is slow, orderly, secular, like natural growth. This is a t)'pe of Chinese conceptions. Creation from without cannot ac- count for the universe. Builder and work are one ; the ideal of human uses is therein, from everlasting to everlast- ing ; and the special form under which the world appears to us is but one embodiment or working out of its inherent humanity. At home in the world, which is in the image of his own nature, man reads its activities as so much human life : a concreteness which does not belong to Chinese faith only, but is found in very different races. The Edda builds the world out of the different members of the giant Ymir, human expression of the elementary frost and fire ; as the Tao-sse shape it out of the fragments of Pwan-ku, the primal man.^ The current magic of most rude races is a claim to com- mand genii and spirits, rather than a subjection to them. In this respect, fetichism itself is a germ of philosophy. Chinese wonder-working is mainly of this character, and well illustrated by the legend of two brothers who had the gift of summoning all spirits to judgment on a moun- tain, and punishing those who had shown evil will to man.* The Hakkas, an interesting native tribe, as described by Eitel, also exhibit this germinant rationalism. They repel metempsychosis and the Buddhist hells, assert the annihi- lation of the wicked instead of their endless punishment, and freely criticise the popular deities.* Rationalistic habits of thought are suggested by such Chinese proverbs as these : ^ — ^ So the Ainos, indigenous race of Japan, trace their origin to beais. * See Mayers, p. 174 ; Carre, I, 474 : Courcy, p. 325. * Mayers, Maxual, 220. * Notes and Queries^ Vol. I., No. z. * Collections by Davis, Scarborough, Doolittle, and others ; also ** Sacred Edict." RATIONALISM. 563 Doing one's home duties, what need of going afar to burn incense ? In making a candle we seek for light : in reading a book Ration- we seek for reason. alistic How can we suit other men's ideas ? Let me only see that p™™'''''- I shame not my own heart. Who knows himself and knows others, will triumph whenever h(* contends. Many seek to know their fortunes by divination : to reproach others is the true ill-fortune ; to be reproached by them is the good. Every effect has its cause. Man ascends by nature, as water de- scends. You may find the measure of heaven and earth, but not of mind. An enlightened mind is like heaven ; a darkened one like hell. Who knows himself knows others, for hearts are alike. All the myriad gods are one God. Idolatrous superstitions are man's device. Every man reaps as he tills. Who lay up goodness have gladness ; who lay up evil, sadness. The upright fear no thunderbolts. Would you know what you were, see what you are ; would you know what you will be, see what you do. Seek not happiness outside your sphere of duty ; do nothing beyond the bounds of reason : do your own work and rest content. If one be not enlightened within, what lamp shall give him light : if his purpose is evil, what prayers shall he repeat ? The evidence of others is not comparable to personal experience ; nor is " I heard " so good as " I saw." If one be not perfect in human virtue, how shall he reach immortal perfection ? Traceable through all classes, and through the gradations of instinct, fancy, and mature culture, this absence Results of of a supernaturalistic motive explains many things jntu'^p^. in Chinese institutions. It forbids the existence of a naturalism, priestly caste ; and, among true Confucians, of any priest- hood whatever. There are paid officials who aid in the performance of religious rites, but the function involves no privileges nor special honoK. Properly speaking, the civili- zation is secular ; not for want of religion, but from the necessity of recognizing ideas in their positive working uses, instead of organizing a special; class for guarding and transmitting their speculative or contemplative contents. Thus is avoided the intolerance involved in a system of 564 SAGES. ecclesiastical rule. Where the worth of a belief is tested by its working capacity for general service, there can be no exclusiveness on merely theoretic or dogmatic grounds. Where the national consciousness recognizes no outward Divine caprice manipulating the universe of laws, there can be no ground for assuming a human right to impose a special creed by force of wiU. Thus the Chinese perceive no reason for restraining opinions but their having inter- fered with the permanent political order. The same lati- tudinarian spirit directed the policy of Genghis Khan, of Timour, and other great Mongol chieftains.-' The aim of these Asiatic conquerors to establish a universal empire dwarfed all those differences of theoretic belief over which they loved to play the impartial patron. This indifferentism as to opinion, combined with the demand for ethical and political conformity, is well illustrated in Key-ing's Edict of Toleration, issued in 1845.^ It is not a mere lack of specu- lative interest, but a positive zeal for being and doing. The State is the central spring of Chinese life, and suffers no intrusion of higher sanctions than those itself recognizes. It alone does not take the name kiao, which signifies sect.^ This equality of the creeds is a result of instinct and principle combined, and therefore consequent and complete ; while the toleration reached by Christian sects has been for the most part a limited half-way concession to reason against the instincts of their faith. Even the enlightened Utopians of Sir Thomas More, — who are pure rationalists, and hold it wrong to persecute any for his religious belief, because " no one can make hi/nself believe any thing he pleases," — deprive unbelievers in God and a future life of all employment in public trusts, " as men of base and sordid minds." » See Hue's Christianity in China, I. 274-283, 306. Marco Pdo, B. IL ch. ii. » WaiJams, II. 370. 3 waiiams, II. 233. RATIONALISM. 56$ The rationalistic element is conspicuous in Chinese lit- erature, and may be called the crown of a national ^^^onai- culture, as pure ethically as it is socially humane, ism in ut- It appears in the vast number of critical analyses, ^'^"'"' and the ample discussion of all traditions and classical works.^ A certain disputatiousness betrays the irritability of reasoning faculties kept in constant exercise on the de- tails of knowledge. There is really no limit to the freedom of denial here, except that sense of continuity in the life of literature, which in China is a form of religion. Chu-hi's analysis of the Shu-king shows how far rational speculation can be carried within these limits. Some of his canons are worth quoting : — Inquire into thyself before thou dost investigate others ; else thy spirit will be like an unbridled horse, that roams about aimlessly and is lost. The deeper the mind penetrates, the clearer it becomes ; the moie it spreads itself out on the surface, the more it is confused. Let the writer's thought so ripen in thee, that it becomes as it were thy own thought. For inability to comprehend and retain the import of a book, I know but one remedy : read less, and think more of what thou hast read. Act towards a difficult work as a brave general who leaves his foe no rest till he has overthrown him.^ In the long process of atomization from which the most venerated books have not been exempt, all assump- ^^^^ ^^.^._ tions have been denied, ali beliefs tracked to their asm and elements and run out to their extremes. Pan-kou ^=™=='°"- describes the hcense of his time in these respects with great sorrow, as proofs of its degeneracy. Over against Confucius, who reverently weighed circumstances, distinc- tions and degrees in human relations, rose the " Universal Love" principle of Mih, which was interpreted as com- munism. Fuh-kia's school set itself against all amelioration of human conditions. Seun opposed the Mencian doctrine « See Wylie's CUmk Lit., pp. 124-144. = Schott, Chines. Lift., p. S4- 566 SAGES. of the excellence of human nature, asserting that man could become bad as easily as good. Pessimism is represented in Yang-choo. At the opposite pole from Confucian prac- ticality is the rare speculative radicalism of Chu-hi. Lao- tse's mystical protest showed that even the sacred faith in institutions and social solidarity brought its reaction. One celebrated scholar is mentioned who actually rejected the diagrams of Fo-hi and the categories of the " Great Plan " of the Shu-king. All the educational classics are humanitarian, a culture The text- based on positive physical and mental laws. The books Siao-hiao describes to the young the functions naturalistic, ^j^jj-j, devolve on them in the great natural rela- tions, illustrating these by ideal instances from history, and by ethical precepts. The Ta-hio teaches that the founda- tions of the State are in personal character, and that office belongs to capacity. The " Millenary Classic " is to the same effect with the Siao-hiao. The Confucian Books represent the three grand forces, 'Heaven, Earth, and Man, as mutually penetrative, while self-perfection is the chief duty and sum of disciplines. " Filial Piety," says the " Sa- cred Edict," " is founded on the unalterable law of Heaven, the correspondent processes of Earth, and the common obligations of all people ; " all of which involves the duty of rightly caring for the body and mind. Laotse's Tao (Way of Reason) is the common term of all the schools, so applied as to designate an eternal wisdom to which all must appeal. Chu-hi says, " Reason is the celestial principle innate in man." Mencius vindicates the human faculties ; and Chinese metaphysics reaches its highest point in the identity of the rational principle in man (Li) with the ul- timate ground of the universe (Tai-ki), the one substance of its dual law. The defect of Chinese rationalism as a whole, in the light of modern philosophy, is obvious. It consist^ t over concrete- RATIONALISM. $6^ not in that inaptness at positing an actual God outside the cosmos, which Christians have usually called " athe- Phiiosoph- ism," but which is entirely in accordance with spir- „ot atheism itual pantheism, the highest form of theism, ^- but *"" ' cone in the want of sustained contemplative power. It ness. fails to hold idea as thought, apart from concrete embodi- ment, with sufiScient grasp to trace its functions in their real integrity through the spheres of imagination and specu- lative research. No lack of religious sentiment and con- viction is implied : these are none the less real because their object is not externally defined. As a constitutional habit of mind, its analogue will be found in concrete tenden- cies to which Western civilization is becoming more and more exposed through its wealth of material details, and its intense passion for organization and visible uses. Its faults, both in the East and West, are to be met, not by infu- sion of a theology contrary to the best perceptions of the time, but by the study of pure thought, of abstract law, of mathematical relations, as well as by education of the aesthetic nature, and of the sense of ideal freedom. For these, apart from defects of temperament, the Chinese mind affords an opening through its strong realism, R^j^tion o£ disposed to hold all ideal experiences as validly Chinese objective fact, and through the rational and human J„dto°the basis on which it treats all opinions, freely examin- intellectual .... wants of ing their positive value. Shall not the two civili- the west zations, brought into close practical relations, ob- "■>w">'J- serve their common need of ideal and contemplative inter- ests, and incite each other to supply defects so obvious in each, when seen from a standpoint without itself ? The influence of Chinese ideas seems to have had large part in shaping the present wide-spread rationalism influence of the Japanese. The official and upper classes in °° J^p*°- Japan are altogether secular in their philosophy. The wor- ship of images has not engrafted itself, even in Buddhism, 568 SAGES. on the original spirit cultus of the natives. " Young Japan " above all things welcomes scepticism, and relegates the kami gods, as respects supernatural claims, to the region of primitive superstition. Even the Buddhists show " remark- able philosophical instinct and rationally guided liberty of thought." Mr. Seward reports that "the Japanese, under the influence of Confucius, have become a nation of doubt- ers " (in the Christian sense).i But a noble significance is already to be recognized in the mental attitude and method we are now to study. Human reason, with the Chinese, substitutes the independ- ence of morality for the " authority of revelation." Naturally it has reached the most complete and consistent system of ethics ever affirmed by any race. 'Tis as far from truth as possible that self-interest is the basis of this system. Neither hope of reward nor fear of penalty is conceived as its ultimate sanction. The supreme validity for man is in his own nature and the cosmical laws. Behind the State stand justice and humanity as its only purification. Behind these the eternal order of the world, whereof the teacher and the type are the rational constitution of the soul. Deeper than all, the universe is essentially right ; its laws mean well by man. Heaven, in the sense of its essential wisdom, jus- tice, and benignity (when rightly interpreted as a whole), is all-seeing, all-good ; and morality is the harmony of man with himself, and thereby with Heaven. ' Hubner, p. 287 ; De Rosny in Congr. d. Orientalistes, 1873 ; Seward^s TravetSf p. loa II. CONFUCIUS CONFUCIUS. npHE extreme obscurity in which the lives ot all reputed -*- founders of positive faiths are involved sug- Data for gests the impression that this favoring screen has '"'°'"^='^s* ^ *~^ concerning been one of the conditions of their overshadowing Confudus. fame. Their biographies betray the free play of popular imagination around a vague and shifting centre, plastic to the worshipper's desire. In the case of Confucius, there is an explicitness in the details which may seem to testify to their historical truth. On the other hand, the passion for details is a trait of the Chinese, and enlists fancy as well as conscience in its service ; so that it is only to docu- ments really original that such favor is due. And for these we have additional guarantee in the habit of committing every thing concerning persons and events to written form. Such original sources for the biography of Confucius are, however, very limited. While later writers have ascribed to him a large body of ethical wisdom, with something of the license with which the Jews employed the name of Solomon and the early Christians that of Jesus, it is undoubtedly to the Lun-yu (Analects) that we must look for the most trustworthy record of his life and conversation.^ It is far * The Li-ki^ which purports to record these conversations, is a compilation rnacje five or six hundred years after his death. The Isse gives only fragments about his later years. Amyot's biography is of little repute. The commentary to the Y-king^ ascribed to Copfucius, is not believed to be genuine. His " Spring and Autumn Classic " has not a single reference to himself. The Kia^u (analyzed by Plath) is hardly pure history. The Sse'kioi Sse-ma-thsian (very full) is of more authority. Plath, after extended research into the Z.t-*/ and Kia-yu, thinks their ** ritualistic sayings cannot be wholly rejected, however it be with the philoso- phemes in other works." See his articles on the sources of the Life of Confucius. {Bay. A had. d. WUsensch. XII. XIII.) Dr. Legge is more sceptical. The French missionaries must be used with caution. Faber's (German) BibUography of the subject is of great value, but the works mentioned are for the most part inaccessible. 572 SAGES. more serviceable than either of the other classics which bear his name.^ Of its origin, Pan-kou tells us that every disciple carried about tablets for recording the teacher's words, and that after his death they were brought together and put in order. Dr. Legge sees indications of later influence in certain personal characterizations of disciples To an outside student, however, the book bears the most obvious marks of just such a hurried process of compilation from notes as Pan-kou describes. ^ It is rambling and without chronological order, though with here and there a dim kind of unity in certain sections.^ The social disintegration of the time was unfavorable to The times, the trausmissiou, or even the formation, of correct firet Chris- ^ecords. The Imperial Government was a cipher, tian age, aud national records were at the mercy of every historical" insanity of the hour. Any thing like serious critical records. study must have been exceedingly difficult at such a time. The invincible habit of social order permitted, even then, the activity of such a teacher as Confucius migrating from court to court with his policy of peace, justice, and political unity. But though surrounded by sincere disciples, and sustained by an unsurpassed faith in human nature, he spoke, on the whole, to deaf ears ; and his efforts to effect a political reformation failed as utterly as those of Jesus to enforce the opposite doctrine, that the politico-social world in his day was not worth saving at all. In one petty State only were the institutions he urged still ^ The Ta-hio, though Confucian in quality, is largely from an unknown author, and con- tains but seven short paragraphs ascribed to his hand. It is a philosophical treatise, and formed a portion of the Li-kL Tsze-Tsze, author of the Chung-^ung^ was grandson of Con- fucius, and could scarcely have failed to be conversant with him after coming to manhood* As an account of Confucian beliefs, this work deserves great respect ; but it tells us very little of his life, while it is of course difficult to separate the doctrine ascribed to the teacher from the reporter's personal opinions. 2 See close of B. IX. » For example : B. I. contains much about the way to learn ; B. III. about ceremonies and music ; B. V. about the qualities of persons ; B. X. about Confucius's personal habits ; B. XIII. about government ; B. XIV. ibout official relations. CONFUCIUS. 573 extant, in an imperfect form. His preference for the early Tcheou statutes stood but small chance of favor from the ambitious chiefs who would not have known the Great Duke, had he risen from the dead to rebuke the degenerate dynasty to whose better days he had given, according to Confucius, noble laws. Historical documents in such times must have been sadly neglected ; * and the days that fol- lowed were even more destructive. After the civil wars followed the calamities of the T'sin, when the Confucian teachers were massacred and their books burned. Even after the reparation of this ruin by the Han, "the rites could not be performed correctly (140-87 B.C.) for want of portions of the ancient tablets." ^ Under these circumstances, which remind us of the way in which the New Testament biographies had to grow up during and after the Jewish war, it is hardly to be expected that any other than fragmentary records of a wandering political and philosophical teacher should have been pre- served. No one wrote the Life of Confucius in detail, and we must piece bits of information together to learn where he journeyed, whom he knew and loved, and what he did. Doubtless his ideas are correctly given and developed by his disciples, since their account is perfectly consistent in its entire spirit and its separate details. Of these none deserves more confidence than Mencius, whose allusions are frequent. As already observed, the scanty materials thus described are analogous to those to which we are confined in similar the case of every reputed founder of a positive j°^^^^"^"f^£ faith. The fact points to a general law. The lives every of these men, however admirable, received little „f ,"" '"^ t a re- public regard in their own times. The circum- ligion." stances which afterwards drew around them the fromtL faith of a generation or a race were part of the '^"='- ' See Pauthier's quotations, Jour. As., 1868, p. 388. ^ Ibid., Oct., 1867. 574 SAGES. great current of progress, which used names and persons with less regard to what they really stood for, than to what might be made out of them by those strangely complex forces which create the steps of humanity. If an age wants a personal centre of reverence, the very obscurity which has covered an individual may, by protecting his life from investigation, furnish a strong element of natural selection for such a purpose. The names of the really grandest characters in history may well have perished from the knowledge of mankind, while their influence is a latent power that could not fail. This is part of the tragedy of life, and must be accepted, that the great lesson of disin- terested virtue may be followed to the end. There are differences in races as to this relation between Real value the imagination and the historic sense. In the Confucian ^^^^ °^ Coufucius, there would be the strongest records. tendency to present every report of his doctrine in some concrete personal relation. It would be in such forms as an answer to questions, a counsel to princes, an admonition or criticism of disciples, a way of dealing with some personal emergency. These frameworks are always given in the Lun-yu. Yet, on the other hand, their defi- niteness and sobriety almost guarantee their truth. But whether in detail accurate or not, the value of the record is none the less as testimony to ideas that were seeking expression in the times, giving birth to it and to him ; and were destined to a mighty development when that wild ferment was over. The world's saviours are the movements of humanity Ideas, mt itsclf : uot SO much individuals as ideas; public jndividu- and private necessities of growth ; the internal world's genius of a people or an age asserting its sway "saviours." and shaping private wills, unconscious of its mas- tery, to ends beyond themselves. The names that come to stand for vast movements are not necessarily those of the CONFUCIUS. 575 most efficient workers therein, but symbols whose selec- tion is itself a history of ideal constructions, requiring the closest study of historical facts and laws. No individual life deserves the permanent title of Headship to the all- mastering truths which ages recognize as those they were seeking. The organized belief sought a centre in some historic name, which gradually acquired royal rights and cumulative prestige. The pride of an organized religion gives a spurious repute to records held symbolic of this official meaning (the symbols of a symbol), till the coming of a higher freedom proves that the ideal they served for has changed. The end must be, that at last the truth that science and liberty, the daily hopes and familiar blessings of Nature, the open and secret tides of civilization are the homestead of natural religion ceases to be classed as Con- fucianism, Christianity, or Judaism, or to wear any nar- rower name than Universal Religion ; and the ethics that all must confess are referred to the Moral Order of the Universe, revealed in the nature of the Soul. But I hasten to assert also, under these limitations, the value of personal life through whatever it has done in the line of these deeper currents, whether truly personal reported or not. Historical uncertainty does not '"*'"^""- alter the power of character, nor the absolute precision with which every great thought or act tells upon its time. Nor is the uncertainty always likely to be the same. A record so prosaic and human as the Lun-yu has, as we have said, advantages as testimony. That its doctrine was based on universal nature, rather than on personal claims, removed the strongest motive to mythic Ucense, ^^^^^^ and left the way open to impartial study of facts, confudus ■' '■ based on Confucius is a philosopher ; he appeals to reason p^^eiy only ; he claims no divine commission, nor mes- ^^^^ sianic destiny. It is in the name of all history man and experience, that he announces laws of pri- s'"""^- 576 SAGES. vate and public ethics, and enforces them on his time. He recalls a wild chaotic age to these laws as to a true life, which it knows, as well as he, that it is rejecting. The penalties he proclaims are already matters of experience ; the rewards he promises are pointed by ideals as old and fa- miliar as the history of his country supplied : his faith is in human nature and its normal relation to the universe. His basis is thus scientific and intuitional. And his entire reliance on the force of his own personal character and moral appeal causes the personal element to be everywhere peculiarly prominent in the record, to which it gives an objective value of no ordinary kind. A teacher of whom it could be said that the four sub- jects on which he did not talk were " prodigies, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings ; " while the four which he did affect were "letters, morality, devotion of soul, and truthfulness," ^ — was not likely to attract around his name, at least for a time, many accretions passing the simplicity of fact. His ideas were given to thoughtful men in free conver- sation. They were no prerogative of a sect or a church, bound to awe the world by self-exaltation and mythological prestige. The Chinese regard Confucius, however perfect as a sage, yet as one who presented truths older than him- self, and old as the world ; and such a term as Confuci- anism, as an exclusive title, could not grow up in China around these truths. Nothing, as we shall see hereafter, could be stronger than his repudiation of all claims to per- sonal superiority over other men. In his modest confes- sions, and his naive declarations of a love of virtue as his only confidence and delight, there is a singular attractive- nese unlike any thing in the records of other teachers of mankind on a similar scale. We have here to deal, not with a shifting, mythically * Lvnyu, VII. 20, 34. CONFUCIUS. 577 constructed ideal ; but with a secular, positive person, — a simple citizen of the Empire. Chung-ne, otherwise called Kung-fu-tse,^ was born 551, B.C., in the State of Loo, in what is now called Life of Shan-tung, in the reign of Ling-wang, twenty-third Confudus. Emperor of the Tcheou. His parents were of high dignity but poor estate. Their proud claim of descent from the primeval Hwang-te did not free the young scholar from the honorable discipline of toil ;^ and his father's death gave him in childhood to the entire care of his mother, to whose memory he was always tenderly attached. Noth- ing is recorded of his boyhood but a passion for imitating the ceremonial rites of his elders ; yet he seems to have aspired to public service from the first, holding the post of supervisor of fields and grain in his native State, when only twenty years old. But he cared less for " the condition of sheep and oxen " ^ than for the morals of men ; and assumed the function of teacher in early manhood, retaining as disciples only such persons as had that natural insight and scent of truth, which enables them "from hearing about one corner of a subject to divine the other three." * At his mother's death, we find him anxious to render all the services to her memory known to custom, and distressed at hearing of storms overturning her monument through the neglect of those left in charge of it. The three years' mourning interrupted his public relations, but permitted a withdrawal like Paul's to Arabia, fruitful of deep convictions and large aims. " At fifteen, my mind was bent on learning ; at thirty, I stood iirm ; at forty, I had no doubts ; at fifty, I knew the laws of heavenly order ; at sixty, my ear was obedient to the voice of truth ; at seventy, I could follow my heart's desire without transgressing right." ^ ^ Teacher of the Family of Kung. ' Lunyu, IX. 6. » Menc, v. pt. ii. v. 4. « Lunyu, VII. S. » Ibid., II. 4. 37 5/8 SAGES. These claims, however positive, are of a rare and noble His sense Hiodesty. They not only recognize progressive of the law stages in moral culture, but teach that only the of develop- . . ^ . . i-inri ment in ripe experience of a Iife-tirae spent in loyally tul- cuiture. filling these stages of growth fits one freely to trust all the currents of his natural desires. In this pa- ■ tient sense of indispensable conditions, he spent most of his years in striving to establish, in one State after another, the ethics and politics on which he appears to have " stood firm" after the studies of his youth. His personality must have attracted attention at once. Early fgj. << Dukg Chaou of Loo " sends him to Tcheou, to political relations, study the old institutes of that family, then on the throne. To the same period is referred the story of his visit to the mystic, Lao-tse, out of which a very striking effect of contrast has been worked up. The great individualist holds the great conservatist and organizer as a mere delver in the dust of dead men, while he himself seemed to Confu- cius a celestial dragon flying so high that he could not be caught. Chaou being driven from Loo, Confucius follows him to Tse ; where his advice is not respected, and where the offer of the revenues of a city without the right to earn them by managing its affairs according to his conscience provokes him to say, " Very far is Duke King from under- standing me."^ In curious contrast with the austere philosophy which governed these and other official rela- tions of the sage, was his enthusiasm for peculiar forms of ancient music, which he describes as both beautiful and good, and which makes him forget the taste of food for days.^ At this early period his ideas of the proprieties of function as the basis of political and social order were ^ Lunyu, XV. iii. 3 ; Legge (p. 67, Philadelphia ed., 1867), from Pamily Sayings, ' Lunyu, III. 25 ; VII. 13. CONFUCIUS. 579 thoroughly matured. To the question, " What is govern- ment ? " he replies : " It is where the prince is prince, and the minister, minister ; where father is father, and son is son." Personal, character and national unity were his reme- dies for the disintegrations of his time, and the former as the sole ground and guarantee for the latter. For imperial functions as representative of the Divine Order he had the- most jealous respect, becoming indignant at any perform- ance of the great national rites by another hand, or any recitation of sacrificial odes by chieftains who had assumed the forms of royalty.^ Disorders in Loo kept him from office for fifteen years, when a turn of affairs brought him the charge of a official town, of which his -disciples tell us that he entirely ''*^- reformed the morals, even to the quality of the handwork.^ This evidence of his capacity raised him to the office of Minister of Public Works. Here, as well as at the head of the Department of Crime, he performed similar wonders of administration. He punished false dealing, repressed licentiousness, reduced brigandage and baronial ambition. It is recorded that he broke off a pohtical conference in consequence of the other party's bringing a military escort ; that he punished a father who complained of his son, for not teaching him filial obedience ; and that he had a custom of consulting suitable persons in criminal cases, which gives a rough idea of jury trial. Troops of female dancers and fine horses sent to seduce the affections of the prince from his Puritanic minister proved successful,^ and Confucius sorrowfully went away to Wei. Then followed many bitter years of exile, in which he wandered, Dante-like, among princes who were ExUeand strangers to his principles, heavy with the sense of ;»'»"der. having grown old in unappreciated service at home. But philosophy, the root of consolation and strength, sus- ■ Lunyu III. 2, 10. ' Li-ki- ' Lunyu, XVItl. 4- 580 SAGES. tains his courage if it does not remove the burden of his grief. Escaping an attempt at assassination by his enemies, he reminds his followers that his cause could not be harmed by such means.^ Assailed by scandal, he rests his good name on a simple appeal to Heaven for justice.^ Satirized on his personal appearance, he could see the comic side of it.^ In all personal dangers he held his character to be sufficient protection.* The story of his breaking a forced oath, mentioned only by much later writers, is probably a fiction.^ Hearing that one of his disciples is recalled to Loo (the order was in fact intended for himself), he utters his inmost longing : " Let me too return ! "^ Poverty and hunger are faced with stoical reliance on the dignity of human nature.'^ To those who reproached him for wasting effort on a corrupt State he answers, with Chinese sobriety, that only a corrupt State needs saving.* Amidst these discouragements, he describes himself as Use of m one who in his pursuit of knowledge neglects his fortunes, food, and sinks his sorrows in the joy of attaining truth, and thus is enabled to forget the coming on of old age.^ There are stories, perhaps founded on this reputa- tion for a spiritual mastery of circumstances, of his resort- ing to the lute amidst his privations, and to singing ; and of his claiming that " for the man who tries himself and maintains his virtue, through hail and cold and snows the pine endures and flourishes." " The sharp trial is my good fortune." i" The root of his force is faith in unrecognized virtues and the unseen ideal powers of the soul. Tseu-kung suggested that his notions were evidently beyond the times : could he not come down a little ? Confucius re- » Mencius, V. pt. i. 8 ; Lunyu, VII. 22. > Lunyu, VI. 26. » Legge, p. 79 ; also Lunyu, XIV. 14. • Lunyu, IX. 5. » Legge, p. 79; also Plath's Lib. d. Con/., II. p. 8. • Luxyu, V. ai. ' Ibid., XV. 1. » Ibid., XVIII. 6. • Ibid., VII. 18. 10 Legge ; Plath, from the Isse. Lei. II. 1* CONFUCIUS. 581 plied : " A good farmer sows his corn, but cannot make it bear harvest. The wise man spins his web of right ways, and he cannot ensure its being received. But you would have it received without his shaping it at all. Sse, your, plan is not very far-seeing." 1 " The fragrant wood grows unseen and seems wasted ; so the wise man changes not his rule for suffering or want. As for life and death, they hang on destiny." ^ His cause was the moral universe, himself but its instrument ; his life or death its incidents.^ It was not important that he should stay in this court or in that, but only that he should not stay where he could not obey its commands.* Thus he never remained more than three years in a kingdom.® Popular odes ascribed to him express the traditional idea of the man of sorrows grieving for his people. The death of a favorite disciple, whose aspiration and modesty fitted him to carry on his great work, was one of the heaviest blows of this period, and brought out his warmth of affection : " If I am not to mourn for such a man, for whom should I mourn } He held me as a father. I would fain have borne myself to- wards him as to a son."® At last, at the age of sixty-nine, came the recall, after thirteen years of exile, to his native State. He Recall to returns with an ideal, for ever disappointed,^ but ^°° ■ ^*- ■^ ^ drawal to never doubted nor dishonored. The lesson he had literary striven to teach others, of the fitnesses in time and ^'^' place, had been commended to his own lips on the great field of affairs, and was thoroughly learned. Henceforth he will labor for a nobler future, and endow the ages with a gift which they cannot reject nor forget. In State affairs we hear but httle mo-e of him ; but the ancient records of immortal men, — their wisdom, rites, Hws, the historic provi- » Sse-ki, quoted by Plath, p. 22. « Ibid. ' Lunyu, XIV. 37, 38 ; IX. s « Ibid., XVIII. 3, 4. » Mencius, V. PT. 11. 4. 6 Limyu, XI. 8-10, 6, 18 j VII. 10 ; IX. 20. ' Ibid., VII. 5. 582 SAGES. dence of moral order, — are gathering in tha:t silence of his latest years into a voice that shall echo through a hundred generations. There is an anthem scored between these modest lines : " When I returned to Loo the music was reformed, and the Odes found their proper place." ^ The time was short ; only five years more of life were to be allowed him. He wanted fifty to study the Y-king, the mystic diagrams, where all relations were written in a ci- pher as old as the world.^ Once we hear of his emerging into political affairs, to protest against harsh taxation pro- posed by one of his own disciples.^ The " authorities " of Loo could not be roused to vigor or even to good sense. His last great sorrow was the death of Tsze-loo ; a kind of " Peter " among the disciples,* but skilled to draw forth his best thoughts, and praised as one who never slept on a promise, and would not flee from a post of peril, nor die a natural death.^ The Tchun-tsieu is believed to have been the work of his last few months of solitude, his part- ing protest against the evil time. That all his literary activity was crowded into the five years before his death is probably substantially true. His disciples keenly felt his outward failure ; they em- oidage. phasized the burdens of old age, disappointment, and disease that weighed on him when he crept about on his stafi, saying, — " The mountain must crumble, the strong beam must break, and the wise man must wither Uke a plant." To a disciple he says : — "No one in the Empire would make me his master; my time is come to die." "The Tablet no longer comes out of the Hoang-ho, nor the Book out of the J^o : my day is done." * 1 Lunyu, IX. 14. » Lunyu, VII. 16. ' Plath, pp. 37-39. * Legge. » Lunyu, v. 8 ; IX. 11, 26 ; XI. 12, 14, 24 ; XIII. 3 ; XV. i ; XIV. 23, 45 ; V. 25 i H- »r XII. 12 ; Legge, 87. • See Legge, 87 ; Plath, II. ; Li-hi, &c CONFUCIUS. 583 These expressions, if genuine, are plainly the language of sickness and old age, uttered in the weakness of jj^^^^^, approaching death. But it is the intense natural pathos of reality of the sad record that impresses us. Con- n^s^'^a trast it with those of other deaths famous in the '^'"'^ tradition of faith. Buddha dies in a holy grove, with those surrounded by reverent companions, serenely trans- o^""'^' J. . •' Teachers. lerrmg to them the precepts'they are to bear forth for the healing of the nations : he dies transfigured in the glory of assured success, ascending into the perfect bliss of Nirvina. Jesus on the cross, abandoned by his dis- ciples, in an agony that catches at words of despair, is yet the centre of signs and omens that contradict these words ; and dies with the proud claim on his lips of a finished life- work, foreordained by the plan of the Omnipotent. These are idealizations ; man's mythic clothing of his own religious desires in the responsive heavens and earth. But they are not biography : they are not the actual dealing of real man with real life, with inexorable limits, with pain and old age and death ; with social failure and the unknown future. They ignore and set these aside in the person of one, but neither solving their mystery nor defeating the reality of their dealing with all. As man matures, enforced to front the clearly seen facts of Nature, and to master them only by accepting what they bring, he wants human experien- ces ; the ever human conditions dealt with in human fash- ion, according to universal laws of strength and growth. He wants reconciliation with these conditions of his life ; not repudiation of them, nor evasions of them by miracu lous or other special gift. That life is most helpful which, bearing all the burden, " knows what is in man " by know- ing only what human nature can bring to meet it. " To practise wonders to be honored in future ages," said Con- fucius, " is what I do not do. I will not stop half way on the right path." ^ ' Chung-yung, XI. ; Lunint, VIL 20. 584 SAGES. Jesus puts no trust in this world, but finds refuge from its practical relations in supernatural promises and hopes, and in an exaltation of love and faith which is yet but a single side of human experience, after all. Buddha calls his followers out of the world to pronounce it empty and void, even while consecrated to removing its sorrow, and filling it with peace and hope. Confucius strives to incar- nate his idea in actual institutions ; not a kingdom apart from this world, but of this world, as China saw and must see it. The intensity of the hope measures the depth of the disappointment. Not more than Confucius does Jesus find acceptance from the world. But to one who saw the world passing away in flames of judgment in the near future, this would be of little moment. To the Jesus of the New Testament, lifted in the awfulness of a divine purpose, a mystery of Hebrew prophecy and atonement for sin, the burden of woe is in the unsounded depth of this atone- ment, in the symbolic withdrawal of God's supporting hand from the last agony. Mark the contrast. The cry of the young Jesus, " It is finished," is messianic function in its earthly pangs fulfilled. The words of the aged Confucius, " It is time for me to die," are the spoken consciousness of a long life spent in faithful service of the highest practical aims, which had left him stranded and alone, with no out- ward sign of success, yet assured that what a mortal life could do had been done. Not to the scientist only, but to every one who comprehends that the laws of our actual nature must be faced and built upon, not superseded, surely the more pathetic and the more attractive of the two. This one mortal life had done what it could to rebuild on Dignity of better foundations, and now all must be left to the ""rarfrnd keeping of the moral order it had proclaimed. No their task, public reward, no trust in miraculous aid : the seed must be left in the unwilling soil, and the sower must de- part, having done his best ; trusting, for the State, only in CONFUCIUS. 585 the slow retributions that must bring order and peace. With this we are at home. It is life and truth. It belong^ to the future, as to the present and the past. Observe, too, that he who has faced injustice in presence of kings and peoples does not compromise his convictions in presence of death : — " I have seen inen die from treading water or fire, but never from treading the track of virtue." " The true man will yield up his life to preserve his virtue." ' He has not, like the Sibyl, burned his books one by one ; he has not adapted doctrine to the exigencies of a church. His latest work is the completest monument of his confi- dence in the humanity to which he appealed. His response is the veneration of miUions ; a tribute not to miraculous power, but to pure force of character, to the devoted service of historical continuity and universal law ; a tribute which will continue valid when the limitations of the Chinese, as those of the Christian, ideal, shall have passed away for ever. It was foreshadowed in the enthusiasm of his disciples. " Chung-ne cannot be reviled. It is of no use." " He cannot be attained to, more than heaven can be scaled by a staircase." Tributes of " The door must be found to reach the sacredness and the his foUow- state within him ; and few there are that find it." " While ^^ you live, how should I (Tsze-loo) presume to die ? " ^ The eulogy of Tsze-Tsze, author of the Chung-yung,' asserts that, — " Wherever the sky overarches and the earth sustains, and sun and moon shine, and frosts and dews fall, all that have blood and breath unfeignedly honor and love him. Hence he is called the companion of Heaven." ' Mencius quotes a disciple who speaks the belief of all: — » Lunyu, XV. 35 ; Mencius, VII., rr. t 42 i Lunyu, XV. 8. « Ibid, XIX. 23, 24, 25 i XI. 22. " Chmg-ymig, XXXL 586 SAGES. " The sages among mankind are the same in nature ; but they stand out among their fellows : and from the beginning not one has ever been so complete as Confucius." * The unique description of his manners and tastes in the The Lun- tenth book of the Lunyu, however childish at first yu picture sight, is not without real value. It may not be of his per- . , - . sonaihab- edifying to know that he was fond of ginger, and "^' liked his food well minced, and was a very proper man according to Chinese ideas of dress, diet, and de- meanor. And if we are pleased to hear that he could be relied on not to go too far in potation, we are, alas, rather posed by the fine point that, in presence of the prince, his manner betrayed "respectful uneasiness, grave but self- possessed ; " and not less by the comical figure of a great sage, trembling in the legs when officially receiving a public guest, keeping his robe adjusted even, before and behind, and hastening forward with arms spread like the wings of a bird. All these matters we must leave till we have better acquaintance with the meaning of Chinese ceremonies and their doubtless untranslatable verbal de- scriptions. But it is impossible to mistake the great out- His traits hncs, cveu in this Oriental photograph, of a temper- ofchar- amcnt combined of modesty, prudence, reverence sympa- for far-descended amenities and dignified respects, thies. g^jjjj delicate regard to the feelings and expectations of others. How significant the record that he bowed down to the cross-bar of his carriage on passing a mourner, just as he did to the tablets that told the statistics of the State ! ^ Elsewhere we read of his sedulous attention to the comfort of the blind,^ of his rising when in company of the afflicted,* of his teaching respect for the young, " of whom we know not but their future will be equal to our present." ^ Hij ^ Mendus, II. ft. i. 2 ; see also Plath's Sckiiler d. Conf. for testimonials of latei works ; and for the lamentations of his disciples after his death, Ibid., Leb. d. Conf. II > Lunyu, X. 16. » Ibid., XV. 41 j IX. 9. • Ibid., IX 9. » Ibid., IX. 22. CONFUCIUS. 587 fine sense of filial affection is combined with regard for the right of children to be free from disrepute on account of the vices of their parents.^ His sympathetic appreciation appears in his frequent tributes to his followers,^ and his desire to spare needless or wanton sacrifice of others was proverbial : " The master angled but did not use a net ; he shot, but not at perching birds." * His disciples were his children ; he was tender to the sick ; he was natural and easy, capable of enthusiasm for music, roused by hearing of high achievement or fine thought.* His sense of the humorous makes him unique among the founders or masters of faith.* Yet he keeps a serious and """'' critical eye on the qualities of his companions, and knows how to make aphorisms of common sense out of his broken idols and disappointed expectations.® The lofty critical ideal test by which he tried all comers made some ^'''*' of these personal judgments appear severe, and led to those sweeping expressions of his disappointment in human character, which are at variance with his own praises of the practical effects of virtue as matters of daily experi- ence.'' But his charity for the weak and sinning was very generous : — " By observing a man's faults it becomes known that he has vir- tues." ' " He who requires much from himself and little . from others will save himself from resentments." " How can one guide the blind unless he supports him when tottering, and raises him when fallen ? " ' Tseng-tseu said : " If the master sees one good in a man, he forgets a hundred faults." i" His answers to all ^^^^^^^ policies of hopelessness or indifference were always use of op- noble, and his acts fearless of evil tongues. " If I p"""'"'"-- » Ltmyu, IV. 21 ; VI. 4. • IbiA, II. 9 ; IX ig ; VI. 59 ; XII. 12 ; XI. 4, 6. » Ibid., VII. 26. « Ibid., XI. 8, 10; VI. 8; VII. 4; X. 15, 16; VII. 13, 3«- » Ibid., XVII. 4: XIV. 14; V. 6. • Ibid., V. 9 ; XIV. 5, 33 i VII. 25 ; VIII. 18, 2. ; XX. i ■, XIV. 26, 6 ; VI. 9. » Ibid., IV. 6 ; V. 26 ; VII. 25 ; IX. 17 J see especially B. vi. ' Ibid., IV. f. • Ibid., XV. 14; XVI. I. '" PlMh, p. 9- 588 SAGES. associate not with those who need help, with whom then shall I concern myself ? " " Am I a bitter gourd, to be hung up out of the way of being eaten ? " " If even a rebel chief will employ me, shall I not accept it and make a Tcheou even of him ? " " If in calling on a harlot (prin- cess) I have done wrong, may Heaven reject me." ^ It was his principle everywhere "to seize the opportunity and beware of evil." Of two things he hated most, aim- less living was one. The squatter on lazy heels he hits Hatred of with his Staff. " Rottcn wood cannot be carved ; aunkssness ^ ^j^.^. ^^jj ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^ trowcl." ^ " In youth and insin- -^ cerity. not bccomingly modest ; in manhood doing nothing worth remembering, and living on to old age, — this is to be a pest." ^ The other hateful thing was insincerity. The glib tongue and strain to appear what one is not, fine words, excessive respects, pretended regards, — of these he is ashamed.* In mourning, ceremony without sorrow is vain.* Life must be made valid, or he would have none of it. No staying where his principles had no chance. No attempt to do what he had not learned to do, or to fill functions he could only discredit ; ^ no tampering with self-respect, but, by all accounts, fidelity to his own max- ims, that " virtue is what devolves on oneself, and is not to be yielded to any ; " and that " to see what is right and not to do it is the part of a coward." '^ Shaped in the Chinese mould of the " Middle Path," a Good prudential balance of relations, he shows a sedulous sense, regard to circumstances and distinctions, which may sometimes seem excessive, but usually illustrates his good sense.* His counsels are wise, kindly, and fitting the case in hand ; * he is no doctrinaire, but a student of > Lunyu, XVIII. 6 ; XVII. 7, s ; VI. 26 ; Menciua, III. ft. n. 3. » Lunyu, V. 9. » Ibid., XIV. 46. * Ibid., XI. 24 ; V. 4 ; XVI. 4 ; VII. 25 1 V. 24 i XI. 20 « Ibid., III. 4. • Ibid., XIII. 5 ; XIV. 28. ' Ibid., XVIII. 3, 4 ; XV. s.S ; H- >♦ • Ibid., XIII. 17 ; X. 29 j XIV. 21 ; VI. 19 j VII. 8 ; XI. 21 j XIV. 14. • Ibid., XI. 21 ; V. 21. CONFUCIUS. 589 persons and emergencies. His incessant theme is the balance of character, the danger of one-sidedness, the mutual dependence of study and original thought, of solid sense and fine taste, that due observance of limits in which the virtue of any quality consists.^ He is not par- catho- tisan but catholic, " without foregone conclusions, ^''^'^■ or arbitrary prejudices, or obstinate egotism."^ From his followers he " conceals nothing," to none refuses instruc- tion, whether rich or poor ; meeting the questions of every person on the ground of reason.^ And with all his respect for forms and functions he boldly challenges proof, that in his praise or dispraise of other men he has ever shown respect of persons in writing or speech.* " Tsze-loo asked what constitutes the superior man. He an- swered, ' Self-cultivation, so as to give rest to all people. Even Yao and Shun were still anxious about this.' " ^ " Seeking to be estab- lished, the true man seeks to establish others ; wishing enlargement, he enlarges others." * One who could recognize such a scope of meaning in self-discipline as this might well make self-culture the basis of his ethics of humanity. Surrounded by a personal admiration without limit, his modesty is astonishing. He lays claim to nothing Modesty. but love of truth and virtue ; thinks himself good enough at letters, but far from the ability to carry out in conduct what he believes right.^ He dares not rank himself with the great ideals. "It may simply be said of me that I strive to become like them." He pretends to no origin- ality : " a transmitter, not a maker, believing in and loving the ancients." * Here was one who foreclosed by his own > Lunyu, VI. 2' : XX. i ; XVII. 8 ; II. 15 ; VI. i5 ; VIII. 2. ' Ibid., IX 4. ' VII. 23,7 ; XVIII. 5, 7. « Ibid, XV. 24. ' Ibid., XIV. 45- • Ibid., VI. 28. ' Ibid. V. 27 ; VII. 32 ; IX. 7 ; VIL ». • Ibid., VII. 1, .9; XVIII. 8; VIII. 21; VII. 16. 590 SAGES. confessions that admiration which men yield to those who , bring fresh Promethean fire to the Hfe of the race. If he really wrote the " Spring and Autumn Classic," and ex- pected to be judged by it as his one original work, it cer- tainly- adds little to his fame. We can well believe that one so absorbed in the universality of truth should realize that there can be no pure originality, and none apparent, save in the way of presenting old truths. We can see that to one coming after such a past as China by his account unfolded to his enthusiasm and faith, originality must have seemed foolishness in face of the majestic record of saints, sages, and institutions. Originality is the aureole of a nation's youth and untried powers. Here a people had seen all political and personal phases, and preserved the memory of all. Had the ideal waited till the days of Confucius, it would moreover, for a Chinese, have been unworthy the'name.^ Yet Confucius has not done himself justice. In its "naiit compactness, self-consistency, thoroughness, and In style and breadth, thc work of this master may well be called »pmt original. Certainly there is nothing like it in the history of his people. His thought combines Socrates, Seneca, and Epictetus, with a consecutiveness and point peculiar to his race. The Lunyu is a rain of sententious and pungent epigrams, a flood of gnomic wisdom, a mys- tery of compacted phrase, condensed experience, and keen adaptation. Its immediate growth from conversation and event is unique and surprising ; and the frequent air of commonplace in its maxims is owing not so much to the lack of imagination as to their transparent truth, and to the fact which we do not sufficiently consider, that the evidences of their wisdom have been accumulating for us ^ We have really no assured data of Chinese history previous to Confucius, besides thes« writings of his- If he derived them from his own imagination, (nriginaliiy would be but f tame word to express the unparalleled genius of the work. CONFUCIUS. 591 through all subsequent ages. No other style resembles this of the man who, " in his native village, looked simple and sincere, as if he were not able to speak." His very abdication of originality is the most original thing I know of in the history of human leaders. To have put himself wholly out of sight ; to have arrogated no throne, predicted no future justification "in glory;" to have offered no cre- dentials for the right to rule mankind, nor even breathed the possibility of such a thing, — places Confucius by him- self, among the centres of permanent instituted homage. It is true there is a Chinese element in this suppression of his individuality. But absorbed into the millions of his people, he takes them up into an unquestionable seif-respect. manhood, which asserts original meaning and peculiar genius for the whole. Of what other political and institu- tional workman can this ideal personality be affirmed .■" This merging of himself in the truth of which he is the instrument does not blind him to the fact that he alone does really represent it, and that his function is indispen- sable.^ His purposes are not running themselves. Des- tiny is behind them, with the incalculable reserves that are not barred out of the field by any man's failure or fall.^ Hence the spiritual perceptions, which prove Confucius to have been no mere utilitarian or logician. He spintuaiii^y. knew that misfortune and evil treatment can bring out the higher forces of character.^ Trusting in deeds rather than words, penetrating beneath shows to substance,* he could admire the patience and silence of creative law, and feel the inadequacy of language to report it. " The Master said, ' I would prefer not speaking.' Tsze-kung said, ' If you do not speak, what will your disciples have to record ? ' The Master said, ' Does Heaven speak ? The four seasons pursue their > Lunjtu, IX 5. » IbiA, VII. «. •. Ibid , XIX. 17 ; IX. 27 ; XII. 5 ; VI. 9. « Ibid., XVII. 14 i XIV. 19; XVII. .1. 592 SAGES. courses, and all things are constantly produced ; but does Heaven use words ? '" i He learned the indispensableness of quiet thought, of laith in patient conformity to conditions, of thorough fidel- inteiiectuai ity, of Uniting modesty with enthusiasm for truth. Let us observe that no test of insight and faith is finer than the degree in which one recognizes the real lim- its of knowledge to be better than any uncertain specula- tions and desires by which they have been disguised ; trusting what our nature shall bring us, rather than to impose our apparent interests in place of its orderly paths. " You know not life, how can you know death .' " ^ " It is wisdom to do human duties faithfully ; and, while respect- ing spirits, to keep aloof from them." ^ This life was too full and real for him to sacrifice any of its duties to dreams of another ; or to shift its emphasis to theological sanc- tions, consigned by most faiths to custodians of heaven and hell. His religion dealt with the living conscience and the sovereign laws. " Of three things a true man stands in awe : the laws of Heaven, great men, and the „ words of the wise." * It was reverence for prin- Keverence ^ for Princi- ciplcs to whlch he gave the name " Heaven " (Tien) ; a sense of their adequacy and intimacy, which needed no external image or symbol. " Heaven " is a life to which he aspires : and this is his worship. " My prayer is a constant one." '" " Offences against Heaven are an end of prayer." ^ " Heaven " is society, recognition, ])eace. " 1 do not murmur against Heaven. I do not fret ^ Lunyu, XVII. 19. Compare Ps. XIX. 3 : " There is no speech nor language, and their voice is not heard ; yet, &c." Also Goethe's : " Speech is so idle, I may say presumptuous, that before the grand silence of Nature in solitude, one is seized with fear." ^ Ibid., XI. II. Compare the Greek sentences, — of Democritus: "Seek not to know every thing, lest you become ignorant of every thing ; " of Sosias, " Speak only of what thou knowest;" of Chilon, "Let not thy tongue go beyond thy thoughts;" of Xenophon, " He who talks most of the gods knows nothing." Also Goethe, " Of the internal structure of the brain we know nothing ; what then can we know about God ? " » Ibid., VII. 20 J VI. 20. • Ibid., XVI. 8. » Ibid., VII. 34. • Ibid., III. 13. CONFUCIUS. 593 myself at men. Below, I learn ; above, I aspire. There is Heaven : that knows me'' ^ Of his reliance, even for public life, in the unseen and spiritual, this passage quoted from him in the Chung-yung is significant : — "Among means of popular improvement, sound and show are trivial. An old ode says, 'Virtue is light as a hair.' But even a hair has apparent size. The doings of Heaven do not touch men's senses. And such is the highest virtue. In peace and silence is the spirit approached." ^ The labors of Confucius had little visible effect on the politics of his time. Like Paul, in early Christian- Tragedy of ity, he disappears at death from the notice of a '''='''■'• world whose secret movement he is, nevertheless, power- fully impressing. His literary work was far more effective than his political. Regarded as an experience, his life is the tragedy of Chinese virtue. In him the national demand for instant concrete embodiments appeared in the form of an ethical system of the highest tone, at a moment when its application was in every petty kingdom of China inevi- tably a failure. The disappointment must have been pro- portioned to his natural confidence in his demand, which he made such efforts to meet ; to his belief in human nat- ure ; to his certainty that the guarantee of his doctrine of the State was no less than the divine order of the uni- verse. In this strange, sad mystery, it was not for him to give over the world to a doom of destruction. Political life .was man's real existence : it was incomprehensible that man should reject its normal rules. But Confucius learned the lesson. The demand for in- stant realization of the ideal may go so far as to ^^^^^^ ^ forget its intrinsic and eternal value. Every thing testifies that he brought out of his defeat not only the wis- dom of limit, the philosophy of a culture that rises through drawbacks to a true balance and breadth ; but also a stately ' LuHyth XIV. 37. ' Chung-niunff, XXXIII. 38 594 SAGEis. harvest of integrity and self-respect. Nothing is more evi- dent than his firm intrenchment in moral order as of one and the same purport within him and without, in his own ideal and in the facts of experience ; and therefore to be accepted in every outward condition it imposed, however harsh, as wiser than private plan or desire. This self-reli- ant rest in natural law is probably the best reconciliation of the soul with the realities of destiny, as it is certainly the crown of moral freedom. Reading between the lines of Confucius's life, we seem to see written in the strange old Mongol face the grand maxims of the Roman stoics : " All things are fruit to me, O Nature, which thy seasons bring." ^ " Do not ask to have things that are made by Nature made according to your wishes, but wish to have them made as they are made." ^ " Freedom is not procured by full enjoyment of what is desired, but by controlling the desire." ^ As compared with reliance on a Providential Will, conceived more or less under human conditions, this The hi h- i^^spect for the inherent unity and universality of est form o£ the moral order is a higher form of faith, and a completer solution of the world. It is impossible to reconcile with volitions of a justice and mercy conceived in -that individual way the terrible facts of evil. No " divine scheme " in this line, whether of miracle, saviour, or ultimate redemption, can make the stern mysteries of strife, suffering, and death less repulsive to the mature reason of mankind. That self-respect, which alone can afford to dispense with the attempt to explain or evade them, is in fact respect for one's own inward ideal as rep- resenting a moral order inherent in the unknown substance of the world. Love and justice can be held with firmer faith to the inmost meaning of things, when revered as inherent in their nature or process, and as of themselves essentially sovereign, than when referred to distinct voli- ^ M. Antoninus. ^ Epictetus. > Ibid- CONFUCIUS. 595 tions of a power that might have willed otherwise, and that deliberately props them on sanctions aside from their intrinsic value for the soul. The resemblance of Confucius to the Stoic and Socratic type is striking in such further respects as his Affinities appreciation of self-knowledge, equilibrium of fac- with the ulties, limit and difference in the qualities and l^tl^f capacities of men. But he possessed a tenderly schools, sympathetic instinct, which made him more lenient than either of these schools to the weakness of human will and the imperfection of human knowledge. He is easily moved to tears by the sense of his dependence on the affection of his companions, and on their recognition of his motives and aims. Not a shadow of contempt deepens the heavy judgment he is compelled to pass on his own generation. No denunciation to future wrath mars his mournful testimony against their blindness and deafness to the appeals of truth. The seclusion of his latest years veils other and deeper resources, not so easily to be slighted or set aside. -' ° The legacy The personal force that could prepare at the close ofhisiatest of a rejected life such a self-justification as the ^^^''^' legacy of a nation's imperishable gospel, was making an appeal from the present to the future hard to parallel in history. Here nothing is due to the praise or furtherance of his disciples. This work of a neglected old age is al- together his own. There is no record of a suggestion from others, nor of any practical aid in its accomplishment. It was a history, a literature, a transcript, by his own showing; nor can we disprove the admission. Yet it was an irresistible call upon the conscience and heart of his people to confirm, at the bidding of all its traditions and culture, the truth of the ideal he had offered them only to be despised. He knew a dialectic that covered all their experience. And they have found in him all they had lost 596 SAGES. or wasted. Here indeed a "rejected stone is become the head of the corner." With their own people, whom they loved most, Buddha, Pythagoras, Jesus failed. But to Con- fucius the Chinese consciousness has answered like the stringed instrument to which he resorted for solace in his hours of trouble. In that splendid bequest of the Classics, nothing dear to Chinese experience is forgotten. It is probably the completest statement of a national faith ever made, — song, annals, mystic symbolism, historic tendencies and lessons, personal ideals, — to be read in the reverence of a people for its past, " the child the father of the man ;" not as prodigy, nor exclusive pretension, but as the order of Nature, the familiar laws of all ages and tribes. III. DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. "pJ^ROM our account of what Confucius was, we proceed ■*■ to a summary of what he taught. We have here an interest purely human. Never eyes so concentrated on ethical law as these Mongoloid orbs, struck wide open and possessed by its commandments in a wild and rudderless time. Art, science, nature, are all ignored ; or at least postponed to that renovation of the personality that must master and guarantee them. There- fore his first demand is that the sanctity of individual conscience be fully recognized. " The commander of a great army may be carried off ; but the will of a common man' cannot be taken from him." ^ The end is self-perfec- tion ; ^ the starting point, self-respect. "What the superior man seeks is in himseK; what the ignoble man seeks is in others. Virtue is like the polar star, which keeps Man'srela- its place, and all stars turn toward it. The substance of the tion to Odes is in this : ' Have no depraved thoughts.' When one ii™self. discerns no evil in his own mind, what room for anxiety or fear? It is needless to dwell on what is past and done. He is not discomposed because men take no note of him. For (such) uprightness man is born."' To the personality of another is due a like respect. " Faithfully and kindly admonish your friend : if you find him im- practicable, stop ; but disgrace not yourself. Even a parent requires • Lunyu, IX. 25. ' Chung-yung, XXV; Lutiyu, XII. i ; XVII. 6. » LuHfii, XV. so, 35 i II. 1, 2 i XII. 4 ; III. 21 ; XIV. 13 ; 1. 1 ; vi. 17. 600 SAGES. remonstrance. However long the intercourse of friends, the same respect will be shown as at the first."- ^ The rule of such faith and freedom must be the just estimates that come of self-knowledge and self-discipline. " A man should say, I am not concerned that I have no place : I am concerned how I may become fit for one. I am not con- Just self estimates cemed that I am not known : I seek to become worthy to be and inward known. I am concerned that I do not know others. Assail honesty. yQ^,. ^^j, vices, not another's. When you know a thing, to hold that you know it, and when you do not, to admit the fact, — this is knowledge." " Honest dealing with one's own character, insisting on reality, renouncing pretension as vain, is the indispensable thing. " Is virtue from a man's own force, or from another's ? How can a man conceal his character ? The superior man sees the heart of the mean one. Of what use is disguise ? What is in comes out. There- fore the wise will be watchful when alone." " First the plain ground, then the colors. Fear not to forsake your faults. Fear not poverty, but fear to miss of the truth. Be not ashamed to learn of inferiors."' This thirst for realities goes to the essence of things," and we have such definitions as these : — " Distinction is not in being heard of far and wide ; but in being solid, straight-forward, and loving the right." " Filial Piety is supposed to mean the support of one's parents ; but brutes can do that : without reverence, what difference between these kinds ? " Learning is fulfilment of the great relations of life. Virtue is "inquiring with earnestness, and inwardly making application." Manners consist in " behaving to every one as if receiving a guest, in causing no murmuring, and in not treating others as you would not wish to be treated by them." • Lunyu, XII. 23 i IV. iS; V. 16. > Ibid., IV. 14; I. i6j 11. 17; XII. 21. > Ibid., XII. I ; II. 10. Comment to TaJao, VI. Lvr^u, III. 8 ; I. 8 ; XV. 31 ; VIII. » DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 60I Propriety is that rule "by which tendencies are saved from excess." " If one be without virtue, what has he to do with rites of propriety or with music ? " Language is " not mere utterance ; but keeping words to the truth of things." Hence the virtue of a wise reticence as to what we do not know.^ " How is it men will not walk by these ways ? Who can go out but by the door ? How can a carriage go without a yoke ? " ^ This is the sum : there is no rest for man but in ideal standards and aims ; no success but in the triumph of principles. " The virtuous rest in virtue : the wise pursue it. The love of It is better than the love of beauty. It is not left to stand alone." ^ " To one who said, ' I believe in your doctrine, but my strength is not equal to it,' Confucius replied : ' This would be real weakness : but you are XvcmAn^ yourself J "* But the price of virtue cannot be evaded. " The good mechanic sharpens his tools : make thou friends with the best. Let an ignorant person be fond of using his own judgment, and calamity will befall. If what is spoken be first determined, there is no stumbling: so with affairs. The wise will never intermit his labor : if another man succeeds with one effort, he will use a hundred." ' Progress must be gradual.^ Conceit and complacency are inexcusable and fatal. " It is better to be mean than insubordinate." " Slow in words and earnest in action. Act before speaking, and then speak according to your actions." ^ > Lunyu, XII. 20 j II. 7 ; I. 7 (Tsie-hea)i XIX. 6 (do) ; XII. 2 ; III. 3 ; XIII. 3. » Ibid., VI. isi II. 22. » IV. 2; I. 7 (Tscehea); IV. 25 « Ibid., VI. 10. » Ibid., XV. 9; Chung-yutig, XX. 20. • Ibid., II. 4 J IX. 10 ; XIX. 7. ' Ibid., VII. 3S; IV 24; II. 13. 602 SAGES. The impression that the Confucian philosophy is based spontane- o" self-intcrcst well understood, is erroneous. Its 'ty- highest motive is spontaneity, love of right for its own sake, zeal for order, harmony, law, and growth. " The mind of the superior man is conversant with righteousness ; the mind of the mean, with gain. They who know truth are not equal to those who love it, nor they who love it to those who delight in it. I long to see one who loves virtue as he loves beauty. If one in the morning hear the right way, he may without regret die before night. Is virtue remote ? I wish it, and it is at hand. The good man brings forth righteousness in humility, completes it in sincerity, and per- forms it according to right order." ' "What can be made of one who holds fast his virtue, without seek- ing to enlarge it ? " "A man enlarges his principles, not they him. Leave not virtue without culture. Respect the promise of youth.' The plant may stop at the blade without flowering ; at the flower with- out fruiting." "Your good careful people of the villages are the thieves of virtue." * Tsze-Tsze's picture of the ideal man is the crown of Con- fucian ethics : for dignity and insight nowhere surpassed. " He prefers concealing his virtue, while it daily grows more manifest to others. He knows how the distant is involved in the near, and how what is minute becomes manifest. He examines his heart, that there may be nothing wrong there. He is not to be equalled in work which other men cannot see. The Book of Odes says, ' Be free from shame in your secret chamber, where the light of Heaven looks in. Rever- ence appears in his quietness ; truth in his silence. Without reward he urges men to virtue ; without anger, he awes more than weapons of war.' " * Such is man's relation to himself. Next comes his rela- Reiation tlou to othcrs. And here the ethical criterion of toothers, ^j^g MongoHau is like that of Kant, — universzl validity. 1 Lunyu, IV. i6; VI. i8 ; IX. 17! IV. 8; VII. 29; XV. 17. ' Ibid., XIX. 2 ; XV. 28 ; VII. 3 ; IX. 22. " Maxima debeter revereutia puero." — Juvtt- nal Sat., XIV. 47. * Ibid., IX. 21 ; XVII. 13. Tliis expression appears from Mendus (VII. PT. 11. 37) to be applied to conventionally moral and routine-bound people, too inert to feel any impulse to progress. * Chung-yung, XXXIII. DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 603 " The superior man is catholic, not partisan. His virtues may be practised among the rude tribes of South and North ; their absence will be disapproved, even by his neighbors. The right way reaches wide and fer, yet it is secret ; open to the lowest and least, yet con- taining what the highest cannot fully carry out" ^ " Overflow in love to all, and cultivate the friendship of the good." '• The good man loves all men ; loves to speak of the good in others ; is loyal in friendship ; wishing enlargement for himself, seeks it for others. A superior man helps the distressed, but does not add to the wealth of the rich. All within the four seas are his brothers." ^ Confucius twice or thrice announces " the Golden Rule " in its negative form.^ Those who contrast this xhe Coid- with the Christian exhortation are not apt to be ™^^e: positive aware that the Confucian ethics also contain the andnega- strongest statements of the rule in its positive «^=f°™* form. " To be able to judge of others by what is in ourselves may be called the art of virtue. In the highest path are four things which I have not attained, —to serve my fether as I would have my son serve me ; my prince as I would require my minister to serve me ; and my elder brother as I would wish my younger brother to serve me ; and to act towards a friend as I would have him act towards me." ^ Out of abundant special implications of the principle of putting oneself in another's place, we need only mention the precepts to love speaking well of others ; to hate the proclaiming of their faults ; to hold back nothing from friends ; to seek every chance of helpfulness.^ Every virtue must proceed at once to action. " Mere suppression of vice does not constitute virtue. Can that be love which does not lead to vigilance with its object ? Or that loyalty which does not lead to instruction of its object ? " « All the five elements of virtue are activities, save one.^ » L-ut^u, II. 14; XV. 5; Chung-yung, XII. 2. ' Ibid., I. 6; XII. 12; XVI. 5; V. 16; VI. 28; VI. 3; XII. s- • Ibid., XII. 2 ; V. II ; XV. 23. ' Ibid., VI. 28 ; Chung-yu,^, XIII. \. • Ibid., XVI. s ; XVII. 24 ; VII. 23 ; XVIL i. • Md., XIV. 2, 8. ' Ibid., XVII. 5. 6q4 sages. It is the same with the duties set for the young.^ Confu- cius has no quarter for n^ations. Tsze-loo, quoting from an Ode, — "he dislikes none ; he covets nothing ; what does he that is not good ? " — the Teacher said : " These ways are by no means adequate to \Trtue." - I hasten to add that this famous " Rule," laid down in ^ , one or another form bv all ancient moralists. oftfae although intended to express an unselfish spirit, Rn!e"as ^^ ^'^ ftom being an adequate or even a proper amodre la^ for human conduct It refers judgments to "^ personal desires only, which of course must differ according to character as well as knowledge : and its ap- pUcation would make one's desires for oneself whatever their quality, the gauge for his treatmen: of other men. A high morahty demands, not that we should treat them as we wish them to treat us, but that we should be able to rise above our wishes for ourselves, or even theirs for themselves, and recognize their right to the best treatment of their situation and need, whether we should wish for such specific treatment ourselves or not. If I am selfish, and want my greeds consulted, shall I therefore gratify another's to his injur)' ? It is obvious that, unless r^u- lated by a law higher than itself, the " Golden Rule " is made of any metal quite as easily as of gold. The Inquis- itor probably justified the rack and stake by the argument that he would himself prefer being compelled into behef at any cost, to perishing eternally for unbeUe£ The bigot apphes to others the law of imphcit faith which he beUeves has saved himself from perdition. TTie '" Golden Rule " wiU never save the world from Cathohc despotism nor Protest- ant bigotry : it is too easily transformed into an oigan of persecution. Nothing will suffice as a rule of judgment in the treatment of others, but a wise insight, the fruit of sjnnpathy and study, discerning real conditions, and rever- 1 Xw^K, I. 6. - IfakL, IS. 26. See also Bad. XTIL j, 12. DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 60S ing clear principles as a higher law than personal tastes or wishes. A simplistic rule of square is as likely to be unjust to others as to be either noble or kind. The inap- plicability of such ideals to actual civilization is becoming in many ways evident. Confucian philosophy seeks to find a higher principle which shall give concrete validity to morals. This is its main feature, and appears in the limitations with which every rule is guarded. Its negative rule of " reciprocity " is no better nor worse than the Christian form of the same; but shows, at least, caution in approaching such a test in positive form, and shrinks from leaving full swing to "the judgment of another's needs by one's own desires. Con- fucius goes further, and supplies a body of caution- Caution- ary maxims, which, while seeming to limit the tZIT' humanities, really lead them in the direction of Confucius, right practice. Here Chinese prudence becomes genuine sense ; showing the close connection of the ideal with practical conditions in the mind of this people. With the faith of the Western world, the ideal has been a sphere of culture apart from other spheres ; with the Chinese it is identical with actual culture. It therefore demands right balance and harmonious relation, secured only by positively accepting all the human conditions with their mutual lim- its. Its ethics are for practical education. Confucius demurs at repaying injuries with the same kindness with which we return benefits. "With Return what then will you reward kindness .' Recompense '"^^-^ injury with justice!' ^ The human heart cannot i;«- be tutored into effacing the sentiment of personal grati- tude. So in communicating truth, he affirms the Soc^ratic rule that differences of moral receptivity must be recog- nized.2 War is permitted after a people are sufficiently educated to act intelligently instead of being thrown away • Lunyu, XIV. 36. ' Ibid., VI. 19 ! XVII. 3 i VII. 8 ; IX. 29. 5o6 SAGES. by their rulers.^ The influence of men's popularity, or the reverse, on the opinion we form of them is pointed out as misleading. " The loves and hates of the multitude need investigating." ^ All scrutiny must be in an affirmative 'spirit; never losing respect for human nature, nor the ten- derness of charity and faith.^ " Only the virtuous know how to love or hate." * And Confucian " hate " is wholly free from malice or revenge.^ These practical ethics abound in prudential and regu- Aimat lative precepts, which pursue wholeness and balance of balance in the character. Caution in speech, . ' avoidance of friendship with men of lower aims, of a partiality that blinds to the qualities of others ; observance of natural subordinations, conflicts of duty, even restraint from an admiration of antiquity which hides the demands of the present time (a warning we should hardly expect from Confucius), — are all carefully included in the limitations which are in aid of a broader harmony.^ Never were the conditions of genuine labor better re- cognized. " Do not seek to have things done quickly ; nor look at petty advantages ; nor speak forth-puttingly, lest you make not ... " your words good. The superior man doe's not go out of his labor. place. The bird knows his resting-place : shall not a man be equal to this bird ? When the archer misses the centre, he ' Lunyu, XIII. 29, 30. ^ Ibid., XIII. 24 ! XV. 27. s Ibid., IV. 7. * Ibid., IV. 3. * Ibid., XIX. 3. Dr. Legge*s charge of a malevolent spirit in Confucius, on the strength of a passage in the Li-ki^ would have more force if he had given evidence of its historical truth {Prolegontj p. 113). Whether this passage, forbidding that one should live under the same heaven with the slayer of his father, brother, or friend, be the language of Confucius or of his followers, it seems intended to express that intense veneration for the ties of kindred which was the root of Chinese religion, and which at that time had no other guarantee than self-de- fence, though afterwards embodied in the terrible severities of the Penal Code. As the law against parricide went on the assumption that a crime so horrible was past belief, so the pre- cept counselling instant destruction of a different class of violators of those sacred ties, at the hand of their natural protectors, makes a similar impression. » Lunyu, XII. 13 ; XIX. 25 ; I. 8 : XVI. 4 ; Ta^io, Comm. to VIII. Striking parallels to the rules of family subordination are found in the early maxims of the Hebrews, Egyptians, and Greeks. L-unyu^ XIII. 18; Chuns-yungf XXVIII. DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 60/ seeks the cause of failure in himself. In whatever position, high or low, he does what is becoming to it ; thus he never can be where he is not himself." ^ "Perfect the virtue that is according to the Constant Mean." The so-called "rules of propriety" are, in fact, rules of right order, and concern the limits which restrain a virtue from passing into a vice. " To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short." Natural distinctions in men forbid equality of virtue : to some it is inborn ; to others it comes easily, to others hard ; and some are incapable.^ Patriarchal relations are treated with the same regard to essential distinctions and positive instincts. Filial Moderate piety and fraternal submission are not arbitrary, imerpreta- but rest on a reverence for age which is not in- "™.°* ^ Patnar- compatible with remonstrance, firm though modest, chai Eth- nor separable from gratitude and real apprecia- tion : it must seek, by carrying out the wishes of forefath- ers, to forward their purposes with posterity ; and is thus referred to the sense of social continuity which made it a religion.^ Confucius does not carry the law of social subjection so far as most teachers of patriarchal ethics.* Of the be- havior of younger to elder brothers he says only that it should be respectful.^ On woman he is equally reticent. He calls a prince's wife his helpmeet {foo-jin) ; his word for wife means the equal of her husband ; and the Chung- yung makes him praise connubial harmony as the music of lutes.^ His few words on education are admirable ; polite • Lunyu, XIII. 17 ; XIV. 21, 28. Ta-hio, Comm. to III. ; Ckung-yimg, XIV. 2 Zmbj/k, VI. 27, 16; VIII. 2; XVII. 8; II. 15; XIII. 20; XI. 15; XVI. 9. Com- pare with these limitary precepts the Delphic: "Of nothing too much." " In haste is peril; in calmness, beauty " (Periander). " From what is not within thy power restrain thy desire." (Epictetus). "In everything avoid extremes: beauty is right proportion" (Phocylides) > Lunyu, II. 6, 7; IV. 16-21 ; Chung-yung, XIX. « Solon went so far as to forbid saying any thing more just than one's parents ; and Pitta lus, as to counsel flattering them (Stobaus). • Lunyu, I. 6. • Legge on XVI. 14; XVII, 28, refers only to concubines, not to women as sueh. 6o8 SAGES. Studies, which depend on leisure and opportunity, should come after the graces of character.^ " The excellence of a neighborhood is in virtuous manners." ^ The Confucian State is an evolution of Moral Order, The c n '^^^^ ^ ^ ^^^ apparently devoid of individuality fucian should refer the integrity of the political sphere ^'*'V to the self-respect and culture of its members is based on ^ individual remarkable. We might explain it by prudential regard to its own defect in this very direction of individualism, were not the perception so evidently intu- itive and organic, and held firmly in view as the secret of national existence. It proceeds, in fact, from the idea of the Family as the social unit, — the basis of all construc- tion. The Chinese have not analyzed human values to their atomic principles, any more than resolved language The Fam- ''"'° elementary sounds ; and the Family Idea per- iiy Idea a sists as a compound factor. But this idea is made ^o'nTi"^ "P °^ personal duties. The family depends on rights and each member's fulfilling his own special functions : and thus the patriarchal system contains a power- ful germ of personal culture. The State as its expansion is thus a moral order, an ethical absolutism, a personal reli- gion. Government is always responsible to the self-respect and feelf-discipline involved in these personal relations : in their fulfilment only- is authority ; in their maintenance alone, success. '^'' ' But while pdblic virtues are defined by the family ideal,* Duties the ^^^ Gssential idea of duty as such, involved in these condition special duties, is riot forgotten by the best minds ; of Rights, g^^jj gQ Confucius and Mencius state, in terms as unqualiSe(f as any moralist has ever used, that the right to govern others depends on the power to govern self, and * Lunyu^ 1. 6. • Ibid., IV. I. ' Chuns;-yuns^ XX. DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 6og refer the growth and decay of States to the facts of per- sonal character. The Ta-hio undertakes to show " what is first and what last." Its nucleus, ascribed to Confucius, is a chain J. . , ,,.,., TheTa-hio. ot sequences, tracing the process by which right government flows from the will of the ruler to purify his desires and enlighten his mind. Far from stopping at the famil\- relations, it goes to the " cultivation of the person as the root of every thing." ^ Here is the " point of rest ; " here the inward peace that secures deliberation and suc- cess. The Ta-hio follows this dialectic of " the Master," with illustrations from the Odes and the ancient kings.^ To ideal character Confucius ascribes unlimited powers. It is everx'where appreciated ; it will subdue bar- unlimited barians ; its appeal will do more than punishments powers of to reform the bad ; it settles strife by a word ; it ™'"''' finds all men its brothers.^ Thus founded, a ruler's virtue is irresistible. "If his desire be for what is good, the people will be good, as grass bends before the wind ; if he is not covet- ous, thev will not even be hired to steal ; if he loves right, they will obey without orders.* Confucius himself claims that he could perfect a government in three years .^ As to the requisite period, he is not always consistent with himself, but the law holds good." It is not necessary to suppose that these unlimited claims for the power of character in a ruler are mere rhet- sigmficance oric. Confucius hoped for political good from the "f ">«>dea. monarchical principle only, as affording adequate oppor- tunity for the play of moral powers. A fixed postulate of » Soz»»i», xm. 13. ' Such as T'ang's inscriprion on his bathing tub: " Renovate tfyaf/dsHy.^ See also CJkmt^-rtM^t XX. » llud, IX, 13; XV. s! II. J : XII. i, 5- « Ibid., XII. iS, 19. " Ruler, begin by ruling thysdJ" (Pittacus) ; " Learn to obey, that you may know how to command'* (Sdon). » nrid., XIX. is; XIII. 10. • Itid., XIII. ii, a 39 6lO SAGES. Chinese life, it required, as its justification, a capacity for fully carrying out the righteous order of the world. As a relief from present miseries its unity attracted th-e imagi- nation of Confucius, as imperialism did Dante's in the dis- tractions of Italy in his day. In the petty States, abuses of royal power forced on his mind the conviction of its corresponding opportunities for good. He shrinks from no consequence of his grand assertion that " to rectify is to rule ; " in other words, that only justice and mercy are government, or deserve recognition as such. As for the bad ruler he has nothing but contempt, so for the good ruler his enthusiasm resembles that of the Jew for his Messiah. Tsze-Tsze's praise of such a deliverer reminds us of Job's plea for the powers and effects of a noble life : " His institutions, rooted in his character, are attested by his people ; he compares them witli the ancient kings, and finds them perfect ; with the laws of Heaven and Earth, and finds them in full accord ; lays them before ancestors, and no doubts arise. He can await the sage of a hundred years to come without misgiving. His acts are a law for ages, and his words a lesson. They who are far ofiE long for him, and they who are near bless him. ' From day to day and from night to night will men perpetuate his praise.' " ^ These tributes to the power of virtue aim to centre the , . , traditional loyalty to patriarchal institutions in a Impenal- J -J a^ ism of single type of national unity. The constant quar- on ucms. ^^j ^£ Confucius was with the princes who broke in fragments this common loyalty, and his literary task was to rehabilitate the ideal monarchy. " When bad govern- ment prevails, regulations proceed from the princes ; when good, from the Emperor." ^ Yet his appreciation went be- hind this imperial policy, and he could do justice to the virtues of even the feudal chiefs.^ His body of precepts for the guidance of rulers is unsur- Precepts passed in the history of political ethics, and holds for rulers, g^g timely foF the imperialism of a Western people ' ChunK-yung, XXIX. » Lmyu, XVI. s. » Ibid., XIV. i8. DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 6X1 to-day as for that of an Eastern patriarch before the Chris- tian era : — " Let there be men, and government will flourish ; without men it decays." " Its administration is in securing proper men by means of the ruler's own character, following the paths of duty and good-will, advancing the good men and setting the bad aside. The good ruler does not expect in one man talents for every employment. The good officer fulfils his function with modesty, and does not meddle with an- other's. Banish the songs of Ch'ing (immorality), and keep specious talkers afar off. From of old death is the lot of all men ; but if the people have no confidence in their rulers the State is at an end." ' The Chung-yung lays down nine duties for the ruler : self-cultivation, family affection, respect for high officials, honor to talent and virtue, a generous confidence, good pay, and kind regard to all officers ; light imposts and as little official interference with the people as possible ; encouragement of labor, hospitality to foreigners, and fur- therance of the best interests of the State.^ The four signs of bad government are, — to put to death those you have left in ignorance, to exact sudden press of work with- out warning, to make sudden change from loose to extreme execution of laws, and to give niggardly pay.^ " Do not slay the bad for the sake of the good." " The commander of a great army may be carried off, but the will of a common man cannot be forced." * The childish submission of the people implied in some of these rules is balanced by the emphatic charge Rights of to consult their wishes and respect their good-will, 'he people. Their " submission," only to be had by right treatment, signifies that religious loyalty with which the Chinese regards this political order, recognized by all as the true one. The assertion that under a good ruldl " there will be no discussions among the people," far from being intended > Ch-ung-yung, XX. Lunyu, II. 19, 20; XVIII. 10; XIV. 27-29; XV. 10; XII. 7. > Chung-yung, XX. 12. ' Lunyu, XX. j. * Ibid., XII. 19 ; IX. 25. *' I cannot admit that as a law which a tyrant enacts contra" to the will of the people " (Pericles, according to Xenophon. Mentor. I. 2). 6l2 SAGES. to enjoin passive obedience, which is not a Chinese idea,^ declares the entire capacity of the masses to discern when they ought to be satisfied with their rulers and when to oppose them. A true statesman, while always seeking to take the op- ideaiofthe portunitics of officB when his private dignity and statesman, consciencc are respected, retires when he finds he cannot stem the tide of evil.^ When a country is ill- governed,, riches and honor are things to be ashamed of.^ The "concealment" of himself, enjoined as his duty in such times, does not mean hiding from duty, but simply the self-respect that refuses to derive emolument from ruinous policies by which the power of a bad ruler will o^^erbear all that his ministers can do to resist him. And the come-outer must hold his principles, even to death.^ There was ground for such counsels in the experience of Confucius, if ever in any one's. Nothing can be stronger than his pictures of the rise of petty, base men to power, the absence of opportunity for the wise and good.^ Yet so far was he from abandoning the times by any unworthy self-concealment, that he was pointed out even by friends as the man who was expecting to stop a deluge or save the incurable.^ And here we touch the last great question : How is man related to the Whole ? The Confucian philosophy allows no gulf between per- iii. Reia- sonal conviction and public conduct, ideas, and who'ie ""^ institutions. Its doctrine of an " all-pervading "Unity" Unity" ^ is interpreted by the words "centre heart stateTml ^^ heart ; " meaning the inmost of man as the bond World. of each with all. This unity is the universality of principles, and embraces under one law the Person, the ' Ltmyu, 11. 19 ; XVI. 2 ; XIII. 15 ; XIV. as ; VII. 14. Legge's Prokgom, p. 40 ; I-u» yu, V. 22 ; XVIII. 2. ^ Ibid., XVII. I, 5 ; XVIII. 3- ' Ibid-, VIH. 13. * Chung^ang, X. » Z.KKJ/K, XIII. 20 ; V. 6, 26 ; XVII. ii ; III. 16 ; XIV. 25 ; VI. 14 ; XIV. 37. 38- • Ibid., XIV. 41 ; XVIII. 6. ' IV. 15 ; XV. a. DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 613 State, and the World. Unity, the highest aim of rehgious philosophy in all races, rests, for Confucius, on purely ethi- cal and practical grounds and their application to every sphere.' He even escapes the dualism of the Yin and Yang, which runs through almost all Chinese conceptions. This was the necessity of moral earnestness, which pre- cludes any thing like internal schism, a rent and divided will. " The secret of the whole way of Heaven and Earth is that they are without doubleness." ^ To this end Nature, physical and human, must be essen- tially trustworthy and sound. In all times and races the highest culture has been marked by re- worthiness spect for the name of Nature, till this name has ^^^oT become at last the keyword to the grand synthesis mico-Ethi- of science and religion. Here Confucius is abreast of the foremost. He knows no natural impotence for good ; no split in the foundations of the spiritual con- sciousness, making them a contradiction and a fraud. Man can reach virtue, because it is his inmost law and his unal- terable relation to the universe.^ All the Confucian virtues are natural ones. The "rules of propriety" (/i) are man's accord with the nature of things. They are to be pursued with a natural ease.* " Virtue harmonizes with the courses of the seasons, which know no collision." ^ It flows with ease in the currents of government as if they were made for it. It is in such sympathy with the inner movement of natural laws, that the good man has no dependence on any thing or being apart from himself. "Call him Heaven, call him the Deep." ^ In other words, as Christianity asserts Fatherhood, so ' Lunyu, IV. 15. ^ Chung-yutig, XXVI. 7. » Lunyu, XIII. 27 ; XVII. 6 ; XII. 2 ; XIII. 19 ; V I. 28. " We can free ourselves from evil" (Democritus in Siob., Ed. II. ix). " It is not difScult for man to be good" (jEschines in Ibid., II. viii. 26). " Live according to Natnre, and you shall never want" (Epicur. in Seneca, Lett. xvi). " Nature is good and self-consistent. Not to wander from the nature of things, and to be formed according to its law and example, is wisdom" (Seneca de Vit. Beat., 3, 8). * Lunyu, XII. I, 2 ; I. r2. ^ Ckung-yung, XXJX. • Lunyu, XV. 4 : VIII. 18 ; XIX. 25 ; Chung-yung, XXXII. 6l4 SAGES. Confucian faith is in the Wisdom, Order, Benignity of Right- eous Cosmical Laws, and in man's essential unity there- with. This "unity" resembles that of Xenophanes, whc Greek inslsted on the harmony of the universe, and sub- analogues, stitutcd laws of nature and society for special idola- tries. But Confucius has a distincter .conception of the difference of unity from totality, more like Parmenides, the further unfolder of the Elean philosophy ; and through his purely ethical basis reaches a clearer idea of unity in Nature than the Greek mind. One knows not which to admire most, the purity of these ethics or their affirmative spirit. The Chung-yung ^ presents this unity in its human norm. The Tao ^^ " equilibrium of the faculties and feelings." This or true is the Tuo (true path), "pursued through benevo- ^ ' lence ; " " not to be left for an instant ; " it is our proper nature ; and " if sought afar from common con- sciousness it is not found." ^ It is intuitive : " the supe- rior man does not wait till he sees things, to be cautious ; nor till he hears things, to apprehend." ^ It makes the utmost of the powers, moulding their action on love, and brings remote spheres into right order by rightly managing near ones.* This principle of conduct is called also Ching. Tsze-Tsze describes it as interchangeable with intelligence, self-completion, end and beginning ; the infinite in man, manifest without show, working without effort, divining the future, and everlasting.^ That a better translation must be found for a term which signifies all this than sincerity, is obvious. Pauthier and R^musat call it " the perfect " or "the pure." But if we bring together the fragments of ^ The Chwig-yung (Invariable Mean), mentioned as part of the Li-ki as far back as the Han, has high reputation as a record. Its style is different from the Lunyu, consisting of enchained propositions and logical sequences, whose subtle shades of meaning evidently defy translation. * Chung-yung-, I. xiii.-xx. "The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth " (O. T.). » Chung-yung, I. • Chung-yung, XIII. 3, 4 ; XX. 17. " Thou hast been faithful in few things, I will makt thee ruler over many things " (N. T.). « Chung-yung, XXL, XXV., XXVI., XXIV. term trans- 'sin- DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 615 the definition, it can mean no less than the normal move- ment of human faculties in those natural channels which represent their harmony with each other and their unity with Universal Order. This, in a moral sense, Meaning would be " sincerity," but it would be vastly more ; "^ ">= 1 • 1 • r 1 term^ even the mherent sanity of human nature, and its kted accord with the infinite and eternal. Why Dr. ""^^" Legge should call this, or any aspiration to this, a " fig- ment," except from theological preconceptions,^ it is not easy to see. All aspiration in man depends on such faith in normal relations between the soul and the Whole. And the Chinese Ching is confessedly no less than the ideal of personal wholeness or integrity, as the motive of con- duct and the result of steadfast culture "of the shoots of goodness in one's own being." ^ Nowhere is it pre- tended that its attainment is possible but upon these conditions.^ The defect of the Chinese method is obviously opposite to that of the Hindu, and consists in not holding Contrast abstract ideas firmly enough to study them apart "ithHinTu from the concrete, as the other consists in an in- tendencies, ability to escape them. As a religion, the Confucian prin- ciples may be contrasted in the same way with Christi- anity, as identifying the ideal too closely with a prescribed embodiment, while the Christian ideal was constructed with such entire isolation from the actual world, that it could not and cannot be embodied at all. Although Confucius ex- presses so clearly the theory of virtue, we observe Absorptioa that its contents are never for a moment separated °* Con- , , J. . , luciusin from patriarchal institutions as the mould ot social patriarch. ife. This, as we have seen, was the tragedy of his ^'='"- > Dr. Collie says " the Chung-yung does not contain a single direction how guilty man may recover the favor and image of his Creator." But we may observe that what it does pursue is a matter of highest moment, for which Dr. Collie's doctrine of salvation provides no direction whatever. » Ckung-^ung, XXIIl., XXVII. » IHd., XXII. 6l6 SAGES. career. His real universality was forced into a special channel, whose limits prevented its evolution. Morality and politics were not separated even as ideas, even as soul and body. They could not be seen in those mutual relations in which progress consists. Morality must be a free, self-evolving idea; forced into organizations, it may help them endure and bear fruit ; but lacking growth in its aims and disciplines, it will feed on self-complacency till it stiffens these very moulds into mechanism and dead pretence. But these inferences must not be run too far. A people generates its method out of its own needs. The mechani- cal results of organization in Western life are due largely to a demoralizing choice, constantly going on, in which a higher conscience conforms to a lower. In China, the whole conscience being embodied in these ancestral moulds, they embody the ever-living loyalty and religious faith of the people. Hence the venerable civilization in which they issued. It is moreover unjust to represent Confucius as laying No doo- down a doctrine of inertia. The precise contrary trineof is shown in passages already quoted.^ To these we may add his tribute to Tsze-Yuen : " I saw his constant advance ; I never saw him stop." ^ Tsze-Tsze ascribes to him strong warnings against neglecting the present time out of reverence for the past.^ Tsze-hea says that "he who daily recognizes what he has not yet, and forgets not what he has, attained, may be said to love learning." * It is not claimed that such passages should be strained Sense of ^^ ^^ cffcct of coutradicting that appeal to the continuity supposcd past as a fixed ideal, which is of course the prevailing spirit of Confucian teaching. But > Lunyu, XIX. 2 ; XV. 28 ; VII. 3 ; IX. 21, 22 ; XVII. 13. » Ibid., IX. 20. » Chung-yung, XXVIII. * Lunyu, XIX. t DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 617 they show that hostility to progress beyond the actual present,- is no part of that spirit. Its conservatism, too, has this merit, that it does not attempt the insane project of reconstructing society ab initio, by edict and on the mo- ment, in disregard of the continuities of all human history. There is, as we have seen, no pure destructiveness even in Chinese rebellions. Of this respect for the inevitable heredity in ideas, manners, and institutions as a germ of true political science we have already spoken, and have here only to suggest its bearing on the actual intercourse of races as a part of the science of religion. They who fear the intrusion of Chinese " fetichism " into " Christian civilization " have hardly observed that Contrast this naturalistic faith in social continuity is far ,""^'^J°■ -^ logical idea more favorable to progress, in an age like ours, ofcatas- than that ideal of catastrophe and interference '"'' ^ which has hid from Christianity for so many ages its own historical origin and real antecedents. The Confucian method has a scientific element in facing the facts of natural order directly and without reser- Scientific vation of miracle. History, culture, institutions ;i™hh!lse are all, for it, purely natural products, and hence thought, so far are fair fields of scientific study. Confucius even directed the passion for divination, as centred in the Y-king system of numbers and relations, into lines of accordance with real nature and life. He emphasized the laws of ethical sequence and the inherence of effect in cause ; and substi- tuted the independence of principles for outside personal caprice, whether conceived as intruding demonic or divine volitions into the order of Nature. All the powers ascribed by fetichism to spiritual beings he absorbed in that intrinsic " harmony " of the world, of which eternal principles of right are the secret. The absence of supernatural sanctions, of motives drawn from another life, the reference of virtue and knowledge to their own authority and self-evidence as ra- 6l8 SAGES. tional and becoming, are so many ,signs of a conception of invariable law organically fixed in the mind of this race, though as yet limited from various causes to an imperfect view of the order of Nature itself. They are thus prepared to appreciate the stage of science at which we now stand, much better than great portions of the populations educated in the theology of the Church. Who should more readily seize the scientific principle of evolution than those rational- ists who have already evolved their ethics out of human nature, and their political institutions out of human ethics, and their conception of the cosmos out of inherent prin- ciples of order identical with those which flow in human virtues and powers .' What they need can only be the new material, which will alter the form of that conception with- out changing its spirit. But there is another side to the picture. Prescribed sys- Prescribed tcms and routines are fatal to progress in science ethical and art. The attitude of obligation and predeter- iheiref- mined feeling absolutely excludes the pure love of feet on art, bcauty and truth. The Chinese temperament is science, / _ ^ andreii- unsultcd to contcmplatlon, and depends on obser- ^°"' vation of things rather than on the continued study of principles. In this respect Confucius has been its repre- sentative rather than its reformer. The Hebrews failed of art and science from a similar inability to separate the ideal from moral prescriptions, though these prescriptions were of a religious rather than political nature, and centred, in later times at least, in an authoritative church and canon. Distinctive Christianity has shown a similar antagonism to science and art, in so far as it has absorbed the ideal ele- ment in theological dogma, in commandments and sanctions by an external will. Confucianism escapes these reefs of theological prescrip- tion ; and there are foundations for science in its idea of inherent order, and for art in its love of harmony, limit, and DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 619 relation, as well as for religion in its reverence for ethical perfection, for culture, for humanity. But natural science and fine art find no place in the teachings of Confucius ; nor does religion attain a fully self-conscious freedom. These aspirations of sentiment and reason are confined within certain lines of personal and social duty. A few ever repeated formulas of method, subordination, prudential policy, official behavior, and proper intercourse between classes of persons constitute the staple of these prescribed moulds of doctrine. We find large affirmations of essential right and spiritual law ; but we miss aesthetic emotion and intellectual fire ; we miss the flight of imagination in free space, the study of thought and things as possibiHties of new and unexpected truth. With political institutions in constant view, and reference to official life as the great end of existence, there is yet no thrill of patriotic passion, nor ardor of progress in political wisdom, nor prescience of dis- covery. All is attained : the infinite unknown absorbed in the definitely known and organically applied. It is in this respect the nominalism of the positivist, which treats ideas as pure phrase and name except in so far as they are embodied for the understanding, and ignores the trans- cendental faculty, the step beyond experience, wherein are freedom, prophecy, and progress. Ignores in theory, yet never quite escapes in practice ; since even positivism takes that step beyond ex- xranscen- perience, in the very conception of invariable law ^i°",^„t in on which it rests. And the Confucian philosophy Positivism, is not without its hints of analogous capacity, especially in its ethical basis. For principles in their very nature tran- scend the Hmits of definite experience or observation. It is impossible wholly to confine the meaning of a moral pre- cept within the scope of prescribed and definite duties. The idea " / ought " has a primal absolute quality as intui- tion, which not only exalts the acts to which it is specially 620 SAGES. applied with universal meaning, but as a principle of con- duct looks beyond them towards infinite sanctions for the whole conduct of life. It is this ethical element, whose peculiar force in Chinese Mind all- thought may be relied on to counteract the defects controUin; jnst suggcstcd. The absolute form of its state- fucian ment in Confucius is itself a guard against the system. oncsidcdness of evolutionism, as held by many modern scientists who reject the idea of the infinite, and seek to explain mind, the universal form of knowledge itself, as a temporal and final product of matter by laws of descent alone. The positivist school of Comte lay claim, in some respects justly, to the Chinese mind as embraced within their sphere.^ Of this we shall speak more fully hereafter. But we note in Confucius a predominance of those aspects of mind which present it as all-controlling in the natural world ; such as the subordination of the universe to intelli- gence and virtue, whose all-productive energy is its spring and its motive power ; and that spontaneous perception of the Tao (Reason) by human faculty, through which man is proved one with the order of the whole. These are obvious signs of recognizing the intuitive and infinite aspects of mind. By the time of Confucius, the Divine had come to be expressed by thinkers as Tien (Heaven), rather giouscon- than as Shang-te (Supreme Ruler) ; a natural re- ceptions. gj,](. q£ j-jjg gtrongly concrete form of their concep- tions. The great sages give ample proof that the change not only involved no loss to the moral and religious ele- ments, but even brought a more positive assertion of them. Confucius always speaks of " Heaven " with a reverence and trust which certainly approaches very nearly the inti- macy of personal relation. His favorite theme of an all- 1 The positivist side of Confucian philosophy is presented by Lafitte, Consideraiiom Gin. di la CivU. Chin. (Paris, 1861). DOCTRINE OF CONFUCIUS. 621 pervading moral unity could hardly mean less than central intelligence,^ especially in one whose whole philosophy claims for mind the mastery of things. We need but instance his definition of the ethical laws, of nature, of human destiny, as " the ordinances " of Heaven,^ and of prayer as a constant communion with its spiritual powers ;^ his recognition of his own function of fulfilling its purpose and desire ; * and the utterance of his feeling of its divine sympathy as of one conscious of his good intent.® Dr. Fa- ber thinks ^ that in this faith " no helping hand is reached out from above, no reviving breath inspires the fainting pow- ers." It seems to me the admitted language and life of Con- fucius give evidence of both. And how should so manifest a sense of harmony with the inmost purpose and meaning of life be ineffectual to sustain its apostle, merely because not clothed in the intense objectivity of the Shemitic or Roman religious ideal .■• Has not the time come for escaping, in our own thought of the Infinite, that traditional definiteness of objective conception which ignores the essential fact that it is at once the substance of the soul itself, and the immeasurable- ness of being in which we dwell .■" We shall thus prepare for the swift and sure passing away of all anthropomorphic theories, by believing it possible to find inspiration as well as strength in receiving the harmonies and interpreting the discords of the world simply in the light of a lofty faith in life itself without positing their inmost spirit in any distinctive object either without us or within, beyond their own practical meaning as light, righteousness, and love. This attitude itself will, I am persuaded, bring us into better understanding of the great forms of human faith 1 Lunyu, IV. 15 ; XV. 2. See especially for relation between intelligence and the virtue that makes man one with Heaven, Chung-yung, XX., XXI. » Lunyu, XX. 3; XVI. 8; Chung-yung, XIV. » Lunyu, VII. 34- ' '''''^•' '^- '■ » Ibid., XIV. 38. ' Lehrhegriffd. Confucius, p. » 622 SAGES. most unlike those conceptions in which we have hitherto been trained. Nor do I see that the force of the Confucian ethics is destroyed by the absence of sanctions drawn from a future life.^ The power of an ethical system depends mainly on the intensity with which it perceives and states the law of duty, and insists on the present as the real retributive centre for the inward life. Dr. Faber allows that " the sum of the Confucian precepts is, ' Be ye perfect,' though not, 'as your Father in Heaven is perfect' " ^ Yet so, they would add, as to " form one life with earth and heaven ; a har- mony of principles in which the whole world shall be re- newed and blest." ^ We have now to indicate the practical influence of Confucius, — his function in developing the institutions of modern China. ^ Lehrbegr, d^ Conf, p. 13. ' Lekriesf»% p. S4- ' Chung-yungi XXII., XXXI., 3. IV. INFLUENCE OF CONFUCIUS, INFLUENCE OF CONFUCIUS. H I STORY is not woven by the master hand of any man, however gifted. Not even its pattern spedai is foreseen. It is the lot of every one who expects pi^of"' ■ * prophecy to renovate society by the immediate force of a always a special doctrine or plan, of whatever ideal value, to '^''"*' be proved in so far a false prophet. Jesus imagined that the coming religious changes of his time were to be effected by destruction of the visible and social world, and his own return in the clouds of judgment within that gen- eration. Buddha expected to conquer Brahminism on the soil of India by missionary efforts. Plato in Greece, and Pythagoras in Italy, hoped to carry ideal politics against the current of their times by carefully modelled institu- tions, set forth in writing or positive laws. Mahomet be- gan with preaching his sweeping monotheism in the form of peace and good-will. The legend of Moses makes him break his first tables of the Law in despair of his people, and betake himself to a code which falsified his plan of making all of them priests and kings. In our great mod- ern revolutions, the veto of Nature on all expectations of doctrinaires as to the special way in which social wrongs are to be abolished, has been signal and decisive. The secret of historical method is impenetrable. Every one of 40 626 SAGES. these prophets saw a great coming light ; but not one of them knew how it was to be kindled, and their ideal wis- dom was borne along folded in practical delusions. None the less honor to them for fidelity to the idea. We but • mark the positive law. The political centralization which Confucius pursued as In case of the remedy for his times was destined to be accom- Confucius. piished ; but not in his day, nor in the way he proposed. Had he foreseen that it would have been pre- ceded by the persecution of his followers and the burning of his books, the tragedy of his life would have been heightened. One recalls what Luther said, looking back on his early dreams of church reformation : " If I had known what enemies men are to the truth, I should inevi- tably have held my peace." Confucius would have put his own experience differently from this ; but it contained much that was analogous. The long anarchy which was to work out the conditions of national unity was pre- figured in the bitter disappointments of his ministerial plans, and the failure of his official career. Yet, after all, the life of Confucius was perhaps the most wonderful success on record. His plan of organization was a failure. His unorganized His unor- influcnce took effect in a social element, whose wtrTsuc- growth would probably have astonished him be- cessfui. yond measure, and from which flowed ultimately some of the best qualities of actual Chinese civilization. The function of Confucius in Chinese history is this : His definite Hc gave clcar and positive form to the ethical prin- function. ciple of the traditions, and by his writings and, con- versation made it a force of public education and national unity. He identified its path and law with the concrete rela- tions of the Family and the State, and placed these relations on the basis of personal character. There is no evidence that this educational force of ethics had reached any thing like INFLUENCE OF CONFUCIUS. 627 SO definite a shape, or so positive a worlcing power, before his time. Of this function he seems to have been fully conscious : the result proved how well he understood the instincts and wants of his people. But this was not all : he gave his whole energy to a reconstructive plan which found no foothold in his age. This was the erection of imperialism on the ground of a continuous national consciousness, uniting the maturity of the race with its childhood. This great conception was destined to prove controlling in after ages ; but, as a plan of reconstruction, it was a failure. Confucius was not accidentally famous. He read the heart of his people, and struck the key of its future deliverance; but the method to which he gave his life was a vain attempt to set back a tidal wave of the hour. On the other hand, he started a motive force of whose capacities he had no conception. He probably did j-^^^ the not contemplate its formation. This force was the li's^T class of teachers and statesmen, afterwards ex- into a panded into that great body known as the literati, p"""- It does not appear that such a class existed before Confu- cius ; though individual germs of it were undoubtedly present, since his example would not otherwise have had the effect that was manifest in the course of two or three centuries. There were representatives of personal power in all periods of Chinese history, who exercised many of the functions afterwards concentrated in the literary class ; there were brave ofificial censors before Confucius ; trusted ministers had drawn up institutes of government ; the na- tion itself had an instinctive respect for culture, which he did but develop. But no authentic sources of information for this period exist, except the Classic Books ; and we nowhere read in these of wholly independent persons, like Confucius, going from court to court purely in the interest of ideas, as teachers of great etnical laws in their appli- 628 SAGES. cation, and directors of the minds of princes and pupils. The sage, or " superior man," as Confucius exemplified him^ was in many respects unique. He combined elements of the Hebrew seer, the Greek philosopher, whether scholar or itinerant legislator, and the modern professor of politi- cal science. He was a purely individual force, to which even official distinction must bow, though his subse- quent absorption of office itself could not have been fore- seen. Nothing was more conspicuous in Confucius than his respect for his position as teacher ; as a sanctity not to be slighted nor infringed, even by a prince. He taught his followers the great lessons, of antiquity expressly that they might bring them to bear on reckless rulers, and pre- serve the State from the spirit of conquest and from arbi- The bai- trary will. He was, in fact, instituting the perma- ance to im- nent balance to his own principle of imperialism, in pen ism. ^ principle of moral and intellectual supremacy. Without positively organizing such a political element as a distinct class of persons, still less predicting its great des- tiny, he yet laid its foundations by furnishing in his life its personal ideal, and in his writings its body of instruction. As leading the way in bringing the force of educated schol- arship, devoted to a pure ideal, to bear upon the whole com- munity from the top to the bottom of its scale, he may be said to have founded the literary class which governs China ; and thus initiated the system which forces the sovereign to select officials from the body of the people on grounds of merit. This healthful balance to military and arbitrary govern- Conflict of ment issued at last in the rule of Confucian culture the two over every other element of political life. At first Confucian it mct z. uatural resistance from the purely political triumph, power. • This antagonism was more fully brought out by Mencius, two centuries afterwards ; and its rapid growth is shown in the energetic hostility of Chi-hwang-ti, INFLUENCE OF CONFUCIUS. 629 and in the courage of its resistance to his passion for mili- tary conquest, and to the disruption of the nation from its past. The strife of the two ■ principles came to its focus in this reign ; and the alniost immediate revival of let- ters, foreshadowed in the devotion of the Confucians to their master's convictions in the day of trial, proved how strong a bond of unity had already been created among his followers. In the age of the Han, he was entitled Kung (Duke) ; in the seventh century (T'ang) he is the " Su- preme Saint," and his descendants are ennobled ; in the Ming his " worship " is a national cult. But beyond this, the class he did so much to form has organized the State ; their Han-lin is the dispenser of powers ; their educational system has unified the Empire. The sovereign follows the rule of the sage. To the literary class we owe the service of special gifts and glories of Chinese civilization, theiiter- The great historical cyclopaedias, annals domestic and foreign, educational institutions, development of the language, — all are its work. Its open gates forbid the growth of caste, and the blood of all classes and condi- tions is carried through all the arteries of the State. It is the democratic element ; rebellions are generally headed by scholars, and the secret societies are managed by them. The same class conserve the peaceful and indus- trial habits of the nation, and the refining influences of culture. Its two most effectively conservative traits are directly traceable to the influence of Confucius. The first E;h;c3,j„d is the identification of ethics with right fulfilment political of special functions, duly respecting the great nat- ural relations as conceived and expanded' by the Chinese mind. It has made a religion of the Confucian creed, that ' this is government, — where prince is prince ; and minis- ter, minister ; and father, father ; and son, son." ^ This * L-unyu^ XII. 11. 630 SAGES. reverence for fundamental distinctions and natural respon- sibilities has protected China, through all its civil turbu- lence, from the excesses of the doctrine of equality and an all-levelling socialism. The other trait is the consciousness, shaped by the unity Doctrine of of the literary bond, of an unbroken continuity of National national existence and political faith. Of this in- Continuity. 11, , ,. .. iz-^r- calculable cohesive force the Confucian writings are the daily food, and the literary class the constant func- tionaries. It has penetrated the unpoetic life of China with an ennobling sentiment, and softened its hard routines with the inestimable feeling that the whole past should be dear and sacred for its germs of present blessings. It has brought out a noble consequence imbedded in " filial piety," by mak- ing political honors flow, not as in the West from the par- ents to the children, but from the children on the parents ; thus impressing on the living generation at once the self- respect of one who must earn his own position instead of inheriting another's, and the generous motive of repaying parental care. The stages of the process by which Confucian teaching Form of Tcsulted lu the politico-literary class will hereafter Confudus's form a most interesting chapter for Western study, teaciing. j^^ prescut too little is known to justify any at- tempt to present them in detail. We know that Confucius taught by conversation, answering the questions of intelli- gent men, in or out of office, as to religion, ethics, and in- stitutions, and especially as to the actual problems of their duty. They dwelt in their homes, and could hardly be called a school. Some were in closer intimacy than others, though we cannot accept the estimate that the one class numbered seventy, and the other three thousand.^ The Sse-ki undertakes to specify the faults of which each of the most conspicuous was cured by the influence of the Master 1 Mencius, II. pt. i. 3. See Plath, Scklller d. Confuc.,, 1873, pp. 4, 5. INFLUENCE OF CONFUCIUS. 63 1 while Confucius himself expresses his debt to many of them for moral and spiritual help.^ So far as is known, there was no attempt at organization for any purposes whatever among these disciples. There was nothing analogous to the Hebrew schools of the Prophets, nor to Pythagorean leagues in Southern Italy, nor to Buddhist fraternities in India. After his name had become famous, we find it re- ported that his followers split into eight parties.^ The greatest work of this preacher of concrete organization was that which he did not dream of organizing at all ; a n affords fact which accords with the universal laws of in- no ground fluence. There has never, in fact, existed any ade- sive cen- quate cejttre for such construction in the life and "^'^■ teachings of Confucius : these appealed to the natural reason and political traditions of the nation. No such ex- clusive centralism could be set up in his name as has formed great religious communions around the names of persons who claimed supernatural commissions to save or to destroy. Confucius "the Master" is simply the "Teacher," -The not the " Lord to whom every knee shall bow." ^^i,^'"" -' IS simplj He is only the chief of sages, wisest counsellor, the spokesman of his people's sense and spirit. In ^"'=''"- presence of his tablet in the temple attached to the exami- nation-hall, the graduates receive their diplomas as in sight of the " Master of Letters," but not of the king of the con- science. The veneration for him is a tribute to personal character and service ; it is in keeping with the national bearing towards all "superior men," with habits of defer- ence towards the authority of wisdom and virtue. There was thus no foothold for any thing like a Confucian church or apostolate, which should grow into an all-mastering aristocracy as a priesthood of letters. Nor has the literary class ever entertained an idea of separation from the ' See for their different traits and habits, Lwgnt XI. 12 ; V. 24 ; XI. 8, 10 ; V. 25. * Han-fi, A. D. 229. 632 SAGES. body of the people with purposes of this kind. It is not a close corporation ; it is not a masonic fraternity. It is simply the incessant flow of the elect of the national schools to functions of honor Eind command. Its " graduate " bears little resemblance to the early Confucian teacher of politics, itinerating the States in search of employment in the arts of governing, and taking princes under tuition. That in- Evoiution dividualism is wholly lost. It is tranformed into a ofConfu- yg^g^. system of fixed official relations, by which the Clan ideas , ill institu- central authority of government is represented, and tions. j(.g administration effected throughout the Empire. It is the outgrowth of a national system of education woven into the common life of the masses, the executive force of principles which the nation regards as the fixed and final order of human society. These principles are more than personal opinions, more than a provisional policy of this or of any time. They run back of Confucius. They do not rest on his authority ; they do not imply the perfection of his writings, nor the infallibility of the Classics. They are the substance of Chinese consciousness, the race-mould or type, physiological as well as mental. No people were ever so successful in expressing its inner life in its positive in- stitutions as the Chinese. There is no contradiction to solve, no struggle of the ideal against the actual here ; be- cause that would not be recognized as a true principle of government, which was not believed to be embodied in the substance of the State. Bad government is here simply the attempt of individual rulers to violate this universal consciousness of the people, and is rightly resisted and overturned on that ground alone. Do we wonder at the persistence of a form of civilization which is so truthful an expression of the inmost life of a race .'' Or is it surprising in view of the respect of Confucianism for human nature, for reason and law, for order, justice, humanity, for per- sonal culture, and the rights of virtue and fitness in civil INFLUENCE OF CONFUCIUS. 633 service, that it should find equal favor from the patience of China and the ardor of Japan ; absorbing the cruder cultus of deified men in that realm of the " Rising Sun," and keep- ing pace in its extension with the swift advance of popular intelligence ? V. MENCIUS. M E N C I U S. npHE text of Mencius ^ is ascribed by the oldest authori- -*- ties to his own hand ; by later ones to his , / ... Internal earliest disciples. The want of connection in its character parts is suggestive of compilation ; but the extreme f^^^f j^' minuteness of detail in names and circumstances, Mencian far beyond that of the New Testament, points at least to very recent recollections, if not to the teacher's own lips. The sentences are not strung together, like those of the Sermon on the Mount, as if gathered from various sources into an anthology. As we study the book, the im- pression deepens that we have before us the product of a » Our resources for the study of Mencius are now ample. We have two translations of his writings, both of them results of great research, — the Latin version of Julien (Paris, 1824), and the English of Legge. It is surprising to note the general agreement of these versions ; the one a miracle of linguistic genius, composed after only six months' study of the ChineSfe lan- guage; and the other, one of the noble fruits of twenty years' laborious research. Besides these, we have a French version by Pauthier (1852), substantially accordant with the others. The differences in the three afford opportunity, by comparison, for arriving at probable solu- tions of doubtful passages. We have also the aid of parallelisms from the eight editions con- sulted by Julien, and the wealth of commentary collected by Legge. To these advantages must be added that of observing how strongly the rendering of Chinese signs can be influenced by the literary style of the translator, and his preconception of Chinese mind. References to the works of Mencius appear, with quotations, in works which existed previous to tbe Han, and within a century after his death, and which came into the hands of official literary Boards at the revival of letters. (Legge, Sect. IL) In the earliest centuries of our era, the host of commentators commenced with an illustrious statesman, whose work is still extant ; and in the Sung they are reinforced by Ch" hi, to whose labors we owe, by his own account, the ac- curacy of the present copies, as well as their special divisions. More recent dynasties have added immensely to the research expended on one who is now, since the Sung, recognized as a sage at the side of Confucius, and as rightly developing his doctrine. Julien's }*roe?n gives a list of over sixty commentaioi-s consulted by him. Six hundred editions of the text are »ccessible; and innumerable scholars have expounded it. 638 SAGES. single mind. The conversational logic by which political and moral truths are forced upon princes and disciples is very original, and pervades the whole with one spirit. Every- where it is the same man who speaks and deals with othei men ; and a man of remarkable genius, as lofty as it is keen and bold. His apothegms are full of sense and strength ; clear-cut, decisive, rapid, wise, and noble. Their surprising aptness in detecting the fallacy in hand, and in bringing out the conclusion desired ; their command of historical illustration, and their compacted logic, — imply elaboration. And we cannot but think that, if they are the records of spontaneous talk which they purport to be, they have been worked over with a view to complete effect. On the whole, it seems fair to suppose that they were drawn up by Men- cius himself at the close of his public career.^ None but himself could have been so circumstantial. Any one but himself would have been likely to praise him, or at least to depict his personal habits, as the compilers of the Lun-yu have given those of Confucius. To Chinese disciples, the temptation to such tributes would have been irresistible. From the death of Confucius to the birth of Mencius (371 2- c.) was a little over a century. During that and th& interval we hear of many Confucian sayings ; and "^^' efforts to commend his doctrine to the leading princes and States are duly recorded.^ Mencius was per- haps a disciple of the grandson of the Master, Tseu-sse, who compiled the Chung-yung. His life synchronizes with the great age of Greek philosophy, and with the movement of Greek mind to the East through Alexander of Macedon. He inherited the name and blood of one of the great families of Loo,^ honorably mentioned by Confucius himself, who ^ Legge says, " Nothing prevents us from accepting the sayings and doings contained in these books as those of Mencius, guaranteed by himself." (p. 12.) 2 See Plath's Schtiler d. Confucius ; 5se-ki, Kia-yu, and other histories. " Lunyu, VI. 13 j XIX. 18 -, Ta-hU>, Comm. X. 22. MENCIUS. 639 has numbered some of its members among his disciples.^ He inherited the Confucian writings, the influence of their growing school, and the lessons of a time which was prov- ing by its miseries the wisdom of their warnings and the truth of their philosophy. He was well born and well taught. His father's death consigned him to the exclusive care of a mother, by whom he was shaped to habits chuahood of industry and self-culture, and to the faith and ^^^^^l' courage of a reformer. The traditions report that ™g- she cut in pieces a beautiful web she was weaving, to im- press on him the irreparableness of wasted hours ; that she changed her dwelling again and again to protect him from examples that might blunt his conscience, or lead him to formalism ; that she turned his maturer mind to delicacy in the treatment of his wife ; and bravely met his unwilling- ness to answer a call of public duty which would deprive her of his care, with the injunction : " You are a ripe man and I am old : do as you ought, and I will do what becomes me." When disciples criticised the cost of his arrangements for her burial, and especially the thickness of the coffin, he re- plied: "Is not this alone a satisfaction to one's heart, to keep the earth as far as possible from the bodies of his dead ^ I have heard that not for all the world would a good man be mean towards a parent." ^ The petty States were absorbed in a final struggle be- tween T'sin and T'soo, whose ambitious leaders Relations left the Empire only transient intervals of peace.^ Zlul^^t- Never was a time farther from the promise of a isfactory. true king ; never a time of such suffering from oppressive rulers.* Yet Mencius bates no jot of hope in these evil days. The people were waiting to welcome good govern- » Lunyu, V. 7 ; VIII. 4- ' Mencius, 11. pt. n. 7. » Ibid., VI. PT. II. iv. • His pictures of these miseries are as terrible as any thing in the chronicles of France 01 Italy in the Middle Ages. I. pt. ii. iv. ; II. pt. 1.. iv. i III. pt. ii. ix. 9. 640 SAGES. ment. " With half the efforts of the ancients, the result would be two-fold ; such the opportunities of the time." ^ His faith in persuading princes to seize these oppor- tunities was not less than fliat of Confucius ; but his experience was no better. Duke Wan of T'ang listened patiently to his plans for social improvement and popular education, showed the utmost tolerance even to ultra- communists, and earned the name of one who strove to bring back the rule of humanity.^ Yet, for some unex- plained reason, the sage leaves his service and does not return to it. With this one exception, the princes wholly failed to please him. Even in Seu-en of T'se, who heard quietly from his lips severe rebukes and regicidal doc- trines, he " did not find the ruler he wished," and gave up the relation of his own accord.^ Seang of Liang "afar off did not look to him like a ruler ; and, closely studied, had nothing venerable about him." * He " found no one dis- posed to treat these kings as fit to be spoken with about right dealing ; than which no disrespect to them could be greater." Mencius, for his part, does not "dare to set forth to them any thing but the ways of Yao and Shun." ^ Ever ready to recognize unappreciated virtue, and to aid every practical effort,® a great conscience nevertheless His faith- incessantly moves him to remonstrate, to warn, to Mtesti- ];)o](j yp thg sufferings of the people in contrast with against the dutics and powers of a" true king. His free- ™'™^' dom of speech is unexampled. The right and duty of the people to treat an oppressor as a usurper and ruffian is again and again brought home to the rulers who consult him. He is not content with ethical precepts ; he has his positive plans of labor, taxation, mutual help through a division of lands for private and public tillage, and other local regulations. He is familiar with all past institutions * Mencius, II. PT. i. i. ^ " Humanum regimen " (Julien). I. pt. ii. xiii. ; III. PT. I. i--iv. ' Ibid, II. PT. II. xii. * Ibid , I pt. i. vi. " Ibid., II. PT. 11- ii. " Ibid., IV. pt. ii. xxx ; III. pt. i. iii. MENCIUS. 641 and changes in these matters, and uses their lessons in a statesmanly and philosophic spirit. Mencius is the st„„g,h type of Chinese political science in the concrete, of Us What gives unity and noble purpose to the national '"''^*' life stands in his teachings more clearly and fully than in those of his master. For decision and point his counsels are beyond all praise. His singleness of purpose lifts him above others into absolute freedom from crooked poli- cies or selfish aims. " I wish to rectify men's hearts, to end perverse and unbridled talk : not from love of disput- ing, but because I can do no otherwise." ^ How clean and fine his idea of duty : — " To dwell in the wide house of the world ; to stand in true attitude therein ; to walk in the wide path of men ; in success, to share one's principles with the people ; in failure, to live them out alone ; to be incorruptible by riches or honors, unchangeable by poverty, unmoved by perils or power, — these I call the qualities of a great man."' "The difference between Shuh and Chih was nothing but the interval be- tween the thought of gain and the thought of goodness." ° He wastes no time in planning how to win hearing or propitiate majesty. How grandly direct his first confer- ence with the king of Liang, with which the book opens : "Venerable man," said the king, "since you have come here a distance of a thousand li, you have doubtless something to say for the profit of my kingdom." Mencius replied: "O King, why talk of profit ? I have humanity and justice for my teaching, nothing more. If these be put last, and profit first, your officers will not be content till they have stripped you of all." ■■ So to King Wan, anxious for the future of his little State : — " The best foundation for a royal line is to do what is fit to be handed down. The end is with Heaven. For you, O King, 'tis enough to strive to do your best." * « Mendus, III. pt. n. ix. Ibid., III. pt. n. ii. » VII. pt. i. xxv. ♦ Ibid., I. PT. I. i. ' Ibid., I. pt. ii. xiv. 41 642 SAGES. His self-respect is even more sensitive than that of Con- Sensiiive fucius. He refuscs a salary, lest it should tempt seitrespect him to keep a situation which he saw to be unfit for him.' He wiU. not receive gifts from a prince which are not needed for public service, because this is a bribe.^ He replies to those who advised him to be more complai- sant to princes, with the reproof : " Never did one who bent himself make another straight." ^ The slightest vio- lation of etiquette justified an officer in refusing to obey the summons of the ruler : for the law of right order was above the caprices of rank. " Justice is the way, and right order the door." * " As to rank, how should I be on terms of friendship with you, the prince ? As to virtue, how should you be on such terms with me ? " ® His refusal to hold intercourse with a feUow-commissioner ® has an air of arrogance, but was probably not without reasons known to himself. A rebuke administered to King Seu-en for an offence to this personal dignity is worth notice. The king excused himself from visiting Mencius on pretence of Ulness, pro- posing that the latter should make the call on himself the next day instead. The philosopher, knowing that the point at stake was one of precedence, answered with fine irony : " I also am unwell, and cannot go to court" ^ Next day however he goes out as usual, and when called to account by another, puts him off lightly ; but before the king's officer he fearlessly sets the whole truth : — " You misunderstand me. ' Kings have their wealth,' said Tsang. ' I have my humanity, tiiey their dignities, I my justice. Wherein am I inferior ? ' Was not this right ? Three things are everywhere in honor, — rank, years, virtue. Rank is first in courts; age in vil- lages ; virtue in helping the times and the people. How should he * Mendus, II. pt. n, xir. = Ibid., II. pt. n. Si. * IHd., III. pt. n. i. * rbid, V. PT. n. tH. 5 Ibid. « Ibid,, II. pt. n. yi. * Ibid., II. PT. II- iL " lufdidter etiam segroto ■ (JuHes). MENCIUS. 643 V- ho possesses but one of these despise one who possesses the other two ? If a prince would act nobly, he must not summon his ministers as subjects ; but, if he wants their counsels, he goes to them." ^ He is as downright with his disciples as with the princes. " You have come here," he says to one, " for the sake of eating and drinking. Have you learned the ways of the ancients to so little purpose ? " He tells another that "wild grass is filling up his mind." Answering shallow criticism of his conduct, he makes the critic confess him- self to be " indeed a small man." ^ His sensitiveness springs from profound conviction of the need of his function. Through all evil times DuetoUs he traces the work of the true sage, restoring the h^'f^tc-" face of the earth and the spirit of man.^ History, t'on. with its cycles of good and evil, is for him the endless les- son that principles are eternal, and that with the hour comes the man. As Yu subdued the floods ; as the Great Duke aided Woo to overturn the tyrants of the Shang ; as Confucius struck terror into the evil men of his day by his Tchun-tsieu, — so there was work set for Aim also in a day as void of noble aims as those were, as infected with perni- cious sects and schools, the tyranny of kings and the lust of gain.* " When a sage shall next arise, he will certainly not change my words." More attractive than his jealous self -estimation is- his devotion to the good of the people. Every conver- Devotion sation with rulers is consecrated to their interests °^^ ^^^u^Z and rights ; every admonition and every rebuke i>umanity. pressed instinctively to this end, with an er^rgy that * Mencus, II. pt. n. ii. It is diiBcult to see how Dr. Legge makes out a piece of " prevari- cation ' ' here (p. 26). He also finds Meocius guilty of meeting Seu-en's excuses for not accept* Ing his principles, in an unworthy manner. Seu-en objected that he loved beauty, substance, and valor too much for such strictness. Mencius bids him satisfy these tastes, yet only in such ways as would give the people also opportunity of enjoying them becomingly (I. pt. 11. iii. v) What there is in this to deserve censure, I fail to comprehend. * Ibid., IV. PT. I. XXV. ; VII. pt. ii. xxi. ; II. pt. ii. xii. * Ibid., III. pt. ii. ix. * Ibid.,II. pt. h. xiii. 644 SAGES. pierced every barrier. In full confidence that all men have s)Tnpathy with suffering, and that when moved by its ap- peals one could as easily govern a State as " turn a toy in the hand," Mencius holds steadily up before his royal pu- pils the whole picture of the public miseries, charges them again and again with the guilt and shame, and pushes his plans of relief as if they had but to speak and all would be accomplished. No less than six such pleas for humanity and justice are recorded in detail ; while more fragmentary assertions of the precedence of the people to rulers, of its affection and confidence as their real treasure, of its pros- perity as the blessing of Heaven, meet us on every page. On this theme imagination, logic, statesmanly thought, indignation and entreaty are all concentrated. " Have you watched the growing grain after the season of drought : how, when the rain falls, it stands up refreshed ? Who can keep it back ? These shepherds of men all love to destroy men. Were there but one who did not, the people would hasten to obey him as rushing waters that cannot be stayed." ^ This broad demand for humanity found its arguments in the barley blades ripening in millions on the wide acres ; in the common endowments of men, their outward senses, and their sense of beauty, as attributes pointing to a com- mon spiritual capacity for truth and goodness.^ Like Confucius, he accepted all who came with a mind Affimative to Icam, without inquiry into their past ; and was spirit. charged with paying too little regard to moral stand- ing.^ More perhaps than Confucius he emphasized the germs of ^od in men ; believing, like Plato, that no man willingly sins ; and more intent, even while denouncing wrong, on laying better foundations in the mind and heart of his people, than on confuting the delusions of their teachers, or overthrowing their vicious lords. " However > Mencius, I. PT. I. vi. ; III. pt. n. v. • Ibid., VI. pt. i. vii. Ibid., VII. PT. n. XXI. MENCIUS. 64s bad a man be to look upon, yet if he purify himself with restraint of mind and outward cleanliness, he hiay sacrifice to the Supreme." ^ Of all teachers perhaps the most affirmative ; thoroughly alive to the reserves of moral power in peasant, sage, or king. His intensity of faith and motive-energy makes him cairy out the qualities characteristic of his master in a more pronounced way. He is more jealous of his personal dig- nity than Confucius, more protestant in his humanity, more positive in his assertion of the right of revolution, more definite in his plans of reform. The fact may point to advance in the conditions which called for such dealing, as well as to the growth of self-conscious purpose in the class of reformers which Confucius had created. Mencius had a genius for principles. The very trans- parency of his moral precepts, — these solutions of ^ problems of duty, these swift cuts through knots forprin- of policy, — hides the wonderful intuitive force from which they spring. For his open eye the age and its wants were daylight. He is face to face with the primal laws of character which take up the facts, as a magnet gathers the dust of iron on a plate, into those orderly shapes that the time requires. Things are brought to right proportions and real values in eternal scales, and the fulfilment of real functions becomes the sole test of suc- cess. Not more clearly does he affirm the irreversible laws which it is fatal to oppose, than the real distinctions and balancing contrasts that make up human nature and des- tin\'. He keeps the " middle way," and has no applause either for the man who stands stiffly out on his individu- alit\-, or for the man who cares not with whom he keeps company.^ " Every man for himself," and an in- Against discriminate " love " that knew neither prince nor extremists, parent, he regards as equally forces of social disintegra 1 Mencius, IV. pt. n. xxt. ' IbiA, II. pt. i. ix. ; VII. pt. i xxti. 646 SAGES. tion.^ He devoutly rests on the law of Heaven, yet in- sists that men shall work out their own success ; puts ceremonies on the ground of natural respect ; subordinates form to spirit while honoring both.^ He perceives the function of evil to drive men to good,^ and the philosophy of reaction as explaining their transitions from one ex- treme of opinion to another; drawing lessons of charity and wise treatment from these natural necessities* He perceives the industrial law that the head should rule the hand, and manual labor be directed by skilled thought. He is at once the worshipper of spontaneity and the stern legislator of self-discipline. His fine plea for the real rights of the passion-nature may be contrasted with the asceticism of the neo-Platonist and the Buddhist, and the long protest of Christianity against "the world and the flesh." What he most admires in Confucius is his universality ; a mind adaptable to every occasion and con- juncture." * This even justice to all human forces was due to his be- Doctrine li^ i^ the essential goodness of human nature ; a o£ the belief so thoroughly characteristic that it as fairly o£ Human dcscrves to be called by his name as by any m the Nature. history of thought. He reads man, not from below, but from above ; not from his crude actual, but from its enfolded promise ; defines human nature, not by its out- ward phenomena, but by its essential law and possibility, — as a true artist knows his portraiture to be untrue to his subject unless he constructs the permanent image out of the best expressions to which the features tend. Hence every element of the human is legitimate in its due propor- tion and bearing on the rest, and guaranteed by laws of cosmic order, of which such righteousness is the voice. 1 Mencius, 111. FT. 11. ix. 2 Ibid., 11. PT. n. vii. ; II. pt. 1. iv. ; V. pt. i. ii. ; VI. ft. n. i. * Ibid., IV. PT. I. ix. * Ibid., Vll. pt. n. xrvi. * Ibid., V. pt. u i. MENCIUS. 647 This doctrine was no crude utopianism, but guidance to the heart of all problems by a path to be trodden Not mo- in humility and self-discipline. To one who doubted p'*"' ''"' it Mencius pointed out the conditions, quoting the craditbns Shi-king : "The medicine will not cure the patient ot*:'^'""-^- unless it gives him pain." ^ He is strenuous to refute those who define human nature by its outside details, by mere vital phenomena, by pleasure, by moral indifferentism, or as a result of outward conditions alone : — " 1 he virtues are not poured into us, tiiey are natural ; seek and you will find them, neglect and you will lose them. To every faculty and relation belongs its normal law ; but without its fit culture it will decay. How lamentable to lose this mind, and not know how to seek it. T/ie end of wisdom is to seek the lost mind.'" ' " Of all seeds the virtue is in their ripeness."' " Only he who has studied his mental constitution knows his nature ; knowing his nature, he knows Heaven." ■* This essential soundness is not a rout of undisciplined instincts, but right order of government between what is made to rule and what to obey : — " They are great men who follow that part of them which is great. Let one stand in his nobler part, and the meaner will not be able to take it from him. This is simply what makes greatness." '" " The superior man desires a wide sphere that he may give peace to multi- tudes ; but what his nature makes his own cannot be greatened by the largeness of his sphere, nor lessened by its obscurity." ^ Mencius finds a natural adaptation in man for dealing with circumstances, which constitutes his freedom, Human and which should forbid him to call them fate.^ Freedom. The force manifested by noble impulses when spontane- ously following their objects is the testimony of human nature that these channels of power represent its inmost purpose. " When Shun heard a good word or saw a good * Mencius, III. pt. i. L ^ Ibid., VI. pt. i. viii., xi. > Ibid., VI. PT. I. xix-xx ; also II. pt. i. ^. * Ibid., VII. pt. i. i. » Ibid., VI. pt. I. XV. • Ibid., VII. PT. i. sd. ' Ibid., VII. PT. II. XXXV. 648 SAGES. deed, he was like the Kiang bursting its banks and grandly flooding all things." ^ " When a bad father is brought to feel delight in what is good, the whole land is trans- formed." ^ Hence Mencius is so anxious not to suppress his " passion nature," but only to hold it within limits as set by morality, which is its natural ruler.* " The great man is he who does not lose his child-heart* He does not think beforehand that his words shall be sincere, nor that his acts shall be resolute ; he simply abides in the right.* heart. The right path (tao) is near, yet men seek it afar ofE ; the labor of duty is easy, yet men seek it in what is difficult." 6 The way is wide ; it is not hard to know. Go home and seek it, and you shall not lack teachers." ' No one more clearly distinguishes radical human nature " Human from impulscs that prove imperfect growth or long not'cmde ^'susc of natural powers. His stern warnings of instincts, the penalties of such abuse have been already no- ofdisd- ticed. But sin is always for him the misuse of piine. powers essentially (that is, ideally) good. His fine parable of the trees that grew luxuriantly till cattle browsed on them, so that men falsely imagined from their bare stripped appearance that the nature of the soil was barren ;* and his picture of the water, made, by forcing, to appear as if its nature was to flow upwards,® — are illustrations of his best spirit. As natural track, virtue is easy ; but 'tis discipline that makes the man. The sorrows of Shun were his culture for the throne.^" " When Heaven is about to confer a great function, it first exercises the mind with suffering and the limbs with toil ; exposes the body to privations, and confounds the undertakings. In this way it stimulates * Mencius, VII. pt. i.xvi. * Ibid., IV. pt. i. xxviiL • Ibid., II. PT. I. ii. * Ibid., IV. pt. n. ziL » Ibid., IV. PT. n. xi. ; " If on prafinit effichim " (Julien). « Ibid , IV. PT. t xi. ' Ibid, VI. PT. n. ii. • Ibid., VI. pt. I. viii. ' Ibid., ii " Ibid., V. pt. i. i.-^iL MENCIUS. 649 power and supplies defect. Incessant falls teach men to reform, and distresses rouse their strength. Life springs from calamity, and death from ease.i Men of special virtue and wisdom are wont to owe these powers to the trials they have endured."' The penalties of working against Nature are not the anger of a jealous God ; they are effects of disobedience to the laws of the soul and the world : — " They who expect to live without enemies, yet have no kindness for others, are like one who should try to hold a heated body Natural without dipping it in water. Men expect by tlieir own dark- laws of ness to enlighten others. The artisan may give a man com- penalty. pass and square, but he cannot make him skilful in the use of them. What misery they shall suffer who talk of the evil in others ! A man must first despise himself, then others will despise him. A family must first overthrow itself, then others will overthrow it. A State must first smite itself, then others will smite it. He wlio stops short where it is unbecoming will stop short in everything. How can one conceal his character ? " ' From such philosophy and faith as this we shall hear no weak complaints of the vanity of human endeavor, ^.^^^^^j The utmost in that direction is "dissatisfaction" ness and at meeting no prince who can be taught the duties "^"""S'- of a ruler.* His failures did not weaken his self-respect. " I love life, but there is that I love more than life. There- fore I will not seek to hold it by unworthy ways." ^ That this is no empty boast, the constant plaindealing of this censor of rulers, any one of whom could have cut off his head by a word, gives ample proof. The escape of a critic so unflinching can be explained only by the very fearless- ness and self-respect that forced upon anger the sense of its own impotence. We recall the almost identical words • Mencius, VI. ft. n. xv. ' Ibid., VII. pt. i. xviii. • Ibid., IV. PT. I. vii. ; VII. PT. n. xx., v. ; IV. pt. n. ix. ; IV. pt. i. viii. ; VII. pr. i »liv.; IV. PT. I. XT. ♦ Ibid., II. PT., II. xiii. • Ibid., VI. pt. i. x. 6$0 SAGES. of Algernon Sidney, writing from exile to friends who Grounds urged him to purchase forgiveness by retraction.^ of his -pjjg personal force of such a man as Mencius was personal ^ force. a phenomenon, and we read of a king's sending a person to spy out whether he was like other men.^ That he spoke in the name of all history, of the good and great whom all men knew, and whom to reject was a greater treason than his own contempt of living courts, doubtless helped to shield him from arbitrary violence. And it is no light resource to one who must stand for unpopular truth, that he can feel enthusiasm for those who have stood for it in the past. Mencius does not stint his admiration for his master : " I have not attained to the sages of old, but I would learn to resemble Confucius. In all ages there was never another Confucius." ^ What he most honored in all Nature thcsc great men he is not slow to specify : " Not peai'to''^' ^° ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ kingdoms of China would they have antiquity, committed an act of injustice, or put to death an innocent person."* Quite as impressive is his humility before his ideal. " Master," asks one, " have you arrived at the dignity of a sage .-' " Mencius answers : " Oh what words are these ! Confucius would not claim to be a sage, and do you put such a question to me .' " ^ Yet there is no slavishness in his appeal to other helpers : " The principles of all sages are the same, though at a distance of a thou- sand years ; it is like uniting the halves of a seal."^ He is never weary of reminding men that all can become Yaos and Shuns. "The multitude wait for impulse; the few arouse themselves." ' He reserves the full right to doubt the venerated Classics. " It would be better to be with- out the Shu-king than to believe every word in it." ^ 1 " I hope to die in the same principles in which 1 have lived, and I will live no longEj than they will preserve me. I have ever had it in mind that when God shall place me in such a condition that I cannot save my life but by doing an indecent thing, the time has come wherein I should resign it. I live by just means, or not at all.** ^ Ibid., IV. ft. il. xxxii. * Ibid., II. PT. I. ii. * Ibid., II. pt. i. ii * Ibid., II. PT. i. ii. " Ibid., IV. PT. II. i. ' Ibid., VII. pt. i. x. * Ibid., VII. pt. n. ii. MENCIUS. 65 1 The men of old are to be " studied in order to discover if in all respects they are to be approved." ^ We note with surprise, that in all the dealings of Mencius with the princes of his day there is not one word ^, ^ •' The Con- nor action in which he does not maintain the spirit sistency o£ and pursue the aims which have now been de- ''•"™°'''^ scribed. Even where the story seems to tread the edge of a dubious policy, the next step rescues it, and makes the supposed wrong not only a rebuke to our doubts, but a condition of some noble piece of counsel.^ Thus the philosopher seems to defend the habit charged on scholar- statesmen, of going from court to court with large attend- ance at the expense of the State, as well as that of taking public support without performing public service. But as we go on, we find that he is dealing with a shallow labor- theorist, who has no idea of the value of intelligence as an element of production, nor of the services rendered by thinkers like Mencius, who were constantly consulted on public affairs. Mencius takes occasion to compel recogni- tion of moral and intellectual values. It is a lecture on the ■moral basis of credit and prosperity, from which many of our own labor reformers might derive as much benefit as the hypercritical P'ang Kang.^ His denunciation of the " good careful people of the villages " as " thieves of virtue " ceases to appear unjust, when we find them to be a class of persons who in New Testament phrase would be called the " Pharisees " of the time.* The Confucian confidence in moral power as absolutely without limit recurs in Mencius with at least equal Absolute- energy. "The good ruler will have no enemy. „„jji If obliged to fight, he is sure to overcome." " If p°""- * Mencius, V. PT. n. viii. ^ See especially Ibid., II. pt. 11. viii. ; I. pt. ii. x., xi. 3 Ibid., III. PT. II. iv. See Legge's severe criticism, p. 53. There is no proof that Men- cius himself was chargeable with these idle displays : nor that he had any means for gratifying such tastes, had he possessed them ; which is improbable enough. As for taking pay, the laborer is worthy of his hire ; and nothing like concealment of convictions for the sake of giiii can possibly be imagined in his case. * Ibid., VII. pt. 11. xxxvii. 652 SAGES. the ruler be righteous, all will be righteous." ^ It may sur- Grounds P^ise US that such a faith should not have been of the incredible to men like Confucius and Mencius, '^°'^' who seem to have ignored the fact that their most devoted service of principles failed to convert, so far as the record shows, a single petty monarch to the right path. It is true they might deny that the age afforded no fair chance for testing the principle. They aver, too, that in case of failure one must blame himself, not virtue. " If one love and there is no return, let him examine his own heart ; if he cannot govern men, let him examine his own wisdom."^ But, after all, is it so strange to one who ob- serves the prodigious force of fashion and public opinion, or reflects on the magnetism of an idea when it fully pos- sesses a living man, and the swift changes of belief that make a generation pass utterly out of the latitude of their immediate predecessors, that these earnest Oriental proph- ets of righteousness should claim for principles the mystic secret of rule, and insist on their efficacy against all the rebuffs of the hour.' Man does not live by experience alone, but by transcending experience, assured of what he does not see, and never has seen, as real ; nor can he ever recognize the absolute worth and authority involved in the idea of duty, but by a mental lift into a sphere above all the limits and contingencies of actual human conduct. We must add that the dependence of the people on the character of the ruler is the most obvious fact of experi- ence itself to a Chinese mind, which can find no equivalent for the immensity of imperial influence under patriarchal institutions but the majesty of Heaven. As actual gov- ernment in these political ethics means responsibility to the highest justice and good-will, the converse of the prin- ciple must concede the inherent powers of these virtues in ' Mencius, I. pt. i. v., vi., vii. ; II PT. i. v, ; II. pt. ii. i. ; IV. pt. i. xiii. ; IV. pt. il f * Ibid., IV. PT. I. iv. ; IV. pt. ii. xxviii- MENCIUS. 653 transforming the individual to the vast sphere of the State. The very terms of the statement, that the highest aim of government is the rule of the best, imply that the best pos- sesses an inherent capacity to rule. It is the glory of Mencius to have fully comprehended that, in politics as in personal culture, nothing will serve or save but the triumph of principles ; that all expedients which reject their slow and normal operation, all sudden conversions, all reconstructions at will or by master-strokes, are delusive. " Kwan said, ' Now the whole kingdom is drowning ; how is it that you do not save it ? ' Mencius rephed : ' A drowning kingdom must be rescued by right principles ; not like a drowning person, by the hand.' " ' I. The Mencian ideal oi personal character may be given in a few sentences : — " A real man is one whose goodness is a part of himself. Of the qualities of the sage, none is greater than that of being a Heai of helper of men to right living. He is ashamed of areputa- personal tion beyond his desert. Having found the right way within '^ ^™^ "' himself, he rests in it, firm and serene, holding intimate converse with it, and reaching to its fountain head. He obeys the right and waits for the appointed. His words are plain and simple, yet of widest bear- ing. His aim is self-culture, yet it gives peace to all men. All things are already complete in us. There is no greater delight than to be conscious of right within us. If one strive to treat others as he would be treated by them, he shall not fail to come near the perfect life. Every duty is a charge, but the charge of oneself is the root of all others. ,The disease of men is to neglect their own fields and go to weeding those of others ; to exact much from others, and lay light burdens on themselves. Over-readiness of speech comes of not hav- ing been reproved. Even those who strive to be perfect stand in need of reproof. A true scholar holds possession of himself, neither by riches nor poverty forced away from his virtue." ^ * Mencius, IV. PT. i. xvii. * Ibid., VII. PT. II. XXV. ; II. PT. i. viii. ; IV. pt. ii. xviii., xiv. ; VII. pt. ii. xxxii. ; VII. PT. I. iv. ; TV. PT. I. xix.; VFI. PT. 11. xxxii.; IV. pt. i. xxii.,xxi. ; VII. pt. i. ix. 6S4 SAGES. Here is the Socratic " daemon" or warning voice within : " Let not a man do what his sense of right bids him not to do, nor desire what it forbids him to desire. This is sufficient. The skilful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman. When right ways disappear, one's person must vanish with one's prin- ciples. The honor which man confers is not true honor. Those to whom Chaou Mang gave rank, he can degrade again. He whose good name comes from what he is, needs no trappings. The ancients culti- vated the nobility of Heaven, leaving that of men to follow in its train. Serving Heaven consists in nourishing the real constitution of our being, anxious neither about death nor life." i II. The substance of the social ideally benevolence and Social justice. "To say 'I cannot be humane and just,' Ideal. is to throw ouesclf away." ^ But the basis is pa- triarchal. " Shun held the conquest of all the hearts of his people as but a bundle of grass, so long as he had not gained those of his parents." ^ In dealing with provocations, the Buddhist, Stoic, and Chinese sages have reached the same secret of equanimity. " If one treat me unreasonably I will say, ' I must have been want- ing in kindness or propriety. How else should this have happened ?' Then I will mend my ways. If the other continue perverse, I must have self-respect enough to say, ' I must have failed to do my best.' If all is vain, I say, ' Why vex myself about a wild beast ? ' Thus the wise has life-long vigilance, but not one morning's serious trouble. To nourish the mind, there is nothing better than to make the desires few." * " By virtue alone in itself, one never reaches rule over men's hearts. He must make his virtue sustain others." " Good-will subdues its opposite, as water fire." ° " Friendship with a man is friendship with his virtue." ° " A people's hmits do not consist in dykes and borders." "The Political security of a State is not in the strength of mountains and ideal. streams. No advantages compare with the accord of men." ' ^ Mencius, VII. pt. i. xviL, xli., xlii. ; VI. pt. i. xvii. ; VII. pt. i. i. 2 Ibid., IV. PT. I. X. * Ibid., IV. PT. I. xxviii- * Ibid., IV. PT. II. xxviii. ; VII. pt. ii. xxxv. ' Ibid., IV. PT. n. xvi. ; VI. pt. i. xviii. ^ Ibid., V. pt. n. iiL "^ Ibid., II. ft. n. L MENCIUS. 65 s "Abstract good principles are not enough to give the kingdom peace : laws cannot execute themselves. If the good and wise be not trusted, the State will come to nought. The people are the most im- portant element in a State : the ruler is the least. The empire is not given by one man to another. The choice of Heaven is shown in the conduct of men. It is an old rule, that the oppressor may be put to death without warning. King Seuen asked about relatives of the ruler, when high ministers. Mencius replied that, if he had great faults and would not hear advice, they should dethrone him. The King changed countenance." ' The king is counselled to become the parent of the peo- ple, by personal attention to the characters of officials ; to set example to others by domestic virtues ; not to pity brute creatures and neglect men ; to see that all had means of livelihood and resource against famine, with leisure for personal culture ; that schools were well conducted and their standard high. The families of criminals should not be involved in their punishment ; the destitute should be objects of public care. Mencius is a free-trader. Taxing trade originated in punishments inflicted by the people on a mean and grasping dealer.^ " When men die of famine, you say it is the season that is to blame. What does this differ from saying, when you have caused a man's death, ' It was not I, but the weapon ? ' ' When a public officer is neglectful or cruel, what would you do with him ? ' ' Cast him off,' replies the King. 'When in the whole kingdom there is no good government, what then ? ' King Seuen looked to the right and left, and spoke of other matters. ' When the old and weak are found lying in ditches, and your granaries are fall, and none of your prefects have told you of these things, do not blame the people that they seize their opportunity to repay such treatment.' ' If you know a tax to be un- just, end it at once.' "^ The condition of all prosperity is physical well-being ; without it culture is impossible ; and punishment Landand , . , , f. School of the crime that is caused by want or opportu- system. * Mendus, IV. PT. i. i- ; VII. PT. 11. xii., xiv. ; V. ft. i. v. : V. pt. u. iv., ix. ' Ibid., I. PT. 11. vii. ; I. pt. i. i. vii. iii. ; I. pt. ii. v. ; II. ft. i. v. ; II. pt. ii. x, ■ Ibid.| I. pt. I. iii. ; I. pt. u. vi. ; I. pt. u. xii. ; II. pt. ii. iv. j III. pt. ii. viiL 6S6 SAGES. nity to earn a living is simply a man-trap.^ The true land system is the village division into nine squares, with a central field for public tillage, with mutual aid in every kind of need.^ " Closed parks are pitfalls in a kingdom." ^ " Great generals are great criminals. They who delight in \rar de- Jiiiitaiy serve the highest punishment (though war is allowable when **'^- just or necessan). The hearts of men do not submit to force, but to virtue. Of the true king the Shu says, ' There \^-as not a thought but did him homage.' '" * Mencius teaches that the laborer is worthy of his hire. Labor. which should be estimated b\- the service done. The head must direct the hand. The ruler must submit his judgment to those who have fitted therasehes to fulfil required functions, just as he would order his chief lapi- dary to cut and polish a stone, instead of putting this tal- ent aside to follow his own ignorance.* The official, who is out of his true place, is fit only to bring death on himself.'' But IMencius is Chinese in his respect for subordinations, sooa, and recurs with interest to the complicated system order. of thc old Tcheou dynasty, which had been broken up in his day by the law of the strongest among the feu- dal chiefs. He had searched for the records which these chiefs had made away with, and apparently learned much of the old rfgime developed from the character and tradi- tions of the people. He hardly could have expected to introduce such artificial distributions as we now find in the Tcheou-li ; but he distinctly perceives the need of peaceable reconstruction, based on the historical conti- nuity of the State. A few points of great significance are to be noted in the Mencian idea of reform. » Mencius, III. PT. I. iii. > Ibid. » Ibid., I. rr. n. ii. * Ibid., VII. PT. II. iv. ; II. ft. i. iii. j IV. n. u xiv. » Ibid., I. pr. n. ix. • Ibid., VII. PT. n. xxix. MENCIUS. 657 As Confucius had urged a central monarchy, so Mencius, more intensely moved by the increasing miseries J^^^^^^ ^j of the time, pressed the counterbalancing element Revoiu- of popular rights, and especially the right of regi- cide. He, more than any one, seems to have awakened in the national mind this great offset to patriarchal ideas, demonstrating the capacity of the Chinese to escape these limits, through their tendency to equihbrium and balance of powers. Adhering to the monarchical principle and the cherished right to be well governed, he all the more earnestly Govern- insists that government was founded on the good mem for of the masses. He is emphatically the People's *epeopie. Advocate, the Chinese Tribune. Had China been of less extent, and less absorbed in patriarchalism, Mencius, it is easy to believe, would have reached the principle of representative government. He was no friend to heredi tary monarchy, and wanted a popular expression in the choice of rulers.^ He had a keen sense of the danger that China would fall to the level of the barbarous tribes from which new States were being periodically formed. " I have never heard of our own people being improved by barba- rians. I have heard of birds leaving dark valleys for lofty trees : but not of their leaving the trees for the valleys." ^ He gave much thought to resisting extreme doctrinaires. In those times of social fermentation schemes for . . . ■. Against reconstituting society found ready hearing, till doctn- they " had quite filled the kingdom." « They are "*^"- of interest to us as showing how similarly all races of civilized men react from systematic rules of balance and " the Mean," to one or another extreme. There were sectaries who protested against a division of labor, and thought a man made for nothing but to get subsistence by * Mencius, V, pt. i. v. * Ibid., III. pt. i, iv. ' Ibid., III. PT. II. ix. 42 658 SAGES. his own handiwork. Mencius refutes the theory that every one who does not perform the manual labors necessary to produce all he lives on is an oppressor, by showing the absurdity of any one's trying to be independent of the labor of others, as well as of contemning all products ex- cept those of the hands, in an argument applicable to all forms of government, and as timely to-day as it was two thousand years ago.-' His healthy common sense rejected equally Yang's theory that self was all, and Mih's that all men, as brothers, must be treated precisely alike. He de- manded respect for differences of character, and at the same time for the duties of each to the whole. Even Tsze- moh's middle ground between the extremists displeased him as being a rigid rule of square, and leaving no free- dom to act as circumstances should demand. "What I dislike in holding to one point alone is the injury it does to principles ;• by taking up one point, it disregards a hun- dred others." ^ But the appearance of these ethical ultraists was an in- structive phenomenon in Chinese life. The " selfish philosophy " of Yang seems to have been to Selfish an extent bitter and cynical. Life was vanity, phyoT because it had miseries and ended in death : what Vang. was the use of it } There is nothing new under the sun, and never will be any thing. Take all things how- ever with resignation, since you cannot change them. Why wish to prolong life, or why hasten to die ? Endure and wait, indifferent to both. Yang looked at virtue as something doomed to misery and failure. Not one of the great or good had known a day of joy ; even their fame was a figment, since they could not enjoy it after death. The wicked on the other hand are happy, while they live and gratify themselves, and know nothing of their evil repute after death. Yang's pessimism is obvious ; but he ' Mencius, III. PT. I. iv. " Ibid., VII. pt. i. xxvi. MENCIUS. 659 does n jt draw from it any argument for vice. He simply supplies no high motive, and falls back on inertia : an ex- ample of how puzzling are the problems of life without moral or aesthetic enthusiasm to override them. His equanimity as to events, and his utter scepticism as to what are called the rewards of conduct, do not lead him to abuse of virtue or hatred of its supporters. His despair was a natural result of the time. Mencius, however, saw its demoralizing tendency, and denounced it.^ He prob- ably did not recognize the naturalness of its reaction against thg extreme claims set up by the Confucians for the actual power of virtue over men. Mih-teih was a more active spirit who went for simple habits and broad benevolence. His fault, for Men- communis- cius, was in changing the national customs to the ''■= *°°'y detriment 01 the family and its special claims, universal Here again was a natural reaction. We wonder ^°™' there were not more like it. Against the profound distinc- tions and subordinations of patriarchal ethics, Mih-teih demanded that universal love should be held, in every rela- tion alike, the supreme motive. He traced all social evils to one-sided and exclusive affection. His question how any form of wrong-doing could occur to degrade persons or States, if men universally loved all others as they love themselves, is obviously unanswerable. This being what ac- cording to his disciples he intended, it seems somewhat over- critical in Mencius to denounce propositifens not more abso- lute than many of his own, and needing to be completed rather than assailed. " What good men hold their duty is to further all that will benefit the kingdom, and take away all that will harm it. The law of universal love will remove every evil ; and the only difficulty in acting in accordance with it arises from men's not seeing the advantages of it, and rulers ijot having set the example of obeying it." ^ * Mencius, III., pt. ii. ix. " Legge's transl. of Mih's treatise. 66o SAGES. The difficulty with Mih-teih's principle is its abolition of all distinctions. He demands that princes care as much for other States as for their own ; that chiefs regard the families of others as their own. " This principle is as cor- rect as the sides of a square." That is just it : an abstract idea applied with logical severity to every concrete relation, destroying all shades or contrasts, leaving no room for dis- crimination between persons. Mih illustrates Chinese mental methods, however, in his logical deductions. " How can a thing be good, and yet incapable of being put in practice.'" His dream of the reign of universal love is the ideal of an unworldly spirit, but it ignores the very facts of personal relation on which the affections depend. It assumes that all limitations of it by reason of relative nearness in sphere, instinct, or responsibility are selfish; which is farthest pos- sible from truth. He himself unconsciously concedes that differences of treatme^it are produced by love. How other- wise can he justify Yu in punishing rebels to benefit the empire ; or T'ang for not daring to pardon criminals ; or Wan and Woo for rewarding the good and suppressing the bad .'' When he interprets his principle as " making the ruler gracious and the minister loyal, the father kind and the son filial, the elder brother friendly, the younger obe- dient," he seems to have conceded all that Mencius could require. Dr. Legge's charge of arguing wholly from expediency does not seem to be made out by the translation itself. The very terms of Mih's statement disarm it. Is it quite fair to say that he "stumbled on a great truth" 1 We fail to see the force of the distinction taken by Dr. Legge, that the Christian law of love is superior to Mih's because more specific, and because "based on loving God best."^ We should say that love of loving is a more thorough form of • Legge, p. 121. MENCIUS. 66 1 the love-principle than " loving the Lord thy God." The authority of a personal sovereign does not add to the sanc- tity of unselfish love, nor to the validity of morals, but re- mo¥es them from their basis in the nature of mind to the platform of individual claims. Nor is it true that Christi- anity gives more detailed application to the principle of love than the Chinese sages, who in fact specially pursue concreteness. That " the idea of man as man cannot be fully realized, where there is not the right knowledge of one living and true God," is, we think, true only in a sense at least as far from the views of the author now quoted respecting such right knowledge as from those of Mencius or of Mih. The motive force of Chinese morality is prob- ably as profound a reverence for essential right as the Christian Scriptures have inspired in their followers. Two traits illustrate the representative character of these Chinese sages (Heen-jin), whose lives and doctrines Two lead- have now been sketched. One of these is their '°^.^™. of the Chi- devotion to the Patriarchal Idea, which has given nese sages. consistency and longevity to the Chinese State. Mencius constantly urges the relation of parent and offspring as the root of all other relations and the basis of politics. Hence no duty is so incumbent on a prince as the care of the old. The most unfilial of conditions is to be without children. To perform obsequies to parents is even more important than to serve them while living. Shun would have aban- doned the empire itself to save his father from punishment for murder, by carrying him away into concealment, and cheerfully forgetting the duties of State.^ This is proba- bly the most absolute assertion of patriarchal ethics in all the Chinese books. The other trait referred to is the absorbing interest of these sages in political life. Every thing in their writings * Mencius, VII. pt. i. xxii. ; IV. pt. l xxvii. ; IV. pt. ii. xiii. ; VII. pt. i. xxxv. 662 SAGES. runs to governmental relations. All illustrations are drawn from princes and ministers. It almost seems as if the Classics were written for the instruction of rulers alone. If Mencius would describe his own power of judging men from their words, he at once refers to its advantages as aid in the conduct of public affairs.-' If he would describe the most interior laws of self-culture, it is but as a means of giving counsel to rulers.^ An old ode of the Shi pictures the care with which a bird builds her nest above the pass- ing crowds. Confucius comments ; " Did not he who made this ode understand government .'' " And Mencius adds, " Who will dare insult him who knows how to govern aright .? " s The limitations of such traits as these in an ethico-politi- Recogni- cal tcachcr are obvious. But if the power of such tinuous"'"' ''■ teacher everywhere must consist, not in attempt evolution, ing to eradicate the root qualities of his peoplci but in directing them according to their best capacity, Confucius and Mencius certainly struck the right path. Their constant reference to ideals in the past are not the drawbacks to progress they at first appear, but practically set their ideals in the future as much as our own direct appeal to it. The only difference is that in China no future is believed to be .separable from the past. Evolution is the eternal law, in the sense that nothing can appear in the result which had not its adequate ground in the beginning. Thus the root of things is not in what is less than them- selves, but in what is greater. No petty "plasm," but the cosmos itself explains the origin of living man. This cling of Chinese sages to continuity in historical movement is the secret of the national permanence. To every civilized people in some form a corresponding respect 1 Mendus, II. PT. u ii. 17. * Ibii, IV, PT. I. iv. ; VI. PT. ir. xv. 1, 2; VII. pt. i. xviii., xx. ; IV. pt. 1. xxviii., 2. 2 Ibid., II. PT. I. iv. MENCIUS. 663 for its own origin and traditions is one of the main condi- tions of enduring life. The incessant appeal to politico- filial piety made in the Classics affords a perpetual stimulus to political culture at its higher levels, and plays the part fulfilled in races of warmer temperament by what we call patriotism and public spirit. Confucius and Mencius were in fact reformers in the true sense of the word. Their whole aim was con- Reformei» structive, the rectification of personal and political by con- character. The public life of China takes from moral them a fresh impulse, -and receives a systematic '°™- form, an educational stamp. Definitely the two great for- ces counterbalancing imperial absolutism are largely due to these two men : the rise of the literary class to Confu- cius ; responsibility of rulers to the right of revolution and regicide, to Mencius. In fine, our tribute is due to the single-mindedness of teachers, every one of whose words bore directly on the idea for which they lived ; the sovereign rights of virtue in the making of men and the ruling of States. No rank was too high, no class too humble, to be taught this universal principle. With no other personal authority than the con- viction of its indispensableness, these men went forth from their self-study filled with the dignity conferred by this all- saving word, to demand of kings and peoples the square acceptance of its claims. They demanded that its appeal to the moral and spiritual nature should be substituted for the right of the stronger, and for every form of arbitrary will, in the growth of character or the rule of States ; dealing as plainly with the foolish and cruel as with the well-dis- posed in their rude and semi-barbarous day. Always calm, serious, regardful of all sides and of all needs, constructive and genial, open-eyed to opportunity, ever consequent in the logic of humanity and honor, they gathered up the best in the faith and feeling of their people in the hour of its 664 SAGES. need. They have shown that Rationalism can be an affir- mation of religion, as universal as the demands of life. And the attestation to their greatness is that veneration of ages which is the people's gratitude to those who have un- derstood its heart BELIEFS. I. FOUNDATIONS. FOUNDATIONS. INTRODUCTORY. ' I ''HE account now given of Chinese traits and institu- -*- tions prepares us to interpret the ways in various which this peculiar people have recognized the estimates 1 ■ r , . , , J^ ^ . , of Chbeai relations or human nature with the Infinite and religious Eternal; in other words, with the Universe as a <=^p*"'y- Whole. This recognition, as a form of conviction and aspiration, — which is what we properly mean by religion, — is an organic necessity ; not only underlying all special or positive religions, but prompting them to a life beyond themselves. Yet we are met on the threshold by the square denial that the Chinese have any religion. We are asked to be- lieve that a quarter of the human race have achieved a vast and permanent civilization, while devoid of capacity for that which is asserted in the same breath to be the source of all personal and social good. More astounding than the statement itself, is the fact that its suicidal consequences should have escaped the notice of its authors. Where is the indispensableness of religion, if such effects are pro- ducible without it as the Chinese Empire exhibits ? Ben- jamin Constant asserts broadly that religion in China is but a matter of usage, maintained by authority, all sentiment and conviction extinct ; that the cultus of ancestors has nothing in common with the immortality of the soul ; that rites addressed to Heaven are rendered to the Emperoi 668 BELIEFS. by a people who have lost the faculty of believing and even of desiring.^ The reader of this volume is already aware that, while the evils of mechanical culture in China are too obvious for discussion, negations like the above can serve no other purpose than to prove the ignorance of the writers and of their times. A more definite study of the inner life of this people will be necessary to show how exaggerated the picture is, not only in general outlines, but in every detail. But the inquiry has a larger scope; the phenomena will indicate the breadth of a demand in human nature that can assume forms so widely differing as the traditions of the Aryan, Shemitic, and Chinese races. It is there- fore an incomparable school for the study of Universal Religion. Wuttke, a Hegelian historian, finds ^ that the Chinese idea of man's relations with the Infinite is only that of "the par- ticular with the general ; excluding not only prayer, sacri- fice, and atonement, but all the pathos and tragedy of life, and substituting such symbolic play as burning paper or performing oflflcial routines : in fine, making any thing like religious institutions impossible, since a church is but a method of reconciliation with God, of which the Chinese has no conception." Writers who are too much absorbed in dogmatic Christianity to measure any other form of be- lief, can hardly be expected to afford positive data less in- accurate than the blind assertions of Constant. It is not true that the religious idea in China means merely the re- lation of the particular to the general, nor that the sym- bolic rites and routines of the people are " substituted " for serious experiences. We do not admit that the " tragedy and pathos of life," either in China or elsewhere, are de- pendent on prayer, sacrifice, or atonement ; nor that a * (Euvres Posthum, sur la Polyth* Rotn.i II. 231, 23a. ' Gesck, d< HeidtnihvtnSi II. 62-67. FOUNDATIONS. 669 community is incapable of religious institutions because it has no Church, in the Christian sense of the word. How opposite a view may be taken of the same phenom- ena appears in the following resum^ by Courcy ^ : — " China was always distinguished among pagan cults for the inno- cence and purity of its religious institutions. Recognizing, at the outset, the existence of the Supreme Being, and of a Will regulative of the forces of the universe ; proscribing human sacrifices and obscene rites, which stained Egypt, Judea, Rome, and Greece ; regulated and commented for thirty centuries by sages who derived the art of gov- erning men from the religious sentiment, — Chinese polytheism was always remarkably intelligent and chaste." But here too are phrases which, if taken in the popular sense, would be likely to mislead. The Chinese idea of " a Supreme Being," or " a Will regulating the forces of the universe," is quite dissimilar to that of the Christian super- naturalist ; and it is in no such sense as his use of terms would convey, that the polytheism of ancient China has been revered by later philosophers. We cannot understand the religion of China without comprehending the bearings of the fact that her conditions civilization is, in important points, antipodal to of appre- ours. Its attitude toward the worlds of matter '^'^"°^' and man is determined by constitutional peculiarities as distinctive as those which have produced the faith of the Shemites, or the intellectual qualities of the Aryans. The earliest form of social organization that could be endowed with order, law, and mutual guarantee has in China ab- sorbed the religious ideal, and held it fast in patriarchal moulds. In other words, this type of the Family ^^ ^j^._ Idea has here grown into the Tribe, the Clan, the archai Civil and Political Order. It has become the reli- gion of a civilization. This is the evolution we are study- ing ; its permanent types, its developed culture, its educa? * V Empire du Milieu, pp. 218-219. 670 BELIEFS. tional powers, its banes and blessings. And so we begin by noting a right to such evolution in the Patriarchal Family Bond, not inferior to that of Theocracy in the Hebrew, or Individualism in the Christian mind. PATRIARCHALISM. That Universal Religion affirms identity of ideas in all Definition ^S^^ '^^^ raccs is an error, which would make it ofuniver- deny progress. An idea is universal when it ex- sa 1 eas. j^^^ j^ evcry age and race, by force of human nature and by the laws of growth, in the form and at the stage of development of which such age and race are capa- ble. This law should hold as true of the present as of the past, and obliges us to refer both, for interpretation and criticism, to a better idea yet to be made actual, of which they are alike the conditions. We are accustomed to speak of the Family as the basis of our civilization ; yet we are apt to forget that, under various meanings, it has been the Their inspiration of many phases of social life widely dif- phases fering from our own. The truth of our axiom that guarantee *^ progress, marriage, as the root of the Family, is the prime guarantee of social order does not rest on the perfection of marriage institutions as existing with us, but on the fact that, at every stage in the development of the Family as an idea, marriage has in one form or another been the sign and security of what was best in that stage. " Every thing," said Quintilian of Roman society, " is contained in marriage, — State, people, children, patri- mony, domestic security: where then is liberty so neces- sary .? " 1 Our Aryan form is the result of ages of elabora- tion by the highest races, and especially by the Romans ; ' Declatn.^ 249, 251. PATRIARCHALISM. 6? I tracing descriptively all resultant relation^ips between the offspring of a single pair, in various grades, with minute jealousy for the monogamic principle, and providing a dis- tinctive name, with fixed rights and limits, for each mem- ber of the family tree. But ruder types of marriage, as it exists in savage or semi-civilized tribes, are not less truly the high-water mark of the culture there attained ; and each of these types, however low, embodies a step in social progress beyond a lower stage. It is equally obvious that our own marriage laws await improvements from the truth of science and the spirit of equity. It is then as sign and guarantee of progress that the forms of the Family Rela- tion have eminent function. And, in this point of view, even the cruder phases of that relation will be found com- pensatory for many repulsive facts which the study of primitive human society forces on our attention. These historical phases cannot therefore be presented as strictly defined forms : they are transitions of progress ; reactions and interactions, covering vast periods of a social evolution whose limits cannot be stated, and whose begin- ning is as unsearchable as its end. As far back as positive institutions are found runs the Idea of the Family, as a more or less durable Antiquity sexual union between a greater or less number of ^^^„'^j- individuals, under recognized sanctions social and of the religious. Of no other existing relation is the 3™^.^ antiquity and continuity so fully established. Its development is like that of the leaf, as mairt element of the plant at every stage ; or like that of the type of an animal series, found alike in its earliest and latest. forms. It is the constructive atom of civilization ; the social mole- cule : and its value is represented in the increasing vener- ation with which human experience has regarded it. It is the exponent of man's perpetual endowment with powers of creation, love, and law. It means creation, as securing 6/2 BELIEFS. to his generative function the power to effect that con- tinuity of life which is at once his aim as a social being and his first hint of immortality, as well as his later argu- ment for its truth. It means law, as gradually ennobling his sexual, instinct by self-restraint and mutual supervision, by the motive of protecting the weak, and by respect for the virtue of chastity. It means love, independently of its relation to the sentiments, as organizing complex social unities, whose private bond is placed under public sanc- tions, and whose currents set towards mutual guarantees on the largest social scale. Deep as is the root of marriage, as exponent of the Marriage Family, in the social being of man, it is neverthe- primitive '^^^ certain that this institution is in no sense family tie. primitive ; that it was a great step in progress, developed out of a social state of vast and unknown dura- tion, in which such guarantees had no existence. And the compensation for this, in many respects, repulsive fact is the equal certainty that germs of this beneficent step were working towards it throughout that long and hidden period of Nature's gestation of social man. The most civilized races have consecrated the organized Ante-patri- Patriarchal Family as the primal form of human sixuaireia- society. Their religious myths have even repre- tions. sented it as an idyllic, if not an ideal, state. The Western poet, trained by his Shemitic Bible, sings of the " world's gray fathers coming forth to watch the rainbow's sacred sign '; " or of " Jacob's sonnes," who " In the calm golden evenings lay Watering their flocks ; and having spent Those white dayes, drove home to their tent Their well-fleeced traine." So the Mongol, on the opposite hemisphere, points with pride to his living imperial representative of a patriarcha! PATRIARCHAL ISM. 673 chief, who organized the " hundred " original families of China. A recent writer, whose researches on early social construction have great value within the Aryan sphere, describes the main idea of patriarchal life, — namely, that " reproductive power was exclusively in the male parent," — as the basis of the earliest human religion.^ But patriarchalism, loosely definable as that form of the family in which the house-father is the fixed centre and absolute law, is now seen to have been but a phase in the evolution of the family ; not its original germ. It was neither an instant endowment nor a supernatural influx, but a slowly attained result. The historical truth is probably given, in substance, in the statement that, according to the natural progress of social construction, children are first regarded as related to the tribe in general ; second, to the mother and not to the father ; third, to the father and not to the mother ; and only at last to both.^ These views can hardly be offered, at this stage of in- quiry, as mere hypothesis ; since they depend on the dictum of no individual, but on careful researches extending through the primitive races of all the continents, and are enforced by indications of " survivals " in the higher races also. It seems clear that the earliest known individual rela- ^^ . Their tions were determined, not by the family bond at all systems of as a fixed limit, but by sexual promiscuity in which °"^' parentage is matter of pure uncertainty, and each person is consequently held related to large masses of men and women as a whole. Thus in certain " Turanian " systems of kinship, the terms father and mother do not represent actual progenitors at all.^ The typical form of this homo- geneous stage of society is found in the family system of the Hawaiians, in which grades of relationship are massed • De Coulanges, La Citi Aniifue, pp. 36, 37. ' Lubbock, Orig. ofCiviliz.^ p. 113. " Morgan, Smitkson. Conlrii. {No. xvii. p. 394) and Ancient Society (1877), p. 437. 43 6/4 BELIEFS. according to generations ; each of which, as a whole, is brought into the direct line of descent, as if no distinction were made in the sexual rights of any of its members. In other words, all brothers, sisters, cousins, are held alike as fathers or mothers of the children of each one ; all who belong to the next preceding generation are grandparents to these children ; and all of the next succeeding genera- tion are in turn children to the latter.^ Evidences of the extension of similar systems are abundant, and even higher forms of the family organization retain vestiges of these earlier stages. Thus the Chinese still counts kindred in nine lineal degrees ; calls the sons of his brother his own sons, and is called father by them ; thus putting all of the same generation into one category.^ Nothing similar has been found in the earliest Indo-European life, which seems to represent a stage of the family much more advanced.^ Yet even this crude condition affords hints of aspiration Geimsof for a more definite order, ilany American races a h^ier ascribc the introduction of culture to the marriage orderiQ these of a brother and sister.* An effort to distinguish ^"^■^^ relations on some other principle than sexual de- sire was that of referring parentage to the female line, in respect both of name and inheritance. The family centred The in the mother, not in the father ; and her relatives, moier, as ^^^ y^ coutroUed what it transmitted. This custom, centre oi ' ' the family. SO wholly opposcd to later and especially to patri- * See Morgan, Siniihson. ContrH., pp. 143, 454- These researches are of the most ex- tended and thorough nature ; they mark a new era in the study of sodai otjguis. See also on the whole subject, McLellan's PrimUwe Marriage (£din., 1865) ; Tyler's Early History oj Mankind, I. x ; Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes (1851) ; Bachofeu, Das Mvtterrichi (Stnt^ard, 1861) ; Giiard Teulon, Origenss de la Fain. (Paris, 1874) ; Lubbock, Orig. 0/ Ctuilix.^ Vol. L ; McLellaii, Studies in Ancient History {1876). The Tiews expressed in the text are independent of the controversy now being w^ed between the special theories of Morgan, McLellan, and Bacbofen, on points into which we cannot enter here. Nor can we &II0W Morgan throng his successive systems iA relationship on this primitive social stage. A ncieni Society, 1877. ^ Morgan, p. 422. So in India and Ametica. * See Fick. Die Ehemalige SpracheisiMeit d. Indog. Eur^ pp. 267, 368. * Muller, Die AmerjJtan, Urreligionen. PATRIARCHALISM. 675 archal ideas, is so common among early races •' as apparently to mark an epoch in the development of society. It prob- ably arose from the fact that the primitive promiscuity allowed no certain evidence of parentage save visible con- nection with the mother. An enduring witness of this state of things in most rude races is the strange custom of the " couvade," where the husband is put through a dra- matic representation of the act of delivery,^ as if to guar- antee by way of symbolism an otherwise uncertain claim. So strong was the tendency to precedence of the female, that in Sumatra there exist proofs that the husband and his offspring were regarded as the property of the wife's family.^ In China there remain penal laws restraining the old right of the wife's father to put her husband out of his house ; and the Japanese have customs that place the wife in advance of the husband as to privilege. In Africa, the chief is commonly attended by a " sister " queen, to whom all deference is paid. The peculiar prestige accorded to women in these primitive times may have had something to do with the position of dignity which they are known to have enjoyed in the marriage laws of certain cultivated races, like the Egyptians and Persians. Although this prestige arose from the conditions of an almost inorganic stage of human life, it is itself a step in progress. It must have cost ages of struggle with the rude desires which it sought to curb. It was in fact a necessary means of realiz- ing the idea of property, and marks the entrance of this great agent of civilization into the social field. The growth of the family out of indiscriminate sexual attractions is a process which proves that self-re- ^°^ • 1 1 r 1 origin of straint is an inherent law of human development, the family. 1 " It was formerly universal among North American tribes.'' Morgan, p. 140. Domenech, Great Amer. Desert, U. 304, 307. Taylor {^Etruscan Kesearches, p. 59) finds it specially jrevalent among " Turanic" tribes. > Girard Teulon, pp. 193-201 ; Hellwald, Culturgesch., p. 36 j Tylor, Early Hist., &c. • Teulon, p. 150. 676 BELIEFS. In its strict sense, the family begins when this process of individuation has produced durable units founded on such limitation of the female to one husband as removes am- biguity from her offspring, and bridles his instinct within a definite circle. Here enter his functions as protector, and his self-consciousness as originator of the seed of life ; forces which reverse the earlier conditions of precedence between the sexes. The result, after long stages, is the patriarch with his recognized household of one or many wives, each having her fixed relation to the family guaran- teed by the whole social state ; and all subject to that paternal power of life and death {patria potestas), which controls all the older civilizations, — not less those of Ju- dea, Greece, Rome, and India, than those of China and Japan. It is as idle to despise as it is to ignore these rude be- Thebe- giimings of social evolution. This gradual self- ginnings limitation, these motives of property, these changes evotokin of precedence between the sexes, are signs of an no argu- invincible upward movement. They are the slowly ment for . - , , material- shapcd affirmations of man s part in the construc- ism. ^jyg powers of an infinite cosmos. It is equally unphilosophical to pronounce them evidences of a degrading or of a distinctively material origin of mind. Whatever be the process of historical generation, it is not the mere gen- erating atom, but the whole cosmos with its inscrutable substance (known only by mind, and in mind), that is con- cerned in every step towards the individuation of the family and the realized personality of the soul. As every law of the universe must help to lift the acorn into an oak, so the crowning results of the human process can be no isolated effect of lower causes, but represents the convergence of all lines, the common attraction of all forces, to their best resultant expression, which cannot be greater than themselves. PATRIARCHALISM. 6'J'J The institution of Marriage, as guarantee of the Family Bond, was the grand step of self-emancipation signifi- from rude instinct. It had to work on natural <=^"«°f Mamage aggregates, out of which groups were to be con- m tWs structed in accordance with the needs of social ^™""°°' order. These groups, under marriage sanctions, were the units {goirams, gentes, phratricB) that afterwards built up the cities and states of antiquity, under further sanctions of religion. The extension of such a family group was effected by the use of certain fictions of assumed relation- ship ; and still more by a method which has probably been almost universal at a certain stage of progress, — that of " exogamy" or confinement to marriages outside the tribe. The first ground of this custom, — as well as of that of capturing wives from other tribes, which is found associated with it in most primitive societies ^, — was apparently the desire to obtain exclusive sexual rights, without trespassing on the claims of the whole tribe to common possession of the females within itself.^ It was thus developed as an effort at self-limitation ; a step to- wards positive marriage, out of the promiscuous inter- breeding of relatives. Thus the Chinese have a Asinsti- tradition that Fohi instituted true marriage among p'f^'''' " the hundred tribes," by prohibiting intermarriage cwna. between persons of the same name ; ^ a limitation which became permanent and still remains. The common error that the number of these names is still just a hundred is due to the natural impression that the uniformity of pro- hibitory action would maintain the groups on which it acted at the same figure. China has preserved, through all ages, the vestiges of those successive steps by which patriarchal institutions were erected out of the inorganic relations which preceded them. 1 Taylor, Etrusc* Res. p. 56; McLellan's Primitive Marriage. Illustrations in Ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Boman traditions are familiar. * We must demur at accepting McLellan's theory that it was a result of female infanticide. * A similar prohibition exists among the gotrams or family tribes of India. 678 BELIEFS. Chinese tradition further affixes this transition by exog- Transition ^'^^ to real marriage to the period when the " black- from com- haired " nomads settled in the valley of the Hoangho. mumsm to real It is not improbable that the tradition in substance marriage jg corrcct, and that the change was part of the new connected . with the social necessities brought by agriculture, which re- dustr^i^"' quires a secure organization of the family. The China. deliverance from rude communism would thus be associated with the birth of industrial life. It is further to be noted that the Chinese system of con- sanguinity, while it retains the primitive division into great lineal classes as before mentioned, at the same time clearly distinguishes these collateral relationships from those which result from the true marriage relation ; thus marking the advance from such lower conditions. " It must have origi- nated in early days when all looked on each other as equally members of an increasing family, and any new birth as in relation with every individual composing it." ^ Organic marriage, then, must have been the result of a The Pa- long • cpoch of Struggle against ignorance, inertia, triarchai animal and brutal instincts, and a general inorganic and Fami- Condition of society ; a struggle acting at different Uy a result centres with different degrees of force. The entire of ages 01 ^ " ^ upward contrast between patriarchal institutions and the struggle, relations that preceded it — in such points as de- scent by male line, absolute paternal power, jealousy for " pure blood," and intense interest in the male child as car- rying on the continuity of life — demonstrate the force of the reaction and the resistance it had to overcome. The energy of this current, setting towards monogamic marriage from the beginning, sufficiently indicates the natural validity of this form, which a theological interest has based upon supernatural ordinance. As the primitive prestige of the fe- 1 Mr. Hart's interesting letter, quoted by Morgan, is our authority for these latto Btatements. PATRIARCHALISM. 679 male is not to be ascribed to real appreciation of her special qualities, so the rule of the male which succeeded ^^ i^flu. it is not explicable as a mere result of tyrannical ^nce on 1 r 1 1 1 1 rm *^^ condi- mstmcts on the part of the husband. The con- tion of dition of a woman was in fact greatly improved by ^o""^- the change in her position from the hetaira of the whole tribe to the permanent wife of one man, though sharing that position with others ; and even as his concubine, or second wife, she became protected as having a recognized membership in his family. These fixed relations brought out her directive qualities, and enforced respect, even in patriarchalism, for her aesthetic and spiritual gifts. Alike in Judea and China, this regime, far from being the sheer absolutism of the male, was much modified by such appre- ciations ; and not to speak of the precedence accorded the female in Egypt, as described by Herodotus, and in Lycia by Polybius, the old Aryan household, more resembling the patriarchal, called the husband /«^? (master), the wife pat- nia (mistress) ; and its domestic relations appear to have been mainly just and equal.^ The extent of patriarchal authority was determined by social requirements. Some of these are obvious ; its justifi- such as the security afforded to the marriage rela- so^;™™ tion by grouping the household around an Individ- needs. ual capable of protecting it ; and the necessity that this exclusive relation to a single household should be sustained by a corresponding control over its members, and by com- mand of the highest sanctions known to the State. Further ; as soon as the Family becomes organized, the external proof of parentage, confined before to the ^^..^ ^ female, gives way to the distinct consciousness of maiesu- paternity. The father is fully aware of his func- p'™*°^" tion as initial, and able to identify his offspring. As the responsibilities of this function become apparent, and the ^ See Fick, Spracheitiheiii p. 266. 58o BELIEFS. Family comes under religious sanctions, ancestral rites securing an earthly immortality become the all-absorbing interest in the life of the Asiatic man ; and thus this male supremacy develops into a " divine right ; " the wife and child are transformed into property, simply because in such ages control of the household can mean nothing else than property. Uterine relatives are no longer allowed to inter- fere with the descent by paternal line, because the sanctity of the family would be infringed. Thus woman becomes freed from her relatives, and finds a sphere for personal influence, though within a new form of dependence. As for " right of might," it plays a less important part in these changes than what may be called the religion of the seed ; the necessity of a unitary household, and of a positive central authority for sacred rites. Religion, again, centres in the desire of offspring, — the patriarch's wealth ; and of male ofEspring, the defence of his household, and continuity of his line.^ The Chinese say that " death with- out a son is the greatest disrespect to parents." Such beliefs indicate the causes of patriarchal concubinage, a custom to which religious motives imparted a quality not of the senses alone. The patria potestas, as power of life and death over the family, is comprehensible enough when we remem- triafo- ber that in these initial stages of society the l"''"arii F2-i"ily W3-Si in fact, the only distinctly organized the first expression of the State; and that the right of ^ "'.^? „ ultimate decision which inheres in government organizing o govern- could havc uo Other location than the religious, moral, and social head of the household. Of this absorption of the State in the Family, the curious assertion of Mencius is in point; that the duty of an Emperor to ^ So important is a son in these respects, that in China the condemned are often reprievea till they can obtain an heir. See also Vol. I. pp. 205, 206, for similar conceptions by tho Hindus. PATRIARCHALISM. 68 1 his father takes precedence of his duty to the Empire itself. And while rejoicing in the progress which with- draws from any class of individuals such tremendous powers as are here combined, we must not forget that we have more ground for admiration than for self-compla- cency in observing on how vast a scale are here developed those virtues of filial piety and paternal care, which have no such prominence for civilizations in which equality (if not equity) is the watchword of progress. But \S\& patria potestas\& by no means an unqualified sov- ereignty in forms of society founded on patriarch- Benignity alism.. We have seen that in India the mother was °f. "^^ p^- religiously honored, and with her female children relation, receives large control over property by descent. ^""^^ "■= In China she is venerated equally with the father, to moth'er- The Emperor kotows to his mother, and the Queen ''°'"^' dowager assumes the reins of State. The laws against patricide and matricide are the same. Beating a mother is held so monstrous a crime that the house of the offender is destroyed with its foundations, and the whole neighborhood shares in the penalties. The solemn national feasts for the old are for women as well as for men. In the exhortations of the text-books to filial piety no distinction is ever made between the parental claims. So with other patriarchal races. The old Accadian laws of Chaldea forbid the son to deny either parent,^ ^^^^j j^^ and refuse both ground and water to the forsaker other na- of his mother.^ Everywhere, the Hebrew " Honor °^' thy father and thy mother" is the typical commandment.^ The Hebrew law gives equal right to both parents to bring rebellious children to punishment.* The laws of Solon en- acted that the indigent father or mother shall be supported 1 Tablet transl. by Sayce in Records of the Past, III. ^ Maspero, p. 141. ^ Only the Egyptian Ptahhotep makes no mention of the mother in his instructions oil Filial Piety (Byugsch Hist. d. Egypie, p. 31). < Deut., xxi. 18-21 ; see also Exod xxi. 15 ; Lev., xx. 9. 682 BELIEFS. by their offspring ; and he reproved one's permitting himself to appear more just than those who begot him.^ " In no wise displease thy mother," says the Avesta.^ " Hold thy parents dearest of all," says Cicero : " from them come life, property, liberty, law." ^ " Reproach not thy parents," says the Koran, " but defer to them in tenderness ; saying, ' Lord, have compassion on them both, even as they reared me when I was a little one.' " * These illustrations help to explain the continuance of The "patria s^<^^ despotic powcr as the householder's for so potestas" many ages, in such civilizations as China and because a' Rome. The anomaly was being neutralized all growing ^jjg while by natural affection, social necessities, type of nat- -^ . nrai duties and interference of the community with self-iso- and needs, jg^^-j^g family rights ; and the patriarchal forms gradually merged in broader social elements. Th&patria potestas itself was not an imposed tyranny, but the unitary force by which the family, as groundwork of the State, was at first maintained ; and we hear in its claim the voice of Nature gathering her children under the fold of sovereign law. It does not appear to have been more abused than any later powers granted to individuals or States. Its continuous transformation is the sign of its accordance with normal human needs. In Roman society it yielded to the secular claim of the State, that the son who fought the nation's battles, and the wife whose rights, real and per- sonal, were too important to be confined to the old mantis of her husband, should become independent. And although maintained in China by a persistent veneration for ancestry and for male descent, its severities have given way to the demands of a civilization far more humane and genial than that of Rome at the period of the Christian emperors. > Stob. Flor. I. 87. « Khrrdah-nitah. ' Poit redit. in Senat., see Floril Langit^ p. 411. « Rod\vell's^or together by means of "power." The statement ^'■"='^^' has an exclusive form, at variance with the whole not rest on tenor of his profound and brilliant researches. No p"^"""'?- one has so clearly shown how permeated this form of or- ganization was with germs of a very different nature, and especially with the two agencies of Equity and Legal Fic- tion, by which " the exclusive power of the family ruler undergoes slow dissolution." He has traced the steps in Roman law which, from giving all the wife's property to the husband, ended by referring it wholly to her own control except so far as settled for family support ; she herself coming completely out of the patria potestas, — a process of emancipation commencing as early as the " Twelve Tables." ^ A similar process is traced in Hindu patri- archal law, showing that as early as Manu the wife " had more proprietary independence than is given her by the English Married Woman's Property Act." ^ Maine has even shown the change of the Patriarch into the Tribal Chief, through the "Joint Family," by means of "an elective principle which counteracts the sole power of birth." ^ In general we may, I think, affirm that patriarchalism in ful- filling its constructive aspirations abolished its own des- potic traits. It has already been noticed that the State involved duties which must tend to equality of rights among the members of the family as then constituted. The Roman State made it a common circumstance for the son who had no power to hold a shred of property in his own right, or to perform a single free act during his father's life, to vote by the side of that father, and perhaps on opposite sides on public questions ; to command him in 1 Early Hist, of Instit. Lect. X. See also La Citi Aniigue^ P'373» and Hadley's Roman Law, p. 141. 2 Maine, p. 322. '^ Ibid., p. X17. 684 BELIEFS. the field, and even to punish him as a magistrate, and de- prive him of his goods. The house-father was not, with all his authority, the em- Dudes of bodiment of rights more than of duties. He was the Chi- fff}^Q^ the depositary of power in a great social or nese house- t. j ^ ^ father. der must always be, so long as that order expres- ses a natural growth, — the guardian of the whole. He was obliged to provide for the family, and was even responsi- ble for their conduct. According to the Chinese " Sacred Edict," the parents are involved in the children's sins, and are punished for them. In life and death they depend on the virtue of their children for honor and support. If a father used his right to cut off the life of his son, he in so . far cut off himself from immortality, or became a wander- ing ghost without friends. He could not impoverish his wife and child, though all they had and were was his. He could not set them aside without offending the religion of the household. Our chapter on Chinese Government has shown how And of the ^^^* crowu of patriarchalism, the imperial office, is Chinese fenccd about with responsibilities ; so that the mperor. (jggpQ^jj, house-father has become a ruler whose right rests only on his fitness to rule, and whom his mil- lions of children have full right to slay for his vices as a common ruffian. As these millions are not his mere property, so the patriarchal family were not mere property ; but possessed rights which although in many respects dor- mant, yet awoke with the death of the house-father, if not before. " They were not things, but persons." ^ A similar reciprocity was involved in the claim of the Of the elder brother on the younger in this system. The elder Sacred Edict says tliat if the younger have little brother, talent, and the elder support him, this is simply his duty ; and if they quarrel, it is as if the right hand bear the left. ^ MommseD, Hist, of Rome (Am. Ed.) I. p. 93, PATRIARCHALISM. 685 The modifying forces now mentioned make patriarchal- ism difficult of definition, and forbid us to believe ^„ . Effect of that it was ever the social inertia it has commonly the " Lex been supposed. In fact Nature refuses our systems, '^""*'' and the best use of her name is that old Latin phrase. Lex Natures, by which the Roman lawyers expressed the equity that wore away the older patria potestas for all time, by emancipation of wife, child, and slave. The patriarch shared the defect of individuality inherent in all stages of social progress but the highest. ^^^ ^^^_ He was in fact no individual, but a constituent Uy, notthe part of a whole, whether Family or State ; and as ^asThe ' truly absorbed in it, as it in him. So far as any pereoDai person exists here, it is the Family as a whole. The Sacred Edict likens it to a spring, dividing into stream after stream, but still one and the same ; or to a tree, split- ting into branches, but still ever an inseparable whole. This, for the Oriental world, is the primal Human Body, whereof " if one member suffers, the rest cannot be happy. The nine degrees of relationship, though counting many hundreds, are still but one person." ^ The subordination of woman is not a speciality of patri- archal society. It mars every system of marriage . laws in the West and the East. And it must be aiism not observed that equality of rights between the sexes o^^jheTub- has in all past stages of progress been simply ordinaUon impracticable. As the flower can be only the last product of the plant, so just relations of the sexes can be only the last term of ages of human culture. Those peculiar gifts, which have always more or less compensated for her physical dependence, require for their fair manifes- tation a more refined social atmosphere than has been breathed in any period of the past. ^ Sacred Edict, pp. 55-56. 686 BELIEFS. Patriarchal religion is anthropomorphic as divinizing the Which be- masculine only ; but not more so than all other iT'ositive positive religions. The bisexual deities of many reUgions. pantheistic faiths, indeed, imply a divine equality of male and female.^ But in every one there are more or less prominent signs of that distinction which is common to all their marriage laws. The Dyaushpitar, Jupiter, Zeus, of the old Aryan nations does not more clearly mark this rule of the male than does the Pater-Noster of the New Testament. It is not natural for the Jew or the Christian to speak of his God as feminine. That the theistic door is now opening to this element may be a sign of the advance of man towards a religious universality that shall require no sexual names for Deity whatever. But because this has not yet arrived for any of the great religions, has therefore the relation of the sexes in these systems been but a petty despotism of man over woman ; or a subordination of which he only, not any will or need of hers, has been the creator .' It were; indeed, a sad outlook on human nature, if a civiliza- tion like that of China could illustrate the persistence of such despotism. History is the prescience, as well as the experience, of man : and its threads of unconscious ten- dency grow clearer to the student with the brightness of the day by whose resultant light he reads, or shall read, their prophecy. Though the Chinese have always maintained the patri- corapen- archal theory ; though the triple dependence of sation to woman on husband, father, son, is a social axiom ; chhiese though 3. different treatment of infants, according manners. |.q ggjj, is notcd in the oldcst poetry ; though the law gives control of the daughter's marriage to the parent, and makes her subject to her step-parents from the wed- ding day forth ; though females are kept behind a screen at banquets and theatres, and withdrawn from public gaze, * See Oriental Religions^ India, p. 226. PATRIARCHALISM. 687 as much as they are from politics in Western life ; though, as representing the Yin principle, they cannot properly govern the State, — nevertheless manners, here as else- where, outrun laws, and assign to woman a much higher position than is here implied. Her position is not that of a slave, nor of social disrespect, but of recognized dignity and power.^ She shares the honors of the family as a whole ; and her subordinations therein are but part of a system of similar subjections from which no member is free : the younger brother being equally in the hands of the elder ; the elder of the father ; the father of his father, who is under ancestral authority. A submission which all alike in their several ways accept is, of course, not a mark of tyranny, but of religious unity : a bond of equality and mutual regard. From the earliest times, literature shows the sexes freely forming attachments, notwithstanding the rule so familiar to our impressions of Oriental life that the parents alone shall determine them, and that the daughter shall not have sight of her future husband.^ " Like music of lutes," says the Shi-king, " is the love of wife and child." ^ "A woman becoming a mother, from a menial becomes almost a god- dess." * No divorce is allowed without law, and wise pro- visions guard the situation of the divorced. No people exhibit more domestic affection.^ In public processions women are conspicuous: Midwifery is almost wholly in their hands. Literature, as we have seen, abounds in names and honors of women, and among the masses there is scarcely any function which they do not perform. Their theoretic exclusion from the throne has not prevented a larger share of political influence being exercised by them ^ See Speer, p. 632 ; Wuttke, II. 134 ; De Rosny, SiaTices des Orieiii, 1873, p. 153 ; Wil- liams, II. 61, 62. * See Ski-king, I. i. 6 ; II. 9, ii. 12. St. Denys*s Foes, d- 'Pang, p. 19. De Mas, I. 51. > Shirking, II. i. 4. See also Ski-king, I. vii. 19 ! x. 5. * Williams, II. 63. » Ckin. Repos. March, 1843. 688 BELIEFS. than by women elsewhere, even to the actual administra- tion of the State ; from the bad queens who ruined dynas- ties in the oldest time down to the reformatory regents of the present time. The custom of crippling the feet is symbolic of the self- crippiing stunting race, and seems the very badge of slavery ; the feet, ygj j^ ^^gg ^q^ sccm to have been imposed by the male, nor to have existed in early times ; the equal admira- tion of both sexes for the " golden lilies " being obviously a result of the national taste for mixtures of finicality and repression. The best authorities agree that it is not more detrimental to health than many fashions even more preva- lent in Western countries than this in China.^ Very few native women have brought ailments from this cause into the European hospitals in the ports.^ A people fond of dancing, and whose laboring women work freely in the fields and walk for long distances under burdens, cannot as a whole have been very greatly harmed by the practice.^ To offset it, we may note that Chinese women wear no stays, are neither bedizened nor deformed by fashion, and escape the male vice of long nails. They have even been described as remarkable for dignity in gait and bearing,* which is, of course, incompatible with so very wide a prevalence of the custom as is generally imagined. Though not strictly monogamic, the Chinese family is Realm- Substantially so ; since the law recognizes but one ture of true wif e,^ and the subordinate position of the con- "poiyg- cubine is the sign that she is tolerated on the amy." ground of that necessity of offspring which is the permanent social and religious bond. Only the rich can afford a harem, the discredit of which is moreover in the * Lockhart*s Med. MissioMary, p. 337, '^ Chin. Repos. August, 1841 ; Lay, ch. ii. 8 See Welcker, Arch, fur Anthropol. March, 1873. Fleming's Travels, p. 161. De Maa^ 69, 71. Dutch Relai. Vol. II. Lockhart, p. 337. * Courcy, 207. * Davis's Chiftese, I. p. 262. PATRIARCHALISM. 689 ratio of its extent.^ For chastity, as recognized and defined by ancient usage, there is the same respect as elsewhere ; nor in general is the sentiment of love less concentrated upon its object, if we may judge from the literature, and from the tender sympathies between parents and children in Chinese homes, than in other civilized races.^ The poly- gamic marriage, however contrary to our civilization, has its sanctities in the East, perhaps as much observed as those of the Christian bridal chamber. Its guarantees against lawless passion have certainly had much efficacy in the past ; how far they still operate in Chinese society we shall probably ere long know better than we now do. The real key to the question between these forms of marriage lies in the fact, that the demand of mankind for monogamic relations corresponds with its progress in respect for the individual as such : it is pSrt of the sense of personality as an independent and immeasurable value. Not in the most civilized races is this yet perfected ; it is even possible that the gap between the ideal and the act- ual in the marriage relation is relatively as great in the higher monogamic as in the lower patriarchal world. The Penal Code of China, as we have seen, severely punishes breach of promise, degradation of the wife to a concubine, or giving her rights to another. In Japan, " woman is not the slave, but the companion of man," ^ free at once of seclusion and of outdoor servi- tude, and sharing in all his social interests and avocations. Women as freely engage in farming and in trade as men ; their percentage of immorality, as compared with woman in males, is less than elsewhere ; and the respect for J»p^°- domestic virtues is signalized by the fact that the chief deity of the old popular faith, representing the sun, is a female ; * Davis's Chinese, I. p. 263. * Lay, in Chin Repos., March, 1843 ; Speer, p. 632 ; Medhurst, Foreigner in Far Cathay^ p. us; Marriage Odes of the .JAz-A/w^; Yang-Ching in " Sacred Edict," on maxims i. xi. * A merican Expedition, I. 397. 44 690 BELIEFS. while the most beloved and honored of the whole Japanese Pantheon is the merciful Queen of Heaven, — correspond- ing to the Chinese Kwan-yin and the Christian Madonna.^ " Japan," says De Rosny, " has established the rights of women, even instituting monogamy by law, and providing books of instruction in the relations of wife and mother not inferior to any thing of this kind in the West." ^ PatriarchaUsm, then, was a normal step in human prog- Root of ress. Whatever part was played in its production patriarch- ]^y (-j^g growth of masculinc authority, or by reaction natural on the carHer rule of descent by the female line, it sentiments, j-gg^g qj^ ^ far deeper ground of sentiment and preg- nant germ of social good. And this ground can be no other than natural piety, of which filial and parental love are the poles, and reverence for age the typical form. This the " Sacred Edict " describes as founded on unchanging laws and universal obligations ; as proceeding in man from grati- tude, and as the basis of every virtue.^ The Li-ki declares reverence for age to be as ancient as conscience itself. Herodotus noticed that the Egyptians, themselves oldest of peoples, always made way for the old and rose at their ap- proach. In Oriental faith this sentiment is evidently held Their real *° ^^ ^^^ prime Safeguard of the State. When the develop- Hebrew said, " Honor thy father and mother, that East.'°Re! '^^y '^^V^ ^^Y ^^ ^°^S in the land," it was not a spectfor mere illusion of longevity as an individual reward, but a belief that this was the law of national pres- ervation ; and, as Michaelis has noted, it is addressed in a special manner to the people as a whole.* Over all the East, in the village communities of India and China, in the African towns, as in Judea, Egypt, Rome, in Homer, the Bible, the Koran, the Shi, and the Shu, the elders sit in the gates, — judges, peacemakers, fathers of the people. ' Smith's Ten IVeeks in Japan ; Jarves's Sketches ; Emile Burnouf, Mythol. des Japanoa '■* Congris Intern, d. Orient, 1873. ^ Milne, 30, 38. ^ See Saalschutz, Mas. Rechi. II. 587. PATRIARCHALISM. 69I The Arab sheikhs, the English alderman, the Hebrew zekenim, the Greek gerousia, the Latin senatus, the seign- iors and sirs of later times, — all attest the homage of hu- manity to its fathers. It is the heart of the highest faiths and of the earliest social forms. So unselfish a sentiment is inseparable from personal reverence. " Never hurry before one older than yourself," says Mencius. " When a son re- ceives the words of his father," said Egyptian ethics five thousand years ago, " his life shall be long in the land." It is only among the athletic and unsentimental Greeks that old age is sometimes treated with contempt. Yet the filial feeling is strong in the best of these. " Respect gray hairs," says Phocylides ; " give place to old age, and dispute not its fitting honors." " Love thy parent if he is just ; if un- just, endure it," says Publius Syrus. " Monstrous and wor- thy of death it was held in better days for a young person not to rise before the old," echoes Roman Juvenal. " The honor of old age," says Plutarch, in his noble essay on the " Right of the Aged to Public Life," " is free from the jealousy that usually attaches to virtue, and is willingly granted by men to their companions. No honor graces the honorer beyond the honored, as that which is given to those of advanced years. There is a world of refinement and delicacy in the saying of Epaminondas, that the pleasantest thing that ever befel him was gaining the victory at Leuctra while his father and mother were still living." " No lifeless statue," says Plato in the Laws, " can compare with the figure of a living father, or grandfather, or mother stricken in years ; whom when a man honors, the heart of the God rejoices, and he is ready to answer their prayers." But it is in China that this sentiment has made its deep- est mark on manners and life. It is a part of that Among the reverence for antiquity which causes every thing Chinese. to savor of age in a country where the records of literary triumphs hang on the walls till they are indecipherable. 692 BELIEFS. " How old are you ? " is the common greeting ; ^ not, " how do you carry yourself?" or, "how do you dof" or, "how are you ? " by which French, English, and Americans re- spectively betray their national traits. Descriptions of the country life of Northern China speak of the infirm and old as treated with constant deference ; of the village patriarchs sitting around the wells and under the ancient trees among their children and grandchildren.^ Confucius and Mencius, in recounting their personal experience, recognize the epochs of life as successively higher stages of attainment. The laws make provision for the support of the old, spare the life of the criminal if his parents need his care, and treat him, if aged, with special forbearance.* Neglect of the tomb of one's parents is a penal offence.* In every religion of China the basis of authority is paternal. What the Con- fucians have vested in their Emperor, the Buddhists en- throne in their Lama, and the Taoists in their patriarchal prince. Festive honors to the old are a national rite, per- formed by the ruler in recognition of their guardianship of the State ; they are served by princes and presented with symbolic gifts, as a power behind the throne.^ From old times the treasury had its distributing department for the benefit of the aged and infirm.® The gratitude of the State to its old and deserving functionaries is historical.' The number of old men in official posts is very large ; so that censors have of late remonstrated against a custom which tended to lower the energy of the civil service. In concluding our review of the idea which lies at the Errors basis of Chiucse religion, it is important to notice concerning Qj^g q^ |.^q erroFs of widc currcncv concerning it. patnarcli- -' ^ aiism in We do not need to be told that " the patriarchal China. theory does not make men truthful, honorable, kind ; ^ Fortune, IVanderinffS, p. 367. ^ Fleming, Travels^ &c, pp. 114, 305. ' Penal Cade, LXXXI. ; LXXXIX. ; XVIIl. * Davis, I. 223. ," See for these festivals. Chin. Refos., September, 1S40 • Gingell's Chow IrtsWlties (1852), p. 104. ' Ibid. PATRIARCHALISM. 693 does not place woman in her rightful position, nor teach all classes their obhgation to their Maker." ^ No recognized theory of social life does all these things, however vaunted by its upholders. Nor can we ascribe the permanence of the Chinese State under these defects to such merely ex- ternal arrangements as strict police, mutual responsibility, isolation, f ear.^ We have seen that the Family system con- tains in its domestic and public forms a great many naturally conservative elements and humane guarantees. But, as we have further seen, the " patriarchal theory " does not properly exist in China ; or rather, it is Not a found only in minds preoccupied with Shemitic tra- acMUza- ditions. China is a development of the patriarchal "on- household into a civilization endowed with the essential ele- ments of social good. The inference is that we have here no mere theory about fathers, wives, and sons, but a com- plex of human forces, out of which flow the humanities and also the defects of the civilizations in question. The Family in Chinese history has proved itself a force of evolution into national systems of schools, rites, poor-laws, joint labor, lo- cal self-government, and mutual aid. We see in the Sacred Edict ^ that it is expanded so as to cover all public duties. Here is at least a permanent root of social continuity ; nor does it run to rankness more than the opposite force of ir- responsibility in Occidental works and ways. At the end of our sweep of self-loosed and headlong passions around the globe, half the human race stands before us to bar such mastership with its anchorage in sentiments of continuity, of reverence for past achievement, and for eternal rules of Nature as guardians of , men and States. Our free energy will stir the inertia of the East to new hopes and aims. But to ignore the reciprocal gain which is so obvious would be the sign of a hopeless self-complacency. ' Williams's Middle Kingdom, I. 297. = Ibid., p. 298. * The quotations from this truly typical classic, in the valuable work of Williams, are un- importaot, and give no idea of its real spirit. 694 BELIEFS. In calling Chinese religion a development of " filial Not a piety," we are far from meaning that it is merely ofTi^tn ^^^ worship of human ancestors. The religious person- Sentiment never worships an external object as ^^'^ such, but an inward idea however embodied. The idea extends beyond the special object, and is always to an extent impersonal ; yet in no positive religion is it wholly so. Whether this limitation by a special object is more avoided by Hebrew and Christian anthropomorphism, or by Chinese " ancestral worship," is a question of degree, but jj^jj^ hardly of essential difference. When Dr. Edkins "deaden- tells US that filial picty in China, as directed towards the "con- men, "has caused the national conscience to be- sdence." comc Comparatively insensible to sin as committed against the Supreme Ruler of the world," ^ we are prompted to inquire whether the said national conscience is likely to be improved by contact with the conscience of the Western nations more than by adherence to the rules of filial piety ? But we observe further that " sin," as here suggested, does not at all mean violation of essential moral principle, but intentional, or inherited, offence to some individual Gov- Theoiogi- ernor who has imposed on man a body of ethical cai patri- rulcs. Of such a Governor the Chinese have indeed archalism , ,, . ,,,... of the hardly a conception. And the inquiry is pertment, West. whether the domtstic or political patriarch of the Chinaman is more likely to overshadow the moral sense than the theological Patriarch of the Western missionary, jealous of every duty paid to parents out of the line of his own edicts ? Morality is the more substantial, the more in- dependent it is of superhuman volitions, and the more fully rested on the nature of things and the authority of truth. No " Supreme Ruler " could supersede Nature, in this large sense ; nor claim the right to be offended by human thoughts or deeds, as if he were an interest outside and beyond the ^ Religion in Ckinat p. 177. THE ANCESTRAL SHRINE. 695 sanctions of these essential laws. And while we are not disposed to put in for the Chinese conscience any excessive claim for actual morality, we must remark, as very favorable to its sense of right, the fact that this sense stands on its own merits, and wholly free from the theological dogma of " sin." The simplicity of the old Shintoo creed of Japan corres- ponds very closely to Chinese primitive worship as simoism we find it in the ancient books. The preservation chines'' of fire in the dwelling as family guardian, belief in Rd'gion- purity of heart and abstinence from things evil, absence of idolatry and festivals for rites, belong to the same tradition of simple ways ; to which we must add the veneration of ancestors and divinely helpful men.^ THE ANCESTRAL SHRINE. The Family would not be competent to create a civiliza- tion if it could not conquer the dissolving power of p^^^^. ^j death. It is at the tomb or the ancestral tablet, fiiia' pie'y where its relations live on, invisibly but unchanged, ZZot^ that the early forms of filial piety become a reli- ''=^*- gious rite. Significantly enough this natural sentiment which directs man in the beginning of his growth, and pro- tects him in its maturity from the very outset, ignores utterly the idea of death. So strong is the sense of /i/e, even in those primitive ways of dealing with the forces of Nature to which we give the name of Fetichism, that science has embraced the whole class of conceptions under the term Animism. It is now agreed to define Fetichism as belief in the possession of special inanimate objects by invisible FeticUsm agents, more or less dependent on the interest and ^^.* "T"^ rare of the believer. The tomb in the old Aryan life. * See K^mpfier ; Smith's Ten Weeks in "^apan ; Jarves's Sketches. 696 BELIEFS. races, the coffin and mummy in Egypt, and the tablet arad coffin in China, as well as the ark of the Hebrews and th\e caaba of the Arabs, would thus come fairly within the class of fetiches, — which survives in the miraculous relics and thousand similar superstitions of more modern times and faiths. But it is evident that fetichism in this sense depends on a sense of personal life as everywhere present, and suscep- tible only of changes in form and place. Every object in Nature may enfold a soul, and so protest against any power in death to touch the cherished ties of life. Fetichism thus passes on into transmigration, and thence into thei poetry of polytheism, which fills the beauty and terror natural scenery, as well as of living organisms, with a/- fa- miliar humanity. The Christian believer has not forgoitten this impulse of half-civilized races to transmute the t/jmb or the totem into a world of personal powers, when he Xgees his priest produce the mystery of transubstantiation \in bread and wine, or associates the presence of Jesus Chri^dt with the confession of his name. That he does not throw aside his fetich when it fails to answers his prayers, is ; i distinction from the earlier and cruder form ; but he cei ■- tainly retains a strong feeling of the dependence of the person worshipped on this human care of the object iii which he is supposed to abide. Ancestral fetichism may be far from conclusive evidence Relation °^ immortality to the thoughtful inquirer. Yet it' ofances- affirms continuity for the family life beyond death, chistn to ^t asserts permanence at the very root of man's immor- couscious rclatlous with the universe. And this is^/ if nothing else, a presumption in favor of his nat- ural superiority to death. But our main object is to mark the elevating influence of which it is found capable, tlae function which it filled in the older civilizations. i Ancestral service carried the home into unseen spheress THE ANCESTRAL SHRINE. 697 associating its image with the object believed to be in- spired by the departed. When one dies, the Chinese say- he has " returned to his family." All ancient nations have turned the grave into a dwelling-place, and all religions have their well-known analogues to the domestic tributes there deposited.^ The practical force of these continuities is illustrated by the wide-spread custom of placing milk and honey on graves, and in general of feeding the dead ; the prevalence of which in so enlightened a people as the Greek proves it to have more connection with the persis- tence of domestic cares and interests than with the bald superstition that spirits devour the visible food. From the terrors of the Guinea negro, who moves his dwelling for fear of ghosts, to the splendid athletic rites at the grave of the Homeric Patroclus, the quality of the household and the relative predominance therein of fears, or loves, or proud traditions determined the character of these se- pulchral honors, and made the ghost a dark incubus or a noble joy. Here perhaps we touch the earliest sign of the creative power of imagination to transmute visible objects Theinvisi- into an ideal world totally unlike themselves. How Uehome-- intensely real this invisible homestead could be- come, we may see in such stories as Plutarch's of the Messenian King, who slew himself in despair because he heard dogs howling about his ancestral altar, and saw grass growing around it ; ^ or that of the Ming Emperor of China, who having lost his parents when young, and be- ing ignorant what had become of their bodies, decreed on his accession that the whole people should sacrifice three times a year to the shades of those whose graves were 1 Roma SoUerraneaj by Kraus (Freiburg, 1873), p. 439 ; Taylor^s Ktruscan ResearcJuv^ ch. ix. ; La. Citi Antique^ ch. i. ; Mommsen's Rome, i. 226; Oriental Religions (India, Rig Veda Hymns) ; Martha's Poeme de Lucrice, p. 136; Polyihiisme HelUnique pat tfirtard (Fiiris, 1833) ! Tyler's Prim. Cnlture, Vol. II. * Plutarch on Superstition, 698 BELIEFS. neglected.^ The unburied was a homeless wanderer ; and the fear of death was resolved into the horror of lying exposed, without that earth-covering which indicated ties with the living, to wild beasts that knew no filial care. With what earnestness the Egyptian followed these dear continuities over the last verge of the mystery of dissolu- tion, embalming the body amidst all the familiar surround- ings of life in his populous tombs ! ^ So the Chinese hoards the predestined coffin of his father as a household shrine, and bestows it on him during life as the best of gifts. To the Egyptian, the body left to itself and to decay seemed an open door to transmigration ; to the Chi- nese, it was a hold lost on the concrete facts of life. But the patriarchal household had more to give the dead itsreii- ^^^^ domestic affections. These have themselves gious a religious root, and prove the instinctive devotion meaning. ^^ ^^^ ^^ thosc uttwrittcn laws of his nature which the heart of Antigone placed above all statutes, and which bade her bury her brother's corpse, though the penalty was to go down alive with him into the tomb. The grave was not a secular dwelling only, but the enduring shrine of a religion in which the fathers sat as gods. However crude in its beginnings, Hesiod could say of this religion that " the men of the age of gold became divinities (daimones) after death ; protectors of the living, guardians of the moral laws." ^ " How, think you," says the dying Cyrus of Xenophon, " should honors continue to be paid the dead, if their souls were destitute of power and virtue .-' " * It is no fancy to recognize here a transition to the parting words of Socrates to his weeping followers : " My friends, it is not me you bury, but my body only." Such the * A ceremony still observed under the title of " Pity for the Unfortunate.'' Neviu% p. 140. * For a description of the ancestral cult of the Egyptians at their tombs, strikingly sugges. tive of the Chinese, see Maspero, //zsi. Ancieftne de V Orient (1875), pp. 62-65. 2 Works and Days, verses 123, 124. * Cyrop. VIII. 7. THE ANCESTRAL SHRINE. 699 evolution of a human faith, beginning in the awe of the fetichist before his ancestral tomb. The Turanians as a whole, — if the phrase be now allowed as defining a family to which not only the Chinese Turanian Mongols, but the Finns, perhaps the old Etruscans tomb-buiid- and the Dravidian tribes of India, belong, — have "^' been recently called, by a bold generalization, the " Race of the Tomb-builders." They have made the tomb a home, a treasury, a palace even, for the spirit ; and the same writer permits himself to ascribe to them the discovery (!) of the idea of immortality. They certainly share with the Egyptians the elaboration of a sepulchral life, from the infinite detail of furniture and mural art of Clusium and Volci to the co- lossal avenues of the Ming tombs. Another branch of the same sentiment consecrated the dwellings of the living to the domestic divinity of the dead, — to the Lares, Manes, Lemures of the Aryan Greeks and Romans, the Hebrew teraphim, and the Chinese " kitchen god." But none of these races compare with the old Egyptian in concentration on life in the tomb : a faith so intensely in earnest that it made hewing out vast catacombs the business of human existence ; loaded them with paint- ings and sculptures immeasurable ; then left them in the darkness, sealed up from human sight for ever, and secured against the very approach of living feet. Nothing like this for absorbing realization, nothing for age or scale of production, has been shown by the " Turanic " races. So domestic is the religion of the Chinese that their an- cestral rites are simply an extension of their home Domestic associations ; and this is so completely effected chTnese'at that the grave has lost its terror and the tomb is the grave. dedicated to joy. With every opening year, soft budding willow boughs are strewn oy millions of hands on the cher- ished sod. The superstitious believe that departed friends are protected from assaults of evil spirits by propitiatory 700 BELIEFS. gifts.^ In numbers these homes of the dead far surpass those of the living. They are the monumental architecture of a people whose delight in perpetuating the relations of this life has absorbed the very earth on which they tread ; and the land may almost be called a necropolis, decked with natural flowers and shaded with familiar trees.^ But the symbolic Tablet brings closer intimacy with Family re- the unsccn than the grave. The ancestral temple iheTnce^ is the Centre of family reunion, without distinction trai temple, of rank or wealth. Before its plain tablets of wood the cheerful tribes hold their domestic jubilees, sources of as pure and happy associations to young and old as the national life affords. Here are none of those fanatical rites which have so often defaced the service of the dead ; every thing is as orderly as the household itself, and as promotive of kindly feeling. Here "worship," if we call it so, consecrates at least the happiness of homes, the purity of marriages, the traditions of duty and love. From oldest times, the Ancestral Shrine has held the Its impor- first place in Chinese affection. The first step in tancein erecting princedoms, palaces, or mansions was to history lay its foundations, and to dedicate it with rites of The'shi- o^^ nomadic origin. The Shi-king describes the king- music and dances and pleasant viands in these " dwellings of the Expected Ones " ^ three thousand years ago ; the sense of invisible presence and participation ; the blessings invoked and received ; the songs celebrating the first husbandmen and openers up of the fruitful lands ; the little child personating a chief ancestor to receive gifts and honors, and the listening even to his prattle as a mystic wisdom.* No grief was suffered to intrude ; nor could these rites be held during periods of mourning. ' De Mas, p. 2S7 : Doolittle, II. pp. 49. 5o- ' Fortune, p. 333- * Tsung-miao is the Chinese term. See Plath, p. 885. • Shi-king, II. vi. 6i III. ii. 3; Shu-king, II. 4, 9- Since Chi-hwang-ti, the table! tas supplanted these primitive symbols. THE ANCESTRAL SHRINE. 70I " The ancestral offering comes not again till the return of joy to the home." The son makes his offering with mind fixed on the parents as still present : " sad in winter to think they are like the falling leaf, yet joyful in spring to think he shall soon see them again." ^ The candle lighted at the bedside of the dead, and the paper-money and clothes burned for his service, have been supposed to prove that the departed are conceived as ghosts groping in darkness and indigence ; but the symbols of sentiment must not be too literally read. Do the offerings laid by Christians on the grave, or their belief in bodily resurrec- tion, mean that they actually think their dead are alive there under the sod .'' The Ancestral Hall is the open conscience of the people, where all duties are laid bare to the wisdom and Functions order of the world, enshrined in these honored Ancestral ones. Here is the family sanctuary ; here the Haii. youth assumes the virile cap ; here marriage bonds and betrothals are announced ; and here princes and scholars are invested with office, and tributes paid to public worth.^ In these halls are conducted all acts of self-government : reading of wills, distribution of property, amicable arrange- ments, trials and judgments;^ even dramatic scenes for the old, and plays for the children.* The forms of the tablet for father and mother do not differ. This filial piety of the living would fain establish a real union with the dead. Such invocations as the following are common : — " Thy body is laid in the grave, but thy spirit dwells in this temple of our home. We beseech thee, honored one, to free thyself from thy former body, and abide in this tablet henceforth and for ever." * These homes of invisible friends, constantly renewed, outlast other dwellings. Some of them are many hun- dred years old. ' Li-ki, ch. jdx. = Plath, ReU u. Cult. d. alt. Chin. > Hubner, p. 589. Zeitsch. d. D. M. G. ; XX. 482. « Plath. " Zuchtkopf, ./4>-4. d. Russ. Gesandsch. I. 132, 236. 702 BELIEFS. We need not pause on the dispute of the Dominican and Christian J^^uit Fathers, whether such rites were idolatrous charges oi Or not. Though the Pope refused to accept the ' °^"^' positive assertion of the Emperor that they were worship in no other sense than that of gratitude and re- spect, and even the Protestant " Chinese Repository " but a few years since denounced them as on a level with the rites of Moloch,^ it is quite obvious that to define honors to the dead, which ascribe to them no divine attributes and even treat them as dependent on the living, as worship is to employ the term in a very unusual sense. What shall we say of the prayer addressed by a noted Catholic of our day to the saints of the early Church, beseeching them to avert the calamity of a certain papal dogma ? ^ The Catholic would supplant Chinese idolatry by the rites of a Church that entitles its pontiff the man-God. More important is the question as to what special form Nature of is here assumed by the wide-spread belief in spirit Chinese intercoursc. Are the spirits believed to be really "spint in- •' tercourse," prcscut ? Coufucius " Sacrificed to them as z/pres- l^i^rthlt^ ent ; " yet he says, " You cannot yet serve men, of Chris- how can you serve spirits .-' " He counsels against tendom. ^^^ close relations with them, and avoids talking of them. Mencius does not even mention the ancestral rites. The doubtful relation of these two great teachers to the most important institution of their country was perhaps owing to a conviction of its having become, or having always been, a superstition. But for the masses the tablet was consecrated by love and belief to a personal guardianship analogous to that which Christians have ascribed to saints, to the departed, and even to the Holy Family as present in pictures and images. The realism of the Chinese however prevents their expecting miraculous ' July, 1849. ^ Dr. J. H. Newman ; see note in SchafPs Hist, of ike Vatican Council (1875). THE ANCESTRAL SHRINE. 703 effects from an object so tangible as the tablet. There is also a dignity and reserve in it, which is out of keeping with such feats of motion and expression as belong to mod- ern spirit manifestations. These are prevalent in China, but confined to a low sphere of mind, where they take rank with divining arts, mysteries of geomancy, and magical evocations.-' The oldest piety is described as dealing with spirits " n jt for one's ease and pleasure," but as if "afar off ; " ns moral and virtue as the sacrifice they receive from men, "-eaiism. giving peace and good-will as its reward.^ The idea seems to involve that mingled sense of "near and far," which everywhere belongs to the consciousness of unseen pres- ence. The old Classics always teach that the spirits listen only to the sincere. The Chinese classics nowhere encourage the ghost-seer ; they are kept, in the popu- lar mind, apart from the sphere of spirit mediumship.^' Nevertheless, a kind of incorporation of the spirit in the tablet as its visible home is implied in the recognized con- ceptions of its nature. Spiritual substance in general — as invisible, mysterious, all-penetrating, and all-producing, neither male nor ^^ female — is called shin?" The human person, as ideas o£ continued life after death, is called kwei-shin, and ^'""'' distinguished from the hwan-k'i, or breath that goes up- ward, and the pe, or animal soul that goes downward.^ The hwan is mental and active, the pe gross and passive. The change wrought in them by death may be said to transform them respectively into shin and kwei, by which terms they are defined in the Imperial Dictionary. Kwei again designates the return of the individual elements ' For Chinese planchettes and spirit-writing, see Tylot's Primitive Culture^ I. 147, 148. • Li-ki, X., XXXII. ' Notes and Queries^ II. No. 2. • Chalmers derives skin from ski, or k'i, represented by the sign for above, and three descending lines. By the Japanese, natural religion is called Shintao, the " Way of Spirits." • Plath, Rel. d. Alt. Chin. ; Malan's IVho is God in China, p. 211. 704 BELIEFS. to their proper place.' The sum of these and other more obscure definitions is that death operates a closer com- bination of these elements with their spiritual or cosmi- cal essence {shiti) in a real being, the kwei-shin. So close is this process to the living world and its sympa- thies, that Visdelou was convinced that the two parts of the soul are believed to be united in a real being through the love of those who render these pious rites, and to be drawn thereby to the offering. ^ The later philosophy conceives the kwei as fixed or localized spirit, and the shin as expansive and mobile ; which affords ground for a com- bination like that above described.* Confucius says the kwei-shin are everywhere, though unseen and unheard. This obviously frees them from all taint of sensuousness. " Their approaches are not to be surmised : can you treat them with indifference .' " * Here, as in the Shi-king, the kwei assume the true dignity of shin. Though the tablet is silent, the presence of an indwell- How its ^"^S spirit is realized in other ways. The popular presence is feeling is shown in the story of the young wife, realized, yjrhose filial toil in heaping the sod over the bodies of her starved parents was aided by celestial hands, throw- ing on a thousand spadefuls to her one. The departed are called upon from the housetops to return into their bodies ; and popular tales describe the soul as leaving the body, and resuming or even exchanging it at pleasure. Marco Polo tells us that the voices of spirits are heard talking in the deserts of Thibet, and the " Buddhist Pilgrims '' are Chinese vouchers for the belief. It should seem, therefore, that among the uneducated similar notions of ghostly powers and purposes prevail as in Europe and America, and that > Chinese Repository, 1848, pp. 327-329. The word kwei carries, in this sense of a returning spirit, something of the vague distrust implied in our words "phantom" and "ghost;" whence the "tinge of evil" in it that gives color to its common translation by the term " devil." ' Ibid. p. 568. • Chu-hi. * Ckung-yung, ch. xvL THE ANCESTi(aL SHRINE. 705 such materialism as belongs to the popular notion of spirits on one side of the world prevails also on the other. It is probably true that, as many insist, Chinese ration- alists " cannot understand the Christian idea of an „ , . Relations invisible person without form." ^ But this diffi- of spirit to culty is not only very common with Christians who °™' do not profess to be rationalists, but is in fact one to which most reflecting persons are subject, whether rationalists or not. We must remember that the idea of form is substan- tially that of vehicle or manifestation ; and in this sense certainly it belongs to all conceptions of invisible as well as visible personality. It is only the highest reach of spiritual pantheism, the mystic faith in super-personal Intelligence, or pure Unity transcending all analysis, that can dispense with some more or less defined medium of this kind even in the idea of God ; universal law itself being such a per- manent form, or divine manifestation. This highest reli- gious sentiment escapes the limits of a positive object of worship, dwelling rather in the sense of divine influences, in the restful consciousness of harmonious and unchange- able relations, a home feeling in life and destiny. And the Chinese sentiment towards the ancestor in the tablet, how- ever it may fall below this, is at least a repose of the mind in somewhat impalpable and inconceivable, and yet held to be adequate. In the kwei-shin the form is con- The kwei- ceived, if at all, only as an inevitable association ^'""• with the past earthly life ; and of this rather with the spiritual qualities and traits, if we may judge fr.om the popular .romances, than the physical. It is obviously an error to confound this cultus with pure fetichism, Ancestral common in Chinese life; whose chief feature is Ji^"e£°ti the subjection of the object of faith to the will of chism. its devotee. The hand that can pull down and throw » See Carre, V Am. Orient. I. 284. 45 706 BELIEFS. aside what it has set up has little to do with the homage of the child to the father. The liberty taken by the Emperor to throw down the altars of the gods of land and grain and set up others when the seasons do not prosper, as he changes his mandarins at pleasure, could never be taken with the ancestral tablet or rite. This would be the most heinous crime known to Chinese conscience. Nature affirms, in these antique enduring rites of the farthest East, a direct communion with the unseen, com- pared with which the ceremonial symbolism of more de- veloped forms of worship seems earthly and trivial. How touching, I had almost said how sublime, this simplicity of method and means ! A bare room, an altar holding fruits and flowers, a memorial tablet to the invisible guar- dian and friend. So for the Shinto shrines of Japan a white screen, a polished mirror, a floral offering suffice, — the pure heart, the self -judging conscience, the grateful sense of beauty and of life. The homage paid by the Chinese to ancestors, then, has elements that deserve high respect from believers neseances- ^^ continuancc beyond death. It is at least the trai rites antique chrysalid where move and grow germs of as diviniz- i i i i . . i . .1 ingthe what they hold to be spiritual intercourse, in the Home. higher sense of the words. But it is more than an evidence of another life ; more than a covered germ. It is loyalty to a spiritual fact and a natural relation, maintained at their real value as the root of social as well as private good. It is the consecration of the Home, in its substance as fil- ial piety and parental care. Better evidence of the moral soundness of mankind could not be than to have chosen, on so vast a scale, to rest its hopes of the unseen world on its own purest affections and holiest duties. Nor is it un- becoming our science, in studying how vast a civilization has been reared upon this principle, to emphasize these its THE ANCESTRAL SHRINE. •JO^ positive elements rather than the very obvious extravagance to which its institution has been carried in China : the persistent immaturity in which it holds the son in relation to the father ; the interception of many aspirations to higher than human or personal objects ; the crystallization of rites and customs befitting only an early stage of thought. Into these we, at the opposite pole of temperament, and un- der the ceaseless goad of science, shall not be likely to fall. But the apotheosis of Domestic Duty, the full faith in ties of nature, in sanctities of filial relation, in disciplines of home-culture, are an example we cannot afford to depre- ciate. They have proved protective against priest-craft and caste, and all permanent social disqualifications on xheirben- the one hand, and the lawlessness of individualism eficrai on the other. They have enforced popular educa- tion, supplied a balance to trade and labor in the most crowded population of the globe, and endowed it with a steadiness of purpose and a general morale unsurpassed for frugality, patience, perseverance, fidelity, self-restraint, and mutual helpfulness ; all of which foster domestic rela- tions, and are fostered by them in return. Most of these practical virtues, which it is the glory of " heathen " China to have maintained abreast with the materialism of indus- try, are precisely what the wonderful economies of our industrial machinery have not contributed, to say the least, to advance. If the statistical science of the most enlight- ened' nations may be trusted, it is time to ask . , , . -^ _ _ A lack in whether illegitimacy and libertinage, the influence westem of impure literature upon family morals, the loose- ""'■'^^"™- ness of the principle of responsibility in parental con- science, and, worse still, the eagerness of the young to gratify a reckless thirst for extravagance with resources they have not earned ; whether the spread of communism in some countries, and the club and class cabals that in others are undermining the safeguards of private life, — do 708 BELIEFS. not demand decisive return to the natural loyalties and disciplines of domestic culture. So indispensable an offset to the drift into solidarity and production by machinery and mass-work alone would seem to call for its special prophets and crusaders before it quite becomes a forlorn hope for our time. We cannot be insensible to the fact that the Chinese are holding forth, under whatever im- perfections, a forgotten ideal ; and may be destined to ex- ert its healthful influence in those educational reactions which are to attend the advancing communion of races and beliefs. THE FUTURE LIFE. " Music and rites," says the Li-ki, " are the means by Spirits as- which spirits are brought into communion with sociated j^j^j^ . f/ecause they represent the harmonies of with the , „ t rr^i . . . 11 1 cosmicai heaven and earth. ' This spint-world was thus °'''*"" associated with day and night, with sunshine and storm, with the order of Nature in its whole relation to hu- man life. The concrete habits of the Chinese mind absorb all invisible life into the homely cosmicai associations in which it moves ; not needing a heaven apart from these, and perhaps accepting a future life with less hesitation than if it had been more inclined to dissatisfaction with the actual and present. So the Egyptian monuments not only show the spirit as engaged after death in the ordinary functions of this life, but as actually rising from its tomb to mingle with the beams of the sun ; and the mystic title of their ancient " Book of the Dead " (Pire-em-hrou) is believed by good scholars to mean " The Outgoing as (or with) the Day." 2 » Ch. it. xvL > CoHgris, Internat, d. Oritntal. (1875), II. 37-47- THE FUTURE LIFE. 7O9 " The Chinese were thoroughly this-siders. Virtue and vice had their returns here." ^ But it does not fol- „ ^^. How Chi- low from this absence of purely " immaterial " retri- nese inter- bution from their theory, that they saw no life ^xIXaZ beyond death. This inference is usually drawn to faith in from the premise.^ But if " immateriality " is to ^"°"'"' be the test, we shall find very little of such belief in any religion. Think of the future world of Dante, of the mod- ern spiritist, of the New Testament, in this point of view. That profoundly moral sanctions make up the substance of ancestral honors in China has been sufficiently shown in this volume.^ What, for instance, can be more positive than the Shi-king's tribute to good King Wan, as " bright in heaven, ascending and descending on the right and left of Shang-te " \ * It is true that the emphasis on famihar scenes and interests is such as would naturally belong to a busy productive people, to whom life is too full of meaning to engender doubts as to its continuance, or abstract medi- tations on its endlessness. As an unconscious motive and light, the sense of essential existence, if we may use the term, is in fact always conditioned on our appreciation of instant values. The richer we find life in materials for our powers and needs, the more precious it is likely to appear, and the' more worthy to endure ; while even the doubts of the understanding, however strong, are not apt to trouble that confidence of content which proceeds from a deep, unconscious participation in the very spirit of life. The Chinese are not without this temperamental faith in liv- ing, fed by a genial outlook on the world and a keen sense of its uses and relations. The result would naturally be 1 Plath. * Carre, I. 396 ; Biichner in Kraft vnd Staff. Wuttke thinks a future life is inconsistent with the Chinese system, " a cuckoo's egg in it, if it exists at all ; " yet after quoting passages illustrating both sides of the question, he admits that those who denied a future life were re- larded as heretics. ^ See also Meadows's admirable reply to Hue (CA. Reb. pp. 66, 67). • Ski-kins, III- i- »• 7IO BELIEFS. an indefiniteness in the idea of man's future destiny, which Indefinite- is better than most, if not all, attempts at pene- conce^*° trating the veil. Some of the later philosophers lion. speak of the alternations of life and death in such terms as to hint that man, like all else, comes to an end at last. But the people, satisfied with the simple sense of continuity in the duties and affections, seem to have left the future in great degree undefined ; the constant con- sciousness of being part and parcel of their vast real uni- verse of law, custom, labor, and rite serving them instead of development in this direction, either theological, myth- ological, or dogmatic.^ And I may add, artistic. For it is in this way I should Why Chi- explain the singular avoidance of interest in remote Tesn't posterity shown in Chinese art. Its leverage is not look to the in the future ; its labor and desire stop with the noTpema- prescnt. The Chinese have had none of the pas- nent. sion of equally industrial Egypt for putting' their faith in future existence into permanent forms. Longevity is their ideal. " This word is written on tiles, coffins, cups, shoes ; it figures in all ceremonies at births, marriages, and funerals."^ Yet there is little effort to erect any thing that shall endure. The Great Wall itself shows little skill in structure ; and was raised for no other than defensive purposes. Like every thing else in China, it was the prod- uct of immediate wants. The noble bridge-work which is so abundant has a similar origin. The colossal pillars of the Ming tombs are of wood, and the avenues of marble animals, rudely carved, are of recent origin. No mighty works of antiquity remain. Having abundance of stone, they prefer brick or wood ; and their trivial architecture rapidly decays. Their memorial arches are ephemeral. Nowhere a love of construction for grandeur and perma- * Of modifications introduced by Buddhism, a foreign importation, we shall speak hereaftej ' Fleming, p. 185. THE FUTURE LIFE. 7I I nence, like the Roman taste for spanning valleys with needless monumental aqueducts of stone; nor of con- struction for barbarous uses as if for all time, like that which built the Colosseum ; nor of works dictated by a brooding fear of death and change, like the sepulchral Pyramids. Here was a live people, too creative in the present to think of the future as needing special provision. Possessed by the very soul of permanence, they wanted no physical proofs of its reality. Full of self-help, they spent themselves on the realities of help. Filled with gratitude to the men who had been so much to them, they gave themselves to their service, assured that future generations would reap the same ardor in their turn. It does not look like utilitarianism, that these devotees of the dead should have so ideal a trust in the unborn. It does not look like barbarism, that such conservatives in all human relations should find their symbolism of these lasting things in such outward fragilities as the wooden tablet, the burnt paper, and the " flowery scroll." It does not look like material- ism, that the aid of durable earthly materials should not be sought to perpetuate what was so dear as the memory of the departed. Their sense of the eternal was concerned with that which most served the purposes of life. They trusted the most fugitive of forms — a written word — to carry their messages to coming men, because it was the rich- est source of present culture, the builder of all living bless- ings for man ; a presentiment surely of the most wonderful fact of modern civiHzation. A more interior apprehension of the everlasting is sug- gested here than we are wont to accord to this . . - , . Content prosaic race ; a compensation for their unprogres- with the sive habits through the virtues therewith allied. ''f^O''^" ^ of Nature How far does their unconcern about the future and laws come from complete satisfaction with the order of °*'^°" Nature, the harmony, as they phrase it, of the heavens and 712 BELIEFS. the earth ? The universe is to them no place of exile, but a home ; builded of unchanging relations with the dear and immemorial needs of man ; its mysteries, solved as they arise for their own experience, shall not puzzle nor afflict other generations yet to come. Why hold communion by carved or piled stones with people whose being is felt as inwardly identical with their own, and under similar ances- tral blessings .-' As their belief of a constant presence of the invisible spirit has needed no dogma of bodily resur- rection, so it has required no outward symbols of enduring life. Other than the religion of the tablet is the inherited fetichism, which here as elsewhere represents the Chinese * Animism i lowcr grade of spiritual intelligence. Intense in- Si aTd"" terest in the visible world has produced the person- moral in- ification of natural forces on the widest scale, but '''"'■ of a very peculiar kind. Without the a^sthetic charm of Greek polytheism, or the inert mysticism of the Hindu, this animistic faith penetrates all phenomena with familiar interests, subjecting them, in a rationalistic and practical spirit, to the control of human intelligence ; so that the shin of the Chinese are too much a part of com- mon life to impose harmful superstitions on their worship- pers. The entire absence of tendency in Chinese thought to deify sensuality or vice in any form is a good educator of these animistic powers. The reading of cosmical activi- ties as human uses, which here constitutes the science of the unseen, recognizes in these energies a basis of intelli- gence, though in the most atomically divided form. That the heavenly bodies and the features of the earth, the air, land, and grain, the roads, fields, and dwellings, the gate, the door, the chamber, should all have spirit guardians against evil powers is a belief which does not distinguish the Chi- nese from any other nation of antiquity, nor from any reli- THE FUTURE LIFE. 713 gion except that of modern science. Where the sages, lawgivers, benefactors of the past, still inhabit the world, the places that knew them can have no animistic powers that are not controlled by human uses. As every trade and art in China pays homage to its traditional founder, so every natural element is under the care of its first utilizer for the benefit of man.^ No Bacon was needed to call this civilization out of idle dreams into busy humanities. All its complex interfusion of seen and unseen goes on its unify- harmoniously without organized church or priest- Z\^^ hood; 2 a magnetic play of instincts giving unity, 'ife. method, and geniality to these manifold ties. On this lower plane a mutual understanding and co-ordination has been effected between a vast number of people, which surpasses all achievements of modern zeal for religious uniformity. It is needless to enter into details. Mandarins pay ser- vice to their official seals, sacrifice to the " god of the gate," and to the symbolic fox, totem of official skill.^ The Peking " Gazette " abounds in petitions for raising monu- ments to local genii, whose action is recognized in every prosperous turn. The shrines are hung with votive tab- lets for deliverances by land and sea, like those common on walls of Catholic churches and dwellings. Like the Christian saints, the sAin watch over the places they once inhabited. The notion of special providence is broken up into a vast number of faces ; but the idea of order so A^j;„t,jg pervades these subdivisions, that the course of conception Nature moves on as if in a perfect understanding, because it is interpreted in entire accord with the instincts of the race. So naive is this reflection, that the " hearth- ^ So with the Shintoism of Japan. * The fedchist or aoimist beliefs of the Chinese are independent of Buddhism or Taoism. ' Doolittle, I. 318. 714 BELIEFS. spirit " reports to Shang-te the conduct of the family at the close of the year, as palpably as the more ideal angels of Mahometan and Christian faith write down their' rec- ords for the judgment day ; and the celestial assizes are represented as conducted on the same method as the ter- restrial ones in Canton.^ Grotesque figures of symboHc persons and creatures stand in the doorways, serving uses as much prized as the beauty of the corresponding images of Hermes and Apollo was by the more refined Greeks, and indicating no sense of discord nor failure of confidence as to the order of Nature, of which they multiply such contorted reflections. Miiller regards " Shin-worship " as an aspiration to Theories scicuce, ou thc way to such abstractions as genera "'swn- ^^^ species.^ The positivists, on the other hand, worship." point to the fact that fetichism, which confounds all the phenomena of movement with life, only gradually reaches a sense of personality as something distinct from these appearances ; on this track the Chinese masses have gone no farther than to emphasize (as shin) the notion of person, without detaching it from that of activity as such.^ These are valuable suggestions, as helping to explain the elements of order and unity found in Chinese animism, by showing it to be a stage of normal intellectual growth. The division of the world between two related princi- Panthe- P^^^' ^^ actlvc and the passive, is essential to isticeie- Chinese philosophy, and has its instinctive form among the masses. In the union of these principles consists the harmony of man with Nature. In the soul and the world, the active element (spirit) is identical ; as the soul of the Egyptian is one with Osiris. Thus the word shin, as spirit, conveys at least a vague sense of the whole of invisible life ; and in this the manifold forms of animism are absorbed. ' Nevius, pp. 134-138. Bastian, Peking, p. 2i-j. a Vm-les. m. Rel. WUsemch. (1874), I. 188. » Lafitte, p. i;. FUNG-SHUI. 715 But while this unity stands very clear in the minds of Chinese thinkers, the contrasts and antagonisms of Nature are fully present to the people, constituting a curious form of superstition of which we have now to speak. FUNG-SHUI. Greek sculptures and legends celebrated the Harpies of the Air, and the Nereids of the streams ; and the Persian Magi, according to Herodotus, sacrificed human beings to the winds to save the fleet of Xerxes from wreck. The elemental powers were recognized in China in a more prosaic way. The meaning of Fung-shut (wind and water) is mainly meteorological ; but it has a wider application to Name influence in general, — such as the flow of ele- ^f j-°^f^" mentary forces, or the power of fashion.^ Grad- stui. ually developed out of the simple divinations of antiquity, it has become an elaborate system of popular sorcery for the selection of lucky times, good locations, and promising plans. Subtle breaths are thought to proceed from the south and north, bringing good and bad influences respec- tively, and the aim is to block the one and open the way for the other ; whence a body of geomantic rules apphed to natural features, by which means certain forms and combi- nations of these are avoided, and others preferred.^ Geo- mantic mounds are raised for protection ; and paths are wound about to keep off evil, or to correspond with the shapes traced by constellations on the sky.^ Every thing in health or happiness depends upon the configuration of the land ; even the decay of towns comes of wrong fung-shui. » See Chin. Refos. Sept. 1849. Yates's Lect. at Shanghai, 1867. • In England, in the i6th century, the South wind was thought to bring cdmiplion. ^ Edkins, in Ckin. Recorder (April and May, 1872). 7l6 BELIEFS. Of all this we find nothing in the Shi-king, where winds are simply winds, and the millfoil and tortoise do all the divin- ing. The " Great Plan " of the Shu-king declares that there is a natural and moral order of the world, which it constructs upon numerical formulas and mutual depen- dencies ; but here, too, is no trace of the definite geomancy of fung-shui. This substitute for physical science has at last reached its typical instrument, a compass ; which combines in concentric circles supposed correspondences between the stars and the earth, parts of the human body, colors, moral relations, and the eight diagrams of Fo-hi combined in sixty-four ways ; the whole arranged around a magnetic needle, and employed as a cyclic calendar and calculator of numerical mysteries for purposes of fung- shui science, by street sorcerers and fortune-tellers, es- pecially of the Tao sect. ' But there are elements in this pseudo-science which de- serve more notice than its foolish schemes of land Based on natural and weathcr. It is associated with the national philosophy, and essentially rationalistic. Probably for this reason its treatment by the educated classes is very lenient ; their scepticism contenting itself with warn- ings against superstition, while granting its special desires. Fung-shui has nothing arbitrary about it ; not a current but moves by fixed rules of Nature unchangeable by man. His object is not to alter the facts, but to get at them. The laws of this groping science are held to be the order of things, not caprices, nor interferences. They are based on such affirmations as that every thing on earth has a counter- part in heaven, which human reason can discern ; and the numbers assigned to each element are as ultimate as the arithmoi of Pythagoras, or the intervals of the musical scale. In this respect they are an advance on the earlier notion of a plan of world-rules revealed by their maker to the model emperor, Yu. To Chu-hi (twelfth century), who sought to FUNG-SHUl. 717 erect the cosmical relations as accepted in China into a system, is due the complexity of the present fung-shui rules, and their partial hold on the educated class. Eite't so far recognizes this rationalistic quality, as to call them "the rudiments of natural science in China." How much real knowledge lurks in the folds of these odd fancies is as yet uncertain. But we cannot Relations doubt that many observations, sanitary, agricultural, to positive and climatic, have been interwoven in so ancient a system, the main object of which has been to work at geodesic phenomena. Its fanciful " compass" at least cen- tres in a magnetic needle. Certain hours of day and night are held more fatal than others to human life. The rules for locating dwellings prescribe good open prospects and absence of water and white ants. Chinese agriculture itself involves no little acquaintance with the laws of meteorol- ogy ; and this is of course incorporated in the current fung-shui. Like animism and " ancestor-worship," this system testifies to the tendency of the Chinese, through all their dualism, to conceive the universe as one vast order, of which man is a part. And this is clear, whether we regard its lower or higher forms, the mystic compass of the sor- cerer or the philosophy of Chu-hi, who reduces all spiritual existence to one substance. However obscure may be these germs of science, they are more obvious than in the mythologies of the more poetic Greeks and Jews. And our studies of these Chinese realists will have prepared us to hear without surprise that, with all their regard for fung-shui localities, they have opened the country to meteoric stations and to the tele- graphic method of storm warnings.^ ' Mr. Hart's arrangements with the Government are given in BaJid's Scientific Atmual ill 1874. 71 8 BELIEFS. DIVINATION. The earliest notions of the Chinese concerning man's Divination rclations with the mysteries of the cosmos do not ba^rof"' 3.ppear in Fung-shui, nor in the animism of Shin- human worship, but in divination ; by the tortoise, the nowe ge. j^jjj{qjj^ drcams, and lots. Divination is practised by all races that seek to acquire a knowledge of the unseen future.^ It occupies the margin which separates the possible from the attained ; and the fine conjectures of the scientific imagination are but its highest form, made accessible by growing insight into Nature. Its basis everywhere, more or less clearly and consciously seen, is a physical order whose ways are re- cognized as fixed and calculable, and whose data it is sought to trace to some sure result. It differs from fetichism and supernaturalism in substituting the permanent for the capricious, and laws for interfering volitions. It is the first clear sign of man's confidence in Nature, of his elevation above the mere dread of unseen powers. His divination is his bold venture into the sea of futurity, bearing a talisman to discern its favoring winds and currents. He binds spirits by the seal of Solomon, and utters the potent words which he believes to express their secret necessities and sure tendencies, so transforming them into uses. For the Chinese, divination has always had peculiar at- Expiana- tractions. An eager curiosity about details, and a "°" °\ '.''^ love of handling the physical world, have caused special in- o r y ' terest of aiiguvy to hold a larger place in their life than any ne!e in'the Other form of intercourse with the invisible, if we art. except the service of ancestors. The quiet and self-controlled attitude involved in it is in accord with their mental habits ; and we cannot but note its contrast with * See Lenormant, Divinai- des Chaldiens, DIVINATION. 719 the passionate zeal of mediaeval sorcerers whose terror before unseen powers was so fertile in cruelty to man. Soothsaying in China is not a matter of imagination, but of arithmetic. Fate can be settled by the calendar. " The Chinese who will know the future does not intoxicate himself with wine, dance, or gas, but goes to counting. He does not take the drum, but the almanac. Every thing in heaveh and earth is matter of clear calculation." ^ It is not edifying to hear hurricanes, earthquakes, and eclipses ascribed to man's disarrangement of the contrasted properties of numbers ; but this is cheerful in com- "^^ J'l^ parison with the bloody persecution of the heathen principles by the Emperor Theodosius, upon the ground that ^^c°°m' their unbelief brought storms and famines from ^^"°''- the wrath of God ; ^ or with the hideous " Malleus " of the inquisitor Sprenger, in the fifteenth century, compiled as a guide for hunting out heretics, and inspired by the insane idea that the Devil had got possession of all the times, seasons, and human doings of the Christian world.^ No effects could ever be produced in China by earthquake, typhoon, or eclipse resembling the terror and despair which have swept over Europe at various periods, in expectation of the destruction of the world for its sins, since the days when the great Augustine announced that the prophecies of Jesus and John were about to be fulfilled upon the hope- lessly depraved nations ; the abject self-contempt and mortal agony with which almost the whole population fled to their altars or the wilderness, when the thousand years of pro- bation had brought the hour set for the loosing of Satan and God's judgment day; the similar results of similar predictions six hundred years later, in the age of Henry IV. and the civil wars of France ; and the ever renewed spasms produced by every fanatical divine with the books of Daniel and the Apocalypse in his hand, till modern ' Wuttke, II. 71. ^ Ulsmy, Magie et Aitroloeit. ' Ukhdet, LaSarciire. 720 BELIEFS. science exorcised the demon of supernatural wrath.^ Of such effects the dogma of Predestination is the fruitful parent. The quality and effects of divination will differ with „ . , the temperament of races and the nature of re- Magic the ^ reverse Hgions. It is 3. form of magic; and magic is the era-"' hi- ^everse side of every great philosophy and faith, losophy One side of such a system is always universal, impersonal, ideal ; a lofty plane of divine order, on which man rests without seeking either for petty com- munications or for interferences by miracle. The other side is represented by interests of detail, which draw away this ideal trust to the realm of special providences and hu- man expedients for directing the course of Nature to pri- vate gratification. But here divination lapses into sorcery ; which, instead of consulting a fixed order of Nature, seeks to produce arbitrary changes in the course of things. This is essentially the same, whether vested in Brahman priest, or Mongol Shaman, or early Christian exorcist, or later prayer-makers working on the Divine will to bring rain in drought or miracles in a good cause. But divination always assumes a fixed order, which it would interpret and apply. In China, men divine what shall become of them by study- ing the figures on a burnt tortoise shell. In Christendom, dogmatic tests of belief are the tortoise-backs of the divin- ers to tell what shall become of other men. Names, days, conditions of salvation, Christ, Bible, atonement, are the magical formulas of a systematized Christianity ; and, when used for the purpose just mentioned, are neither better nor worse than the divinations drawn from arrows by Hebrew seers, or written on Chaldean scrolls, or buried with the dead in Egypt, or sold by Buddhist priests in the streets of Canton. > Fsbricius, mhia Si<'oiheca, rebukes the superstition of supposing that man can diviiu the future by natural phenomena ; yet he would substitute a divination of their divine purpose, qfUr tkt event, by Christian dogma 1 DIVINATION. 721 It is curious to note how the instinct of cosmical poten- cies survives in the midst of a scientific age for TheFung- those whom science has not reached, and even for *I'^^i. those who desire to know what science cannot nations, tell. Horoscopes of the Presidents of the United States, and of German statesmen, have lately brought gains to the astrologers ; though every schoolboy knows that the names of the planets are arbitrary, and their influence on human life null. The prevalence of such superstitions is hardly a test of the amount of real intelligence in a coun- Jtry, since they are largely matters of instinct and even amusement, and not more incompatible than any weak or absurd traditional creed with much better knowledge. The most ignoble form these instincts can take is that of the fear of demonic powers.^ The Chinese Chinese shin are less mischievous than the Christian Satan, christian because even the evil element in that fraternity is Satan. pulverized into a host of individuals, instead of being con- centrated into one vast purpose of essential malice ; and these are, moreover, treated as dependent on man, rather than superior to him. The curiosity of this shrewd and penetrative people is so much stronger than their fears, that divination has a peculiar charm, — as children play at hide-and-seek in old lumber rooms. The diviner Magicas was the adjutant of the early kings and heroes, and '^^^^ nothing could be done without him. The calendar- time, maker was the first historian. Marco Polo says that thou sands of fortune-tellers were supported at the great city of Cambalu;^ and this may well be believed, to judge from their reported numbers in the streets of modern Peking. Yet so great is the discredit attached to evoking the dead, or to magical incantations, that they are incessantly for- bidden by edict as well as by statute law : they are wholly ' The old Chaldeans had their Bible of the " Evil Spirits;" described by Lenorrcaut from the tablets. ^ M. Polo, Bohn's edition, p. 232. 46 722 BELIEFS. renounced by the better class of minds,' and are much less common with the people than the comparatively inno- cent casting of lots and divining by letters, cards, bamboo sticks, and dreams. To superstitions of times and seasons the Chinese are not more addicted than other races : thev have had no astrological predictions so minute as those of Nostradamus and others in mediasval Europe ; the num- ber of days marked as lucky or unlucky in the populaj- faith of the English of the seventeenth and even eight- eenth centuries is fully as great as in any of the Chinese almanacs.^ Our review of Chinese augury has so strongly suggested Transition ratioualistic and unitary conceptions on the lower to Theism, pi^nes of mind, that it leads naturally to the subject of Chinese Theism. The changes undergone by this ele- ment under the slow influence of such conceptions have been intimated in our account of ancestral rites, of ani- mism, of polytheistic and pantheistic forces in the popular faith, and even of fung-shui and divination. In all these the tendency to substitute notions of inherent natural law for volition and caprice is very manifest. Of the highest form of divining, that of perceiving the divine through spiritual affinity, the philosopher has somewhat to say. " If you dis- solve the connection between the intellect of man and the divination of Deity," says Maximus Tyrius, "you dissolve the most musical of harmonies." ^ > Meadows, Chinese RebeilionSy p. 383. * See Articles by Dennys on " Folk Lore of China," in Chin. Rev. It is curious that be- lief in the inauspiciousness of the seventh day for work is introduced into Chinese calendan by Indian astronomers. » Max. Tyr. I. ja. THEISM. 723 THEISM. Notwithstanding the long list of authorities for the " atheism " of the Chinese, from the Jesuit Father Longobardi to the recent " Edinburgh Reviewer," aninteiii- who describes them as " having a language without ?'"' ^'°^' an alphabet and a religion without a God," — a list the sw including such names as Leibnitz, Bayle, Constant, ™'' ^'"'' Pauthier, Quinet, Abel R6musat, and Barth61emy Saint- Hilaire, — nothing can be now more palpable than that the Shang-te, or 7> (Supreme Ruler),i of the ancient Classics is represented as an intelligent Providence, hearing the pray- ers and knowing the hearts of men. Chinese hymns differ from those of the Hebrews and Egyptians in not dwelling emotionally on poetic images and symbols of the God, but bringing him into direct relation with homely life and pub- lic interests in the simplest way. Yet the Shi-king gives him an almost Hebrew personality, as surveying the world, seeking out men for rulers, giving counsels to King Wan, and praising his virtues. He smells the sweet savor of sacrifice ; he is looked to for aid in trouble, makes and unmakes kings, is the bright and glorious God. The mother of the Tcheou becomes pregnant by treading in his footprint, and by his blessing has painless deliverance. All the good kings adore him, and after death sit at his right hand. Almighty, he hates no one. He is the spirit of Tien (Heaven), the source of morality, of just retribution, and of all earthly blessings. In the Shu it is the same. He lends righteousness to ' Naturally enough, this name is given to rulers in lower spheres also. Thus there arose a kind of service of " the five Tes ; " by some supposed to represent the earliest kings, but more probably designating cosmogonic Rulers. This cult fell into discredit, and was abolished as interfering with the respect due the Emperor. (See Medhurst, Ch. Repas. 1848, pp. 185- 187.) The Too sect have a multitude of Tes. But the meaning of Sh ii g-te is as perfiictl)' understood to be Deity, as any anthropomorphic word in any religion of the world. 724 BELIEFS. the people. To him Shun brings offerings, as distin- guished from the lower genii of hills and rivers. He has given man a moral sense ; is offended with Kwan, and chooses to reveal the " Great Plan " to Yu. Tang con- fesses his sins to the heart of Shang-te. Every thing im- plies his dealing with men and things in detail. In these ways the Shu names him thirty-eight times. The Chung- yung says the ancients served him with sacrifices to Heaven and Earth. Confucius and Mencius seldom use the term Shang-te, but prefer to speak of Tien (Heaven) in the same way.-^ The next important fact about the older Classics is that Heaven they make Tien (called often " azure," distant, and ter'iALn"e- '^^ Other ways identified with the sky) interchange- able with able with Shang-te. Tien is " compassionate ; the i„3,i^"'^ parent of men ; unwearied with blessing." It is periods. " clear-seeing, intelligent, and dwells with men in all their doings." " By its will it inspects kingdoms and makes no mistakes : it is offended at wrong-doing ; is invoked against injustice, implored for pity, even expostu- lated with as unkind." It is described as " letting down its net of penalty, as making no appeal to the sense of sound or of smell." So far the Shi. In the Shu it is mentioned in the same way one hundred and thirty-four times ; among these as "loving the reverent, and as seeing with the people's eyes." The Y-king says that the wise man follows the great commandments of Tien.^ Confucius says : " Tien knows me." " He who offends against Tien has none to whom he can pray." " Integrity is the way (tao) of Tien." ^ Mencius says : " Tien exercises men with trials ; holds in its hands the issues of things ; determines men's lot accord- ' Medhurst's elaborate articles in the Chin. Repos., for 184S, seek to prove, by exhausthre quotations, that Shang-te is the Chinese Ruler of Tien. > Ch. xiv. > Lunyu, XIV. 37 ; III. 13 ; C&utteryuHff, XX. iS. THEISM. 725 ing to their conduct." " To delight in Tien is to love and serve all men." ^ At the present day, very common expres- sions are, " Great Tien, help us ! " and, " Great Te, deliver us! "2 The later philosophy identifies Tien, Shang-te, and Li, the order of Nature. The providential and moral meaning conveyed in Shang- te and Tien as interchangeable terms, and the dis- g; ^^ ^^ tinction always made between these on the one theistic hand as unity, and the multiplicity of the shin on the other, are clear evidences of a personal and anthropo- morphic theism. And this is confirmed by the tendencies to unitary views of the cosmos, which have been already traced in lower forms of popular belief; and by theistic affinities, more or less probable, recently brought out by Miiller and others, with this Chinese Tien, in the names of supreme deities in the religions of most Mongolian and Turanic races.^ Marco Polo saw the name of a Supreme God on the Tartar tablets and temples, and describes his worship.* Rubruquis was told by the Tartars that they " believed in one God, and he a ' sprite ; ' and the images they made were not of him, but of men, and for their memory." ^ Bastian says : " The Mongols believe in one God ; not the blue sky, but the everlasting Heaven." ^ The Tunguse, according to Erman, "worship a god, Hanki." "^ Castren has shown not only a theistic element in all the old Altaic religions, but the curious fact, in view of the relations of Shang-te and Tien, that in each of these religions God and Heaven are expressed by the same word.^ That the Jesuits, who were the only members of the * Menclus, VI. 11. 15 ; I. ii. 16; Ibid., 3. ^ ChiTiese Repos, 1845. » Muller, VorUs, Hi. Relig. WUs. 177-182. * Bohn's ed. II. a6. » Hakiuyt, Vol. I. 127, 128. « Peking, p. 370. ' Siieria. *■ Finniscke Mythol. pp. 15, 24. 726 BELIEFS. Church in their day acquainted with the facts, should, Yet the with One exception, have maintained that the Chi- ™^s™'n. nese worshipped a personal God, is as natural as not find a that the Church in its supreme ignorance should „ord have decided against them. The great contro- answering vcrsv of thosc davs as to whether Tien meant to the God •^ "^ of the the visible sky, and whether the Chinese were not Bible. materialists, has yielded in the main to a different one, which agitates the Protestant churches at the present day as much as those difficulties troubled the Catholics. The problem of the modern missionary is how to get the God of the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures into Chi- nese speech. Is Shin, Shang-te, or Tien-chu (Lord of Heaven) most suitable to convey the idea of " the Bible Jehovah ? " i The difficulties of this question beset the projectors of a translation of the Bible on every side. One way (Shin) are the breakers of pantheism ; the other way (Tien) the gulfs of materialism. It has caused hopeless division in the Bible societies, and, as far as I know, the solution is as remote as ever. And this obviously for the best of reasons. While the question, " Who is God in China .' " seems to have been at last quite clearly settled in favor of Shang-te,^ the practical difficulty is, after all, that neither name suits the Christian conception, nor conveys it to the Chinese mind. We may go further, and add that, by admission of the leading advocates on both sides,^ the Chinese language has no word capable of rendering the service required for the '' Bible God." Still less has it a fit term for the Triune Deity of the missionary creed. Dr. Boone even rejoiced in this fact as a special point in favor of Chris- '■ See Chin. Repos. for 1848, the writings of Drs. Boone, Medhurst^ and Malan ; and the Amer< Orient, yourn. for October, 1868. * Boone, Chin. Kep, as above, pp. 58, sg ; Medhurst, pp. 109, 583. Later phases of the controversy are summed up in two papers, by Hoppner and Martin, before the American Oriental Society (October, 1868), and in another by Woolsey (1867). THEISM. 727 tianity ; as showing that " God's providence has reserved to his servants the part of introducing" this meaning into " the heathen term Shiny How, indeed, should there have been any need of the missionary at all, if the Chinese language proved these people already acquainted with this " only true God " ? But what if the real point lies in the unfitness of this God himself to enter and take hold of the Chinese mind ? In fact, this is the necessity of failure inherent in the missionary purpose. Milne tried eighteen combinations of Tien, Shang-te, Shin, Hwang, Chin, and Chu, and Morison four, without success. Visdelou says in despair, " If we translate shin by spirit, it is inadequate ; if by God, we go too far." Hardest lot of all, the advocate of Shang-te is dealt with by critics for misleading the Chinese into the idea that they have already in their own religion the same Deity with the Christians.^ Yet how can they be expected to accept a name for a deity of whom they have never heard ? These difficulties would seem to be insuperable indeed. The interchangeableness of Shang-te with Tien in the old Classics is borne out by the association of his Meaning oi edicts with the seasons and the general order of *« identity ° of Shang-te Nature. All positive religions show the tendency to with Tien; make cosmical nature the manifestation of Divine "= °"s>i> not in ma- will. But the peculiar habit of Chinese thought teriaiistic, intensified this tendency. It does not conceive ^JJ^Jb. essence apart from manifestation, nor the ideal i'^of from the concrete. And thus while the moral emphasis so conspicuous in the old theistic conceptions forbids us to regard them as mere personifications of the material heavens, it is unmistakable that in a very prac- tical sense God was Nature, and Nature was God. The %hin are expansive and contractive forces in Nature, and » Chin. Repos. 1848, pp. 45^461. 728 BELIEFS. Shang-te himself is shin (spirit). The dictionaries describe shin as the inscrutable principle in Nature ; which at once identifies the word with Deity. The sharp distinction drawn by Christian supernaturalism between God and Nature, therefore, cannot be said to exist for the Chinese. Even the most strenuous advocates for the personality of Shang-te do not find in him the " Bible attributes " of ex- ternal creative power, and self-existence apart from time. His character as shin makes him a source of emanations. " Things spring from him, as men from parents." It is evidently an entire mistake, however, to call the unity of God and Nature materialism, rather than spiritualism ; the universe is alizie with moral law and spiritual intent, just as these on the other hand are inevitably manifested in natural forms and cosmical relations. This naturalistic belief may be conceived in two forms. In the first, the One Deity, with his subordinate principles and forces, becomes but a common term for the arbitrary caprices which a crude religious sense affirms in Nature. In the second, He is identified with the regular and uni- form processes observed by a positive habit of mind, intent on industrial and social uses ; and thus becomes the sub- stance of permanent law and hfe, cleared of capricious interferences with the course of Nature in proportion to the growth of such practical intelligence. This latter form is plainly that which is presented in Chinese civilization. In the evolution of this tendency is the key of its intellectual and religious phases. As in such a movement the idea of personal will natu- rally recedes before the growing ideas of principles tion. su. and laws, we are not surprised to find Confucius '^^'"' and Mencius inclined to abandon the apparent ^dually supernaturalism of the older books, and to substi- ibopped- ^^^g j.jjg name Tier. (Heaven) for Shang-te. A sim- ilar disposition is found in Western races, in proportion as THEISM. 729 the scientific element supplants the traditions of supernat- ural will. The later philosophy of Chu-hi,the high-water mark of Chinese thought, shows the full triumph of this tendency. " Shang-te," says Chu-hi^ plainly, " is Law." Chu-hi iden- tifies Te, Tien, and Li, the principle of order in Nature ; the former words " meaning that Li is master." ^ He says of theophanies similar to those of the Old Testament, that " if men can have visits from Shang-te, he can hardly be the incorporeal being he is represented." " Shin," says his disciple, " has consciousness, and can operate all ; but Law embraces a great many principles higher than the consciousness of Shin, or its universal operation." ^ The difference of this tendency from that of the She- mitic and Christian Bibles is obvious. As they are contrasts supernaturalism, so this is naturalism. As their withShe- moral and spiritual ideal is a Being separated from chrfsSn the universe, so for this the universe itself is the '^^^■ very presence of the ideal, the activity of its law. As they are anthropomorphic, so this is pantheistic. That there are analogies as well as differences, lines that run together, common insights and common superstitions, is equally manifest ; nor can any of our terms quite state the special distinctions between the consciousness of the Mongol and the Shemito-Aryan. But as these distinctive qualities run through the whole of Chinese thought, no word known thereto, or likely to be known, can possibly be endowed with the qualities of the God of Abraham, or of the God of Jesus and Paul ; still less with those of the God of the Christian Church and dogma. The Chinese idea of the cosmos does not allow special revelations in the sense of the term as used in these latter faiths ; since the will of Shang-te is simply the order of ' CAin. Sep. 1848, pp. 34, 4'- ' See Chalmers, in Ckitta Review, May and June, 1875. 730 BELIEFS. Nature and the moral law. "Heaven," says Mencius, " does not speak ; it makes itself known only through the course of events." No special Holy Book miraculously given and preserved is possible ; only the Book of Nature, whether expressed in signs and symbolic characters, or in obvious processes, open to all ; its order interwoven every way with the conduct and condition of man. Its laws are interpreted as dependencies on a morality at once human and universal, the motive force of the conscience and the cosmos alike ; and all afflictive phenomena are warnings to the State, not by sudden wrath of God, but by inherent working of relations. No vicarious divine atonement can here be invented to satisfy a law which acts, and must act, immediately in the nature of men ; and even the Emperor, who as represent- ative of the people assumes the blame" for their sufferings, does so not as the innocent suffering for the guilty, but as himself a real offender. " Organic involuntary sin," " im- puted transgression," "natural hate of God's law," — a belief to which the evangelical still clings as the main dependence for Christian virtue, culture, and even intel- lectual resource, — for similar reasons can have no place in these religious ethics. Thus the rational science and practical sense of our Affinities time fiuds itself on better terms with Chinese witiira- theism than with the theological creeds. Here are science, gcrms of its own cherished principles, that being is not to be conceived apart from manifestation ; that, in other words, the reality of all Life and Law is in their operation ; that the universe, as totality of living powers, cannot be outside the Essential Force of them all ; that the cosmos, as infinite, must be one with its divine sub- stance, — unless there are two infinites, which is self-con- tradictory and impossible. However inapt Chinese think- ing may be at dealing with the idea of infinity, its habit THEISM. 731 of realizing ideas through thdr concrete expressions is obviously akin to the scientific notion of law; and its religious belief that the moral order underlies the phys- ical as its substance, however inscrutably to the im- perfect sight of the human observer, — is in full harmony with our present aims at the conciliation of science and religiofi. This is genuine theism, not atheism. The order of the world, as thus conceived, involves intelligence ; not cosmic indeed that of an external Cause, nor yet of a Per- ">'"™ son, in the sense of individual agent ; yet such Intelligence as can be identified with unchangeable relations given in thought, and is itself an all-containing Unity. The tendency towards dispensing with anthropomorphic conceptions now described must always react on Emotional the tone of the emotions and aspirations, which in '^^enciea more imaginative races are found to borrow inten- pomor- sity from the human qualities of their religious ^ '^'°' ideal. The incitement of personal relations must here be wanting to the, culture of sentiment as well as of individ- uality. A distinctly individual God is simply private Will and Purpose grown into an all-mastering ideal. Com- munion with such a God, human in every thing but the colossal proportions of his traits, must stimulate intense fears, desires, and expectations, imperious motives, selfish or unselfish, ind that sense of being inspired or controlled by Divine intentions, which may be fitted either to ex- alt or to enslave. Hence the variety of ethical quality in the resultant creeds and institutions of distinctly anthro- pomorphic religions. And hence their hostility to scientific progress ; which shows how naturally they resist all inter- ference with the arbitrariness of will inherent in their indi- vidualized God. Here are at once emotional advantages and intellectua. 732 BELIEFS. and moral defects, from both of which it might seem Higher that the cosmical theism which recognizes Deity ta cos^rai^ oiily in the order of nature and man, instead of theism. placing it outside as a humanly constructive agent, would be wholly exempt. As matter of fact, however, we must observe that such cosmical theism covers a whole line of development which has many phases. The universe of law is impersonal only as more comprehensive and more vital than individuals ; its sublimities, harmonies, and uni- ties are the fountains of profoundest enthusiasm and trust. These results are conspicuous at the summit of culture; while at its beginning many of the mysteries of Nature oppress the soul with terror all the more from their being identified with a Divine power. What we call cosmical theism is thus in its different phases the lowest and the highest religion. The intelligence of the Chinese places them in the higher grades of this series. Their lack of ardor and of emotional sentiment is a matter of tempera- chinese nient more than a result of impersonal conceptions sentiment of Deity. Within those lines of relation in which b'y°it'scon- their traditional currents run, they are lacking sciousness neither in tenderness, loyalty, nor emotionality. The perpetual consciousness of regular methods and unchanging paths curbs at once their caprices and their fears. No passionate aspiration for union with a separate God across the fathomless gulfs between finite and infinite on the one hand ; and no enfeebling sense of an outer darkness of penalty, inflicted by Divine wrath for deadly though unconscious sin, on the other. The ethical power inherent in a worship of Divine laws Its ethical in thc Order of nature and life gives to Chinese ^d^lr- virtue a peculiarly dignified and home-born grace. >ntees. The guarantees of right are in no arbitrary will, : ut in this eternal order, without beginning as without end ; the nature of things. THEISM. 733 That the iteration of moral precepts, sure to weaken the proper force of virtue, has not made this people on the whole less conscientious than others, nor prevented their illustrating integrity and self-sacrifice on as large a scale in every age as these traits occupy anywhere else in civilized States, is certainly proof of some compensating energy in the moral sense, some counteracting efficacy in its religious sanctions. And this must be found in the closeness of re- lation recognized as existing between the laws regulating the cosmical and human worlds ; in the mental habit which entertains ideas only in the form of actualities, sees prin- ciples by means of their practice, and makes no distinction between religion and life. II. BUDDHISM. THE COMING OF BUDDHISM. CAUSES OF ITS GROWTH IN CHINA. TN view of the data presented in the preceding sections, •^ the mere fact that a foreign system of belief Apparent should have taken root in Chinese soil and become "■>=•"'- 1 J* .., . t r 1* • ablenessof a popular laith is a phenomenon of peculiar inter- china for est to the student of religions. The thoroughly buddhism. Hindu system of Buddhism seems to stand at the opposite pole from all distinctive traits of Chinese thought. The social conditions of which it was the outgrowth, and the beliefs from which it was a refuge, were alike unknown to these open-eyed and busy children of a work-day world. The Chinese were not made weary of life by mental passivity, nor stirred to religious revolution by the pressure of caste. They were not impelled towards Nirvtlna by longing to escape the endless chain of transmigration, the dreary climbing and descent along the fated scale of existence from the angel to the stone.^ The dream-land of contem- plative imagination was as reinote from their concrete brains as the lawless fancy that ran riot in miracle and metamor- phosis. How sober and practical their ancient books of his- tory and song ! How simple arid domestic their ancestral world ! How loyal to Nature the spirits of earth and ^ The old uative tribes of China show no sign of the metempsychosis, nor of the hells of Buddhism. The Hakkas ridicule its Paradise. {Eitd, //eiesarulQutries, I. No. 12.) 47 738 BELIEFS. heaven ! How real the relations of religion with govern- ment and social order ! What had a trenchant logic of negation, a destructive analysis of the actual, whether of traditions, institutions, or phenomena, an infinite mathe- matics of unseen penalties, potencies, and mysteries, to do with these positive architects of this world and their shrewd and patient toils ? Religious celibacy and mendicancy among a people who knew nothing so discreditable as to be childless, and did nothing else so successfully as they multiplied their breed, except supporting themselves by the honest indus- try which was their religion ! Separation from the world within cloisters, and under incessant religious rituals and routines ! It has been supposed that the strange creed was accepted as a relief from the "negativity of rationalism." not owing But this Cannot be admitted. Chinese rationalism "ne'ltiv- ^^^ ^^""y positive, and believed very much in na- ity of ra- ture, in morality, in the sanctities of human rela- nor pubUc tious, and in the presence of a Divine life in the indiffer- uuivcrse and a spirit-world in the heart. Moreover, all the traits of Buddhism we have mentioned have been continually denounced by emperors, sages, and lead- ing philosophers. Its relic-worship was satirized by min- isters and statesmen, who struggled age after age against such superstitions, whether in Buddhists, Nestorians, or "* Roman priests.^ Even Chinese tolerance again and again National yielded to the sense of danger from this subversive testimonies faith. In the sixth century, the Buddhist and Tao- againstit. ^^^ belief s wcre dealt with as politically mischiev- ous, and their books burned. Three centuries later, religious orders were forbidden to young persons without consent of parents, and the entrance of novices put under a supervis- ion which is still maintained. The Buddhist monasteries » See Beal's Introd. to SudJ. Pilffrimt. COMING OF BUDDHISM. 739 were secularized or destroyed in large numbers, and the monks driven back into social industries.^ In the fifteenth century, the right of monasteries to hold real estate was limited, and all excess given to the poor. The Sacred Edict cautions the people against Buddhist legends and delusions ; denounces the mythology of the sect about future retribu- tion, and reproves the drone lives of its disciples. Buddhism was violently assailed at the beginning of the Ming as per- verting the people.^ The actual laws, which are poorly executed where they conflict with popular opinions, yet deal with the monks as persons who have withdrawn from social duties, hold them under special regulations, and treat them as an inferior class, subject to severer penalties than the laity.^ On the whole, the class is described as ignorant, low, and little esteemed | * though this cannot be true of the history of the Chinese Buddhists as a whole. Nevertheless, the doctrine was far more successfully propagated in China than in its native land, whence ^ess it was driven forth to find a welcome in the appar- readily «- ently unsympathetic tribes of the North. Miracle than the has been resorted to as the only explanation of the s'=p3"='°'' of early wonderful extension of Christianity in a hostile christian- world. But Christianity followed the tendencies. "''■ of Aryan thought, and adapted itself to the popular and phi- losophic demands of its age, even while its symbolic books were based on the old Hebrew Scriptures. Buddhism struck its taproot in a soil as unpropitious as can well be conceived. It was imported bodily in a ready-made litera- ture of its own, which had to be transported over vast mountain ranges, and translated into a tongue which had no expressions for many of its terms, and no response for much of its substance. It had apparently not a shred of • See Bazin, yourn. Asiat., 1856, p. 135. ' Wylie, p. 134. • See Comro. to the Petial Cede; Bazin, pp. 166-168 i Penal Codi, CLXXVI. • Lassen, IV. 745. 740 BELIEFS. relation to the ancient Classics or the later teachers. For two hundred years after its first preaching in China, it produced in fact but little effect. Fifty years before the recognized date of its acceptance, its books had met with very poor reception.^ Hordes in Central Asia had been converted by Hindu missions long before ; and the faith was fully established in Kashmir nearly a century in ad- vance of its reception at the Chinese court. Its exten- sion eastward was aided by the sovereigns of that kingdom, and by the chiefs of the Yuetschi horde, who sent books to China about the time of Christ.^ The Chinese have always held the independent mountain region of Kashmir in great reverence, like all other Asiatic races ; they have believed in the longevity of its chaste people, as well as in the mys- terious powers of its devotees.^ They speak of it as the home of '' successors of Sakya-mouni, whose venerable aspects recall his pictures." * This was the wonder-land to which, according to Chinese traditions, the Emperor Ming-ti, following his dream about a gigantic statue encircled with light, sent messengers, who brought to China the first statue of Buddha and a' symbolic white horse, a.d. 6i. This year cannot be taken as the date of the entrance of Buddhism into China, which was very gradually effected, though commencing not far from the opening of the Christian era. Mr. Fergusson, an enthusiastic student of Serpent-wor- Mr. Fer- ^'^^P' regards this primitive agricultural cult as the gusson's historical germ of Buddhism. He traces its prev- thr^gin alence among the " Turanic" tribes of India, Kash- ofBudd- mir, and Thibet, whose rulers figure in the Hindu Serpent- epics and Buddhist records as Naga (snake) kings ; worship, and he even goes so far as to maintain that no race ^ Matouanlin. ^ Lassen, II. 1074, loSo. ^ Vii de Hiouen-Thsanff^ p. 94 ; Marco Polo (Bohn) I. xxviii. * Chinese accounts of Hulaku's war (R^musat, ^ouv. Mil. I. 179 ; Dabisiattt I. |i3i n- 147. 148). COMING OF BUDDHISM. 74I permanently adopted Buddhism, which had not previously been serpent- worshippers. Even in China he finds traces of this wide-spread deposit, sufficient to indicate the hitherto unsuspected point of attachment for Buddhist ideas.^ The symbolic meaning of the dragon in Chinese history, its relations to the elements in common with the Buddhist serpent, the pictures of Buddhist deities crowned with serpent heads, together with abundance of snake images and legends, form part of his arguments for this apparently overstrained theory of the origin of Buddhism. The dragon-guardian has always his place in the house at , the foot of the ancestral altar, and is installed at the build- ing of it.^ Live snakes are still carried in procession in some parts of China for luck, in honor of the " serpent- king," and afterwards turned loose.^ In China as well as in India, serpents are the genii of lakes, caves, and the ground in general. These facts, however, simply point to the primitive veneration of agricultural populations for the strange creatures whose habitations in rocks and holes they turn up and supersede. Upon Mr. Fergusson's theory, such survivals should not appear at all ; certainly not in connection with Buddhism itself after so many centuries of its existence : since he regards the serpent-cult as pro- ducing it only by way of reaction, and Buddhism as over- turning this cult and substituting asceticism in place of its coarser superstitions. The value of these researches is unquestionable, as yielding illustrations of the combined forces of re- . ...... Its value. action and continuity in religious development. The transforming effects of Buddhism on the tribes of India and Central Asia were certainly accomplished in part ' The Chinese use their term for dragon (lung) to express the Sanscrit word Naga, and regard the former animal as a snake (Mayer's Notes a-nd Queries^ HI. 3). Fohi had a serpent body. The Manchus and Mongols divine by the serpent (Erman, II. 93). See also Eitel's Handbook of Chinese Buddkisvu • Eitel iN. andQ. III. 3). ' Chin. Recorder, April, 1872. 742 BELIEFS. through its points of attachment with their agricultural and other traditions.^ Though serpent-worship is too widel) spread a form of primitive religion to serve as a solution of the peculiar difficulties we encounter in the growth of Chinese Buddhism, the connection of Hindu and Thibetan forms with the serpent-symbol is unmistakable. The Amravati Topes, the Pictorial Stone-Bible of Buddhism, are covered with innumerable emblematic sculptures al- most all of which bear relation to the Naga people, and when explained, as they are now likely to be by the studies of Dr. Beal,^ as representing the Jatakas, or stories of Buddha's previous lives, will throw great light on the history of the faith. The serpent in Hindu mythology has mysti- cal meanings which ally him to Buddhist philosophy. He is a sacred ascetic, withdrawn into Nature to receive like it the impregnation of the spirit. The power of Buddhism proceeds from qualities and Its made- pnnciples deeper than any special cultus of living quacy. or natural objects. The superstitious hatred of early and mediaeval Christianity to the snake,^ and its close connection with the conception of a personal Devil, so con- spicuous in that faith, would not justify us in regarding Christianity itself as a mere reaction against the symbolic serpent-worship of the Hebrews. Eighteen hundred years have elapsed since Buddhism Wonders entered on its career in China. It has given dynas- effected ^ies to the empire, carried monarchs from the throne by Budd- . . . . . • i i hismin into its monasteries, set up its images in the palace, China. g^j^jj penetrated the masses with a symbolism for- ' The serpent is also associated in primitive mythology with the R^n Cloud, over which the Sun is victorious ; whence the curious mixture of good and evil in the symbol. Compar the Vedic legend of Vritra with the serpent-worship of Egypt and Mexico. See also Gold- liber's Hehr. Mythol. ' yourn. of Roy. As, Sac. 1870. 8 See Croyances PopuL du Moyen Agt^ par S. L. Jacob (1859), p. 17. COMING OF BUDDHISM. 743 eign to their traditions ; besides domesticating, though with modified meaning, a philosophy wholly contrary to the mental habits of the most conservative nation in history. In the old national books and rites there is not a sign of images nor paintings ; all such art is confined by this literary people to their written signs. Buddhism has covered China with both these products. All the statuary that so profusely adorns the national tombs, although largely of Confucian origin, is yet later than the introduc tion of Buddhism. The temples of this exuberant sym- bolism are crowded with figures of saints and hosts of pictures. The stirring industry of artisans and traders has been beset with serene Buddhas, countless as the stars, sit- ting in cross-legged remonstrance against all this toil and trouble for a world of dream. The sober sense of these busy realists is mocked by many-headed gods and colossal prayer-wheels turned with levers by ox-power ; ^ by huge pagodas hidden inside and out under countless repetitions of the human being renouncing his human functions ; ^ and by wooden carvings of saints with entrails of silver or skins of gold.^ Over against the busy marts and ancestral shrines of Canton rises the lofty island of Poo-to, covered with temples of Buddhist pilgrimage, and ascended by winding stairs that overlook a wilderness of beautiful monastic gardens.* Grotesque and horrible paintings of Buddhist penalties in the other world ape the courts of the secular mandarins. Rosaries, drums, paper drafts on heaven, transmigration indulgences sold by strolling priests, have come to exert fascinations on a people who have neither a church nor a class privileged to hold the keys of heaven and hell. The Grand Lama presented the Manchu Em- peror on his accession with a golden rosary, in token of » Bastian, p. 40. ^ Dool- H- 467 * Nevius, p. 93 ; Treaty Ports of China^ p. 160, * Fortune's Wanderings, p. 172 ; La Chine Ouverte, p. 149. 744 BELIEFS. the union of races under one sovereign ; and the mandarins themselves now wear the symbol of Buddhism as a part of their official dress. Nearly two thousand works have been translated from Its prolific the Sanscrit by Buddhist missionaries and native literature, gcholars siuce the beginning of the Christian era ; ^ while the list of native compositions, biographical, ethical, philosophical, and ritualistic, already known to Western students, counts up to hundreds of volumes ; all elaborately classified according to schools, with verbal keys and definitions. These great catalogues alone testify of a propagandism of unexampled ardor and success, yet in full accord with what we have already seen in other spheres of Buddhist energy. The canon in China is seven hundred times the amount of the New Testament.^ Hiouen Thsang's translation of the Prajni Paramit^ is twenty-five times as large as the whole Christian Bible. Beal enumerated, in a paper read before the Congress of Orientalists, in 1874, forty-seven (translations of) Sutras, and one hundred and twelve volumes. Wu-ti (6th century) is said to have col- lected a library of fifty-four hundred Buddhist works, and the amount of these translations was enormously greater than that of the Confucian classics.^ " It is an easy task," say the literati, " to read our Classics and philosophy, in comparison with the five or six thousand volumes concern- ing the doctrine of Buddhism." * But, after all, the extraordinary growth of this religion Laws of in China will be found to illustrate the same laws ReiiS™ °^ historical continuity, reaction, ideal demand and explain this supply, which accouut for the rise and progress of ^"™' ' all positive religions. • Beal, Budd. Pilgrims (xxxiii.), says this number had been translated as early as thi >wz dynasty in the sixth and seventh centuries. * Seal's Catena of Budd. Script., p. 2. • Schott, Chin. Lit.., p. 40. * Neumann, Fref. to Catechism of Shamans, COMING OF BUDDHISM. 745 I. We note, in the first place, that its introduction was by no means rapid. Centuries elapsed from the first .. asIow, arrival of its monks under convoy of trading cara- ^"'^ ""T vans from Kashmir and Nepal, before any progress secular aid. was made ; and its first important steps were effected by imperial aid.^ It made itself useful to kings by its powers of divination, even in their campaigns.^ Notwithstanding this, it worked slowly among the masses ; being bitterly opposed, as we should expect, by the followers of Confucius and Lao-tse.^ It was only after the wars of the Three Kingdoms in the fifth century that the root was fairly struck in the soil, though during all this time missionaries were constantly travelling back and forth between China and the Buddhist States to the West and South. II. In the next place, it was the practical part of Budd- hism that was first introduced into China ; the „ , , ' II. Itseth- part most in accordance with the traditional taste kaiside for simple ethics and for honoring great teachers, '"'f^^^gj. It was easy to gain access for one so famous as "s points Sakya-mouni for his advocacy of popular rights, ^ith™"'' into the pantheon of Chinese saints. The toler- neseprind- ance, forbearance, and mercy which inspired Budd- hist ethics, the call of its devoted preachers to self-discipline and mutual service, did but carry out ideals familiar to every youth in China, the burden of classics, schoolbooks, and domestic training. The first translation from the Sanscrit was " the Sutra of Forty-two Sections," * whose ethical character might readily enough present it The sutra as an outgrowth of native culture, intensified by an ^l°^_ ardent humanity hinting of fresh inspiration, like tions. Christianity in its rise out of Judaism. Its vow to "return ' Lassen, II. 1078-80. * As seen in the history of Buddhaguddi, a seer of great influence in the fourth cenbity. Lassen, II. 1082. ^ Lgs Ordres Reiig. de VEth^ Chifiois (par Bazin). ymtr. As. 1856, pp. (09, 110, ♦ Beal's Catena, p. 185 ; Budd. Pilpr. p. 22. 746 BELIEFS. evil with ungrudging love, the more good for the greater evil'" (c. 7); its noble definition o^ goodness, as "agree- ment of the will with the conscience" (c. 13); its "twenty difficult objects " to be pursued as virtues, all of them forms of ethical balance, of the " mean" as between ex- tremes, — such as " strength without rashness," " touching objects without setting heart on them," " success without exaltation," " knowledge and ability without lack of good- ness," " use of means without compromising principles ;" and its counsel to "keep the mind well-adjusted, so as to acquire reason " (c. 1 1, 33), — are all thoroughly in the Con- fucian spirit. Its pensive sense of universal impermanence is a natural feature of the Chinese poetic temperament, and its , contempt for class pretensions, as " dust motes and broken platters " (c. 42), is as familiar to native Chinese instincts as to Buddhist reform. Not only does this nobly ethical Sutra lay little stress on merely speculative grounds of belief, but it declares in almost the words of Confucius that discussions about heaven and earth, spirits and de- mons, are of infinitely less merit than doing one's duty to parents, who are verily divine (c. 10). Instead of the mystical Nirvina of the later schools, the end of endeavor is, " through purification of the heart " from falsehood and lust, " to rise to the paradise where reason and virtue constantly abide " (c. 14). The Puritanism of these beginnings is also recognizable The Gate- in the " Catcchism of the Modern Shamans," for chismbf ^ f monasteries ; whose rules embody the the Sha- ' ■' mans. permanent principles of the faith. It protests against ornaments, lewd songs, theatres, and sorcery, as well as all such games as chess and dice as leading to gambling and other forms of dissipation; all natural enough in a great people whose tastes peculiarly exposed them to such temptations.^ In the similar ethics of the ' Neumann's Translation, pp. 68-70. COMING OP BUDDHISM. 747 Dhammapadam, and of the " Four Verities," the kernel of the Buddhist creed, there is certainly nothing incon- The sistent with Chinese habits of thought, or unsuited I^tdW' to attract persons who desired to live thoughtful " f™"- and earnest lives in conformity with the national a"'"^^ ideal. In this work, Nirvdna is peace, purity, permanence, personal blessedness, and release. The burdens of change, disease, and death are announced to have their roots in ignorance, and to be subject to the mastership of the " Right Path." The simple Githas i of the Pritimoksha, which belongs to an age previous to Christianity,^ and contains the rules of conventual discipline at the earliest formation of the Buddhist Church, might easily have em- anated from any Chinese sage. " Patience and resigna- tion is the only road." " The mind made to see clearly can avoid the ills of life." " Without complaint or envy, re- straining appetite, cheerful, and fixed in virtue ever g ^_ advancing, is the doctrine of all the Buddhas."^ theticuse i-T-iT 1 1 r f -I /~^ r • ' • lOf Chinese Ine phraseology or older Contucianism is used books, freely in the Buddhist works, — such as Tao (right ^rms, and way), Shing-jin (perfect man), Shin (spirits of the dead).* The Classics themselves were freely accepted. Neumann had in his possession a Buddhist exposition of the Ta-hio and Chung-yung ; ^ and the Catechism itself ap- peals to the great examples of the ancient kings.^ The speculative kernel of all Buddhist ethics places virtue and wisdom in the " identity of opposites," and refers external phenomena to " the heart as the one essence, thus seeking the great deep of the Right Mean ; " "> while a very early translation from the Sanscrit describes Sakya as " realizing the truth of the Middle Path, hke the musician who tunes his strings to the medium point of tension." * The concen- • Rhymeii sentences interspersed in the text. ^ Seal's Catena^ pp. 7, i8q. • Ibid., pp. 158, 159. * Catechism of Shamans. ' Ibid. « Ibid., f. 68. ' Catena (from Jin-chau, 1573), pp.^ 26-28. • Ibid. p. 133. So the Siamese (tVheel 0/ Latv, p. 141). 748 BELIEFS. tration of the mind on the nature of things and their actual laws of birth and change, in place of explaining their origin from a creative will, is peculiarly Chinese.-^ So the infinity of reason and of the laws of the universe is as strongly stated in the Lunyu and in the Tao-te-king of Lao-tse as anywhere in Buddhism. It is true that a highly speculative Sutra (the Dasabhflmi) The was translated among the earliest ; but it was to v^'ide '■ obtain works of a simpler and more strictly ethical or specu- nature that Fa-hian travelled to India in the fourth doctrine, century.2 ^q^ (-jh eight hundred years after the cameiater. commencement of Buddhist missions did the mys- tical doctrines called " the Great Vehicle " begin to affect the character of the faith in China. In the sixth century, the twenty-eighth patriarch, Bodhidharma, exiled from India, brought this thoroughly Hindu system into China, intro- ducing at the same time ascetic practices familiar to the Hindus.^ It was hardly Chinese to sit for nine years with one's face to a wall.* But even in the wisdom of the " Great Its Chinese Vchiclc " there were elements to which the Chi- affinities. nese mind could readily attach itself, such as the identity of substance and phenomena, and the self -evolution of worlds. This, the doctrine of the Swabhavika, is now the most widely extended in the Buddhist schools of China. The impersonal theism of the Thibetan schools ® is, more- over, closely allied to the later forms of Confucian philos- ophy. It was not, however, till the eleventh and fifteenth centuries that any thing like a proper canon of speculative Buddhism was formed in China.^ Without entering further into these points at present, we may say with confidence that the religion of Sakya, as domesticated in China, was a form of incitement to humane and self-disciplined liv- * See Modern Buddhist^ pp. 47-51 ; 29, 32. • Budd- Pilgr.,^. 4. * See WassiUef, Le Bouddhisme^ pp. 35, 36. • Budd. PUgr.^ XXX. Amp&re, Science en Orient^ 117-131. • See Schlagintweit, Aa«i:A. Ak. d. WUs., Feb. 1864. • Eitel. COMING OF BUDDHISM. 749 ing, rather than to monastic institutions or speculative creeds.^ III. The literary industry of the Buddhist missionaries must have greatly conduced to their success, as jjj j^_ surpassing the natives in the very art which was dustryof in widest repute and use. These ardent toils must h^5t^"hoi- have powerfully counteracted their own anti-Chi- arsmd nese theory of the vanity of this life. To the ^'^^^ "^' wondering eyes of a wisdom-loving race they revealed an unknown world of literature, — vast, earnest, profoundly moral, and pointing on to restful heavens beyond earthly toils. Of the immense stock that rapidly accumulated, the vast majority of works were translations from the Sanscrit ; and but a handful were of native origin. But the labors of the missionaries were not in the cloisters so much as in the streets. They were preachers, rather than monks. Insti- tutions for those who wished to renounce the world hardly obtained foothold in China before the fifth century ; at which time they rapidly increased, and a hierarchy was developed.^ Even when monastic institutions had become numerous, they do not seem, as in Christian history, to have Monastic impeded the industry of the nation to any great institutions extent. In Western China and Thibet, the quiet totiie monasteries afforded a natural point of rest ; since ^^'^• their rules of seclusion required no change in the dreamy far-gazing passivity of the nomadic mind, but rather served to fix it in the definite channels which it lacked. In the wear of Chinese civilization they were in many obvious ways a relief ; nor is it probable that a larger proportion of the population has availed itself of the monastic or men- dicant life than would be naturally due to reaction from toilsome external routines towards an equally monotonous, ' That this was the case with the earliest forms of Buddhism in India and Kashmir, se« Vassilief, p. 6i. ^ Bazin, p. ii6. 7SO BELIEFS. but quite different kind of social mechanism.^ The pro- digious growth of monachism in an early stage of Chris- tianity was not a more natural reaction on the intense political and social absorption of the Roman world. IV. But before considering reactionary helps to the IV. Sym- Buddhist missions, we may note other adaptations pathies of in this rcHgion for Chinese life. The chief of these was its own all-embracing hospitality, — an affirma- tive spirit in remarkable contrast with the apparent nega- tion of its creed.^ Thus it readily associated itself with the traditional rites in honor of ancestors,^ and its sympa- thies admitted not only the historical ideals of China, but the kwei-shin, their invisible representatives, whom the patriarchal sentiment had identified with all the relations of life, both domestic and public. " The Kwei-Shin rever- ently attend the reading of Sanscrit (Buddhist) books," says Jin-chau in his account of the Buddhist Cosmos.'' They were gathered into the fold of this universal religion in China, as were the old Brahmanical gods in India. Its temples contain statues dedicated to the inventors of agri- culture, of fine arts, and of useful articles ; to departed phi- lanthropists, beloved officials, martyrs, literati, and sages.^ The stores of Tao-sse legends and popular superstitions, growing up for ages, were treated in the same manner; receiving expansion and systematic form from this con- structive force of Buddhist sympathy.® As the Chinese Its supply had not waited for Buddhism to set them upon nattre^e- pursuiug the sccrct of immortality, so their clear ments. sense of the continuity of cause and effect, and of the close connection between the visible and invisible worlds, was a natural pre-formation for Buddhism to work into its own better defined systems (i) of the Karma, oi ^ On the slow growth of monastic life iu China, see evidences in Wassilief. ' See the first volume of this work. * Chin. Ouverte, p. 242. * Translated in Beal's Catena, p. 23. » Chin. Ouverte, p. 153. • Saiin, p. 13* COMING OF BUDDHISM. 75 1 new body derived after death from the moral elements of the past life, and (2) of transmigration-spheres dependent' on like ethical necessities. Those sober ways of conceiv- ing the relations of man with an unseen world, which had prevailed in China for ages, were supplemented by the imaginative genius thus imported from India ; and, on the other hand, Buddhism so far accepted the politico-concrete tastes of the Chinese as to form its Inferno on the model of the penal codes, and its judgment days on the proceed- ings of the mandarin courts. Nothing like these phenom- ena is found in the Buddhism of other countries. We naturally ask how the transmigration faith of Budd- hism could have become reconciled with the tab- ReconcUe- let-home of the dead, and their continued depen- !"^!"°' ^ beliefs ap- dence on the personal support and sympathy which paremiy they received during life. But is this stranger than t°an°mi-' that popular Christianity should be able to combine gration the notion 6f purgatory, and even of heaven, with spirit-^ that sentiment concerning the abode of the spirit '^^'''• till the resurrection day, which, among other motives, draws surviving friends to frequent the place of the body's rest ? It simply shows how incapable the mass of minds are, in any religion, of reconciling reason and emo- tion on matters so inscrutable as the future state of being ; and how little difference there is, in this respect, between the naturalism of the pagan and the supposed enlighten- ment of the Christian by positive revelation. The promise of a happy transmigration was doubtless an . attraction, as offered by the early Buddhist teach- other at- ers. Redemption from the consequences of sin by features of counterbalancing good works based upon liberal Buddhism. conditions, the prospect of prayers in one's behalf and at one's tomb by a body of priests, and the fascinations of the Buddhist paradise, were all powerful inducements to accept the faith. 752 BELIEFS. The form under which Buddhism prevails in China is Changes really in many respects a distinctive product of tilntT'" ^^^ national type. It differs materially both from Chinese the Buddhism of India in earlier times, and from thought, ^jjg Thibetan, Ceylonese, and Siamese in later. It is found to have passed through internal changes in adapting itself to these special conditions, quite as great as those' which it introduced among the people it sought to transform. The worship of mortuary relics was exchanged for the rites of the s/im. The earthen charnel-house (stupd) gave way to the cheerful ancestral shrine. The concrete paradise of Amitabha was substituted for the Nirvana of speculative Buddhism, and large portions of the cosmical and geographical lore of the faith were based upon Chinese traditions. V. Buddhism derived great influence in China from its v A for '^^"^'^^'^^ organizing capacity. It gave point and oforgani- systcm to wcalc mythologic instincts, and lent the authority of association and hierarchy to the ascetic impulse. Thus it could not fail to be recruited from the Tao-sse. This " School of Reason " was a far greater re- action on Chinese habits of mutual dependence and com- bination than that of Fo ; so that those who had forsaken the living world at its call were all the more prepared to welcome a substitute for the social resources to which they had been used, in the unworldly constructiveness of Buddhism. The " Catechism of the Shamans " shows by its minute rules of obedience and etiquette how thor- oughly the monastic disciplines correspond with those- strong instincts of the Chinese mind, — reverence for pa- rental authority and social obeisance. The necessary sub- without stitutions are effected with as little disturbance as anceof possiblc of thosc attitudes of mind with which the previous happiest activity of the convert has been pre- viously connected. The vows of the novice are associa. tioQs. COMING OF BUDDHISM. 753 confined to familiar precepts of Chinese morality. The minute prescriptions laid down for his most ordi- TheCon- nary duties merely carry out the familiar teachinsc ™°'^»d r i JUT- 1 1 theFam- 01 home and school in a new sphere ; at the same iiy. time this new sphere, as involving a total change of dress and exclusion from intercourse with relatives, becomes that pronounced renunciation of the world which is re- quired. In this way the large class that desires to take a new departure without losing hold on constitutional in- stincts and cherished methods, and to live a life unspotted from the world without ceasing to be substantially Chinese, is skilfully met and satisfied. The completeness of the change is illustrated in the legends of Buddha, which show him adored by his own father, and justified by his merits in treating all his near kindred as he did the rest of mankind.^ Yet the convent is the image of the family. Its Superior possesses all the authority of the natural father whom he supersedes ; and the filial piety involved in those sacrifices to ancestors, which the Buddhist monk, though not the layman, must abandon, is simply transferred to him.^ As matter of fact, the habits of these Buddhist monks as described by travellers betray that they are still subject to the dispositions and tastes which they had before, entering the "holy life." The lazy, gluttonous, sensual, are not altered by the opportunity of spending their lives in chant- ing formulas and performing genuflections before images. Like all other religions. Buddhism opens doors to self-in- dulgence, and the extremest philosophy of self-abnegation and world-emptiness runs upon the verge of incontinence. VI. But the growth of Buddhism in China was fur- thered hy reactions against existing conditions, as vi. a force well as by their development. Whether the power °^ r=^'>™- of persecution to multiply the forces of a patient and ear- ' See Alabaster's Wheel of the Law, for such legends. ' Bazhi, pp. 161-163. 754 BELIEFS. nest faith like this can be numbered among these helps, is questionable. After all, there were but two great per- secutions of the sect ; and these involved proscription and secularization rather than martyrdom. They were not to be compared with the persecutions which gave such im- ^ ._^^^ pulse to the growth of the early Christian Church. Confucian Yet the inherent contempt of Confucian rational- contempt. j^^^ £qj. ^.j^g pricsthood must have tended to in- crease their repute among the ignorant and superstitious. An element of far greater value is the natural demand for release from routines of incessant toil and ab- Against . , • 1 . material sorption in material interests, into an atmosphere interests Qf mcditation, or at least of rest. The Chinese and rou- tines of were never without interest in the invisible; but '°''" the emphasis of Buddhism was on that side of things, and drew the mind to its mysteries as the daily food of thought. It was a complete relief from the tradi- tional concentration on the present life, — a reaction to ethical motives and sanctions derived from the future. The aim of the national teaching was to lift ethics Against upon purcly disinterested grounds. But that, even ethical in rationalist China, the mass of men should be from the content to follow virtue without regard to the present adjustment of earthly accounts by rewards and life only. * '' , . . , ,.r , penalties in another life was not to be expected. Buddhism waged constant dispute with Confucianism on this point. A centre of attraction was thus established for great numbers, who desired positive dogma and supernat- ural guarantee concerning questions which the philosophic mind was content to leave unsolved. We must add reactions of a political nature. The chief Secular resourcc of Buddhism in earlier, and perhaps in poiiUcT later, periods was the friendly interest of emperors. reactions. In all rcligious history the secular world, as em bodying the common sense and practical interests of the COMING OF BUDDHISM. 755 community, has been the natural support of protest, if not of reform. In tne present case imperial aid was largely due to jealousy of the literary class, which was a constant censor of the rulers, and the main obstacle to their martial enterprise. It maintained the supremacy of civil over mil- itary power, and by its peaceful precepts nullified many ambitious schemes, perhaps also many needed efforts at national defence. The wrath of Chi-hwang-ti, as we have seen, was but the explosion of these long-suppressed antag- onisms. Most of the services rendered to Buddhism in its efforts to supplant Confucianism, by monarchs of the Han, the T'ang, and the Youen dynasties, were more quiet and continuous forces in the same spirit. The exclusion of the community as a whole from per- forming the national rites has not only resulted in wide- spread associations for political revolution under the name of religion, but has produced, very naturally, a disposition to accept rites and mythologies of foreign origin to supply their place. Counteractive of such favoring influences from the State were the restrictions it imposed on ecclesiastical c^^^fg^. life. While admitting the Buddhists to free growth, active re- it assumed that direction over their institutions which belongs to its claim of fatherhood over all political and religious spheres. While the convents are permitted to administer their own affairs, no person, since the T'ang, has been allowed to enter the novitiate without a license ; nor can a monastery be founded except on similar terms. In 1309, a Youen emperor abolished the immunity of these institutions from taxation.^ The penalty for sorcery by a priest is two degrees more severe than for the same crime by a layman. VII. To all these explanations of the extension of Gau- ' Bazin, pp. is3i iS4 i i49' yS6 BELIEFS. tama's gospel in China we hasten to add those which are suggested by what it was in itself, and by what it had a VII. In- right to expect on the principles of universal re- tueTy' ligion. Its earnest effort to mitigate the burdens Buddhism, of life, to Counterbalance the sense of imperma- nence, to lead the consciousness of sinfulness and dishar- mony to trust in remedial laws and in final release ; its aim to interpret the inexorableness of natural cause and effect in the interest of ethical justice, and to reconcile it with spiritual ideals ; its philosophy of atonement through right- eousness alone ; its gospel of pity ; its call to absolute self-abnegation and eternal devotion to the good of man- kind ; its pure ethics ; its peaceful disciplines ; its ardor in constructive labors and civilizing arts, — are adequate to explain a great measure of success for any faith in any age or country. Not less attractive is its toleration for all beliefs which pursue the same end of human good, and that rejection of punishment for opinion's sake, which is so well illustrated in the dealing of Buddhist logic with Chris- tian missionaries. Says the " Modern Buddhist " : — " How can we join Christianity, when each party therein threatens us with hell if we agree with the other, and there is none to decide between them ? I beg comparison of this with the teaching of the Lord Buddha, that whoever endeavors to keep the commandments and walks virtuously must attain Heaven." i In view of these facts we must say, with entire respect Eitei's es- ^^^ ^^- Eitel, that his characterization of Buddhism timate. would be to US incomprehensible, did not his frank concessions prove his charges to be rather the indispensa- ble common-place of the Christian missionary than the con- clusions of his own better reason. A strange estimate it is. " No conscience, no God ; no active principle of good- ness." Yet it "prepares the way for Christianity, if we {t. e. Christians) had but half the enthusiasm («. e. for 1 Wheel of ike Law^ p. 33. DEVELOPMENT OF BUDDHISM. 757 our own convictions) which inspired those disciples of Buddha." ^ Could any thing more perfectly illustrate the fact, that the unconscious complacency of Christian dog- matism can never explain to us the feelings or the thought of other races ? THE DEVELOPMENT OF BUDDHISM. The enigma of Buddhist success in China, of which we have attempted a solution, involves the more gen- The pub- eral problem, — how to explain the prodigious b^^^^^j, power exercised by this faith over the destinies of expansion, mankind. In a previous volume I have endeavored to de- scribe its unequalled forces of expansion and persistence ; the wide aptitudes, by means of which it has civilized rude and isolated tribes on a vast scale, and over regions sepa- rated by at least half a hemisphere ; the attractions and affinities, which have made it the Nirvana,' into which hosts of human currents gladly flow. That a hideous worship of nonentity, such as most Chris- tian scholars have presented under the name of Buddhism, should be competent to such enduring theorythat command over the life of humanity would convict "^^Jship our respect for human nature of blindness and folly, of nonen- Can an anomaly cover a wider historic field than the rule, and yet not supplant it in our theory of humanity .-' Reason prescribes the conviction that great moving forces of mind must be affirmative in substance. Religion is aspiration to the Best. Morality is allegiance to Right. Philosophy is demonstration of the Real, as basis of cul- ture and conduct. These three affirmations form the three- fold aspect of man's ideal life. But here, it is pretended, is > Eitel's Buddhism, LecL I. 758 BELIEFS. a form of religion, philosophy, ethics, which denies every thing; which pursues the destruction of every germ and principle of existence, and treats right, truth, and good as empty phrase and sorrowful delusion, in common with all elements of perception and desire (sanskira). And this misnomer is the accepted faith of half the civilized world ; has been growing for two thousand five hundred years, and shows no signs of decay. Such an exception overthrows the rule of reason, and humanity becomes its own mockery and self-contradiction. Whether this is the true present- ment of Buddhism will further appear by a definite study of its development in the Chinese Empire. The Its quail- ^ ^ tytobe large historical and literary data brought within ite d^CTet ^^^ reach by recent researches are amply sufficient opment in to show whcthcr Buddhism is an exception to the "^ principles of Universal Religion, or really presumes the world and the soul to be, behind all contradictions, mutually related for good. These data have not hitherto, so far as I am aware, been used for such a purpose, nor in such large and important bearings.^ We must admit, at the outset, that the defect of Budd- Bearing of hism, as of all Oriental faiths, including Christi- science, or anity, is the want of that practical science which the lack of . . .11 t it, on the refers transient phenomena to universal laws of question of bgauty aud use, -^ — an element of modern civilization the unreal- ■' ity of phe- which has done more than any distinctive religion nomena. ^^ recoucile man to his inevitable relations with the finite, as real foothold and resource, and the indispen- sable path to his ideal. This distillation of inherent laws, wondrous enduring servants of human desire, from all transient experiences of life, has given a new measure for judging the question as to objective reality. While the ^ The inquiry is supplemental to the general review of Buddhism in my volume on India, and seems necessary to the comprehension of that variety of forms and adaptations which thit sympathetic &ith has assumed. PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM. 759 Eastern dreamer, estimating hearts and hopes and his other treasures of time by their relation to permanence alone, pronounced them . uftreal, the pupil of science, con- cerned with their value as elements of service to the whole sum of natural and spiritual laws, finds them real. The difference does not indicate different degrees of moral earnestness, nor different methods of reasoning ; but arises from the concentration of scientific thought on temporary- details and materials, through the practical energy of the Aryan race. If we bear this important consideration in mind, it will help not only to explain the seeming ^^^^ ^^^ anomaly of Buddhist negation, but also leave atoryof room for perceiving that capacity for meeting ^"'^*'™- spiritual and moral needs, which explains the power of this faith over races and ages. The meaning of Nirvdna does not lie on the surface, nor has it merely taught the emptiness of life and time. The realities of faith make light of current definitions. As cen- turies pass, the colossal Buddha of Japanese art sits un- moved on his pedestal, a divine benignity and wisdom in his majestic repose ; while the granite face of thundering Rameses, lord of all powers of conquest, who wrote his boasts of immortality on a thousand gigantic walls, lies broken in the desert sand. I. Primitive Buddhism. The sense of impermanence is one of the largest factors in the religious history of mankind. Ever-recurring . pangs of separation, involved in the mortality of all of religion beings, possessions, and ties, make life inherently a ^ '"j^ „£ tragedy, into which it is the function of religion, as imper- philosophy or as faith, to bring the reconciling ele- ment of freedom and self-respect. Upon its effort to affirm 1 solution of the dread problem, to forecast deliverance, to 760 BELIEFS. meet the fatal nay with some indubitable yea, depends the title of every system of belief to the interest of the student of religion. It is obvious that a philosophy which should know only how to deny what human experience has sup- plied to meet these demands, could never hold place in human regard beyond some passing hour of passion or despair. Equally improbable is it that man should cling for long periods and in great masses to a mere shell of faith, a weak religious cohesion pretending to give foothold over an acknowledged infinite void. So much enduring life will a religion command as it can show of power \.ofill the void, and so much only. Thus it is that the refinements In Chris- of civilized intercourse, by sharpening the edge of tianity. thcsc kccn fates of change and loss, prove the severest test of Christianity. The strong suspicion of its inability to meet the demand is of itself sufficient to pro- duce wide and growing defection from its name and com- munion. Its assurances of a personal Providence, and its theory of compensation and disciplinary love, it is affirmed, blink the facts of experience, offsetting their bitter realities by sentimental desires, instead of accepting and solving them. Still more damaging to its special claim in an age of earnest dealing with these facts, is all resort to ancient miracle and authority, since both expedients palpably evade In Budd- them. Whatever defects may be equally obvious hism. in Buddhism, it cannot be charged with ignoring or glossing this tremendous problem of pain ; nor with leaving out of its solution, such as it is, one fraction of the reality, howsoever mythology has idealized its founder. The Buddha of oldest traditions is a prince, who, perceiv- "^^ ing in the spectacle of disease, old age, and death Verities" the law of all existence, is moved by sympathy and of primi- pj^y ^Q accept the renunciation to which they point ; hism. and by thus trusting the law to the utmost limit PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM. 76I of its demand, to make it for himself and for all men a sure path of final release. This solution of the problem of all religion is, as I read them, the substance of the " Four Verities ; " in which all parties agree to find the type of early Buddhism, and which visibly run, "like gold in sand," through the whole subsequent development of the faith, moral, metaphysical, mystical, its subtlest mazes of logic and its endless cosmogonies, for two thousand years. What are these " Four Verities } " — Pain ; the Cause of Pain ; the Possibility of Release ; the Way of Re- Their ei<=- lease. The first two are understood as involved in "'*"'=°* positive all existence, by the law of cause and effect ; the belief, last two as resulting from the constitution of moral being. Observe what elements of positive belief are here. The impermanent world of possessions is renounced ; but only in the name of sure deliverance, to which suffering is itself the way. Each of the Four affirms either the knowledge of inherent facts and causes, or the knowledge of inherent powers to meet and overcome them. As the root of evil is in the nature of self-gratification, so its cure is in the mightier consciousness of duty. The facts men dread are recognized in full ; the inviolability of law is adored ; vic- tory is promised, adequate and real ; the struggle to reach it, and to share it with all mankind, is accepted as the work of life. Distinctive of Buddhism is its full ernphasis on the dark side of experience, as on a reality not to be set aside by miracle, providence, or compensation ; and its absorp- tion of every thought in the way of release measures alike its confidence in this release, and its realization of the bur- den which makes release a necessity. Its reliance on ethical law is absolute. The whole func- tion of life is moral. The creative forces of the xheir universe are moral results. An ideal virtue is the ™''^ ™'- standard of all human values, from which no ele- ment of universal love and justice is absent. Charity, self- 762 BELIEFS. restraint, forgiveness, return of good for evil, compassion, energy, patience, and the expulsion of selfish desire, are carried to an extreme which at least implies enthusiastic faith and profound sympathy. The early Gdthas ^ say : — " Scrupulously avoiding all wicked actions, reverently performing all virtuous ones, purifying the intention from all selfish ends, — this is the doctrine of all the Buddhas." " Destroy anger and there shall be rest." " Without complaint or envy ; joyous without care ; fixed and advancing ever in virtue." " As the butterfly sips the flower and departs without harming it, so the follower of Buddha hurts not another's goods ; observes not another's sins, but watches his own conduct lest he go wrong. So do ye, dis- ciples, seek not more than is needful, but be content with what is given." " " Waste no time, but think of the flre that consumes all things ; seek deliverance from it early, and give not way to sleep. Avoid worldly interests, divining future events, and courting the rich. Aim only at emancipation by self-control and right thought. Watch well the heart, for it is the ruler of the senses ; it is hke a wild elephant, like an ape that has got free into the branches. Let it not get the mastery. Let no word of reproach escape your lips ; one bitter thought is the loss of all your virtue. Unwavering self-restraint, untiring patience, are the marks cf greatness. These are the helmet of de- fence, so that no sword can harm you, and no foe subdue." ' This is the substance of all early Buddhist teaching ; of Early the Gathas, the Dhammapadam, the " Forty-two asimUar Sections " Sutra, and the Vinaya, or Disciplines, as character, sccn in the carliest form of the Pritimoksha ; * an intensely practical homily, and one of the most beautiful ever preached to men. The moral characteristic is so marked, that it has become the main test of the antiquity ' Short verses appended to the Sutras held to belong to primitive Buddhism, which for a long time was probably confined to oral teaching. ^ Catena, pp. 156-159 ; Wassilief, Le Bouddkisme, p. no. 3 Seal's Translation, read before the Oriental Congress (1874) ; from the Suira of *' Budtt ha's Dying Instruction." This Stitra is now believed by Mr. Beal to be the primitive fonn ol which the PrcUimoksha was an expansion for conventual purposes. * Wassilief, p. 100. PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM. 763 of Sutras whose date is not otherwise known. In further evidence that the dawn of speculative inquiry was later than this reliance on moral precept and effort, it can be stated that among the questions discussed in the earlier schools of Buddhism (the Hin&yand) was whether the chains of desire (sansdrd) could be escaped by morality alone.^ The initial aim was to transcend the evils of hfe and the transmigrations which were their endless repeti- , ^ Acceptancu tion, by practice of the Jiighest virtues under such of the best forms as they assume for contemplative ages and ^"aofgood races. The oldest name of its disciples was se"seinthe Sramanas? analogous to the Hebrew Chasidim p'"™'' and the English Puritans. Their rejection of the world was strongly tempered by practical reason. Their criterion of virtue, as laid down from the beginning, even declared that whatever is in accord with good sense applied to cir- cumstances is in accord with right.^ In fact, Buddhism, in its protest against Brahmanism, retained the best of ex- isting customs and beliefs. Not only is the whole Legend of the Buddha, with its personal symbolism, found to re- produce with surprising fidelity the old solar mythology of the Vedas, the imagery of Agni, of Vishnu, and Purusha ; * it endows them with a profound moral and human mean- ing. The doctrine of Sakya inherits the thirst of early Hindu philosophy for the permanent, and its faith in the powers of contemplation and inward purification. It de- velops Kipila's idea of the independence of the soul, and of the illusoriness of an outside Iswdra, or Lord. Sakya him- self, while asserting revelation and authority, is yet but one of an endless series of teachers, all proclaiming the same tidings, — the eternal truth of Nature, which never was, and never will be, unspoken. He is called Tathagata, or one who comes like those before him. He is a man like the • Wassilief, p. 100. ^ Ibid., p. 83. = Ibid., p. 19. • See the remarkable work of Senart, La. Ligende du Buddha, Paris, 1875. 764 BELIEFS. millions around him (at least in the outset), and affirms only what is human and universal. The claim of respecting good sense and rational uses Humani- was not altogether unfounded. Buddha renounced ''^=- self-torture and squalidity, and called the devotee out of his isolation into communities bound by common labors and disciplines, and by a purpose to deliver all man- kind from sorrow and sin : preaching openly to the people and affording them the opportunity of alms-giving and ser- vice to the law. He gave public meaning to the religious life, and made it an educational force (element). He ig- nored its previous form of caste, and announced it as man's freehold without distinction of persons. At a very early period women were admitted freely to the chief functions of public help and private culture.^ It has been shown by Benfey ^ that the Buddhists have circuia- been the principal circulators of Eastern apologues "°"°' and popular tales over the continent of Asia, con- apologues ^ ^ . ' and tales, tributing very largely to the stock of the Western nations in this kind of literature, so essentially the lan- guage of common sense and genial observation. Of the distinctively Buddhist form of these Fables, the beautiful sentiment is not more impressive than their keen wit and practical wisdom. This primitive acknowledgment of the claims of good Practical scnse is the germ of other practical services with services, -^yjjif^jj history must accredit the Buddhists : as the first of the Hindus to use written signs for literary pur- poses ; ^ as the earliest popular preachers ; as creators of ' The Nepalese Scriptures contain legends of the Buddhist contempt of Brahmanic vice> and of ' caste-pretensions, worthy of the highest civilization (Burnouf, Buddhisme Indieii^ p. 186). Everywhere Buddhism has abolished a priestly caste. In Ceylon caste coexists with other forms of social order, the state admitting all these on equal terms. ^ See his Analysis of the Panchatantra. • The first mention of written literature in Hindu history is the record of a Buddhist king, contemporary with Asoka, who used it to provide copies of works for the preachers. Wassi- lief, p. 47 ; note from Daranatha's Thib. Hist, of Buddhism. PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM. 765 the drama and tale in India ; as introducers of alphabets into Corea and Japan ; and as the organizers of social life in Central Asia. In their early schools we discern the seeds of that intel- lectual culture of which they have been the parents. Germs of It is ever the open, not the closed or dreaming, eye Jy^fc^^. that these sympathetic workers trust. It is by in- ture. telligence only that the Buddha (awakened one) lives and conquers and saves ; it is by intelligence alone that the " path " is seen. All interests in life are to give way to the mental effort to withdraw the faculties from the dominiqn of pain and decay. They must be fixed in contemplation (dhy- and) till that illumination comes which is called "prajnd;" " making the sight of the eye needless ; a lamp in dark- ness ; medicine for all suffering ; a safe boat to cross the sea of old age, disease, and death." ^ '' All that we are is the result of what we have thought. Reflection is the path of immortality, thoughtlessness the path of death. Let the wise man guard his thoughts. Of those who are freed by knowledge of the truth, the tempter never finds the way. Than a hundred years spent without insight the life of one day is better, if a man sees begin- ning and end." " The best of men is he who has eyes to see." ^ The philosophy of Pain was not yet developed into the " Twelve Niddnas," a metaphysical catena tracing the pro- cess of its production in detail ; still less, into the doctrine of illusio7i as involved in the relation of consciousness to its objects : a result of one of the most subtle and refined discussions in the history of thought.^ But the first term of all this speculation was already there in the doctrine ihat ignorance (avidhyd) is the root of evil, and that the soul can reach a science that utterly dissipates its gloom. The chain of causal sequence is felt in all its pressure, * Sutra of Dying Instruction- * Dkammapad&.t T. 21, 36, 57, 113, 273. ' See Wassilief, 310-324. •^66 BELIEFS. though not analyzed into its interlocking links of destiny, Yet the " path " through it is seen at the same moment, and the Promethean light of love and duty points forward to release. Practically, morally, ideally, intellectually, then, early Buddhism contained more positive than negative elements ; and we now add that in its treatment of the spiritual laws and demands its tone was equally affirmative. It is a disputed question whether the desire of annihila- Theidea ^«^« helongs prc-emiuently to the eariiest schools.^ of Nirva-' Xhe Buddhists, as feeling so intensely the miseries undevd- of existence, would naturally be more engrossed by oped. tjjg immediate method of release than by the study of man's ultimate destiny. The logical consequence of their theory of renunciation would hardly be traced out to an absolute principle, nor in its relation to every form of existence, until it had become familiar by time. The oppo- site opinion seems to be based on an etymology of Nir- vana as the favorite expression of primitive Buddhism, for which I am unable to find any ground in those Sutras which are admitted to be of early date. The meaning of Nirvina has been fully discussed in a previous part of this work.''' It may be added that "no more waving (as of wind) " obviously does not mean absolute extinction ; and, even when illustrated by the going out of a taper by ex- haustion, might as readily refer to the passions and attach- ments, which were held to be the grounds of pain, as to existence itself. Speculations on unreality and " the void," which come nearest to the logical argument for extinc- tion of being, belong to the later metaphysical schools of the Abhidhirma, not to the early Sutras nor to the Vinaya. It is indeed possible that vague desires of escaping per 1 WassUief asserts that it does, p. 93. " Oriintal Religions, India, B. III. ch. iii. PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM. 767 sonal consciousness may have attended the first , . -^ Instinctive keen sense of the iippermanence of all its con- desire of tents, of the decay and death of whatsoever made TdlvidL it most dear, yet without any definite idea of conscious- what should succeed it. The experience is a natural one, and even as harsher reaction far from uncommon. " Cursed be the day in which my mother begat me," cries Job in his despair. One who throws up all chances for the ' present may seem to himself to surrender the whole future also, while in fact he does not do so. Judged by the keen- ness of the Aryan and Shemitic sense of personal identity, Buddhist rejection of definite thought and desire would be equivalent to a cry for annihilation, and as such Burnouf and others do not hesitate to regard it.^ That a fair inter- pretation of Oriental consciousness does not require such inference may be illustrated by the fact that karma (that organized moral result of life which alone remains after death in the transitions of transmigration) is positively declared to be not the same soul, but a new person ; while, notwithstanding, the change is dreaded or desired as if for the same person, and Buddhist works are full of legends and discourses by saints relating to their own previous lives. In these cases annihilation, however strongly as- serted or implied, is evidently apparent only ; at least in our sense of the word. In all the earlier treatises, and most of the later. Nir- vana is described in cordial and endearing forms of .^.^^^^^ speech,^ and a vivid imagination expends itself in asaposi- enumerating its joys. All nations have associated o^exit™ destruction with darkness ; but Nirvana is always enceand illumination. It is even immortality.^ ^°^' * Lotus of the Good Law, ' See extracts from the Dhammapad&m in the author's chapter on NirvSna {India, as above). ^ Buddhagosha, the great Buddhist commentator, translates Amrita, the nectar of im- mortality, by the word NirvSna (Mullet's Dhammap., p. 63). This is the element of early Buddhism, which Hardwick (n., 95) considers "cold, dreary, and abstract." 768 BELIEFS. The whole struggle of Buddhism was to escape the un- real ; and this is of itself the strongest possible confession of belief in a real. The steady movement by which the conception of Nirvana became more and more distinctly positive, till it ended in the clear assertion of Nagasfina, " Great King, Nirvina is," ^ sufficiently indicates its tend- encies. Ma-touan-lin says the Buddhists and Tao-sse mean by nihility " undisturbed repose, stillness, and peace." ^ " In what," asks a recent writer, " could the reform of In what Buddha have consisted if not in affirming annihila- refom*'' tion, since all the rest had been proclaimed before consisted, him by Kdpila and the Brahmans ? " ^ I reply : In a reformation of the spirit and the moral sense ; in a protest against isolation, asceticism, worship of an outside Creator and Lord ; and, in a far keener sense than earlier creeds, of the miseries involved in definite experiences, which is an- other thing from definite desire of utter extinction for all forms of being.* It is impossible to reconcile the Buddhist descriptions of NirvSna Nirvi,na until we bring in view the pantheistic idea explained ^^^^ which they start, of the identity of the essen- from pan- ^ ' •' theism. tial soul in every person with the eternal and infin- ite. The ground of personal destructibility is always rep- resented as referable to the law, that whatever is composite may and must be dissolved. All arguments for " extinc- tion " proceed from this premise, which implies the demand for somewhat simple, and so eternal, as the true life. Every conceivable form must perish, leaving a " void," which is Nirvana ; but this very void, if for no other reason than that all results of composition are got rid of, must be that reality which in its essence the soul con- ' PraJK& ParamiiA. ' Neumann, Caiech. Sham., p. 40. * Carre, V Ancien Orient, 11., p. 223. ♦ Wurm IJndisch. Relig., p. 169) insists on a triple NirvSna, " simple, complete, and great complete," to the first of which Carre thinks Obry is confined. But this solution of the whole liistory of the word does not touch our position relative to the early forms of Buddhism. PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM. 769 fessedly is. This view is guaranteed in the fact that Nirvana is called the highest science, the result of profound meditation ; since otherwise, 'the very product of the soul would thus be supposed capable of destroying it, — a notion too absurd to ascribe to a mind like Sakya's, and a hundred generations of his followers. Nothing can be more explicit than some of the more elaborate Sutras, to the effect that the soul, instead of being reduced to nothing by Nirvana, becomes the substance of every thing. " Illustrious disciple, whatever male or female disciple of mine is able to realize the impermanence of the five skandkas (organized elements of mind and body), he or she has arrived at the condition of permanence. Because Tathdgata has entirely got rid of the subjects of impermanence composing the body, therefore his body is permanent, and therefore boundless'' ^ "The Modern Buddhist" naturally observes: "If we were to believe that death is annihilation, we should p^ « -^^^ be at a loss to account for the existence of man. ^™ Bud- 'All of you,' says Buddha, 'who are in doubt immon^- whether there is a future life, had better believe ''y- there is one ; you will then abandon sin and act virtuously, and if there should be no result, such a life will bring a good name and the regard of men.' " ^ A questionable form of reasoning it may be, but clear evidence enough of the animus of the faith,^ especially in its earliest epochs. Further evidences of the spiritual negativity of early Buddhism have been drawn from its rejection of other de- an Iswara (Lord) ; from its reduction of Brahma memsof If. T T • r /- . • early Bud- tne supreme to the conditions of finite existence ; ahism from its denials of a creation or end of the world, ^^ng'y supposed and of a personal First Cause. But these negations "merene- were simply the reverse side of an intense positive g^"™=-" » Parinirv&na Sutra (Beal's Catena, pp. 175, 184). Also Bastian, Verkettuug d. Buddh. (ZeiUch. d. D. M G., XXIX. 73) who calls NirvSna the "existence of the thing-iii. itself." 2 fVkeel of the Law, pp. 41, 42- ' See also the Sttraftgavta Sutra, in Beal's Catena. 49 770 BELIEFS. realization of the cosmical facts and laws as valid in them- selves, — and of the impossibility of reaching a beginning or end in an infinite series of tycles, whose whole meaning is as completely centred in the present moment as in any previous point. It is an error to suppose that such denials are irreligious or unspiritual, merely because they refuse worship to an individual God separate from the universe of soul and sense. Whatsoever of intimacy, guidance, or help, apart from intervention by miracle or caprice, can be expressed by the term Fatherhood, is in substance realiza- ble in terms of Universal Law in proportion as we learn those essential relations of world-order, of which " love " and " wisdom " are but the human and finite expression. Hav- ing this sense of the benignity of world-order as a whole, did the Buddhist need to go behind it.? Of what value would it be to ascribe these to an Iswdra, or outside Provi- Noneed dence, if they are already held to be involved in the °j™ ^ nature of the world itself which He is supposed to (Lord). govern .' And they must be so if they exist at all. The sense of the Infinite is not lost in the Buddhist " nega- tion," but referred to inherent forces instead of fortuitous and external ones. That sense has never been more thoroughly brought into play than in the numerical con- structions of Buddhism, — whether its innumerable worlds of natural development, or its series of Buddhas without beginning or end. The moral order {karma} is conceived as penetrating all The Moral worlds and beings, sole • survivor of world-collapse. Law of the the breath that stirs in the void with new creative ^™^' power proceeding from the highest heavens of virtue (dhyanas), where it survives all change, adequate for ever to clothe living souls in bodies like the sun, and to serve as seed of coming evolutions.^ This ethical sover- eignty is the central idea of Buddhist cosmogony, and it is ^ See Beal's Catena, pp. io6, 107 ; Wurm's Gesck, d. Ind. Relig., p. 163. PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM. 77 1 developed from the intense moral instinct which consti- tuted the primitive germ of the faith. Neither priestly caste, nor exclusive church, nor sacrificial rite, nor per- sonal prayer, nor vicarious atonement for sin, com- simplicity plicated the simple and earnest reformation, whose ofp"™- appeal for all that these things are elsewhere sup- hist ap- posed to bring was made purely to man's own pri- p'^'' vate endeavor to put inward right in place of moral wrong, — the noble nature against the mean ; and to the service, not of a mediator or redeemer,^ but of men who come ever as the hour needs, and who work not by substitution, but by teaching and example, and by the inherent forces and tendencies of nature to good beyond evil. Such is a brief summary of the positive elements which relieve primitive Buddhism — if we may use the term to express the earlier forms of this movement — from the charge of feeding man on the wind of negation and despair. The Sutra of the Forty-two Sections,^ already noticed as translated into Chinese as early as the first Extracts century, though here and there showing signs of "F^rty- later elaboration, yet fairly illustrates the character '"° sec- •^ . tions" of the period now under review. Sutra. " Buddha thought within himself : ' The extinction of desire is he real self-conquest. To be fixed in spiritual contemplation is to conquer the power of evil.' " Buddha said : ' A day's meditation is blessedness. Let one look on heaven and earth, and think, These shall pass away, and the mind becomes at once illumined. Weary not of meditation. Bodily elements are but as names ; what we call self is but a passing guest ; its concerns are like the mirage. As the fragrance of incense con- sumes itself, so with the search for carnal desires and the repentance • Wuim (p. 156) wrongly describes Buddha as a " Mediator," in the exclusive personal sense. ' Seal's Caiem 772 BELIEFS. that follows it. The rude grasp after wealth is like a child's eating honey with a knife. With the first taste of sweetness comes the pain of wounds. Lust and desire are like running with a torch against the wind, which blows back the flame to burn the hand of the holder. True religion is like bringing a lighted torch into a dark house, — the darkness is ended, and all is bright. How great the light of truth ! ' " Lust and desire are like a vase of foul water, where one has placed beautiful things, which the muddiness hides from sight. Once purify the heart, and we behold the spiritual part which we had from the beginning, though involved in the nature of life and death ; then mount we to the blessed land of the Buddhas, where virtue and wisdom abide for ever. Lust and desire bring sorrow, and S?en a guilty fear. "Ten things are evil: murder, theft, lust, are evils of the body; evasion, slander, lying, flattery, of the speech ; envy, anger, delusion, of the thought. Thou must not kill, nor steal, nor commit adultery, nor lie, nor be drunken. Avoid dancing, theatres, high seats, covet- ousness, costly dresses, and perfumes. " A religious man has his griefs as well as an irreligious one. What is goodness ? It zs, above' all thiftgs, agreement of the will with the conscience. Who is the great man ? He who has most patience in bearing injury, and who maintains a blameless life. Who is he that deserves veneration ? He whose heart is pure and calm, and in all things wise, even in future things : he is in the light. •'A man sat on knives to appease his lusts. Buddha said : 'Though ' you mutilate yourjelf to escape the outward cause, it is not to be com- pared with destroying the evil inclination. The heart is the busy con- triver of these lusts. Even as this deluded man, do most men think.' " When thou givest alms (to the saint), do so from the motive of religious duty, and to advance the cause of righteousness. To feed crowds is not to be compared with feeding one good man. It is in- finitely better than attending to questions about heaven and earth, demons and spirits. All these are not to be compared to the duties we owe our parents. " There are twenty difficult things : To be poor, yet charitable ; to be rich, yet religious ; to escape destiny ; to see the words of Buddha ; to be born when a Buddha is in the world ; to repress lust ; to see an agreeable thing and not desire it ; to be strong and not rash ; to be in- sulted and not angry ; to live in contact with the world, yet without desiring to possess it ; to investigate things to the bottom ; not to despise the ignorant ; to root out self-complacency ; to be learned and yet good ; to look at the hidden principle behind professions ; to attain and not be exalted ; to use means wisely ; to save men by PRIMITIVE BUDDHISM. 773 changing their hearts ; to be the same in heart and life ; to avoid dispute. "The more evil done me by another, the more good shall go from me to him : the fragrance is for me ; the harm of the slander will fall on the offender. " One who obeys principle is like a single warrior who is opposed to ten thousand ; who wins the victory, even when he falls, being brought home to his own country. " He who is guilty of a crime without repentance will as surely return in bodily shape (after death), as water returns to the sea ; as the shadow follows the substance, so misery follows sin : but if he purify himself of evil ways, he shall, after penalty, attain the supreme Way. " He is a true Sramana, who leaves all for religion, penetrates to the secrets of his own heart, and reveals in himself the law which knows no selfish thought. " I regard the dignity of kings as motes in the sunbeam ; gold and jewels as broken platters ; silken dresses as silk rags ; millions of worlds as the earth alone ; and the four great rivers as the mire beneath my feet. The forms of religion are but rafts to bear over the treasure. To long for Nirvana is as watching by day and night." I add extracts from the Ktidddka-Pdtka, a Ceylonese Sutra of great reputation, and very ancient, as promthe appears from its preceding the Dhammapad^m in Kuddaka the Pali Scriptures : — " To serve wise men and not foolish ; to give honor to whom honor is due ; to dwell in a pleasant land ; to have done The good deeds in a previous existence ; to be filled with right Blessing, desires ; to succor father and mother; to cherish wife and child; to follow a peaceful calling ; to cease from sin ; to be diligent in good deeds, temperance, and chastity ; discernment of the Four Truths ; the prospect of Nirvina ; the soul of one unshaken by the changes of this life, inaccessible to sorrow, passionless, secure ; — these are the greatest blessings. They that do these things are invincible on every side ; on every side they walk in safety ; yea, theirs is the greatest blessing." " There is a treasure laid up in the heart, a treasure of charity, piety, temperance, soberness. It is found in the sacred shrine. The Trea: in the priestly assembly, in the individual man, in the stran- sure. 774 BELIEFS. ger and sojourner, in the father, the mother, the elder brother: a treasure impregnable, that cannot pass away. When a man leaves the fleeting world, this he takes with him beyond death. Let the wise man practise virtue that follows him after death ; treasure that gives delight to gods and men. Grace and beauty, pleasure and pomp, all these it can procure ; all prosperity, all pleasure, the full attainment of Nirvana, supreme Buhddahood, — all these it can procure. IX. " Let one who has gained knowledge of the tranquillity of The holy Nirvana be diligent, upright, conscientious, gentle, not vain- ^^ glorious ; contented and cheerful, not oppressed with cares, not burdened with riches, not arrogant, not greedy for gifts. Let him not do any mean action, for which others might reprove him. Let all creatures be of joyful mind, whether seen or unseen, far or near. Let no man deceive another ; nor, from anger, even wish ill to his neighbor. " As a mother, as long as she lives, watches over her only child, so among all beings let boundless good-will prevail, unmixed with enmity, throughout the world. If a man be of this mind, so long as he be awake, standing or walking, sitting or l)dng, — then is come to pass the saying, ' This is the place of holiness.' " II. The HinAyana School. The moral ardor of primitive Buddhism was seconded Second by an equally earnest metaphysic. The " Four B^dUsm. Verities " were bound together in a chain of The logical causation known as the Twelve Nidanas, Nidanas. which are regarded as marking the second stage of the movement. In these, without attempt to solve the problem of ultimate cause, with which Buddhism has nothing to do, impermanence is treated as the existing fact, and its conditions in the consciousness traced as a process of evolution, in order to remove it by dealing directly with its inmost root and ground. In sub- stance, things are what mind makes them ; and as their evil is thought into being, so it can be thought away : thus fate can be turned to freedom, and pain to peace. THE HINAYANA. 775 Death is the necessary result of birth ; and birth rests on the deeper fact of definite existence as such, a logical But this again depends on attachment, desire, con- <:hain tact with senses ; whose basis, as name and form, is in the conscious apprehension. Thus we are referred to the character of mental conceptions, the root of which is illu- sion, or ignorance. To realize that mental illusion is the evil to be removed, is to recognize that pursuit of true knowledge by study of thought as an essence is the way to remove it. And the grand conclusion follows, that med- itation on truth shall attain truth ; delivering man from the whole chain of causes on which impermanence depends, both in the present life and in the transmigrations that grow out of it, and bringing the ever-recurring cycles of pain to an end.^ Without dwelling minutely on the links in this logical chain, or attempting to define subtle dis- tinctions in the meaning of terms, which are the more obscure from the difficulty we have in entering into Ori- ental experience, we may notice especially two things. The first is, that the whole series relates to essential mean- ings, not to outward phenomena ; that " desire," as dealing a niddna, is not a special form of wish, but the ™'"'™^'^- ^ ^ ^ ^ physical attraction of mind itself to definite objects ; that causes " apprehension " is not a kind of thought, but thought itself considered as perception ; that " illusion " is not such spe- cial fancy as that the long cloud-lines of the evening sky are islands in a distant sea, and the shining crescent in its depths is a sailing ship, but a necessity involved in the con- sciousness of objects considered as external to the mind. And the second thing we notice is, that the substance of all this abstraction is positive. He who would ^ and posi- abolish the illusion of ignorance must be pursuing tive reaii- .•tnowledge, as he who is trying to escape blindness "°^' ' See Burnouf ; Intr. a VHist. du Boudd. IndUn, pp. 432-451 (Biblioth. Orienl ed.). Foucaux's Lalita-Vistara^ p. 531; Lassen; Koeppen ; Wurm, Gesch. d^ Ind. Rel., p. 203 J Wheel 0/ the Law ; Spence Hardy. •J^6 BELIEFS. is really trying to see. The very existence of the niddna chain is the guarantee that what Buddhism sought was reality and freedom. It followed up its conviction of the end to be pursued by searching out the philosophy of experience on of trans- which the movement must proceed. In the same Th^'Five "i^iiner, it formulized the grounds of transmigra- skand- tion by its " five skandhas" — attributes of individ- ual being, in which consciousness and its illusory self-projection in emotions and desires are presented as the conditions of sensation, perception, and form. Thus are provided elements of discussion as to whether the ego exists distinct from these skandhas, or is made up of them and shares their illusoriness and their transience. How- ever destructive of definite form, here is at least a meta- physical process which pursues recognized facts and forms into their subtlest relations. Mind is affirmed the sub- stance of things, and ignorance and delusion are renounced as the soul of evil. A similar passage from the moral to the metaphysical formed the second stage of Christianity. In both Similar . . . .... • ij: transition cascs wc sce the religious instmct justiiymg itseii moraHo ^y seeking a positive basis in the laws of human theraeta- naturc and experience. Buddhism was meant to fifeariy ^^' ^^^^ a mere attraction to given ends, but also a Christian- philosophy ; and every step insists on a universal "''' principle as the motive to integrity, study, and growth. The intense realization with which it grasps the facts of sorrow and death makes this philosophy more than a piece of metaphysical construction. It is earnest, heroic, tragical. The philosophical element, inherited like so many others Phiio. from Brahmanism, was vigorous in the early stages sophicai of Buddhist reform. It is even claimed by be- eLTy^° lievers that all the three Pitdkas, or Caskets of Buddhism, the Faith, — Sutras (precepts), Vindya (discipline) THE HINAYANA. ']'J1 and Abhidhirma (speculative doctrine), — were already ex- tant at the death of Buddha, and canonically recognized at the First Council, held at that time.^ However incredible this statement, there is no dispute among them as to the fact that eighteen schools were represented at the Second Council only a hundred years after the death of the teacher. Less speculative than those which succeeded them, they were called by the latter Hindyana Dates of (smaller conveyance). But at the grand Kashmi- ">= ='=''°"'^- rian Council, held by the Indo-Scythian King Kanishka, about 40 B. c, the schools of the MaMyana (larger con- veyance) are found fully organized ; and all the sects are reconciled in the universality of Sakya's principles and aims.^ What were the Hinayana schools 1 We hear of but one great dispute concerning discipline.^ It grew out^j^^,,^.^ of a desire to relax the stringent rules against ayana" eating, drinking, and living after the ways of the world, and to show leniency towards weaker brethren.* The result — as in the Christian Church on the analogous ques- tion of eating meat offered to idols, and receiving the uncir- cumcised — was a serious schism. Like Peter and Paul at Jerusalem, the old Buddhists and the new were apparently reconciled at Asoka's Council (Third), in the third century after Buddha. Nor did the Hihiyana schools concern themselves about the authority of special discourses,, although for centuries * See Wurm, p. 142. ^ Wassilief, p. 77. Eitel, whose drift is towards ascribing Buddliist achievements to Chris- tian forerunners, spealts of the canon of Kanishka's Council as a few books of uncertain extent. But Matouanlin gives a long list of books and priests as arriving from India in early times, and the most important Hinayana works had been translated into Chinese in the first century. (Wylie, p. 164.) Eighteen missionaries were sent to China in Asoka's time, !5o B.C. The Kashmir Council was called for the express purpose of legitimating the Mah- »yana doctrine of Nagtrjuna, whom all tradition pla:»s as early as two centuries B. u. Sne Wassil., pp. 31, 32. ^ Wassil., p. 17. • Pallad. Arb. d. Russ. GeselUch. zu Pfking, II. 183. TJZ BELTEFS. all Sutras ascribed to Buddha must have been preserved in the memory alone.^ Not the reception, but the interpreta- tion, of Sutras was the main point of discussion ; the doc- trine to be based on thera.^ Whether the chief speculative compositions date before Asoka or not, their main tenden- cies were in full career at his council, — which was the Nicaean of Buddhism, — and definitely settled its canon.^ This rapidity of speculative development is interesting, as showing the depth and strength of the moral current ; which carried the intellectual along with it. The Hiniyana schools applied Buddha's principles (i) to questions relating to his earthly life, — whether points of this was humanly actual and natural ; whether his discussion. j ■ , . i 2.1 j. i • words were or were not inherently true and savmg, even where they appeared contradictory, and whether his person was to be numbered with those of his followers ; (2) to scholastic analyses of the elements of experience, which had to be crucially tested and distributed into numerous formulas according to their fitness to be accepted or rejected,* of stages in the renunciative process and the organs and forces to be employed therein, and of the pre- cise relations of the Arhats (higher saints) to human weak- nesses, doubts, progress ; (3) to the pregnant questions, whether the chains of existence can be escaped by morality alone, and what are the nature and limits of contemplation ; and from these they plunged (4) into problems of ontology, of real and unreal, not now in the sense of value but of essential truth and falsity ; such as whether matter and time are real ; whether there is an external world, and whether it be composed of atoms ; whether there is a life beyond the dissolution of the skandhas (elements of visible * The first signs of the use of writing for the purpose are in the time of Paniiii, thiro century b. c (Wassil., pp. 26-47). « Ibid., p. 61. ^ Lassen, II. 458 ; Kceppen, I. 185 ; Bumouf, 521. * These rejected elements are supposed by Wassilief to be the Four Verities. (?) THE HINAYANA. 779 individuality) ; and even whether the ego itself has a real and positive being.^ The results of these speculations were of course largely negative, as regards the productive values of life in ^ffinnarive our sense of the words; but striliingly affirmative andnega- in the emphasis laid by their earnestness, logical '™"^'' ^" energy, and rich resources on those very faculties which they are supposed to have denied and sought to destroy ; and in their bearing, not on abstract thinking alone, but on matters of heart and conscience, and religious aim. Some of these old Abhidharma treatises expound " wisdom ; " others dialectic, terminology, dogmatics, religion. The Agaikas of these busy schools, like the Hagada of the Talmudists, enter into full illustrations of morality, logic, metaphysic, by abundant mythology and verse.^ In the mean time the Buddha-life becomes Buddhaship, deriving a certain exclusiveness from these Intel- Formation lectual ideals. The number of Buddhas is limited °^ ^,^"' sonal my- to seven, and the biographical legend is shaped on thoiogy. a prescribed mythic model ; a kind of Messianic idea. The Vaibishika and Sutrantika schools, the two main divisions of the (Kashmirian) Hiniyana,^ differed on Realistic the relation of the mind to the world ; the former j™;^' ° holding perception to be immediate, the latter schools, mediate ; * the former recognizing reality both in the abso- lute and in the individual, and holding the uncompounded as eternal, while the latter laid special emphasis on the idea that the form of " knowledge " is imposed on things by the mind. The one regarded Buddha's body as that of a common mortal ; the other maintained the equality of Buddhas in dignity ; and had also a foregleam of modern ' This series of HinSyana questions is carefully condensed from Wassilief, who has given the only trustworthy summary we possess. ^ See espet.ially translation given in Wassil., pp. loq, 117. • Wurm, p. 201. ' Wassil., p. 40. 780 BELIEFS. science, in an earlier theory of rrionads, or atoms not in contact.^ Far from defeating the practical exhortations to follow Practical good sensc and right use of circumstances with ^oithe^T-^ which they were at first associated, these specu- gument. lations, however ominous of negation, seemed to lend more energy to the opposite pole of interest in the concerns of this world. The land rang with debates ; and these intellectual tourneys in India involved the stake of doctrinal confession and even of life, one or the other of which had to be surrendered as the penalty of defeat.^ What an earnest business was argument in that world of dreams ! There is a legend of a scholar, who every, day composed a gdtha containing the substance of that day's teaching, wrote it on a copper tablet, and sent it forth on the head of a wild elephant, challenging by drum-head all the world to dispute its doctrine ; and who thus composed six hundred Abidharma verses. Such faith in discussions held itself open to accept all new opinions which com- mended themselves to the sense of truth. At the Council of Vai9ali, the thesis was offered that the only exclusive doctrine of Buddha was that which did not contradict reason.^ Monastic life gathered believers into a world within the . ^ , world, rather than without ; full of earnest func- And of monastic tions and motives. The literary labors of the labors. monks were not speculative only : they expanded the Vinaya prohibitions so as to cover manifold forms of possible evil, analyzed down to the minute differences of method to be employed on each ; and worked out regula- tions of dress, manners, disciplines, vows, occupation, re- lations with the world, and with one another.* All this ' Wassil., pp. 275-284. ' It is even on record that the conquered party was to throw himself into the river, a become the slave of the victor, or adopt his religion. Wassil., p. 67. » Ibid., p. 219. * Ibid., pp. 80-85. THE HINAYANA. 78 1 aimed at an end beyond itself, practical and universal. Its field was the human race. The Hinayana period Missionary was that of the expansion of the faith. This great ^'■^'"■• " unreal " world was the sphere of a missionary ardor which spread the gospel of Pity and Release over Kashmir, Nep^l, Ceylon, and even to distant China.^ The many contra- dictions of the schools found their unity in Buddha's sub- lime idea of living for the deliverance of mankind. ° Unity of The ardent saints fly like eagles through the air to the the northern wilds, to convert the serpents (itagas) ==*'°"'s of Kashmir. Apes turn to men in snowy Thibet ; tiieir beasts and evil spirits cease to cohabit together, '^"'"^'y- and a race thus predestined to every vice is transformed into disciples of the " Four Verities." ^ By advice of apos- toHc men, a child is exposed on the mountains, whose traits strangely mingle the best forms of the inorganic and ani- mal world : seen in the desert by hunters, he silently points them to heaven ; taken to the petty rulers of Thibet, he becomes king, founds civil order, and redeems the world from falsehood and crime ; and " the divine precepts of Buddha rise like the sun over the mountain snows." ^ A Bodhis^ttva descends to hell, and delivers every form of being through six realms of creatures ; out of his very tears of pity bringing Buddhas to birth.* Doctrines, disciplines, dress, and manners were adapted to new countries, with a degree of interest in social conditions which showed that the eyes of the Buddhist missionaries were open to the light of this life. Why all this stir about a hollow illusory world >. In truth we are forcibly reminded in this whole experience of Buddhism of the truth that a secret and inevitable infusion of everlastingness is mingled even with ' See dates in Wurm, p. 150. ' See Bastian, Peking, pp. 256-641. » Story of Buddhacri; see Schlagintweies triJslationof thi Chronicles 0/ Kings of Th bet (Ahhandl. K. Bay. Ak. X. 831). * Bastian (p. 262) has this legend of Chutuktu-Nidubar. 782 BELIEFS. that impermanence in human life, which belongs to its passions and its possessions. 'Tis this that invincibly at' tracts the ascetic to the very objects whose transiency he would fain utterly renounce. III. The Mah^yana School. In the evolution of Buddhism the " Four Verities " are The succeeded by the " Twelve Nidanas," and these by o£°thr'"° the " Doctrine of the Void." The Mah^yana centres Void." in demonstrating that conceivable forms and dis- tinctions are but names ; that existence and non-existence are the same ; that every thing is, and is not ; and again neither is nor is not, because the very idea of it is an illu- sion. Such the " Doctrine of the Void." ^ Yet never was Buddhist intellect so productive and earnest as while busied with this object ; and the passion lasted for a thousand years ! What does it mean ? It was no isolated freak of reaction that produced this Its logical ardent search for the emptiness of life. It was a develop- natural outgrowth from primitive Buddhism, and ment from rt t r • • t r 1 n Buddhist flowed from its protest against the sorrowful flux pnncipies. q£ finite things and the "sin" of being immersed in them. It was the logical sequel of that vast renuncia- tion. What we make it our morality and religion to surrender, must appear empty and unreal. The finite world, renounced, becomes " the Void." " The principle of suffering, itself," says the Mahayana, "is the vanity of -things." 2 Repulsion from the impermanent, we must remember, is itsaffirma- impulse towards the permanent. The transience tiveside. q£ gyery conceivable object is perpetual suggestion » See WassD., pp. 122, 133 j Mah&parinirv&na Sutra, Beal, p. 178 ; PraJnA Paramiti (Ibid., 283); Wassil., p. 147. » Wassil., p. 181. THE MAHAYANA. 783 of endurance as lying outside it, in the not conceivable, the not expressible in terms of distinction or of compo- sition. Things are void in view of a fulness : they appear false and vain through the intuition of truth and use. " Nirvdna is a void ; but it destroys deception, and frees from evil." ^ But does not this refuge from the void in the inconceiv- able, of which nothing can be asserted, merely substitute a second void for the first ? By no means, I reply. By his very pursuit of it, man pronounces it real. It is living, be- cause it is his life. And as the world he has pronounced void inevitably constitutes the matter of his own existence, it is this very " void " which that reality in fact enters and fills. So that every faculty in proportion to its earnest- ness in renouncing the finite becomes a new finite force in the service of the abstract ideal. Hence, as I conceive, the marvellous contradiction which the later Buddhist schools exhibit. They are actually more positive in affirming the infinite and eternal, than negative in rejecting the finite Astothe and transient. So true is this, that as compared infinite and with primitive Buddhism the Mahiyana is com- monly regarded as softening the old negations, both in its idea of Nirvana and of permanent being. It is certain that the Sutras of the later schools seem to revel in a world of presumed reality infinitely more vast and plastic than the undeveloped senses which they reject. Thus the Mahaparinirvana,^ which elaborately traces the all-destroying powers of age and death through every sphere of gods and men, showing that even to be born a God is not desirable, as bringing these with it, excepts the highest heavens and the saint fixed in Mahdyana prin- ciples, from their sway. It describes Nirvana as non- > Thibetan Catechism ; Schott's Budd. in Hoch-Asien. ' Beal's Catena, pp. 160-188. 784 BELIEFS, existence, only in the sense in which " a thing is free from that which is opposed to itself ; " an admirable definition of perfect wisdom and happiness. It labors through many books to prove this a real state, " consisting in personality, permanence, purity, and joy." As knowledge resides not in the individual subject or object, but " in the transient union of these elements in harmonious relation," so what we call I results from a similar incidental and transient combination of elements, and is therefore " but a name." " Yet the true self remains after all this knowledge of the composite is destroyed ; and that is personal, permanent, joyful, and pure." " To escape the skandhas is its permanence." " When Buddha is wholly freed from the subjects of im- permanence composing the body, his body itself is perma- nent, and therefore boundless." "All outward appearances gone, there is left the one true principle of life." Although absorbing Buddha in essential being, the MahAyana gives a stronger impression of his personality than the Hind- yana ; emphasizing his virtues, especially of renunciation, in the depths of his spiritual repose.^ The Surangama Sutra ^ opens with a subtle argument of Spiritual- Buddha against locating the mental essence in any Surangama special scnscs or objects. He endeavors "to excite Sutra. in his hearers the consciousness of that mind which springs not from any earthly source." "All phe- nomena are but manifestations of mind, which is the sub- stance of the universe. This it is that is found able to act, after all sensations have disappeared, as it were upon the mere shadows of things." " Whatsoever is unfixed and un- certain is the travelling guest ; what is fixed and certain we call the Master of the House. All that is calm and restful we may liken to the sunbeam in space ; all that is . * See Wassil., pp. 128-133. ' Translated by Beal from the Chinese, Catena, pp. 284-369. THE MAHAYANA. /03 unsettled and unfixed is the dust that flies in it." In its substance mind depends not on cause or connection ; " is neither self-caused, nor the opposite ; it is independent of conditions and not phenomenal." " Like a lost child that suddenly meets its tender mother, the con- gregation hear the teacher unfold the difference between the true and false, the seen and unseen, the perishing and eternal." They " begin to believe that after all there may be further life." They " see their bodies as grains of dust in the void, or bubbles of the sea ; " but " their soul as perfect, free, and indestructible ; ever the same ; identical with Buddha," whose praises they sound ; " longing for his nirvana, and his illuminating energy and boundless love, they would pass through the worlds and rescue the countless beings immersed in sin, and in the end with them find rest." " This original perfect Heart, in its very nature mysteriously efful- gent, boundless yet one, pervading greatest and least, enthroned in the smallest particle of dust, yet turning the great Wheel of the Law apart from sense, different from all existing objects, is yet possessed by all." 1 In distinction are involved moral perversion and trans- migration. But perversion itself being illusory, it is vain to ask its cause. Thus summarily is the question of the origin of evil answered. " Dismiss all idea of production and destruction, and keep to the permanent reality of being ; the only reality is that which the The secret eye of dharma (religion) perceives. Of the knowledge of of wisdom. remote causes or past conditions of birth I never speak, lest I bring illusion. The mind leaves no room for deception when it does not attempt to grasp its own activity. This is the mysterious lotus, the magic sam&dhi, instantly overleaping all error." " Nirvina is that which admits of no conditions, such as are attached to limited existence. It is identical with the nature of Bud- Reality of dha, without bound, place, or time." 2 « The wind dies out, Nirvlna. but can you say it no longer is, when the passing stroke of a fan can revive it ? " ' The resemblance of these Sutras to the Brahmanical Ufanishads, with which their origin is associated, will strike the attentive reader. (See Oriental Religions ; India.) 2 Bcal's translation, read before Intern. Congress, 1874. 5° 786 BELIEFS. In the Lankdvatdra, Buddha enumerates among the many interpretations of Nirvana that of annihilation, and says, " They who so regard Nirvina, shall not attain it." i The "Diamond Sutra," ^ which goes so far as to speak of the words, " I must deliver all these sentient beings," as not really spoken by Buddha, because there were really no such beings to deliver, yet describes the highest condi- tion of being as " actual, one, uniform, an enlightened and just heart, consisting solely in exclusion of individual distinctions." The extreme of speculative negation is reached in the The Para- P^ramiti works, whose vast expansion is due in mita large measure to repetition of formulas and illus- andwrit- trations. Paramit^ means virtue and perfection, ings. "phe six Paramitis, — morality, patience, application, contemplation, wisdom, and charity, — insisted on as the path to perfection in this most developed school of Budd- hism, show how persistently it recurred to its early spirit of moral earnestness and self -discipline ; and the Mahdyana is specially marked by inculcation of pity and love for all mankind.^ The Prajna-Paramita, the typical work of this class,* de- The Praj- clarcs that nothing really exists, and we use names, na-Para- not for realities, but for illusions. But it immedi- ately defines this unreality as attaching only to the transient quality of things ; since the heart of the world is paramiti (transcendence), a joy and fulness for which no word will serve but " inexpressible hght." ^ The student of this, as well as of other Mahiyana works, is impressed by the curious inversions in logical movement ; the contra- dictory aspects under which each object can be presented 1 Burnouf, p. 460. » From the Paramita. (Beal, R. A. Soc, 1868). '^ Wassil., pp. 120, 121. * Twice translated into Chinese, — in the fourth and seventh centuries, — and there defined as " Wisdom carried over or across," i. e. to Nirvana, or Absolute Rest. It is ** eighty times the tize of the New Testament.'* Of course such estimates can only be approximatet *• See Wassil., pp. 145-148. THE MAHAYANA. 787 balancing negations by equal affirmations, and thus giving as it were free play to a sense of reality in the endless chain of metaphysical construction and ideal belief ; to a hope and trust in the infinite that knows no bar, nor dearth of resource. The energies of practical science and art alone can pre- vent the religious nature of man from concentrat- g. .g_ ing itself on the infinite and absolute as the only cance of real, by enforcing justice to the finite side of truth, 'ai^tsorpi Such exclusiveness, here as elsewhere, is a defect, ''™ »> ^^^ not in the spiritual aspirations, but in the tempera- mental relations of a race to the external world. It reveals the soul as possessed by the mystery of its own being and destiny ; by the perception of substance beyond words or thoughts or things. Its secret as a spiritual satisfaction consists in its root in a form of experience which knows no distinctions of special faiths, but penetrates all that ever have been or will be. The heart of man here rests on what contains his powers, not on aught that is contained by them ; and every effort to define their heaven fails through the very necessity they are in to look beyond themselves. " The law that can be explained in words," says the Budd- hist, " is no law." The later Mahdyana schools are commonly divided into cwo classes, each of which exhibits striking positive L^ter elements. The Madhyamika is an effort at recon- Mahiyana .... . ,. . . , 1 schools. cihation, avoiding extremes in its phraseology ; allowing that the world of illusion Aas existence, even as illusory ; and that the absolute world beyond forms xhe Mad- is non-existent, but in the phenome7ial sense.-' Nega- hySmika. tion of the extreme views of being and non-being is thus in the interest of affirmation on both sides ; the combination of these two, not the exclusive right of either, being in fact the true expression of all knowledge. > Wassil., p. 318. 788 BELIEFS. The Yogatcharya school is pure idealism ; differing from The Yogat- ^hc Paramit^s in emphasizing the reality of the chSrya. absolute more fully, and asserting the existence of the soul (alaya) as without beginning, and while under illusion from time immemorial, yet not forgetting to seek its true life.^ " All things are the product of thought. Neither the atoms of matter, nor the consciousness of mind, can be any thing else than the echo of the idea, and reflections of its state. To men water appears as water ; to gods as nectar ; to demons as blood. The representa- tion is according to the desire." ^ The soul manifests itself under changing forms ; but all things are to be seen in the eternal and divine.^ A still later phase of the same positive tendency is found in the Buddhist schools of Nepil, described by Mr. ofNepi!; Hodgsou as divisible into tour classes, — mystic, their posi- theistic, moral, and practical.* A careful study of tive aims ' ' i , J and his elaborate account of these schools enables us to grounds, (jigcern that each pursues a positive substance, to become one with whose real being is the end of all en- deavor. These appear to me to justify the following dis- tinctions : — I. The Swdbkdvika delights in resting in that which swSbM- we should call the nature of things; that har- "^^- mony with their own laws in which their truth and virtue consist ; that inner constitution which no supposed personal nor final causes can transcend or go behind. In this sense the world is self-evolved ; its life-principle is within, not without; religion is cosmogony, as an unfold- ing of the infinite ; and the symbolic Lotus is expanded into the seed-vessel of innumerable worlds.^ " The sandal tree freely exhales its fragrance on him who tears its 1 Wassil., pp. 289, 151, 160, 134. 2 Lankavai&ra, analyzed by Wassil., pp. 30&-310. ^ ibid., p. 134 ; also Lassen. * See Burnouf, pp. 392-395. * See Catena^ p. 11. THE MAHAYANA. 789 bark. Who is not delighted with its perfume ? It is from Swabhiva (Nature). Who sharpened the thorn ? Who gave their forms, colors, habits, to the deer and birds ? Swibhava. It is not according to the will of any ; if there be no desire or intention, there can be no designer or intender. From Swabhiva all things proceeded ; by Swabhava all things are preserved ; all their structure and habits, and their destruction : Swabha,va is the Supreme." ^ II. The Aiswarika affirms a God, "infinite and eternal, sum of perfection ; one with all things, though sep- . , arate from all ; the essence alike of what is capable of change, and of what is not {pravritti and nivrittt). In this Self-existent One the soul is freed. This is the cause of all things ; Tathdgata (He who has gone like others)." ^ This is Adibuddha, " delighting in making all blessed." ^ The soul, as his effluence, preserves its individuality, and does not perish.* III. The Karmika rests on the law of ethical causp and effect as the substance of human experience and the meaning of the niddnas, whose illusions are ruled by this universal law." IV. The Ydhiika is absorbed in conscious human vatnika. effort, and expects release by means of it.^ These Nep&lese schools are believed to have received their present form at a comparatively late period ; espe- cially that of the theists, whose Adibuddha, as a form of divinity, is referred by many scholars to the tenth century, and even to a Western origin.'^ But we shall see that the- ism is but the natural development of Buddhism itself. ' Hodgson, extracts from SangUa. Books (R. A. S. II. 29). '■ Ibid. ' Ibid., p. 84. ♦ Hodgson, Lang, and Lit. and Rel. of Nep&l and Thibet. » Hodgson, yourn- of R A. S. II. ' Ibid. ' Burnouf, Klaproth, &c See Carre, II. pp. 260, 261. For these schools see also Bastian, Peking, p. 618 ; Wylie ; Franck, Etudes Orient., 48. 790 BELIEFS. IV. Mysticism. We have seen that the effort to destroy all definite The fourth forms of thought proved to be cultivation of the Buddhism power of intellectual abstraction. "The Void," is recur- made an object of desire, becomes a reality ; and religious is identified with essence, with soul, with depth of sentiment. T)pitv On the one hand, religious sentiment reasserts its power in proportion as the faith is diffused over the popula- tions to be rescued by its humanities. On the other, con- templation pursues a state of absorption ; its idea being one that cannot be grasped, but only felt, and as it were partaken by spiritual immersion. Thus the fourth stage of Buddhist evolution is Mysticism, and the Buddha is God. Two results follow: the object of worship has become Personal pcrsoual ; the method miraculous and thaumatur- worship gj^ jjj ^j^g history of religions these two elements Buddha are always found to be coincident. With emphasis sodatlon^ on personal relations with Deity comes reliance on withmira- miraclc and sign, the supposed marks of volition, connection Persoual soverclgnty requires revelation by won- logicai. der-working, either past or present. A certain impersonality in religious conceptions seems necessary to the scientific sense of invariable law. I do not mean im- personality considered as intellectual abstraction, but as inherent cosmical force. The absence of the scientific sense, on the other hand, leaves open door for the ten- dency of man to worship gods in his own image, and to rely on their interferences with Nature. Even the extreme of contemplation, in such case, runs over into the demand for these specific objects. To empty the world of all real- BUDDHIST MYSTICISM. 79I ity by exclusive pursuit of abstraction leads to the neces- sity of peopling these void spaces with occult pow- ers and human gods. It is not then by chance maturgy that the highest forms of abstract philosophy have "^^"^""j apparently degenerated into popular forms of nee- extreme romancy ; that the thaumaturgist waits on the ti^^„'™' mystic. The ecstasy beyond all forms and con- phiios- ceptions sits at the heart of the world, and holds °^^^' all its secret springs of power. Plotinus is the natural parent of Jamblichus ; Buddha and Lao-tse are followed by the magicians of modern China and Thibet. And Christianity has been saved from similar extremes only by the faculty of Aryan races for scientific study and practical uses, which has not only worked itself free at last from the supernaturalism of this faith, but is questioning all but its moral substance. The consequences of extreme abstraction are manifest in the later stages of Buddhism. But they are very far from negations. I. From the void whence all definite conceptions are excluded religion evolves new imaginary powers, gupg^^t- which, as they proceed from no labor, obey no uraiism hmit ; and which, as the product of his desire to ° g^^^j. win mastery over the conditions of the finite, rep- 'J'>'" resent to man his own achievement and the prize of his renunciations and disciplines. Hence magical and clair- voyant gifts, overleaping the slow steps of these disci- plines ; the supernatural powers of the samddhi, or absorbed state, to control elements, to divine by stars and days, to cure disease, to make gold, and to supply the elixir of immortality. Minute rules for attaining these powers (giddi) fill the dhyani, or upper heavens of contem- plation. Things being unreal, names become the currency of piety, and inherit the mystic virtues of the void they fill. 792 BELIEFS. Hence mystic formulas (dhardni), to whose repetition all Mystic virtues and powers are ascribed,- and especially to '^''''dha t^^i"" written forms ; perhaps in part a tribute to rini"(for- the wonderful invention of writing, which in Thi^^nes I"dia and the bordering lands seems to have co- ofAsia. incided in time with the extension of Buddhism, and its appeal to the masses of Central Asia. These Buddhist formulas have been the runes of Asia. They were identified with the deities whose names and signs they recorded.^ The old Gathas came to have miraculous powers analogous to those of the Christian cross. ^ A few all-potent names and phrases expand the later Sutras to portentous size. As the kneeling crowds follow the genu- flections of priests in Christian cathedrals, so the revolving prayer-chests, filled with written invocations, are watched alike by the Buddhist priest and by the people incapable of reading their meaning." The old mystic figures indica- tive of countless powers are believed to be inscribed on the Buddha himself, and sought for among the children born in Thibet, when a new Dalai-Lama is to be chosen for the Church.* Such the logical circle to which religion is held. For Theiogi- beings and things to be pronounced "mere names" cai circle simply brlngs the startling necessity of believing The '^°° that names are beings and things. This is the sub- "Tantras." stautial Icsson of the Tantra stage of Buddhist development. The Tantras are a medley of Buddhist speculations, gross superstitions of Central Asia, and • Wassil., p. 141 ; Sanangsetzen's Gesch. d. Osi-MongoUn (Schmidt) ; Yule's Marco Polo, I. 277, 282. ^ Wassil., p. 161. 3 Bastian, Peking, pp. 37, 563. ' ♦ There are reckoned thirty-two principal and eighty secondary signs or symbols. Con- spicuous among the marks of the Sakravartin (Master of the Wheel), are the wheel or disk the cross, the horse, the tree ; all of them are ingeniously traced to earlier symbols of Vishinv u the sun, and Indra, the lightning. See Senart, La Ligende du Buddha (Paris, 1875). BUDDHIST MYSTICISM. 793 theurgic formulas ; showing the perverted uses to which the later phases of an organized religion will put the heritage of its Scriptures, its history, and its traditions, — yet not without features of a higher type,^ II. But with the miraculous element enters also the per- sonal. Buddha is no longer an idea, — a spiritual with the and moral force working through example, mem- ^^btned ory, and the endless power of truth. He is a per- the per- sonal God. He is Adibuddha, Buddha of Budd- viTuyof' has,2 the Self-existent One of the Nep^lese theists. Buddha. To this conception of Deity is transferred all the humanity and pity of the early faith. " Adibuddha dehghts in mak- ing happy every sentient being ; he is assuager of pain and grief." " He is lord of the ten heavens, creator of all the Buddhas." In all Buddhist countries, he who has passed into Nirvdna still hears the prayers of men, and strives to save them for his heaven. But more than this : the pas- sion for personal relations has multiplied him into millions of Buddhas through uncounted ages and worlds. The Bodhisdttvas (essentially wise) saints, who turn back from the threshold of Nirvina to re-enter incarnation for the deliverance of mankind, appear in vast numbers as mani- festations of Deity. Every Buddha is first a Bod- TheBod- hisattva, waiting his time in the dhy&ni heavens, hissttvas. like the Logos before his incarnation. When a Buddha comes on earth, he has also his form in heaven.^ The honors paid the Bodhisittvas, as emanations of Buddha for the redemption of mankind, have gone far towards supplanting the claims of Sakya-mouni himself. The Mahayana is not chary of the possibilities of human nature. Millions of these Bodhisittvas, it says, listened to his teaching, and wait to become living Buddhas.* * Bumouf (pp. 465 et seq, ). ^ Wassil., p. 134, shows that the Tantras are made up -jf fragments of all the schools. ' Kceppen, II. 27. * Ibid-, 18. 794 BELIEFS. Manjugri, Maitreya, Amitabha, Avalokitesvira, and the The Budd- ^^^^' ^^^ Buddhist Christs ; ideals, constructed to hist Mes- satisfy the demand for personal and human saviours. Their names and qualities are such as every great religion has ascribed to its earthly substitutes for omnipo- tence ; such as compassion, mercy, everlasting care for all mankind.^ Statuary represents their universal powers by multiplying bodily members invested with symbolic figures, with- the wheel, the lotusj the trisul, the gem, — and lends their features and attitude the mild serenity that befits their enduring life of contemplation and love. The sense of Buddhahood freely reflects itself in colossal images of Man reposing on the Throne of the Worlds. Its worship of persons overflows the distinction of sex. The Nepilese adore AdiprEljna as the Highest \yisdom. " Mother of Buddha, and Universal Mother, omniscient, mani- . . fasted in the modesty of women, teacher from whom disci- of Mother- pl^s leam the ways of action, that each may follow the path hood. Adi- his genius bids." " Self-estaWished, the sum of virtues, prajna. merciful to all thy worshippers, all the merciful Buddhas are thy children ; and in thy heart resides the law of absolute truth. Thou camest not from any place, neither goest thou to any. Every- where present, the prosperity of the whole earth, the perfection ol powers (moksha)."^ Kwan-yin, the Chinese goddess of mercy, destroyer of hell, redeemer of the sinning and suffering by her own pain, will be seen to be the counterpart of Adiprdjna. The Siamese believe in the immaculateness of the Vir- virginand gin-Mothcr of Buddha for countless generations.^ child. In their vision of the conception, the holy child enters as a white elephant the womb of Maia, watched with perfect delicacy by the forty thousand angels of ten thousand worlds.* All the Bodhisdttvas {burchans) in Thi- ' See Oriental Religiofis ; India^ p. 6oi. ^ Hodgsou, M^ 0«/f, p. 311. , ^ Wheel of the Lawt'^'ti^' ♦ Ibid., p. 99- For the right of woman to be priestess, or nun, ^^tiDer Weiseunddet BUDDHIST MYSTICISM. 795 betan mythology, except the Lama, are represented in female forms.' " The Japanese Buddhists embody protec- tive providence in thirty different forms of their Goddess of Mercy." ^ To meet the demand for concrete relations with the superhuman, this worship of the human, with logi- Buddhist cal inconsistency, has not only in these later phases ^y'-^<>^°sy provided liturgies for a faith to which, in its earli- by the est form, prayer seemed to be impossible,^ but sup- J]!,°'^hu^''^ plied a prodigious mass of miraculous legend, of man. ecclesiastical system, of personal sovereignty over men. Yet it has known how to inspire the whole with a human- ity, purity, and breadth of relation which yields harvests of social order and unity on a scale equally impressive.* To its very summit the hierarchy is still a tribute to human nature, for it is open to all men. The Buddhahood con- tinues to be human ; its numerical exponent is so vast as practically would absorb the whole population of the globe in the same divine function. Buddhism everywhere offsets its mythologic passion by a profound interest in real Historic humanity, which makes it a creator of historical '°'"'^^'- studies. As in India it has provided all the landmarks and data of chronology, so in Japan it has endeavored to bring lists of historic rulers out of the mass of mythical legends preserved from early times." On the other hand, so simple and so universal are the experiences to which this faith makes appeal, so universal free of definite dogma and .exclusive authority is its affinities oi , , 11 i -1 Buddhism. argument, that its mild invitations attract all tribes and surround all strifes and problems with a larger sweep of sympathy. Its Wheel (Sakra) of the Law rolls like the Tiar, ch. xxv. (Wollheim, p. 755). In the Thibetan temples five female deities stand behinil the seven jewels as mediators (Bastian, p. 570). ' Bastian, p. 586. 2 Pfoundes, Fuso-Mimi-Bukaro, p. no. ' Catena, p. 397. * See Oriental Religioi.s, India. " Matouanlin, see Atsuma Gusa. 796 BELIEFS. sun, which it symbolized, through the whole circuit of the heavens, to illumine all. Its Lamas praise the " Buddha of myriad names." Its The sol- morality and psychology are the solvent of Asiatic ventof civilization. It assimilates beliefs, customs, and Asiatic civilization, traditions, imparting to them a meaning as well as a currency and harmonious relation they had not known. It supplements defects ; it absorbs and utilizes energies. It is monastic and hierarchical with the listless rover of the steppes. It is democratic and providential with the civilized Chinese, who seeks escape from his bonds of routine and his attachment to things seen and under- stood. It is mortuary and miraculous among the supersti- tious tribes of Cochin-China and Siam. It has lifted into the service of its orderly disciplines the noisy drum and bells of the northern Shamans. It has interwoven with its legend in Thibet the Persian dualism of creation, fall, and strife of good and evil angels,^ and the spiritism of the ruder Bhuta-worship of Southern India. It has appro- priated the sacred tri-literal {Aum) from Brahmanism, ex- cluding its pride of caste. It has accepted Shiva and Par- v&ti, fierce mountain gods, among its retributory powers ; ^ transforming the bloody sacrifices of the one into incense and flowers, and the skull-necklace of the other into a rosary for the penitent. It has changed the symbol of Tartar sovereignty into the holy " wheel," whose revolution achieves powers and rewards not of this world. Its topes are covered with tributes to the primitive serpent-cultus which it superseded ; and the nagas are propitiated into civilization by legends ascribing to them the guardianship of the highest speculative " wisdom," and the conversion of Nagarjuna, its reputed founder.^ It has accepted the ' Bastian, pp. 581, 584, 588. '^ Wurm, p. 196. » Wassil., pp. 119, 213. See also Fergusson, R. A. S , 1S68. The n&gas in the wonderfu.' sculptures of Amravati are represented as of equal importance with Buddha himself. Thej are the handsomest people on the monuments. BUDDHIST MYSTICISM. 79/ deified men of Japanese worship as so many incarnations of Buddha for human good, and thereby won a foothold represented by sixty thousand temples and three times that number of priests.-' Perhaps it will one day do the same easy hospitalities to Mohammed, or Moses, or Jesus. We have read of but one Buddhist sect whose habits are ex- clusive and whose spirit is censorious and bitter : the Nichi- ren of Japan. Even Buddhism must have its " ranters," if 'twere but in reaction on Nirvana's peace. So has it inter- fused itself with Confucianism in China, and with In China. Shintoism in Japan, that it is hardly separable from them by the eye of a foreigner ; nor do its disciples in fact form a distinct body, the rites of each of the religions being resorted to indifferently by the same persons.^ Buddhist emperors of the Han sacrificed to Shang-te while carrying Buddhist amulets under their robes ; and Buddhist symbols were found in the "Summer Palace" at Peking when the Enghsh destroyed it, indicating the imperial sympathies.^ Even the Sacred Edict, in its severest criticisms on the " sect of Fo," admits that they " attend to the heart," or did so, until corrupted by legends of miracles for purposes of gain.* The universal affinities of Buddhism, aided by its wise tolerance and its earnest search for the hidden ^ ^^j. .^^ essence of good under all faiths, have enabled it to of brother- pass all barriers and find the brother in every com- munion, so far as he acknowledges ihorality, humanity, and spiritual endeavor to be the great ends of hfe. A popular Chinese Sutra opens with the affirmation that " what Buddha taught is all good, and differs from the Yu-kiao (Confucianism) only in name ; " and then it goes on to designate this substantial moral identity in detail.^ » See Griffis, The MikadJs Empire. ^ See Wurm, p. 150. 3 St. Denys, Pohies des Thang, p. 19. * Maxim vii. * Tsing-tii-wen. Extracts are given in Schott, Der Budd/iismus in If oc/t-A sien. But it claims that, while Confucianism is for this life only, Buddhism frees from traiismi^ation alsa For a like spirit, see TAe Modern Buddhist of Siam. 798 BELIEFS. " Kwan-shin (a Buddhist saint) said : ' All virtues grow from pity- The Tsing- ing love of man.' Lao-tse said, ' Of the three noble qualities, tuwen. pitying love is the noblest.' The Confucians say, ' Of the five main virtues, love of man is the chief.' All have thus the same mean- ing. Not seeing this, people nourish wrath and revenge." i " I have written this book," says the author of the Tsing- tu-wen, " to give joy to all men, to make their hearts wide, and to become a Buddha-heart." ^ The Mongolians claim, in proof of the unifying breadth of Mongolian their faith, that " there is not an unbeliever in the Buddhism, land." 3 The same authority says of them, that " immortality is firmly believed by the whole population." " They scorn the idea that the soul began its life with the body, or will perish with the body. Every Mongolian be- lieves that its condition in the future life depends on the use it has made of the present. Nowhere is there less cruelty than in Mongolia ; even the meanest creature is treated with consideration, as well as the cattle and flocks. The very birds are tame, and there is pity for the mos- quito " ! Ampere contrasts the tenderness of Buddhists towards animals, in putting up hospitals for them while men are covered with vermin, with the Christian Male- branche crushing his little dog with his foot, convinced that animals are machines. For the humane and noble things in the Christian Bible and elsewhere Buddhists have much respect. Powers are ascribed to prayer and-to pious labors for the public good, such as making roads and clearing lands. " The attitude of mind is what determines the moral quality of an action." That this religion " hinders the material prosperity of Mon- golia," with sixty per cent of the population in monasteries, and " though supporting themselves to a great degree by labor, yet celibate and without enterprise," we may not be * Schott. Tsing-iu-wen, p. 117. * Ibid., p. 95. ^ Chin. Recorder^ January and February, 1874. BUDDHIST MYSTICISM. 799 inclined to dispute. That "' while three-quarters of the children go to school, it is mainly to learn pronouncing ; " that " only fourteen per cent of the Lamas can read," and that " the people pay heavily for their prayers and miracles," — are statements that do not surprise us when reported of a faith which teaches the emptiness of the world. That the humanities are cherished, that " the Mongolian feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, gives tea to the thirsty and relieves the oppressed," " only because these things have their reward in making merit ; " and that the people are " very wicked," especially in the temples, — are, on the other hand, inferences not to be accepted lightly, nor with- out more proof than we possess ; especially as they are in opposition to the whole history of Buddhism, and to facts admitted by the writer from whom we take them. The trickeries he mentions are of small account beside those of more civilized nations. That so few can read is consistent enough with a religion which has passed into the ritualistic stage. Yet in Nepal, according to the best authority, " the main body of the literature consists of popular tracts suited to the wants of the lowest classes," even those that are destitute of every luxury that in our ideas precedes the luxury of books.^ And in China, the mass of popular liter- ature is of Buddhist origin. Even St. Hilaire says it is rare to find persons in Buddhist countries who cannot read, and that most monasteries have schools for the poor.^ Reading is the special joy of the Buddhist nomad in his tent, of the Lama in his cell. We of the West may here see a whole race of men who can read and meditate, and who jet ignore our practical sciences, finding contempla- tion, not brutal and sensual pleasures, all sufficient ; claim- ing that its service of love and pity, and its promise of mastery over the sorrows of life and death, are a religion ' Hodgson, Lang, and Lit. Sc, pp. 9, 10. ^ Le Bouddha, p. 400. 800 BELIEFS, more universal than those triumphs of sectarian faith and material civilization which so absorb the virtue of the Christian world. CHINESE BUDDHISM. The relation of the Chinese to Buddhism is external Chinese ^"^ derivative. The creative stages of this re- Buddhism ligion had already passed, and it had reached its ecclesiastical and personal stage, when it began to get foothold in the empire in the centuries which followed the reconciliation of its schools at the council of Kanishka. There was little that Chinese thought could add to its in- tellectual development ; nothing that Chinese habits could supply for deepening that earnest renunciation of the finite and sensuous on which it was based. We do not wonder that the early and principal books of the faith were trans- lated from Sanscrit by Hindu, not by Chinese, hands ; nor yet that centuries afterwards, when the " Chinese Pilgrim " traversed India, representing a great religious demand in his own country, ^ it was in order to obtain from the orig- inal seats of the faith a light upon its meaning which he could not find at home.^ And this, although he was him- self so devoted an adherent of the highest speculative school at which it ever arrived, that the words of the Prajni Paramiti were his constant refuge and protection from all evil,^ and although he was afterwards, in his zeal, to wear out his toilsome life in making a new translation of that immense work. With all the defect of original force in Chinese Budd * China contained in Hiouen Thsang's day thirteen thousand temples (?). Seal's Introd. p. 29. ^ Julien's Vie de Hiouen Tksangj 1853, p. 12. * Ibid., p. 28. On the character of Hiouen Thsang, see Oriental Religions^ Vol. !■ p. 67^' CHINESE BUDDHISM. 80I hism, the whole literature of this earnest faith has Yet the for two thousand years made the empire its home. 1"™^^^^! It has gravitated thither from what was apparently veiopment the most congenial clime, to one where it might seem ifgi*'.^ ''^ that men were desirous of receiving it in proportion as they were unfitted to comprehend or to unfold it. By far the fullest fund of Buddhist Scriptures, — at least two thousand volumes,^ — throwing great light on all other texts, and even on the monumental records of the faith in India,^ is found in a language utterly un suited to render the sounds of the proper names with which it is crowded, and to which great importance is attached. The confinement of ° , ^ Difficulties Chmese characters to the representation of certain of transia- syllabic sounds, and the imperfect vocalization of s°°3^^°" the race, made it unavoidable that Sanscrit names into cw- should be written in false phonetics, and that phil- °"°' osophical and religious terms should be rendered by ideo- graphs which expresssed their abstract meaning in a figu- rative or Qoncrete way. For these, and other reasons, the translating of this enormous body of writings from Sans- crit into Chinese is one of the most astonishing monuments of rehgious industry in the history of mankind. Although it was mainly the work of Hindu monks, the Chinese were quite as active in obtaining and circulating the originals, and in giving literary form and expansion to a faith which had been preserved for many centuries after Buddha without recourse to written words.^ The translations of Mr. Beal alone are sufficient to show that these Chinese col- Extent of lections cover all the schools and forms of Budd- |_^°^ Jj'_ hism. Scarcely a Sutra is known which is not lections. ' Wylie, p. 164 J also Edkins's list, Joum. R. A. S. xvi. ; and Pre/, to BeaVs Catena. " See Beat's paper, read before Oriental Congress of 1874 (TrMner's Record). • Fifty-five Chinese monks visited India before 730 A. D., and wrote journals of their travels. Matouanlin speaks of the lively intercourse between the countries kept up by the interests of Buddhism. One hundred and fifty-seven monks brought writings to the court from India in the tenth century (see I.assen, IV. 743, 744). 802 BELIEFS. preserved in this language. It seems the function of this people to gather, register, and tabulate the thought of the Eastern hemisphere.^ They have analyzed in the minutest manner stages of religious contemplation, forms of moral- ity, rules of self-discipline and conventual life. It could not have been, however, a merely literary pas- signs of sion that led to the formation of a vast number reaiappre- of sccts. Sent large bodies of monks back and ciation and /■ , , . ^-. r earnest- forth bctwecn India and China for a thousand ness. years, and stimulated a courage in overcoming the dangers of mountain and desert travelling, which rivals the highest achievements of modern exploration. Nor could it have been for merely bibliographical purposes, — the col- lection of books in libraries, — that the subtle metaphysics of the Surangama Sutra, and the minute practical regulations of the Pritimokshas, were both laboriously rendered into the current speech of a great people. The facts indicate that Buddhism, as a substantial faith, had struck root in the permanent qualities of the nation. And we can appreciate the zeal of Hiouen Thsang in defending his people against the contempt of the Hindu sages, when he described China as famous for its just laws, and reverence for the aged and the wise ; for its science penetrating all mysteries, its ad- miration for the " Great Vehicle," its power of contempla- tion, and its devotion to peace and good will.^ This national interest in Buddhist thought reaches to Even in ^^^ highest forms of the Mah^yana. Such Sutras meta- as havc been already quoted as exhausting meta- physics. physical acuteness, in order to exclude every thing but the universal element in mind from the categories of permanence and bliss, are in fact among the most popular Buddhist writings in China. The most conspicuous native school, that of Chi-kai, called the Tien-tii, seeks to em * See Wylie*s immense list. * yie de Hiouen Thsang^ p. aji. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 803 brace the whole range of Buddhist metaphysics, morals, and discipline ; beginning with thorough external nega- tion, yet proceeding to a full demonstration of spiritual permanence based on pure morals and broad humanity, and ending with the path of absorption by which the mystic powers of the saint are at- ^j^^ tained (sam&dhi). The Chong-lun, ascribed to cwong- Nagarjuna, founder of the Mahclyana, is a still subtler process of contradictory syllogisms ; showing the impossibility of affirming either being or non-being, to the end of proving the transcendence of Nirvana to all forms of cognition.! But the great popularity of such speculations does not necessarily imply a corresponding strength of points of metaphysical conception. "The Chinese appre- l^^^^l. ciate these subtleties," says Beal, " without enlarg- histmeta- ing upon them. Their commentators confine them- fhJcw-"'^ selves to bare explanation of terms, and indulge in nese. no original speculations." There was no passionate dis- putation as in India. The Confucians and the bonzes do not discuss logic so much as positive facts and moral effects. In short, this literature seems rather to meet a demand than to quicken a natural force. The attractive- ness of the " Expanded Sutras " probably consisted mainly in their impartiality in the treatment of all forms of thought, — a gratification to the national habit of balanc- ing and mutually neutralizing things; this, too, in the interest, not only of harmony, but of a permanent " un- knowable " reality beyond the constant flux of minute detail, the endless dust-whirl of an intensely social life. The vague longing to escape these vanities, which so strongly marks the poetry of the later T'ang, is thoroughly Buddhistic. The theory of St. Denys, however, that this quality is owing to the enormous void left by the absence • See Beal's Pafer, &-c., iit su/ira. ; also Buddh. Pilgrims, pp. 14^. I43- 804 BELIEFS. of definite religious beliefs, and that the plaintive self- abandonment and ennui of such men as Li-thai-pe and Thou-fou is but the poetic reaction from indifference and Rektions sccpticism in doctrine, is disproved by the fact that to Chinese the equal scepticism of Confucianism in general °^'^' produces very different effects; while Buddhism, on the other hand, has in fact a very strong element of religious earnestness. I prefer to explain the poetic Budd- hism of the. T'ang by impartiality rather than indifference in the Chinese mind ; by its natural thirst for some spirit- ual solvent of these infinitesimal details, coming and going as if to mock the sense of immortality everywhere ; and by the growing complexity of a civilization which will be found to have shown in its simpler stages no such tendency to the abstractions of metaphysical negation. The taste for speculative Buddhism appears to me a sign of the breadth of the national mind, as denoting a Metaphys- icai affini- Capacity for the purely ideal, which could hardly be expected from its concrete habits. But we can go ideal a" ^ ties; the ideal as the truly further, and detect the connecting link between concrete, ^j^^gg j^^^j^g ^^^ ^j^g higher philosophy of Budd- hism in the purpose of the latter to prove mind and mat- ter to be one, as substance and manifestation ; and also to dissolve all positive phenomena into the ideal as the only real concrete: so that the national habit of dealing with these phenomena itself receives a kind of metaphysical endorsement and spiritual interpretation. We must observe also the many signs that even the Practical highest flights of Mahiyana logic do not ignore alii?!'™" th^ ^^'^^y claims of Buddhism to stand by common finities. scnsc, and to be a religion of reason as well as faith. It was natural that the Chinese should be attracted by this quality in Sutras which demonstrate the self-existence of mind, and the perpetual inherence of the soul therein ; ^ the 1 Sitrangama. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 805 rW attainment of " transcendental (other-shore) wisdom ; " ' the permanence, personality, and bliss of Nirvana ; ^ the escape from ignorance and transience, to rest in what is eternally true and stable;^ and the endeavor to combine pure knowledge and action with the meditative rest which knows no sorrow and fears no loss.* Still more satisfactory to the positivist habit of mind was the direct dealing of Buddhist speculation with the facts of experience as expressions of unchanging laws, without beginning or end ; instead of attempting to stop at some " First Cause," or to solve all things by the idea of an eternal will. Of the Thibetan schools mentioned in a previous chapter, the most popular in China is said to be the Swdbhavika, which refers all things to their " nature " as the ultimate solution, under whose larger law must fall all individual wills whether providential or creative. But the metaphysical element in Chinese Buddhism is not so characteristic as its moral qualities, its purity, .humanity, and earnest self-discipline ; and these are in full accord with the genius and tradition of the people. They belong alike to the oldest precepts and the latest speculations. Through all abstraction and world-rejection, the aim to rescue a human race immersed in evil, moral and physical, and to find rest as a blessing for all to share,^ is kept steadily in view. The worth of that essence is urged, from which, " though wandering from birth to birth in delusion and sin, the divine can yet bring forth its native rays of bright reflection from the eternal deep (brightness of the ocean shadows) by virtue of right handling." ^ The purpose of all teaching is " through what is good for our- selves to do good to others;"^ "to bring heavenly medicine to the world." ^ The Shaman's daily prayer is that " every » PrajnA Paramim. ' MahAfari-nirv&na. » The whole Mah&yana. * Tien-tai School. ' Surangama, in Catena, p. 343 ; Chi-kai, Ibid., p. 267. « Surangama, Ibid., pp. 353, 354- ' Sutra o£ Dying Instruction. » Ibid. 8o6 BELIEFS. breathing thing may wake to saving wisdom." We have already seen that the Chinese Nirvana is " perfection of purity and permanence." ^ The method is unvarying. In every Buddhist Scripture Ethical duty comes first, — purification from inward taint andpracti- ^jjjj gyjj wish j clcansiug of the spirit, not of the cal method i of the form. The old Gatha runs through the whole. Buddhist Scriptures. " jjg ^j^q guards his mouth with virtuous motive. And cleanses both mind and will, And suffers his body to do no evil thing, — His is the three-fold purification, The full doctrine of all the Buddhas." ^ " The three moral diseases are covetousness, hate, delusion ; for which there are three medicines : (i) the sense of impurity ; (2) a heart full of love : (3) knowledge of the moral law (karma)."' " The substance of a Bodhisattva's character is perfect patience, which is of four kinds : (i) when reviled, he reviles not again ; (2) smitten, he is not angry ; (3) treated violently, he returns love and good will ; (4) threatened with death, he bears no malice." * " Keep the body temperate ; restrain the senses; forget not self-, examination. Put away every sin. Hold fast patience. If one, because he does not enjoy as he wishes, loses patience, he is one who will not enter on the path, because he cannot at once quaff the dew of immortality."^ " Buddha said : There is no profit in seeking to know one's previ- ous lives. To acquire knowledge, guard the will and the conduct. You rub a mirror to remove the dust, that its natural lustre be saved and seen. So keep pure from sin, and you shall know your past and future." ^ Chi-kai minutely analyzes the moral hindrances to pro- gress ; discourses earnestly on the sense of wrong-doing ; treats the love of pleasure in the style of a Puritan, and in- sists on cutting off the secret springs of evil in the heart.' ^ Matouanlin says the Buddhists and theTao-sse agree in " explaining" nihility by quiet or stillness. ^ Catena^ p. 159, ^ Maluipar. Sutra, * Pu-sa-sing-ta-king (Beal's Paper before Or. Congr., 1874). ■ Sutra of Dying Instruction* * Forty^two Sections Sutra^ p. 12. ^ Catena CHINESE BUDDHISM. 807 As the special grace of the Mahayana, he opens the door of repentance to all ; the conditions being renewal of faith in retribution ; shame, reverence, fear ; devout conduct, confession, cleansing the heart, and desire for the good of all men. Even the trivial rules for monastic discipline,^ which treat the disciple as a machine, retain a singular refine- How they ment of precept, teaching decency and mutual re- ^"^r^^^ spect, and watchfulness over the behavior: and selfish this is true of all the Pritimokshas and catechisms of"moMs! of the empire. A body of monks, whose medita- 'i"5m. tions and penances for the general good were to be sup- ported by the contributions of the masses, must make alms- giving demoralizing to the sentiments and the sympathies. But Buddhism provided against this danger by everywhere urging a spirit of helpfulness suggestive of civilizing work. The great motive of world-renunciation, which seems to have been a leading power in the formation of all positive religions, was thus somewhat controlled ; nor was the Chi- nese temperament wanting in those qualities which hold religion to practical materials and uses. " The Chinese have given practical application and de- velopment to the Sutras received from abroad." ^ The chi- In J[ndia, caste and a hostile faith opposed the ^^^^ popular liberties sought by Buddhism, and finally theprac- expelled it. In Thibet and Mongolia it had to ^^l^J^^l^ contend with savage rites and superstitions. But Buddhism. in China it found a civilized people ready to discuss its problems, and to second its humanity. They have im- parted their own elasticity to this religion of other-world- liness and pain. The Feast of Lanterns, the Chinese Saturnalia, when all people have freedom and equality, is » Neumann's Catech. of Shamans ; where the scope of rules goes to the maintenance of moral precautions and restraints very needful in Oriental life. " Schott, Der Biiddh- in Hoch-AsUn. 8o8 BELIEFS. Buddhist in application, if not in origin.^ The monasteries in China are bright with gardens, and planted in the best scenery of the country. Rites are kept with little strict- ness ; creeds and traditions melt together ; and the bon- zes, however low their grade of culture and social repute, yet belong to the people, and meet the wants of those clas- ses which Confucian rationalism does not reach. Though the Chinese have not added to the canonical scriptures of Buddhism, they have greatly multiplied its stores of precept and legend, of popular fictions, and ethical and religious sentences inscribed on temples and shrines ; pedagogic enough, yet always pure, and commonly in a vein of prac- tical sense or homely humor. Williams says of the priests that "their moral character, sts and ^^ ^ class, is ou a par with their countrymen ; and religious many of them are respectable, intelligent, and so- services. bcr-miudcd persons, who seem desirous of making themselves better by their religious observances." ^ In re- ply to Gutzlaff's account of the indifference and levity of services at which he was present in Poo-to, Fortune sug- gests that the sudden appearance of a Chinaman with pea- cock-feather and "pig-tail" might possibly produce similar effects on a Christian congregation. Himself a less preju- diced observers he was impressed by the seriousness, of Buddhist services.^ The ethical qualities now noticed are specially conspicu- versions ous in the rich store of apologues, which the Budd- hist Tpo-' '^i^t^ '^^^^ partly originated in China, but in the logues. main translated from the Sanscrit. To most of these our only access is through the Chinese version. * It commemorates the victories of Buddhism over Brahmamsm, and Buddha's abjuration of ascetic habits. See Wurm, p. 199 ; Giiard. U. 100 ; Doolittle, II. 36 : Bastian, Peking p. 97. 2 II. p. 231. 5 JVaTulerings, p. 176. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 8og Julien's compilation of these fables ^ illustrates the genial and practical sides of Buddhism, its clear perception of the facts of experience and the conditions of character, as well as its tender and wide-reaching humanity. In all these apologues the Buddha speaks either in per- son or by implication in his law, as a human helper Their hu- and guide. He is not a metaphysician, but a So- ^^'^^j.. cratic person unmasking pretence, dividing the ticai sense, shadow of things from their substance. As where he shows the Brahman who would burn his own body, that it is better to burn the passions of his heart (xvi.) ; or likens the ascetic who sought deliverance by trying to punish this ever-shifting envelope of the soul, to the sailor who made a mark on the sea where he had lost a treasure, that he might know where to look for it again (Ixix.) ; or rebukes the conceited priest who went about with a light to en- lighten the blind world, while unable to see with his own eyes (Ixii.) ; and the elephant-tamer who could subdue the mouth, body, and will of his beast, but not his own (xv.) ; or humbles the vain-glorious pretender to mastery in every form of art, science, or business, by teaching him unimag- ined powers of mastering the senses by the purity and patience of the law (iii.). He is the counsellor to all rational ways of conduct ; praising the prudence of the tortoise who draws in her head in danger, and the elephant who concealed his sensi- tive trunk in battle, as the wise man his tongue (xxxv., Ixxix.) ; reproving expectations of success not earned by fulfilling its conditions, nor by paying regard to one's own proper fitness and function, — as the owl was plucked and driven out of the palace for pretending to the rewards of ' Contes et Apologves Indiens (et Chm), Paris, i860. Hardwick's sweeping assertions [Christ and other Masters, II. J07) as to the depravity of Buddhist bonzes are based, for China, on such worthless authority as Gutzlaff, one of the shaUovtest and most prejudiced of writeis. 8lO BELIEFS singing birds (iv.) ; and as the savage, whose theft of royal dresses and pretence that they were descended from his fathers was detected by his ignorant way of putting them on (Ivii.) ; and as the foolish man who cut down his fruit- tree to get at the fruit before it was ripe, "like a seeker of the law who expects virtue without paying the price in disciplines (xlv.) ; and even as Aninda did not realize by how many lives and toils the Buddhahood was earned, like the boy who imagined pearls were produced in a jar (Ixxxvi.). He is a mentor, warning against every-day perils to vir- Their ^^^' ^^'^ unnotcd obstaclcs in the right way. The spiritual hidden treasure of gold is a poisonous snake to the perception. (jjg(,QYgj.g]- ^^i^ . ^jjg \^[^ Qf paper pickcd up in the street and still keeping the perfume of the spices it covered, and the infection of spoiled fish from the string with which it was tied, teach the power of contacts unperceived and forgotten to induce permanent habits (Ixxii.) ; the man who gives up the whole law because he has broken a single pre- cept is like one who cast away all his oxen because a beast had destroyed one (Iv.). He sees the humor hidden in human foibles and pre- tences, likening their absurdity to one's planting roasted seeds because they tasted better than raw ones (Ixvii.) ; and satirizes superstition in the surprise felt by the god of thunder, who, when about to punish one who had disobeyed his father, was asked, " Where were fou when my father did the same thing to Ms father ? " (cxxi.) He is earnest in his rebuke of the mock piety that goes about softly like the cat in the rosary necklace, but with heart cruel as wolves (cxxv.).^ We observe, too, a keen sense of the inevitable things in human life. The burdens of the body and the illusions of desire are symbolized and represented in multifold ways ^ Tiiese last two apologues are of Chinese origin. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 8X1 (cxi., xxiii.). The mirage that deceives the thirsty traveller is the dream of one who is enthralled by the eagerness of his wishes (xUi.) ; and the three Brahmans, who, after vain attempts at concealing themselves from the destiny which had appointed them to die at a certain time, came bravely forth to meet it, testify that man has no refuge but virtue (xii.). Joined to this full appreciation of the evils of life is an unwavering faith in the supremacy of the law of Their faith love. A minister, obtaining great subsidies from in the law his master on the promise to construct a drum °^'°™' that shall be heard all over the empire, expends them for garments and food which he distributes among the poor, summoned from all the towns and highways ; and when the Emperor asks for his drum, replies, " Go through all your dominions and listen. Your drum is Buddha's law of love " (i.). The far-reaching providence of this infinite law, the care of Buddha for his creatures, affords quaint Oriental ana- logues to the Christian Fatherhood that watches the spar- rov/s fall, and numbers the hairs of the head, and shares the pain which befalls the least ; while it adds a gospel of tenderness to the lower creatures peculiar to itself. Buddha converts himself into a stag, that he may make of his own body a bridge to transport wild animals fleeing from burn- ing woods, and perishes in the final effort to bear the weight of a hare (Ixxx.). What a triumphant vindication of Nir- vana is in the legend that, on awaking from its sleep to find that a bird had built her nest and laid her eggs upon his head, he forthwith subdues his senses to another dream lest he should disturb her, and moves not till the young birds have flown (Ixxxv.) ! As a popular religion in China, Buddhism reflects the 8 12 BELIEFS. concrete and prudential habits of the race ; which natur- Popuiar ally selects for development its latest stage, char- in'chi'nlTs acterized, as we have seen, by a semi-mystical the stage devotion to official or providential ideas. In this depend"™ stagc of 3. rcHgion, morality is no longer indepen- ences. dent. It rests on personal sanctions and com- mands, not on the inherent authority of principles. The world is governed by a more or less humanized will and intent. The highest good becomes a result of private peti- tion or ecclesiastical relations symbolized in fixed disci- plines, liturgies, invocations, and formulas manifold.^ That genius for abstract thought in which the faith be- This de- &a" ^3-s been supplanted by a worship of concrete pendence persouagcs, from whom all blessings are derived, oentrated. The multiplicity of official beings in the later stages butdif- of Buddhism has been already referred to. The fused; . ■' contrasted liberalism of the Mongol pursued a method oppo- withthe gj(.g ^Q |.j^^(. q£ (.jjg exclusive temperament of the Shemito- ^ ^ ^ Christian Shcmito-Christian, which has concentrated this per- *^°™' sonal homage upon one Supreme God and Christ, of whom the ecclesiastical mediators and officials are but derivatives. In the later phases of Buddhism, the way to the Buddhaship was made wide and free. Sakya himself was believed to have said that the numbers of perfected persons was countless.^ Innumerable Dhyini Bodhisdttvas awaited their time to re-enter the world as Buddhas, with a patience to which a million years was as a day, and in a succession which knew neither beginning nor end. How wonderful this expansion of the idea of self-renunciation for the sake of mankind into a competition of millions for the highest work and reward, without mutual interference or naste to displace each other ! ^ This change is expressed in Buddhism by the substitution of litui^g^es for the older PrHt- mokskas, or rules of discipline. See Catena^ p. 397. 2 Mah&pari-nirv&na ; Catenaf i86. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 813 So vast a success in achieving the Buddhaship would seem likely to cheapen its value, and reduce the Effects of conditions of character to a mere shell of nominal *"' ^f™' sion 01 the self-disciplines ; but this effect was in a measure Buddhaship obviated by the concrete meaning and ethical em- ^^^on'of phasis given to the religious consciousness. The I'^v- practical result of an infinite subdivision of personal Deity was to give something like infinite expansion to the ideal of personal virtue ; the essence, conditions, and laws of manifestation in all these Buddhas being (humanly) identi- cal, as if the whole were but the expression of one instant divine consciousness or aim. Through kalpas of time, as unchanging in spiritual contents as they were inconceivable in their reach, spread the eternal patience of these hosts of a Divine humanity ; like the beating of a single heart, for ever calm and for ever full. The open door to Buddhaship, and the easy terms of pardon with which the MahAyana re- placed the rigid exaction of penance by the early church, popularized the religion, and smoothed the passage for hu- man sympathies through the old heavens of inexorable law and abstract logic, to familiar relations with these spiritual ideals of power and love. The affections of the worshipper became more or less concentrated upon a few cherished names and personalities which represented the whole ; while the one essential meaning of virtue was allowed to stand valid in every new ideal life to which mythology or history might ascribe it. In this arithmetical field, the Chinese have been very productive. They have three popular female divin- The popu- ities, and three Buddhas, — Kagyapa (or Amitabha), ^Yeud^! Sakya, and Maitreya, — covering respectively the hahood. past, present, and future, and usually combined in triple groups in their temples ; ^ a breadth of artistic conception ' Bastian, Pekin/;, p. 59 J Lassen, II. 714, 715. 8 14 BELIEFS. befitting their historical civilization. Upon three or four of the traditional Bodhisittvas, the Chinese Buddhists have lavished their whole capacity of prayer and trust. I. Maitreya, " the Loving One," the beloved disciple of Maitrs a Salcya, and by him designated as his successor "the Lov- after five thousand years should have exhausted mg ne. ^j^^ moral resources of the present aeon, and the world have come to need another Saviour ; the Messiah of all sects and schools of Buddhism, whose advent shall rec- tify all errors, and make amends for all sorrow,^ — has ever been the inspiration of all such intellectual reforms as were too progressive to be ascribed to Buddha himself.^ His bosom was the haven for which alone the pious " Pilgrim " longed in his last hour,^ after dividing his goods among the poor, and praying that all the good he might have done in life should be credited to his fellow-men ; the haven which all heavy-laden souls in every strait have desired, through- out the Buddhist world. Maitreya, beyond question, holds the first place in the Chinese heart. Throughout the empire his image stands in the temples, crowned, often gigantic, as the all-embracing Possibility of the Future ; benignant and even smiling, bearing the lotus of a signifi- cant legend. It is the symbol of a Buddhaship, which, as belonging to the saint whose flower should be first to blossom, would have been Maitr^ya's with all its attendant authority, had not Sakya exchanged the flower-pot with his own while the possessor slept.* Maitreya is the ideal of pure spiritual liberty as well as of love, a school of phi- losophy being ascribed to him, which insists, against all metaphysical objections, on the perfectibility of the soul, and its capability of full deliverance from illusion.^ That he alone is honored by all Buddhists alike, seems to point ' Kceppen, I. 327. " Wassfl., p. 131 ; Eastian, p. 62. 3 Ki> de Hiouen Thsang^ p. 345. * Bastian, pp. 9, 14, 70; Wurm, p. 11)2. ' Wassil., p. 316. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 8l$ to him as the earliest of the Bodhisattvas,^ and his name indicates the essence of the Buddhist faith. II. Mandshusri, "the Mild and Holy," represents the demand of later Buddhist sentiment for a historical Mandshu- First Cause. He stands for creative wisdom, order, f"?',*' , ' Maker and harmony, symbolized by sword and book, in atti- Teacher, tudes of activity, and associated in India with Sarasvati, consort of Brahma and his creative word.^ There are hints of his historic reality ; but a large mythical basis is implied in his correspondence to Nagarjuna, as embodi- ment of the whole Mahayana system.^ Evidently of Hindu origin, he is the centre of a large group of Chinese legends a»d traditions usually pointing to India. The grand pros- elyter and preacher of the faith, he is believed to have not only taught twelve kinds of Sutras on the snowy heights of the Himalaya,* but to have drained the valleys of Neplll, and civilized its tribes.^ III. " Avalokiteswara, 'the Condescending,' is the Provi- dence as Mandshusri is the Framer of the world," Avaiokit- says Koeppen,^ who even finds him analogous to "™worid- the Holy Spirit in Christian doctrine. He it is who providence, inspires the historic movement of the Buddhist Church. His worship is of South-Indian origin,'^ but he has appeared in a great variety of regions, and under numerous forms. He it is, whose oath to save every creature before permit- ting himself the repose of Nirvana is cherished as an all-sufiScient solution of sorrow and sin, by all Buddhist hearts. Born of the Lotus, to him is addressed the mysti- ' Kceppen, II. 17. According to Eitel's Handbook, statues were erected to him as early as 350 B. c. * Bastian, pp. 36, 46, 361 ; Koeppen, II. 23. ^ Koeppen, II. 21 ; Wassil., p. 132 ; Bumouf, p. loi. • Wassil., p. 131. • Lotus, p. 505. " Kceppen, II. 23: Wurm, p. 195. ' Catena, p. 386. 8l6 BELIEFS. cally potent cry of all Thibetan disciples, " Om mani padme hum." ^ His Cultus is certainly very ancient. Fahian found him associated in India with Mandshusri by the Mahayana school, in the third century.^ Apostle to Cen- tral Asia, he is called in Thibet " the Great Compassionate One," " the Almighty, beholding with his own eyes ; " and in India he is Padmapani, " Bearer of the Lotus." ^ Hiouen- thsang says that when his statues, set up to mark the bounds of the Holy Land of Magidha, sank earthwards, it was a sign that faith was failing ; and that when he him- self saw them, they were buried up to the breast.* The pious pilgrim read his Sutra with fervor, when crossing the desert with no other guide than the slant of his own shadow on the ground along the lifeless wastes ; and lifted up to him alone the ceaseless prayer for aid to fulfil his vow never to return to China till he had seen the cradle-land of the faith. ^ All prayers offered before this Bodhisattva's image with sincerity were, he tells us, heard and answered ; ^ and he recounts the legend of the god's appearance as a Man of Gold to one whose long affliction made him sigh for death, to warn him against despair and counsel him to endure patiently, with thoughts turned towards leading others into peace.'' The Prajni-Paramita is dedicated to Avalokiteswara, as the highest fruit of the intellect offered to the genius of humanity. The Sutra inscribed with his name ^ is exceedingly pop- ular in China. It affirms that if untold millions were in anguish they need but hear this name and invoke it to be delivered, each out of his special grief how- ever terrible ; the forces of Nature being made subject, and all wicked purposes converted into love, in the instant of the prayer, and all desires for good fulfilled. This is the Buddhist Vishnu, manifested in every land and in ■ " O the Jewel in the Lotus." Amen I » Bud. Pilgr., p. 60. ^ Puini, Intro, io Avalok. Suira in Atsitma Gusa. * yulien^ p. 141. ' Ibid., pp. 38, 29. • Ibid., p. 180. ' Ibid., p. 146. » Lotus, ch. Htvi. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 817 every avatdra in which it is possible to succor others by assuming a common nature with the object he would save. He is " the God who gives freedom from fear." He is, in sum, the constant Providence of the world till Maitreya shall come ; and in the later literature he becomes the son of Amitabha, the most prominent name of Deity in the Buddhism of the North. He is even associated with the earliest use of writing in the diffusion of the Law.^ IV. Following a natural association of ideas, the Chi- nese have translated the Sanscrit name of this xhe female Bodhisittva by the word Kwan-shai-yin, or " Man- saviour, ifested Voice ; " and thence, by some process not R^ations easily explained, transformed him into a female, J° Avaiok- Kwan-yin.^ It is possible that he has been here identified with an older national divinity. Native tradi- tions describe Kwan-yin as the daughter of a wicked king, but born amidst miracle and endowed with mirac- ulous wisdom. Resolved, against her father's will, to dedicate herself to religious instead of married life, she endures a series of cruel punishments ; miraculously guarded and aided, like Cinderella in the Western tale, by higher powers, who share her drudgery and sway the elements in her behalf. But at last comes the tragedy of martyrdom, and the very beasts bear her away like angels. When she passes through the hells, with folded hands in- voking Amitabha and looking upon the agonies of sinners, hosts of flowers rain down from heaven and burst upward from the earth, and the instruments of torture are swept away. As if from a dream she awakes in presence of Buddha, in a hermitage, whence she is transported by a Naga to the island of Poo-to on the coast of China. ' CateTuit p. 386. ^ Beal thinks the sex of Kwan-yin originated in the sakti, or " manifestation " by speech pertaining to each divinity in Hindu religion. In this case, the sakti of Amitabha was AvalokiteswSra, and hence K\ran-yin (R. As. Soc 1866). 52 8l8 BELIEFS. Here, throned in the water-lily, she delivers the mari- ners from wreck, like Helen in the Orestes-legend of the Greeks ; heals the sick, and performs miracles of love in answer to prayer.^ Her liturgy, apparently drawn up by a Ming monarch Her lit- (1412), though evidently based on older traditions "■■sy- and rituals, has curious resemblance to modern Christian liturgies in form ; and, so far, might be sup- posed to proceed from the Catholic Church. But it con- tains no allusion to any faith foreign to Buddhism. It is recited with offerings of flowers and incense, symbolic of the harmonies of heaven and its own spiritual perfume, and with consecration of the body as a world of " atoms evolved from the universe, to be united in one orderly whole ; as a type of the pure union of all sentient crea- tures with the heart of Buddha." ^ The liturgy recounts Kwan-yin's vow to save all living beings ; recites many sacred names and sentences ; declares the miraculous powers of the true worshipper, which re- mind us of the New Testament promises to disciples that they should heal the sick, and take up deadly things un- harmed ; and ends with formal confession of sins and vows of repentance, and with prayers that all men may attain the truth, and revere the holy church of Buddha.^ Kwan-yin is the advocate and redeemer of souls from the prison of remorse, and at the judgment after death.* All-hearing and all-mastering, she has a thousand eyes and arms, which alike in China, Japan, and elsewhere are sym- bolic of her universality in thought and love. The statues represent her hovering in white robe over a stormy sea, or sitting on a lotus holding a child in her arms, with two * Wurm, p. 194. 2 Beal, p. 402. The attempt to connect the Kwan-yin cultus with the Nestorians of Central Asia, and of the Sin-gan-fou inscription, is peculiarly unfortunate ; since this sect of Christian heretics were noted especially for refusing worship to the Virgin, and rejecting images and celibacy, constant elements of the Buddhist creed- • Ibid., 398-409. * La Ckine Ouverte, p. 152. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 819 more little ones at her feet,i — resemblances which of course convinced the earlier missionaries of the Chris- tian origin of her worship. She is dispenser of mercy, abohsher of the hells, redeemer of sinners and sufferers by her own pains.^ V. But Kwan-yin, as manifestation by speech, must be referred to some invisible essence whose spirit she AmMbha, reflects into the actual world of sorrow and sin; t'"="'^°"'- j i_ ■ • A • A 1 1 passionate and this is Amitabha, " the great compassionate Heart." Heart, and merciful Father of all that lives." ^ The name of this latest (.?) of the ' Bodhisattvas, with whom Kwan-yin is practically one in Chinese faith, signifies Boundless Light, and has received the full meaning of the Hindu Adityas, or Immortals. His name, 0-mi-to-fo, is of all dhardni the most potent ; it is everywhere recited by the Buddhist tribes with all the reverence accorded in Christendom to the name of the Trinity, or in Islam to the "Allah Akbar." Eighty-four thousand methods of salva- tion are folded in its letters. As Mandshusri is the World-framer, and Avalokiteswira the World-providence, so Amitabha is the compensation for earthly ills to the good beyond death. When the heavens of con- HisPara- templation were planted above the mansions of '^'^''■ the old Brahmanical gods, these heavens became grad- ually penetrated by a living love and pity, a true Buddhist humanity, radiating through their purity, repose, and bliss.'' In the infinite depths, beyond millions of worlds of birth and death, as beyond the sunset and night of this life, those rivers of everlasting mercy flow between banks of precious stone and over golden sands, amidst the perfume of flowers and refreshing dews, and all creatures that can * Bastian, p. 46. * Chinese Repository, April, 1841. • Kwan-yin Liturgy (Bea], 409) ; also Tsing-iw^wen, Ibid., 374 i Schott, Buddh. in Hoch Alien. * Catena, p 379 ; Bastian, p. 228. 820 BELIEFS. minister to human joy. In this heathen Beulah, angels in- spired by Amitabha, in form of birds, warble praises of the Highest and of his Law ; and forests wave in melo- dious measure, filling the hearts of the blessed with admi- ration and love. Whoso is born there shall never again know birth ; nor shall dread of transmigration disturb his rest. He whose karma shall testify of an unworldly heart and clear mind shall be blest with the vision of Amitabha and his saints at the last, and be at once transported to this immortal abode. Such the marvellous transformation of the old Nirvina Chinese of abstraction to meet the concrete genius of the transforma- Chinggg • — from negation of the visible composite tion of Nit- ' ° _ , -"^ _ vSna. universe into crystallization of all known sesthetic forms in an invisible creation. And what are the conditions of this heavenly bliss ? "To The con- ^akc rcfugc with this loving Father with believ- diiions o£ ing heart, and thus secure the destruction of sins, though numberless as the sands of Ganges." The root of virtue is faith, and wisdom is its child. Not to doubt, but to faith, " one's inner heart expands like a flower from the bud; he beholds Buddha and comprehends his law." Not conformity nor nonconformity, but belief in the loving God is salvation.^ But faith is not all.^ This Paradise is not of the heart only ; it must be made by labor, like an artist's work.^ " If one hunger and I feed him, or freeze and I warm him with clothing, 'tis a great benefit. How much greater if I cause all beings to be freed into endless joy ! " * Nor must just atonement be avoided : — " A sufferer from pain should say to himself, ' By reason of my * Tsing-Ut^wen^ or "Discourse of the Paradise" of Amitabha; see Catena, pp. 374» 37^. ' " I said to a sick man : ' If you believe, you can be restored ; ' giving him a recipe, and bidding him pray to Amitibha and then take the medicine. He did so, and was cured. (Ibid.) » Ibid. ; Schott, ut supra, p. 70. * Ibid., p. 91- CHINESE BUDDHISM. 821 sins I have come into this state.' He is purified by the desire to bring into Paradise all whom he has injured. The silliworm breeder should say, ' My silk-making has caused the death of living creatures, and I pray Amitabha to deliver all these iliy victims.' The wine- dealer should say, ' May all creatures harmed or ruined by misuse of the noble wine be restored.' The physician should say, ' When called to the sick, I will make haste to save him, without asking whether he be rich or poor, great or humble.' "^ Another condition is a liberal recognition of the mixed nature of human character and conduct : — " Buddha said to Ananda : ' There are those who have done good in this life and yet shall receive punishment ; and those who have done evil, yet shall enter a heaven of the Gods.' " ^ " What is Amitabha's promised deliverance ? Is it annihilation of all these beings ? Not so ; but their restoration to the one condition of happiness, in which all were included before the Amitabha's delusions of sense led them astray." ^ " Man never dies ; ^jf^ the soul inhabits the body for a time, but leaves it again ; the soul is my self^ the body only my dwelling-place. Birth is not birth ; there is a soul already existent when the body comes to it. Death is not death ; a soul departs and the body falls. Men of this world know nothing of their souls, but see only their bodies ; so love life and hate death. Do they not need compassion ? Soul comes and goes because of its actions, whose eflfects are retribution. This is nature's law. Shall we not watch carefully over our actions ? " ^ The sensuous element in Amitabha's heaven is not stronger than that pictured in the Apocalyptic New j^^ ^^^^^_ Jerusalem ; and, like that, is too closely dependent ousness on moral and spiritual conditions to be in any ^^™ ° "^ sense carnal. One school goes so far as to explain it as wholly symbolical and transcendental.^ "Men object to believing in this final abode of the good," says Jin-chau ; > Ibid., pp. 107-110. '■ Ibid-i P- 74- ^ Confessional Service of Kwan-yin (R. A. S. 1866, p. 418). * Tsing-tu-wertj in Schott, p. 91 ; also Catena^ p. 121. ' Bastian, p. 252. Hardwick, for whose mind holiness is inseparable from faith in Jesua Chnsi, finds no sign of this virtue in the Buddhist paradise, and considers it to have no common ground with the Heaven " prefigured in the glowing page of the Apocalypse." II. p. 106. 822 BELIEFS. " whereas they ought to say that the reward of the soul is fitly represented as invisible." We must observe, too, that the fatalism of the karma is here transfused with ethical freedom. There is no distinction of caste in this heaven of Amitabha, nor of sex, nor rank, and its doors are open to all ; while the old Nirvana appealed to renouncers of the world only. The Bodhisattva faith is of the people ; its rewards follow the good life close upon death, and its summons is simply to victory over evil in the heart and life. The Thibetans believe that " Amida's Word " inspired Amida's a Saviour (Usaktchi) to descend through all the tTth' spheres of retribution and open wide their doors ; hell. his falling tears bloom into Buddhas, strong to save those whom all his weary toils failed to convert. Usiktchi is the Thibetan Kwan-yin ; and he delivers the ship- wrecked drifting from the spirit-isles, as she succors those who are drifting on the seas of this world.-^ Amida, like all the BodhisHttvas, was himself altogether The Di- human. The Sutras say that, when a king in some vine as former kalpa, he became a monk, and on reaching sainthood uttered forty-eight wishes for the welfare of mankind. It is to fulfil these that he now dwells as Buddha in his Western heaven.^ This pure humanity of the Divine has made Buddhism attractive to the Chinese in spite of its abstract thinking and its unworldly aim. The hold of the Amitabha faith on the people of China and Japan cannot be exaggerated.^ Its emphasis on "clear ideas," its effort to remove external impediments to the pure light of intuition, and its interfusion of abstract thought with practical faith and love, have commended to • Bastian, pp. 262, 263. The Hak-kas, a mountain tribe in China, ascribe an immediate reward to the righteous after death, in the stars, and annihilation to the wicked; but they ridicule alike the Amida heaven in the West, and the Buddhist hells. (Eitel, in Notes atid Queries, I. No. xii.) 8 Bastian, p. 228. > Beal, R. A. S. iitb. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 823 the former prosaic race a system whose speculative basis and logic are beyond the conceptions of the mass of The special origin and connection of these various forms of personal worship are of less importance to uni- versal religion than the fact that they combine in sonai Buddhism to cover all those sreat demands of '°™^ °* . ° Buddhist popular religious experience which Christianity has worship claimed exclusive power and authority to meet ; tXsi've while equally penetrated by inspirations of duty religious and love. With mystic freedom they melt into each other ; showing that the principles that animate the whole are of far more vitality than any special form or name that they assume. The review now given of the intellectual and practical elements of Buddhism enables us to note several General important conclusions concerning it. conciu- ^ sions con- I. Its theoretic unselfishness, reaching into the cerning highest ideal spheres through innumerable personal ft"^„n''J™' embodiments and innumerable worlds and cycles, fishness. II. Its assertion of an Absolute Law and Substance be- hind these personal manifestations ; a Law whose Affirmation speculative pursuit through all negations and ab- °*Law. stract contemplations was not permitted to divorce itself from the ultimate purpose of delivering mankind from sorrow and sin. ^ The historical origin of the Amida Paradise is obscure. Wassilief thinks it borrowed from foreigners in Southern India. Eitelj finding no trace of it in the '* Pilgrims, ' refers it to Kashmir, where it first appears (Lectures, &c.). Eitel traces Gnostic and Parsee elements in the belief, and Wurra, Manichaean. Beal hints that it came from Alexandria to India in early limes, and that its origin may have been Christian (R. A. S. 1866). But its morality and laith in the future world are both as fully Buddhist as Christian. Its notion of Paradise is Oriental. The doctrine itself came to China, not wifJi BodhidhSma in the sixth century, butaa eariy as the first or second. 824 BELIEFS. III. The combination of idealism with practical sense,' ConcUia- of rcason with sentiment, of " clear ideas " with idealism P^*^^ ethics and practical humanity, which forms its with sense, theory of culture; and which has made the most concrete and positive of all known types of national mind the chief heir of its metaphysics and its brotherhood. IV. Its reconciliation of moral determinism {karma) Of freedom with practical freedom ; as believing that every life- withfate. organism contains the results of the whole past of conduct, and that the very length of personal life is pre-de- termined at birth ; yet equalizing all men in the possibility of self-release ; repudiating all vain backward-looking bur- dens of regret that interfere with moral effort in the present moment ; making its retributory heavens and hells such a restless wheel of change that eternal punishment is impos- sible ; ^ while Nirvina (or its later equivalents) rounds all destinies, open for ever to all ; accepting better conduct as the true atonement, and knowing no other forgiveness than that accumulation of counteracting thoughts and desires which constitutes habit, and so supplants the conditions of evil. V. Its democratic philosophy of human nature as respects Democratic inherited vice and the possibility of deliverance ; human scttiug asidc distinctions of sex as well as caste, nature. Opening its monastic institutions to women, its free cloister rebuking the closed secular doors of Christendom.^ VI. Its peculiar fitness for the mass of men, as dealing Fitness for ^ircctly with the facts of evil and the darker side the gen- of human destiny without effort to evade or ignore era mm . ^^.^^ ^^^ ^^ Supplying paths and motives for social improvement by which barbarous tribes have been con- verted to order and harmony, and their savage gods sup- planted by ideals of gentleness, pity, and righteous law. ^ See especially the DhaTnmapad^m ; The Modern Buddhist ; and the Tsing-iU'VJeH. * See Catena^ pp. 65, 113. 8 See'Zff Religieuses BouddhisteSt by Mary Summers. Paris, 1873. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 825 VII. Its poetic capabilities, not only in a cosmical but in a spiritual point of view. This trait, by many Poetic ca- wholly refused to Buddhism, is the more remark- pai''''''«=- able proof of aesthetic vitality in human nature, as showing its power to produce an inconceivable mass of mythologic imagery in a religion which denounces the senses and pro- claims war on the finite world. The popular dream of Ami- tabha's heaven is wreathed with flowers and gorgeous with the symbolism of colors and forms. Earthly men and women behold in vision their souls growing as flowers there, flourishing or fading as their virtue here waxes or wanes ; and the parterres of paradise are but reflections of the human loveliness which the outward eye cannot see ; types of the law that " the soul of one advancing in virtue may be already in heaven, though the body still dwells in this travailing world." ^ Day and night are marked in heaven by the opening and closing of these spirit flowers, and blossoms spring in a mother's hands when a saint is , born.^ Amitdbha creates the world-spaces out of lotus pith.^ The future life has its Judgment-Record, its Scales of Character, and its Mirror, whose face neither flatters nor distorts.* The poetry of dualism is represented in wars of good and evil spirits on a colossal scale, and its angelology in guardian genii of nations and men.^ In every one grows a tree of good and a tree of evil, whose myriads of leaves are so many propensities ; by nourishing the one, the roots of the other fall away.® T\v&jat&kas, or legends of Buddha's lives, and the tradi- rions of missionary adventure and struggle, are xhejats- equallv full of poetic inventions; such as that of kas, and . . propaga- the Bodhis^ttva, who flew to Himalyan heights on tionofthe the wings of an eagle to convert the Naga tribes ; ^'"'■ and that of another who sought also the world of snows, ' Schott, Buddh. in Hack Asien. ' Beal, p. 78. ^ Bastian, p. 58a • Ibid., pp. 568, 695. » Ibid., p. 590- " Ibid., p. 564. 826 BELIEFS. and when his head, wearied out at last, falls asunder into twelve parts, reappears in each as a fresh life, overspread with the light of Buddha's countenance.^ When the nagas of Kashmir oppose the preaching of the faith, their arrows and rocks hurled against the saints are turned to flowers.^ The Bowl of Buddha eternally accompanies the faith, and reflects the fortunes of the law in its wanderings, fadings, and renewals ; mystically moving from heaven to earth, and from earth to heaven ; yearned for by saints and adored by worlds; multiplying the mite of the poor till it over- flows the brim, and for ever absorbing costly tributes from the rich without being filled,^ — the true Holy Grail of the Orient. With these high values we must contrast the actual con- Actuai dition of Buddhism as a Church. We find an inert condirion aud formulatcd faith, crystallized into ecclesiasti- Buddhist cism as in Thibet, or frittered down into a popular Church, mythology and social convenience as in China. The living spirit of the religion could not perish thus ; but, by the law that governs the life and death of special faiths. The ood ^^^ ^®^^ '^^ ^^'^ body of rites and traditions, trans- has become migrated into national character, and organized ^™' ' itself in secular virtues, unconscious habits of thought and desire, and familiar principles of common sense, which are the real marrow of religion and morals. Mechanism invariably marks the later stages of all positive The Law rcligious organizations. And if we compare Budd- of Trans- j^jgj. j.j).gg ^^^ forms with those of Catholicism formatiODS in religions, which they SO resemble, and the readiness with which Buddhism adapts itself to the social genius of the Chinese with the corresponding conformities of Christi anity to practical and scientific growth in Western races we shall be convinced of the law, that a special religion 1 Bastian. pp. 262, 263. * yourn, Asiaiigue, Dec. 1865. * Fahian, in B-uddh. PUgritHS, CHINESE BUDDHISM. 827 can hold out only by becoming absorbed on the one hand into the mechanism of ritual, and on the other into the spirit of the people from whose blood it has drawn its sus- tenance. Nor, as we have seen, is Buddhism singular in substituting the worship of Divine persons for the worship of independent principles and the sanctions of truth. In- stituted religions inevitably fall through the same descents from the freedom of eternal ideas. Other defects of Buddhism are traceable to its rejection of the visible and finite world ; thus depriving its Defects of humanity and rationality of the very materials ^'"*'^'"^'"- which their growth requires. I. The current of beneficence is mainly turned into the . line of almsgiving, for the support of a body of ^^ -Bj-ye^^. ecclesiastics who are supposed to earn by devotion hood. to the other world the right to be maintained by the chil- dren of this ; and these ascetics are gathered under such institutions as monasticism and celibacy, tending to dis parage, depopulate, and ultimately dispel the sansdra (spheres of the senses) pronounced illusory in the creed. Thus in the name of humanity may men suppress what is most human. Self-murder, for instance, is forbidden ; but self-sacrifice, in its most extravagant forms of mutilation and suppression, ybr the sake of others, is a familiar lesson of all Buddhist legend. II. The current of rationality sets towards abstractions, leaving the actual world to the irrational, and the n^ s„p„. unreasoning mass to ignorance of the positive laws s'""°ns. of Nature and man. The resulting superstitions afford abundant material for the purposes of Christian mission- aries,^ who eagerly pluck these rank weeds of heathenism as a foil to the perfections of an exclusive Gospel. The ' See Doolittle, Nevius, and others, of whose valuable works this animus is the only mc portant defect. 828 BELIEFS. Sacred Edict of Yung-ching, however, shows how Confu- cianism itself looks upon idle miracle-stories and the neglect of social duties. Buddhist superstitions are not only free from impurity, Similar to and outgrowths of kindly sentiment, but represent ^er°^ great common types of belief, whose universality religions, among the ignorant classes of different races forms one of the most interesting facts of ethnological study. They are such forms of magic, astrology, divination by times and places, exorcism, thought-reading, spirit mani- festation, and occult elemental powers as constitute the folk-lore of the world under different names, and with local variations ; ^ and remind us quite as forcibly, in these lower grades of culture, of the unity of human nature, as do the noble sentences and deeds that crown all great civ- ilizations and religions alike. The single pecuHarity of Buddhism in this sphere is its extraordinary readiness to Effects of assimilate all popular beliefs, giving them a com- themag- mon bearing on its own grand objects of institut- pathy of ing an ethical centre for all thought, and providing Buddhism, rclcase from the sorrows of existence. This mag- netic sympathy is especially noticeable in China, where it complements the utilitarian habit of the people with an ideal world of transmigration and release, and their demo- cratic secularism with the preaching of morality and spir- itual law. In full harmony with Chinese eclecticism it has absorbed all popular instincts and tendencies, and shaped its invisible world, as far as possible, out of materials fur- nished by the customs of social life. Its Judgment Day is an assize in perpetual session, on the model of the manda- rin's yamun, both as to forms and penalties ; but the gro- tesque and horrible pictures of these spirit courts, circulated 1 See especially an interesting series of papers on the Folk-lore of China, in the China Revitw. Also compare Croyances popul. au Moyen Age, par G. Jacob (Paris, 1859) | A. Maury's Works ; Merrick's Mohammed ; Chapter on Fung-shui in present volume. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 829 among the people in the name of Buddhism, bear as little trace of the essential gentleness and pity of that religion, as analogous constructions in the cur- Buddhist rent belief of Christendom, or Dante's mediaeval ''''=™°- hells, — of which these Chinese horrors are a kind of prose reahsm, — can exhibit of the Beatitudes of the New Testa- ment, or the noble ethics of the Old. But even this Budd- hist Inferno remains true to the spirit of Chinese practical morality in the directness of its relations to actual con- duct. " National shortcomings are spotted with grim, un- erring precision. Spiritual penalties are directed against chicaneries not punished by temporal law ; against unjust weights and measures, traffic in bad silk, starched cloths, vile nostrums of pharmacy, neglect of sanitary duties, and even such improprieties as lighting the pipe with written paper." ^ It is plain that Buddhism, in its coarsest and harshest aspect, does not forget the function of preacher and guardian in behalf of social order and propriety. The well-known analogies of Buddhism with Christian- ity are not accidental ; nor are they results of his- ^he anai- torical derivation. They extend much further than "sies of is generally supposed, as would readily appear rites with from a comparative view of the history and issues Christian of the two religions. These moulds of religious through structure, whether doctrinal, ecclesiastical, ritual, or ■i^"™"""- popular, form portions of the great mythologic organism which belongs in common to all positive religions before these are transformed by science. They are the supernat- uraUst expression of desires and needs that have not yet found their natural paths and objects. There can be noth- ing more self-contradictory or irrational than that the advocate of Christianity as divine, against heathenism as human and profane, should collect in that interest a list 1 Rev. T. J. Selby, in C&«a Review, March and April, 1873. 830 BELIEFS. of crude or semi-barbarous Buddhist habits, every one of which, down to that disparagement of the finite world from which so many of them proceed, has its analogues all through the history of Christendom, and would still per- vade it but for the constant struggle of a purely secular science to set aside the ignorance and contempt of Nature on which they rest. They are to be abohshed in all re- ligions alike, by the conviction of invariable law and cosmi- cal unity, and by devotion to the uses of life and the world. Function The dignity of science is in bringing a culture to of science jjjg^j^'g powcrs and a peace to his heart which no in recon- ^ '■ ciiing man belief ip personal government, whether of a Christ conditions ^^ ^ Buddha, can effect ; and whose solution of of life. the darker problems of life rests on an assurance deeper than trust in anthropomorphic Deity can afford, of the inherence of human destinies in the unity and har- mony of universal law. Though no positive religion makes provision for its own Prophetic corrcctiou by science, being in its own esteem germs of infinitely above and beyond science, yet there is it; their , . , , -^ . , ' •' groundsill none which does not contam abundant presenti- human mcuts of scicntific truths and uses ; simply because nature. . ... . each is a complex of aspirations and needs seeking their satisfaction, however unconsciously, at the breast of Nature. 'Tis this milk by which they are fad, and by none other. Must they not learn something of its true quality from the beginning.' The especial impulse of Buddhism to go behind personal Providence to inherent rule and tendency, renders its speculations very rich in foregleams of the science that reconciles man with the conditions of his own being. It conceives the universe as under an all-pervading Law Such fore- {karmd). Its innumerable worlds are the product gleams in pf evolutiou, without beginning or end; their cy- Buddhist . ' & & 'J niythoi- chc proccsscs of growth and decay move not by "^^ creative interference, but by inherent law; their CHINESE BUDDHISM. 83 1 reproduction begins in a mist-mass (nebula), filling a void, of immense duration, analogous to pure space, whose rain accumulates first into seas (star-dust) and then into bub- bles, — whence the worlds. The celestial spaces are meas- ured by successive heavens that widen in arithmetical ratio, and correspond in distance from the earth with the times of bodies falling through thousands of years by one law of motion (planetary movement). Sun, moon, and stars are dowered with living growths and relations. These are marked by kalpas of time and by tiers of worlds, piled in layers (geology) through an illimitable ocean (continental function). The imagination is over- powered by an astronomy which counts worlds by " the number of grains in the dust of millions of Merus," and by the more than microscopic vision of the infinitely minute ; hinted in Buddha's saying that water cannot be strained free from innumerable living forms, which not the mortal eye, but only the illumined mind, can see.-^ Finally, that conception of an Inscrutable Substance whose manifestation includes all forces and effects The in- that belong to Intelligence, while itself infinitely 3"^^'''° transcending these, — in which we now discern the stance. crown of science, — has its prefiguration in such passages from the Sutras as this summary by a Chinese writer : — " As there is no limit to the immensity of reason, and no measure to the universe ; as the forms of life cannot be numbered, nor the mod- ifications of the Karma estimated, — so all the Buddhas are possessed of infinite wisdom and infinite mercy. There is no place in the universe .where the essential body is not present and perpetually manifest. It may be asked. From what cause did these worlds innumerable spring ? We reply, From Soul (atma) alone. From this, the universal essence, comes all that exists."' ^ BeaFs translation of Jiu-chau. 2 Catena, pp. 123 - 125. The shape of the Sanchi topes represents a series of cosmogonic symbols: the elements in succession ; earth as base ; water as globe resting on it ; Jire as a triangle surmounting the globe ; wind as a crescent above this ; and, firally, ether as culmi.i Dating ilame. 832 BELIEFS. Alabaster closes his translation of that remarkable pro- duction of a minister of the King of Slam, the " Modern Buddhist," with the following summary, which in the main well describes a scientific religion : — " The religion of Buddha meddled not with the beginning which it Summa could not fathom ; avoided the action of a Deity it could not of Budd- perceive ; and left open to endless discussion that problem hismby which it could not solve, — the ultimate reward of the per- " Modern ^^^^- ^* dealt with life as it found it ; it declared all to be Bud- good which led to its sole object, the diminution of the dlnst. misery of all sentient beiugs ; it laid down rules of action which have never been surpassed, and held out reasonable hopes of a future of perfect happiness. Its proofs rest on the assumption that the reason of man is his surest guide, and that the Law of Nature is perfect justice. To the disproof of these assumptions we recommend the attention of those missionaries who wish to convert Buddhists." ' This " Modern Buddhist," arguing against Christian no- tions of divine interference in natural -phenomena, and showing the folly of anthropomorphic solutions, invariably falls back on natural laws. Epidemics, for instance, can- not be the work of a divine volition, because they can be escaped by going away. " I leave you to form your own opinion whether they are the work of devils, or the visita- tion of God, or the result of the fall of leaves in heaven, or of a Naga king's power, or of a bad atmosfihere." ^ The nalvet6 of his argument against a personal Providence as cause of phenomena shows how contrary that doctrine is to Buddhist habits of mind. For the relief of those who fear that science is cutting Assuring off all foundations for faith in the spiritual ele- lessous ment, when it substitutes the realities of Law for history of the notions of a Creator and a Special Providence, Bud- — ^g ^jji ^jj^ these significant facts : (i) that the very religion, whose philosophy rests more than any other on this all-sufficiency of Law without First Cause * Wheel of LaWt p. 73. * Ibid., p. 9. CHINESE BUDDHISM. 833 has throughout its two thousand years of changing phases maintained the principle of its Mahayana, — that all things spring from mind, and are rounded by eternity of wisdom and right ; (3) that the religion which puts necessity in place of volition, and lifts the inevitable sequence of cause and consequence above the powers alike of men and their gods, has identified this Fate with Moral Order, and taught man to make the bitter sense of illusion his grandest stim- ulus to the pursuit of virtue, and the ceaseless pain of change and decay his incitement to find immortal life in the path of discipline and love. S3 III. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. ' I "HE signal success of Buddhism in China leads us to ■*- consider the history and prospects of those Freedom other forms of religious propagandism which have jt^";^' striven for the last fifteen centuries to recast the China, national mind in foreign'moulds. If they have accomplished no more during this long period than merely to fret the edges of native belief, it is certainly not owing to lack of opportunity for testing their fitness to meet its demands. In 1326, the Franciscan Bishop of Canton, De Perusio, wrote as follows : — " In this vast empire are people of every nation, and all are free to live according to their belief. For the Chinese have the opinion, or rather error, that every one is saved in his own sect. We can preach safely, but convert no Jews nor Saracens. Of the idolaters many are baptized, though. many walk not after the Christian way.''^ Five and a half centuries afterwards, the missionary Blodget writes from Peking,^ concerning the ceremonies on the emperor's recovery from dangerous illness, that neither ruler nor people would have objected to any one, native or foreigner, " who should have on that day exposed the folly of such idolatry in the most public manner, or argued for the truth of the Christian religion." ^ Between these two epochs of free proselytism there have been intervals of persecution of a more or less religious ' Gieseler's Eccles. Hist., IV. 259. ^ Dec. 30, 1874 ; Miss. Herald, June, 1875. ' Similar testimony is given by Lay, Forbes, Tomlin, Marshall, Williams, and others. 838 BELIEFS. nature, which are described in that partial and highly colored' style, infiltrated with miracles, special providences, and ecclesiastical assumptions, which renders missionary literature in general, especially Catholic, so striking a sur- vival of the less attractive features of the ancient myth. In view of three things, the amount of martyrdom in these persecutions is really insignificant : first, the immense efforts to transform China into a dependency of the Chris- tian Church ; second, the systematic attacks constantly made upon the religio-political rites and civil allegiance of the Chinese ; and third, the extreme antagonism of Eastern and Western civilizations, and the barriers of language and customs to mutual understanding. The extent to which such causes of collision have been carried is proof of the remarkable openness of the Empire to materials by which the jealousy of government and people must necessarily be aroused. Jews, Mussulmans, and Christians of every sect have Failure of availed themselves of these open doors ; but ^F"'*' whether it be a persistent Hebrew settlement gions save ^ Buddhism, fixed in Ho-nan from remote antiquity without making the slightest impression, and finally dying out in squalid misery in the middle of the nineteenth century ; or a Nestorian mission of the earliest Christian centuries, so completely effaced that no vestiges of its influence could be found when the Roman Catholics opened their religious campaigns in modern China, save one questionable inscrip- tion ; or a flourishing Romish commission, numbering at one time hundreds of thousands of converts, but steadily dwindling down to the present day ; or a Protestant sec- tarism, whose positive achievement is to be found, not in the souls it has converted, but in the scientific methods and educational forces which have accompanied it ; or a sprinkling of Mohammedans in various quarters, whose occasional rebellions effect nothing, and whose religious MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 839 influence compares feebly enough with their former pres- tige in the carrying trade of the empire, — in each and all of these instances of religious propagandism, the absorb- ent quality of the Chinese mind has been far more con- spicuous in dissolving this foreign material than in working it up into any visible results. The Jews of Kai-fung-fu were heard of by Ricci in the seventeenth century as numbering ten thou- jews. sand, and others at Han-chou were believed to be more numerous. This Catholic padre of course believed them to be the remnant of the " Ten Tribes." He brought to Peking an old copy of the Pentateuch from their syna- gogue, then five or six centuries old. In 185 1, a report by two Chinese Christians sent from London to investigate the condition of these waifs of Abraham showed about seven families gathered around a ruined temple in utter destitution, unable to read their own Bible for half a cen- tury. They had adopted native rites, had never heard of Christ, and had lost the expectation of a Messiah. Their name for God was Te and Tien. They worshipped the Tao as reconciling all faiths, and bowed before Confucius while still observing passover, circumcision, and the sab- bath. Eight manuscripts of Old Testament Scriptures were brought to Europe, faded witnesses of the vanity of attempting by special revelations to change the tendencies of a race.^ The Chinese annals mention numerous Arab embassies for mercantile purposes from the seventh century Moham- down to the fifteenth,^ and our earliest account of sedans. ' Martin [Hist, of China, I. 240, II. 447) actually represents the Jews as acquainted with China eighteen centuries before Christ, on the strength of a passage in Genesis which men- tions " linen or silk ; " and points out that Confucius had only seventy-two of his disciples initiated, " precisely the number of the Jewish Sanhedrim, the Roman cardinals, and the dis- ciples of Christ." For accounts of the Chinese Jews see also Williams, II. 288 ; Chin. Repos., July, 1845 and July, 1851 ; Caurcy, pp. 231, 232; Lettres Edifiantes, Vol. XVIII. * Bretschneider in Notes and Queries, Nos. 7 and 8. 840 BELIEFS. China comes from two Arab travellers in the ninth. The efforts of this race of enthusiasts in commerce as well as in faith were apparently directed towards circulating Chi- nese ideas and inventions in the West ^ rather than towards converting the Chinese themselves. The Arab travellers aforesaid state that no Chinese embraced Islam, nor spoke Arabic.^ Yet Ibn Batuta, in the fourteenth century, found Mohammedans living under their own laws throughout China, a wealthy and influential body.^ Navarrete says there were in his time (seventeenth century) five hundred thousand Moors in the Empire ; among them many literati, whom the rest considered apostates.* Many tales are related of the sturdy refusal of Mohammedans to comply with the " idolatrous rites " of the natives, and even to take literary degrees which might involve such compliance.^ Being traders, the Arabs were never subjected to the persecutions which befell Buddhist and Christian propagandists.^ Notwithstanding these advantages, the extension of Mo- hammedanism at the present day is far below that ascribed to it by these early travellers. Its main strength has lain in the outlying western province of Hi. Its mosques are sprinkled about the great cities, and it has force enough to embroil whole provinces in insurrection. Yet supposing it to count half a million of followers,^ it is but a drop in the ocean of the Chinese people. It is moreover partially Con- fucian. Some mosques have imperial tablets, and many of its members pass literary examinations.^ But the intense religious energy of this faith does not fail it even in the cold atmosphere of Chinese rationalism. Its rival sects — white caps and red, traditionalists and radicals — dispute on the old European themes with entire freedom.' ' See Draper, InUll. Devel. of Europe. ' P- 37 (Renaudot's transl.). 3 Travels, Ch. XXIII. * Append, lo Arai. Travellert. " Ibid., pp. 181, 182 ; Bretschr. as above. » Chin. Rev., Nov. and Dec. iS/i ' Williams. > Ibid., II. 285, 286. » Chin. Rev., 1872. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 84 1 Mohammedan literature in China discusses the Divine nat- ure and attributes, necessity and freedom, the origin of the world, the fate of the soul after death, the problem of evil, with a zeal that shows the Chinese brain to be far from inaccessible by the mysteries of being. Arabic works are common in Peking which strongly assail " idolatry." ^ Each variety of Christianity has tried its hand at the conversion of China ; first the heretical, then the Papal, and finally the sectarian Protestant. I. The tablet discovered by a Catholic missionary in 1625 at Sin-gan-fu, dated A. d. 781, and referred to j. Nesto- the Nestorian Church of Syria, declares that Olopen '^°^- (a priest presumably of that school) established a church in Shen-si with the approval and support of Tai-tsung and his successors, who even provided for the conversion of the whole empire to Christ.^ It is upon this inscription, and a few unwarranted inferences from blind traditions con- cerning the ubiquitous apostle Thomas, that such sweep- ing claims have been constructed as the statement of Martin,^ that " the inculcation of the divine precepts of our Redeemer, shortly after their adoption in the West (sic), has probably been the means of preserving China from oarbarism " (!) If, however, the inscription itself is to be trusted, we may well wonder that no trace of this immense victory over heathen ideas was to be found seven hundred years later, when the Jesuit Fathers had to begin the whole work afresh. The Sin-gan-fu tablet is doubtless very .j^^ g.^^_ old ; and, as Julien, Hue, and others have shown, gan-£u its record that missionaries from Ta-thsin (probably '''''°'" Persia) propagated a form of Christianity in the seventh century is verified by Chinese testimony; but its details * Salisbury (Am. Or. Soc. 1863) gives extracts to this effect from missionary letters, ' See the translation in Williams (II. 291) ! also Chinese Rejios , September, 1844 i Whit- ney, Orient. Siudies, 2d ser. p. loi ; Layard's Niruvsh^ I. 206. ' China, I. 245. # 842 BELIEFS. are extravagant, and stand without any certain support in the native literature. It is even doubtful what its real statements are. The three versions — French, Latin, and English — will be found to differ materially ; and Dr. Bridgman confesses that if a hundred Chinese should translate it, each would vary from the rest. So alien to the Chinese thought and tongue are the dogmas described, that one hardly sees how the fact could be otherwise. Many circumstances combine to render this monument of little practical value. It is improbable that Tai-tsung should have caused the Christian Scriptures to be trans- lated and circulated. Nobody knows who Olopen was ; nor can he be identified, though the record calls him a "high priest." There is no likelihood that " five kings," with long trains of priests, were appointed to rebuild Nestorian temples. The priest Isaac, proselyting at the court and enrolled in the royal pavilion, must, if a real personage, have made some record in Chinese history, and been in some way reported in the Western world ; yet he is not to be found in either. That Edessan Nestorians fled from persecution into Persia in the fifth century, and thence diffused themselves through regions more easterly still, conveying a knowledg^j of Greek letters, is admitted.^ It is on record that they converted a Tartar prince in the eleventh century. Nesto- rian settlements in China from the seventh to the thir- teenth centuries are not denied.^ The mysterious Prester John, whose locality is still as hazy as the tradition of his fabulous wealth and power, is generally accredited to this sect as a convert. But the argument for Nestorian influ- ence on Chinese theism, especially in early times, is of the most attenuated character. And the famous inscription is still a problem of historical study, not without its suggestion * Gieseler, I. 403, 404 ; Cosmos Indicopteustes ; Hase, Hisi. Christian Churchy p. 108 ! BaU Repos., 1841. '^ rilc's Christ, in China, I. 68-72. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 843 of deception for religious ends. So far as it is of any value, it goes to prove the liberal spirit of the Chinese towards foreign proselyters many centuries ago. The Mongols, who favored free discussion, being expelled by the native Ming dynasty, a new policy succeeded ; com- munications with Tartary were cut off, and Christianity disappeared, apparently by absorption in Buddhism, or by natural decay. The last appearance of Nestorianism is connected with the arrival of Orthodox Christians, and a consequent strife in which both went down. The Catholic Hue describes this heretical sect in China as immoral and ignorant, and as the chief obstacle to the efforts of devoted and long-sufferin'; Franciscans, like Corvino, Oderic, and others, to Christianize the empire.-^ II. The seventeenth century opens with a wonderful chapter of Christian propagandism. The efforts of u Ro^an the Roman Church could not have been more ably CathoUc "i -n*'- ii-rn T • Missions. maugurated than by Ricci and his rellow Jesuits. Jesuit and Ricci avoided the superstitions of the Church, and Dominican, interested the Chinese by his scientific and moral labors. Aleni wrote twenty-five works on the creed, and Schaal com- piled the miracles of the Church. Lecomte^ (1698) says the Jesuit Fathers in his day had translated catechisms, gospel-expositions, moral treatises, practical rules of piety for all classes, ritual prayers, bodies of divinity, and even thought of putting the Missal into the vernacular. He describes the Chinese as strongly interested in the sacra- ments, in images, relics, and especially in the Virgin, " to whom all their churches were dedicated ; " doubtless con- founding her with Kwan-yin. The Manchu princes per- ceived the worth of these prudent missionaries, who adapted themselves to the national institutions and beliefs, • Hue, I. 257, 293i 332) 3i6. ^ This quaint old missionary wrote a remarkably correct account of China, much of which is confirmed by later researches. 844 BELIEFS. and treated them with great honor. Verbiest, set to mak- ing cannon, was also raised, like Ricci and Schaal, to high oiBce. Grimaldi was sent on a mission to Russia. Ger- billon and Pereira were employed in Tartary. The Jesuits were entrusted with supreme direction of mathematical studies ; their services were recorded in the annals, and honors paid to their memory. Their success among the potentates of the empire, especially Ricci's, was, according to Catholic writers, prodigious.^ With the people they passed for deities, like Paul and Silas of old. Lecomte says that crowds waited for him on the highway with fruits spread on tables, and that he was " greatly moved by the innocence of their faith." The story, of their achievements, as recorded by Hue, Medhurst, Lecomte, Duhalde, and others, abounds in fascinating episodes. Such is the story of Father Schaal's relations with the young Emperor Chun-chi ; who, while appreciating Chris- tianity, steadily refused to become a Christian to the last moment of his life, though taking a tender farewell of the friendly priest whose person he loved better than his creed.^ The reaction that followed his death, stimulated by the attacks of the missionaries on the national rites and their parade of organized converts as an " imperium in imperio," was natural enough.^ But though Schaal was proscribed, and his companions banished, this did not pre- vent the Catholics from a more brilliant campaign under Kang-hi, who issued an edict of toleration, and even gratified them by declaring himself a pure theist. Dis- gusted at last by the quarrels of Jesuits and Dominicans over the question of tolerating the immemorial rites of China, by the assumptions of the Pope, and by the appar- ent intention of these foreigners to govern his people in ' Hue, II. 251, 252 ; Marshall's (Catholic) History of Missions. ® P&re d'Orleans, Hist, of the Tartar CoTig-uerors ofChiiut, pp. 44, 45. ' It was also owing Id part to disputes between the Christians and Mohammedans. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 841; his Stead, Kang-hi turned against them in the height of their success. Their sudden and complete suppression by his successors upon similar grounds (i 724-1 747) shows how little real impression Christianity had made, apart from imperial favor.^ The edict was directed against " magic," indicating the idea held by native rationalism, then as now, concerning the pretensions of this faith to miraculous basis and powers. Since this expulsion, the constant efforts of the Catholic Church have been more successful in martyrdoms than in conversions. The Order of St. Vincent de Paul succeeded the Jesuits in the Chinese mission.^ Raux was put on the Board of Mathematics, and Hue and Gabet explored the empire. The French secured safety to their missionaries in China by the treaty of Whampoa in 1 844, and the full right of preaching in the ports two years afterward ; and in 1861, under stress of French and English cannon, Prince Kung agreed to erase from the Code all penal or degrading statutes against Christianity.^ It is not easy to overstate the pious ardor of these Jesuit priests who penetrated China, disguised as natives, Practical toiling to educate the people in Christian civiliza- andi''"- . ary zeal of tion.* Their dogmas were offered in the most en- thejes- gaging form possible, notwithstanding the efforts ""^' of the Papacy and the Dominicans to combine more aggres- sive and exacting features. Their extraordinary following was obviously due to personal magnetism, since there is no evidence of any new moral or spiritual principle in their fresh floods of fetichism, beyond their own self-sacrificing zeal. But these modest and cheerful personal relations were ' Williams, II. 308-312. De Mas, II. 299, 300. The Emperor's logic was simple. " You wish to convert all my subjects, do you not ? " " Yes, your Majesty." " And then, if you succeed, will they obey me, or you ? '* (De Mas, p. 303. ) * Brine, pp. 48, 51. ' Medhurst, Foreigmr in Far Cathay, p. 37. ' Magaillans (New Hist, of China, 168S), IVylie's Catalogue, i44i and Chinese Reposi- tory, Dec, 1841, enumerate the translations made by these Fathers into Chinese, and the works produced by the discussion of them. 846 BELIEFS. SO effective, that even recent toleration by statute as a treaty right is held to endanger their success, by making the teach- ers conspicuous in a control over converts that will embroil them with the State. The Jesuit records reveal a training of the young, combining Chinese classics and Western science with doctrinal teaching, which prepared the pupil of Christianity to play a part in the life of his own people, and obtain political ascendancy.^ The glory of martyrdom Theirmar- has not been wanting. P^re Avril (1693) says tyr spirit, ^jja); five-sixths of the Jesuits who took sail for China were lost on the way ; nor has the Roman Church a more honorable chapter of heroic toils and sufferings than the history of this apostolate in China. Of the scientific and literary talents of Ricci, Schaal, and Ver- ^,^^j^ biest ; of Amyot, Gaubil, Visdelou, De Mailla, "mem- Grosier, and the rest, to whom we owe the most complete account of Chinese civilization known to the Western world before the middle of the present century, — we cannot here speak in detail. Upon the whole, after eliminating much credulity and some superstition, the " Memoires concernant les Chinois" must be regarded as a wonderful monument of modesty, sincerity, and scientific labor, and of incalculable value for all time.^ What has all this devotion accomplished towards the Yetunsuc- ^^'^ Specially proposed ? Of the four hundred cessfui. millions of Chinese, less than a million have been converted on the highest estimate, which is the evidently extravagant one of Hue. Meadows, a far more trust- worthy authority, lessens the number by half.^ Brine, Nevius, and the reports of 1848 give three hundred thousand, which is probably nearest the truth. Hiibnei claims a great increase since i860.* But these conver ' Brine, p. 54. ^ See also De Mailla's Ifisi. of China, from the National A nnals, in twelve vols. 1777 -* 1783- 3 Chinese and their Rebellions^ p. 52. * Ramble, &'c., p. 630. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 847 sions have neither touched the intelligent classes, nor acquired moral prestige enough to protect the missions from superstitious panics among the masses. The con- verts are of the lowest class, mainly women, children, and men worn out by age ; all utterly ignorant, of course, of the meaning of the Latin service.^ The statistics of conversion have been somewhat curiously made up. Sick infants are baptized, by inducing the parents to have them washed in water from the priest's bottle as a means of re- covery ; by which pious fraud the souls of fifty thousand children a year have been secured ^ as spoils from these doomed Egyptians. To the natives who believed themselves afflicted by demons, the earlier missionaries used to give pictures of Christ, to which fetichistic effects were ascribed. The prayers of the convert, turning flames from his house upon those of his relapsed neighbors, were " improved " as examples of divine vengeance, in the interest of the Christian God.^ Miracles were cheap. Those of Faber especially spread amazement through the empire, and con- verted hosts of these sheep without a shepherd.* Hostile rulers and mandarins died suddenly, struck by lightning.^ Earthquakes stopped the reading of the decree for cruelly executing Father Schaal, till the judgment was reversed.^ Absurd imitations of European sermonizing were ascribed to converts in proof of their piety under persecution.'^ Such hollow sensationalism, not confined to Catholics, may help account for droves of converts, as well as reveal the value of their conversion ; but it brought its speedy reaction in past times, and will certainly do so in the present. Priestly interference with native marriages in the name of religion is another ground of dislike. Still worse is the confessional, bringing the Chinese woman into closer rela- • Brine, p. 55. » Williams, II. 319- ' Lecomte, pp. 4i5> 4i6- • Ibid., 414, 358. 5 Hue and Marshall, passim. ' Lecomte, p. 36"- ' See instances in Marshall, Vol. I. 121-141. 848 BELIEFS. tions with the priest than with her own husband. Even a greater drawback than this is the national dread of po- litical innovations supposed to be impending through the foreign bell and book. So wide-spread a hostility to the missionaries as has recently been evinced could not have resulted from all these causes, were not their religious faith a matter of entire indifference, morally and intellectually, to the masses of the people. III. Plowever unsatisfactory the results of Catholic pro- pagandism, those of the Protestant missions have testant becu far less effective. While the leading laborers Missions jjg^yg been such men as Morison, Milne, Lockhart, a still _ ' ' greater Mcdhurst, Legge, Williams, Bridgman, of a per- "'"'' sonal ability in no wise inferior to the Catholics, the almost infinitesimal harvest of the twenty societies interested in these missions, in comparison with that of the rival Church, points us to those radical differences between Chinese and Christian beliefs, which are empha- sized in the Protestant much more than in the Catholic dogma. The confession of failure is almost uniform. In the five Treaty Ports, the Protestant converts amount to about four thousand.^ In 1 860, the number of the mission- aries exceeded that of the converts not actually in their pay.- Martin, who thinks the preachers "actuated by a nobler purpose " than the priests, is obliged to confess that the demand made by the former for real change of heart produces little or no effect, as compared with the mere out- ward confession required by the Catholics ; which is nat- ural enough.^ Brine's account of the English and American schools for Christian education is no less discouraging.^ Morison's toils and failure are a painful record.^ So little effect has been produced by Christian publications, that a Chinese statesman in a recent memorial treated them with * Nevius, pp. 363, 375. ' Scarth, Twelve Years in ChhtA. ' Martin, II. 491. ♦ Brine, p. 61. 6 Zeitsch. d. D. M. G., 1848. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 849 entire indifference.^ Respectable natives say that rogues, who have nothing to lose, avail themselves of baptism as a means of obtaining wages at the house of a missionary. Educated men seldom tolerate the Christian teacher in their homes. The mandarins generally are said to feel the same contempt for the missionaries as for the bonzes,^ and are hostile to them simply as presumed plotters of pohtical and commercial change, or as claiming judicial rights over the action of native converts.^ The Government scorns to notice their dogmas, and its severest rescripts denounce simply the teaching of rebellion by disrespect to ancestors and to spirits.* This failure to interest the Chinese mind is, of course, fatal to Protestant proselytism. Tens of thousands of Bibles and miUions of tracts are distributed ; but hardly an instance is on record of an appeal for explanation of Scripture.^ The tracts, distribu- ted by thousands at the competitive examinations, are apt to serve for wrapping paper in the market of Macao. ^ Missionary publications are scarcely known beyond the little circle of converts.^ The fact cannot surprise us when we consider that the majority of these tracts assert, in very bad Chinese, a natural depravity in man as groundwork of the scheme of Christian salvation ; a doctrine absolutely irreconcilable with the organic life of the nation for thou- sands of years. We have by no means expressed our sense of the futility of this business. No fetichism on earth compares with the enormous expenditure of money, machinery, and labor in printing and circulating Bibles among heathen whose utter waste of them is fully equal to the supply. Even the ■ Medhurst, Foreigner, b'c, p. 45- ° D* Mas, p. 315. ' Hiibner, pp. 619, 620 ; Medhurst, Foreigner, b'c, p. 37 ; Brooks, Seven MontM Run, p. 179. • See Medhurst's Chi?ia, ch. xxii. ; Williams, ch. xix. » Williams, II. 343. « Doolittle, I 36. ' Giles's Sketches; by an official for eight years in China ; p. 168. S4 850 BELIEFS. Catholic condones his own priest-and-image worship by ridiculing this scheme of converting men by the contact and authority of a printed book.^ He contrasts the pro- digious expense of Protestant official machinery, without result, with the economy of his own effective methods ; the married sedentary lives of the teachers, or confinement tc the neighborhood of the large cities, and their avoidance of personal peril and direct appeal to the remoter masses of the empire, with the apostolic lives of his itinerant semi-Chinese priests.^ He points to the large dependence of the Protestants on Catholic versions, and to the ad- mitted poorness of their own. He affirms perhaps over- strongly, that if, as admitted by high authority, but a fraction of the handful of converts adhere to their faith, every one of these costs England and America a quarter of a million sterling.^ So discouraging is the attempt to convert a vast and Hopes of immemorial civilization to a new religion by a miraculous schcme of unauthorized assumptions, that many conversion ...,,.. of the missionaries take refuge in the expectation that a Chinese, people who are proof against ordinary methods will be Christianized by miracle.* This penchant for "mi- raculous evidences " in the logic of the Christian, which renders it so ill-advised in him to bring charges of super- stition against the heathen, is in fact an impenetrable bar- rier to the confidence of a rationalistic people like the Chinese. They readily detect the absurdity of an attempt to absorb all their own sober historical traditions into the sacred books of a people of whom they never heard, upon the pretence that this people has been miraculously illu ' Marshall, Hist. Missions^ I. ^ GutzlafTs effort to introduce the Catholic method was a scandalous failure (Eitel, CAm Recorder^ Jan., 1876). 3 Marshall, p. 169. ♦ Neviiis in The Naiiott, May 6, 1869. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 85 I minated to furnish the criterions of truth and duty. The old Catholic idea, that the Chinese were " Noes Effect of neveives," ever and anon re-appears in the standard <^''"=''^" assump- works of Protestant missionaries.^ This is un- tion. promising; but the prodigious assumptions of exclusive ownership in the way of salvation, and of the extreme re- ligious blindness of the heathen, are enough to defeat the proselyting efforts of any body of men, however able or sincere. Medhurst was quietly asked if he supposed there were no good people in China before his arrival, and how he could think of coming there to exhort people to be good. Some of the difficulties in the way of commending Christianity as an improvement on Chinese beliefs Admissions could not escape the missionaries themselves. Ne- of themis- vius mentions the inability of the native language to express Christian ideas, and the constant necessity for alluding to persons and usages with which they were un- acquainted ; and he even wonders " how without special interposition of Providence they can avoid concluding that polygamy and concubinage are recommended by our re- ligion."^ Neumann remarks on the disadvantage of not being able to present them with a purer ethics than their own. " The historical element in the Bible should be separated from the ethical." "A Chinese who has seen the habits of Hong-Kong, or who has suffered from the persecution of Californians, will hardly show desire to be converted to Christianity. A sagacious Chinese once said to me : ' True, you are our superiors in science Argumema and discovery. But our moral principle is much '^'"""•i- more efficient. Our masses are much less vicious and self-seeking than your Christians, such at least as we ' See Legge's account of Yu's deluge ; Kidd's China, p. 212 ; Williams, IX. 199. A wri- ter in the Chinese Recorder argues that the mythical Pwan-ku is no other than the Bible Cush ; whence Hindu Cush 1 ^ Nevius, p. 648. 85 s BELIEFS. see in our country.' " ^ Williams mentions similar " argu- menta ad hominem ; " such as that the Christians were proved unfit instructors in benevolence, by sending opium to China ; in rectitude, by intimidating her with fleets and armies ; in filial piety, by neglect of parents after death ; and in morals generally, by the intemperate lives and reckless cupidity of professed Christians in China.^ Med- hurst allows that the Chinese do not improve by contact with the foreigners ; ^ and Hiibner, that the foreign popu- lation of the ports has little confidence in the efficacy of the missions.* The prolonged and hopeless disputes of sects and translators over the name of God do not improve the situation. The more intelligent Chinese call the mis- sionaries " preachers of lies," ^ and " regard our (badly trans- lated) Scriptures, and Christianity itself, as a tissue of absurdities and impious pretensions."® The real service of Christian missionaries has not been in proselyting, but in labors to enlighten the minds vices of and heal the bodies of the Chinese by Western L'L„T science, and to make known the literature of this testant ' mission- hithcrto unknown people to the world. Their sci- entific uses have been the ground on which they have found welcome and even honor from the Government. The Bishop of Peking wrote the Queen of Portugal that missionaries should be mathematicians, physicians, sur- geons, apothecaries, clock-makers, engineers, machinists, painters ; because any of these qualifications would easily open the gates of that city.'' From first to last, the emis- saries of every sect have acquired position by means of practical services, wholly apart from religious teaching. And if Dr. Legge is right in regarding the missionary enterprise as the greatest blessing that has fallen to China, ^ Neumann, Ost-Asiat. Gesch.f pp. 457, 487. ^ Mid. Kingd., II. 378. ^ Foreigner in Far Cathay, p. 188. * RambU, &^c., p. 618. s Sirri China, II. ch. x. " Meadows, Chin. Rehell., p. 79. ' De Mas, II. 313. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 853 this can be the case only upon the ground now stated. China has always had a desire for mathematical writings, and the demand has been met with great energy by Euro- pean teachers, ever since Ricci began by translating the books of Euclid. Wylie gives a list large enough to show a commendable zeal for such positive studies.^ But the crown of the Protestant missions has been their medical institutions. The reports of Drs. Parker '^ The Pro- and Lockhart constitute one of the noblest rec- testant ords of effective humanity in history, and must be ''°^p"^^- counted to the credit of the Christian faith in so far as they proceeded from religious motives. The number of sufferers relieved by these and similar institutions under Protestant direction is estimated at three quarters of a million ; and the grateful appreciation of their humanities has been fully equal to their value. ^ Dr. Lockhart, in his interesting vol- ume, labors to impress the idea that these medical services were intended to subserve " the dissemination of gospel truth." ^ Dr. Macgowan " presented the facts of electricity before the Chinese mind in such form that some of the elementary truths (dogmas) of Christianity were made evi- dent." * " Tracts directing the reader to the ' true Physi- cian ' were placed in the hands of those who were relieved."^ Mr. Abeel " conversed with the patients at the Amoy hos- pital on religious subjects daily." This recognition of the immense importance of scientific and practical humanities as conditions of access for Christianity to the Chinese peo- ple^ is the clearest admission that it is by the moral, g^._,^j.g^ not the theological or specifically religious, side success that Western civilization is destined to work in ame- ^°^'^^ liorating the Eastern world. How slight are the logical results on the latter side, which the missionaries ' See also Knowlton, in CAix. Recorder, nlay, 1870; Williams, II. 337- 2 Brine; Williams, II. 346-350 ; Ckin. Rejios., Aug., 1841, April, 1843; Martin, II. 493 i Nevius, p. 341 ; Lockharl's Medical Missionary, &'c. 8 Medical Missionary in Chi:ia, pp. 217-224, 183. ♦ Lockhart, p. 232. 6 Ibid., p. 217. » See WiUiams, II. 353 ; Lockhart, 1 ii5. 854 BELIEFS. most desire, is illustrated in a report of Dr. Hobson,^ in which, speaking of his medical institution, he says that " the fruit of many faithful discourses, of frequent religious conversations, and of thousands of tracts," has been " the conversion of two patients and a hopeful change in the con- duct of several others.'' The effort to impress on the native mind that the ultimate motive and end of all this humanity is " to convert it from the service of idols to the living God " is honestly admitted by Dr. Lockhart to be a failure.^ It may be hoped that so palpable a lesson will redound to the increase of more spontaneous forms of virtue. Equally deserving are the efforts of Protestant mission- Literary arics to diffusc a knowledge of Chinese literature labors. through the Western world. The writings of Wil- liams, Doolittle, Nevius, Medhurst, and others are fa- miliar to the public ; and the highest gratitude is due to those devoted toils which have resulted in the English periodicals printed in China during the last half century, — the " Repository," the " Recorder," the " Review," the " Notes and Queries," all of which have been largely the work of missionaries. The labors of Legge, Marshman, Bridgman, Milne, have given us the classical and educational writ- ings of China ; those, of Eitel, Faber, Edkins, Chalmers, valuable works on the language and literature. Although, for ourselves, we find what seems a larger and better esti- mate of the subject in writers from a secular standpoint, such as Meadows, Julien, Pauthier, Davis, Lay, — we are very far from under-estimating the bearing of the laborious scholarship of the Protestant missionaries on the purposes of Universal Religion. This is far more obvious than their likelihood to aid in the propagation of technical Christianity. It is simply inconceivable to one who reads the constant declarations that the Chinese have no word to represent God, or spiritual essence, and no conception of the naturaJ » Lockhart, p. 182. ^ Ibid., p. 189. MISSIONARY FAILURES AND FRUITS. 855 corruption of mankind, how these worthy people can expect the conversion of such a race to such dogmas as theirs. In view of all these facts, the pictures of a China re- generated by the knowledge of Jesus Christ, as Sum of painted by enthusiasts like Dr. Speer,i are certainly ^^^^""^^^ extraordinary. Nowhere in Chinese annals is there "'s lesson, any recognition of Christian doctrines that have been in dustriously propagated among them for a thousand years. The tide of race-tendency sweeps steadily on, unimpressed ; incapable, it would seem, of even taking cognizance of these conceptions of a fallen nature, and a mediatorial salvation through Jesus of Nazareth. Never was there a more con- clusive witness against the dream of substituting one dis- tinctive religion for another in the consciousness of a race previously unrelated by historical tradition or other affinity to the supplanting force. Never a plainer admonition to direct our interest in remote civilizations to those deeper ethical and spiritual processes which run beneath all special faiths or systems ; and to give such emphasis to these nat- ural forces as shall everywhere discover and bring to con- scious life the free unity of spirit on which the future of religion depends. ' data, pp. 671, 67a. IV. TAO-ISM. TAO-ISM. I LAO-TSE. N Buddhism we have seen the entrance into Chinese civilization of a sense of invisible relations and Recapitu- a philosophy of release from pain and change, which '^''°'' °f lay out of the line of its culture and supplemented relations its special defects. To the practical interests in '° China, which the Chinese were mainly absorbed Buddhism was essentially alien. It is true that the humanity which marked its influence on semi-barbarous tribes, although not so conspicuous in a mature and well-organized society, did not fail even here to minister to physical needs. It even sought friendly relations with the concrete State, which greatly aided its growth. But none the less were its institutions planted in renunciation of the social and political world. In its philosophy and ethics, family, mar- ket, farm, and State were illusions, having indeed the func- tion of supporting the equally illusory body of the saint himself, but wholly external to the true end of existence. Its ideal was separatist ; its theme, not governments and social interests, but a kingdom not of this world. It pointed to the impermanence of these powers in proof of their unreality. A guest in realistic China, it had to accept the actual mould in which society was cast as a phenomenon ; but none the less positively did it pronounce this mould phantasmal, and pursue its destruction by the eternal realities of Karma and Nirvana. Modified by its setting in Chinese material constructiveness, its Hindu essence remained entrenched behind a psychological bar- rier mightier and more stable than the Himmaleh that 860 BELIEFS. divided the two races on the physical globe. How the contrarieties were made helpful by mutual hospitalities, and resulted in revealing unexpected affinities, we have endeavored to trace in the preceding sections. But we are now to observe another religion of China ; one which by reason of its roots in the national soil en- tered more deeply into the national spirit, and aimed not at its destruction but at its idealization. Lao-tse did not, Difference like Buddha, separate the ideal from the actual, of LaMse ^Yie infinite from the finite, the invisible from the from Bud- ' dha: not visiblc, the soul from the State, as mutually incom- tive'but patible. With Chinese constructiveness, he de- ideaiist. mandcd their reconciliation and unity. With Chinese concreteness, he refused to hold the absolute idea apart from embodiment, and insisted that to it belonged the motives and methods of all practical spheres. Govern- ment, the ultimate aim and sum of this concrete national tendency, he desired not to abolish, but to transform into that spontaneity and spiritual reality which would express the Reason and Law of the universe in the life of man. It was not, as I conceive, his purpose to withdraw a body of ascetics from a world of dream, but to put a real world of men and women in possession of the secret of public hap- piness and private virtue, of the grounds of political institu- tions and social science in ideal faith and consecration. Thus conceived, the philosophy of Lao-tse ^ is not more His phii- truly a reaction against the organized institutes of osophyas thc Chincsc, than an outgrowth of their psycho outgrowth logical habit on the best side ; an ideal justification of Chinese gf j-jjjg jj^ ^jjg form of protcst against its practical mmd as a ± o j. reaction pervcrsion. Oibese This home relation appears to have been en- institu- tirely overlooked by the expounders of Lao-tse ; most of whom, so far as I have found, assume that * Or Lao-tze ; the ao pronounced like the German iz», and the £ as in the French le. LAO-TSE. 86 1 his system is so thoroughly antagonistic to Chinese life as to prove either a foreign origin,^ or else a deliberate purpose to overthrow and abolish the whole fabric of gov- ernment in the interest of quietism or negation.^ Both these hypotheses seem to me inconsistent not only with the character of the Chinese mind, but with the results of such study of the Tao-ie-king, as is now made practicable by no less than five translations into Western languages by the ablest sinologists of the age. Lao-tse, it must be admitted, stands alone ; without a school, without apparent recognition. His root is Hisisoia- indeed in the old monotheism of the Shi and the !'™ ^"'^ im person- Shu, and he unfolds their intuitive simplicity and aiiiy. first-hand contact with Nature. His ethics are not in con- flict with Confucius.^ He is not without predecessors of like spirit ; for he abounds in sentences out of some ancient lore, of which we have no knowledge but from him. A few of his followers have written sayings in his mood. But he preached not for the many ; and though the originality and loftiness of his gospel have enforced admiration in all later Chinese epochs, and his book — a piece of sainthood as fascinating as it is transcendental — has spoken like an oracle to each reader in his own personal tongue, yet Lao- tse illustrates the truth that " to be great is to be misun- derstood." His personal life made no outward mark. Birth and names ; * official functions in the archives of Tcheou ; withdrawal from corruptions he could not stem ; ^ a questionable interview with Confucius, and an equally ' Wuttke, II. 82 ; Eckstein, your. Asia/., Sept. and Oct., 1842. 2 Even R^musat, who considers it the starting point o{ Chinese religion, has apparently no conception of this connecting bond of psychological relation, and actually regards the later Tao-sse school as the proper interpreters of its meaning. The ignorance of most anthoritiea for popular opinion concerning China is illustrated by Barrow, who asserts that Lao-tse changed the Buddhist metempsychosis into a scheme of resuming the body after death through certain medicinal substances. " 3 Compare especially the first chapter of the Tahio with the Tao-te-king (liv.). ♦ Julien's Inirod. to Tao-ie-king. ' Von Strauss's IrUrod. to Tao-ie-king (Ivi.). 862 BELIEFS. doubtful journey to the West ; ^ death at an unknown place and time ; a title which means simply Old Master, or Venerable Saint, — the rest is legend ; semi-Buddhist myths of incarnation,- or the wild fancies of a school of thaumaturgists and spirit-mongers, who have not the most distant idea of his meaning. He is a word ; a protest and prophecy in one ; a book, TheTao- — the Tao-tc-kiug, or Classic of the Way (Law te-king. Qj. Reason) of Righteousness ; ^ a voice of univer- sal truth and sentiment, appealing to all ages, yet in its special form, like all such, incomprehensible without close regard to the people and the time to which it spoke, and to whose current speech and conduct it applied ideal tests. Nothing like this book exists in Chinese literature ; Uni uein "othing, SO far as yet known, so lofty, so vital, so Chinese restful at the roots of strength ; in structure as ' °" '"' wonderful as in spirit ; the fixed syllabic characters formed for visible and definite meaning, here compacted into terse aphorisms of a mystical and universal wisdom, so subtly translated out of their ordinary spheres to meet a demand for spiritual expression that it is confessedly al- most impossible to render them with certainty into another tongue. The Western translators differ materially in the rendering of terms and phrases.* The native comraenta- ^ Originated many centuries after his time. KaiifiFer, Gesch. d, Ost-Asien, II. 74, 91. ^ For these legends see Bastian, Peking, pp. 478-422, 454-486. 3 R^musat translates it, " Book of the Reason and of Virtue ; " Julien, " Book of the Way and of Virtue." ^ ( i) The immense resources of Julien for explaining the Tao-le-king would give his ver- sion supreme authority, but for the fact that the later commentators whom he uses are as likely \o illustrate the philosopher's statement that he was understood by few, as did the men of his own generation. Many of his renderings, moreover, are incoherent and obscure, and force us to seek further light. (2) The German version of Von Strauss, prepared with evident schol- arship and a skilful use of all other labors in the field, wins entire respect, and brings great light into dark places. {3) Plancker sets aside all interpreters, native and foreign, and offers a mystical version strikingly different from all others. However mingled with fippreciation 01 spiritual elements in the Teacher, the European metaphysics of this version weakens our con- fidence. (4) The English version of Chalmers, though compact and forcible, repels by a dis- regard of dignity, quite out of place in such a work (see Ivi., xxviii., Ixviii.), and fails of the spiritual glow and elevation that must have pervaded the original. We pretend only to a sm- cere endeavor to infer the common truth which is partially expressed in these various versious. LAO-TSE. 863 tors, so far as we are as yet acquainted with them, throw little light on their, master ; while the teachings of the Tao-sse school are in palpable contrast with his spirit. Nevertheless, these drawbacks do not hide the substantial meaning ; since the very differences in these many author- ities enable us the better to construct the portrait which all partially suggest. And to this end we need to take our standpoint in a wide and impartial view of the nature of Chinese civilization, which can be supplied only by an inde- pendent study of translations ; while the linguistic contro- versies that beset the theme could result in no satisfactory knowledge to the professed sinologist himself. Between the translators and the critics, Lao-tse has been made responsible, not only for the later supersti- doctrines tions of Tao-sse astrologers, diviners, elixir-seekers, ascribed to and spirit mediums, of which the Tao-te-king does ^^"^^ not contain a trace ; but for personal behef in " a chaos," in " an immense void before creation," in " the miseries of transmigration," and even for the desire "to live with- out labor on the credulity of his fellow-men." ^ He is charged with a more negative and destructive spirit than that of Buddhism ; with a " philosophy of caves and soli- tary places as the domain of pure spirit," whose pride is " to tread the world under foot," and to play the part of immobility and inaction, — holding with the Sankhya, that the soul is a spectator only, and not even in contact with the senses.^ " He mixes the act of creation with old Sivaite myths by which Nature becomes the working of a generated and imprisoned spirit." ^ " His idea of paradise is as an- archical as that of Confucius is patriarchal." * " He would strip off all contingent modes of being, and reduce the All fortunately agree that the work is thoroughly authentic. The last version (Strauss) en- dorses the judgment of the first (R^musat), that " there is no book in China of whose age and integrity there is so complete certainty as of this." • See Williams, II. 243. ' Eckstein, your. As. (Sept. and Oct., 1842). » Ibid. ' Schott, CAin. Lit. 864 BELIEFS. senses to entire impotence, that existence may return to its principle," while the people are to be kept in primitive ignorance that they may not learn evil, and so thwart this object of all morality.^ He is " a pessimist and an obscur- antist." - " His ' non-being ' is opposed to being, as his ' non-action' to action." ' Julieh makes him protest against all mental action, and involves him thereby in hopeless con- tradictions. Even Von Strauss revives Remusat's idea of a cabalistic reference in his descriptive designation of the Tao to the Hebrew word Jehovah. Add to this the in- genuity of the Jesuit scholars in detecting in the Tao-te- king a heathen witness to the Trinity, the Logos, and the Incarnation, iive centuries before Christ, — and we shall have some idea of the burden laid by interpreters on the shoulders of the great mystical teacher of the East. Of all this portraiture I can find little or no trace in the None of Tao-tc-kiug itself, and feel the less confidence in these in such chargcs the more carefully authorities are king. Its compared, and the time and motive of its compo- character- gition Considered. It is a book of wonderful ethi- istics. cal and spiritual simplicity, and deals neither in speculative cosmogony, nor in popular superstitions. It is not the " Speculations of an Old Philosopher." * It is in practical earnest, and speaks from the heart and to the heart. Its religion resembles that of F6n61on or Thomas k Kempis, combined with a perceptive rationalism of which they were not masters. It knows nothing of " chaos," nor " void time," nor of metempsychosis (which entered China with Buddhism), nor of the worship of spirits (a develop- ment of the later Tao-sse).^ The sexual myths of Eckstein * Pauthier, in Franck*s Dici. d. Scunces Pkilosoph. * Bunsen, God in History., I. 265, * Carre, L'*Ancien. Orient-^ I. 401-403. * Chalmers so entitles it. ' The one allusion (Ix.) on which this last charge is founded is apparently intended to pro- tect the traditional faith in ancestral presence and help, from the influence of superstitious b» liefs in evil demons. Julien translates it: "The great point is not that spirits will not iojure men, but that the wise man does not." Von Strauss says, " The kwei will not harm a rightly governed people by shin (demonic) influence." LAO-TSE. 86s have no other foundation than the name, " Mother of all beings," applied to the Tao ; and his " drudging soul of Nature" is only discernible in an ethical exhortation to become masters of men by ministering service, not by op- pressive control.^ The Tao-te-king is neither ascetic nor pessimist ; it does not despise the body.^ It holds the in- dividual to exalted ideals, and claims the world for noble uses. So far is this virtue from " anti-social pride " or the aim at inaction, that its constant theme is the abdication of personal claim and the love and service of mankind. Its supposed " hostility to popular education and proe- ress IS a strongly expressed preference of spon- posed ob- taneity and simplicity of heart to the vanity of a ='='"'™"™- culture thoroughly pedagogic and prescriptive. It is a prophet's cry : Better begin afresh with the first steps of civilization, with only knotted cords to convey thought, with an insignificant State that has to mind its own affairs, and whose people have every thing to learn, than boast a civilization grown so wise in the self-complacency of vir- tuous phrases and precepts, of mere quantity in things known and done, without reality and without faith, that it is perishing of its own machinery of prohibitions and pre- scriptions in sheer ignorance of the spiritual and humane conditions of power.^ This is the natural meaning of those passages of Lao-tse which have been charged with " ob- scurantism," * when viewed in their relations with the facts of Chinese government and society in the age to which he addressed them. This practical and public mo- jj^p^^^^jj, tive gives intensity to his insistence on the laws of caipur- self-reliance and self-restraint, on the mastery of ^°^^' eager ambitions, on the powers of silence and the adequacy ^ Tao-te-ki7ig^ chs. Ixvi-, Ixviii., Ixxviii., li. 2 Ibid., ch. xiii., supposed to teach such contempt, merely uses the body as an illustration of our regard and care for what is nevertheless the condition of all forms of pain, to enfoiT:e the duty of loving the public interests, however great the personal sacrifices they demand. 2 See Ibid., chs. xviii., xix., Ivi., Ivii , Ixv., Ixvii., xxvi., xxviii. ^ Ibid., chs. Lxxx., xviii., iii., xxix. ss 866 BELIEFS. of inward peace ; to his faith in the invisible, impalpable, and outwardly weak, in unexpected resources and reserves of moral power ; ^ as well as to that lofty preference of be- ing to doing,^ and non-interference with the freedom of others,^ which have been mistaken for negative quietism, and even for idleness and self-indulgence. Such misinterpretations as have been quoted simply re- Meaningof ^^^^ ^he Tao-tc-kiug to a mass of self-contradic- its "non- tions. Its " non-action " does not propose that man shall forbear while the work is done by Heaven, but is defined as a living union with Tao, as secret power to make all things new,* through humility and self-renun- ciation ; a still and unapparent strength that " does not strive," but " hides itself while it lifts up men." ^ Its para- doxes, putting the least above the greatest, and rest above work, are intuitions of the spiritual mind ; enforcements of substance against shadow, of living soul against dead mass. Philosophically they affirm that cyclic return of strength to weakness and back again to itself, on which all life and growth depend. They illustrate the ethical laws that he who humbles himself shall be exalted, and he who minis- ters shall rule ; laws on which the whole gospel of this marvellous teacher incessantly turns. As its " non-action " is not effort to destroy the body Meaning and supprcss sensation, so its term " non-existent " "non-ex- is employed to designate no merely abstract es- istent." sence, but the reference of all beings to a Law beyond their finiteness ; a law whose transcendence does not separate it from life, since it is the " Mother of all Beings ; " their " asylum and support." Lao-tse does not teach with the Sank-hya, that the soul is but a spectator of the world, nor with the Buddhist that it should detach itself from life. In brief, what he deals with is not abstract ' Tao-te-king, chs. xlv., xxxv. ' Ibid., chs. xxxviii., xlvli. 8 Ibid., chs. xxxii., Ixiv., Ivi., Ivil. * Ibid., chs. xxii., Ixviii., xxxv. ' Ibid., chs, li., Ixx., xxxiv., xxviii. LAO-TSE. 867 logic and metaphysic, but personal character and spiritual insight, moral earnestness and devout faith. He does not " seek paradise through anarchy ; " he summons " a pater- nal government " of minute regulations to respect the right of the person to follow principles, not as the slave of rules, but as freeman of his own conscience and love.^ He espe- cially recurs to the symbol of childhood to express this faith in spontaneity and simplicity, this liberty of un- forced obedience to the laws of our being ; and repeatedly claims that it means earthly power and immortal life.^ The Tao-te-king is water from unseen wells ; life from original fountains. It has its store of rhythmic n^ origin. sentences from older times, and often reminds us ^"'y- of the later sages ; but it has not borrowed Jehovah from the Hebrews, nor received providential presentiments of the Greek Logos and the Christian Trinity. Equally un- warranted, so far as I can see, is Julien's inference that the Tao is " a being deprived of action, thought, and desire, and in no sense an intelligent cause." ^ The name Tao may be traced throughout Chinese thought, under the signification, in some form or Meaning other, of a world-basis in principles as distin- "' '^^° ^ "^ ^ both Law guished from individual volitions or forms of con- and imei- sciousness analogous to human, yet with tacit or ''sence. expressed reference to the ethical and religious sphere ; indicating truth of doctrine, principle of conduct, reason and right in human judgment ; in brief, the Right and Righteous Way. Thus while behind personality as sub- stance, it is nevertheless as life, as manifestation, the active force of matter and mind. " Truth," says the Con- fucian, " is Heaven's Tao ; the cultivation of it is man's.* ■ Tiu>-U-Jcivg, chs. xxxii., Ivii., Ixiv. ^ Ibid., chs. xxviii., lii., Iv. ' The passages he quotes (xviii., xxx,, xxxi.) prove nothing of the kind. Plath \^Rel. eL Alt. Ck.) says the character is composed of two others, meaning Head^ and to go ; u *., to g« in the highest way. See Lunjru, I. 4, 8. The Y-king says Yin and Yang are called Tao. * Ckung-yuTtg, XX. 18. See also Lvnyu^ I. .*. 868 BELIEFS. The Shu, in one of its oldest chapters,^ speaks of the "heart of Tao." And Lao-tse constantly describes it by every function of spiritual being and work, — as Maker, Preserver, Guardian, Father, Lover ; ground of all moral- ity, wisdom, power, and joy. It perhaps points to a ra- tionalist philosophy of very early times, by which the traditional anthropomorphism may have been assailed ; and it has even been supposed that Confucius, in his sin- gular warning against the " Tao of antiquity," had in view some such ancient school. At all events, the Tao of Lao- tse emphasizes union of inconceivable substance with energy of concrete life, in a manner very different from any thing in that purely practical and political sage. Yet, in another point of view, it is perhaps the most "The striking illustration of that absorption of the ab- \vfy" stract into the concrete which we note as the main 5iso. feature of Chinese thought. Principle is here rec- ognized not as a metaphysical form, but as a " Right Way." In the Tao-te-king the idea rises to spiritual grandeur, and the Tao is at once the impersonal root of the universe and the living tide of freedom, power, love. " The Way that can be spoken is not the Eternal Way, The Name that can be named is not the Eternal Name. Nameless, the Way is the source of heaven and earth, — Named, it is the Mother of all beings : He that is free from selfish desires shall behold it in the spirit; He that is possessed by passions, in the outward form alone. — And those two are one in substance, though differing in name ; Depth and the depth of depths : the entrance to all spiritual life." ' " The Way that cannot be named is the beginning and The"UTi- ground of heaven and earth." Here is one to speakabie" whom the world is not mere flow of phenomena, of the or process of self-evolution, but real substance; world. without which indeed there were nothing to "pro- 1 Shu'kingi Pt. II. II. 15. * Tao-te-king, ch. I Maximus Tj/rius, Diss., XXXVIII. LAO-TSE. 869 ceed " or be " evolved ; " to whom the very endlessness of its changes involved unity, stability, infinite being, as their inexhaustible ground and perennial source, without which they must come to nought. And though this substance can in no possible way be revealed to man as it is, and he can only affirm its transcendence to all persons, names, and forms, perceiving at least with certainty that it is, — yet even this sense of its reality, however impalpable, is so far from being a phantasm of the thinking faculty, that 'tis it alone which conditions reverence for the true and real as such, the substance of the most concrete human virtue. No other interpretation deals fairly with the " Tao " of the passage just quoted. Through such abstraction of pure reality as infinite and eternal do we come to hold truth and duty, ideas and principles, venerable ; and life itself as no passing shadow, but consubstantial with these fathom- less realities. We may call the universal substance " non- existent," since it is itself the ground of all existences, while not definable by any ; yet is it inseparable from man and Nature : and we misuse language when we speak of it as before time or beyond space, as entering or leaving the human soul. Thus Lao-tse describes it as through the ages an all-sus- taining providential care,i yet veiling its path and j^^ j^^^^, subduing its glory, parading no strength, seeking nent, yet . , 1 . reserved, no praise, with no motive beyond a spontaneous f^.^ love.2 A serene and still movement of resistless "^idi^s Its claim." power, working as one that works not, without haste or striving for effect, withholding its own sway that man's obedience may be free, and he be ruled only through his own nature, not by imperial edict or personal will.^ This is the mystery of virtue.* By what resembles this in himself man knows himself a child of the Eternal Way, » Tao-ie-king, chs. xiv., xxi., xxxiv. IbW-. chs. xl., li., iv. ' Ibid., chs. xxxvii., Ixxiii., xxxiv., li. * Ibid., ch. U. 8/0 BELIEFS. and finds his true life.' The Tao of the saint is in claiming no greatness, and so achieving greatness ; in ruling men by love and service ; in simplicity and one- ness with himself ; in the self-knowledge and self-reliance that have learned to trust the invisible laws ; in tender regard for the freedom of others, intermeddling only to open, never to close or clog, their path.^ He renders good for evil, and regards wrong-doers as placed in his safe-keeping.^ With his own lot and sphere he stands in right accord.* His witness is the universal in his own The in- being and its relations : it is law and love in their ward wit- widest significance as the order of the world. His assurance of immortality comes from knowing what is imperishable ; from fulfilling the purposes of living ; from returning, childlike, to the Way which is Life.^ To these foundations in personal liberty and spiritual Summons law Lao-tse recalls the State. Not by the many the State ^]^q follow show, or mcasurc effect by numbers or to recog- •' _ nize spirit- by institutions, but by the few who are committed lielanr ^° ^^^ substancc, is the nation upheld." Not by laws. trying to make the impartial laws patrons of one's private interests, but by controlling one's ambitious desires, is success possible.'^ Not by one who presses and suffocates men by his much doing and managing, but by one who is content with 6em^, and with the unforced processes of real growth, are the people advanced.^ In these senses it is only the action that desires to forbear action, it is only the virtue of powers whose first care is to leave the powers of others free, that can turn private conduct into public service, and befriend mankind.^ * Tao-te~ki7igi ch. lii. ^ Ibid., chs. xxxiv., vii., viii , Ixviii., Ixxxi., xxvii., xxiii., xxxiii-, xlvii., Ixiv., li. * Ibid., chs. xxvii., bdii. * Ibid., ch. xlvi. ^ Ibid., chs. xvi., lii. ' Ibid., chs. xxxviii., Ixvii. ' Ibid., chs. i., v., Ixiv. * Ibid., chs. xlviii., Ivii , Iviii., xxxiT * Ibid., chs. Ixiii ., Ixiv. LAO-TSE. 871 Unmistakable signs betray the civilization that has ig- nored this dependence of the mass on the spirit, signs of and fed on the shadow instead of the substance. ?""'<=. '^=- 1 1 moraliza- Men have lost all centre in themselves, mechanized tion. by incessant interference and oversight ; ^ and the virtues themselves become but an inflated currency of phrases that do not even promise to pay the values they parade. A dead-weight of prescriptions and conformities has fore- closed the genius of the young, and hardened the faces of the elders against sentiment and faith. In this way it is that men come to have " virtue " after they have lost all knowledge of the Right Way ; to have " humanity " after they have lost virtue ; and " equity " after they have lost humanity ; and " propriety," after they have lost equity.^ These boasted virtues become proofs of hypocrisy and signs of dissolution.^ It is an everlasting law that the simple should be taught by those who can refrain from over- teaching ; that the nation should be led " by those who will bear its burdens, and can endure its reproach. " * But when a State substitutes false for true subordinations, its government and social order are subversive, at war with the heavens and the earth. The summons of the Tao-te-king is for all time. Despot- ism or republic ; equalities democratic or patriarchal ; The state human nature levelled and squared into formulas, ?r""°' ^^ whether by endless law-making in the name of self- factured." government, by royal edicts, or by traditions never retested nor freely chosen, — the process is one and the same. The State, says Lao-tse, is " a spiritual vessel, and cannot be manufactured." ^ The invisible substance of liberty and service rejected, there comes the all-dissolving frenzy of corrupt competition, popular delusion and misery amidst whatsoever smartness and shrewdness, and the desolations > Tao-te-king, ch. Ivii. ^ Ibid., ch. -axni. ' Ibid , ch. xviii. * Ibid., chs. xxxvii., xlviii., kxviii. ^ Ibid.i ch- =««• 872 BELIEFS. of civil war in which power goes to the strongest hand.' " Large and open are the meshes of heaven, but none can escape them." ^ When, in times of national history such as are here de- Lao-tse's scribcd, a prophet strikes at that inveterate self- poiiticai conceit which makes reformation impossible ; when he must reject the very names of virtues because they stand only for paint on the face of death, — it is no wonder that his word appears to other times and races all the more strangely destructive for the very energy of his appeal to the bare tests of a lofty righteousness and truth. But here is briefly his political gospel : — The great should become lowly (Ixi.). Long indeed have men been sunk in delusion (Iviii.). The more kings multiply prohibitions and penal statutes, the poorer become the people (Ivii., liii.). Learn how to refrain from doing, and let the people of themselves find the right way. Let them alone, that they may have a mind for good (Ivii.). Why did the ancients honor this right way ? Was it not because it is found by force of nature, without long searching ? Was it not because by means of it wrong-doers obtain (true) liberty and life ? (Ixii.) Wonderful indeed is this clear summons to principles which the best modern governments have not yet accepted nor pursued, — amidst Chinese pedagogy and police, six centuries before the Christian era, and in the name of the eternal rights of personal virtue and freedom ! So much of general outline seemed needful, to place this Chinese nonconformist in the light of those relations by which he should be measured and judged, and which most of his interpreters have thoroughly ignored. I proceed to offer such extracts from the Tao-te-king as will convey its substantial meaning ; though no analysis could do justice to the delicacy and beauty of its transi- ' Ibid., chs. XX., liil, Ixzv., xxx., Ixv. * Ibid., ch. IxdiL THE TAO-TE-KING. 8/3 tions, which is not a practical reproduction of the whole. Obscure as the connection of his compact aphorisms may seem, Lao-tse incessantly recurs to his central idea of the Eternal Way, and again and again develops from it the laws of personal character and public duty. I. A depth, whose void all uses are not vast enough to fill ! How still and pure, as if the Eternal were indeed there ! i Before i_ ^he all beings, before Shangte (God). To whom shall we trace as Eternal a son the Father of all ? (iv.) A depth of soul, imperish- ^*>' able ;" mystery of Motherhood; root of heaven and earth. He that worketh through it shall not be weary (vi;). We see it not, yet we know it ; hear it not, yet perceive it ; touch it not, yet embrace it.' Ahke beyond conception, these three (aspects) are one : nameless, escaping us into the void, it is past finding out. If you go before it, you see not its face ; if behind, you see not its back. So to trace its working in oldest times as to guide the present by its light, is to hold the clew of Tao (xiv.). Impalpable, yet containing the forms of things ; impenetrable, yet the abode of beings ; dark, yet within itself a spiritual substance. And this subtance is truth, and its witness sure. From the days of old till now never has the Name of Tao failed, nor its creative work ceased. Whence know I that things have this origin ? By Tao itself (xxi.). Immaterial, unchangeable, all-pervading, unwearied: I have no name for it. If I would speak of it, I call it. Tao." If I must give it a name, I can only say, " It is great." In the world are four that are great, and the king is one of these. His law is from the earth ; the law of earth is from heaven ; the law of heaven is from Tao ; but the law of Tao is from itself alone (xxv.). Everywhere it reacheth, on the right and on the left. All beings wait on it for life, and it refuses none.« When its work is done, it claims it not as its own. It loves and supports all beings, but lords > Cf. Chtmg-ynng (XII.) ; "The tao of the wise reaches far, yet is secret.'' 2 Literally, "the spirit of the valley dies not." ■ Ji-hi-wei are the three words by which Lao-tse here additionally describes the spiritual qualities of the Tao. Their origin rad meaning are yet to be determined. R^musat and Von Strauss think they are mere sounds, representing the syllables of the word Jehovah, derived by Lao-tse from Hebrew sources! Julien rejects this, and translates, " smooth, little, fine ; " bu» Ihe dictionaries indicate a more abstract meaning. * " Thou art the Way by which all creatures go." (Ram&yana.) ' " The eyes of all look unto thee, and thou givest them their meat in due season." 8/4 BELIEFS. over none. In Tao is no eager desire. It is permitted to call it in- significant. All beings return to it, and it lords not over them. Great is it, and the holy man who claims no greatness achieves it (xxxiv). The movement of Tao is return (into itself). Its force is in weakness. All existence is from being ; being Laws of springs from nought (xl ). For ever is it (Tao) without develop- doing, yet leaves nothing undone (xxxvii.). i menu From Tao comes, the One ; from the One, Two ; from Two, Three ; from Three are all things. For all things are included in rest and motion (Yin and Yang) and the spirit of Nature (Khi), by which these are made one (xlii.). All things are born of Tao ; by its power upheld, by its substance Of Provi- formed, by its forces perfected. Therefore of all beings dence. there is none but reveres Tao, and honors its virtue.* And this is not by command of any, but by free force of Nature. For Tao produces, sustains, shapes, ripens, guards, and covers them with its power. To produce and yet take no possession ; to act, yet take no claim ; to enlarge, yet not control, — this is the mystery of Virtue (li.). The origin of the world is the mother of all. Whoso has found his Life in mother knows himself to be a child ; and knowing this, and Tao. returning to his mother, though the body perish, shaU not be harmed (lii.). Tao is the refuge of all beings ; the treasure of the good ; the redeemer of the wicked. Why did the ancients so honor Tao, but be- cause by seeking it can be found, and forgives those who have done ill ? Therefore, of all things most precious is the Everlasting Way (Ixii.). The life of Tao is spread abroad as brooks and rivers become floods and seas (xxxii.). ' The way of Heaven is like the way of one who stretches a bow ; Sovereignty bringing down the lofty, lifting up the depressed ; taking of spiritual from those that have too much, and giving to those that have ^^' not enough. The way of men is opposite to this (Ixxvii.). ' The analogy with Hegel's theses of the development of the Idea, in itself and for itself ; of the logic of the movement of the Spirit, and of progress as the identity of being and nought, — is obvious. The German philosopher has formulated for the West the same conceptions which are here instinctive and intuitive in the East- Lao-tse combines with them a profoundly religious spirit, and a sense of personal liberty throi^h cognition of the universal, as rare as it is admi- lable. To these he perpetually recurs, never forgetting their pracdca] autborityand interest, in his deepest meUphysic To give these their full development is no less than the *' mystery or' the Virtue of Tao" itself. ^ " As the birds to a tree, so all beings repair to the Supreme Soul" {Pnurta U/anisAad) "Eternal Brahma, end of fear, refuge," So., (Katha Ufanishad.). s CI Ecclesiastiaa, XXIV. 31, 32. THE TA.O-TE-KING. 875 Heavenly Tao has no favorites ; yet is it ever bounteous to the good (Ixxix.). It blunts its sharpness, strews from its fulness ; tempers its splendor, becomes one with its dust (iv.). In its simplicity so infantile, yet the whole world dares not make it subservient (xxxii.). Its simplicity brings freedom from craving, and this brings rest; and the world hastes of itself to righteous- ness (xxxvii.).' Hold fast to its great Form (idea), and the world shall come to you. It shall come and find no evil ; only peace and rest and joy. When Tao comes forth iirom the mouth, it hath no savor ; neither sat- isfies it the eye nor ear ; but of its resources there shall be found no end (xxv.). Striving not, i{ is master ; speaking not, it is answered ; calling not, men come to it of themselves ; patient and slow, but its plan is wis- dom ; its net has wide meshes, but nought escapes it (Ixxiii.). II. Whoso is without craving desires shall behold this spirit, in substance, not in form alone (i.). Things are known by jj p„son- their contraries, and suggest each other: being and nought, alcharac- heavy and light, long and short, before and after. So the ac- "■■• tion of the best man^ is as if he acted not. His teaching is by life, not by words. All beings move. He withholds not himself. He fulfils virtue, but he claims no praise (ii.). Heaven and contraries: earth endure, because they live not for themselves (iv.).^ Least is So the holy man makes himself less than others, and becomes s^^^'^^'- the first (vii.).' His goodness is like water, — a good to all; which contends not, but goes to the low places that men despise. Like the Tao, striving not for itself, it makes no foes (viii., xxii.). Better leave alone, than try to grasp and fill at once. A good thing accomplished that will bring him applause, he takes himself away (ix.). What is bent shall be straightened ; the empty is that which can be filled. So he who displays not himself shall shine ; he who Substance exalts not himself shall be exalted (xxii.). True goodness and show, is good, because it does not show for goodness, makes no account of mere doing ; half goodness does merely for the sake of doing. True humanity acts, yet not for the sake of acting. But justice is obliged * Cf. Max. Tyrius (Diss. xl.). *' O Laws more ancient than laws, O legislation more mild Ihan legislators, to which he wh;3 willingly submits himself is rich and free." * Shing-jin^ the complete man. ' So Julien and Strauss ; Chalmers reads, " because of their not aiming at life." * " He that humhleth himself shall be exalted." 876 BELIEFS. both to act and to take account of the action. Propriety acts ; and il not respected, it has to stretch out its arm and compel respect. So things go on. Losing Tao (reason as natural), men fall back on their goodness ; that lost, on their philanthropy ; that lost, on their (regula- tions of) justice ; and then on rites of propriety. This is but the peel of virtue ; the beginning of insanity. This wisdom of pretension is but the flaunting show of Tao and the beginning of folly. Hold fast to the substance, and leave show ; abide by the fruit, and let the flower pass (xxxviii.). The hard and strong are signs of death ; the yielding and weak, of life and growth. When the tree has become strong it is felled. The great and forceful go under ; the tender and feeble ascend (Ixxvi., Iv.). The hollow part of things makes them useful : the hub of the wheel, the inside of the jar, the windows of the house. Their part in being is for gain, but their part in non-being is for use (xi.)- The five colors blind the eye ; the five sounds deafen the ear ; the five tastes will spoil the mouth. Riding and hunting befool men, and things hard to attain pervert their ways. Therefore the true man's sphere is his heart, not his eyes (xii.). Rest is the lord of motion. The true man, in his daily work, never swerves from a quiet and serious mood.(xxvi.). The true leader is not fond of war ; the skilful soldier is not wrath- strength ful- He who strives not shall overcome. He who serves in not men shall be their master. This is accord with Heaven ; striving. ^.jjg greatness of the men of old (Ixviii.). He who stands on tiptoe stands not firm ; straining the limbs is not making progress (xxiv.). The wise of old were deep, and hard to be made known. Timid, like one who fords a winter stream ; circumspect, like one who is from home ; evanescent, like melting ice ; simple, like unwrought wood ; empty, like a valley ; opaque, like troubled water. He who possesses Tao seeks not to be filled (xv.). Silent teaching, the might of quietness, few there are that attain (xlii.).' Let thy doing be as not doing ; thy labor as not labor ; thy taste, that which is without savor ; thy great the little, thy many the few.^ Recognize the difiicult in things, and they shall be found easy (Ixiii.). He that meddles, mars ; he that grasps, loses. If men regarded Self- the end as they do the beginning, there would be no failure, restraint. Hence, the true man's desire is not to feed his desires, and not to seek great things.' He aims to help all men to their freedom, ^ ConiaciuSjLunyu, XVII. 19. '^ So Von Strauss translates. Julien says, '* Great and small, many and few, are equal in the saint's eyes." ' M. Aurelius. THE TAO-TE-KING. 8/7 and is careful not to intermeddle therewith by overdoing (Ixiv.)- Who knows others, is sharp; who knows himself, is enlightened. i Who masters others is strong ; who masters himself is the hero. Who has content is rich. Who goes forward boldly has will. Who leaves not his own place shall endure (xxxiii.). The world may be known with- out leaving one's door. To behold the heavenly way, no need self- of peering out of the window. 2 The further one goes (from reliance, himself) the less shall he know (xlvii.). Forsake your much learning, and be free from annoy. 'Twixt aye and yea, what is there to choose ? 'Twixt good and evil, how vast the gulf ! But the frenzy will not cease (with men). How full they all are ! I alone so empty, so befooled, so befogged, where all are so knowing ; so good for nothing, where all are so smart in doing ! I alone am different from others ; but I adore the all-sustaining Mother (XX.). The ancients said : " The bright in Tao are as darkness ; the ad- vanced in Tao as those that go back ; the firm in right as one who has no strength ; the true in faith as base and vile. Loud is that voice which is not heard. Great the image whose form is not seen " (xli.). The wise can be silent : the talker is not wise. Shut the hps ; close the doors ; blunt the sharpness ; soften the glare ; become of the dust — this is to be one with Tao. Inaccessible to bribes as to ter- rors, to profit or disaster, exaltation or disgrace, — such an one has the world's respect (Ivi.). On them who feel no fear of what ought to be feared shall fall that which is most fearful. Let none find his dwelling too narrow. Respect his life too cramped. It is not too narrow, if they do not *°'' °™'^ think it so (Ixxii.). My words are easy to read and follow ; krone's yet none can know or practise them. Few know me : I am self, the more honored.' Therefore the wise will wear coarse garments, and hide his jewels in his bosom (Ixx.).* Which is nearest you, your name or your person ? Which is most to you, your person or your posses- sions ? (xliv.) ^ He who subjects the animal to the spiritual becomes one with himself, and even a child.' If he makes his inward sight clear and pure, his faihngs shall pass away. Let the doors of Heaven be open or shut, he can dwell like the female bird in the nest. His clear insight shall dispense with toiling to know (x.).' ' Socrates, * Julien puts these sentences in the first person. » So Julien; Strauss says, " So far am I esteemed;" Chalmers, " V/orthy they that copy me. " * ' ' Cast not your pearls before swine. " »" Is not the life more than meat ? " ' " Except ye become as little children, -a shall not enter," &c. ' " He who is free from desire beholds by tranquillity of the senses the majesty o£ the soul." {Katha UpanisktdA 878 . BELIEFS. The force of an intant is in its harmony with itself: the knowledge Inward of harmony is everlasting (Iv.). Whoso has wholly ceased hannony from self shall find immovable rest. Things that have re- andrest. turned to their root, and fulfilled their purpose, are still. They become everlasting. To know the everlasting is light ; not to Union know it is to work one's own misery. He who knows the withTao. eternal becomes universal: being just, he is a king; being a king, he is Heaven ; being Heaven, he is Tao ; being Tao, endur- ing ; though his body die, he knows no harm (xvi.) .^ He who holds to what is of man and of woman in himself, is the world's channel. He who knows that which is hght in himself, and views himself as in the shade, is the world's model. He who knows his dignity, and keeps his humility, is the valley of the empire ; ^ virtue shall fill him ; to childlike simplicity shall lie return (xxviii.). Whoso is in accord with Tao is one with Tao ; he is one with virtue, as the corrupt with cor- ruption. To lack faith is to find none (xxiii.).^ As for me, three treasures do I prize. The first is compassion ; The three the second, frugality ; the third, humility. When Heaven treasures, would save, it surrounds with compassion (Ixvii.). The good has no rigid heart ; of the hearts of all the people he builds his own.^ The good should be treated with goodness, — also the evil; the upright, uprightly ; also the insincere. To the saint, all are his chil- dren (xlix.). He takes care of his own part of his contract, and insists not on that of his neighbor. He attends only to his promises, not to . his claims (Ixxix.). He who knows his (true) life shall fear ,^„(3i no wild beast ; nor needs armor in the armed host. The armor of rhinoceros finds no place for his horn, nor the tiger for his sincerity claw, nor the weapon for its point. He has no mortal part (1.).' Faithful words are not fine. Fine words are not faith- ful. The good is not skilled in fine speeches. The knowing is not the wise, nor the wise the knowing. The saint hoards riot. The more he gives to men, the more he hath. This is the tao of Heaven, — to bless, not harm. This the tao of the good, — to act and not strive (Ixxxi.). * *' When He is known as the nature of every thought, then immortality is known." ^Vedanta.') "Those who know the Supreme Brahma become even Brahma." (Ibid.) " Drops mingling with the sea will all become the sea ; so souls when blent with God, themselvis will God then be." (Angelus Silesius.) See also Oriented Religions^ India, on meaning of " knowledge " in the East, pp. 333-335- ^ That is, Where the streams gather their waters * " To lose it altogether" (Julien). * So Strauss; Julien reads, "Adopts the belief of the people," which does not seem ac- cording to the context. 5 "They shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not harm them.", (Mark xvi. 18.) THE TAO-TE-KING. 8/9 III. The best man is the best ruier, if he undertakes to govern. For his government is by greatness of mind, and harms none jjj .p^^^ (xxviii.). To him all the people turn their eyes and ears, govem- They are all his children (xlix.).i Alas, that a prince of ™™'' ^y myriad chariots should rule with levity, and fling away his throne ! (xxvi.). Because the great waters lie lower than the streams, they make these subject ; so he who would rule the people will put Rule himself beneath them. He will not burden them (Ixvi.). "irough rtf 11 1 . .11. . 1 . . humility Of all thmgs the most yielding, is water ; yet nothing is ^^^ hard enough to withstand it. The weak masters the strong ; service, the gentle, the hard. Who knows this not ? Yet none can follow it. Therefore is it said by the wise, " Whoso bears the nation's shame stands at its head. Who bears the sorrows of the land becomes its king." This is not more strange than true (Ixxviii.). Heap not praises on the wisest, lest men quarrel (for the fame). Glorify not goods hard to get, and men will not steal. By not gazing on alluring things, the heart will be at peace. Wise government is .pij^ j, therefore to make the heart void (of craving), to fill the repressing inward part (with good), to control the wills, to make strong selfish the bones (substance). (In these respects) one will seek to "^'"^s- make the people ignorant and without desire, and to bring to inaction those who know (those allurements) .^ This done, government is complete (iii.). If rulers would follow the Way that works as if it worked not, all beings would of themselves become transformed. If they resisted, I would show them the simplicity that is beyond all name ; which stills all passionate craving, so that the world comes of itself to do aright (xxxvii). Of kings in old time, the people only knew that they were. Then they came to admiring and praising them; next they feared them ; then despised. Men yield no faith Effects of to those who show none (xvii.). The great Path left, came forsaking (your) " philanthropy " and " justice.-' With the sharpening ^p°^^- of the wits, come trickery and sham. Discord arising in the ^^ue for family, comes (the law oQ " filial piety." " Devoted and loyal " prescrip- people are a sign that the country (itself) is in disorder and '"""• decay (xviii.).^ 1 "Eyes was I to the blind, and feet to the lame. Men waited for me as for the latter rain," &c. (Jobxxix.) ' So Strauss. Julien, following commentators, translates literally, as if Lao-tse would remand the State to primitive innocence and simplicity. Chalmers says, " Without desire of evil ; " and this is the substance of all the versions except Plancknei's, who regards the whole as a piece of satire, a quotation from the speech of the foolish I a That is, " The call for examples of this kind is a sign." Lao-tse is showing thit what 880 BELIEFS. Leave your knowledge ; away with your smartness ; and the people The con- ^'^ ^^ ^ hundred-fold happier. Let alone your over-busj ceit of " philanthropies ; " away with your (virtuosity of) " justice," ^•nsdom and the people will return to natural piety and fatherly love. Drop your shrewdness and gainjulness, and thievery will cease. Be not satisfied with the show of things : then you shall hold the substance. Show singleness of heart. Suppress greed, and contract ambition (xix.). The wise of old did not seek to render people smart, but to make them simple. People are hard to govern, so politic are they. But to govern them by their sense of pohcy is to corrupt them, and to rule without it is to be a blessing to the land (hcv.). This incessant knowing heaps up more and more. To dwell in Tao is to come to repose ; to do nothing, yet accomplish all.' This is the path to the throne. He whose passion is to be always doing is not fit to hold it (xlviii.). He who would take in hand to make the State shall not prosper. The State is a spiritual vessel, and cannot be manufactured. The The State '"^'^•^^'' ™ars ; the grasper loses (xxix.). Let him rule rained by the empire who Can let things alone. The more regulations, over-regH- the worse off the people ; the more munitions, the more wars ; ^' the more skill in making things, the more gewgaws ; the more show of penalties, the more rogues. Therefore, the wise man says, ■■ I win be quiet, and the people wUl have a chance to improve themselves I will have no pet schemes, and th»y will be simple of heart" (Ivii.). When government is blind, the people prosper. When it spies and supervises every thing, they are wretched. How long this cheating them of their proper sight has endured ! (Iviii.) If I were wise enough, I would pursue the right way ; but how to bring this about ? The right way is plain, but men prefer by-ways. And by ^^ *^^ palaces are splendid, the field shall be desolate, the luxury, granaries empty. To wear fine clothes, and carry sharp and war. swords, and be filled with eating and drinking, and to heap up riches, — that I call splendid robbery (liii.). Where armies have encamped, grow thorns and thistles. On great campaigns follow great famines. The good soldier is content with victory. He dares do nothing for mere love of mastery. He subdues, but is not lifted up. (xxx.) causes tlie boast or claim of special virtues is the conscioosness of self, the absence of spon- taneous goodness, in an old traditional state of society beset by formulas and prescriptioDS. ^ This illustiates Lao-tse's favorite style of paradox, produced by putting the ideal again* the conventional uses of words. THE TAO-SSE. 88 1 Let not the larger land overpass the desire to unite and preserve mankind, nor the smaller land the desire to enter the service Saved by of mankind. That both may attain their aims, the great must I'umanity. make itself the least (Ixi.). If people do not fear death, why use the death-penalty to scare them ? And if the people are kept in constant fear of death, and I seize and slay whenever wrong is done, who will keep his courage? There is the great Master of Punishments.' He who assumes his part is Uke one who hews out the work of the carpenter ; he cuts his own hand (Ixxiv.). A little State in a narrow land might be so ruled, that though it had but arms enough for a hundred men, it should not use them, a model Its people should love to live, yet should stay at home ; they State, should return to the knotted cords ; their food should be sweet to them; their (rude) clothes fine, their homes bright, their customs dear. With the neighboring land so near them, that the dogs and cocks could be heard, yet should they grow old and die without crossing over to each other's homes (Ixxx.). THE TAO-SSE. " On them who have no fear of what should be feared, there shall fall what is most fearfuh" This was Riseofthe the word of the prophet of Tao to the dissevered '^''°-^^^- States, in whose mechanism of prescription he saw the failure of free personality, that saving life of nations. His unheeded prediction was fulfilled in three centuries of an- archy, ending in Chi-hwang-ti, the Napoleon of the East, and the rule of the strong hand. The word-pretences of " humanity and justice," that Lao-tse had pricked with sharp moral insight, were given to fire and sword. Whether the tradition be true or not, that this royal Nemesis him- self was of the school that, in the name of Tao, pursued earthly immortaUty by means of elixirs and spells, it is certain that an extensive literature of such superstitions had already associated itself with the Tao-te-king. This work was spared by the conquero' from his holocaust of ■ That is, Heaven. See Julien, from the commentators. S6 882 BELIEFS. letters, doubtless because it was regarded as a book of divination hostile to the Confucian school. At the revival of learning the productions of the Tao-sse had amounted to no less than nine hundred and ninety-three volumes by thirty-seven authors.^ Of the ten great philo.sophers reckoned as subsequent to Confucius and before the Christian era, at least the half were of this sect.^ " Few ages have passed without expositors of the Tao-te-king, which has been popular among reading men of every denomination." ^ The " Nameless Void " became indeed the " Mother of Their use Being." While the self-secluded thinker was so o theTao- ^vithdrawu within its veil that it was possible to te-king as . ^ ... basis for make him the centre of mythic legends imitative aldocciSi °^ Buddhism,* his mystic volume opened a field for studies. the freest play of popular imagination. The Tao- sse have been the mythologers of China. From them came the old fables of Pwan-ku, and of those half-human builders of the social world that so strongly remind us of Darwinian evolution. Out of the serene contemplations of life and death, the praise of powers attainable only by devout con- secration, they drew a visionary alchemy and astrology, strange prototypes of the Mohammedan and the Christian, which some suppose to have been their products." That the school which claims Lao-tse as its founder has had little perception of his belief, is as plain to Chinese scholars as to us. Ma-tou-an-lin says of the Tao-te-king, that " its true spirit was ever the more misunderstood the farther removed men were from its day." Chu-hi says that moun- • Pankou's Catalogue. ^ Julien's Introd. to Tao-te-king. ' Wylie. • Ko-hong (fourth century) collected these legends of transmigrations and successive incar- nations, or in part invented them. Lao-tse was believed to have written nearly a thousand works, among them the Y-king ; to have been the guide of the oldest kings ; and to have come down to earth from the Tao, in every age ( Julien ; also Williams, II. 246). Of his priority to all earthly rulers, and precedence of all other teachers, see Bastian's Peking^ pp. 48, 421, ^ Thus the Tao asserts its everlasting validity. " Before Abraham was, I am." • A mer. Or. Journal, Oct., 1868 ; Edkins, Shanghai A Imanac, 1827 ; Wylie, p. 173. THE TAO-SSE. 883 tebanks and sorcerers stole the name of Lao-tse for gain, comprehending none of his meaning.i The Sacred Edict can see no other object in the vain talk of the Tao-sse than nourishing the animal spirits and lengthening out hfe for a few years. The Tao-sse, however, are not alone in their perversion of the highest fruits of spirituality to subserve a longing for the supernatural. This perversion similar takes essentially the same forms, and with strange fn7ther°'"^ persistence, in every religion. The necromancy of religions. Christian countries, never more abundant than now, has come to the point of claiming scientific as well as religious value, still centring, as in the East, in " spirit intercourse." So in the old time, Moses fulminates against sorcerers and consulters of spirits, and at the same time institutes divi- nation by Urim and Thummim, and makes his Jehovah as subject to human manipulation as Baal or Astarte.^ Wherever the invisible is conceived as a sphere of superior wills, there are found the priest on the one hand, and the trance-medium on the other, to procure knowledge of their purport. The modern spiritist protests against magic, yet accepts the whole substance of sorcery in the Bible legend.^ Every language has its phrases to express the idea of a " familiar spirit," and the automatic speech of the possessed. The attractions of spiritual genius are universal ; and a book like the Bible or the Tao-te-king becomes a unj^^sji fetich to crude stages of mind, as well as a com- magnetism panion to higher ones. Speaking to men according "f sX'tuai to their capabilities, it gives back to each his own genius, ideal in the glory of that authority with which its acknowl- edged mastership is clothed. The Tao-te-king was cer- tainly not intended to subserve such a school as the ^ Schott, pp. 28, 29. * Divination, however, has always some tacit admission of fixed and trustworthy law (sac p. 718 of this volume). ' See Howitt's HUi. of tht Supernatural, in illusttatioo of this naive inconsistency. 884 BELIEFS. Tao-sse ; though competent as their sacred book, to de-- velop their best elements. And the school of Tao must not be judged by the tufted The merits itinerants who sell nostrums in Chinese cities, or Tao-sse as Walk in proccssion through fires, bearing images of reformers, genii, to imprcss the vulgar. It has had distin- guished members in every department of thought ; dynas- ties have been its pupils and defenders ; and it has waged long warfare with the other two great religions for the con- trol of national culture.-' The " Great Void " was, after all, Tao ; it was principle, reason, ideal way ; it had therefore its philosophy of culture. . Many writers have called the Tao-sse the rationalists of China in an eminent sense. They are certainly its heretics?' The freedom of Tao was a sphere of spontaneity, above formulas and prescriptions ; around which has gathered the antiritualism, if not the antinomianism, of the nation. To the Tao-sse belongs the worship of the god of litera- Their turc.^ The medical divinities are Tao-ist. Chinese physical medicinc, such as it is, probably owes more to the studies of these porers over plants and minerals, than to any other source. The names of the various parts of the body are Tao-ist* So is the theory that men are formed by chemical forces within an immense crucible. In their writings on earthly immortality, the spiritual side is often taken against materialism.^ They ascribe the national doctrine of " the two principles," and the cosmogonic dia- grams of Fo-hi, to their master, and believe that Confucius Their large was his pupil.^ Their gospels were "written by religion the earliest kings." Buddha learned his lore of and letters. Xao saiuts, and the annunciation to his Virgin 1 For the history of its imperial epochs, see Biot's Pub. Itistruci. in China ; Bastian*9 Ethnologies p. i6r ; Schott's Chin. Litgesck., p. 38 ; Carre's VAnc. Orient. ; Arbeiten a Russ. Gesandtsch. zu Peking {li^z-ii^-}), I. 290. 2 Neumann's Lehrsaale d. Mittelreiches (1836), p. 12. ^ Mayers, N. China Branch R. As. Soc.^ i86g, 1870. * Edkins, Shanghai Almanac ^ 1857. ^ Wylie, p. 177. " Bastian, I, 421. THE TAO-SSE. 88$ 'Mother was sent by Lao-tse, who had already taught the Tao to Hindu disciples.^ Furthermore, it was to primitive Tao fathers that writing itself was revealed, in the form of eight uncreated and everlasting signs, containing the sub- stance of the faith, so dazzling that the wisest cannot bear • the sight; and these signs were translated into sounds at the opening of the present world-epoch, for the endless good of mankind.^ In short, the Tao spirit-spheres are the axis of history, and their personal powers its invisible creators.^ Among 'these they have admitted Mih-teh, the communist preacher of universal love.* They have assidu- ously wrought in all the old fields of belief, mixing doctrines with a startling license,^ and an equally singular zeal for study, spite of the warnings of the Tao-te-king. Like the alchemical books of the Middle Ages, the works of Tao-sse doctors made the ethical purity of their Moral and Master a condition of success in their mystic e^emTnts quest of immortality.^ "The true alchemist ex- ™*e sc3,rcli for pels his evil passions, is diligent, forgets fame and occuu wealth, comprehends the true object of life, and p™"» gains mastery over the elements." ^ In China, as in Europe, these occult speculations were marked by an instinctive reverence for cosmical unity, by mystic faith in the identity of all elements through a common root, and by spiritual perceptions seemingly at variance with the object pursued.^ Such values may generally be ascribed to the efforts of un- scientific people at communion with an invisible usreia. world of spirits, however distasteful to the culti- '»■>= "> ... progress vated mind, or however at variance with the pre- misunder- scriptive methods of tradition or institution. The """"^ intolerant dealing of the Hebrew prophets with such appe- ' Schott, p. 29. ^ your. As., Sept. axid Oct., tS42. » Schott * Faber, Quellen zu Cott/ttc., p. 11. » Chalmers, in China Review, Jan. and Feb., 1873. « Schott, p. 34. ' Edkins, from a Tao work in Shanghai A!manac,\ibT. » The Chinese term for Tao-sse alchemy means " uniting-bond" (Edkins). 886 BELIEFS. tites for food forbidden by the jealousy of Jehovah, has" associated them in the Christian Church with sin ; and the contempt into which they have at last been brought by true science has probably obscured the fact that they have been in past ages mainly ways of escape from dead traditions into freer relations with Nature. In China they have min- istered to imaginative faculties, whose demands found little encouragement in the classics or the schools. In a blind way they have reflected the living protest of the Tao seer. And, in all their extravagance, the stories and dramas of this school abound, as we have seen, in half-conscious satire on the vices of Church and State. Their morality becomes more marked as we come down to later times, and is a fea- ture of the gradual coalescence of the Tao-sse schools with Buddhism. Its sympathies have been extremely wide. In its temple widesym- at Peking, statues of Confucius, Buddha, and Lao- thl'xao^'^ tse stand side by side, the central place being sse. given to Buddha in politeness, as a stranger in the land.i The Yin and Yang, the goddess Kwan-yin, and deities of astronomical cycles, are also represented.^ The most venerated of its books, next to the Tao-te-king, says of the three religions of China that, though differing, they tend alike to make men virtuous, and reproves all hatred or contempt of either. The devotions of the whole school, however, centre in the Tao-te-king. In explaining the peculiar relations of this book to Chi- Gromds "^^c culturc, wc must bear in mind that it was but of the the highest form of a very ancient conception of fuencrof man's relation to the universe ; combining a philo- theXao- sophical basis of the world in Supreme Reason, and the ethical and spiritual manifestation of the same in human nature. Such connection is a constant element in the history of Chinese thought. In no othe: ' Basdan, p. 43. * Ibid., pp. 45. 46. THE TAO-SSE. 88/ way than through this /oot in a national habit of mind can we explain the great number of commentaries drawn forth by a book so wanting in apparent grounds of popularity, in all the principal schools. Its depth and seriousness in- deed, and the trenchant force of its criticism, must have made it a spiritual power that would challenge every thoughtful mind. It has had important influence on every eminent person of later times. The system of Chu-hi rests on similar premises ; although he strongly criticises the abstract and quietist character of Lao-tse.^ The most sympathetic expounder of the Teacher is Tchwang- sayings oi tse,^ whose saying that " life has bounds, but know- its ^isci- ledge is without bounds," is worthy a place in the Tao-te-king. In the same spirit he declined to hold office, because he would rather be one of his own swine than " a tricked-out animal led by the cords of princes to the sacrifice." In a famous chapter,^ he contrasts the petty powers of movement in creatures, great and small, with the immensity of space ; and adduces the obvious limitations of men, in their various functions and virtues, to point the great principle of Tao ethics, that " the only freedom pos- sible is in conformity to the laws of Nature through recti- tude towards heaven and earth ; so that one shall abide in their infinite wisdom, in place of his own conceits." " Therefore," he concludes, " the true man is without ego- tism ; as the divine nature disclaims merit, so the sage the praise of men." " The Emperor Yao said to Hiu-yeou — ''When the sun and moon appear, shall we light a torch ? When rain falls, shall we go to water- ing the ground ? Show thyself for the good of the nation, and let me be henceforth a shadow, for well I know my faults.' " Hiu replied, ' Shall I set myself up in place of one who has gov- erned the empire so well. Shall I be guilty of pretension so false ? The wren needs but a branch of a tree to live on. The empire is not > Neumann, Introd. to Chuhi. ^ Fourth century, B. c. ' Siao-yaa-yeou, translated by De Rosny, Textes Chinois. 888 BELIEFS. for such as I. Though the chief provider for the genii should prepare the sacrificial meats but ill, would it become his assistant to leave his own humbler work to supplant him ? ' " i The short mystical aphorisms of the " Book of Eternal "The Spirit and Eternal Matter,"^ are substantially those Book of of the Tao-te-king ; repeating the mystery of the spirhand Vold that contains all things ; the rest that is pure Eternal stillness, yet nowhere inert ; the two principles Matter." , , . . / , , , , , , ■ , that divide the world, and yet are one ; the higher and lower souls in man, and the dependence of virtue on the subjugation of selfish desires. Though matter and spirit are both eternal, yet in essence the last is primal, the first secondary. The Tao (Self-existent Reason) is the one essence of the whole. The Tao-saints were not so withdrawn in meditation, The Tao- as not to have their eyes open, like their masters, public^" to the needs and dangers of their times. Even in affairs. thg wars of China they played a part not unlike that of Christian saints in mediaeval Europe. Their sim- plicity, serenity, and independence seem to have given them a moral authority which it is creditable to the great men of China to have often recognized, not for the secrets of longevity only, but in matters of public moment. They were the counsellors of the Mongol dynasty. Tchinggis Khan was a disciple of the Tao, and sent far across the ch'ang deserts of Central Asia for the venerable Ch'ang Tchin Ts^ Ch'un to visit him at his camp in Persia, appar- Khan. ently for the sole purpose of hearing him discourse of the duties of rulers and the principles of the Tao. The record of the journey is extant, with notices of the man, and even his correspondence with this Conqueror of the World .3 One of his followers describes him thus : — " When he sat, he was motionless as the dead ; when he rose up * Tao-sse school, transl. by Neumann, Lehrsaale, etc. ^ Ibid. ' See Bretschneidet^s Chinese Mediteval Travellers (Shanghai, 1875). THE TAO-SSE. 889 right, he was like a tree ; like the thunder and the wind when he moved. A man who had seen and heard much. There was not a book which he had not read. My veneration for him increased daily. He was always cheerful and social ; he wrote verses and loved nature. He considered life and death like warmth and cold, but thoughts about them did not perplex his mind. Could he enjoy such perfections if not penetrated by the Tao ? " To this sage wrote the " Master of the .World : " — "As my calling is high, my obligations are heavy. I fear there is something wanting in my ruling. I have ever taken to heart the ruling of my people, but I could not find worthy ministers. I have heard that thou, master, hast penetrated the truth and walkest in the path of right. Long retired from the world, yet to thee the virtuous repair in multitudes, like clouds on the path of the immortals. I was always thinking of thee. But we are separated by great mountains and plains, and I cannot meet thee. I can only descend from the throne and stand by the side of it. I have prepared an escort for thee. Do not be afraid of the sandy desert. Pity the people, or pity me, and teach me the way of preserving life. I shall serve thee myself, and hope thou wilt leave me a trifle of thy wisdom." And the saint replies, in the spirit of Lao-tse : — " I confess that in worldly matters I am dull, and know not yet Tao, though I have sought in all ways. Great as my repute is, I am no better than others, and looking into myself I am ashamed. Who knows my hidden thoughts .■" I am old and infirm, and even if I should reach your majesty I should not be of service. Public affairs and war are not in my capacity. The doctrine of Tao teaches to re- strain the passions, — a difKcult task. I am anxious to satisfy your desire and to brave frost and snow. Therefore I solicit your decision. Four of us were ordained together, — three have attained sanctity ; only I am unworthy the repute of a saint." " Holy man," said Tchinggis, " you have come from far. Have you a medicine of immortality ? " The Master replied, " There are means for preserving life, but no medicines for immortality." Invited to dine with the Emperor every day, he replied : " I am a wild man of the mountains (recluse). I cultivate the Tao and love solitude." The Emperor let him live as he liked, and gave him the title Shen-sien (imperishable).^ 1 Chinese Mediatial Travellers, pp. 43-47- SgO BELIEFS. His followers proposing to carry home the bones of a disciple who died in these far lands, he answered thein thus : " The body shaped of the elements perishes without any value ; but the soul is real and free and none can grasp it." " Upon that," says the narrator, " no more was said." ^ These elements do not exhaust the school. All desires Popular to reach occult wisdom without the toil of learning ti^e^di' flowed into the open gate of Tao, " Mother of the ments Unknown." Always what a few call "the Un- by the knowable " is that which all seek most to know, ^^°' and that in which they must somehow find a home for trust. Itself democratic, early Taoism was flooded with a fetichism still older, popular and native to the Chinese. Shamanic genii, exorcisms and spells ; strivings for earthly longevity ; the quest for imperishable youth ; vague hopes of vegetable or metallic means for transforming into splen- dors the miseries of human experience ; Hindu reverence for life in all creatures ; Buddhist trinities and destinies ; recording spirits laying up the details of conduct in writ- ing for future judgment, — all these tendencies found foot- hold and freedom under the broad shield of Tao. To not one of them did the work of Lao-tse give sanction. But its Their broad sympathy with free aspiration ; its startling point of contrasts of the outward and inward ; its oracular attach- . (. . . . ment to paradoxcs ; its promise of mystic resources in the the Tao- jjjjjjjgn ijfg^ ^nd especially of immunity from death, which though spiritual in meaning, like that of the Hebrew Book of Wisdom and the Gospel of Jesus, could easily be taken in a physical sense ; its instinct of cosmi- cal unity, and its praise of the simple and unlearned ; in sum, its constant emphasis on the invisible laws by which all institutions were to be tried, and before which they were found wanting, — were points of ready attachment for these crude expectations from the spirit world. How ^ Chinese Mediaval Travellers^ p. 50. THE TAO-SSE. 89 1 wide their margin for vague sentiment compared with the close appeal of the national classics to the understanding, and to definite relations and interests ! ^ It is not easy to believe that the Tao-te-king could have been accepted as an ideal, without elevating the significant standard of thought and sentiment among the less ^^^.^ cultured. And although the works of the school works. are to a great extent known to us through their opponents, they retain marks of this refining influence even in their titles : " The Light of the Darkened House," " The Heart- enlightening Mirror," " The Book of Rewards and Punish- ments," " The Book of Devotion and Faith," " The Book of the Outward and Inward," " Ascent to the Mystery of Wisdom," " Transformation by Wisdom and Virtue." The effect of these works is likened to " that of a bell struck in the silence of midnight," — so distinct is their appeal to the contemplative nature. De Rosny has recently translated one of the shortest of their earliest ethical treatises, which gives us <. Book of as noble a standard of duty as any gospel in the R^^'-'J^ V .for good world, — the Yin-tchi-wen, or " Book of Rewards for acts done Benefits done in secret." ^ It opens with the dec- i°^^"=«" laration, by an ancient divine ruler, of his providential care of men : — " I have judged men for seventeen generations. Never have I oppressed the people, nor borne hard on the laborer. I have rescued them from calamity, have relieved their miseries ; I have had pity on their orphans, and forborne with their faults ; I have wrought them good in secret ways. Above them I have moved the blue heavens. May they keep their hearts in my ways, and they shall receive the blessings." Self-renewal in the heart ; constant acts of love, all of which shall reap their rewards ; reverence for Buddha, and » There is plainly no need of supposing, with Gallery, the existence of another Lao-tse, as author of a book of magic, afterwards co;iounded with the Tao-te-king. ^ Textes Chinois. 892 BELIEFS. Study of good books ; help to the unfortunate, and even to creatures under the feet ; honest weight and measure ; generosity to servants ; trust in friends, — these are sam pies of the quality of precepts, far superior to those of the gnomic poets of Greece. " Burn not the forests. Light a torch in the night for travellers ; build a boat to take them over streams. Spread no nets for birds in the woods. Slay not the laboring ox. Plot not for thy richer neigh- bor's goods. Envy not another's wife or daughters. Sow not strife. Break not marriages. Use not thy riches to oppress the poor. Invite to virtue by practising it in body and soul. Hide the faults of others, and make known their virtues. Let not thy tongue say what thy heart denies. Give to posterity the instruction that will reform mankind. Surrender thy riches for the good of the human race. In action be conformed to Heavenly Reason ; in speech, to the moral sense of humanity. Examine thy conscience in the solitude of thy bed." The practical tone of this manual proves that the "mid- night bell" of the Tao meant more than a call to holy dreams. All these qualities come to their high-water mark in the The Kan-ing-pien} or " Book of Rewards and Punish- "Book of ujents," the real Bible of the Tao-sse ; of all their Rewards ' « ' and Pun- works the most widely read, the most comprehen- OCai^inE- ^^^^ ^"^ ^'•^ ^*^^ °^ ^ other faiths, and the most pien). hospitable to current superstitions concerning the invisible powers. Though in its present form a long elab- oration,^ it is nevertheless ascribed to Lao-tse himself. It is an ethical anthology of two hundred precepts, accom- panied by sanctions which mainly consist in a record of human intentions and actions, made by an invisible police with view to future retribution in the lengthening or short- ening of the earthly life. The ethical quality of these max- ims is unsurpassable. The purity of taste shown in the ' Translated by Julien (1835). ^ It can hardly be traced back beyond the tenth or twelfth centuiy, and appears to be thi work of a collector named Wang-siang. THE TAOSSE. 893 compilation is in such contrast with the puerility of the retributory frameworlc, that the combination would amaze us, were we not familiar with the same phenomenon in all the Bibles of the world. Fruits of a popular demand for the universal wisdom of seers and prophets, yet enfolding these treasures in the forms in which they are appreciable by un- It^^^l scientific minds, the Bibles blend in their contents '"'"^°™ the mastership of the wise with the subservience hLessof of the foolish. But the moral appreciation they "'"• contain is of more moment to us than the follies and fears with which it is burdened, and which are but as the broken speech of one who stammers love and confidence in an ill- known tongue. It is so that religion demonstrates the unity of the race. Let us, after all, remember that science has not as yet, even in the most civilized communities, gone far in poike effacing the traditional notions of a police man- ™"»g= - . ment of agement of the universe. They still resist its theuni- assaults on the belief in Divine interference with ™T '" modern the movement of natural law ; a dogma in which religions. the espionage of the old Oriental genii is concentrated in the intensest degree by monotheism. The "jealous God" of the Christian Sabbath includes in one Being all the powers wielded by the invisible mandarins of the Tao-sse police, and plies reward and punishment on the other side of death as arithmetically as they do on this. The Hebrew idea of retri- bution, involving minute personal supervision, runs through the whole Christian Bible. And they who still quote the tale of Ananias and Sapphira, or the miraculous extension of the lifetime of Lazarus, can hardly contemn the dealings of the Kan-ing-pien with the thread of human life. Sab- bath manuals and revivalist machinery still exercise con- stabulary powers in the name of God ; and praying bands vie with inflated preachers in the function of handling keys 894 BELIEFS. at the earthly end of supposed telegraphs that announce their verdicts or desires to the Throne, and bring back the postponing indulgence or the condemnation without re- prieve.^ It is still popular to preach death as a police arrangement for warning or punishing the living, by tak- ing off the objects of their love. This idea is rigidly put in the Chinese Scripture now before us ; the wives and children of the wicked being taken from them to balance their accounts with criminal justice.^ Nothing in the Kan-ing-pien theory of retribution need surprise the disciples of any Bible in the world. ing-pien But from all Bibles alike chaff falls away in due freedom time, and real grain endures, — the pure 'and lofty andim- ethlc that has been the main factor in their help- mortality. j. , . , , , ... lulness, as it was the deeper motive power in their growth. The thread on which our Tao-sse sentences are strung is the consciousness of moral freedom and of alle- giance to eternal right. " The happiness and misery of men are not predetermined. Man draws the one and the other by his conduct. Reward and punishment follow good and evil as the shadow the body."^ Nor is immortality be- yond death excluded by the earthly nature of these retri- butions.* However confidently the Tao-sse looked for an elixir of earthly longevity, they could not but see that death came alike to evil and good ; so that their promises of im- mortality to the righteous could have had no merely phy- sical meaning, but pointed to that connection which men have been apt in all ages to cherish between rightness and lastingness. Even the curious extension of their arith- ^ A Methodist bishop is recorded as pronouncing the deaths of several American statesmen within a few years as proofs of the divine disapproval of their opposition to tlie national admin- istration. The favorable answer from God to the prayers of a sensational preacher for a sick relative, by the immediate improvement of the patient, though at a considei-able distance from the human operator, was reported by the latter in one of our city pulpits, and doubtless widcl; accepted by his converts. ' Ibid., p. 504. ' Ibid., p. 6. * Ibid., p. 133. THE TAO-SSE. 89S metical ethics to the point of transferring one's unpaid accounts with the moral law at his death to his descend- ants, did not imply that he was himself beyond reach of further payment. By the patriarchal faith a man's vir- tues flow back in honor and blessing on his fathers ; and it is in the same spirit that he assumes their moral debts and wipes them out by bearing the unpaid penalties. To us it seems scarcely conceivable that civilized races like the Chinese and the Hebrews should have 1 r ^ 1 -, -, • Sources of been firmly persuaded that the length of men's theiiiu- lives depends on their moral qualities; but we ^'°"*^' ^ ' virtue en- forget that veneration for age was the religion of suresa the Oriental world, whose devout illusions were pe"sist!' harshly broken by the sharp senses of the Greek. ™« °* The hoary head was the highest token of Divine agdnst care. Its claim to the best shares in life would ™p"'' ence. mamtam firm hold on the sense of justice, even to the disregard of frequent facts of experience. For it is not experience that governs the belief of men, but their interpretation of experience. There is a virtue in re- ligious faith akin to imaginative power ; it is able to believe against all apparent outward evidence what its ideal demands. " Despair," says the Arab proverb, " is a freeman ; hope is a slave." It is but putting the same truth in another form, when Shelley sings of " hoping till hope creates from its own wreck the thing it contem- plates." Forces like these are indispensable, on every level of culture, to lift man above his allotted weight of pain and loss. The audacity of their obstinate promise of equal justice to be meted out in this life is but an instinct- ive form of loyalty to the unseen resources of virtue and its claim to command. The persistence of beliefs against experience is favored by the wide margin left for saving explanations. The Tao-sse theory, that every good act . added to the years of 896 BELIEFS. life and every bad one diminished them, was beyond the power of human insight to apply with any thing like pre- cision ; and the practical result would be that men would strive to attain long life by good conduct, without pretend- ing to question cases in which the law appeared to be re- versed. A religious belief, when backed by a sense of moral benefit, resists inductive scepticism ; no longer de- pendent on instances, it stands by appropriating the a Through Priori authority of ,the moral sense. Shall its moral claim be confuted by some bit of uricomprehended association. r..iAi*i i* •• • 1. tact i A higher logic moves in its wings, and its feet are not entangled in earthly stumbling. On lower stages of growth as on higher, facts are plastic to the idea, and this possessor of the soul is the interpreter of the world. Hence the difficulty of escaping an error so rooted in moral justifications as is this belief in the squaring of personal ac- countabilities in the present life. So strong its hold, that the protest against it has been a sign of rare genius, and makes spiritual landmarks and immortal scriptures like the drama of Job. The famihar act of faith, by which the Christian affirms the existence of a perfect God and the absolute jus- tice of his ways, is ventured in face of a mass of positive and permanent evil tenfold more crushing than the prac- tical evidence against which the Oriental world maintained this doctrine that health and longevity were signs of the approval of Heaven.' It is seldom that a believer realizes the extent to which his own creed overrides the laws of evidence ; it is only when he turns to the study of other religions that his common sense enters the field, and he wonders at a far less amount of the same element as an incredibly superstitious evasion of the plainest facts. ' The only religion that absolutely refuses to faith this power of ignoring hostile experi- tnces is Pessimism ; and this, as is proved by the philosophy o£ Schopenhauer, its most con- spicuous advocate, asserts the right of the understanding to protest against the world and life, only to pronounce its exercise of this and every other function to be itself an illusion and a fraud. THE TAO-SSE. 897 The Kan-ing-pien carries the theory to its extreme con- sequences. Poverty, calamity, mortifications, evil re- pute, every effect of adverse stars, pursue the evil- J^ond"^,, doer and make the penalty-shortened life intolera- '"'^y. ble. The virtuous, on the other hand, " succeeds Inte''"" in all his undertakings, being in accord with Kan-ing- Heaven." i It does not follow, however, that the fnteri^r'^'' inference was strictly drawn so as to make mis- *^'^- fortune always a proof of sin. The pith of the matter was simply that the physical world and the fortimes of men were under one ethical law, revealed in the human ideal of right. However true as a basis of philosophical thought, this principle depends for its interpretation on a culture which knows how to recognize the ways in which the laws of Nature really serve the nobler life of man. "If a man be unjust," says Plato, "let nothing that is called good ever be his. For to have all good inpiato. things without justice and virtue is the greatest of evils, if the man be immortal ; not so great, if he lives a very short time. These are the truths you must compel your poets to teach your youth. If I were a lawgiver, I would inflict very heavy penalties on any one who should dare to say that there are bad men who lead pleasant lives, or that the profitable and gainful are one thing and the just another."^ The inexorable justice of Nature, as asserted in the Kan-ing-pien, does not reach these high spiritual ns mem- justifications ; but neither does it exclude the tender M^ide. mercies that alone could reconcile man to its severity. The sinner's repentance began a series of balaitcmg credits which assured him, if persevered in, of final felicity. ^ " If your heart forms a good intent, though you have not yet acted on it, the good spirits attend you ; if a bad one, though yet unaccomplished, the evil are at your side." * * Kaft'ing'^ien, pp. 10, 138. * Laws^ II. ■ Kan-ing-pUtiy p. 514. * Ibid., p. 51a. S7 898 BELIEFS. This emphasis on the interior quality of virtue, on reality and sincerity, the substance before the show, which marked the ethics of the Tao-te-king, pervades the whole Kan-ing- pien, and indicates that the spiritistic machinery of the school was a later accretion, and had small effect on the kernel of its tradition. Tread not a crooked path. Good intentions are the same with Sentences good actions. Deceive not in the secrecy of your house, from the Rectify your own heart that you may improve others. It is Kan-ing- • ^ ,1 • t ... , ,. , ■ ^ crime to think against justice ; secretly to injure good men ; Virtue in to know what is good and not do it ; to ascribe one's own the heart, crimes to Others ; to expose others to danger to save one's self ; to seek one's advantage at the expense of others ; to be proud of success by wrong means ; to claim the good deeds of others ; to make unjust estimates of good and evil ; to hide treachery in the heart ; secretly to desire to possess others on account of their beauty, or to covet what belongs to them ; to speak otherwise than one thinks ; to defame others, and call one's self pure ; to regard any wickedness as a sign of ability. It is a crime to enrich one's self by fraud ; to give bad goods in In exterior return for good ; to seek riches eagerly ; to destroy the relations, property of others ; to adulterate merchandise ; to use short measures ; to borrow and not return ; to usurp the fruits of other men's labor or skill ; to get office by cunning and fraud ; to buy lying praises; to harm weaker persons in order to advance one's self; to forsake public good for private ends ; to fawn on superiors ; to dis- order administration, rewarding the guilty, punishing the innocent ; to break law and receive bribes ; to deceive the simple ; to make light of the people's life. Follow righteousness and filial piety ; respect the old and cherish In private the young. It is a crime to treat near relatives angrily ; to relations, fail of mutual respect as husband and wife ; to show disre- spect to one's teacher ; to calumniate one's fellow disciples ; to enter foolishly into bad society. Receive the favor of princes with fear. Pity the orphan and the widow ; pity the unfortunate ; ridicule not Humane their infirmities ; save men in danger ; rejoice in their suc- sentiments. cess, and moum their losses as if they were your own ; yield much and take little ; be not angry at insults ; do favors without ex- pecting rewards ; give without regretting it ; be humane to animals, even to insects ; harm not even plants or trees ; do not frighten sleep- THE TAO-SSE. 899 ing birds, nor kill those with young, nor break eggs without motive. They who kill innocent men are like foes that slay each other ; he who defrauds another is like one who swallows poison. Wasting cloth or grain, or poisoning trees ; pursuing pleasure immoderately ; hurrying from old things to new ; drinking to Against excess ; boastfulness ; wilful caprices, — are wrong. To rid- bad habits. icule saints and sages ; to murmur at Heaven, curse the weather, mock at spirits, call heaven and earth to witness in belialf of crime ; Against to show contempt for the souls of one's ancestors, ^ are in-eligion. crimes against religion. To these are added warnings against misleading the people with false doctrines ; and a variety of admonitions as to keeping sacred days, seasons, and places ; and against such superstitions as grew out of an earlier condition of semi-barbarous life, such as " passing over live men, leaping over fire, pointing at a rainbow or spitting at a shooting star." Finally, all honor the virtuous ; Heaven protects him ; evil spirits avoid him ; he succeeds in every Blessings thing ; he may look for immortality in another life, °^*° and for happiness and public trusts in this. The second part of the Kan-ing-pien is a running com- mentary on the maxims, illustrated by instances Tiie Kan- which enforce the doctrine of retribution in a more ™^^'e". complex form. Its imperial preface dates in the "n^s. seventeenth century, and it is manifestly separated from \he first part by a wide interval. The simplicity of the elder precepts has given way to paraphrase and exposition, in which sentences are interwoven, usually of equal moral ideahty with the former. The exact squaring of accounts with the moral law is here carried on into a future EtWcai re- life, betraying the influence of Buddhism, and pos- ^','h°he sibly in some degree of Jesuit Christianity, at that Jmureiife. time active in the empire. Men pass back and forth be- tween the worlds, curiously mixing up the inferno of Manu goo BELIEFS. or Dante ^ with the every-day concerns of life. Everlast- ing penalties await infanticide, and " deceiving of the people by lies ; " others, such as those that punish cruel officials, are measured by Buddhist kalpas. As in Manu, the wicked inflict sufferings on themselves similar to those they have wrought in others, or suffer death from diseases of the organs they have abused. The " unpardonable sin " is not in speaking against the Holy Ghost, but in maltreat- ment of parents. Resurrections are a commonplace, and enter regularly into the retributory system as executed by the decisions of the spiritual court. This system has also the control of cosmical phenomena, directing them on the person of the sinner, who is struck by lightning, mica: phe- smittcn with disease, or swept away by strong winds, nomena. „ -phe epochs of wind and rain are deranged by crimes of rulers and people." Boys who burn sacred books are carried off by pestilence. The Tao-sse Ananias is an official who beats an angel disguised as a mendicant ; an unkind son is crushed by a stone falling out of the sky ; violent men die violent deaths ; the blasphemer of spirits is torn by a dog ; the licentious person sees his children given over to vices like his own, for which no miracle would seem necessary ; a moral intuition is hinted in the aphorism that " Providence has no special affection, yet always helps the virtuous." These mathematics, that de- termine destiny as a quotient of balanced accounts democratic lu good and cvil conduct, override all earthly dis- spint. tinctions ; and, in the judgment, both Chinese and Buddhist wisdom see the slave equal with his master, and ihe beggar under one responsibility with his prince. The main motive to which Tao-sse preaching appeals is Official the love of official position, which is promised to all anlthi^* good people with an assurance as astonishing as reward. the legend-manufacturc by which it is enforced ' Kartr-ing-pUtit pp. 136, 94, 453. THE TAO-SSE. 9OI A kind of second childhood in an old country, this appeal merely means that the civil service holds in China the place so long held by the Church in Christian countries, as under special Divine blessing. Open to all, the hope of office is as available a stimulus to the morality of the Tao-sse as it is to the ambition of the American schoolboy. It is true that the proportions here tabulated between virtue and its rewards involve an ideal estimate of office to which even our education has not yet attained. For instance, one who voluntarily assumed the death-penalty in place of a younger brother is on record as indemnified by having a grandson who is raised to a magistracy and fills it with credit. An- other, who has provided for an impoverished man who had been his teacher, receives as reward a post of the third class and the pleasure of seeing his descendants successful in the school examinations. Against these puerilities we may put such stories and sentences as the following : — The Emperor Wu-ti said one day to a priest : " All my life I have loved to bestow favors. Have I acquired merits ? " " Not gp;_.;j^^[ one," answered the priest. " Your actions were prompted by principles desire of recompense, and were therefore without virtue." — and pre- The immortals seek men more earnestly than they are sought ^^^^^°l^ by them. The gods are rectitude itself, and accept the per- son of no man. Do not seek to flatter or bribe them in your prayers ; such prayers will bring you misery only. Men say, " Deceive not the gods ; " but I say that he who cannot deceive his own heart can hardly deceive spiritual beings. We cannot disguise our actions even by the thickness of a hair. — The judge after death refuses to recognize earthly contracts in evidence of character, saying, " I will take note only of the witness in your own heart." He who lusts after another is guilty from the moment of forming the desire. Wine is a destroyer of the reason of man. Instead of repairing bridges and highways, smooth the highway of your own heart. When that is levelled, all else shall be smooth.' The spirits are within as well as without us, and the wise will watch their hearts, not pardoning their own lightest faults. Better rouse the anger of the godS than yield to the corruption of the age. The fidelity of the dog should shame those who forget benefits. He 902 BELIEFS. who has received a drop of water ought to give a fountain in return, When children, servants, or guests commit faults, we should hold our- selves the authors. Yu, seeing criminals led to prison, wept for the vices that had led to their fate. Tao-wen, seeing the sufferings of la- boring men, reproached himself as their cause. Fou-pi, being insulted, took no notice of it, but replied, " I think some one else was meant." The aggressor blushed, and apologized. A magistrate, being ridiculed by a student, refused to hear his name, lest he might not be able to forget it. A high officer gave this advice at death to his sons : " En- dure insults. How many calamities have befallen because brave men would not bear wrong ! " Another, about to sign a death-warrant, dropped his pencil, saying, " I have no strength to write." The sum of duties is to cultivate virtues in secret, and to do good to all creat- ures, according to one's means and with all one's might. What is useful to other men cannot fail to be useful to yourself. Sorceries, that endanger life, health, or estate, should be prohibited and punished ; but let wise and useful practice of medicine be encouraged. The an- cients said, " Do not kill a bird three springs old. The little ones in the nest await the mother's and father's return." One who shot at a stag, and hit his own son, heard in hi_s grief a voice say, " The stag loves his child as much as you loved yours." The rites are violated when creatures are slain in numbers to gratify the palate. Laws are known to all nations protecting the ox who toils for us, and harms none. These practical ideals should surely redeem Tao-sse lib- eralism from the suspicion of religious indifference which has been so often urged against this reverent sentence of the Kan-ing-pien : — " Though the religions of the Confucians, the Buddhists, and the Tao-sse differ, yet their principles tend equally to make men virtuous. They who ridicule and despise them are guilty of great crime.'' Tao-ist theology at the present day represents in a com- Present blncd form the large sympathies vsrhich have led it theology constantly in the past. Its highest God, according the fusion ' to Edlcins,^ dwells in the heavens, creator and mover of Chinese thereof, and source of all truth ; immaterial and spontaneous : — evidently the meaning of Tao is not yet lost. Its second divinity presides over the books of the * Paper read to N. China Branch R. A. Soc, May 19, 1859. THE TAO-SSE. 903 school, the movement of times, and the evolution of the two principles ; and the third is Lao-tse himself, the incar- nation of doctrine as life, revealing himself in various forms and times to deliver mankind. Have we not, we may ask, in this combination of spiritual essence, cosmical immanence, and saving manifestation, the Tao-ism of Lao-tse, the naturalism of Confucius, and the Avatir system of Buddha ? The union is crude, but it is real. Beneath these, according to the same account, all forms and elements are interfused with spirit powers, apparently of Shamanic and Buddhist origin ; products of many ages of alchemy, astrology, and other efforts to penetrate the mystery of the world. Most of them seem to be benevo- lent and helpful ; such as " the Honored One," who hears and saves the suffering, ferries souls to heaven in the lotos- boat, holding the willow branch, whence he scatters dew of doctrine ; the all-merciful Kwan-yin ; "the Thunderer," who renovates all ; " the Sun-spirit," transformer of evil to good ; " the Moon-spirit," impartially dispensing joy and sorrow. A God of letters, identified somehow with the constella- tion of the Bear, protects all creeds and maintains culture. Even Confucius has divine honors. A divine succession of patriarchs have transmitted the doctrine, and one of them at least is a woman. Alchemists and physicians are in honor, lists of the most famous being kept, and records of their great works. The living head of the Church is called Heavenly Teacher (Tien-shi), and Great Ruler (Ta-te). On the shadowy border-land between the seen and un- seen, life and death, the groping of the ignorant in Tao-sse all ages has issued in superstitions of a common f."P"f"- o J- tions be- type. They have afforded abundant material for sa- long to tirists and comedians : nor have Tuvenals and Lu- ^^"\""^i ' -^ mon to all cians been wanting to any civilization, when these religions. 904 BELIEFS. delusions have reached the excesses to which they tend. In China those of the Tao-sse priests are as much ridiculed even among the theatre-goers of the lower class, to say How nothing of the educated, as they would be in civi- treated liged nations of the West. While the Sung rulers by the . ° educated treated them with respect, it required but a change class. q£ dynasty to show the nation making merry over their absurdity.^ Their fatalism is not only contrary to the spirit of Chinese literature, but eminently to Lao-tse him- self. Talismans, elixirs, divinations, spirit manifestations and possessions are common phenomena of religious his- tory in all the principal races. As Mongolian, their physi- ognomy here is peculiar, showing strong family likeness to Special the habits of all tribes of Central Asia and North- j^°°/°„""' eastern Europe, and even to those of the primi- them. tive inhabitants of Chaldea and Babylonia, whose sacred writings, as now read in the cuneiform tablets of Kouyoundjik, are supposed to prove, by these resem- blances, their Mongolian origin.^ What most distin- guishes the Tao-sse is the spiritual and ethical interest which has sifted these rude traditions of the race, or re- fined them into forms consistent with civilized life. And this we must ascribe to the doctrine of Tao. For the poetic development of Mongolian fetichism we must look not to China but to Finland, whose wonderful epic shows the aesthetic qualities of which the race was capable.* ' Schott, Chin. Liigesck.y p. 36. * See Lenormant, Les Origines AccadUnnes, 1874 ' Castren, Finn, Myihologie, V. PHILOSOPHY. PHILOSOPHY. THE Y-KING. 'T*HE initial word of all Chinese speculative science is the -•- Y-king, or " Book of Transformations." The Causes of native authorities call it the source whence all the j^p^^jToj other Classics proceed. It is certainly the thread the Y-king. on which the national culture is strung, reappearing through every epoch and system, including the reconstruction of philosophy by Tcheou-tsze and Chu-hi, for whom its mean- ing is as profound as for Confucius and Lao-tse. Even Chi-hwang-ti, who burned all the other Classics, respected the Y-king. There are obvious grounds for this preference. In its simplest form, it is undoubtedly the oldest of the symbolic books. The primitive instinct of the Mongolian is for divinatory methods of questioning Nature, which, as poised between opposites, require a dualistic conception of unseen powers ; and such a conception forms the basis of the Y-king, embodied in the simplest and the most con- centrated of symbols. The identity of the abstract with the concrete, which we have found everywhere determining the Chinese mind, was nowhere so compactly signified as in these two primitive diagrams of wholeness and TheDU- division ( ) out of whose combinations grams of and permutations its speculative faculty has evolved the whole constitution of Nature and man. What has been made of these images may be inferred from the enthusi- 908 BELIEFS. astic descriptions by the French missionaries, the most scholarly of whom says of the Y-king : " It is the ency- clopaedia of Chinese metaphysics, physics, and morals ; treating Nature more metaphysically than physically, by certain universal principles ; and for morality, dealing with it thoroughly, forgetting nothing which relates to the life of man, whether as iridividual, father of family, or mem- ber of the State." ^ The Hi-tse, or commentary on the Y-king, generally ascribed to Confucius, says of the dia- grams : — " Their name is insignificant, their method great. Their meaning is far off in the heights ; their sentences are the beauty of imagery. This book is the station whence the wise sounds the depths and discovers the secrets." ^ The Y-king properly consists oi four parts. I. Sixty-four double-ternary combinations of the two Elements primitive forms of line ( ) ; their three Y-kki° parts being arranged in as many ways as possible, I. Thetri- ^" That o£ P4re Regis, edited by MoM (German), is at present the only available version. The coming translation by Dr. Legge is looked for with the greater interest, as likely to supply a lack which prescribes great diffidence in submitting, at the present stage, any account of thil extraordinary classic ' Mem. cone. Us Chinoii, 11. pp. 44-45- Ampire, Science en Orient, p. 103. 912 BELIEFS. ous intuitions and experiences, translates them into im- ages, and applies these with confidence as a key to the interpretation of Nature and the fortunes of men. The physical and moral world are here recognized as in inti- mate relation, and human conditions conceived as in some way a result of universal law. Of all systems of divina- tion, the Y-king must be admitted to present the simplest and most rational type. It is altogether free from the pre- scriptive details of rite and ceremony, and the semi-bar- Simple barous spirit common to most of these systems, naturalism. Unlike the Athirva Veda, and the newly discov- ered magic of the " Sumerians " (or " Accadians ") of Chaldea, or the corresponding portions of the Avesta, it is without religious mythology ; is guiltless of all allusion to god or demon, and stands in the utmost simplicity of posi- tive naturalism. It knows no poetic impulse ; no hymn nor prayer ; only rigid symbols with their verbal keys. Chinese philosophy consists of the evolution of such a cosmical conception as this ; and the continuity of its hold on the primal symbols proves the consecutiveness of the national mind. Whatever occult meanings may have been ascribed to Based on these " diagrams of Fo-hi," in Chinese thought they thereia- ;lja.ve always represented the simplicity and univer- unity to sality of natural laws. If reading the greatest in diversity, j-jjg least, the complex in the simple, the whole in the atom, the one in the different, the law in the phenom- ena, is the process of science and religion, that process is surely foreshadowed in a physical, moral, philosophical, and political system deduced from a continuous and a broken line, as symbols of all pervading principles. Chosen at first as natural types of the contrasts of odd and even, light and shadow, male and female, heaven and earth, up- per and lower, dry and moist, hard and soft, complete and incomplete, — perhaps, as some traditions say, preceded THE Y-KING. 913 by other symbols of like purport, such as black and white squares, as we know them to have been followed by squares of numerical relation,^ — their substantial meaning has been the relation of unity to difference as ground of that composition of elements by which each being and thing becomes what it is. Out of this relation the Chinese might well build their whole philosophy and faith.^ It is so pro- lific and comprehensive for them, not because of their lack of a better, but by reason of its own validity as the constant postulate of all really philosophical thought. The dualistic or polar principle, of which the Y-king is a development, is not of physical but mainly of meta- The polar physical origin. Its real root is not in this or that f"""^'* opposition of elements which it may be taken to losophy. explain, nor in all such oppositions together ; but in the twofoldness inherent in human consciousness, whether as the sense of inward and outward, of me and not-me, of positive and negative, good and evil, right and wrong, as implying each other, which is too constant and fundamen- tal to be wholly unperceived at any stage of mental activ- ity. The chief productive force in all religious mythology, it seized on the fact of sex as omnipresent in or- Antithesis ganic life, with special ardor, and gave it that °^^'^' antithetical meaning suggested in generation as the con- trast of active and passive, of creative and receptive, which it bears in all ancient thought. So that, in this their most prominent cosmical feature, the Yang and Yin of the Y-king correspond with the symbolism of the more emotional and poetic races.^ Unity in diversity, the growth of life through baJance of polar forces, had thus its Bibles before reaching its Organon ' In the " Round Table of Fo-hi " various elements of mystic meaning are arranged in a circle with the sixty-four hexagrammes, and used for popular horoscopy. ^ On the various attempts of Chinese writers to explain the Ki human experience and purport. The Yang and Yin of Nature typify that equilibrium of passions and powers in which man finds his highest good ; a conception far worthier of philosophy than the dogma that any of these are absolutely evil. . In this sense the Hi-tse says, "The words of the' wise should be like the movements of Heaven and Earth, which wander not from their path." ^ A German interpreter,* idealizing the first four words of the Y-king, translates them as " the good, the fair, An ideal the useful, the true," and defines it as the whole '^^I'l^l object of the book to incite to the fulfilment of Y-king. these ideals. " Correspondent to these, each carrying on the . ffi-ist, I. 8. ^ ibid- » Ibid., VII. 5- « Piper. Zeiisck. d. D. M. G-, III. pp. 273-301. 91 8 BELIEFS. preceding to a new stage, are the four seasons, — as germ, bloom, ripening, and finally completion ; the ground of return to a new birth." For life is first in the germ, as love ; next in the blossom, as free glad play of powers ; next in the fruit, as a reconciling justice to all the human powers ; last, its wisdom as achieved is the end, from which, on a higher plane, the evolution will recommence. " A presentiment of the value of mathematical certainty," he adds, " and of the transiency of the moment, led these old thinkers to conceive images of actual nature in super- sensual ideas, free from arbitrary change ; welcome land- marks for man, lifting himself out of childhood amidst the overwhelming mass of details." Whether this is too poetic a version of the old riddle for the quality of Chinese aesthetics, or not, will be decided differently by different minds ; but some warranty for its substantial meaning is certainly to be found in the method of the commentaries. They carry out the elemental koua into correspondences through the animal world, the human body, the very plants and stones. They thoroughly paral- lelize the world with man. The Y-king is the Chinese Swedenborg. This Christian seer did but fall back on the ancient intuition of an essential unity between the material and spiritual worlds. The infancy of scientific observations in all thoughtful races has been fond of demonstrating the The in- virtues of proportion and series, combining the stinctof powers of numbers, connecting phenomena by "■ rules of symmetry and parallel divisions. 'Tis an unconscious instinct of the spiritual nature to report its own rhythm in what it sees, as the eye sees rainbows because it is itself an orb. Thus the Yang and Yin round their koua into circular series. Their reactions are recog- nized in all natural alternations, all repetitions and renewals-, and these polarities are treated as cyclic movement. I know THE Y-KING. . Qig not where the mind of man is found more strongly pos- sessed by the sense of such movement in life and Nature, than in the philosophy which the Chinese have built up around the koua of Fo-hi. In the commentaries to the Y-king, ascribed to Confucius and other great men, is contained the substance of those later systems which are most fully represented in Chu-hi. The amount of philosophical literature in the Chinese lan- guage must be immense, if we may judge by the sketch of enumerations of "the Six," "the Ten," and "the thephiio- Twenty " who have founded schools and discussed literature systems. The controversies on human nature to ofcwna. which the optimism of Mencius gave rise, and those pro- ceeding from the innovations of Wang-ngan-shih on Con- fucian doctrine twelve hundred years later, with those that attended the growth of Buddhism and the Tao-sse on rationalism and the future life, fill the long period between Confucius and the new school, which came to completion in Chu-hi, recognized as the highest philosophical authority by the modern Chinese. Since his time, " hosts of writ- ings" in this department have appeared, but none have found equal repute with his. A philosophical Encyclo- pasdia, drawn up by forty-two scholars in the iifteenth century, bearing the comprehensive title of " Ground Principles and Laws of Nature" (Tsing-li-ta-tseuen), and abridged by Kang-hi in the eighteenth, embodies the productions of the school of Chu-hi, derived, we are told, from more than one hundred and twenty writers, and covering all branches of Chinese science. The sub- stance of his speculative philosophy was, however, con- tained in the compactest form in the T'ai-ki'-t'u of his predecessor, Tcheou-tse, which he edited with an intro- duction, and systematically developed.^ Chu-hi's life (1129-1201) was exactly contemporaneous 1 German translation, by G. Von Gabelenz, Dresden, 1876. 920 . BELIEFS. with that of Maimonides, the reconstructor and harmo- chu-hi's nizer of Jewish philosophy, and had a singularly Life and analogous function. He inherited the inspiration Function. ^£ ^ philosophical revival commencing two hundred years before, and already numbering several writers of great repute, whose principles he developed. The inven- tion of printing, three centuries previous, had stimulated inquiry, and provided materials for studying the national literature. The current idea of his mental qualities is indicated by stories related of his boyhood. When his father, pointing to the sky, said to him, " That is Heaven," he replied : " But what is there above it .' " At ten years of age he was impressed by the saying of Mencius, that sages were but men like himself. These promises of rationalistic earnestness and freedom were followed by a manly course in official life. As immediate adviser to the Emperor, his criticisms in the matter of the civil service were so pointed as more than once to cause his expulsion from office, and resulted in the banishment in which he died. During the intervals of public labors he composed works which have won for him the title of Restorer of Chinese thought. His humanity was as famous as his speculative wisdom and personal integrity. He is credited with having stimulated education among the poor by insti- tuting instruction in all useful branches, with diminution of taxes, punishment of official corruption, and enforcing public aid in times of distress. He decHned high posts of honor for the sake of writing his thoughts on the T'ai-ki and the Order of the world. He is, in brief, a Chinese ideal man, even to the regularity of his methods in thought and diction ; and his following as a teacher has been immense. Yet he died an exile, deserted by his pupils ; a death as serene and silent, as his life had been active and fruitful in the wisdom of speech.^ ' See Wuttke, II. 107, 108 ; also Neumann, Introd> to Cku-hPs Philosophy, THE Y-KING. 921 When asked what is essential for man, he replied : " Care- fully to seek out what is right, and to put away what is wrong. By rectitude have the wise acquired their wisdom ; by the rectitude of Heaven and Earfh are all that live." A proverb says : " The compiler of the Classics was Kung; the expounder of them is Chu. If Confucius should return, he would not alter a word that Chu has written." In 1241, scarcely a generation after his death, his tablet was placed, by edict, in the temples of Confucius throughout China. Neumann compactly describes his work as follows : ^ — " Chu-hi is the Aristotle of the Middle Kingdom. His writings embrace the whole faith and science of his nation, treating specially and systematically of every branch therein. He prepared an Index to the great histories of Sse-ma-kwang and Lieou-schu, and arranged the ' Four Books ' in the order in which they now stand. He wrote text-books, books on the art of government, on laws, language, morals, and poetry. A review of his works would be a true picture of Chinese civilization." Besides the commentaries that contain the most widely recognized exposition of the Classics, among which that on the Y-king is in peculiar honor, Chu-hi is author of the Siao-hiao, used throughout the empire as text-book in the schools, and of a standard treatise on Education ; so that he, more than any other, may be called the framer of the actual Chinese mind, so far as it is framed by special educational methods and materials. In accomplishing his work of bringing to philosophical order and relation the doctrines of previous philosophers, he has certainly made himself the centre of national interest and culture. He has shown that in China, as in Europe, a great man concentrates his whole people, lifts them to focal intensity, and immensely simplifies the task of other races or ages in acquiring de- ' ItUroductian to Chu-hfs Philosophy. 922 BELIEFS. tailed acquaintance with their literary treasures, however colossal. His pupils wrote down his words; and their records were published, within a quarter of a century from his death, in books compiled from earlier separate works, to which many were added ; and the whole was embodied in the Tsing-li- ta-tseuen, before mentioned, — the Natural Philosophy of China in the fifteenth century.^ With aid from the works referred to below, and the notes and dictionaries treating of philosophical productions among the Chinese, I shall now endeavor to construct an exposi- tion of the system of which the Y-king is the beginning, and Chu-hi the completion. This will involve a view of the relation of philosophy to the characteristics of Chinese mind as already described, and afford the crowning illustra- tion of its genius and results. METAPHYSICS. Can we properly use the term Chinese philosophy in a Is there a gcneric scusc .' Is philosophy itself divisible ac- cunese cording to nationalities ? It is obvious that while the problems with which it deals are common to human experience, and while its ultimate purpose is always to satisfy the demand of man for a rational conception of his relations to the universe, the ways in which these ma- terials are associated must depend very much on race-qual- ities and conditions, and even on national ones. If each ^ For accounts of Chu-hi's life and works, see Chinese Repos. for April, 1844 ; Schott's Chines. Lit., pp. 50-52 ; Meadows's Chinese and their Rebellions ; Neumann's Transl. of Chu-hrs Philos. of Nature^ Leipsic, 1837 ; Carre's Z'.<4 ncien Orient., I. 462-64 ; Wuttke, II. 107, loS; Sommer, Grundsdtze d. neu. phil. d. Chin, in Ermau's Russ. Arch.j xiv. Thai* hih-ttih d. Tsckeou-tsi mit Tsch-u~kVs Commeniare, by Von der Gabelentz, 1876 ; Julien notes to the Tao-te-king, METAPHYSICS. 923 people has distinctive characteristics which make it a social unit, its philosophy and religion, which are simply its cur- rent method of thought and its ideal of aspiration, should possess an equally distinctive form. When we come to the broader race-distinctions, — Aryan, Shemitic, Mongolic, whether linguistically or physically determined, — the pos- sibility of such differences becomes a prime necessity of historical science. The Chinese constitute not only a national but a race type, and nothing can be more strongly marked than its uniformity and self-consistency ; a mental physiognomy as positive as the Mongol visage. The nature of this type has been presented in the preceding chapters, of which there remains to be considered the philosophical aspect and meaning. For these general reasons, as well as from the facts now to be offered, we must reject the prevailing opinion Didphiios- that philosophy began with the Greeks, and that the "^Ijfthe^" Chinese were incapable of it, as never having ad- Greeks? vanced beyond the instinctive or " homogeneous" stage of mind.^ Supposing this last statement correct, the conclu- sion would by no means follow, except upon a very narrow view of philosophical evolution. Every stage of Function human progress must have its own method of con- °l *= ^ ' thought of ceiving man's relation to himself and the world ; social and even the stage of social childhood, if repre- ''"'d'^'x"'- sented by a great and multiplying race, and expanded in a civilization of three thousand years, must have constructive habits and principles of thinking. The function of such a race would naturally prove analogous to that of the instincts of childhood in the individual, to nourish elements of the maturest manhood, whose maintenance throughout life is a condition of healthful growth ; perceptions to which it will ' See especially Hegel, who seems to me in this, as in many other matters, to draw his I Jta from popular beliefs and historical prejudices ; as also from the exigencies of formula 924 BELIEFS. be the crown of a higher culture to return, on another curve in the " spiral of progress." There are, however, important respects in which the term Maturer childhood is wholly inapplicable to Chinese civiliza- o/cunlse ^^°"- ^*® immense duration must have given it, on experience, its own ground, 3. maturcr experience than more brilliantly self-conscious and versatile ones. There are pri- mal instincts to which human development is found to bring justification, and whose prominence in these persistent patriarchalists is at least a prophecy, even if unfulfilled, of the conclusions of science. So their intuitions of natural law participate in the promise of unity which now inspires the nations. In this respect, Chinese philosophy is well worth recognition. We note its permanent freedom from certain contrarie- ties which have beset the understandings of other races, and which their own maturer science is found to dissolve. I. Chinese philosophy has no account to settle with I. No an- religion as with a separate and rival authority, tagonism Bctwecn these spheres there is here not only no of philos- . , . ..... , ophy and antagonism, but properly no distmction ; inasmuch religion; g^g religion has not instituted itself as an ab extra pure va- lidity of legislation to supply the defects of human reason, reason. whether political or personal. Evgn the national religious rites are simply symbolic expressions of its char- acteristic constant mode of conceiving man's relation to Nature and life ; with no pretence of differing, either in origin, process, or authority, from familiar and secular lines of thought. Chinese philosophy recognizes no objective sphere of knowledge beyond the cosmical laws, spiritual and material, as immediately apprehended by the human mind. It maintains the validity of man's natural reason and conscience, as incapable of such perversion as could break their inherent relation to truth, or render them im potent for acquiring and organizing it. METAPHYSICS. 925 Hence there can be no question of supremacy between reason and faith ; since faith itself is simply nat- „ ., , - , . . ^ J Ho strife ural conhdence in a rational order of the world, between That this testimony should be supplanted by an in- \^^^^^ fallible communication from without is inconceiv- object of able to the Chinese mind ; so strong its perception ^rfil"!' that all " communication " to man must ultimately P=""" resolve itself into the operation of his own facul- ties on the truth of the world. Here is a people with hardly an idea of " supernatural revelation " in the Shemitic and Christian sense ; ^ no reli- gious law but the interpretation of life and Nature by the human ideal, by the course of events, by the flow of causes and effects. Its kotia symbols do not come, like the Mosaic Tables, from out the thunder and hghtning of a descending God, nor like the Christian dispensation in miraculous prophecy and world-compelling divine commission ; but quietly issue from a river, in the form of inscription on a dragon-horse as the ideal animal, and are read by Fo-hi as he walks, studying the natural forms of things and crea- tures. And these symbols, even considered as communi- cations from a higher sphere than man, are abstract and simple in the extreme ; leaving to human discovery, natural interpretation, and free comment the whole substance of morals and science for which they are to stand. Religion is here presented, not as submission to an out- side will, but as conformity to a principle of life and ^^j^^^^^ good which inheres in the universe, is found in the philosophy consciousness, ethically expressed in the equilib- ° '■"^™" rium of human tendencies, and spiritually in the spon- ^ The Christian conception of " revelation " is proof against all refutation of supposed miracles by the science that brings them within the natural order. Thus a scholar like Lenor- want, commenting on the prevalence of divination by trees in all Shemitic countries, and ad- mitting that the " burning bush " of Moses "falls under the same order of ideas," proceeds to add that this does not in his view throw any doubt on the " miraculous nature of the fact." (La Divination ckez les Ckaldiens, p. 87.) So summarily does religious monarchism dispose of unwelcome results from scientific induction ! 925 BELIEFS. taneous movement of this true balance in man into every form of virtue and every emotion that pursues the good of others as its highest end. T'ai-ki, Tao, Tien, Shang-te, Li, or however this Supreme be expressed, — is always known as principle, law, reason, immanent in the cosmos, speaking through the symbolic meaning of its forms and changes, and interpreted by the reason and the heart. The most devout work of Chinese religious sentiment, the Tao-te-king, is at the same time a rational philosophy, set forth in aphorisms, not in prayers or praises ; its incon- ceivable Tao is in fact a positive Waj/ of Life, whose rule is read in the spiritual experience of man and the contrasted elements with which his thought has to deal. As in modern religious science, faith and reason are Its imtuic- slowly coming to be referred to the same faculties iTphTo^ working together inseparably in all thought, so for ophy and Chincsc iustinct they are naturally united in a simi- Xm-^ l3,r way ; faith can be only the confidence of man shadows in these faculties and processes, and reason his thetic rationale of their testimony. In neither the in- umtyin stinctivc nor the scientific definition can they be modern ^ ^ . r bcionce. Separated by giving them essentially different ob- jects and spheres, nor by making the one a supplement, supernatural or otherwise, for the defects of the other. Such a separation of reason and faith, as special organs Discussion respectively of philosophy and religion, has been a of the good fruitful sourcc of demoralization in the Occidental ofthTiong mind. Its result is seen in the currency of such separation malformations of phrase as ''-irreligious philosophy" two °''° and " unphilosophical religion ; " and in an expansion spiieres. gf ^]^e demands on either side for entire independ- ence of the other, into a full antagonism, in which religion contemns pure philosophy as atheism, and philosophy de- fines religion as mere supernaturalism ; each side accepting METAPHYSICS. 92/ the narrow definition of its opponent as the true one, and waging war on that basis. Humanity becomes a heap of mutilated members ; aspirations divided against them- selves ; a strife of fragments assuming to be wholes, rife of exclusiveness, intolerance, and despotism. From these results the Chinese instinct of unity escapes, as the present review of its history demonstrates. The separation of faith and reason was, it is true, in the interest of freedom, as necessitated by the tyranny of su- pernaturahsm in the name of religion. But the reconstruc- tion of their broken unity upon a higher plane and in a further interest of freedom has proved equally necessary. That the understanding has gained as a special faculty through that temporary separation of reason and faith in the freer minds of the past is obvious. Moral energy has also been nurtured by the sense of outwardness and Morality personal absolutism in the object of religrious wor- ™'de- 1 • T. rr ■ pendent ship. But both these effects are provisional and on this transient. That morality does not depend on such ==p»f='"on- separation of reason and faith is clearly proved by the fact that no race in the world has attained, by the habitual use of it, so pure an ethical consciousness as the Chinese have reached without it ; and none, it is probable, on the whole, a practical conduct more free from the grosser vices. Their defect of growth is partially due to the fact that they have never reaped the development which comes from the process of negation, as the constant condition of new and higher sfelf-affirmations ; a mental failing not so harmful to morality as the permanent subjection of reason to faith. II. In Chinese philosophy we have nothing to do with matter as a crude, dead substance wholly distinct '^- ^° •' absolute from viind. Such an antithesis is contrary to mod- separation em science also, as involving helpless discontinui- "^^^ ties in the elements of being. In all Chinese matter. 928 BELIEFS. thought of permanent mark, the world given in the senses is the product of mind ; but not as subsequent in time. This precedence of mind means an essential pri- macy. The universe is the unity of essence with mani- festation. The terms " Original Force " and " Original Matter" are used by Chu-hi with remarkable insight, to express a mutual interfusion and interdependence of these two, which makes either principle inconceivable without the other. " The relation of force to matter is essential, Related as and the terms before and after are so far inap- ^^i- plicable to it; though to the principle of force festation. is to be giveu the precedence. All exists through the Primal Force, whose union with form and quantity is only possible through the Primal Matter, while of itself without this it could neither strive, nor work, nor pur- pose." ^ " The Primal Force is the Master, hence called ' the Incomparable ' (das einzige). It is fundamental, hold- ing difference within itself." ^ Here is direct contrast with creation in the Hebrew Contrasts sensc, and with emanation in the Greek. Both of ofthis these involve positive separation of mind from concep- tion with matter as from a dead, outside, and alien element ; Md'creek ^""^ ^o'Ca. Consequently issue in contempt of the ideas. scnscs as purely external to the spirit (Neoplaton- ism and Christianity), either making the world a place of probationary exile for man's nobler part, or crippling his faculties with the sense of being bound to a domain of death, a vale of tears. For "creation out of nothing" the Chinese have no No Chi- term ; nor for a beginning of the world in time. nese tenn p^j. ^^y Jq ^^^ conccive of Separation from the tionontof Primal Source, which is simply the essential in- nothing." jjjQsj- fact. And this view has its ground in the * Cku-k^s Philosophy of Nature (translated by Neumann), 3, 31. » Md., p. 8. So in Chu-hi's Commentary to iht T'airki'^u. METAPHYSICS. 929 inherence of effect in cause, which impHes that the primal cause must have existed for ever as effect also. Phibsoph- Creation on the other hand involves a definite be- 'c^i'.diffi- ginning of effect, and of course existence previous to thatTon- such beginning ; in other words a stay of proceed- "p"°"- ing, preventing the manifestation of essential being itself. This ante-causal existence, which should properly be extra causal and devoid of finite expression, is nevertheless in the creation-mythology clothed by imagination with the forms of personality, purpose, and special supervision, and otherwise put under purely temporal conditions ; and be- comes the object of religious contemplation for the ideal thought and feeling of Aryans and Shemites. But the effort to actualize essence without manifestation is thus on its face a failure ; and these philosophies of religion, based on separation of God as spirit from world as matter, are therefore being superseded by a closer bond of thought with universal laws. The cosmos, visible and in- xhesden- visible, is now conceived as a whole, and as the ''fi'^™''- ception of Whole ; and the Infinite, instead of being exclu- universal sive of this whole, is the order and rationality of substance. a universe in which the greatest and the least, space and atom, movement of thought and starting of seed, are alike as law, necessary, and alike unfathomable. There is but one world, and that not dead atomism, but in substance a living unity, including man and all that man conceives. While we find ground within it for positive distinction of person and thing, it gives none for a gulf between spirit and matter, nor for any adequate definition of either which excludes the other. We have already said that this identity is not, for the Chinese, so absolute as to exclude precedence in Empioy- the order of ideas. And the necessity is so strong "^."J^^y for such distinction, that they too are forced to phUoso- assume the phraseology of imagination as to tem- p'^"'^ °' 59 930 BELIEFS. poral successions, even where such conditions of time are the terms rccognizcd as inapplicable. Thus, while no great lni^°"" authority in Chinese thought has failed to regard "after." Force as foundation and root of matter, never- theless Chu-hi himself, while distinctly repeating that "earlier and later" can have no more application to this relation — which is essential, not temporal ^ — than to the " distinction of day from daylight," ^ at the same time uses the terms " before and after " in expressing the relation in question : — " Before Primal Matter had gathered mass, Primal Force had noth- ing on which its manifestation could be based." ^ " Before Heaven and Earth were, the Primal Force alone was." ^ " It was veiled, like water in the sea ; as all beings are as water in the sea, yet the sea (as such) is lord (substance) of the whole, while we are derivatives." ° So Lao-tse says : " There was a Being, inconceivably perfect, before heaven and earth arose ; dwelling alone, unchangeable." ^ And so strong is the demand for at least verbal personification of the principle from which the world proceeds, that, from Shang-te in the Shu-king to T'ai-ki in the latest philosophy, the manifestation of divine essence is expressed in terms that seem to include both under conditions of succession in time. But Chu-hi insists that he means nothing of this kind. Expiana- Hc iuccssantly repeats that neither Force nor "°°' Matter can really exist without the other, nor even be conceived as so existing. Lao-tse in the same way identifies the Being thus pictured as precedent to the world in time, with his " Unconditional Non-being or Void," without trace of form ; the base and limit of all times be- fore and after, as the eternal substance of all existence, — a sense of the word " void," in which it is admitted by Chu- hi also.' The older worship of Shang-te, instinctive rather ■Chu-hi, 3. Mbid., 3. » Ibid., 2. * Ibid., 3. ' Ibid., 2. « Tao-te-king, XXV. ' PhOos. Nat., 3. METAPHYSICS. 931 than philosophical, still treats the world and all its phe- nomena as immediate manifestation of an Immanent Life. And in all later references to the Primal Force as existing alone, previous to evolution of heaven and earth, the allu- sion is to the actual order of things merely, which is ad- mitted to have had a beginning, but itself succeeded earlier phases of matter ; or it is a concession to the weakness of all human speech in discoursing of the Infinite ; or finally it is a sign of such absorption in the idea of essential being as raises even the familiar forms and conditions of think- ing into attractive expressions of that idea. But philoso- phy reminds itself, for Chu-hi, that these are imperfect devices, and that the way of the Eternal can have no be- ginning and no first point of entrance into the tracks of time. I proceed to illustrate this position from the history of Chinese thought. Shang-te, as God, is inseparable ^nity o£ from Tien (Heaven), and is nowhere said in the essence old Classics to have " created " the world. It must ^stat^n"' have surprised the Chinese to read in the Protes- inshang- tant translation of the Bible that " the Shang-te created the Tien," — the Tien being no other than Shang-te himself. The T'ai-ki, wherever found in the Hi-tse, the school of Confucius, or the modern school of Tcheou-tse and in the Chu-hi, is the whole universe, considered in its ulti- '^'^'*'- mate principle, reason, law.^ " In the Y-king its energy is expressed by words that mean to produce, not to create." ^ The T'ai-ki'-t'u, after educing the Yang and Yin from this First Principle, says that their unity constitutes it.^ " In the world," says Chu-hi, " there is nothing extra-natural ; ' T'ai-ki is the GTeat Extreme or Highest Point, where speculation must turn back upon itself; literally, the Ridgepole to which one climbs on one side only to go down again on tha other. See Von Gabelentz, Introd. to the T'ai-kt'-fu, p. 7. ' Visdelou, in Pauthier's Livres Sacr. de VOrient-, p. 139. « Sect. 4. 932 BELIEFS. Nature is omnipresent, and hereby manifestly perfect." " Every thing has its own nature ; the unity of the whole is the T'ai-ki." ^ " All beings are after one law. If heaven should stand still, earth would fall, and all things perish ; only through its working do they exist." " The T'ai-ki so exists as to be within the principles of motion and rest, and not so that it can be separated." " The powers of the primal force can be seen only by means of the primal matter." " It is not out of things, but in them." " Every thing has life because the T'ai-ki is in it." The one Eter- nal Force is all : hence its name, the T'ai-ki, or ultimate principle." ^ Chu-hi labors through wearisome repetitions to express this his root-idea that all things are potentially within the T'ai-ki (or Tao), as their essence, and all in- separable from it. It is the same with Ta:!?, which means the "Way of lu the the T'ai-ki " as rationality, its operation ; and hence '^^°- is identical with it. Chu-hi distinctly affirms this.^ Lao-tse prefers to emphasize the positive entity of Tao as behind all manifestation (in idea), even of the primal Force, but does not separate it from its products : all is Tao.* As reason, " it goes through all unwearied, the mother of the world ; one with the dust ; inconceivable, yet in it are forms, beings, truth ; by it we know." ^ The moral and spiritual sides of Lao-tse's doctrine produce a double use of the word, which stands sometimes for the substance of all being (the Nameless), and sometimes for the true right way which men by virtue walk in and possess, and by vice lose and come to nought.'' By this twofold meaning the Tao covers the whole ground ascribed to it in the Y-king writers, who speak of it as the heavenly, earthly ' T'ai-kV-t'tt, Comment, to Sect. 5. * Chu-hi's Phil, of Nat. ; also Wuttke's synopsis of Chu-hi Gesch. d. Heid.^ II. ai. ^ Phil, of Nat. ^ 15 (b). * Tao-te-kingj chs. xlii., xxi. 5 Tao-te-king^ chs. xxiv., xxi. * Ibid., chs. xxiv., xxvii., Ixxvii , liii., Ixv., xxx., Iv., xxiii. METAPHYSICS. 933 and human way, including all three {san-isai) in the one Right Principle, or Law of Being. The Chung-yung also describes Tao as at once the all- pervading law of the world, and the right path of in the man.i Its ideal virtue {eking) is at once the Tao *^'""'«'' of Heaven and of man.^ The Confucian school employ the term only in the moral aspect, as the way of right ; but it represents the in other identity of the inmost order of the universe with ™tings. that of human nature, physical, moral, spiritual. The Shu-king says : " Act not against Tao, to get the praise of men." ^ If our purposes are always set on Tao, our words will always proceed from it." * The Hi-tse says, "The truth and law of the Tao of heaven and earth are enduring ; so also the light of the wise, completing the revolution of the world." ^ These ancient maxims are but resumed in the philosopheme of Chu-hi ; " The holy man is the complete embodiment of the T'ai-ki." ^ The common meaning of all these illustrations is the in- separableness of essence from manifestation. This in the use principle is inherent in Chinese philosophy, which "^^^^^^ ^^ consequently holds " spirit " and " matter " under a designate single conception. The word Tao-le is in current pj ^j"™" use to express this idea ; le being the principle gamzation, (tao) inherent in material bodies, considered as their root or origin ; the principle of organization ; the soul of the uni- verse, — all of which constitute but one Le ; and this is to the le of individuals as the water of the ocean, out of which each takes a part." "' Thus we find that the apparent dualism of Chinese thought covers a deeper unity in the conception Different of being. So thoroughly is this unity recognized, p™swToi that the numerous terms by which the student is ">is unity. ' Chung-yung, XII., XXVI. ^ Ibid., XX. 18. 3 Shu-king, II. B. II. 6. * Ibid., V. B. v. 7. 5 Mohl, II. 134- • Comment, to T'ai-i^-t'u, Sect. 8. ' Morison's Dictionary, 9945-9947; 6942. 934 BELIEFS. at first confused, as by a heap of fragments, are reducible to different aspects of one and the same principle. A sug- gestive summary of these meanings is given by Meadows to the following effect : ^ — T'ai-ki is used when the ultimate principle is regarded with reference to the origin of the Universe. Too pre- sents it as the right way, and Le as the orderly laws of the world. As overruling force and retributive law it is Tien ; as flowing forth in decree or will, Tien-Ming ; as influx into humanity, Jin-sing. Tien and Te personify this course of Nature. Te is the sin, or mind of Tien. Man's sin (heart) is his sing, or nature, as thence evolved. Tih (virtue) is the ultimate principle regarded as the inherent virtue of that which it produces. Ching is the spontaneous embodiment of this in the holy man. "Thus all these terms really mean one and the same thing, — the ultimate principle, conceived as in operation at various stages in the evolution of the universe." Within this complete unity of substance, — the law of „ . . which we should state to be that of manifestation, Distinctioil of person not creation; of evolution, not emanation; of in- " ' ™^' herence, not influence ab extra, — there is, as the numerous terms just given show, enough of ideal analysis to represent all the varieties of aspect in which the universe presents itself to the philosopher. Chu-hi, for instance, fully distinguishes person from thing, as " that which is capable of self-movement and self-stay. " ^ Nevertheless this distinction does not involve any essential separation of matter as thing from spirit as person ; since (material) things are but the manifestation of (spiritual) force ; and Yang as representative of active spiritual force, and Yin of passive, are interwoven in every thing and cannot exist 1 In his work. The Chinese and their RehellioTis (p. 35?>, a treatise of rare clearness, breadth, and learning. The same keynote to Chinese thought bas been recogni2ed by Wuttkft ^sch. d. Heidenth., and by Lafitte, La CioiL Chi'ttaiset 1S61), * Neumann, p. 32. METAPHYSICS. 935 apart.^ Cosmical energy is not separable from that out- ward material which it actuates and which thus shares the life of principles, laws, uses. This philosophy of cwn philosophy evolu- evolution, as stated in compact aphorisms by ^J? Tcheou-tsze, begins with positing within the T'ai-ki tion. or ultimate substance the antithesis of movement and rest ; the dynamics and statics, we might call them, of manifes- tation ; the alternation on which all beings and processes depend : — "The Highest Principle of the world contains movement (Yang) and rest (Yin). Of these each is the ground of the other, and prepares the other; and their distinction as principles stands fast." "Yin and Yang combining produce the five elements, to which correspond the five atmospheric conditions, whence proceed the seasons of the year." " The five elements united are Yin and Yang ; these in their unity are the primal principle ; and this principle has no (ulterior) principle. To each thing belongs its own nature." " The truth of the T'ai-ki and the energy of the Two and the Five wondrously combine. The male principle is KHanj the female, K'lin. By these comes production ; for all natures arise through generation, whence succession and change are endless." " The complete fulness of the T'ai-ki is man ; spirit, knowledge, is produced, and form ; the five great virtues are in play ; and, good and evil being distinguished, the various forms of character appear. " ^ Chu-hi explains ^ that " movement is the all-pervading energy of truth (as spirit) ; and rest is the fitness of things by which truth is ever renewed. Rest is the permanent element in Nature ; movement the working force of destiny (as law) ; the result of both is the reality of Nature." " In man the form is from Yin, the spirit from Yang ; the five great virtues come in his contact with things. Yang, as active energy, is the good as Yin is the evil principle ; yet rest also is good, as being fulfilled in movement ; and the work-resting of the two constitutes right order." "The ' " Yin divides into Yin and Yang, and Yang into Yang and Yin," Ibid., 33 (a). See also }Jv-tse, Mohl, II. 395- s Tai-ki'-tu, Sects. 2-«. ' Appendix to Tairki'-fu. 936 BELIEFS. heart's perfection is in rest to find work, in movement to find self-restraint : still, yet stirring ; stirring, yet still." Three points in this theory of evolution are worthy of Its main Special notice: i. There is no distinction of dead points. matter and living spirit ; if Yin is matter, neverthe- less it is so in no sense which deprives it of inherent energy, since every thing material is a combination of Yang with Yin. 2. The substance is inseparable from the manifestation, and contains it ; and while the higher is ^^w- erated from what is inferior to itself, yet every such step involves a higher than either term, — the all-embracing, un- fathomable Substance itself, from which all things are evolved. 3. The mystery of the process is none the less recognized for the apparent positivism which states the bare phenomena without even attempting a solution. " All," says Chu-hi, " is of one essence ; nor is there aught without the mystery of that which has no other ground than itself, and which is yet present in every thing." ^ " Behold it from before (the finite side) we comprehend not its oneness ; from behind (the infinite unseen) we compre- hend not its finite dispersion." ^ The immediate relation of force to matter in Chinese philosophy is not atheistic, unless theism be taken »hich in the narrow sense which conceives God after m wh the high- finite analysis. For the supreme principle is always genceis conccived as one and universal, all-directing, even conceived, all-wisc and good. Its inseparableness from its manifestations is not atheism unless we should hold that it was denying gravitation to deny that it exists apart from gravitating orbs. The passage from infinite to finite, from essence to embodiment, by no formulas of man ever ex- plained, is here assumed, as in all philosophical thought, and without attempt at formula ; but instead of opening a gulf to be hierarchically filled, or a remote inscrutable will » Comment, to Ibid., 2. ' Ibid., 4. METAPHYSICS. 937 to be approached with fear or hope, or altered by human desire, the process of self-manifestation is assumed to be without separation of phenomena from the Substance of the world. They are still a part of the inscrutable mystery of the Divine order itself. And within this order move the real attributes of mind. The "Will of Shang-te," the " Mother-hood of Tao," the " Heart of the T'ai-ki," are ex- pressions which indicate this recognition of intelligence ; and the form most readily ascribed to the intimacy of man and nature with their original Source is that ideal relation most cherished by the Chinese, the parental. The intelli- gence ascribed to the First Principle must appear in the world, its embodiment. " How," says Chu-hi, " can it be said that Heaven and Earth have not a heart (or Hving energy) .' How should not that, by which their everlasting order revolves in its changes, think f " ^ Yet not of course after the analogy of human processes of self-con- Not after scious though t.^' In this latter sense, " Heaven and ^"^'°s>'"f self-con- Earth are not spirit ; yet they have what the human sdousness. spirit has not, the power to produce." ** In the same sense again, it is said that Yin and Yang do not think nor desire.'* But not in that sense which would exclude some inscru- table form of intelligence ; as is evident from the constant use of such terms as the " virtue," " rationality," " love," of Heaven (Tien), and the purposes embodied in the order of Nature (Yin and Yang). They certainly do not imply the personal self-consciousness of a being who works on mate- rials or to results which he regards as external to himself. But the conception is of spiritual principles and laws, as with- out those limitations which inhere in minds and wills that are conscious of themselves because conscious of others like to themselves, yet distinct and independent. Such a con- ception is perfectly reconcilable with what we know of the ' Neumann's Chu-kif 23. ^ Ibid., 22. s Ibid. ♦ Tsing-li-ta-tsmen. See Wuttke, II. aS. 938 BELIEFS. nature of intelligence ; and, in one or another form, seems to be the ultimate point which philosophy reaches in its exploration of life. I would emphasise this fact. The Yin and Yang are The world Principles, not visible objects, though inseparable rests on from all phenomena. The "primal force" of Chu- asuhi^" hi is a principle, by whose eternal unity with mate. "primal matter," the principle of manifestation, production is rational and universal. It is immaterial ; not even form, but that which necessarily manifests itself in form, and only knowable by man as that which does so. Of the three constituents of every phenomenon, — the tan- gible external thing (chili), the primary matter (khi), and the primary force (li), — the first is impossible without the second, and the second is grounded in the third. These elements are not only common to all Chinese philosophy, but form the current notion of the nature of things. "The Li," says Medhurst, " is almost uniformly believed to be an independent principle, regulating and remunerating the good and evil actions of men." He found the Chinese ever ready to grant that " the material heavens cannot rule, nor senseless numbers originate, the animal and rational creation ; " and fond of ending discussion with the exclamation, " Every thing is to be resolved into this principle of order." ^ Behind all is the T'ai-ki, or Tao, ground of spiritual and material alike. " This," says Chu-hi, " is the primary force (li). Yang and Yin are the primary matter (khi)." The negation involved in the Tao of Lao-tse and the T'ai-ki of Tcheou-tse is on the one side absence of limitation, and on the other absence of prior cause : in other words, self-adequacy and self-origina- tion. The Tao is "Void" (non-being), yet "that from which all being springs." In the same way the T'ai-ki is "the Highest Principle, or Ground, without ground." ^ It • Medhurst's Chiita, p. 190. » Tairki-tu, Sect. i. METAPHYSICS. 939 other words, it is its own ground, and requires nothing beyond itself. The Tao and the T'ai-ki are forms of affirming an ultimate truth or reality, — an Ab- ^, ,. . • . •' ' ine Abso- solute. It IS not mtended to base the world on luteReai- emptiness and nonentity. Nor, when Chu-hi says 'Z^Zl^ in criticism of Buddhism, that " the foundation of °« i"'«i"- things cannot be vacancy, even if there be such a ^™"' thing as a void at all," i does he mean to fall back on any doubt of the transcendent reality of his T'ai-ki as beyond all special forms of being, but rather to insist on its realis- tic aspect ; its being always manifest in concrete existence. Even Lao-tse does not deny this. "The Tao produces all beings ; by its power sustains, by its life forms, by its energy perfects them : whence all beings wait on it with adoration." 2 The difference is that Lao-tse inclines to dwell more than Chu-hi on the purely abstract side ab- sorbed in its mystery, which he really probes a step further than the latter; saying that " the Tao is source of the One itself (T'ai-ki), which produces the Two (force and mat- ter)." So at least Chu-hi understands him ;^ — a specula- tive transcendence that seems to open something like Neoplatonism or the Vedanta, where it was least to be expected. This ultimate reality contains the substance of those relations by which intelligence is known to us. Thus, as li and khi, it "holds at once the cause and the instru- ment, the governing and the governed, the reason and the rational object." * The relations of these are nothing else than intelligence in its universal form. Then we have the Immaterial as basis of evolution. " The purest part of the primal matter," says Chu-hi, " is spirit." ^ " The world is the spontaneous activity of heavenly reason."^ The " Neumann, 14. * Tao-te-king, ch. li. ' Neumann, 7. ♦ Premare's definition. See Carre's L'Ancien Orient., I. 464. " Neumann, 41 (a). ° Chu-hi, Append, to T'ai-ki'-tu. 940 BELIEFS. root of being is traced to laws inherent in mind, and recognizable only by mental experience. What then shall we say to such conclusions as that of Wrongly Prcmare, that the T'ai-ki is " nothing but matter interpreted producing all things ; since it is without views, aiism. designs, thoughts, can do nothing, and acts neces- sarily and without liberty ? " ^ We reply, first, that matter in this sense is wholly unknown to the Chinese mind. Next, that " views, designs, thoughts," are not things com- patible with intelligence as a universal cause ; and if they are necessary to spiritual activity, then spirit cannot be infinite. As to the " inability of the Li to do any thing," in reality it is believed to produce every thing. To say that " it has not liberty " because it moves by inevitable law in its own spontaneous nature, _is self-contradictory ; since this is the very definition of the highest liberty. The Hi-tse says, " The words of the sage should be like the movement of Heaven, by a law that cannot be broken." Davis gives the still stranger reason for calling Chu-hi a " materialist," ^ that he " makes no distinction between the creature and the Creator:" a phrase which might define pantheism, but certainly does not describe materialism ; and moreover has no bearing upon Chu-hi, who does not recognize such a relation as that of Creator at all. He does however fully aflBrm a distinction between Force and Matter, considered as guiding principle and that which is guided or moved, though within one and the same uni- versal life. It is curious to note how many Christian writers on Chi- nese philosophy have failed to see that the inherence of essence in manifestation in no sense implies materialism ; or only implies it in that high sense which dignifies the concrete world as the real activity of- all ideas, truths, and powers. We have seen that in all the principal works of Chinese speculation and practical education the immate- » Carre, I. 466. » China, II. 22. METAPHYSICS. 94 1 rial is made precedent to the material. The same termin- ology runs through this whole development of ages. And everywhere rationality in some form is pronounced the origin of these two principles, by whose combined action the world exists. "Tao," says the Hi-tse, "is a way, corresponding to man's action from a fixed law (heart)." "Things Rationai- cannot exist," says Chu-hi, "except through the uu"^*' Primal Ruler." The Li-ki calls this sovereign Principle. principle the Ultimate of Humanity ; , the Shu-king calls it the Unity according to Reason. Confucius speaks often of Tien in terms that can hardly be dissociated from ra- tionality. The Y-king speaks of the "virtue of Heaven and Earth ; " and its whole system goes to show the set of the world-order towards the moral and intellectual perfec- tion of man. If by " materialism" we understand what I conceive to be its real meaning, namely, that mind is the product Human of the lowest forms of existence, then Chinese phi- ™" Menc, IV. PT. II. 9 ; Ibid., PT. i. 10. ^ Menc, IV. PT. i. 8, 9. " Ibid., VI. PT. II. 13 ; VII. pT. n. 33. « Chung-vung, XXVI. ANTHROPOLOGY. g6l words that they should be sincere, or of actions that they should be resolute ; but simply speaking and doing what is right." 1 So the later philosophy points to twelve saints who have been incapable of evil.^ " Ching," says Tcheou-tsze, " is the name of the perfectly real and naturally right ; and what makes the holy man is nothing else than his com- plete realization of it. He who has it comprises in himself the spontaneousness of all true principles. Ching is the T'ai-ki."3 The sum is that the saint becomes one with the freedom and energy of universal law. Here is the basis of a spiritual philosophy, as well as of a philosophy of spirit. Evolution of spontaneous universal principles results in the spontaneity of the highest p™pi=s virtue. 1 he T ai-ki, the Tao, the Li, the Tien, are through not merely found in the humanities in which they '>>""=™'y- ultimate, but reach in these the concrete life by which they themselves properly become real. For, by Chinese logic, no essence has real being except through the matter in and by which it operates. " Only by perfect virtue can the perfect way (Tao) be made a fact." * This ideal humanity, realized in a few, is regarded as the process of history, and as yet to be unfolded in An ideal the race. Confucius, Mencius, Tsze-Tsze, Lao-tse, thTTrbiter Chu-hi, all describe its fulfilment as the ground of «' history. universal harmony on earth. " The superior man con- ducts the world to happy tranquillity. They who are afar look with longing for him ; those who are near are never weary of him. Ching perfects all things, the beginning and the end ; its possessor completes not only himself, but all others." ^ " He brings back the unchanging standard of truth and duty, and perversities disappear." ^ " The good ' Menc, IV. PT. ii. 26, 11. * Sommer in Erman*s Rliss. Archiv.^ XIV. ' Aniiot. on the Tung-shoo ; Meadows, 366. ♦ Ckung-yung, XXVII. « Chung-yung, XXXIII., XXIX., XXV. • Menc, VII. pt. ii. 37- 61 962 BELIEFS. man is the great helper, forsaking none ; he is the true light ; the channel of the whole world." ^ This soul of virtue is not merely the natural ruler of the Identity world : it is the real efficacy of that Force by which ^th'the ^^^ things subsist. Thus the cycle of evolution, Life of the beginning in spirit as abstract idea, is completed °'^^ in spirit as concrete personality. Ching resumes all universal principles in itself, and is their product, as power. To show this identity is the purpose of the Chung- yung. It is in view of this participation in the Infinite that the saint (whether Confucius be intended or not) is thus described : " He has no being nor any thing beyond him- self on which he depends. Call him man in his ideal, how earnest ! an abyss, how profound ! Heaven, how vast ! All who have blood and breath unfeignedly honor and love him. Hence it is said, ' He is the equal of Heaven.' Able to assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth, he may form a third with these.^ ' Knowing his nature, he knows Heaven.' ^ ' He whose action is in harmony with Tao becomes one with Tao : the virtuous is one with virtue. ' " * Thus the saint, as representative of human nature, and of its unity with the highest force, shows the individual The power soul Capable of transcending its individuality by par; '° "d"'di ticipation in universal spirit, through the principles viduaiity. it perceives and puts into life. This participation shows that mind is regarded as the constant ground of all things ; since it is precisely through his quality as mind that man is conceived as partaking of the universal essence. ' Tao-U-iing, XXVII., XXVIII. ■' Chung-yung, XXXII., XXt., XXVI., XXXI. > Menc, VII. PT. I. .. « Tno-te-kin^'. XXIII., XVI. ANTHROPOLOGY. 963 which can therefore be no other than spiritual. Thus Chinese philosophy, like the highest tendency of science, lifts the question of the origin of mind above itsreiation merely genealogical data, which run it back to '°.*' , J . ongln of plasm and inorganic matter, in the universality mini and eternity of that cosmical life of whose spirituality its own experience is the witness. The saint is not the mere product of slow development from lower forms, though genealogically he is so. He is the seer, by participation of that universal mind of which his own knowledge is the manifestation. When we find, as we do here, the universal in the individual consciousness, we recognize the primacy of mind. This all-sovereignty of the normal man, embodied in institutions, and identified with imperial govern- Chinese 1 • -11 1-1 embodi- ment, has inspired the philosophers to present memsof perfect ideals in the persons of the oldest rulers, *='^e*' man in and brought the people to their idolatry of the miers. good emperor, and their utter repudiation of all authority in the bad one. Hence too the inference drawn as to the character of rulers from phenomena of the heavens and earth, which are held to be dependent thereon ; so that from the days of the Shu-king to the present, the con- science of the imperial representative of human perfec- tion has been bound to test and judge his conduct by these phenomena, as signs of his success or failure to justify the .symbol. This is Chinese " Special Providence ; " though results of human forces rather than of interference by an unknown sovereign and supernatural will. In China they have said from the Shu-king times : " When rulers are good, no hail hurts the harvest." But this kind of prognostication is so tempered with rationalism, that it fails to produce the destructive moral results on govern- ment that might be expected ; Chinese rulers having, 964 BELIEFS. especially of late years, maintained their hold, in spite of eclipse, famine, and pestilence, as long as those of any other nation. On the other hand, this supposed depend- ence of physical phenomena on human conduct, being made a matter of invariable law, becomes as great an obstacle to scientific progress as the idea of the Hebrew or Christian, that in their most startling effects they are miracles of retribution. The divinization of a perfected human nature, so con- Contrast stantly the theme of the philosophers, might well of the involve a correspondently low estimate of actual ideal with , . actual men. The spontaneous justice and benevolence of '"™' the Ching-jin (holy man) was in fact ascribed only to those whose lives lay outside the range of observation, and was offset by perpetual complaint of its absence from contemporary life. This would seem to involve a weaken- ing of faith in such capabilities of human nature as must be conceded to all men if to any. The higher the estimate accorded to immortality, for instance, the less possible would it be to regard it as inherent in human nature, inasmuch as this unworthy mass of men and women would then partici- pate in it. It would, we might suppose, come to be held a special attainment of the few. Yet by one of those incon- , , sistencies between fixed ideas and admitted ex- it does not affect the pcriencc, which are so apt to be found maintaining beUeriri themsclvcs in human belief, and which probably men's im- help to prcscrvc true balance, the Chinese do not mortaity. gggj^ ^q ^g disturbcd in their worship of human nature by the apparent pessimism in their estimates of actual men. Nor does the belief of mankind in immortality depend on the observation of exalted virtues : and however exclu- sive the theory of it may be in its more refined forms, it will maintain universal application unless set aside by ANTHROPOLOGY. 965 some philosophical conception as to the origin and nature of man's spiritual being. Now in China the prevailing philosophy, so far from being inconsistent with this belief, in most respects tends to enforce it. To make this evident we must notice a propensity in most Christian writers who have attempted to expound the phraseology of Chinese metaphysics. Starting from their own idea of matter, as a dead but positive substance external to spirit, and from that Materiai- of spirit as somewhat purely negative to matter '^m of the and separate even trom form, they lose sight of the sistem substantial interdependence of essence and manifesta- ^'"' ^'"" -^ nese con- tion, and apply the terms " atheism " and " materi- ceptions. alism " to conceptions which, in the light of this interdepen- dence, imply exactly the opposite. Unity of essence and manifestation being the central idea of Chinese philosophy, its language must be interpreted in view of what this unity requires. If the separation of spirit from form is incon- ceivable to the concrete working of the Chinese mind, the same habit also resolves matter itself into the operative force of principles which are identified with the human spirit, as well as with the substance of Nature and cosmic life. Is there, then, any thing in this conception of human nature which would discredit personal immortality .' immor- The high possibilities conceded to virtue, and the "-^^^^^ familiar nature of those qualities which are re- deduction garded as germs of the ideal, strongly suggest a ^''"^ '"""■ future life, if only as an incident to the progress of these qualities and powers in their function of mastering natural forces, and converting them to human good. But as a future'l.ife is not wont to be accepted upon the logic of ideal virtue, but rather upon the meanings attached to the ideas of spirit and individual being, it is by inspection of these meanings that we must determine whether immortality be 966 BELIEFS. not, as Wuttke says, "a cuckoo's egg in the Chinese system." Not only has the language positive terms for spirit as Terms for ^^^^ (sMii), and for spirit as fixed, or " contracted," spiritual in definitely known human embodiments {kwei) ; but the Hi-tse actually defines shin as that which does not fall under the measure of Yin and Yang.^ Chu- hi says it is that through which matter and elements exist ; and to the " spirit " of the Primal Force he gives the same name {siri) which he applies to the human mind. " That is spirit which moves itself, and refrains from moving, at its own will." 2 For spiritual beings the great moralists have deep vener ation. Confucius describes the kwei-shin iust as Veneration ■' lor spirits we should speak of free spiritual forces. "We look for them, but we do not see them ; listen, but we do not hear them ; yet they enter into all things, and there is nothing without them." " Their approaches you cannot surmise, and can you treat them with indifference .-'" ^ He identifies them with the highest virtue (ching). So Mencius says, " When the sage is beyond our knowledge, we call him a ' spirit-man.' " * The Shu and Shi speak of hosts of spirits, as moved by music and by sincerity, and as accepting only the sacrifice of the good. They form a divine society to which only goodness will admit one. The kwei-shin are the basis of national worship, and in later times the pivot of the Buddhist and Tao-sse religions. The reticence of the philosophers, as contrasted with the posi- tive faith of the people and the religious books, is very 1 natural, and proves the earnestness of a rationalism which would not affect to dogmatize on matters beyond experi- ence ; but there is nothing in their definition of' spirit which makes a future life impossible. 1 Hi-tse^ VIII. 2 Neumann, 41, 5, 32. » Chung-yung, XVI. * Menc, VII. pt. it. 2%. ANTHROPOLOGY. 967 The Statement of the Li-ki, that " man originates, for his moral part, from the virtue of Heaven and Earth ; origin of for his physical, from the combination of Yin and ™"- Yang ; for his spiritual, from the union of spirits and gods ; and for his proper form, from the subtle essence of the five elements," 1 — will hardly be comprehended without taking Chu-hi's more scientific expression of the same ideas in the form of evolution. "Man," he says, "is the flower of the five elements ; " " the house in which the Yin and Yang cannot be separated." Their material aspect appears in his physical elements, their dynamic (or spirit- ual) in his moral and mental powers. He receives their purest elements, the product of their capacity for ration- ality. The spiritual appears in him at birth. This evolu- tion from the elemental forces of the cosmos proceeds upon the constant energy of the primal substance, whose spirituality makes man a spirit.^ Thus born of the elements, polarities, and dynamic uni- ties of a living cosmos, he is composed of a spirit- ^j^ ^ j_.;j_ ual {Ho-en), and an animal part {P'e). At death uaUnd the first ascends to " heaven," the last descends to pa™|^as dust. Death is simply this separation ; but it is ^«tedby not absolute, since the general belief is that sin- cere rites will cause the complete, though more subtle, reunion of the Ho-en and the P'e in their former per- sonality, now invisible.''' Plainly the principles into which the Ho-en ascends are the immaterial one of Primal Force, and the Primal Matter which is simply its operation. In every being a force of individuality {li) is united with the khi, or general sub- stance of matter, " which it uses as its instrument or vase." ^ ' Calleiy, p. 45 (ch. viii.). ^ Neumann, 29, r. 8 On these points see Neumann's Chu-hi\ Sommer's Grundz. d. neueren Philos, d. Chiitts. ; Plath, Rel. d. Alt. Chin. ; I'authier's China ; Visdelou ; Medhurst's Theol. 0/ tht Chinese : Carre, L'A nc. Orient. j I. ch. viii. * Primare i Carre, I. 464. 968 BELIEFS. And of this combination the bond is a rational " heart " (sin), ruler of the body, and invisible principle of the sing, or substance of the irian. To the sin is ascribed the power of putting the Primal Force in the man above the Primal Matter, and of bringing the faculties into proportionate activity. It subordinates the P'e to the Hoen, the Khi to the Li. Through its special Li, which is not destroyed by the separation of the P'e, the Ho-en may then still retain positive being and find other embodiment, as upon Chinese principles it must im- mediately do, if it exists at all. The popular idea that the Hoen and P'e may again be united, like the beliefs in ghosts with us, is simply a sign of the strength of the per- suasion of continued life after death. Translated into familiar language, this Chinese psychol- conciusion ogy obviously contains nothing materially different as to Chi- from European, so far as regards the elements and nese belief . _, ... structure of individual being. The contrast lies in in immor- •^'"y' the evolutionary theory of its origin and in the non-distinction of matter as dead from spirit as living ; and these points are rapidly becoming data of our modern science. While we find here no demonstration of a future life, and no distinct advocacy of the belief in either of the leading Chinese philosophers, we are still further from finding any thing inconsistent with it, or even with its being regarded as a natural and fitting crown to human evolution. Should the capacity of becoming equal with heaven and earth, and one with their substance and source, through a humanity which places the spiritual above the material part, lose its force as an argument for immortality because of the unwillingness of the philosophers to describe inmost laws of being by any of the terms that signify the limited experience of men.' It is allowed by all that a large proportion of the Chinese fiave sympathy with the Buddhists and the Tao-sse in their belief in personal ANTHROPOLOGY. 969 spirits ; and that the belief in communion with ancestral ones is almost universal. Is it, then, to be supposed that the moral teacher who simply refrains from pretending to have penetrated beyond veils that no man ever lifted in the flesh has thereby denied the possibility of a future life ; and this, too, through a theory which, so far from being materialistic, elevates ideal personality into the substantial ruler of the world .' We find, then, no proof that immortahty is a " cuckoo's egg " in the Chinese system ; nor do we conceive how any important constituent in a nation's belief can be an inter- loper in its philosophy. The principles of Chinese evolutionary science have al- ready been stated. But Chu-hi's interpretation of sum^a„ the cosmical process deserves attention as the fit- ofchu-hi'a ting close of this account of the philosophy of a people whose affinities with the science of the West are of the highest interest. We may note, before attempting to describe it, that as the unity of essence and manifesta- tion forbids the commencement of the cosmos by creative act at any given time, so no other cosmogony is possible here than one which should trace the development of the actual order of the universe as a single link in an infinite series, without beginning as without end. The law of cycles, operating on this immeasurable scale, would lift cosmogony into the realm of metaphysical construction outside the natural sphere of Chinese thinking, but for certain a priori principles, which, with but little attempt at development, it imposes at once on the visible world. The system of Chu-hi resumes the whole physical phi- losophy of China from beginning to end. He dis- ^l"^ tinctly refers the beginning of the present order of Evolution ^ Nature to a period some ten thousand years ago, ^^^5°^^ ''i and regards it as the metamorphosis of an earlier or end, or 970 BELIEFS. cycle, which, according to his school, lasted one hundred lossof ^nd twenty-nine thousand six hundred years. ^ force. Heaven and earth, having the form of the primal matter, cannot be annihilated, and only the distribution of its elements can be changed. These constantly flow from the all-productive Primal Force, yet without separating from it, since their principles of motion and rest reside poten tially within its depths, and by their free manifestation as distinction, with instantaneous flash {i. e., movement inher- ent and necessary), institute the actual world-order. By none have these principles of productivity been scrutabie analyzed or explained. This force behind matter ^°'"^^' is wholly inscrutable. By the inherent movement, ascent and descent, of the two principles (as unity and di- versity, motion and rest) and the five elements, all Production _ ■" / ' . _ ' by polarity things are produced in manifold permutations. and per. -j-j^jg jg y^^^ ^j 2 (\^^\ ^f heaven and earth. The mutation, ^ ' from evolution is progressive. The elements originate nebua. j^ ncbula or chaos, penetrated by oscillatory or circular movement of the two principles, having inherent tendency to revolve before it moves ; which produces a separation of higher and lower parts, and more or less pure : whereby heaven and earth are set apart. The cir- cling of the primal matter " rubs forth " a deposit, which forms the earth, held in place only by the swiftness of the revolution of the whole. Under the same influences, a great moist heat moving in the chaos separates it into water and fire. From the slime of the former the solid earth is formed. From the purest parts of the latter come atmospheric meteors. The result of further elimination of all heavy parts of fire is light. ^ The elements of this sketch will be found in Neumann's translation of the Philosophy of Chu^ki, For further reference, see Wuttke, II. pp. 13-28, and Chinese Repos., Oct., 1844. ^ Basil's Chin, Dictionary defines Li by "to govern ; the right reason of thinss ; tfat immaterial first principle implicated in matter ; inherent." ANTHROPOLOGY. 9/1 Heaven is the earth's dwelling ; earth is within it, and so penetrable by the celestial breath that in respect scientific to its movements it may be called " mere void." =^gg^^ So rapid the circulating movement of the heavens, that on the highest mountains, say the Tao-sse, the wind of it cannot be withstood. Were this motion to cease, the earth would fall from her place. Heaven is not high in itself, nor earth low ; but the solid weight of the earth causes it to be called low. The earth is round, since wherever we go we are still in the middle of it.^ The shells found on mountains prove that the earth is a deposit from water. There were deluges in past ages, since these objects were not made of stone. The purer and finer es- sence of the two elements produces the less pure ; and by further operation draws out metal and wood. From these come the infinite variety of forms and phenomena. The polar forces of matter, which primarily move this evolution, are Yang and Yin. They inhere in elements and forms, each possessing its own through predominance in its composition. Thus wood and fire are Yang ; metal and water are Yin.^ But while dividing the world between them as constructive powers, these two principles Yin and are not separated from each other. For in Chi- ^^°jj^°"j nese philosophy principles are always mutually things in penetrative and in essential harmony ; so that proper! much pains are taken to show that really every tions. thing contains in itself a combination of the two, and by reason thereof goes through its appointed changes of motion and rest, of beginning and end, of life and death. The construction of Nature, which passes here for physical science, consists in calculating, by numerical proportions, the different combinations of Yang and Yin in each series * See Sominer (as above). ' The relation of the elements to heaven and earth is not very clearly given in Neumann's Abstract, which ascribes water to heaven and fire to earth, in one passage, and in another the reverse. 972 BELIEFS. of phenomena, — elements, colors, senses, seasons, planets, signs, cycles ; all of which are based on very slight data of facts, the grounds of judgment being mainly speculative. It will easily be seen, however, that the descent of the principle of polar combination into the whole realm of forms approximates to the modern theory of atomic struc- ture, which makes polarity the basis of all individual exist- ences. The polarity consists not merely in motion and rest, growth and decay, expansion and involution, and the antithesis of sex, but in numerical relations of odd and even ; a kind of chemistry of definite proportions, contain- ing, like the rest, strange instinctive presentiments, from a purely a priori point of view, of scientific laws. The continued separation of these finest elements of the cosmos, a purification of Nature, issues in the bloom of formation of man ; " heart of Nature, perfection of the eie- ^^ uubrokcu line of unity, as things are from the ments and •' ° heart of brokcu Hnc of diversity." ^ The idea of law is held fast, as the soul (i) of activity, form, and move- ment, producing the principle of evolution- '(/?) in things conceived as one ; and (2) of their material being {khi), as rest, passivity, and multiplicity. Li and Khi are thus the primal force and matter in their universal operation. Khi itself is again divisible, as matter in its activity (Yang), and in its rest (Yin) ; the one as life and expansion, the correia- ^thcr as death and involution. Finally all things tionsof have their height of convergence, in which they ''"^"' mutually touch ; so that fire changes to earth, and earth to metal. Once more a hint of the conclusions of physical science. We here observe the philosophical relations of that sin- Phiio- gular system of popular superstitions which domi- tesisTf nates Chinese life under the name of Fung-shui Fung-shu!. Of this substitute for science we have already * Neumann, 35. ANTHROPOLOGY. 973 spoken ; its endless correspondences, and numerical rela- tions between earth and heaven ; its permutations of the two principles to produce the various features of Nature ; its interpretation of these as bearing on the lives and for tunes of men ; its complicated compass of the geomancers ; its mysteries of the white dragon and white tiger, of cur- rents to be drawn on, or fenced off, by right selection and management of locations for dwellings, temples, and tombs. ^ The groundwork of the whole is found stated in Chu-hi, without its superstitious details, and goes far back of him to the old koua divination. Eitel calls Fung-shui " a groping after science, untu- tored by practical observation," which is certainly Rationai- true. But this system by no means embraces the isticcnt- - , , ^_ icism of whole capacity of the Chmese for mterpretmg Na- supersti- ture. Rationalistic opinion has at all times found "°°^- expression in criticising this popular fetichism. Thus a treatise in the fourteenth century (before rational- ism had begun to penetrate into popular beliefs in the European world) exposed the " vulgar errors " of the time under fifteen heads, — life and death, pestilence, spirit- powers ; sacrifices, customary and iUicit ; elves and mon- sters, witchcraft, divination, choice of places for tombs ; physiognomical notions, fortune-telling, positions, times and seasons, strange doctrines.^ " The Kih-wuh-ting (1528) treated from a rationalistic point of view the rules of per- sonal culture and public duty."^ Wang-chung (eighteenth century) was a very original metaphysician who suffered persecution on account of the boldness of his attack on superstition. He is described as of boundless audacity in his criticism of the Confucianists themselves.* Even in Fung-shui itself we may observe hints and presentiments of the latest science, not to be found in the writings of any 1 These are elaborately described in Dr. Eitel's pamphlet. « Wylie (p. 70) gives an analysis o£ this work, the Pihn-hwo-fien. ' Ibid. ' See Mayers's Manual. 974 BELIEFS. Other ancient nation, if we except the poem of Lucretius, and a few scattered gleams in the Hindu and Greek schools. In positive observation of specific facts, however, the Greeks were far superior. The absence of miraculous intervention, or of supei- Fore- natural will ; the non-commencement of the world ofmoderr ^ ^^ beginning of its present system ; the im- scieiice. measurable cycles of the. past; the unity of law; the interpenetration of forces ; the immanence of the primal Substance ; the division of Nature into force and matter ; the primitive nebula, or homogeneous chaos ; the circu- lar or rotary movement by which the distinctions of time, of the seasons, of heaven and earth are produced ; the evolution of all forms from the primitive simplicity ; the polarity of force, so conceived as to suggest atomic struc- ture and definite elementary proportions ; the endless per- mutations and redistributions of matter without loss ; the correlation of forces, — all these, however indistinctly pro- nounced and undeveloped, indicate a divinatory genius for science, which is one of the mysteries of this colossal in- stance of arrested national development, and deserves a much profounder study than present data permit. We are not surprised that early descriptions of the Causes of Chinese should have reported them as carefully theirnon- Qbgej-ying astronomjcal phenomena, and dilated on mentare their interest in European science, and the effort aconcete £ their Statisticians to record and arrange these idealism, o and the observations from an early period downwards. The scientific" defects which frustrate such intuitions by debarring machinery, them from the minute studies in which our age is so fertile are (i) an idealism which cannot hold itself apart from definite embodiments, and so imposes itself directly on Nature without suspense, thus failing of the correction which free study of things would have supplied ; and (2) a consequent absence of the machinery of scientific discov- ANTHROPOLOGY. 975 ery. We must remember that until Galileo and Bacon, and the most recent apparatus of physical science, the Euro- pean world was at the mercy of arbitrary fancies Promise and forces imposed on Nature as explanations, cwnese and as fertile in superstitious beliefs in currents, mind, subtle influences, and the whole pandemonium of occult powers, as is the Fung-shui of the Chinese. Witchcraft, sorcery, and magic are scarcely clearing off from our skies, our fields, and our homes. Let us not doubt the power of this great people, with their clear sense of law, their work- faculty in details, and their freedom from many of those traditional religious illusions which hinder the advance of science, to use with effect the machinery now available ; to multiply it by the cunning of the eye and hand ; and to complete the circuit of the globe in the magnetic chains of physical and moral amelioration which science predicts, and which only the antipathies of race and creed can long delay.