By 850 the balance of power had left or was leaving the Chow king at Honanfu. His own subjects had grown unwarlike, and he could hardly command even their allegiance; for each man"s feudal duty was first to his own duke, marquis, earl, viscount, or baron;-- strangely enough, there were those five degrees of n.o.bility in ancient China as in modern England. Of these n.o.bles, each with his court and feudal dominion, there were in what we may call China Proper some unascertainable number between thirteen and a hundred and fifty: mostly small and insignificant, but mostly, too, full of schemes and ambitions.
But it was the Lords Marchers that counted. One after another of them had wrested from the Chow the t.i.tle of _w.a.n.g_ or King; it was not enough for them to be dukes and marquises. Then came a time when a sort of Bretwalda-ship was established; to be wielded by whichever of them happened to be strongest--and generally to be fought for between whiles: a glorious and perpetual bone of contention. International law went by the board. The Chow domain, the duchies and marquisates, lay right in the path of the contestants--midmost of all, and most to be trampled. Was Tsin to march all round the world, when a mere scurry across neutral (and helpless) Chow would bring it at the desired throat of Ts"u?--A question not to be asked!--there at Honanfu sat the Chow king, head of the national religion, head of the state with its feudatories, receiving (when it suited them to pay it) the annual homage of all those loud and greedy potentates, who for the rest kicked him about as they pleased, and ordered each other to obey him,--for was he not still the son of Heaven, possessor of the Nine Tripods of sovereignty, the tripods of Ta Yu?--So the centuries pa.s.sed, growing worse and worse ever, from the ninth to the sixth: an age of anarchy, bad government, disorder, crime and clash of ambitions: when there was a decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world;--and we know what manner of incarnation, at such times, is likely to happen.
Conditions had outgrown the astral molds made for them in the last manvantara: the molds that had been made for a small h.o.m.ogeneous China. The world had expanded, and was no longer h.o.m.ogeneous: China herself was not h.o.m.ogeneous; and she found on all sides of her very heterogeneous Ts"ins, Tsins, Ts"is, Ts"us, Wus and Yuehs; each of whom, like so many Great Powers of our own times, had the best of intentions to partake of her sacramental body when G.o.d"s will so should be.--Indeed, the situation was very much as we have seen it.
Then, as now (or recently), China was old, inert, tired, and unwarlike; must depend on her cunning, and chiefly on their divisions, for what protection she might get against the rapacious and strong. She was dull, sleepy and unimaginative, and wanted only to be left alone; yet teemed, too, with ambitious politicians, each with his sly wires to pull. Her culture, ancient and decrepit, was removed by aeons from all glamor of beginnings.--For a good European parallel, in this respect, you might go to Constantinople in the Middle Ages, when it hung ripe on the bough, so to say, and waiting to fall into Latin, Turkish, Bulgar, or even Russian jaws, whichever at the psychic moment should be gaping and ready beneath. There too was the sense of old age and sterility; of disillusionment; of all fountains and inspirations run dry.--In ancient Grecce, it was no such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles" or of Plato"s time to the antiquity of Homer"s. In India, the faery light of an immemorial dawn mingles so with the facts of history that there is no disentangling myth from matter-of-fact; if you should prove almost any king to have reigned quite recently, his throne would still be somehow set in the mellow past and near the fountains of time. Augustan Rome, modern in all its phases, stands not so far in front of a background peopled with nymphs and Sibyls: a past in which the Great Twin Brothers might fight at Lake Regillus, and stern heroes make fantastic sacrifices for Rome. Even modern Europe is much less modern than Medieval Constantinople or Chow China. We can breathe still the mysterious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; you shall find still, and that not in remote countries only, fairy-haunted valleys; a few hours out from London, and you shall be in the heart of druidry, and among peoples whose life is very near to Poetry. But China, in those first pre-Confucian centuries, was desperately prosaic: not so much modern, as pertaining to an ugly not impossible future. Antiquity was far, far away. The dawn with its glow and graciousness; noon and the prime with their splendor, were as distant and unimaginable as from our Amercan selves the day when Charlemain with all his peers went down. If you can imagine an American several hundred years from now--one in which Point Loma had never been; several hundred years more unromantic than this one; an America fallen and grown haggard and toothless; with all impulse to progress and invention gone; with centrifugal tendencies always loosening the bond of union; advancing, and having steadily advanced, further from all religious sanctions, from anything she may retain of the atmosphere of mystery and folklore and the poetry of racial childhood; you may get a picture of the mental state of that China. A material civilization, with (except in war areas) reasonable security of life and goods, remained to her. Her people lived in good houses, wore good clothes, used chairs and tables, chopsticks, plates and dishes of pottery; had for transit boats, carts and chariots,* wheelbarrows I suppose, and "cany wagons light." They had a system of writing, the origin of which was lost in remote antiquity; a large literature, of which fragments remain. They were home-loving, war-hating, quiet, stagnant, cunning perhaps, quite un-enterprising; they lived in the valley of the Hoangho, and had not discovered, or had forgotten, the Yangtse to the south of them, and the sea to the east. They might have their local loyalties and patriotism of the pork-barrel, and a certain arrogance of race: belief in the essential superiority of the Black-haired People to the barbarians on their borders; but no high feeling for Chu Hia-- All the Chinas;--no dream of a possible national union and greatness. Some three hundred of their folk-ballads come down to us, which are as unlike the folk-ballads of Europe as may be.
They do not touch on the supernatural; display no imagination; there are no ghosts or fairies; there is no glory or delight in war; there is no glory in anything;--but only an intense desirability in _home,_--in staying at home with your family, and doing your I work in the fields. And nothing of what we should call romance, even in this home-love: the chief tie is that between parents and children, not that between husband and wife, and still less that between lovers. There is much moralizing and wistful sadness.--Such was the life of the peasants; at the other pole was the life of the courts: intrigue and cunning, and what always goes with cunning--inept.i.tude; a good measure of debauchery; some finicking unimportant refinement; each man for self and party, and none for G.o.ds and Men. We have to do, not with the bright colors of the childhood of a race, but with the grayness of its extreme old age. Those who will may argue that you can have old age with never a prime, youth, or childhood behind it. Some say that Laotse was born at sixty-one, or seventy, or eighty-two years old--a few decades more or less are not worth bothering about--whence his name _lao tse,_ the _old son_ (but _tse_ may also mean Teacher or Philosopher). But I mis...o...b.. the accuracy of such accounts, myself. I think it likely he was a baby to begin with, like the majority of us. And I imagine his country had been young, too, before she grew old;--as young as America, and as vigorous.
------ * _Chinese Literature:_ Giles;--whence also much else in these articles.
Among such a people, how much should you expect to find of the Sacred Mysteries?--There were the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu with the king at Honanfu, to say that his kinghood had behind it symbolic sanctions; there was the Book of Changes; there was the system of the Duke of Chow, more dishonored in the breach than honored in the observance.... For the rest, you might as well look for the Eleusinia in Chicago. Who could believe in religion, those days?--Well; it was the pride of some of the little duchies and marquisates to keep up a reputa-tion for orthodoxy: there was Lu in Shantung, for example,-very strict.* (As strictness went, we may say.) And if you wished to study ritual, you went up to Honanfu to do so; where, too, was the National or Royal Library, where profitable years might be spent. But who, except enthusiasts, was to treat religion seriously?
--when one saw the doddering Head of Religion yearly flouted, kicked about and hustled in his own capital by his Barbarian Highness the "King"--so he must now style himself and be styled, where in better days "Count Palatine" or "Lord Marcher"
would have served his turn well enough--of Ts"in or Tsin or Ts"i or Ts"u, who would come thundering down with his chariots when he pleased, and without with-your-leave or by-your-leave, march past the very gates of Honanfu;--and lucky if he did march past, and not come in and stay awhile; --on his way to attacking his Barbarian Highness the "King"
of somewhere else. The G.o.d that is to be sincerely worshiped must, as this world goes, be able now and then to do some little thing for his vicegerent on earth; and Heaven did precious little in those days for the weakling King-pontiff puppets at Honanfu. A mad world, my masters!
------ * _Ancient China Simplified:_ E. Harper Parker;--also much drawn on.
Wherein, too, we had our symbols:--the Dragon, the Sky-wanderer, with something heavenly to say; but alas! the Dragon had been little visible in our skies of Chu Hia these many years or centuries;--the Tiger, brute muscularity, lithe terrible limbs, fearful claws and teeth,--we knew him much better! This, heaven knew, was the day of the Tiger of earthly strength and pa.s.sions; were there not those three great tigers up north, Ts"in, Tsin, and Ts"i; and as many more southward; and all hungry and strong?--And also, some little less thought of perhaps, the Phoenix, Secular Bird, that b.u.ms itself at the end of each cycle, and arises from its ashes young and dazzling again: the Phoenix --but little thought of, these days; for was not the world old and outworn, and toppling down towards a final crash? The days of Chu Hia were gone, its future all in the long past; no one dared dream of a time when there should be something better than Yen diddling Lu, or Ts"u beating Ts"i at a good set-to with these new sixty-warrior-holding chariots. Who should think of the Phoenix--and of a new age to come when there should be no more Yen and Lu and Chow and Tsin and Ts"in, but one broad and mighty realm, a Middle, a Celestial Kingdom,--such a Chu Hia as time had no memory of;--to whose throne the Hun himself should bow, or whose hosts should drive him out of Asia;--a Chu Hia to whom tribute should come from the uttermost ends of the earth? Who should dream of the Secular Bird now,-- as improbable a creature, in these dark days of the Tiger, as that old long-lost Sky-wanderer the Dragon himself?
Let be; let three little centuries pa.s.s; let the funeral pyre but be kindled, and quite burn itself out; and let the ashes grow cold--
And behold you now, this Phoenix of the World, bright and dazzling, rising up from them! Behold you now this same Black-haired People, young, strong, vigorous, gleaming with all the rainbow hues of romance and imagination; conquering and creative, and soon to strew the jewels of faerie over all the Eastern World. . . .
But this is to antic.i.p.ate: to take you on to the second century B. C.; whereas I want you now in the sixth.--I said that you should find better chances for study in the Royal Library at Honanfu, could you get together the means for journeying thither, than anywhere else in Chu Hia. That was particularly true in the latter part of that sixth century: because there was a man by the name of Li Urh, chief librarian there, from whom, if you cared to, you might hear better things than were to be found in the books in his charge. His fame, it appears, has gone abroad through the world; although his chief aim seems to be to keep in the shadows and not be talked about. Scholars resort to him from far and near; one of them, the greatest of all, who came to him in the year 517 and was (if we are to believe accounts) treated without too much mercy, came out awestruck, and said: "Today I have seen the Dragon."--What! that little old man with the bald head and straggly lank Chirese beard?--Like enough, like enough!
--they are not all, as you look at them with these physical eyes, to be seen winged and wandering the heavens. . . .
But wandering the heavens, this one, yes! He has the blue ether about him, even there in the Library among the books.--He has a way of putting things in little old quiet paradoxes that seem to solve all the problems,--to take you out of the dust and clatter of this world, into the serenity of the Dragon-world where all problems are solved, or non-existent. Chu Hia is all a fuss and turmoil, and running the headlong Gadarene road; but the Old Philosopher--as he has come to be called--has anchorage right outside of and above it, and speaks from the calmness of the peaks of heaven. A kind of school forms itself around him; his wisdom keeps provincials from returning home, and the young men of the capital from commonplace courses. Though he has been accredited with much authorship, I think he wrote nothing; living among books, he had rather a contempt for them,--as things at the best for patching up and cosseting life, new windings and wrappings for its coc.o.o.n;--whereas he would have had the whole coc.o.o.n stripped away, and the b.u.t.terfly beautifully airing its wings. Be that as it may, there are, shall we say, stenographers among his disciples, and his sayings come down to us. They have to do with the Way, the Truth, and the Life; which things, and much else, are included in Chinese in the one word _Tao._
"The main purpose of his studies" says Ssema Tsien (the "Father of Chinese History"), "was to keep himself concealed and unknown." In this he succeeded admirably, so far as all future ages were to concerned; for Ssema himself, writing in the reign of Han Wuti some four centuries later, could be by no means sure of his ident.i.ty. He tells us all we know, or think we know, about Laotse:--that he was born in a village in southern Honan; kept the Royal Library at Honanfu; met Confucius there in 517; and at last rode away on his ox into the west, leaving the _Tao Teh King_ with the Keeper of the Pa.s.s on the frontier;--and then goes on to say that there were two other men "whom many regarded as having been the real Laotse"; one of the Lao Lai, a contemporary of Confucius, who wrote fifteen treatises on the practices of the school of Tao; the other, a "Grand Historiographer of Chow," Tan by name, who lived some century and a quarter later. To me this is chiefly interesting as a suggestion that the "School of Tao" was a thing existent and well-established at that time, and with more than one man writing about it.
It may we"ll have been. Taoists ascribe the foundation of their religion to the Yellow Emperor, twenty-eight centuries B. C.; but there never was time Tao was not; nor, I suppose, when there was quite no knowledge of it, even in China. In the old manvantara, past now these three hundred years, the Black-haired People had wandered far enough from such knowledge;--with the acc.u.mulation of complexities, with the piling up of enc.u.mberments of thought and deed during fifteen hundred busy years of intensive civilization. As long as that piling up had not entirely covered away Tao, the Supreme Simplicity, the Clear Air;--as long as men could find scope to think and act and accomplish things;--so long the manvantara lasted; when nothing more that was useful could be accomplished, and action could no longer bring about its expectable results (because all that old dead weight was there to interpose itself between new causes set in motion and their natural outcome)--then the pralaya set in.
You see, that is why pralayas do set in; why they must;--why no nation can possibly go on at a pitch of greatness and high activity beyond a certain length of time.--And all that activity of the manvantara--all that fuss and bustle to achieve greatness and fortune--it had all been an obscuration of and moving away from Tao.
The Great Teachers come into this world out of the Unknown, bringing the essence of their Truth with them. We know well what they will teach: in some form or another it will be Theosophy; it will be the old self-evident truths about Karma and the two natures of man. But how they will teach it: what kind of sugar-coating or bitter aloes they will prescribe along with it: --that, I think, depends on reactions from the age they come in and the people whom they are to teach. It is almost certain, as I said, that Li Urh the Old Philosopher left no writings. "Who knows, does not tell," said he; and Po Chu-i quotes this, and pertinently adds: "What then of his own five thousand words and more.--the _Tao Teh King._" That book was proved centuries ago, in China, not to have come, as it stands, even from Laotse"s age; because there are characters in it that were invented long afterwards. The wisest thing to believe is that it is made up mostly of his sayings, taken down by his disciples in the Pitman of the time; and surviving, with accretions and losses perhaps, through the disquiet of the next two centuries, and the burning of the books, and everything. Because whatever vicissitudes may have befallen it, one does hear in its maxims the tones of a real voice: one man"s voice, with a timbre in it that belongs to the Lords of Wisdom. And to me, despite Lao Lai and Tan the Grand Historiographer, it is the voice of an old man in the seclusion of the Royal Library: a happy little bald-headed straggly-bearded old man anxious to keep himself unknown and unapplauded; it is a voice attuned to quietness, and to mental reactions from the thunder of the armies, the drums and tramplings and fuss and insolence of his day. I thoroughly believe in the old man in the Royal Library, and the riding away on oxback at last into the west,--where was Si w.a.n.g Mu"s Faery Garden, and the Gobi Desert, with sundry oases therein whereof we have heard. I can hear that voice, with childlike wonder in it, and Adept-like seriousness, and childlike and Adept-like laughter not far behind, in such sayings as these: "Tao is like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency. How deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things!
We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications of things. . . . How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with the semblance of permanence! I do not know whose son it is.
It might appear to have been before G.o.d."
We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal G.o.d, and also the inefficacy of mere ethics. Believers make their G.o.d in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an imitation of themselves. At the best of times they take their New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of their Deity:--the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds the whole together. It is after all but a swollen personality; and whether you swell your personalitv with virtues or vices, the result is an offense. There is a bridge, razor-edged, between earth and heaven; and you can never carry that load across it.
Laotse, supremely ethical in effect, had a cordial detestation-- take this gingerly!--of un-re-enforced ethics. "When the great Tao is lost," says he, "men follow after charity and duty to one"s neighbor." Again: "When Tao is lost, virtue takes its place. When virtue is lost, benevolence succeeds to it. When benevolence is lost, justice ensues. When justice is lost, then we have expediency." He does not mean, of course, that these things are bad; but simply that they are the successive stages of best, things left when Tao is lost sight of; none of them in itself a high enough aim. They are all included in Tao, as the less in the greater. He describes to you the character of the man of Tao; but your conduct is to be the effect of following Tao; and you do not attain Tao by mere practice of virtue; though you naturally practise virtue, without being aware of it, while following Tao. It all throws wonderful light on the nature of the Adept; about whom you have said nothing at all when you have accredited him with all the virtues. Joan was blemishless; but not thereby did she save France;--she could do that because, as Laotse would have said, being one with Tao, she flowed out into her surroundings, accomplishing absolutely her part in the universal plan. No compilation of virtues would make a Teacher (such as we know): it is a case of the total absence of everything that should prevent the natural Divine Part of man from functioning in this world as freely and naturally as the sun shines or the winds blow. The sun and the stars and the tides and the wind and the rain--there is that perfect glowing simplicity in them all: the Original, the Root of all things, Tao. _Be like them,_ says Laotse, impersonal and simple. "I hold fast to and cherish Three Precious Things," he says: "Gentleness, Economy, Humility." Why? So, you would say, do the ethics of the New Testament; such is the preaching of the Christian Churches. But (in the latter case) for reasons quite unlike Laotse"s. For we make of them too often virtues to be attained, that shall render us meek and G.o.dly, acceptable in the eyes of the Lord, and I know not what else: riches laid up in heaven; a pamperment of satisfaction; easily to become a cloak for self- righteousness and, if worse can be, worse. But _tut!_ Laotse will not be bothered with riches here or elsewhere. With him these precious things are simply absences that come to be when obstructive presences are thrown off. No sanctimoniousness for the little Old Man in the Royal Library!
He would draw minds away to the silence of the Great Mystery, which is the fountain of laughter, of life, the unmarred; and he would have them abide there in absolute harmony. Understand him, and you understand what he did for China. It is from that Inner Thing, that Tao, that all nourishment comes and all greatness.
You must go out with your eyes open to search for it: watch for Dragons in the sky; for the Laugher, the Golden Person, in the Sun: watch for Tao, ineffably sparkling and joyous--and quiet-- in the trees; listen for it in the winds and in the sea-roar; and have nothing in your own heart but its presence and omnipresence and wonder-working joy. How can you flow out to the moments, and capture the treasure in them; how can you flow out to Tao, and inherit the stars, and have the sea itself flowing in your veins;--if you are blocked with a desire, or a pa.s.sion for things mortal, or a grudge against someone, or a dislike? Beauty is Tao: it is Tao that shines in the flowers: the rose, the bluebell, the daffodil--the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, the peony--they are little avatars of Tao; they are little gateways into the Kingdom of G.o.d. How can you know them, how can you go in through them, how can you partic.i.p.ate in the laughter of the planets and the angelic clans, through their ministration, if you are preoccupied with the interests or the wants of contemptible you, the personality? Laotse went lighting little stars for the Black-haired People: went p.r.i.c.king the opacity of heaven, that the Light of lights might filter through. If you call him a philosopher, you credit him with an intellectualism that really he did not bother to possess. Rather he stood by the Wells of Poetry, and was spiritual progenitor of thousands of poets.
There is no way to Poetry but Laotse"s Way. You think you must go abroad and see the world; you must not; that is only a hindrance: a giving the eyes too many new externals, to hinder them from looking for that which you may see, as he says, "through your own window." If you traverse the whole world seeking, you will never come nearer to the only thing that counts, which is Here, and Now. Seek to feed your imagination on outward things, on doings and events, and you will perhaps excite, but surely soon starve it. But at the other pole, the inner "How deep and mysterious is Tao, as if it were the author of all things!" And then I hear someone ask him whence it originated--someone fishing for a little metaphysics, some dose of philosophy. What! catch Laotse? "I know," said Confucius, "how birds fly, beasts run, fishes swim. But the runner may be snared, the swimmer hooked, the flyer shot with an arrow. But there is the Dragon; I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds and rises into heaven." No; you cannot hook, snare, or shoot the Dragon. "I do not know whose son Tao is,"
says Laotse. "It might appear to have been before G.o.d."
So I adhere to the tale of the old man in the Royal Library, holding wonderful quiet conversations there; that "it might appear to have been before G.o.d" is enough to convince me. There was a man once*--I forget his name, but we may call him Cho Kung for our purposes; he was of affable demeanor, and an excellent flautist; and had an enormous disbelief in ghosts, bogies, goblins, and "supernatural" beings of every kind. It seized him with the force of a narrow creed; and he went forth to missionarize, seeking disputants. He found one in the chief Librarian of some provincial library; who confessed to a credulousness along that line, and seemed willing to talk. Here then were grand opportunities--for a day"s real enjoyment, with perchance a creditable convert to be won at the end of it.
Behold them sitting down to the fray, in the shadows among the books: the young Cho Kung, affable (I like the word well), voluble and earnest; the old Librarian, mild, with little to say but _buts_ and _ifs,_ and courteous even beyond the wont in that "last refuge of good manners," China. All day long they sat; and affable Cho, like Sir Macklin in the poem,
"Argued high and argued low, And likewise argued round about him";
--until by fall of dusk the Librarian was fairly beaten. So cogent were Cho"s arguments, so loud and warm his eloquence, so entirely convincing his facts adduced--his modern instances, as you may say--that there really was nothing for the old man to answer. Ghosts were not; genii were ridiculously unthinkable; supernatural beings could not exist, and it was absurd to think they could. The Librarian had not a leg to stand on; that was flat. Accordingly he rose to his feet--and bowed.--"Sir," said he, with all prescribed honorifics, "undoubtedly you are victorious. The contemptible present speaker sees the error of his miserable ways. He is convinced. It remains for him only to add"--and here something occurred to make Cho rub his eyes--"that he is himself a supernatural being."--And with that his form and limbs distend, grow misty--and he vanishes in a cloud up through the ceiling.--You see, those old librarians in China had a way of doing things which was all their own.
------ * The story is told in Dr. H. H. Giles" _Dictionary of Chinese Biography._ ------
So Li Urh responded to the confusions of his day. Arguments?-- You could hardly call them so; there is very little arguing, where Tao is concerned. The Tiger was abroad, straining all those lithe tendons,--a tense fearful symmetry of destruction burning bright through the night-forests of that pralaya: grossest and wariest energies put forth to their utmost in a race between the cunning for existence, a struggle of the strong for power.--"It is the way of Tao to do difficult things when they are easy; to benefit and not to injure; to do and not to strive." Come out, says Laotse, from all this moil and topsey- turveydom; stop all this striving and botheration; give things a chance to right themselves. There is nothing flashy or to make a show about in Tao; it vies with no one. Let go; let be; find rest of the mind and senses; let us have no more of these fooleries, war, capital punishment, ambition; let us have self- emptiness. Just be quiet, and this great Chu Hia will come right without aid of governing, without politics and voting and canva.s.sing and such.--_Here and Now_ and _What comes by_ were his prescriptions. He was an advocate of the Small State. Aristotle would have had no government ruling more than ten thousand people; Laotse would have had his State of such a size that the inhabitants could all hear the c.o.c.ks crowing in foreign lands; and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad. What he taught was a total _boulevers.e.m.e.nt_ of the methods of his age.
"It is the way of Tao not to act from personal motives, to conduct affairs--without feeling the trouble of them, to taste without being aware of the flavor, to account the great as the small and the small as the great, to recompense injury with kindness."
The argument went all against him. Their majesties of Ts"in and Tsin and Ts"i and Ts"u were there with their drums and tramplings; the sixty warrior-carrying chariots were thundering past;--who should hear the voice of an old quiet man in the Royal Library? Minister This and Secretary That of Lu and Chao and Cheng were at it with their wire-pullings and lobbyings and petty diddlings and political cheateries--(it is all beautifully modern); what had the world to do with self-emptiness and Tao?
The argument was all against him; he hadn"t a leg to stand on.
There was no Tao; no simplicity; no magic; no Garden of Si w.a.n.g Mu in the West; no Azure Birds of Compa.s.sion to fly out from it into the world of men. Very well then; he, being one with that non-existent Tao, would ride away to that imaginary Garden; would go, and leave--
A strand torn out of the rainbow to be woven into the stuff of Chinese life. You could not tell it at the time; you never would have guessed it--but this old dull tired squalid China, cowering in her rice-fields and stopping her ears against the drums and tramplings, had had something--some seed of divinity, thrown down into her mind, that should grow there and be brooded on for three centuries or so, and then--
There is a Blue Pearl, Immortality; and the Dragon, wandering the heavens, is forever in pursuit or quest of it. You will see that on the old flag of China, that a foolish republicanism cast away as savoring too much of the Manchu. (But it was Laotse and Confucius, Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong, and Wu Taotse and the Banished Angel that it savored of really.) Well, it was this Blue Pearl that the Old Philosopher, riding up through the pa.s.s to the Western Gate of the world, there to vanish from the knowledge of men;--it was this Blue Pearl that, stopping and turning a moment there so high up and near heaven, he tossed back and out into the fields of China;--and the Dragon would come to seek it in his time.--You perhaps know the picture of Laotse riding away on his ox. I do not wonder that the beast is smiling.
For it really was the Blue Pearl: and the Lord knew what it was to do in China in its day. It fell down, you may say, from the clear ether of heaven into the thick atmosphere of this world; and amidst the mists of human personality took on all sorts of iridescences; lit up strange rainbow tints and fires to glow and glisten more and more wonderfully as the centuries should pa.s.s; and kindle the Chinese imagination into all sorts of opal glowings and divine bewilderments and wonderments;--and by and by the wonder-dyed mist-ripples floated out to j.a.pan, and brought to pa.s.s there all sorts of nice j.a.panese cherry-blossomy and plum- blossomy and peonyish things, and Urashima-stories and Bushido- ish and Lafcadioish and badger-teakettle things:--reawakened, in fact, the whole of the faery glow of the Eastern World.
It is not to be thought that here among the mists and personalities the Pearl could quite retain all its pure blueness of the ether.
It is not to be thought that Taoism, spread broadcast among the people, could remain, what it was at the beginning, an undiluted Theosophy. The lower the stratum of thought into which it fell, the less it could be Thought-Spiritual, the stuff unalloyed of Manas-Taijasi. Nevertheless, it was the Pearl Immortality, with a vigor and virtue of its own, and a competence for ages, on whatever plane it might be, to work wonders. Among thinking and spiritual minds it remained a true Way of Salvation. Among the ma.s.ses it came to be thought of presently as personal immortality and the elixir of life.
Regrettable, you may say; but this is the point: nothing was ever intended to last forever. You must judge Taoism by what it was in its day, not by what it may be now. Laotse had somehow flashed down into human consciousness a vision of Infinity: had confronted the Chinese mind with a conviction of the Great Mystery, the Divine Silence. It is simply a fact that that is the fountain whose waters feed the imagination and make it grow and bloom. Search for the Secret in chatter and outward sights and deeds, and you soon run to waste and nothingness; but seek here, and you shall find what seemed a void, teeming with lovely forms. He set the Chinese imagination, staggered and stupefied by the so long ages of manvantara, and then of ruin, into a glow of activity, of grace, of wonder; men became aware of the vast world of the Within; as if a thousand Americas had been discovered. It supplied the seed of creation for all the poets and artists to come. It made a new folklore; revivified the inner atmosphere of mountains and forests; set the fairies dancing; raised Yellow Crane PaG.o.das to mark the spot where w.a.n.g Tzu-chiao flew on the Crane to heaven in broad daylight. It sent out the ships of Ts"in Shi Hw.a.n.gti presently to seek the Golden Islands of Peng-lai, where the Immortals give cups of the elixir to their votaries; in some degree it sent the armies of Han Wuti in search of the Garden of Si w.a.n.g Mu. The ships found (perhaps) only the Golden Islands of j.a.pan; the armies found certainly Persia, India, and even the borders of Rome;--and withal, new currents, awakening and inter-national, to flow into China and make splendid the Golden Age of Han.
X. "SUCH A ONE"
"I produce myself among creatures, O son of Bharata, whenever there is a decline of Virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world: and thus I incarnate from age to age for the preservation of the just, the destruction of the wicked, and the establishment of righteousness."--_Bhagavad-Gita_
"The world had fallen into decay, and right principles had perished. Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds had grown rife; ministers murdered their rulers and sons their fathers.
Confucius was frightened at what he saw, and undertook the work of reformation."--Mencius
Men were expecting an avatar in old Judaea; and, sure enough, one came. But they were looking for a national leader, a Messiah, to throw off for them the Roman yoke; or else for an ascetic like their prophets of old time: something, in any case, out of the way;--a personality wearing marks of avatarship easily recognisable. The one who came, however, so far from leading them against the Romans, seemed to have a good deal of sympathy with the Romans. He consorted with centurions and tax-gatherers, and advised the Jews to render unto Roman Caesar the things which were his: which meant, chiefly, the tribute. And he was not an ascetic, noticeably; bore no resemblance to their prophets of old time; but came, as he said, "eating and drinking"; even went to marriage-feasts, and that by no means to play killjoy;-- and they said, "Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber!"
(which was a lie).--Instead of supporting the national religion, as anyone with half an eye to his interests would have done, he did surprising things in the temple with a whip of small cords.-- "Here," said they, "let us crucify this d.a.m.ned fellow!" And they did.
Aftertimes, however, recognised him as an avatar; and then so perverse is man!--as the one and only possible avatar. If ever another should appear, said our western world, it could but be this one come again; and, because the doctrine of avatars is a fundamental instinct in human nature, they expected that he would come again. So when the pressure of the times and the intuition of men warned them that a great incarnation was due, they began to look for his coming.
That was in our own day, say in the last half-century; during which time a mort of books have been written about a mysterious figure turning up in some modern city, whom you could not fail to recognise by certain infallible signs. Generally speaking, the chief of these were: long hair, and a tendency to make lugubrious remarks beginning with _Verily, verily I say unto you._ In actual life, too, lots of men did grow their hair long and cultivate the _verily-verily_ habit; hoping that, despite their innate modesty, their fellow-men might not fail to take the hint and pierce the disguise afforded, often by a personal morality you might call _oblique._
But if an avatar had come, it is fairly certain that he or she would have followed modern fashions in hair and speech; first, because real avatars have a sense of humor; and secondly, because his or her business would have been to reform, not the language or style of hair-dressing, but life.--"He or she" is a very vile phrase; for the sake of novelty, let us make the feminine include the masculine, and say "she" simply.--Her conversation, then, instead of being peppered with archaic _verilies_ and _peradventures,_ would have been in form much like that of the rest of us. It is quite unlikely she would have shone at Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, or Bazaars of the Young Women"s Christian a.s.sociation; quite unlikely that she would have been in any sense whatever a pillar of the orthodoxies. As she would have come to preach _Truth,_ you may suppose Truth needed, and therefore lacking; and so, that her teachings would have been at once dubbed vilest heterodoxy, and herself a charlatan.
"Below with eddy and flow the white tides creep On the sands."
Says Ssu-k"ung T"u,--