Here was something beyond them; the old man, clearly, was a favorite of Fortune; Fan their master himself must deal with him. So they sent word ahead, and brought him to the palace of Fan. Who understood well the limitations of quack magic: if he was to be beaten at these tricks, where would his influence be?
So he heaped up riches in the courtyard, and made a great fire all round.--"Anyone can have those things," he announced, "who will go in and get them." Shang quietly walked through the flames, and came out with his arms full; not a hair of his head was singed.
And now they were filled with consternation; they had been making a mock of Tao these years; and here evidently was a real Master of Tao, come to expose them.--"Sir," they said, "we did not know that you posessed the Secret, and were playing you tricks. We insulted you, unaware that you were a divine man.
But you have leaped from the cliff, dived into the Yellow River, and walked through the flames without injury; you have shown us our stupidity, blindness, and deafness. We pray you to forgive us, and to reveal to us the Secret."
He looked at them in blank amazement.--"What is this you are telling me?" said he. "I am only old Shang Ch"iu K"ai the peasant. I heard that you, Sir, by your magic could make the poor rich. I wanted to be rich, so I came to you. I believed in you absolutely, and in all your disciples said; and so my mind was made one; I forgot my body; I saw nothing of cliffs or fire or water. But now you say you were decieving me, my soul returns to its perplexity, and my eyes and ears to their sight and hearing. What terrible dangers I have escaped! My limbs freeze with horror to think of them."
Tsai Wo, continues Liehtse, told this story to Confucius.--"Is this so strange to you?" said the latter. "The man of perfect faith can move heaven and earth, and fly to the six cardinal points without hindrance. His powers are not confined to walking in perilous places and pa.s.sing through water and fire. If Shang Ch"iu K"ai, whose motive was greed and whose belief was false, found no obstacle in external things, how much more certainly will it be so when the motive is pure and both parties sincere?"
I will finish it with what is really another of Liehtse"s stories,--also dealing with a man who walked through fire uninjured, unconscious of it because of the one-pointedness of his mind.
The incident came to the ears of Marquis Wen of Wei, who spoke to Tsu Hsia, a disciple of Confucius, about it.--"From what I have heard the Master say," said Tsu Hsia, "the man who achieves harmony with Tao enters into close relations with outer objects, and none of them has power to harm or hinder him."--"Why, my friend," said the Marquis, "cannot you do all these marvels?"--"I have not yet succeeded," said Tsu Hsia, "in cleansing my heart from impurities and discarding brainmind wisdom."--"And why,"
said the Marquis, "cannot the Master himself" (Confucius, of course) "perform such feats?"--"The Master," said Tsu Hsia, "is able to perform them; but _he is also able to refrain from performing them."_--which, again, he was. Here is another example:
Hui Yang went to visit Prince K"ang of Sung. The prince, however, stamped his foot, rasped his throat, and said angrily:-- "The things I like are courage and strength. I am not fond of your good and virtuous people. What can a stranger like you have to teach me?"
"I have a secret," said Hui Yang, "whereby my opponent, however brave or strong, can be prevented from harming me either by thrust or blow. Would not Your Highness care to know that secret?"
"Capital!" said the Prince; "that is certainly something I should like to hear about."
"True," said Hui yang, "when you render his stabs or blows ineffectual, you cover your opponent with shame. But my secret will make him, however brave or strong, afraid to stab or strike at all."
"Better still," said the Prince; "let me hear about it."
"It is all very well for him to be afraid to do it." said Hui Yang; "but that does not imply he has no will to do it. Now, my secret would deprive him even of the will."
"Better and better," said Prince K"ang; "I beseech you to reveal it to me."
"Yes," said Hui Yang; "but this not having the will to injure does not necessarily connote a desire to love and do good. But my secret is one whereby every man, woman, and child in the empire shall be inspired with the friendly desire to love and do good to each other. This is much better than the possession of mere courage and strength. Has Your Highness no mind to acquire such a secret as this?"
The Prince confessed that, on the contray, he was most anxious to learn it.
"It is nothing else than the teachings of Confucius and Mo Ti,"
said Hui Yang.
A main idea of Taoism--one with which the Confucius of orthodox Confucianism did not concern himself--is the possibility of creating within one"s outer and mortal an inner and immortal self; by subduing desire, by sublimating away all impurities, by concentration. The seed of that Immortality is hidden in us; the seed of mastery of the inner and outer worlds. Faith is the key. Shang Ch"iu K"ai, whose "faith had made him whole," walked through fire. "Whoso hath faith as a grain of mustard-seed,"
said Jesus, can move mountains. It sounds as if he had been reading the _Book of Liehtse;_ which is at pains to show how the thing is done. T"ai-hsing and w.a.n.g-wu, the mountains, stood not where they stand now, but in the south of the Chi district and north of Ho-yang. I like the tale well, and shall tell it for its naive Chinesity. The Simpleton of the North Mountain, an old man of ninety, dwelt opposite to them, and was vexed in spirit because their northern flanks blocked the way for travelers, who had to go round. So he called his family together and broached a plan.--"Let us put forth our utmost strength and clear away this obstacle," said he; "let us cut right through the mountains till we come to Han-yin." All agreed except his wife. "My goodman," said she, "has not the strength to sweep away a dung-hill, let alone such mountains as T"ai-hsing and w.a.n.g-wu.
Besides, where will you put the earth and stones?" They answered that they would throw them on the promontory of P"o-hai. So the old man, followed by his son and grandson, sallied forth with their pickaxes, and began hewing away at the rocks and cutting up the soil, and carting it away in baskets to the promontory. A widow who lived near by had a little boy who, though he was only just shedding his milk-teeth, came skipping along to give them what help he could. Engrossed in their toil they never went home except once at the turn of the season.
The Wise Old Man of the River-bend burst out laughing and urged them to stop. "Great indeed is your witlessness!" said he.
"With the poor remaining strength of your declining years you will not succeed in removing a hair"s-breadth of the mountains, much less the whole vast ma.s.s of rock and soil." With a sigh the Simpleton of the North Mountain answered:--"Surely it is you who are narrow-minded and unreasonable. You are not to be compared with the widow"s son, despite his puny strength. Though I myself must die, I shall leave my son behind me, and he his son. My grandson will beget sons in his turn, and those sons also will have sons and grandsons. With all this posterity my line will not die out; while on the other hand the mountains will receive no increment or addition. Why then should I despair of leveling them to the ground at last?"--The Wise Old Man of the River-bend had nothing to say in reply.
Chinese! Chinese!--From whatever angle you look at it, it smacks of the nation that saw Babylon fall, and Rome, and may yet--
But look now, at what happened. There was something about the project and character of the Simpleton of the North Mountain, that attracted the attention of the Serpent-Brandishing deities.
They reported the matter to Almighty G.o.d; who was interested; and perhaps was less patient than the simpleton.--I do not quite know who this person translated "Almighty G.o.d" may be; I think he figures in the Taoist hierarchy somewhere below Laotse and the other Adepts. At any rate he was in a position to order the two sons of K"ua O--and I do not know who K"ua O and his sons were-- to expedite matters. So the one of them took up T"ai-hsing, and the other Wu-w.a.n.g, and transported them to the positions where they remain to this day to prove the truth of Liehtse"s story.
Further proof:--the region between Ts"i in the north and Han in the south--that is to say, northern Homan--is still and has been ever since, an unbroken plain.
And perhaps, behind this naive Chinesity, lie grand enunciations of occult law. . . .
I will end with what is probably Liehtse"s most famous story-- and, from a purely literary standpoint, his best. It is worthy of Chw.a.n.gtse himself; and I tell it less for its philosophy than for its fun.
One morning a fuel-gatherer--we may call him Li for convenience, though Liehtse leaves him nameless--killed a deer in the forest; and to keep the carca.s.s safe till he went home in the evening, hid it under a pile of brushwood. His work during the day took him far and when he looked for the deer again, he could not find it. "I must have dreamed the whole thing," he said;--and satisfied himself with that explanation. He made a verse about it as he trudged home through the woods, and went crooning:
At dawn in the hollow, beside the stream, I hid the deer I killed in the dream; At eve I sought for it far and near; And found "twas a dream that I killed the deer.
He pa.s.sed the cottage of Yen the woodman--Yen we may call him, though Liehtse calls him nothing.--who heard the song, and pondered. "One might as well take a look at the place," thought he; it seemed to him it might be such and such a hollow, by such and such a stream. Thither he went, and found the pile of brushwood; It looked to him a likely place enough to hide a deer under. He made search, and there the carca.s.s was.
He took it home and explained the matter to his wife. "Once upon a time," said he, "a fuel-gatherer dreamed he had killed a deer and forgotten where he had hidden it. Now I have got the deer, and here it is; so his dream came true, in a way."--"Rubbish!"
she answered. "It was you must have dreamed the fuel-gatherer and his dreim. You must have killed the deer yourself, since you have it there; but where is your fuel-gatherer?"
That night Li dreamed again; and in his dream saw Yen fetch the deer from its hiding-place and bring it home. So in the morning he went to Yen"s house and there, sure enough, the deer was.
They argued the matter out, but to no purpose. Then they took it before the magistrate, who gave judgment as follows:
"The plaintiff began with a real deer and an alleged dream; and now comes forward with a real dream and an alleged deer. The defendant has the deer the plaintiff dreamed, and wants to keep it. According to his wife, however, the plaintiff and the deer are both but figments of the defendant"s dream. Meanwhile, there is the deer; which you had better divide between you."
The case was reported to the Prince of Cheng, whose opinion was that the magistrate had dreamed the whole story, himself. But his Prime Minister said: "If you want to distinguish between dream and waking, you would have to go back to the Yellow Emperor or Confucius. As both are dead, you had better uphold the magistrate"s decision." *
------ * The tale is told both in Dr. Lionel Giles"s translation mentioned above, and also, with verbal differences, in Dr. H. A.
Giles"s work on _Chinese Literature._ The present telling follows now one, now the other version, now goes its own way;-- and pleads guilty to adding the verse the woodman crooned.
XIII. MANG THE PHILOSOPHER, AND b.u.t.tERFLY CHw.a.n.g
Liehtse"s tale of the Dream and the Deer leads me naturally to this characteristic bit from Chw.a.n.gtse:*--
"Once upon a time, I, Chw.a.n.gtse, dreamed I was a b.u.t.terfly fluttering hither and thither; to all intents and purposes a veritable b.u.t.terfly. I followed my b.u.t.terfly fancies, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and there I lay, a man again. Now how am I to know whether I was then, Chw.a.n.gtse dreaming I was a b.u.t.terfly, or whether I am now a b.u.t.terfly dreaming I am Chw.a.n.g?"
------ * Which, like nearly all the other pa.s.sages from him in this lecture, is quoted from Dr. H. A. Giles"s _Chinese Literature,_ in the Literatures of the World series; New York, Appleton.
For which reason he is, says Dr. Giles, known to this day as "b.u.t.terfly Chw.a.n.g"; and the name is not all inappropriate. He flits from fun to philosophy, and from philosoply to fun, as if they were dark rose and laughing pansy; when he has you in the gravest depths of wisdom and metaphysic, he will not be content till with a flirt of his wings and an aspect gravely solemn he has you in fits of laughter again. His is really a book that belongs to world-literature; as good reading, for us now, as for any ancient Chinaman of them all. I think he worked more strenuously in the field of sheer intellect--stirred the thought stuff more--than most other Chinese thinkers,--and so is more akin to the Western mind; he carves his cerebrations more definitely, and leaves less to the intuition. The great lack in him is his failure to appreciate Confucius; and to explain that, before I go further with b.u.t.terfly Chw.a.n.g, I shall take a glance at the times he lived in.
They were out of joint when Confucius came; they were a couple of centuries more so now. Still more was the Tiger stalking abroad: there were two or three tigers in particular, among the Great Powers, evidentlv crouching for a spring--that should settle things. Time was building the funeral pyre for the Phoenix, and building it of the debris of ruined worlds. In the early sixth century, the best minds were retiring in disgust to the wilds;--you remember the anchorite"s rebuke to Tse-Lu. But now they were all coming from their retirement--the most active minds, whether the best or not--to shout their nostrums and make confusion worse confounded. All sorts of socialisms were in the air, raucously bellowed by would-be reformers. A "loud barbarian from the south" (as Mencius called him--I do not know who he was) was proclaiming that property should be abolished, and all goods held in common. One Yang Chu was yelling universal egoism: "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." Against him, one Mo Ti had been preaching universal altruism;--but I judge, not too sensibly, and without appeal to philosophy or mysticism. Thought of all kinds was in a ferment, and the world filled with the confused noise of its expression; clear voices were needed, to restate the message of the Teachers of old.
Then Mencius arose to speak for Confucius in this China so much further progressed along the Gadarene road. A strong and brilliant man, he took the field strongly and brilliantly, and filled the courts of dukes and kings with a roll of Confucian drums. Confucius, as I have tried to show you, had all Mysticism divinely behind and backing him, though he said little about it; Mencius, I think, had none. Mencius remade a Confucius of his own, with the mystical elements lacking. He saw in him only a social reformer and teacher of ethics; and it is the easiest thing in the world to see Confucius only through Mencian spectacles.
I would not fall into the mistake of undervaluing Mencius. He was a very great man; and the work he did for China was enormous, and indispensable. You may call him something between the St. Paul and the Constantine of Confucianism. Unlike Constantine, he was not a sovereign, to establish the system; but he hobn.o.bbed with sovereigns, and never allowed them to think him their inferior; and it was he who made of Confucianism a system that could be established. Unlike St. Paul, he did not develop the inner side of his Master"s teachings; but he so popularized them as to ensure their triumph. He took the ideas of Confucius, such of them as lay within his own statesmanlike and practical scope of vision, restated and formulated them, and made of them what became the Chinese Const.i.tution. A brave and honest thinker, essentially a man of action in thought, he never consciously deteriorated or took away from Confucius" doctrine.
It is more as if some great President or Prime Minister, at some future time, should suddenly perceive that H.P. Blavatsky had brought that which would save his nation; and proceed to apply that saving thing, as best he might, in the field of practical politics and reform--or rather to restate it in such a way that (according to his view) it might be applied.
He put the const.i.tuents parts of society in order of importance as follows: the People; the G.o.ds; the Sovereign: and this has been a cardinal principle in Chinese polity. He saw clearly that the Chow dynasty could never be revived; and arrived at the conclusion that a dynasty was only sacred while it retained the "mandate of heaven." Chow had lost that; and therefore it was within the rights of Heaven, as you may say, to place its mandate elsewhere;--and within the rights of the subject--as the logic of events so clearly proved Chow had lost the mandate--to rebel.
Confucius had hoped to revivify Chow--had begun with that hope, at any rate: Mencius hoped to raise up some efficient sovereign who should overturn Chow. The Right of Rebellion, thus taught by him, is another fundamental Chinese principle. It works this way: if there was discontent, there was misrule; and it was the fault of the ruler. If the latter was a local magistrate, or a governor, prefect, or viceroy, you had but to make a demonstration, normally speaking, before his yamen: this was technically a "rebellion" within Mencius" meaning; and the offending authority must report it to Pekin, which then commonly replaced him with another. (It would get to Pekin"s ears anyway; so you had better--and ususally did--report it yourself.) If the offender was the Son of Heaven, with all his dynasty involved-- why, then one had to rebel in good earnest; and it was to be supposed that if Heaven had really given one a mandate, one would win. The effect was that, although nominally absolute, very few emperors have dared or cared to fly quite in the face of Confucius, or Mencius, of their religio-political system, of the Board of Censors whose business it was to criticize the Throne, and of a vast opinion.
There was the tradition an emperor ruled for the people. The office of ruler was divine; the man that held it was kept an impersonality as much as possible. He changed his name on coming to the throne, and perhaps several times afterwards: thus we speak of the great emperors Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong; who might, however, be called more exactly, Liu Ch"e, who was emperor during the period _Wuti_ of the Han Dynasty; Li Shihmin, who filled the throne during the T"ang period called _Taitsong._ Again, there was the great idea, Confucio-Mencian, that the son of Heven must be "compliant": leading rather than driving. He promulgated edicts, but they were never rigidly enforced; a certain voluntaryism was allowed as to the carrying out of them: if one of them was found unsuccessful, or not to command popular approval, another could be--and was--issued to modify or change it. So that the whole system was far removed from what we think of as an "Oriental Despotism"; on the contrary, there was always a large measure of freedom and self-government. You began with the family: the head of that was its ruler, and responsible for order in his little realm. But he governed by consent and affection, not by force. Each village-community was self-governing; the headman in it taking the place of the father in the family; he was responsible for order, so it was his business to keep the people happy;--and the same principle was extended to fit the province, the viceroyalty, the empire.