revolutions, not three, in the last twenty years. Ireland is now at peace because the
Irish fought hard, and we are still fighting to-day because we do not fight hard
enough.
Nor are Chinese civil wars fighting in the real sense of the word. Until recently, civil
wars were never glorified. Conscription for service is unknown, and the soldiers who
do the fighting are poor people who do not know how to make a living otherwise.
These soldiers do not relish a good fight, and the generals relish the fight because they
do not do the fighting. In any major campaign silver bullets have always won, in spite
of the fact that the conquering hero may make a majestic triumphal return to the
capital to the accompaniment of the boom of guns. Those guns 梩 hey suggest so
much the sound of battle, and they are typical, for in Chinese private quarrels and
civil warfare, it is the sound and noise that make up the essence of the battle. One
does not see fighting in China; one merely hears it. I heard two such battles, one in
Peking, and one in Amoy. Aurally, it was satisfying. Usually a superior army merely
awes the inferior enemy into defeat, and what would be a protracted campaign in a
Western country is finished in a month. The defeated general, according to the
Chinese idea of fair play, is then given a hundred thousand dollars travelling expenses
and sent on a "tour of industrial investigation to Europe/3 with the full knowledge that
in the next war his services may be needed by the present conqueror. With the next
turn of events, the most probable thing is that you will find the victor and the
vanquished riding in the same car like two sworn brothers. That is the beauty of
Chinese hanyang. Meanwhile, the people have nothing to do with it. They hate war,
and will always hate war. Good people never fight in China. For "good iron is not
made into nails, and good men are not made soldiers."
VI. CONTENTMENT
Travellers in China, especially .those wayward travellers who go through the seldom
visited parts of the Chinese inland, are equally amazed at the low standard of living of
the Chinese toiling masses and at their cheerfulness and contentment under such
conditions. Even in the famine-stricken provinces, like Shensi, this spirit of
contentment generally prevails in all except extreme cases, and some Shensi farmers
probably can still smile.
Now a lot of the so-called misery of the Chinese people is due undoubtedly to the
application of a warped European standard, the standard which cannot conceive of
any man being happy unless he is living in an overheated apartment and owns a radio.
If this standard were correct, there should have been no happy person in the world
before 1850, and there should be more happy people in the United States than in
gemiitliches Bavaria, where there are very few rotating, adjustable collapsible and
reversible barber chairs, and certainly very few switches and buttons. There are still
fewer, switches and buttons in the Chinese countryside, although in progressive
Shanghai the old- fashioned barber chair that is a real chair, and that one can still find
on Kingsway in London or in Montmartre in Paris to-day, has completely disappeared.
For myself, I am inclined to think that the man who sits on a chair that is a real chair,
and sleeps on a bed that is a real bed (and not a daytime sofa) is a happier man. The
standard that measures a man's civilization by the number of mechanical buttons he
presses in a day must, therefore, be a false standard, and a lot of this so-called mystery
of Chinese contentment is of the Westerner's own making.
It is true, however, that Chinese people are perhaps more contented than Western
people, class for class, when living under the same conditions. This spirit of
cheerfulness and contentment is found in both the literate and illiterate classes, for
such is the penetration of the Chinese racial tradition. It may be seen in the gay,
babbling rickshaw boy of Peking, for ever laughing and joking all the way and ready
to laugh at a fellow-man's discomforts, or it may be seen in the panting and perspiring
sedan-chair coolies who carry you up to the top of Kuling, or it may be seen in the
boat-trackers who pull your boat up the Szechuen rapids and who earn for their living
a bare pittance beyond two simple but hearty meals a day. A simple but hearty meal
eaten without much worry is, however, a great deal of luck, according to the Chinese
theory of contentment, for as a Chinese scholar has put it, "a wellfilled stomach is
indeed a great thing: all else is luxury of life."1
For contentment is another of those words, like "kindliness" and "peaceableness,"
which are written on red paper and pasted on all doors on New Year's Day. It is part of
the counsel for moderation, part of that human wisdom which says, "When good
fortune comes, do not enjoy all of it," and of that advice of a Ming scholar "to choose
the lighter happiness." Among the epigrams of Laotse which have passed into current
phraseology is the maxim that "one who is contented will not meet with disgrace."
Another form of this maxim is, "One who is contented is always happy." In literature, it emerges as a praise of the rural life and of the man who has few worries, a
sentiment which is found in all poems and private letters. I pick at random from a
collection of letters of Ming scholars. Thus wrote Lu Shen to his friend:
1 The Chinese description of this happy state of going to bed with a filled stomach is:
"soft, well- filled, dark and sweet"梩 he last two adjectives referring to sweet slumber.
This expression is positively voluptuous in the Chinese language.
To-night we are going to have a full moon. How about getting a painted houseboat
and bringing along a few musicians? . . . Can you come and spend a night with me in
this early autumn? I am going to have a recluse's gown made, and when my
resignation is accepted, I shall be indeed a carefree old man of the mountains.
It is this sort of sentiment which, when passing into the current thoughts and feelings
of the Chinese scholar, enables him to find happiness in his lowly hut.
Human happiness is a frail thing, for the gods are evidently jealous of it. The problem
of happiness is therefore the most elusive problem of life, but after all is said and done
about culture and progress, it should remain the primary concern of mankind's highest
wisdom to solve it. The Chinese, with their usual common sense, have bent their
highest efforts toward the finding of this happiness, and like the utilitarians that they
are, have always been more interested in the problem of happiness than in the
problem of progress.
Mrs. Bertrand Russell wisely pointed out that "the right to be happy55 was, and still is,
a forgotten right that nobody in the West is interested in, Westerners being
preoccupied with the more secondary rights to vote, to pass upon the King's
expenditure, to declare war, and to be tried when arrested. The Chinese have never
even thought of the right to be tried when arrested, but they have always been
supremely jealous of their right to happiness., which neither poverty nor disgrace is
allowed to take away from them. The Western approach to the problem of happiness
is positive, while the Chinese approach is negative. The question of happiness is
always reduced, in the last analysis, to the question of a man's wants. The fact is, we
are very much in confusion as to what we really want. For this reason, the story of
Diogenes who proclaimed to the world that he was a happy man because he did not
want anything, and who threw away his bowl on seeing a boy drinking from his hands,
always provokes some laughter and a certain amount of real envy from the modern
man. The modern man finds himself in continual perplexity in regard to many
problems, and most of all in problems that affect closely his personal life. He cannot
spare himself a certain luxurious envy for that ascetic ideal of Diogenes, and is at the
same time far from willing to miss a really good show or movie. That gives us the
so-called "restlessness95 of the modern spirit.
The Chinese, without going so far as Diogenes, for the Chinese never go far in anything, take the negative approach to happiness through their philosophy of
contentment. Unlike Diogenes, however, a Chinese man wants quite a few things. But
he wants only the things that make for happiness, and at the same time does not insist
on having them if they are out of his reach. He wants at least a pair of clean shirts, for
Diogenes in the story book may exhale a certain spiritual fragrance^ but Diogenes as
a bedfellow would be a different story. But if he is extremely poor and can have only
one shirt, he will not mind, either. And unlike Diogenes, he wants also a good show,
and he would give himself up to the full enjoyment of it. But if he must go without
that, he will not be too sorry. He wants some tall old trees in his neighbourhood, but if
he cannot have them, a date-tree in his yard will give him just as much happiness. He
wants many children, and a wife who personally prepares his favourite dishes; and if
he is wealthy, then a good cook, too, and a pretty maidservant in red pyjamas to tend
the incense while he is reading or painting. He wants some good friends, and a
woman who understands, preferably to be found in the person of his wife; if not, then
in one of the sing-song girls. If he is not born with such "voluptuous luck," then he
will not be sorry, either. He wants a filled stomach, but congee and pickled carrots are
not so costly in China; and he wants a good jug of wine, but rice-wine is often
home-brewed, or he can pay only a few cash for a bowl at the good old wine-shops.
He wants leisure, and leisure he can have in China, and he is as happy as a bird if he
Has met a monk in a bamboo-covered yard
And enjoyed another of life's leisurely half-days.
He wants a secluded hut, if he cannot have an ent ire pleasure garden, situated among
the mountains with a mountain rill running past his hut, or in a valley where of an
afternoon he can saunter along the river bank and watch cormorants catching fish for
the fisher. But if he cannot have that luck and must live in the city, he will not be sorry,
either. For he would have, in any case, a cage bird and a few potted flowers and the
moon, for he can always have the moon. So did Su Tungp'o the poet write about the
moon in a perfect gem- like little essay, called "A Night Promenade at Ch'engt' ien":
On the twelfth night of the tenth moon of the sixth year of Yiianfeng, I had undressed
and was going to bed, when the moonlight entered my door, and I got up, happy of
heart. I thought there was no one to share this happiness with me. So I walked over to
the Ch'engt' ien Temple to look for Huaimin. He, too, had not yet gone to bed. So we
paced about in the yard. The yard looked like a transparent pool with the shadows of
water-grass in it, but they were really the shadows of bamboos and pine-trees cast by
the moonlight. Isn't there a moon on every night? And aren't there bamboos and
pine-trees everywhere? Only there are few carefree people like the two of us.
A strong determination to get the best out of life, a keen desire to enjoy what one has,
and no regrets if one fails: this is the secret of the Chinese genius for contentment.
VII. HUMOUR
Humour is a state of mind. More than that, it is a point of view, a way of looking at
life. The flower of humour blooms whenever in the course of development of a nation
there is an exuberance of intellect able to flay its own ideals, for humour is nothing
but intellect slashing at itself. In any period of history, when mankind was able to
perceive its own futility, its own smallness, and its own follies and inconsistencies, a
humorist appeared, like Chuangtse of China, Omar Khayydm of Persia, and
Aristophanes of Greece. Athens would be infinitely poorer had there been no
Aristophanes, and the Chinese intellectual heritage would be infinitely less rich had
there been no Chuangtse.
Since Chuangtse lived and wrote, however, all Chinese politicians and bandits have
become great humorists, because they have been imbued, directly or indirectly, with
the Chuangtsean view of life. Laotse had laughed before him, a thin, shrill yet
cataclysmic laughter. He must have been a bachelor all his life, or he could not have
laughed so roguishly. Anyway there is no record that he ever married or had any
progeny. The last coughs of Laotse's laughter were caught up by Chuangtse and he,
being a younger man, had a richer voice, and the ring of his laughter has reverberated
throughout the ages. We still cannot resist a chance to laugh, yet sometimes I feel we
are carrying the joke too far, and laugh a little out of season.
The abysmal ignorance of the foreigner about China and the Chinese cannot be more
impressive than when he asks the question: Do the Chinese have a sense of humour?
It is really as surprising as if an Arab caravan were to ask: Are there sands in the
Sahara desert? It is strange, however, how little a person may see in a country.
