itself easily to caricature. The hatred of the Taoist against the Confucianist was the
natural hatred of the romanticist against the classicist. Perhaps it was not hatred; it
was merely an irresistible, mocking laughter.
From this thorough-going scepticism it was but a step to romantic escape from the world and return to nature. Laotse left his post, according to legend, in his old age and
disappeared outside the Hankukuan Pass. Chuangtse was offered a high post by the
King of Ch'u, but replied by asking whether it was wise to be kept and fed like a pig
and then be slaughtered and offered up on the sacrificial altar. From that moment on
Taoism has always been associated with the recluse, the retirement to the mountains,
the worship of the rural life, the cultivation of the spirit and the prolongation of man's
life, and the banishment of all worldly cares and worries. And from this we derive the
most characteristic charm of Chinese culture, the rural ideal of life, art and literature.
The question may be asked: How much was Laotse responsible for this recluse ideal?
The Taotehking, ascribed to him, is a lesser literary accomplishment than the books of
Chuangtse, the Chinese Nietzsche, but it is a more concentrated essence of
old-roguish wisdom. It is, to my mind, the most brilliantly wicked philosophy of
self-protection in world literature. Besides teaching laissezfaire and passive resistance,
it taught also the wisdom of stupidity, the strength of weakness, the advantage of lying
low, and the importance of camouflage. One of its maxims was, "Never be the first of
the world," for the simple reason that thus one could never be exposed to attack, and
consequently never fall. It was, so far as I know, the only known theory of ignorance
and stupidity as the best camouflage in life's battle, in spite of the fact that the theory
itself was the result of the highest human intelligence.
1 English readers -will kindly excuse my gram-mar^ as it is fotind impossible to
convey the forceful terseness of the original except by recourse to pidgin. Ajiy
grammatical improvement -will spoil it.
Human intelligence in Laotse had seen its own dangers and began to preach "Be
stupid!" as its greatest message. It had seen the futility of human effort, and therefore
advised the doctrine of "doing nothing" as a saving of energy and a method of
prolonging life. From this point on the positive outlook on life became negative, and
its influence has coloured the whole Oriental culture. As may be seen in the novel
Teksao Paqyen and in all lives of great Chinese, the conversion of a bandit or a
recluse into a man of the world with responsibilities toward one's fellow-beings, was
always represented by a Confucian argument, while the romantic escape from the
world was always represented by the Taoistic or Buddhistic point of view. In Chinese,
these two opposite attitudes are called "entering the world3* and "leaving the world."
Sometimes these two points of view struggle for supremacy in the same man and at
different periods in his life, as may be seen in the life of Yuan Chunglang. A living
example is that of Professor Liang Suming, who was a Buddhist living in the
mountains, but who was reconverted to Confucianism, married and is now conducting
a rural middle school in Shantung.
The rural ideal of life, art and literature, which is such an important feature of the
Chinese civilization, owes a large measure to this Taoistic feeling for nature. In
Chinese paintings on scrolls and porcelain there are two favourite themes, one being the happiness of family life with pictures of women and children in their leisure, the
other being the happiness of the rural life, with pictures of a fisherman, or a
woodcutter, or a recluse sitting on the ground under a group of pine-trees. These two
themes may represent respectively the Confucianist and the Taoistic ideal of life. The
woodcutter, the herbgatherer, and the recluse are more closely associated with Taoism
than the average foreigner would suspect. The Taoistic feeling is well expressed by
this favourite poem:
I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, "The Master's gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount.
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown."
This feeling for nature practically overflows in all Chinese poetry, and forms an
important part of the Chinese spiritual heritage. Yet here, Confucianism plays an
equally important part. The worship of primitive simplicity was consciously a part of
the Confucian tradition. The agricultural basis of Chinese national life was partly built
on the family system, which identified itself with ownership of land in the country,
and partly on the Confucian dream of the Golden Age. Confucianism always harked
back to the early period of the Emperors Yao and Shun, as the Golden Age when life
was at its simplest and the needs of man were fewest. It was spoken of as a period
when the people squatted on the earth and sang to the rhythm of sticks beaten on the
ground, so happy and innocent that the burden of their song was:
We go to work at sunrise.
And come back to rest at sunset.
We know nothing and learn nothing.
What has the emperor's virtue to do with us?
The worship of the ancients then became identical with the worship of simplicity, for
in Chinese the two notions are closely related, as in the word kup'o, or "ancient and
simple." The Confucian ideal of the family has always been that the men partly study
and partly till the ground, while the women spin and weave. As against the Taoistic
poem quoted, and essentially supporting it in the praise of the simple life, we have, for
instance, the poem which Ch'en Chiju, a scholar at the end of the sixteenth century,
handed to his children as his family heritage:
Life is complete
With children at your feet;
Just a handful of hay hides your cot.
If land is sterile.
To make it fertile, A young calf will surely help a lot.
Teach thy sons to read, too, in spare hours,
Not for fame nor for Mandarin collars.
Brew your wine, plant bamboos, water flowers,
Thus a house for generations of scholars.
The Chinese ideal of happiness was, then, not the "exercise of one's powers along the
lines of their excellence," as was that of the Greeks, but the enjoyment of this simple
rural life, together with the harmony of social relationships.
The real force of Taoism, especially among the people, however, consists largely in
supplying a world of unknowables, which Confucian good sense banished from its
province of ideas. It is recorded in the Analects that Confucius seldom talked about
the supernatural and the spirits. Confucianism offered no hell and no heaven, nor any
formula for immortality of the soul. It solved the problems of human nature, but left
out of consideration the riddle of the universe. It was at a loss to know even the
workings of the human body. In this way, it left a large loophole in its philosophy, and
allowed the popular mind to disentangle, with the help of Taoistic mysticism, the
mysteries of nature.
The workings of this mind were soon apparent in Huainantse (178-122 B.C.), who
mixed philosophy with a wonderland of spirits and legerids. Starting out with the
dualistic notion of yin (female) and yang (male) principles, already current in the
period of the Warring Kingdoms, Taoism soon added to its territory the fairies of the
ancient Shantung barbarians, who dreamed of a fairyland out on the high seas, to
which place the first emperor of Ch' in actually started out with five hundred boys and
virgins to seek his immortality. The hold on the imagination then became irresistible,
and from that time till the present Taoism has always maintained a firm foothold on
the Chinese people, especially in the T'ang Dynasty, when it became for a long period
the state religion, known as the Mystic Religion (because the T'ang imperial house
had the same surname as Laotse, Li). In the Wei and Ch' in Dynasties its vogue was so
great as to completely overshadow Confucianism, and the fashion for Taoism became
connected with the first romantic movement of Chinese literature and with the
reaction against Confucian decorum, as it had been transformed by the late Han
scholars. One of the famous poets compared the Confucian gentleman walking in his
narrow path of righteousness to a bug creeping along the seams of a man's trousers.
Man's nature had rebelled against Confucian restraint and its ceremonialism.
In the meanwhile, Taoism widened its sphere, and included under its arts medicine (or
secret knowledge of the herbs), physiology and cosmogony (all more or less
symbolically explained on the basis of the yin and yang principles and the Five
Elements), magic, witchcraft, aphrodisiacs, incantations, astrology, a good hierarchy
of gods, some beautiful legends, a priesthood and a pope 梐 ll those paraphernalia that go to make up a good, solid popular religion. It took care, too, of Chinese athletics, by
specializing in boxing, and the combination of boxing and witchcraft produced the
Huangchin Rebellion at the end of the Han Dynasty. Last of all, it offered a formula
for bodily hygiene, chiefly by deep-breathing, leading up to immortality by ascent to
heaven on the back of a stork. Its most useful word was cKi (air? breath? spirit?)
which, being invisible, was most susceptible of "mystic" handling. The application of
this cKi was practically universal, from the rays of a comet to boxing, deep-breathing
and sexual union, which was sedulously practised as an art (with preference for
virgins), in the cause of prolongation of life. Taoism was, in short, the Chinese
attempt to discover the mysteries of nature.
V. BUDDHISM
Buddhism is the only important foreign influence that has become part and parcel of
Chinese life. The influence is so deep that we now speak of children's dolls, and
sometimes the children themselves, as "little buddhisatvas" (hsiao p'usa), and the
Empress Dowager herself was addressed as "Old Buddha/3 The Goddess of Mercy
and the smiling Buddha have become Chinese household words. Buddhism has
affected our language, our food, our arts, our sculpture and directly inspired the
characteristic pagoda. It has stimulated our literature and our whole world of
imagination. The little monkish figure, with his bald head and his grey robes, forms
an intimate part of any panorama of society, and Buddhist temples, rather than those
of Confucius, are the centre of the town and village life, where the elders gather to
decide on village matters and annual celebrations. Its monks and nuns penetrate the
privacies of Chinese households, on all occasions of births, deaths and weddings, as
no other persons are allowed to do, and hardly a widow or virgin can be seduced,
according to the Chinese novels, without the help of these religious figures.
Buddhism, in short, means to the Chinese people what religion means to people in
other countries, namely, something that comes to the rescue when human reason
falters or fails. In modern China Buddhist monks are more popular than Taoist monks
and for every Taoist temple (kuan) there are ten Buddhist temples (miao) to be found.
As late as 1933-4 the Panchen Lama of Thibet sprinkled holy water over tens of
thousands of people in Peiping and Nanking, including high government personages
like Tuan Ch' ijui and Tai Chit'ao, and was royally entertained by the Central and local
governments in Nanking, Shanghai, Hangchow and Canton. As late as May, 1934,
Nola Kotuhutu, another Thibetan lama, as official guest of the Canton Government,
publicly declared his ability to protect people against poison gas by incantations, and
actually was able to influence a certain general to change the position of his guns at
this fort through his superior knowledge of astrology and necromancy. Their influence
would not be so great if the Chinese could see a clear way to repel Japanese attacks by
modern military science. The Chinese reason here falters, and there fore turns to
religion. Since the Chinese army cannot help the Chinese, they are willing to be helped by Buddha.
Buddhism has conquered China as a philosophy and as a religion, as a philosophy for
the scholars and as a religion for the common people. Whereas Confucianism has only
a philosophy of moral conduct, Buddhism possesses a logical method, a metaphysics,
and a theory of knowledge. Besides, it is fortunate in having a high tradition of
scholarship in the translations of Buddhist classics, and the language of these
translations, so succinct and often so distinguished by a beautiful lucidity of language
and reasoning, cannot but attract scholars with a philosophical bias. Hence Buddhism
has always enjoyed a prestige among the Chinese scholars, which so far Christianity
has failed to achieve.
Buddhist influence has been so great as to transform Confucianism itself. Confucian
scholarship since the Chou Dynasty was confined to textual emendations and
philologic commentaries. The fashion for the study of Buddhism, believed to be
introduced to China in the first Christian century, rose steadily throughout the
