Part 19

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 passion 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 God. How can you know them, how can you go in through them, how can you participate 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 pricking 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 God."

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 God" 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 canvassing 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 cocks crowing in foreign lands; and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad. What he taught was a total _bouleversement_ 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 Wang Mu in the West; no Azure Birds of Compassion 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 pass 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 pass; 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 Japan, and brought to pass there all sorts of nice Japanese 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 masses 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 Pagodas to mark the spot where Wang Tzu-chiao flew on the Crane to heaven in broad daylight. It sent out the ships of Ts'in Shi Hwangti 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 Wang Mu. The ships found (perhaps) only the Golden Islands of Japan; 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 damned 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 Association; 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,--

"..... in no one form may Tao abide. But changes and shifts like the wide wing-shadows asweep On the mountainside";

--the sea is one, but the tides drift and eddy; the roc, or maybe the dragon, is one, but the shadow of his wings on the mountain sward shifts and changes and veers. When you think you have set up a standard for Tao: when you imagine you have grasped it in you hands:--how fleet it is to vanish! "The man of Tao," said the fisherman of the Mi-lo to Ch'u Yuan, "does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adapts himself to them";--and perhaps there you have the best possible explanation of the nature of those Great souls who come from time to time to save the world.

I think we take the Buddha as the type of them; and expect not only a life and character that _we can recognise_ as flawless, but also a profundity of revelation in the philosophy and ethics. But if no two blades of grass are alike, much less are two human Souls; and in these Great Ones, it is the picture of Souls we are given. When we think that if all men were perfect, all would be alike, we err with a wide mistake. The nearer you get to the Soul, and the more perfect is the expression of it, the less is there monotony or similarity; and almost the one thing you may posit about any avatar is, that he will be a surprise. Tom and Dick and Harry are alike: 'pipe and stick young men'; 'pint and steak young men'; they get born and marry and die, and the grass grows over them with wondrous alikeness; but when the Masters of Men come, all the elements are cast afresh.

Everyone has a place to fill in the universal scheme; he has a function to perform, that none else can perform; a _just what he can do,_--which commonly he falls far short of doing. When he does it, fully and perfectly, then he is on the road of progress; that road opens up to him; and presently, still exercising the fulness of his being, he becomes a completeness, like Heaven and Earth; their 'equal,' in the Chinese phrase; or as we say, a Perfect Man or Adept. Does anyone know what place in history he is to fill? I cannot tell; I suppose an Adept, incarnated, would be too busy filling it to have time or will to question. But here perhaps we have the nearest thing possible to a standard for measuring them; and here the virtue of Taoism, and one greatest lesson we may learn from it. Are we to judge by the impressiveness of the personality? No; the Man of Tao is not a personality at all. He makes one to use, but is not identified with it; his personality will not be great or small, or enchanting or repellent, but simply adapted to the needs.--Is it the depth and fulness of the philosophv he gives out? No; it may be wiser and also more difficult to keep silent on main points, than to proclaim them broadcast; and for this end he may elect even not to know (with conscious brain-mind) too much;--not to have the deep things within his normal consciousness. But he comes into the world to meet a situation; to give the course of history a twist in a desired direction; and the sign and measure of his greatness is, it seems to me, his ability to meet the situation at all points, and to do just what is necessary for the giving of the twist,--no more and no less. And then, of course, it takes a thousand years or so before you can judge. One is not speaking of common statesmen, who effect quick changes that are no changes at all, but of the Men who shepherd the Host of Souls.

I like to imagine, before the birth of Such a One, a consultation of the Gods upon the Mountain of Heaven. A synod of the kind (for China) would have taken place in the sixth century B. C., no doubt; because in those days certainly there was a "decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world." Transport yourselves then, say in the year 552, to the peaks of Tien Shan of Kuen Lun, or high Tai-hsing, or the grand South Mountain; and see the Pantheon assembled.

They look down over Chu Hia; they know that in three centuries or so a manvantara will be beginning there, and grow anxious lest anything has been left undone to insure its success. They note Laotse (whom they sent some fifty years earlier) at his labors; and consider, what those labors would achieve for the Black- haired People. He would bring light to the most excellent minds; the God of Light said, "I have seen to that." He would in time waken the lute-strings of the Spirit, and set Chu Hia all a-song; the God of Music said, "I have seen to that." They foresaw Wu Taotse and Ma Yuan; they foresaw Ssu-k'ung T'u and the Banished Angel; and asked "Is it not enough?" And the thought grew on them that it was not enough, till they sighed with the apprehensions that troubled them. Only a few minds among the millions, they foresaw, would have proper understanding of Tao.

Now, Gods of whatever land they may be, there are those three Bardic Brothers amongst them: He of Light, who awakens vision; He of Song, who rouses up the harmonies and ennobling vibrations; and He of Strength, whose gloves hold all things fast, and neither force nor slipperiness will avail against them. It was this third of them, Gwron, who propounded the plan that satisfied the Pantheon. I will send one among them, with the "Gloves for his treasure," said he.

They considered how it would be with Such a One: going among men as the Gods' Messenger, and with those two Gloves for his treasure.--"This way will it be," they said. "Not having the treasure of the God of Light, he will seem as one without vision of the God-world or remembrance whence he came. Not having the treasure of the God of Music, he will awaken little song with the Bards. But having the Gloves, he will hold the gates of hell shut, so far as shut they may be, through all the cycle that is coming."

With that the council ended. But Plenydd God of Light and Vision thought: "Though my treasure has gone with the Old Philosopher, and I cannot endow this man with it, I will make him Such a One as can be seen by all men; I will throw my light on him, that he may be an example through the age of ages." And Alawn God of Music thought: "Though my lute has gone with Laotse, I will confer boons on this one also. Such a One he shall be, as draws no breath but to tunes of my playing; the motions of his mind, to my music, shall be like the motions of the ordered stars."-- And they both thought: "It will be easy for me to do as much as this, with his having the Gloves of Gwron on his hands."

At that time K'ung Shuhliang Heih, Commander of the district of Tsow, in the Marquisate of Lu in Shantung, determined to marry again.

Now China is a vast democracy: the most democratic country in the world. Perhaps I shall come to proving that presently; for the moment I must ask you to let it pass on the mere statement, satisfied that it is true. Despite this radical democracy, then, she has had two noble families. One is descended from a famous Patriot-Pirate of recent centuries, known to Westerners as Koxinga; with it we have no concern. The other is to be found in the town of K'iuh-fow in Shantung, in the ancient Marquisate of Lu. There are about fifty thousand members of it, all bearing the surname K'ung; its head has the title of 'Duke by Imperial Appointment and hereditary right'; and, much prouder still, 'Continuator of the Sage.'