Part 23

And with it all there was the human man who suffered. I think you will love him the more for this, from the _Analects:_

"The Minister said to Tse Lu, Tseng Hsi, Jan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hua as they sat beside him: 'I may be a day older than you are, but forget that. You are wont to say, "We are unknown." Well; had ye a name in the world, what would ye do?'"

"Tse Lu answered lightly: 'Give me charge of a land of a thousand chariots, crushed between great neighbors, overrun by soldiery and oppressed by famine; in three years' time I should have put courage and high purpose into the people.'"

"The Master smiled,--'What wouldst thou do, Ch'iu?' he said."

"Jan Yu answered: 'Had I charge of sixty or seventy square miles, or from fifty to sixty, in three years' time I would give the people plenty. As for courtesy, music and the like, they could wait for these for the rise of a Princely Man.'"

"'And what wouldst thou do, Chih?' said the Master."

"Kung-hsi Hua answered: 'I would speak of the things I fain would learn, not of what I can do. At service in the Ancestral Temple, or at the Grand Audience, clad in black robe and cap, I fain would fill a small part.'"

"'And thou, Tien?' said the Master."

"Tseng Hsi stopped playing, pushed away his still sounding lute, rose up, and made answer: 'My choice would be unlike those of the other three.'"

"'What harm in that?' said the Master. 'Each but speaks his mind.'"

"Tseng Hsi said: 'In the last days of Spring, and clad for the season, with five or six grown men and six or seven lads, I would bathe in the waters of Yi, all fanned by the breeze in the Rain God's Glade, and wander home with song.'"

"The Master sighed.--'I hold with Tien,' said he."

Very, very human, I say; very Chinese. But here is that which was not human but divine: he never turned from his path to satisfy these so human and Chinese longings; the breeze in the Rain God's Glade never blew for him. It is just as well to remember, when you read of the ceremonies, the body bent under the load of the scepter, the carefully chosen (as it may seem) and habitually worn expression of face on passing or approaching the throne, the "elbows spread like wings":--all the formal round of proprieties;--that it was the last days of Spring, and the waters of Yi, and the breeze in the Rain God's Glade, that were calling to his Chinese heart.

Yes; he was very human; listen to this:--Yuan Jang awaited the Master squatting on the ground. "The Master said:--'Unruly when young, unmentioned as man, undying when old,--this spells _Good-for-nothing';_ and hit him on the leg with his staff."

Which brings one naturally to his sense of humor.

Once he was passing through a by-street when a man of the district shouted:--"Great is Confucius the Philosopher! Yet for all his wide learning he has nothing which can bring him fame!" The Master turned to his disciples and said:--"What shall I take up? Shall I take up charioteering?--or archery?--I must certainly take up charioteering!"

His disciples once were expecting him at the city of Ch'ing; and Tse Kung asked a man who was coming from the east gate if he had seen him there.--"Well," said the man, "there is a man there with a forehead like Yao, a neck like Kao Yao, his shoulders on a level with those of Tse-ch'an, but wanting below the waist three inches of the height of Yu;--and altogether having the forsaken appearance of a stray dog." Tse Kung recognised the description and hurried off to meet the Master, to whom he reported it _verbatim._ Confucius was hugely delighted. "A stray dog!" said he; "fine! fine!" Unluckily, no contemporary photographs of Yao and Yu and the others have come down; so the description is not as enlightening now as it may have been then.

"Tse Kung," we read, "would compare one man with another." The Master said:--"What talents Tse has! Now I have no time for such things!"

I keep on hearing in his words accents that sound familiar.

When he was at Loyang--Honanfu--one of the things that struck him most was a bronze statue in the Temple of the Imperial Ancestors, with a triple, clasp on its mouth. One does not wonder. A Great Soul from the God World, he kept his eyes resolutely on the world of men; as if he remembered, nothing of the splendor, and nothing foresaw. . . . Indeed, I cannot tell; one would give much to know what really passed between him and Laotse. If you say that no word of his lightens, for you that 'dusk within the Holy of holies',--at least he gives you the keys, and leaves you to find and open the 'Holy of holies' for yourself if you can. There are lost chapters, that went at the Burning of the Books; and an old-fashioned Chinaman would often tell you of any Western idea or invention his countrymen may not have known, that you should have found all in the lost chapters of Confucius. It may be;--and that you should have found there better things, too, than Western ideas and inventions. There is a passage in the _Analects_ that tells how the disciples thought he was 'keeping back from them some part of his doctrine: "No, no," he answered; "if I should not give it all to you, to whom should I give it?" Distinctly, then, this suggests that there was an esotericism, a side not made public; and there is no reason to suppose that it has been made public since. But it is recorded that he would lift no veils from the Other-worlds. "If you do not understand life," said he, "how can you understand death?"

Well; we who are stranded here, each on his desert island of selfhood, thrust out after knowledge: peer for signs at all the horizons;--are eager to inquire, and avid of the Unknown--which also we imagine to be something outside of our own being. But suppose a man, as they say one with Tao, in which all knowledge rests in solution: what knowledge would he desire? After what would he be inquisitive? And how much, desiring it, would he possess? What is the end of being, after all? To perform your function, your duty; what men and the world,--ay, and the far suns and stars,--are requiring of you:--that is all. Not to gain infinite knowledge; but to have at, every step what knowledge you need; that so you may fill your place in the Universe, meeting all contours and flowing into them; restoring and maintaining the Harmony of Things. So we hear much about this performance of duty. But in reality, to do one's duty is to sing with the singing spheres; to have the Top of Infinity for the roof of one's skull, and the bottom of the Great Deep for one's footsoles: to be a compendium, and the Equal, of Heaven and Earth. The password into the Tao of Laotse is Silence; Confucius kept the great Silence more wonderfully than Laotse did--or so it seems to me now. Laotse said: _Sing with the singing spheres, and behold, your duty is doing itself uder your hands._ The password into the Tao of Confucius is _Duty:_ he said merely _Do that, and,_--the rest is silence. He may have played that _rest_ on his lute; we are not to hear it in his words. There was a knowledge that Laotse, enthroned in his silence, had no means of using; that Confucius riding the chariot of duty, had no occasion to possess.

Now whether you call Tao _duty,_ or _silence,_--what should the Man of Tao desire beyond the fulness of it? All the light is there for him; all the suns are kindled for him;--why should he light wax candles? That is, for himself: he will light them fast enough where others may be in need. To us, a great poem may be a great thing: but to them who have the fulness of which the greatest poem is but a little glimpse--what should it matter to them? And of the infinite knowledge at his disposal, would the Man of Tao choose to burden himself with one little item of which there was no present need?

So when they say, "Confucius was nobody; there is no evidence that he knew the great secrets"; answer them:--"Yes, there is. He knew that supreme secret, how to _teach,_ which is the office of a Teacher: he knew how to build up the inner life of his disciples; to coax, train, lure the hidden god into manifestation in them." And for evidence you can give them this: Tse Kung--who, you remember, was always comparing this man with that--asked which was the better, Shih or Shang. (They were two disciples.) Confucius answered: "Shih goes too far; Shang not far enough." Said Tse Kung (just as you or I would have done):-- "Then Shih is the better man?"--"Too far," replied Confucius, "is not better than not far enough."--To my ears there is more occultism in that than in a thousand ethical injunctions.--Or answered;--"Whilst thy father and they elder brother are alive, how canst thou do all thou art taught?" Jan Yu said:--"Shall I do all I am taught?" The Master said:--"Do all thou art taught." Kung-hsi Hua said: "Yu asked, 'Shall I do all I am taught?' and you spoke, Sir, of father and elder brother. Ch'iu asked, 'Shall I do all I am taught?' and you answered: 'Do all thou art taught.' I am puzzled, and make bold to ask you, Sir." The Master said:--"Ch'iu is bashful, so I egged him on. Yu has the pluck of two, so I held him back."

Think it over! Think it over!

This though occurs to me: Was that sadness of his last days caused by the knowledge that the School could not continue after his death; because the one man who might have succeeded him as the Teacher, Yen Huy, was dead? So far as I know, it did not go on; there was no one to succeed him. That supreme success, that grand capture of future ages for the Gods, was denied him; or I daresay our own civilization might have been Confucian--BALANCED --now. But short of that--how sublime a figure he stands! If he had known that for twenty-five centuries or so he was to shine within the vision of the great unthinking masses of his countrymen as their supreme example; their anchor against the tides of error, against abnormalities, extravagances, unbalance; a bulwark against invading time and decay; a check on every bad emperor, so far as check might be set at all; a central idea to mold the hundred races of Chu Hia into homogeneity; a stay, a prop, a warning against headlong courses at all times of cyclic downtrend;--if he had known all this, he would, I think, have ordered his life precisely as he did. Is there no strength implied, as of the Universal, and not of any personal, will, however titanic, in the fact that moment after moment, day after day, year after year, he built up this picture, gave the world this wonderful assurance of a man? In his omissions, no less than in his fulfilments. He taught,--so far as we know,--nothing but what the common mind might easily accept; nothing to miss the mark of the intelligence of dull Li or Ching toiling in the rice-field;--nor yet too paltry for the notice of the Hwangti on the Dragon Throne. Laotse had come in the spirit of Plenydd the Light-bringer; in the spirit of Alawn, to raise up presently sweet profusions of song. He illuminated the inner worlds; his was the urge that should again and again, especially later when reinforced by Buddhism, prick up the Black-haired People to heights of insight and spiritual achievement.--But the cycles of insight and spiritual achievement, these too, must always run their course and fall away; there is no year when it is always Spring. Dark moments and seasons come; and the Spirit becomes hidden; and what you need most is not illumination,--which you cannot get; or if you could, it would be hell, and not heaven, that would be illuminated for you; not a spur to action,--for as things are constituted, any spur at such a time would drive you to wrong and exorbitant action:--what you need is not these, but simply stability to hold on; simply the habit of propriety, the power to go on at least following harmless conventions and doing harmless things; not striking out new lines for yourself, which would certainly be wrong lines, but following as placidly as may be lines that were laid down for you, or that you yourself laid down, in more righteous and more luminous times. A strong government, however tyrannical, is better than an anarchy in which the fiend in every man is let loose to run amuck. Under the tyranny, yes, the aspiring man will find himself hindered and thwarted; but under the anarchy, since man is no less hell than heaven, the gates of hell will be opened, and the Soul, normally speaking, can only retire and wait for better times:--unless it be the Soul of a Confucius, it can but wait till Karma with ruthless hands has put down the anarchy and cleared things up. Unless it be the Soul of a Confucius; and even Such a One is bound to be a failure in his own day.

But see what he did. The gates of hell were swung wide, and for the time being, not the hosts of the Seraphim and Cherubim,--not the armed Bodhisatvas and Dhyanis,--could have forced them back on their hinges: "the ripple of effect," we read, "thou shalt let run its course." But in the ideal world he erected a barrier against them. He set up a colossal statue with arms outthrown to bar the egress; the statue of Confucius preaching the Balanced Life. With time it materialized, so to say, and fell into place. You can never certainly stop the gates of hell,--in this stage of our evolution. But perhaps as nearly as it can be done, he did it. Rome fell, and Christendom made a mess of things; it has never yet achieved that union which is the first condition of true civilization. But China, older than Rome, despite her sins and vicissitudes, has made a shift to stand. I shall come to comparing the two histories presently; then you will see. When the pralaya came on her, and the forces of life all went elsewhere--as they do and must from every civilization in their season,--China lost two of her treasures: Plenydd's vision, and Alawn's gift of song, were taken from her. But this stability; these Gloves of Gwron; this instinct for middle courses and the balance, this Doctrine of the Mean and love of plain sane doings: she has retained enough of this to keep her in being. And it was K'ung Ch'iu of Lu that gave it to her. Shall we not call him Such a One as only the Gods send?

Someone told me the other day what he had seen a couple of Chinamen do in a Californian garden. They had a flower-bed to plant, about forty feet long; and each a basket of seedlings to plant it with, and a slip of wood for a model, with mystic unintelligible signs inscribed thereon: WELCOME HOME in English capitals. One went to one end of the bed and the other to the other, and they began their planting. They made no measurements or calculations; used no rod or line; but just worked ahead till they met in the middle. When that happened, and the job was done, the bed was inscribed, in perfectly formed and proportioned English capitals made of young plants, WELCOME HOME. There was no crowding or omission. To account for it you have twenty-four centuries of Confucianism,--of Katherine Tingley's doctrine of Middle Lines, the Balanced Life.

It is a very small thing; but it may help us to understand.

XII. TALES FROM A TAOIST TEACHER

Confucius died in 478: the year, it may be noted, in which Athens attained her hegemony: or just when the Greek Cycle thirteen decades was opening. Looking backward thirteen decades from that, we come to 608 B.C.; four years after which date, according to the usually accepted tradition, Laotse was born. Thus we find the cycle preceding that of Greece mainly occupied, in China, by the lives of the two great Teachers.

We should have seen by this time that these two lives were, so to say, parts of a single whole: co-ordinated spiritually, if not in an organization on this plane. Laotse, like H.P. Blavatsky, brought the Teachings; he illuminated the inner worlds. That was his work. We can see little of him as he accomplished it: and only the smallest fragment of his doctrine remains:--five thousand words, out of his whole long life. But since we have had in our own time an example of how these things are done, we may judge him and his mission by this analogy; also by the results. Then came Confucius, like Katherine Tingley, to link this wisdom with individual and national life. The teachings were there; and he had no need to restate them: he might take the great principles as already enounced. But every Teacher has his own method, and his need to accentuate this or that: so time and history have had most to say about the differences between these two. What Confucius had to do, and did, was to found his school, and show in the lives of his disciples, modeled under his hands, how the wisdom of the Ages (and of Laotse) can be made a living power in life and save the world.

Contrasting the efforts of that age and this, we may say that then, organization, such as we have now, was lacking. Confucius did not come as the official successor of Laotse; Laotse, probably, had had no organized school that he could hand over to Confucius. He had taught, and his influence had gone far and wide, affecting the thought of the age; but he had had no trained and pledged body of students to whom he could say: 'Follow this man when I am gone; he is my worthy successor.'-- All of which will be laughed at: I firmly believe, however, that it is an accurate estimate of things. When you come to think of it, it was by the narrowest margine that H. P. Blavatsky, through Mr. Judge--and his heroism and wisdom alone to be thanked for it!--had anything beyond the influence of her ideas and revelation to hand on to Katherine Tingley. In the way of an organization, I mean. Very few among her disciples had come to have any glimmering of what discipleship means, or were prepared to follow her accredited successors.

And Confucius, in his turn, had no established center for his school; it was a thing that wandered the world with him, and ceased, as in organization (however hazy) to exist when he died. Nothing remained, then, of either Teacher for posterity except the ideas and example. And yet I have hinted, and shall try to show, that tremendous results for good followed: that the whole course of history was turned in an upward direction. You may draw what inferences you will. The matter is profoundly significant.

Thirteen decades after the death of Confucius, Plato died in Greece; and about that time two men arose in China to carry forward, bring down, and be the expositors of, the work of the two great Teachers of the sixth and seventh centuries. These were Chwangtse for Taoism, and Mangtse or Mencius for Confucius: the one, the channel through which spiritual thought flowed to the quickening of the Chinese imagination; the other, the man who converted the spiritual thought of Confucius into the Chinese Constitution. Alas! they were at loggerheads: a wide breach between the two schools of thought had come to be by their time; or perhaps it was they who created it. We shall arrive at them next week; tonight, to introduce you to Liehtse, a Taoist teacher who came sometime between Laotse and Chwangtse;--perhaps in the last quarter of the fifth century, when Socrates was active in Greece.

Professor De Groot, of Holland, speaks boldly of Confucius as a Taoist; and though I dislike many of this learned Dutchman's ideas, this one is excellent. His thesis is that Laotse was no more an innovator than Confucius; that both but gave a new impulse to teachings as old as the race. Before Laotse there had been a Teacher Quan, a statesman-philosopher of the seventh century, who had also taught the Tao. The immemorial Chinese idea had been that the Universe is made of the interplay of two forces, _Yang_ and _Yin,_ positive and negative;--or simply the Higher and the Lower natures. To the Yang, the Higher, belong the _Shen_ or gods,--all conscious beneficent forces within and without man. To the Yin or lower belong the _kwei,_ the opposite of gods: _fan_ means foreign; and _Fan Kwei_ is the familiar Chinese term for white men. From Shen and Tao we get the term _Shentao,_ which you know better as _Shinto,_--the Way of the Gods; or as well, the Wisdom of the Gods; as good an equivalent of our term _Theosophy_ as you should find; perhaps indeed better than _Theosophy_ itself; for it drives home the idea that the _Wisdom_ is a practical _Way of Life._ Shentao, the Taoism of the Higher Nature, then, was the primeval religion of the Chinese;--Dr. De Groot arrives at this, though perhaps hardly sees how sensible a conclusion he has reached. In the sixth century B.C. it was in a fair way to becoming as obsolete as Neoplatonism or Gnosticism in the nineteenth A.D.; and Laotse and Confucius simply restated some aspects of it with a new force and sanction;--just as H.P. Blavatsky, in the _Key to Theosophy,_ begins, you will remember, with an appeal to and restatement of the Theosophy of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists of Alexandria.

It may seem a kind of divergence from our stream of history, to turn aside and tell stories from the _Book of Liehtse;_ but there are excuses. Chinese history, literature, thought-- everything--have been such a closed book to the West, that those scholars who have opened a few of its pages are to be considered public benefactors; and there is room and to spare for any who will but hold such opened pages up;--we are not in the future to dwell so cut off from a third of mankind. Also it will do us good to look at Theosophy from the angle of vision of another race. I think Liehtse has much to show us as to the difference between the methods of the Chinese and Western minds: the latter that must bring most truths down through the brain-mind, and set them forth decked in the apparel of reason; the former that is, as it seems to me, often rather childlike as to the things of the brain-mind; but has a way of bringing the great truths down and past the brain-mind by some circuitous route; or it may be only by a route much more direct than ours. The West presents its illuminations so that they look big on the surface; you say, This is the work of a great mind. A writer in the _Times Literary Supplement_ brought out the idea well, in comparing the two poetries. What he said was, in effect, as follows:--the Western poet, too often, dons his singing robe before he will sing; works himself up; expects to step out of current life into the Grand Manner;--and unless the Soul happens to be there and vocal at the time, achieves mostly _pombundle._ The Chinaman presents his illumination as if it were nothing at all,--just the simplest childish-foolish thing; nothing in the world for the brain-mind to get excited about. You take very little notice at the time: more of their quaint punchinello _chinoiserie,_ you say. Three weeks after, you find that it was a clear voice from the supermundane, a high revelation. The Chinese poet saunters along playing a common little tune on his Pan-pipes. Singing robes?-- None in the world; just what he goes to work in. Grand Manner?-- 'Sir,' says he, 'the contemptible present singer never heard of it; wait for that till the coming of a Superior Man.'--'Well,' you say, 'at least there is no danger of _pombundle';_ and indeed there is not. But you rather like the little tune, and stop to listen . . . and then . . . Oh God! the Wonder of wonders has happened, and the Universe will never be quite the dull, fool, ditchwater thing it was to you before . . .