Part 27

Now then, I want to take one of those clauses, and try to see what Chwangtse really meant by it. "Your individuality is not your own, but the delegated adaptability of God."--There is a certain position in the Scheme of Things Entire,--a point, with a relation of its own to the rest of the Scheme, to the Universe;-- as the red line has a relation of its own to the rest of the spectrum and the ray of light as a whole..... From that point, from that position, there is a work to be done, which can be done from no other. The Lonely Eternal looks out through these eyes, because it must see all things; and there are things no eyes can see but these, no other hands do. This point is an infinitesimal part of the whole; but without its full and proper functioning, the Whole falls short in that much:--because of your or my petty omissions, the Universe limps and goes lame.--Into this position, as into all others impartially, the One Life which is Tao flows, adapting itself through aeons to the relations which that point bears to the Whole: and the result and the process of this adaptation is--your individuality or mine.

_You_ are not the point, the position: because it is merely that which you hold and through which you function; it is yours, but not you. What then are _you?_ That which occupies and adapts itself to the point? But that is Tao, the Universal. You can only say it is you, if from _you_ you subtract all _you_-ness. Your individuality, then, is a temporary aspect of Tao in a certain relation to the totality of Tao, the One Thing which is the No Thing:--or it is the "delegated adaptability of God."

How and wherein adaptable?--The Infinite, occupying this position, has formed therein all sorts of attachments and dislikes; and each one of them hinders it adaptability. Your surroundings have reflected themselves on you: and the sum of the reflexions is your personality,--the little cage of I-am-ness from which it is so hard to escape. Every reflected image engraves itself on the stuff of yourself by the sensation of attachment or repulsion which it arouses. When it says, "The One becomes the Two"--which is the way in one form or another all ancient philosophy sums up the beginning of things;--this is what is meant: the 'One' is Tao; the 'Two' is this conditioned world, whose nature and essence is to appear as pairs of opposites--to be attractive, or to repel. The pigs' point of view was that it was better to live on bran and escape the shambles; the Grand Augur's, that the pomp and ceremony of the sacrifice, the public honor, ought more than to compensate them for the momentary inconvenience of being killed. Opposite ways of thinking; points of view: which cherishing, Grand Augur and pigs alike dwelt on the plane of externals; and so there was no real difference between them. When you stand for you, and I for myself, it is six of one and half a dozen of the other; but when either of us stand for That which is both of us, and all else,-- then we touch reality; then there is no longer conflict, or opposites; no longer false appearances,--but the presence and cognition of the True.

Here let me note what seems to me a radical superiority in Chinese methods of thought. You may take the _Bhagavad-Gita,_ perhaps, as the highest expression of Aryan religio-philosophic thinking. There we have the Spirit, the One, shown as the self of the Universe, but speaking through, and as, Krishna, a human personality. Heaven forbid that I should suggest there is anthropomorphism in this. Still, I think our finest mystical and poetic perceptions of the Light beyond all lights do tend to crystallize themselves into the shape of a _Being;_ we do tend to symbolize and figure that Wonder as ..... an Individuality .....in some indefinable splendid sort. Often you find real mystics, men who have seen with their own eyes so to say, talking about _God, the Lord,_ the _Great King,_ and what not of the like; and though you know perfectly well what they mean, there was yet that necessity on them to use those figures of speech. But in China, no. There, they begin from the opposite end. Neither in Laotse nor in Confucius, nor in their schools, can you find a trace of personalism. Gods many, yes; as reason and common sense declare; but nothing you can call a god is so ancient, constant, and eternal as Tao, "which would appear to have been before God." Go to their poets, and you find that the rage is all for Beauty as the light shining through things. The grass-blade and the moutain, the moonlit water and the peony, are lit from within and utterly adorable: not because God made them; not as reminding you of the Topmost of any Hierarchy of Being; but, if you really go to the bottom of it, because there is no personality in them,--and so nothing to hinder the eternal wonder, impersonal Tao, from shining through.--As if _we_ came through our individuality to a conception of the Divine; but _they,_ through a perception of the divine, to a right understanding of their individuality. It amounts to _us_ to fall into gross hideous anthropomorphism; the worst of them into superstitions of their own.--When one quotes Chwangtse as speaking of "the delegated adaptability of _God,_" one must remember that one has to use some English word for his totally impersonal _Tao_ or _Tien,_ or even _Shangti,_ or whatever it may be.

This Tao, you say, something far off,--a principle in philosophy or a metaphysical idea,--may be very nice to discuss in a lecture or write poetry about; but dear me! between whiles we have a great deal to do, and really--But no! it is actually, as Mohammed said, "nearer to thee than thy jugular vein." It is a simple adjustment of oneself to the Universe,--of which, after all, one cannot escape being a part; it is the attainment of a true relationship to the whole. What obscures and hinders that, is simply our human brain-mind consciousness. "Consider the lilies of the field," that attain a perfection of beauty. The thing that moves us, or ought to move us, in flowers, trees, seas and mountains, is this: that lacking this fretting, gnawing sense of I-am-ness, their emanations are pure Tao, and may reach us along the channel we call beauty: may flood our being through "the gateway of the eyes." Beauty is Tao made visible. The rose and peony do not feel themselves 'I,' distinct from 'you' and the rest; they are in opposition to nothing; they do not fall in love, and have no aversions: they simply worship Heaven and are unanxious, and so beautiful. When we know this, we see what beauty means; and that it is not something we can afford to ignore and treat with stoic indifference or puritan dislike. It is Tao visible; I call every flower an avatar of God. Now you see how Taoism leads to poetry; is the philosophy of poetry; is indeed _Poetics,_ rather than _Metephysics._ Think of all the little jewels you know in Keats, in Shelley, or Wordsworth: the moments when the mists between those men and the divine "defecated to a thin transparency";--those were precisely the moments when the poets lost sight of their I-am-ness and entered into true relations with the Universe. A daffodil, every second of its life, holds within itself all the real things poets have ever said, or will ever say, about it; and can reach our souls directly with edicts from the Dragon Throne of the Eternal.--I watched the linarias yesterday, and their purple delicacy assured me that all the filth, all the falsehood and tragedy of the world, should pass and be blown away; that the garden was full of dancing fairies, joy moving them to their dancing; that it was my own fault if I could not see Apollo leaning down out of the Sun; and my own fatuity, and that alone, if I could not hear the Stars of Morning singing together, and all the sons of God shouting for you. And it was the truth they were telling; the plain, bald, naked truth;--they have never learned to lie, and do not know what it means. There is no sentimentalism in this; only science. We live in a Universe absolutely soaked through with God,--or with Poetry, which is perhaps a better name for It; a Universe peopled thick with Gods. But it is all very far from our common thoughts and conceptions; that is why it sounds to most people like sentimental nonsense and 'poetry.' No wonder Plato hated that word;--since it is made a hand-grenade, in the popular mind, to fling at every truth. And yet Poetry 'gets in on us,' too, occasionally, and accomplishes for

"the woods and waters wild"

the work they cannot do for themselves;--the work they cannot do, cause we will not look at them, cannot see them, and have forgotten their ancient language, being too much immersed in a rubbishing gabble of our own.

What Toism, and especially Chwangtse as I think, did for the Chinese was to publish the syntax and vocabulary of that ancient language; to make people understand how to take these grand protagonists of Tao; how to communicate familiarly with these selfless avatars of the Most High. Listen to this: the thought is close-packed, but I think you will follow it:--

"The true Sage rejects all distinction of this and that," that is to say, of subjective, or that which one perceives within one's own mind and consciousness, and objective, or that which is perceived as existing outside of them;--he does not look upon the mountain or the daffodil as things different or apart from his own conscious being. "He takes his refuge in Tao, and places himself in subjective relations with all things"; he keeps the mountain within him; the scent of the daffodil, and her yellow candle-flame of beauty, are within the sphere and circle of himself;

"...the little wave of Breffny goes stumbling through his soul."

"Hence it is said"--this is Chwangtse again--"that there is nothing like the light of Nature.

"Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the identity of things. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves, but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed."--And there, I may say, you have it: the last is the secret of the wonder-light in all Far Eastern Poetry and Art; more, it is the explanation of all poetry everywhere. It is the doctrine, the archeus, the _Open Sesame,_ the thyme- and lavender- and sweetwilliam-breathed Secret Garden of this old wizardly Science of Song;--who would go in there, and have the dark and bright blossoms for his companions, let him understand this. For Poetry is the revelation of the Great Life beyond the little life of this human personality; to tap it, you must evict yourself from the personal self; "transfer yourself into the position of the things viewed," and not see, but _be,_ the little stumbling wave or the spray of plum-blossom, thinking its thoughts.--"Viewing things thus," continues our Chwangtse, "you are able to comprehend and master them. So it is that to place oneself in inner relation with externals, without consciousness of their objectivity,--this is Tao. But to wear out one's intellect in an obstinate adherence to the objectivity--the apartness--of things, not recognizing that they are all one--this is called _Three in the Morning._--'What do you mean by _Three in the Morning?'_ asked Tse Yu.--'A keeper of monkeys,' Tse Chi replied, 'said with regard to their daily ration of chestnuts that each monkey should have three in the morning and four at night. At this the monkeys were very angry; so he said that they might have four in the morning and three at night; whereat they were well pleased. The number of nuts was the same; but there was an adaptation to the feelings of those concerned.'"-- which, again, means simply that to follow Tao and dodge until it is altogether sloughed off the sense of separateness, is to follow the lines of least resistance.

All these ideas are a natural growth from the teachings of Laotse; but Butterfly Chwang, in working them out and stating them so brilliantly, did an inestimable service to the ages that were to come.

XIV. THE MANVANTARA OPENS

Laotse's Blue Pearl was already shining into poetry. Ch'u Yuan, the first great poet, belongs to this same fourth century; it is a long step from the little wistful ballads that Confucius gathered to the "wild irregular meters," * splendid imagery, and be it said, deep soul symbolism of his great poem the Li Sao (Falling into Trouble). The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain. At last, banished by the prince whose minister he had been, he retired into the wilds, and was meditating at the tomb of Shun in Hupeh, in what was then the far south. There the Phoenix and the Dragon came to him, and bore him aloft, past the West Pole, past the Milky Way, past even the Source of the Hoangho, to the Gates of Heaven. Where, however, there was no admittance for him; and full of sorrow he returned to earth.

* _Chinese Literature,_ by Dr. H. A. Giles. What is said about the _Li Sao_ here comes from that work--except the suggestions as to its inner meaning. ------

On the banks of the Mi-lo a fisherman met him, and asked him the cause of his trouble.--"All the world is foul," answered Ch'u Yuan, "and I alone am clean."--"If that is so," said the fisherman, "why not plunge into the current, and make its foulness clean with the infection of your purity? The Man of Tao does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adjusts himself to them." Ch'u Yuan took the hint: leaped into the Mi-lo;--and yearly since then they have held the Dragon-boat Festival on the waters of Middle China to commemorate the search for his body.-- Just how much of this is in the _Li Sao,_--where the poem ends,-- I do not clearly gather from Professor Giles's account; but the whole story appears to me to be a magnificent Soul Symbol: of that Path which leads you indeed on dragon flights to the borders of the Infinite, but whose end, rightly considered, is in this world, and to be as it were drowned in the waters of this world, with your cleanness infecting them to be clean,--and lighting them for all future ages with beauty, as with little dragon-boats luminous with an inner flame. Ch'u Yuan had followers in that and the next century; but perhaps his greatness was hardly to be approached for a thousand years.

But we were still in Tiger-time, and with quite the worst of it to come. Here lay the Blue Pearl scintillating rainbows up through the heavy atmosphere; but despite its flashing and up-fountaining those strange dying-dolphin hues and glories, you could never have told, in Tiger-time, what it really was. The Dragon was yet a long way off; though indeed it must be allowed that flight, when Chwangtse wrote and Ch'u Yuan sung, was surprised with the far churr of startling wings under the stars. Ears intent to listen were surprised; but only for a moment;-- there was that angry howling again from the northern hills and the southern forests: the two great Tigers of the world face to face, tails lashing;--and between them and in their path, Chow quite prone,--the helpless Black-haired People trembling or chattering frivolously. Not for such an age as that Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan wrote, but indeed you may say for all time. What light from the Blue Pearl could then shine forth and be seen, would, in the thick fog and smoke-gloom, take on wild fantastic guise; which, as we shall see, it did:--but what Chwangtse had written remained, pure immortality, to kindle up better ages to come. When China should be ready, Chwangtse and the Pearl would be found waiting for her. The manvantara had not yet dawned; but we may hurry on now to its dawning.

The Crest-Wave was still in India when China plunged into the abyss from which her old order of ages never emerged. Soon after Asoka came to the throne of Magadha, in 284 B.C., Su Tai, wise prime minister to the Lord of Chao, took occasion to speak-- seriously to his royal master as to the latter's perennial little wars with Yen.* "This morning as I crossed the river," said he, "I saw a mussel open its shell to the sun. Straight an oyster-catcher thrust in his bill to eat the mussel; which promptly snapped the shell to and held the bird fast.--'If it doesn't rain today or tomorrow,' said the oyster-catcher, 'there'll be a dead mussel here.'--'And if you don't get out of this by today or tomorrow,' said the mussel, 'there'll be a dead oyster-catcher.' Meanwhile up came a fisherman and carried them both off. I fear Ts'in will be our fisherman."

* The tale is taken from Dr. H.A. Gile's _Chinese Literature._ ------

Which duly came to pass. Even in Liehtse's time Ts'in characteristics were well understood: he tells a sly story of a neighboring state much infested by robbers. The king was proud of a great detective who kept them down; but they soon killed the Pinkerton, and got to work again. Then he reformed himself,--and the robbers found his kingdom no place for them. In a body they crossed the Hoangho into Ts'in;--and bequeathed to its policy their tendencies and aptitudes.

Ts'in had come to be the strongest state in China. Next neighbor to the Huns, and half Hun herself, she had learned warfare in a school forever in session. But she had had wise rulers also, after their fashion of wisdom: who had been greatly at pains to educate her in all the learning of the Chinese. So now she stood, an armed camp of a nation, enamored of war, and completely civilized in all external things. Ts'u, her strongest rival, stretching southward to the Yangtse and beyond, had had to deal with barbarians less virile than the Huns; and besides, dwelling as Ts'u did among the mountains and forests of romance, she had some heart in her for poetry and mysticism, whereas Ts'in's was all for sheer fighting. Laotse probably had been a Ts'u man; and also Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan; and in after ages it was nearly always from the forests of Ts'u that the great winds of poetry were blown. Still--he had immense territories and resources, and the world looked mainly to her for defense against the northern Tiger Ts'in. Soon after Su Tai told his master the parable of the mussel and the oyster-catcher the grand clash came, and the era of petty wars and raidings was over. Ts'u gathered to herself most of the rest of China for her allies, and there was a giant war that fills the whole horizon, nearly, of the first half of the third century B. C. New territories were involved: the world had expanded mightily since the days of Confucius. "First and last," says Ssema Tsien, "the allies hurled a million men against Ts'in." But to no purpose; one nation after another went down before those Hun-trained half-Huns from the north-west. In 257 Chau Tsiang king of Ts'in took the Chow capital, and relieved Nan Wang, the last of the Chows, of the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu, the symbols of his sacred sovereignty; --the mantle of the Caliphate passed from the House of Wen Wang and the Duke of Chow.

The world had crumbled to pieces: there had been changes of dynasty before, but never (in known history) a change like this. The Chows had been reigning nearly nine hundred years; but their system had been in the main the same as that of the Shangs and Hias, and of Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu: it was two millenniums, a century, and a decade old. A Chinaman, in Chau Tsiang's place, would merely have reshaped the old order and set up a new feudal-pontifical house instead of Chow; which could not have lasted, because old age had worn the old system out. But these barbarians came in with new ideas. A new empire, a new race, a new nation was to be born.

Chau Tsiang died in 251; and even then one could not clearly foresee what should follow. In 253 he had performed the significant sacrifice to Heaven, a prerogative of the King-Pontiff: but he had not assumed the title. Resistance was still in being. His son and successor reigned three days only; and _his_ son, another nonentity, five years without claiming to be more than King of Ts'in. But when this man died in 246, he left the destinies of the world in the hands of a boy of thirteen; who very quickly showed the world in whose hands its destinies lay. Not now a King of Ts'in; not a King-Pontiff of Chow;--not, if you please, a mere _wang_ or king at all;--but Hwangti, like that great figure of mythological times, the Yellow Emperor, who had but to sit on his throne, and all the world was governed and at peace. The child began by assuming that astounding title: _Ts'in Shi Hwangti,_ the First August Emperor: peace to the ages that were past; let them lie in their tomb; time now should begin again!--Childish boyish swank and braggadocio, said the world; but very soon the world found itself mistaken. _Hwangti;_--but no sitting on his throne in meditation, no letting the world be governed by Tao, for him!

If you have read that delightful book _Through Hidden Shensi,_ by Mr. F. A. Nichols, the city of Hienfang, or Changan, or, by its modern name, Singanfu or Sian-fu in Shensi, will be much more than a name to you. Thither it was that the Dowager Empress fled with her court from Pekin at the time of the Boxer Rebellion; there, long ago, Han Wuti's banners flew; there Tang Taitsong reigned in all his glory and might; there the Banished Angel sang in the palace gardens of Tang Hsuantsong the luckless: history has paid such tribute of splendor to few of the cities of the world. At Hienfang now this barbarian boy and Attila-Napoleon among kings built his capital;--built it right splendidly, after such ideas of splendor as a young half-Hun might cherish. For indeed, he had but little and remote Chinese heredity in him; was of the race of Attila and Genghiz, of Mahmoud of Ghazna, Tamerlane, and all the world-shaking Turkish conquerors. --Well, but these people, though by nature and function destroyers, have been great builders too: building hugely, monumentally, and to inspire awe, and not with the faery grace and ephemeral loveliness of the Chinese;--though they learned the trick of that, too,--as they learned in the west kindred qualities from the Saracens. Grand Pekin is of their architecture; which is Chinese with a spaciousness and monumental solemnity added. Such a capital Ts'in She Hwangti built him at Hien fang or Changan. In the Hall of audience of his palace within the walls he set up twelve statues, each (I like this barbarian touch) weighing twelve thousand pounds. Well; _we_ should say, each costing so many thousand dollars; you need not laugh; I am not sure but that the young Hun had the best of it. And without the walls he built him, too, a Palace of Delight with many halls and courtyards; in some of which (I like this too) he could drill ten thousand men.

All of this was but the trappings and the suits of his sovereignty: he let it be known he had the substance as well. No great strategist himself, he commanded the services of mighty generals: one Meng-tien in especial, a bright particular star in the War-God's firmament. An early step to disarm the nations, and have all weapons sent to Changan; then, with these, to furnish forth a great standing army, which he sent out under Meng-tien to conquer. The Middle Kingdom and the quondam Great Powers were quieted; then south of the Yangtse the great soldier swept, adding unknown regions to his master's domain. Then rorth and west, till the Huns and their like had grown very tame and wary;--and over all these realms the Emperor spread his network of fine roads and canals, linking them with Changan: what the Romans did for Europe in road-building, he did for China.