by Will Durant
“I have heard that in Khu there is a spirit-like tortoise-shell, the wearer of which died three thousand years ago, and which the king keeps, in his ancestral temple, in a hamper covered with a cloth. Was it better for the tortoise to die and leave its shell to be thus honored? Or would it have been better for it to live, and keep on dragging its tail after it over the mud?” The two officers said, “It would have been better for it to live, and draw its tail after it over the mud.” “Go your ways,” said Chuang; “I will keep on drawing my tail after me through the mud.”190
His respect for governments equaled that of his spiritual ancestor, Lao-tze. He took delight in pointing out how many qualities kings and governors shared with thieves.191 If, by some negligence on his part, a true philosopher should find himself in charge of a state, his proper course would be to do nothing, and allow men in freedom to build their own organs of self-government. “I have heard of letting the world be, and exercising forbearance; I have not heard of governing the world.”192 The Golden Age, which preceded the earliest kings, had no government; and Yao and Shun, instead of being so honored by China and Confucius, should be charged with having destroyed the primitive happiness of mankind by introducing government. “In the age of perfect virtue men lived in common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with all creatures, as forming one family: how could they know among themselves the distinctions of superior men and small men?”193
The wise man, thinks Chuang, will take to his heels at the first sign of government, and will live as far as possible from both philosophers and kings. He will court the peace and silence of the woods (here was a theme that a thousand Chinese painters would seek to illustrate), and let his whole being, without any impediment of artifice or thought, follow the divine Tao—the law and flow of Nature’s inexplicable life. He would be sparing of words, for words mislead as often as they guide, and the Tao—the Way and the Essence of Nature—can never be phrased in words or formed in thought; it can only be felt by the blood. He would reject the aid of machinery, preferring the older, more burdensome ways of simpler men; for machinery makes complexity, turbulence and inequality, and no man can live among machines and achieve peace.194 He would avoid the ownership of property, and would find no use in his life for gold; like Timon he would let the gold lie hidden in the hills, and the pearls remain unsought in the deep. “His distinction is in understanding that all things belong to the one treasury, and that death and life should be viewed in the same way”195—as harmonious measures in the rhythm of Nature, waves of one sea.
The center of Chuang’s thought, as of the thought of that half-legendary Lao-tze who seemed to him so much profounder than Confucius, was a mystic vision of an impersonal unity, so strangely akin to the doctrines of Buddha and the Upanishads that one is tempted to believe that Indian metaphysics had found its way into China long before the recorded coming of Buddhism four hundred years later. It is true that Chuang is an agnostic, a fatalist, a determinist and a pessimist; but this does not prevent him from being a kind of sceptical saint, a Tao-intoxicated man. He expresses his scepticism characteristically in a story:
The Penumbra said to the Umbra:* “At one moment you move, at another you are at rest. At one moment you sit down, at another you get up. Why this instability of purpose?” “I depend,” replied the Umbra, “upon something which causes me to do as I do; and that something depends upon something else which causes it to do as it does. . . . How can I tell why I do one thing or do not do another?” . . . When the body is decomposed, the mind will be decomposed along with it; must not the case be pronounced very deplorable? . . . The change—the rise and dissolution—of all things (continually) goes on, but we do not know who it is that maintains and continues the process. How do we know when any one begins? How do we know when he will end? We have simply to wait for it, and nothing more.196
These problems, Chuang suspects, are due less to the nature of things than to the limits of our thought; it is not to be wondered at that the effort of our imprisoned brains to understand the cosmos of which they are such minute particles should end in contradictions, “antinomies,” and befuddlement. This attempt to explain the whole in terms of the part has been a gigantic immodesty, forgivable only on the ground of the amusement which it has caused; for humor, like philosophy, is a view of the part in terms of the whole, and neither is possible without the other. The intellect, says Chuang-tze, can never avail to understand ultimate things, or any profound thing, such as the growth of a child. “Disputation is a proof of not seeing clearly,” and in order to understand the Tao, one “must sternly suppress one’s knowledge”;197 we have to forget our theories and feel the fact. Education is of no help towards such understanding; submersion in the flow of nature is all-important.
What is the Tao that the rare and favored mystic sees? It is inexpressible in words; weakly and with contradictions we describe it as the unity of all things, their quiet flow from origin to fulfilment, and the law that governs that flow. “Before there were heaven and earth, from of old it was, securely existing.”198 In that cosmic unity all contradictions are resolved, all distinctions fade, all opposites meet; within it and from its standpoint there is no good or bad, no white or black, no beautiful or ugly,* no great or small. “If one only knows that the universe is but (as small as) a tare seed, and the tip of a hair is as large as a mountain, then one may be said to have seen the relativity of things.”200 In that vague entirety no form is permanent, and none so unique that it cannot pass into another in the leisurely cycle of evolution.
The seeds (of things) are multitudinous and minute. On the surface of the water they form a membranous texture. When they reach to where the land and water join they become the (lichens that form the) clothes of frogs and oysters. Coming to life on mounds and heights, they become the plantain; and receiving manure, appear as crows’ feet. The roots of the crow’s foot become grubs, and its leaves, butterflies. This butterfly is changed into an insect, and comes to life under a furnace. Then it has the form of a moth. The mother after a thousand days becomes a bird. . . . The yinghsi uniting with a bamboo produces the khing-ning; this, the panther; the panther, the horse; and the horse the man. Man then enters into the great Machinery (of Evolution), from which all things come forth, and which they enter at death.201
It is not as clear as Darwin, but it will serve.
In this endless cycle man himself may pass into other forms; his present shape is transient, and from the viewpoint of eternity may be only superficially real—part of Maya’s deceptive veil of difference.
Once upon a time I, Chuang-tze, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming that I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am a man.202
Death is therefore only a change of form, possibly for the better; it is, as Ibsen was to say, the great Button-Moulder who fuses us again in the furnace of change:
Tze Lai fell ill and lay gasping at the point of death, while his wife and children stood around him weeping. Li went to ask for him, and said to them: “Hush! Get out of the way! Do not disturb him in his process of transformation.” . . . Then, leaning against the door, he spoke to (the dying man). Tze Lai said: “A man’s relations with the Yin and the Yang is more than that to his parents. If they are hastening my death, and I do not obey, I shall be considered unruly. There is the Great Mass (of Nature), that makes me carry this body, labor with this life, relax in old age, and rest in death. Therefore that which has taken care of my birth is that which will take care of my death. Here is a great founder casting his metal. If the metal, dancing up and down, should say, ‘I must be made into a Mo Yeh’ (a famous old sword), the great founder would surely consider this metal an evil one. So, if, merely because one has once assum
ed the human form, one insists on being a man, and a man only, the author of transformation will be sure to consider this one an evil being. Let us now regard heaven and earth as a great melting-pot, and the author of transformation as a great founder; and wherever we go, shall we not be at home? Quiet is our sleep, and calm is our awakening.”203
When Chuang himself was about to die his disciples prepared for him a ceremonious funeral. But he bade them desist. “With heaven and earth for my coffin and shell, with the sun, moon and stars as my burial regalia, and with all creation to escort me to the grave—are not my funeral paraphernalia ready to hand?” The disciples protested that, unburied, he would be eaten by the carrion birds of the air. To which Chuang answered, with the smiling irony of all his words: “Above ground I shall be food for kites; below I shall be food for mole-crickets and ants. Why rob one to feed the other?”204
If we have spoken at such length of the ancient philosophers of China it is partly because the insoluble problems of human life and destiny irresistibly attract the inquisitive mind, and partly because the lore of her philosophers is the most precious portion of China’s gift to the world. Long ago (in 1697) the cosmic-minded Leibnitz, after studying Chinese philosophy, appealed for the mingling and cross-fertilization of East and West. “The condition of affairs among ourselves,” he wrote, in terms which have been useful to every generation, “is such that in view of the inordinate lengths to which the corruption of morals has advanced, I almost think it necessary that Chinese missionaries should be sent to us to teach us the aim and practice of national theology. . . . For I believe that if a wise man were to be appointed judge . . . of the goodness of peoples, he would award the golden apple to the Chinese.”205 He begged Peter the Great to build a land route to China, and he promoted the foundation of societies in Moscow and Berlin for the “opening up of China and the interchange of civilizations between China and Europe.”206 In 1721 Christian Wolff made an attempt in this direction by lecturing at Halle “On the Practical Philosophy of the Chinese.” He was accused of atheism, and dismissed; but when Frederick mounted the throne he called him to Prussia, and restored him to honor.207
The Enlightenment took up Chinese philosophy at the same time that it carved out Chinese gardens and adorned its homes with chinoiseries. The Physiocrats seem to have been influenced by Lao-tze and Chuang-tze in their doctrine of laissez-faire;208 and Rousseau at times talked so like the Old Master* that we at once correlate him with Lao-tze and Chuang, as we should correlate Voltaire with Confucius and Mencius, if these had been blessed with wit. “I have read the books of Confucius with attention,” said Voltaire; “I have made extracts from them; I have found in them nothing but the purest morality, without the slightest tinge of charlatanism.”210 Goethe in 1770 recorded his resolution to read the philosophical classics of China; and when the guns of half the world resounded at Leipzig forty-three years later, the old sage paid no attention to them, being absorbed in Chinese literature.211
May this brief and superficial introduction lead the reader on to study the Chinese philosophers themselves, as Goethe studied them, and Voltaire, and Tolstoi.
CHAPTER XXIV
The Age of the Poets
I. CHINA’S BISMARCK
The Period of Contending States—The suicide of Ch’u P’ing—Shih Huang-ti unifies China—The Great Wall—The “Burning of the Books”—The failure of Shih Huang-ti
PRESUMABLY Confucius died an unhappy man, for philosophers love unity, and the nation that he had sought to unite under some powerful dynasty persisted in chaos, corruption and division. When the great unifier finally appeared, and succeeded, by his military and administrative genius, in welding the states of China into one, he ordered that all existing copies of Confucius’ books should be burned.
We may judge the atmosphere of this “Period of the Contending States” from the story of Ch’u P’ing. Having risen to promise as a poet and to high place as an official, he found himself suddenly dismissed. He retired to the countryside, and contemplated life and death beside a quiet brook. Tell me, he asked an oracle,
whether I should steadily pursue the path of truth and loyalty, or follow in the wake of a corrupt generation. Should I work in the fields with spade and hoe, or seek advancement in the retinue of a grandee? Should I court danger with outspoken words, or fawn in false tones upon the rich and great? Should I rest content in the cultivation of virtue, or practise the art of wheedling women in order to secure success? Should I be pure and clean-handed in my rectitude, or an oil-mouthed, slippery, time-serving sycophant?1
He dodged the dilemma by drowning himself (ca. 350 B.C.); and until our own day the Chinese people celebrated his fame annually in the Dragonboat Festival, during which they searched for his body in every stream.
The man who unified China had the most disreputable origin that the Chinese historians could devise. Shih Huang-ti,’ we are informed, was the illegitimate son of the Queen of Ch’in (one of the western states) by the noble minister Lü, who was wont to hang a thousand pieces of gold at his gate as a reward to any man who should better his compositions by so much as a single word.2 (His son did not inherit these literary tastes.) Shih, reports Szuma Ch’ien, forced his father to suicide, persecuted his mother, and ascended the ducal throne when he was twelve years of age. When he was twenty-five he began to conquer and annex the petty states into which China had so long been divided. In 230 B.C. he conquered Han; in 228, Chao; in 225, Wei; in 223, Ch’u; in 222, Yen; finally, in 221, the important state of Ch’i. For the first time in many centuries, perhaps for the first time in history, China was under one rule. The conqueror took the title of Shih Huang-ti, and turned to the task of giving the new empire a lasting constitution.
“A man with a very prominent nose, with large eyes, with the chest of a bird of prey, with the voice of a jackal, without beneficence, and with the heart of a tiger or a wolf”—this is the only description that the Chinese historians have left us of their favorite enemy.3 He was a robust and obstinate soul, recognizing no god but himself, and pledged, like some Nietzschean Bismarck, to unify his country by blood and iron. Having forged and mounted the throne of China, one of his first acts was to protect the country from the barbarians on the north by piecing together and completing the walls already existing along the frontier; and he found the multitude of his domestic opponents a convenient source of recruits for this heroic symbol of Chinese grandeur and patience. The Great Wall, 1500 miles long, and adorned at intervals with massive gateways in the Assyrian style, is the largest structure ever reared by man; beside it, said Voltaire, “the pyramids of Egypt are only puerile and useless masses.”4 It took ten years and countless men; “it was the ruin of one generation,” say the Chinese, “and the salvation of many.” It did not quite keep out the barbarians, as we shall see; but it delayed and reduced their attacks. The Huns, barred for a time from Chinese soil, moved west into Europe and down into Italy; Rome fell because China built a wall.
Meanwhile Shih Huang-ti, like Napoleon, turned with pleasure from war to administration, and created the outlines of the future Chinese state. He accepted the advice of his Legalist prime minister, Li Ssü, and resolved to base Chinese society not, as heretofore, upon custom and local autonomy, but upon explicit law and a powerful central government. He broke the power of the feudal barons, replaced them with a nobility of functionaries appointed by the national ministry, placed in each district a military force independent of the civil governor, introduced uniform laws and regulations, simplified official ceremonies, issued a state coinage, divided most of the feudal estates, prepared for the prosperity of China by establishing peasant proprietorship of the soil, and paved the way for a completer unity by building great highways in every direction from his capital at Hien-yang. He embellished this city with many palaces, and persuaded the 120,000 richest and most powerful families of the empire to live under his observant eye. Traveling in disguise and unarmed, he made note of abuses and disorders, and then issue
d unmistakable orders for their correction. He encouraged science and discouraged letters.5
For the men of letters—the poets, the critics, the philosophers, above all the Confucian scholars—were his sworn foes. They fretted under his dictatorial authority, and saw in the establishment of one supreme government an end to that variety and liberty of thought and life which had made literature flourish amid the wars and divisions of the Chou Dynasty. When they protested to Shih Huang-ti against his ignoring of ancient ceremonies, he sent them curtly about their business.6 A commission of mandarins, or official scholars, brought to him their unanimous suggestion that he should restore the feudal system by giving fiefs to his relatives; and they added: “For a person, in any matter, not to model himself on antiquity, and yet to achieve duration—that, to our knowledge, has never happened.”7 The prime minister, Li Ssü, who was at that time engaged in reforming the Chinese script, and establishing it approximately in the form which it retained till our own time, met these criticisms with an historic speech that did no service to Chinese letters:
The Five Sovereigns did not repeat each other’s actions, the Three Royal Dynasties did not imitate each other; . . . for the times had changed. Now your Majesty has for the first time accomplished a great work and has founded a glory which will last for ten thousand generations. The stupid mandarins are incapable of understanding this. . . . In ancient days China was divided up and troubled; there was no one who could unify her. That is why all the nobles flourished. In their discourses the mandarins all talk of the ancient days, in order to blacken the present. . . . They encourage the people to forge calumnies. This being so, if they are not opposed, among the upper classes the position of the sovereign will be depreciated, while among the lower classes associations will flourish. . . .
