by Will Durant
* To the end of his life he accepted the divinity of Christ, but insisted that Buddha, Krishna and others were also incarnations of the one God. He himself, he assured Vivekananda, was a reincarnation of Rama and Krishna.17a
* The more important volumes are Gitanjali (1913), Chitra (1914), The Post-Office (1914), The Gardener (1914), Fruit-Gathering (1916), and Red Oleanders (1925). The poet’s own My Reminiscences (1917) is a better guide to understanding him than E. Thompson’s R. Tagore, Poet and Dramatist (Oxford, 1926).
† Cf. his magnificent line: “When I go from hence let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable.”27
* In 1922 there were eighty-three cotton factories in Bombay, with 180,000 employees, and an average wage-scale of thirty-three cents a day. Of 33,000,000 Indians engaged in industry, 51% are women, 14% are children under fourteen.35
* “People who abstain entirely from animal food acquire such an acute sense of smell that they can perceive in a moment, from a person’s breath, or from the exudation of the skin, whether that person has eaten meat or not; and that after a lapse of twenty-four hours.”39
† In 1913 the child of a rich Hindu of Kohat fell into a fountain and was drowned. No one was at hand but its mother and a passing Outcaste. The latter offered to plunge into the water and rescue the child, but the mother refused; she preferred the death of her child to the defilement of the fountain.41
‡ In the year 1915 there were 15 remarriages of widows;, in 1925 there were 2,263.44
* This does not apply to all. Some, in the significant phrase of Coomaraswamy, have “returned from Europe to India.”
* The deposed Mandarins at Tsing-tao.
* The Chinese scholar who helped Dr. Giles to translate some of the extracts in Gems of Chinese Literature, sent him, as a well-meant farewell, a poem in which occurred these gracious lines:
From of old, literature has illumined the nation of nations;
And now its influence has gone forth to regenerate a barbarian official.6
* The Yang-tze near Shanghai is three miles wide.
† Cf. p. 92 above.
* This is Confucius’ gloomy way of indicating that but for Kuan the Chinese people would still be barbarians; for the barbarians habitually buttoned their coats on the left side.21
* Professor Giles considers it a forgery composed after 200 B.C. by free pilfering from the works of the essayist and critic, Han Fei;38 Dr. Legge holds that the frequent references to Lao (as “Lao Tan”) in Chuang-tze and in Szuma Ch’ien warrant continued belief in the authenticity of the Tao-Te-Ching.39
* A form of communication that preceded writing. The word make is rather un-Laotzian.
* He adds, with reckless gallantry: “The female always overcomes the male by her stillness.”46
† The Chinese think of the sage as reaching the maturity of his powers about the age of fifty, and living, through quietude and wisdom, to a century.48
* The story is told by the greatest of Chinese historians, Szuma Ch’ien,51 but it may be fiction. We are shocked to find Lao-tze in the busiest city of China in his eighty-seventh year.
* Quoted on p. 668 below.
* Cf. Spinoza: “We are tossed about by external causes in many ways, and like waves driven by contrary winds, we waver and are unconscious of the issue and our fate.”119
† Cf. one of Kant’s formulations of the “Categorical Imperative” of morals: “So to will that the maxim of thy conduct can become a universal law.”121
* “Let me write the songs of a nation,” said Daniel O’Connell, “and I care not who makes its laws.”
* For Shun and Yü cf. page 644 above; for Chieh and Chou (Hsin) cf. pp. 644-5.
* Cf. p. 731 below.
* I.e., the good in man is not born but made—by institutions and education.
* In an eclipse the penumbra is the partly illuminated space between the umbra (the complete shadow) and the light. Perhaps, in Chuang’s allegory, the complete shadow is the body, interrogated by the partly illuminated mind.
* “Hsi Shih was a beautiful woman; but when her features were reflected in the water the fish were frightened away.”199
* E.g.: “Luxury, dissoluteness and slavery have always been the chastisement of the ambitious efforts we have made to emerge from the happy ignorance in which Eternal Wisdom had placed us.” Professor (now Senator) Elbert Thomas, who quotes this passage from the Discourse on the Progress of the Sciences and Arts, considers “Eternal Wisdom” an excellent translation of Lao-tze’s “Eternal Tao.”209
* All dates before 551 B.C. are approximate; all before 1800 A.D. are uncertain.
*Cf. p. 665 below.
* “The situation,” says Granet, “. . . was revolutionary. If the Emperor Wu had had some kindred spirit, he might have been able to profit by this and create, in a new order of society, the Chinese State. . . . But the Emperor only saw the most urgent needs. He seems only to have thought of using varied expedients from day to day—rejected when they had yielded sufficient to appear worn out—and new men—sacrificed as soon as they had succeeded well enough to assume a dangerous air of authority. The restlessness of the despot and the short vision of the imperial law-makers made China miss the rarest opportunity she had had to become a compact and organized state.”19
* The “Western Han” Dynasty, 206 B.C.—24 A.D., had its capital at Lo-yang, now Honan-fu; the “Eastern Han” Dynasty, 24-221 A.D., had its capital at Ch’ang-an, now Sian-fu. The Chinese still call themselves the “Sons of Han.”
* Unless there is truth in the rumor circulated on the death of the boy emperor, in the year 5 A.D., that Wang Mang’s family had poisoned him.24
* Cf. Sir W. Flinders Petrie, The Revolutions of Civilization. London, n.d.
* The assumed name of a French physician who in the fourteenth century composed a volume of travels, mostly imaginary, occasionally illuminating, always fascinating.
† Arthur Waley.37 Cf. the Encyclopedia Britannica (14th ed., xviii, 361): “In the T’ang Dynasty. China was without doubt the greatest and most civilized power in the world.”
* “When the Tatars overthrew Ming Huang and sacked Chang-an,” says Arthur Waley, “it was as if Turks had ravaged Versailles in the time of Louis XIV.”38
* It is a pretty tale, perhaps composed by Li Po.
* A precious wood.
† Cf. p. 694 above.
* From the Chinese K’o T’ou—to knock the head on the ground in homage.
* The most famous of China’s many renditions of the infatuation of Ming Huang with Yang Kwei-fei, her death in revolution, and Ming’s misery in restoration. The poem is not quite everlasting, but too long for quotation here.
* A famous Chinese painting pictures “The Poet Tu Fu in the Thatched Cottage.” It may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
* It has been well translated by Mrs. Pearl Buck under the title, All Men Are Brothers, New York, 1933.
† Translated by C. H. Brewitt-Taylor, 2 vols., Shanghai, 1925.
* On the function of the Censors cf. p. 798 below. Not one of them, Han Yü implies, had protested against the plans of the Emperor Te Tsung to give his approval to Buddhism.
* The passage is quoted in full on page 668 above.
* The Rhus vernicifera. Lacquer is from the French lacre, resin, which in turn derives from the Latin lac, milk.
* Cf. p. 897 below.
† Patina (Latin for dish) is formed by the disintegration of the metal surface through contact with moisture or earth. It is the fashion today to value bronzes partly according to the green or black patina left on them by time—or by the acids used in the modern production of “ancient” art.
* There are some examples of this style in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
* Their origin, in name and fact, is in much dispute. The word may be taken from the Hindu-Persian term but-kadah—“house of idols”; the form may be indigenous to China, as some think,54 or may be derived from the spire that crowne
d some Hindu topes.55
* Though writing is in its origin a form of drawing or painting, the Chinese classify painting as a form of writing, and consider calligraphy, or beautiful writing, as a major art. Specimens of fine writing are hung on the walls in Chinese and Japanese homes; and devotees of the art have pursued its masterpieces as modern collectors roam over continents to find a picture or a vase. The most famous of Chinese calligraphers was Wang Hsi-chih (ca. 400 A.D.); it was on the Chinese characters as formed by his graceful hand that the characters were cut when block-printing began. The great T’ang emperor, T’ai Tsung, resorted to theft to get from Pien-tsai a scroll written by Wang Hsi-chih. Thereupon Pien-tsai, we are told, lost appetite and died.62
* The British Museum assigns to him a faded but lovely scroll of five pictures illustrating model family life;70 the Temple of Confucius at Chü-fu contains a stone engraving purporting to follow a design of Ku; and the Freer Gallery at Washington contains two excellent copies of compositions attributed to him.71
* Cf. p. 798 below.
* Only copies remain: chiefly a “Waterfall” in the Temple of Chisakuin at Kyoto,79 and a roll (in both the British Museum and the Freer Gallery) entitled “Scenery of the Wang Ch’uan.”80
† Cf. Croce’s view that art lies in the conception rather than in the execution.84
* The Freer Gallery at Washington has a “Landscape on the Hoang-ho” uncertainly attributed to Kuo Hsi.92
* A landscape attributed to Mi Fei may be seen in Room E 11 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
† Particularly striking is “The Lady Ling-chao Standing in the Snow.” The Lady (a Buddhist mystic of the eighth century) is quite still in meditation, like Socrates in the snow at Platæa. The world (the artist seems to say) is nothing except to a mind; and that mind can ignore it—for a while.
* Landscape painting was called simply shan-sui—i.e., mountains and water.
* When porcelain was introduced into Europe it was named after the porcellana, or cowrie shell, which in turn derived its name from its supposed resemblance to the rounded back of a porcella, or little hog.102
† The Egyptians had glazed pottery unknown centuries before Christ. The decorations on the earliest glazed pottery of China indicate that China had learned the glazing process from the Near East.104
* A term applied to them by the French of the seventeenth century from the name of the hero of d’Urfé’s novel l’Astrée, who, in the dramatization of the story, was always dressed in green.108
† From the Occidental point of view the one is as hard as the other; for the Japanese, who have gathered in most of China’s famous céladon, refuse to sell it at any price; and no later potter has been able to rival the perfection of Sung artistry in this field.
* The name given by the Chinese to an ivory-colored species of Sung porcelain.
* Excellent specimens of the last two groups may be seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
* An English form of the Russian name for China—Kitai, originally the name of a Mongolian tribe.
* “Shangtu” is Coleridge’s “Xanadu.” The central Asian regions described by Polo were not explored again by Europeans (with one forgotten exception) until 1838.
* “Not a day passes,” writes Marco Polo, “in which there are not distributed, by the regular officers, twenty thousand vessels of rice, millet, and panicum. By reason of this admirable and astonishing liberality which the Great Khan exercises towards the poor, the people all adore him.”8
* Kublai Khan had proved his conversion to civilization by developing gout.12
* She obeyed, and story has it that many concubines followed her example.14
* “Occupied without rest in the diverse cares of a government which men admire, the greatest monarch in the world is also the most lettered man in his empire.”
* The following description of Chinese society will apply chiefly to the nineteenth century; the changes brought on by contact with the West will be studied later. Every description must be taken with reserve, since a civilization is never quite the same over a long period of time or an extensive area of space.
* The denuded slopes and hills, unable to hold the rain-water that fell upon them, lost their top-soil, became arid, and offered no obstacle to the flooding of the valleys by the heavy rains.
* The spinning of silk out of the cocoons of wild silkworms was known to the ancient classical world; but the breeding of the worms and the gathering and weaving of the silk as an industry were introduced into Europe from China by Nestorian monks about 552 A.D.46 The art was brought from Constantinople to Sicily in the twelfth century, and to England in the fifteenth.
* It was not unusual for a Chinese host, when entertaining guests, to pass delicate fabrics around among them,48 as another might exhibit porcelain or unravel his favorite paintings or calligraphic scrolls.
* A word of Hindu origin, probably from the Tamil kuli, hired servant.
* Copper is still the dominant currency, in the form of the “cash”—worth a third or a half of a cent—and the “tael,” which is worth a thousand “cash.”
* His machine consisted of eight copper dragons placed on delicate springs around a bowl in whose center squatted a toad with open mouth. Each dragon held a copper ball in its mouth. When an earthquake occurred, the dragon nearest its source dropped its ball into the mouth of the toad. Once a dragon released its ball, though no shock had been felt by the inhabitants. Chang Heng was ridiculed as a charlatan, until a messenger arrived who told of an earthquake in a distant province.69
† Feng shut (wind and water) was the art, very widespread in China, of adapting the location of homes and graves to the currents of wind and water in the locality.
* Christianity lost its opportunity early in the eighteenth century, when a quarrel arose between the Jesuits and other Roman Catholic orders in China. The Jesuits had, with characteristic statesmanship, found formulas by which the essential elements of Chinese piety—ancestor worship and the adoration of heaven—could be brought under Christian forms without disrupting deep-rooted institutions or endangering the moral stability of China; but the Dominicans and Franciscans demanded a stricter interpretation, and denounced all Chinese theology and ritual as inventions of the devil. The enlightened Emperor K’ang-hsi was highly sympathetic to Christianity; he entrusted his children to Jesuit tutors, and offered on certain conditions to become a Christian. When the Church officially adopted the rigid attitude of the Dominicans and the Franciscans, K’ang-hsi withdrew his support of Christianity, and his successors decided to oppose it actively.91 In later days the greedy imperialism of the West weakened the persuasiveness of Christian preaching, and precipitated the passionate anti-Christianism of the revolutionary Chinese.
* Men sometimes prepared themselves openly for a night in a brothel by pictures, aphrodisiacs and songs.100 It should be added that this lenience towards marital deviations is disappearing today.
* Chinese legend illustrates this with characteristic humor by the story of Hakuga, who was whipped daily by his mother, but never cried. One day, however, he cried as he was being beaten; and being asked the cause of this unusual disturbance he answered that he wept because his mother, now old and weak, was unable to hurt him with her blows.122
* In many cities hucksters stood at the roadside with saucer, dice and cup in hand, ready for the casual gambler.123
* Hence his realm was sometimes called Tien-Chan, the “heaven-ruled.” Europeans translated this into the “Celestial Kingdom,” and spoke of the Chinese learnedly as “Celestials.”133
* The imperial revenue towards the close of the last century averaged $75,000,000 a year; the revenues collected for local purposes amounted to an additional $i75,000,000.ia6 If these national receipts, essential to the maintenance of order, are compared with the $150,000,000 exacted of China by Japan in 1894, and the $300,000,000 indemnity asked by the Allies after the Boxer Rebellion, the collapse of China becomes a mere matter of bookkeeping.
