Leaves from My Chinese Scrapbook

Frederic Henry Balfour

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136380006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2000. This is Volume I of five of a series on China, written in 1887 this is a collection of notes and observations from the author's time in China and includes topics such as the First Emperor, the Fifth Prince, Taoist Hermits and the Seven Wonders of Corea

Chapter X.

A Philosopher Who Never Lived.

“Do you know,” said a nephew of the Marquis Tsêng to a friend of ours a few years ago, “that we have a book in China that bears a very close resemblance to your Bible ?”

“I did not know it,” replied our friend; “pray, which may it be ?”

“It is called the Works of Lieh-tzŭ” answered the young Chinese.

Now, such a statement as this was quite sufficient to make us turn our attention to the volumes indicated with something more than usual anticipation ; and if we find ourselves unable to endorse the description, we have nevertheless discovered much in the book to interest us, and much that deserves recording. Lieh-tzŭ is said to have flourished circâ 400 B.C., and to have been one of the earliest and most illustrious disciples of Lao-tzŭ, the reputed founder of the Taoist philosophy. His book is a congeries of interpolations and additions of a considerably later date ; still, it has been honoured with special attention by more than one Emperor, and His Majesty Hsüan Tsung, of the T‘ang dynasty (713–756), raised it to the dignity of a classic by the title of Ch‘ung Hsü Ghing, or Sutra of Fulness and Emptiness. About the philosopher himself, however, scarcely anything is known : so little, indeed, as to lead the vanguard of modern sinologists to doubt, and even to deny, that such a person ever existed in the flesh. He is, in fact, now generally regarded as a sort of Isaac Bickerstaffe—the literary creation of a sect or school, and so far holding a certain position in the Valhalla of Chinese letters, but not entitled to the honours due to a great historic character about whose personality there is no question. Such scruples are a marked feature of modern criticism ; and not only has a blow been recently struck at the authorship and personality of Lao-tzŭ himself, but the destructive process is sanctioned and encouraged by no less eminent an authority than the Quarterly Review. “A book,” says the writer of an article on the ‘Sacred Books of the East’, “to a modern mind suggests an author. It was not so then”—in the days of old. “No one of them can be properly said to have had an author. And by this much more is meant than the mere suggestion that the books were at first anonymous, or that the names of their authors have not been handed down to us. In those early times a book was seldom or never composed originally in the shape in which it has come down to us. It was not made : it grew. Sayings, passages, legends, verses, were handed down in a school or were current among a body of disciples. These were gradually, and only gradually, blended together. They were added to ; their connection or sequence was altered ; they were collected by different hands and at different times into compilations of different tendencies. Finally one or other of these compilations became so much the favourite that—all being handed down by memory alone, liable to ‘ have their root cut off and find no place of refuge’ if they were not popular—it alone survived. It is the old story of the struggle for life, and of the survival of the fittest—that is, of the fittest under certain circumstances, the fittest for the needs of the school in which it existed, the fittest for its peculiar environment; not, of course, the fittest absolutely, nor the fittest for the purposes of modern historical research. The books lived, or rather were kept alive, not for the sake of the author, but for the sake of their contents. Hence it is that, though certain of the wise sayings or verses it contains may have authors assigned to them, no really ancient book claims to have an author—a human author. It is only later that the tendency is felt to satisfy the natural craving for a cause by assigning books to individual hands.” Candour compels us to admit that these remarks apply with singular aptitude to the book which bears the name of Lieh-tzŭ. It presents all the features of a compilation, and a compilation made by different hands; it contains passage after passage, copied in some instances verbatim, in other instances with less exactitude, from at least two classical works of the Taoist school universally recognised as authentic ; while nothing, or next to nothing, is known of the man to whom it is attributed, beyond references to him in the third person in the very book of which he is the alleged author. We consider, therefore, that we are justified in speaking of him as a philosopher who never lived, and in regarding the Lieh-tzŭ of the Ch‘ung Hsü Giving as no more than a supposititious personage, projected from the minds of a Taoist literary clique.

But the book remains. That is a visible fact, and with it we now propose to deal. The criticism which finds in it a resemblance to the Christian Bible may be rejected at the outset as valueless, for the religious element in the work is extremely tenuous. Our readers, however, shall judge for themselves. The first chapter contains speculations respecting the nature and attributes of God, and the processes of Creation, which, as far as they go, are striking enough, and illustrative of that singular independence and originality of thought which forms so honourable a characteristic of the Taoist school. Here, for instance, is a piece of transcendentalism which occurs on the second page of the book. It would have shocked Confucius.

The Origin of Life and Motion.

There is a Life that is uncreated ;

There is a Transformer who is changeless.

The Uncreated alone can produce life ;

The Changeless alone can evolve change.

That Life cannot but produce ;

That Transformer cannot but transform.

Wherefore creations and transformations are perpetual,

And these perpetual creations and transformations continue through all time.

They are seen in the Yin and Yang :

They are displayed in the Four Seasons.

The Uncreated stands, as it were, alone ;

The Changeless comes and goes ;

His duration can have no end,

Peerless and One—His ways are past finding out.¹

The philosopher, taking as his text a very obscure passage in the Tao Tê Ching—though he quotes the Book of the Yellow Emperor as his authority—then proceeds to show how it is that the Creator is uncreated and the Transformer changeless ; averring that the Supreme Power is self-produced, self-transformed, self-shaped, self-manifested, self-intelligent, self-powerful, self-exhausting, self-reposing ;—though, he adds, to speak of these phenomena as actualities, in the common acceptation of the term, is inaccurate. Then he proceeds to describe the evolution of the visible universe :—

The Four Stages.

Now, seeing that that which has form was produced from formlessness, from what can the Universe have sprung ? Thus it is that it is said there was first the period of the Great Calm, then of the Great Inception, then of the Great Beginning, and lastly of the Great Concretion. At the time of the Great Calm the primordial aura was yet invisible. The Great Inception was when the primordial aura first began to exist ; the Great Beginning was when form first came into being ; the Great Concretion was when simple matter first appeared. Then aura, form, and matter were in readiness, but had not yet been separated from one another ; and for that reason the condition of things was called Chaos. Chaos means the indiscriminate mingling of everything together before their distribution.

“Invisible, though looked for ; inaudible, though listened for ; intangible, though clutched at”—therefore was the primor-dium called the period of Calm, or Stillness ; and there is no form to which that Calm was like.

Then the condition of Calm changed, and it became One—sc., the primordial ether came into being. This One changed again, and became Seven; Seven changed, and became Nine; and the changes of the Nine were final. Then a reflex change took place back to the One ; and the One was the commencement of that change which resulted in the production of forms. The pure and light ascended, and became Heaven ; the turbid and heavy descended, and became Earth ; and the harmonious auræ, in combination, produced Man. Heaven and Earth containing in themselves the germinal essence of all things, the visible creation was evolved and came into existence.

The manner in which the various powers of nature supplement and assist each other is then shown with much perspicacity:—

The energy of Heaven and Earth is not sufficient [of itself] ; nor is the ability of the Sage, nor the usefulness of created things. For instance, the function of Heaven is to produce and to overshadow ; the function of Earth, to shapen and to support ; the function of the Sage, to instruct and to reform ; and the function of things, to fulfil the purposes. for which they were created. This being so, there are directions in which Heaven is deficient, but in which Earth excels ; in which the Sage encounters obstruction, but in which things in general have free course. For it is clear that that which produces and overshadows cannot impart shape and support ; that which shapens and supports cannot instruct and reform ; and he who instructs and reforms cannot act in opposition to the natural purposes of things, which, being once fixed, can never depart from their proper stations in the universal economy. Therefore, the principle of Heaven and Earth, if not Yin, is Yang; the doctrine of the Sage, if not benevolent, is just ; the natural property of a thing, if not soft, is hard ;— all these follow their inherent properties, and never leave the stations to which they belong. Thus, given Life, there are living creatures which produce other living creatures ; given Form, there are forms which impart form to others; given Sound [in the abstract], we have tones which present sounds [in the concrete] ; given Colour, we have that which manifests chromatic phenomena ; given Flavour, we have that by which we are enabled to perceive tastes. The actual beings produced from what has life themselves die ; but the succession of births—the production of living things from living things —is endless. The forms imparted by that which has form are real enough ; but that which imparted form in the first instance has no existence. The tones produced by sound [in the abstract] are audible ; but the tone-producing sound has never gone forth. The hues manifested by colour are varied ; but that which imparts those hues—colour in the abstract—has never been seen. The sensation produced by flavour is experienced by gustation ; but the taste-producing flavour has not been discovered. All these phenomena are functions of the principle of Inaction. The ability to be inherent in the Yin and Yang, softness and hardness, shortness and length, circularity and squareness, life and death, heat and cold, floating and sinking, do and re, production and annihilation, blue and yellow, sweet and bitter, stench and fragrance, appears divorced from both consciousness and power ; but really there is nothing beyond either the consciousness or the power [of this principle of Inaction].

Our philosopher has now fairly plunged into a swamp of metaphysical speculation, and soon gets beyond his depth. We will follow him a little farther in his researches, and then proceed to the stories and parables— some comic, some very beautiful, but all quaint and interesting—with which this book abounds.

In the Book of the Yellow Emperor it is written :—“ When a form moves, it does not produce another form, but a shadow; when a sound is emitted, it does not produce another sound, but an echo. Immobility does not produce nothing ; it produces a something. Forms must come to an end ; the Cosmos is finite in point of time, just as I am myself; but where the end leads to nobody knows. … It is the destiny of the living to be finite ; the finite cannot but come to an end, just as that which is born cannot but give birth in its turn ; so that the desire to prolong life, and to do away with one’s end, is a misunderstanding of one’s destiny.”

The moral of all which is contentment with one’s lot in life, and this forms the subject of the first story that we shall present to our readers. But first let us hear what Lieh-tzŭ and the Yellow Emperor have to say about death, as the illustrations which are given of their theory a little farther on are of incomparable beauty.

The spiritual or essential part of man’s nature pertains to Heaven; his bony framework to the Earth. That which belongs to Heaven is pure and tenuous ; that which belongs to the Earth is turbid and dense ; and when the spiritual part of a man leaves the form in which it has resided, each reverts to where it first came from. Wherefore the disembodied spirit is called a kuei [or ghost], which is something that “reverts” [kuei] ; for it reverts to its original dwelling-place.

The Yellow Emperor said, “The spiritual part enters the gate [it emerged from], the body returns to that from which it sprang; and then what becomes of Me? Between the birth of a man and his death there are four great transformations : from infancy to childhood, from youth to prime, from age to decrepitude, and from the last agonies to annihilation… . On reaching this last stage the man finds himself at rest, and thus returns to the point from which he started.”

It is this idea of death as rest, as a cessation of all worry, fatigue, and strife, that is so touchingly brought out in the stories we are about to give. First, however, there is a charming little anecdote illustrative of a lesson previously given by our philosopher that we must not overlook. We will call it

The Secret of Contentment.

As Confucius was on a journey to the Great Mountain, he fell in with a man named Jung Ch‘i-ch‘i, walking in a country place at Ch‘êng. He was dressed in deerskin, with a girdle of cord ; and he was playing a lute and singing.

“May I ask what makes you so happy, sir ?” said Confucius.

“There are many things that make me happy,” replied the other. “Of all created beings, human beings are the noblest ; it has fallen to my lot to be a human being, and that is one source of happiness. The difference between the male and the female consists in the former being honourable and the latter base ; it has fallen to my lot to be born a male, and that is another source of happiness. Among the crowd of people who come into the world there are some who see neither months nor days—who never live to get free from their swaddling-bands ; I have already lived ninety years, and that is my third source of happiness. Poverty is the common lot of scholars, and death is the end of us all. What cause for sorrow is there, then, in quietly fulfilling one’s destiny and awaiting the close of life?”

“Excellent !” exclaimed Confucius. “By this means can a man find tranquillity and sereneness in himself.”

Here death is regarded simply in the light of the inevitable. In the following stories it is represented in a far more beautiful and attractive guise :—

The Blessedness of Death.

Lin-lei, who had reached the age of a hundred years, and still wore fur clothes at the end of spring, went a-gleaning in the harvest-fields, singing as he walked. Confucius, journeying to the State of Wei, saw him in the field as he passed by, and, turning to his disciples, said—

“That old gentleman is worth speaking to. Go up to him, one of you, and test him with a few questions.”

Tzŭ Kung offered to go, and, coming opposite to the old man just in front of a ridge of earth, “Sir,” says he, with a sigh, “do you not repine at your lot, that you are singing as you glean ?” But Lin-lei continued his course, singing as before ; so Tzŭ Kung repeated his question again and again, until Lin-lei raised his eyes and answered him.

“What have I to repine at ?” he said.

“Why, Sir,” replied Tzŭ Kung, “not diligent in youth, neglectful of opportunities in middle life, wifeless and childless in your old age, and the time of death rapidly approaching, what possible happiness can be yours, that you are singing as you glean ?”

“The sources of happiness that I possess,” rejoined Lin-lei, smiling, “are equally possessed by all ; the only difference is, that others turn them into sources of sorrow. It is just because I was not diligent in my youth, and did not seize on opportunities during the prime of life, that I have been able to reach my present age ; it is because I am wifeless and childless in my old age, and because the time of my dissolution is drawing nigh, that I am as joyful as you see me.”

“Old age,” remarked Tzŭ Kung, “is what all men desire; but death is what all men dread. How comes it, Sir, that you find joy in the thought of death ?”

“Death,” said the old man, “is to life, as going away is to coming. How can we know that to die here is not to be born elsewhere ? I kn...