SINIC AND HELLENIC UNIVERSAL STATES 677
This unfriendliness of the barbarians towards the Confucians seems
to have had two psychological roots. In the first place the barbarian
usurpers of Sinic imperial prerogatives were well aware that the ci-
devant imperial civil servants—whose interests, traditions, and principles
conspired to make them 'die-hard' legitimists—were bound to be un-
friendly to regimes whose pretensions they did not acknowledge; and
the barbarians' consequent lack of confidence in the Confucians* loyalty
made them anxious to dispense with these Confucians' services if they
could find effectively trained Buddhist or Taoist substitutes for them.1
In the second place the fascination which was exerted on the imagination
of these, as well as other, militarily triumphant barbarians by a culture
whose spiritual superiority was not effaced by its military defeat was
counteracted to some extent, in this case as in others of the kind, by the
victorious barbarian's usual desire2 to distinguish his lordly self from
his contemptibly servile subjects by wearing and airing the cultural
badges of an unorthodox religion and an heroic poetry; and, in the sphere
of religion, a Mahayana that was as alien an intruder on Sinic soil as the
barbarian war-lord himself seemed to offer this military conqueror the
distinctive religious emblem that he required.

Thus the Confucian ex-civil servants of an indigenous Sinic imperial
regime who were left stranded in the North by the ebb of the imperial
power after the fall of the Posterior Han, and a fortiori after the fall of
the United Tsin, were constrained to watch their once docile Northern
Sinic sheep straying out of a now dilapidated Confucian fold in search
of some alternative spiritual shelter against the steppe-wind's icy blast,
and at the same time to watch the once effectively barred-out barbarians
who had now invaded the sacrosanct Sinic imperial paddock looking
about them in Buddhist and Taoist quarters for new shepherds to
employ in rounding up the scattered flock. In lieu of a Confucian philo-
sophy which, like other philosophies, was a closed book to the un-
sophisticated and cold comfort to the afflicted,3 the common run of
Sinic provincials in the North under an oppressive barbarian tyranny
turned for comfort to a higher religion which offered a prospect of
release from the painfulness of life;4 and such members of a Sinic
internal proletariat as were not gathered into the bosom of the Mahayana
fell into the net of an indigenous Taoist Church which had managed in
the wilderness to survive a four-centuries-long Confucian ascendancy,
and whose prelates now shrewdly observed and slyly imitated the
methods of appeal by which the Mahayana was rapidly making its
fortune on Far Eastern ground.5 These two religious by-paths along
which a suffering Sinic rank-and-file sought ways of spiritual release
turned out also to be avenues to worldly advancement owing to the
barbarian usurpers* policy of seeking civil servants who would be literate
without being Confucian; and the ousted Confucian litterati thus had
the double mortification of seeing apostasy to an alien Mahayana and to

1 See the passage quoted, in VI. vii. 371, from Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, A Short Cul-
tvral History (Loadoa 1935, Cresset Press), p. 275.

2 See V. v. 229-34, et seqq. » See V. v. 557-68.
4 See Fitzgerald, op. tit., p. 259, quoted in VI. v£L 371-2.

s See V, v, 146-7, 178, n. i, and 557.