The historical development of religion in China

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THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
OF RELIGION IN CHINA

THE HISTORICAL
DEVELOPMENT OF
RELIGION IN CHINA

BY

W. J? CLENNELL

H.M. CONSULAR SERVICE

T. FISHER UNWIN LTD.
LONDON: ADELPHI TERRACE

First published in iqi"]

{All riiihis reserved)

PREFACE

The reflections on the Religion and History of
China contained in the following pages give
the substance, somewhat expanded and re-
vised, of an address delivered on the 8th and
9th of December, 19 13, to the students of
the Caermarthen Presbyterian College. In
submitting them now to the indulgence of
a wider public the author possibly owes a
few words of explanation to his readers, who
may, perhaps, in the light of later happenings,
find some of the judgments over confident. A
year ago China seemed to be in the melting-
) pot ; to-day it is our Western European world
1^ whose faiths, institutions, and traditions are
upon their trial. Yet perhaps the only ex-
planation needed is simply to say that these
i pages were written before the War.

5^

Nevvchwang,

November 19 14.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND PRIMITIVE

CONCEPTIONS . , . .II

II. ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM . . .42

III. TAOISM . . . . . -63

IV. CHINA AND BUDDHISM . . -91
V. THE MINGLING AND DECAY OF FAITH . -US

VI. THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE . . . T29

VII. STAGNATION AND FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN
SOCIETY — THE MONGOL CONQUEST — CONTACT
OF EAST AND WEST . . . • ^55

VIII. NATIONALIST REACTION — LAMAISM . -175

IX. CHINA AND THE CHURCH OF ROME . . 193

X. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY — THE CONTACT OF

CHINA AND MODERN IDEALS . . 207

XI. THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION . . 233

INDEX . . . . . 255

I

GENERAL
CHARACTERISTICS
AND PRIMITIVE
CONCEPTIONS

CHAPTER I

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS AND
PRIMITIVE CONCEPTIONS

The subject of the relation between Religion
and History in China is one so vast that it
would require a long work in many volumes
for its adequate development. The following
pages can only profess to be a rough sketch,
in which indulgence is asked for whatever
in the treatment is disjointed and incomplete.
There are, of course, many books on
Chinese religion. There is a monumental
work by Professor de Groot, '' The Religious
System of China " — not yet finished — in which
he attempts to treat the subject systemati-
cally, with the support of quotations from
native authors, ancient and modern, tracing
the origin and history through the ages of
the various ideas and practices, philosophies
and superstitions met with in China, with

their relation to law and custom, and so forth :

11

12 RELIGION IN CHINA

all illustrated with diagrams and tables,
pictures and photographs, gathered during
many years' residence in the country. Six
big volumes of the intended work have
appeared, and at least as much more would
be required if it should ever be completed
on the same scale. Yet Professor de Groot
confines himself, as far as really detailed
treatment is concerned, to one little corner
of China, namely, the city and neighbour-
hood of Amoy, dealing only in a broad,
general way with the phenomena to be found
in other parts.

Many works, I need not say, deal with
special features of Chinese religion : e.g.
the doctrines of Confucius and his disciples ;
certain classical texts of Taoism ; Buddhism
in the phases which are found in China. The
history of the country, as far as English books
are concerned, has been less adequately
treated ; but here, again, the total is a big-
library of literature of every degree of value.

A common, superficial notion, apparently
prevalent in many quarters, is that

Throe scliools

or tendencies the Chinese people are divided into

ofthouglit. , . ...

three native religious communities
or sects : the san chiao, or " Three Teachings,"

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 13

Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. And
it must be admitted that this idea finds
considerable countenance in the way in
which these Three Teachings are commonly-
spoken of by the Chinese themselves.

Yet, on looking a little more attentively at
the phenomena presented by China, one soon
comes to the conclusion that such a present-
ment of the position is inaccurate. The Three
Teachings are not separate sects in the sort
of sense that Christians, Jews, and Maho-
metans are separate in Western countries ;
or that, for example, Roman Catholics,
adherents of the Church of England, and
Protestant Nonconformists are separate in
England. They do not cover the whole
ground of Chinese ideas and observances, nor
do they exclude one another. They may be
regarded, better, as schools or tendencies of
thought, or perhaps as moods of the Chinese
mind which may be manifested in the same
individual at different times or on different
occasions.

Two of these Teachings, the Buddhist and
the Taoist, have priesthoods ; all three have
shrines, temples, or other holy places. But
the ordinary Chinese layman cannot truth-

14 RELIGION IN CHINA

fully be said to belong to any of them. At
times he calls in the services of priests,
perhaps makes offerings or prayers at temples,
goes on pilgrimage to holy places, and so on ;
but he is not a sectarian adherent of these
priests ; he is not a member of a congrega-
tion regularly meeting for worship at these
temples. Individuals may, of course, be
attracted to one teaching more than to
another, may deem one more truthful, or
more helpful, or more efficacious, or more
— what shall I say? — socially correct than
another.

All the educated classes, all the official
classes, profess a profound reverence for the
teachings and the classical or sacred literature
of the Confucianists, and in that sense they
are Confucianists. They would misunder-
stand and possibly resent the question,
should they be asked if they were Taoists
or Buddhists, reading into the inquiry a
suggestion that perhaps they might be sup-
posed to be magicians or monks, or in some
way cut off from ordinary membership of
society. Yet these same people will, on
occasion, call in Buddhist monks to sing
a *' mass '' at a funeral, or consult a Taoist

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 15

fortune-teller to have their children's horo-
scopes cast, or so forth. In the days of health
and prosperity the Chinese, as a rule, show
curiously little reverence for the images that
abound in temples, nay, often regard these
sanctuaries and their inmates with the most
outspoken contempt ; yet, on a bed of sick-
ness they will call for a wonder-working
P'usa to be brought before them as readily
as the people of Moscow used to send for
the Ikon of the Iberian Madonna, and now
— the theft of certain jewels from the original
having led to a discontinuance of the practice
— have a replica brought to their homes.

The point I want to emphasize is this : If
we go to Russia we shall find the great bulk
of the people to be not only subjects of the
Russian State, but adherents of a perfectly
definite Church — the Russian branch of the
Greek or Eastern Orthodox form of Chris-
tianity. They speak of one another as "the
orthodox." In Spain we shall find, equally
definitely, that people in general are Roman
Catholics ; in Scotland, that they are Presby-
terian Protestants ; in Turkey or Arabia we
shall find them Sunnite or Orthodox Maho-
metans ; in Persia, Shiah Mahometans — and

16 RELIGION IN CHINA

so on in many other countries. In each, those
who do not adhere to the prevalent form of
religion are commonly regarded by the rest
as ** heretics," or outsiders, or in some measure
as an inferior sort of people, less blessed with
the grace and the favour of God than the
dominant ''orthodox" are. The idea is
perhaps less insisted upon now than it once
was, yet it would not be difficult in all these
countries to find it expressed, with every
appearance of strong conviction, that all who
are not adherents of the locally dominant
Church are under the ban of Divine dis-
pleasure, deserving to be subjected to dis-
abilities, perhaps severe punishment in this
world, and doomed to a very much worse
fate in the world to come.

In China there is little of all this, and what
there is is defended on somewhat different
grounds. The state has, hitherto at any rate,
given a certain patronage to Confucianism —
or perhaps it should be put the other way
round : Confucianism has allied itself intimately
with the state, has dwelt on the duty of man
in his capacity as a citizen or subject of the
state, and so has come to regard itself as
the cheng chiao, or cheng taOy the correct,

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 17

proper, orthodox teaching of the nation in
its corporate capacity — of the official classes
in particular ; the ju chiao, or learned teach-
ing of the educated and scholarly. Yet even
this is only partially true : Confucianism has
never been the mental and moral atmosphere
of the masses, and it would be easy enough
to cite instances among the governing class
of persons who have lived under quite other
influences ; who have '' accumulated merit "
by endowing Buddhist monasteries, or been
guided in their public acts by the advice of
Taoist mystics ; and this has never seemed
to the Chinese at large to be incongruous
or inconsistent.

For example, the great Emperor K ang-
hsi, besides officiating as the Vice-Regent
of Heaven at the various ceremonies of the
State Religion, at the Temple of Heaven,
etc., attended almost every morning at the
big Buddhist temple outside the north gate
of the Forbidden City at Peking, called in
Taoist priests from time to time as sooth-
sayers, and all the while so coquetted with
Roman Catholic ideas that, like Felix, he
was almost persuaded to be a Christian.

There have been persecutions in China,
2

18 RELIGION IN CHINA

but they have been directed against tendencies
or practices which have seemed at some given
moment socially dangerous, rather than
attempts to uproot or deflect opinions because
of any supposed peril to the souls of those
who may come to hold them. In view of
passages in the Expansion of the Sacred Edict
of K'ang-hsi, I should hesitate to assert that
this latter idea has been wholly absent, even
in literature and legislation reflecting the
ideas of the intelligent classes, while appeals
to Ignorant prejudice on a lower plane have,
no doubt, been frequent and often wildly
fanatical. Yet it may, I think, be said that
persecution in China has been social and
political in its motive rather than grounded on
aversion to religious opinions as such ; that
it has never been so systematic or so em-
bittered as in Europe ; and that in modern
times it has, as a rule, been simply '' anti-
foreign."

There has been in China, as elsewhere, the
notion that to hold unpopular or unusual
religious opinions, to dissent from the opinion
of the majority, is hateful and harmful to
that majority ; there has been the notion that
to hold strange opinions is — as, of course

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 19

intellectual error may be — evidence of
stupidity ; there has been, very decidedly, the
notion that certain opinions are opposed to
patriotism, or to public interests, general or
local ; but it has rarely been supposed that
heresy is a thing in itself sinful and offensive,
to be reprobated and punished and exter-
minated even though it does not hurt or
interfere with ourselves. The heretic has
been frequently accused of all manner of
wickedness, supposed, reasonably or unreason-
ably, to be committed by him ; he has been
popularly regarded as an enemy of society,
a demon capable of any enormity, possible
or impossible, and on that ground hated and
pursued with rancour ; but, apart from such
accusations or suspicions of immoral and anti-
social conduct, his opinions have been
generally regarded as a matter for his own
choice and judgment.

We find in China a mass of practices which
are not really distinctive of any of the Three

Teachings, which are accepted or
natloiSiity. tacitly assumed as part of the

system of all three, or, more truly,
as outside all three, but which we should
unhesitatinorlv class as relis^ious observances.

20 RELIGION IN CHINA

Some of these are of immemorial antiquity,
carrying us back to an order of ideas in which
the head of a family was regarded as the high
priest of his household, the chieftain of a clan
the high priest of the clan, the sovereign of
the state the high priest of the nation, whose
function it is to make intercession for his
people in a representative capacity before the
unseen Powers. We get, in fact, into a region
where religion and nationality seem to merge
one in another — and that, I think, is the
true basis on which the structure of Chinese
religion is built up.

Beyond a doubt this is so historically.
There was a state before there were schools
of thought ; there were tribes before there
was an organized state ; there were families
before there were tribes. And a whole mass
of ideas centring round the state, the tribe
or clan, and the family, are assumed by all
the Chinese people as axioms, to attack which
is heresy indeed.

All sections of the people accept a common
body of what we can only call national
myths — beliefs in certain great demigods or
patriarchs, or heroes, or whatever we may call
them, e.g. Fu Hsi and Shen Nung, Huang Ti,

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 21

Yao and Shun, and Yu the Great, who are
believed to have been the originators of human
institutions, who appear in history
^°^^^°^y books something in the way that
Adam and Noah, or Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob appear in the Jewish Scrip-
tures, and who, while they are held to have
been historical personages at such or such
dates in remote antiquity, are also worshipped
in temples as if they were existing divinities.
This takes us one step farther. All through
Chinese traditional belief there is no hard
and fast line between a human soul and an
object of worship. Indeed, except that there
is a vague belief in a T'ien or Shang Ti —
Heavenly Providence or Overlord of All
Things — beyond all human or other exist-
ence— the whole body of objects of worship
are more or less distinctly conceived of as
having had in the past, sometimes as des-
tined to have in the future, a human, or at least
a material, incarnation. This is carried so
far that it may be said that all human souls
are, or some day may be, objects of a reverence
very closely akin to worship. Every de-
scendant, at any rate, worships his ancestors.
He does not suppose them to be Almighty

22 RELIGION IN CHINA

Gods, but he does suppose that their spirits

pervade the places where their bodies are at

rest, take an interest in his wel-

worsSiK ^^^^» ^^^ ^^^' according to how he
remembers and venerates them, pro-
foundly influence his fate, here and hereafter.

To understand Chinese religious ideas at
all we must get the notion deeply engrained
into us that the spirits of our ancestors are,
for us at any rate, objects of worship ; that
the due celebration of the proper rites before
their tombs, or their memorial tablets — the
placing of little bits of yellowish paper on
their graves at the Spring Festival of Ch'ing
Ming, for example — is a matter of supreme
importance to us.

If they have been people of distinction the
worship will extend beyond the family circle.
There will be shrines, or, it may be, elaborate
temples erected to their memory, not only
at the place of their burial, but, quite possibly,
in many other places as well. So we pass to
a conception of a sort of canonization, or
posthumous ennobling of the dead, and you
will find that one of the most serious functions
of all Chinese governments has been to decree
what kind or measure of canonization is to

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 23

be accorded to national heroes or celebrities
who are deemed by each succeeding generation
to be worthy of such distinction.

On all such deceased personages a name,
known as their Miao-hao, i.e. "temple name"
or Shih-ming, " name of canonization," Is
conferred after death, whether they be
emperors or any other persons deemed
worthy of posthumous reverence, and it is
under this posthumous name that they are
commonly worshipped.

The being whom we usually call the
Chinese God of War, Kuan Ti, is a perfectly
historical character, a certain general, Kuan
Yli, who flourished about a.d. 200, and who,
after several intermediate steps of glorification,
was raised to his present rank of "godhood"
by Imperial Decree of the year a.d. 1594.
I would call attention also to the recent and
very instructive instance of Sir Robert Hart,
where, on account of his eminent services
to the Chinese state, all his ancestors were,
on his death, ennobled by Imperial command
for five generations back. Every Emperor is
canonized in ordinary course ; he becomes in
this way a member of the national pantheon,
and is worshipped after death, universally, so

24 RELIGION IN CHINA

long as his dynasty retains the throne, locally,
and in cases of special distinction as a ruler,
long afterwards. It is commonly expected of
a new dynasty, and imputed to them as an
evidence of piety and good feelings, to
arrange that the ancestral sacrificial rites of
the preceding line or lines be not wholly cut
off; accordingly endowments, lands etc., are
assigned for this pious purpose. In earlier
days we find that certain vassals of the crown
held their fiefs as representatives of the
most ancient, possibly legendary dynasties.
Statesmen, generals, scholars, are similarly
honoured ; they are treated in fact very much
as if they were, at least for some purposes,
ancestors far beyond the circle of their
physical descendants. In the orthodox Con-
fucian system this practice has received a
special degree of development and attention,
in the creation of a class of " Worthies " —
Hsien-jen — entitled to have their tablets, some-
times their images (but that is rare), erected
in the Wen Miao or Confucian Temples of
Worthies. To be accorded such distinction is,
next to being venerated as a Sheng-jen, or
" Sage," the highest honour in Chinese estima-
tion that can be conferred on merit.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 25

On the other hand, if ancestral or family-
worship is liable to extensions of this kind,
it is also subject to an important limitation
in another direction. By marriage a woman
passes into the family of her husband, and
consequently, in Chinese thought, into the
dominion of the spirits of his ancestors, and
she commonly ceases to worship her own
ancestors. She has, so to speak, transferred
her allegiance. As with Ruth, his people
became her people and his God her God.

This worship of ancestors has prevailed
universally, always, as far as we know the
past history of the Chinese race. They are
a people who worship their ancestors, and who
regard the worship of ancestors as, above all
other ties, the bond which holds communities
together, and the main support of morality
and the decencies of family life. To obey
your parents while living, and to serve them
when dead, is the virtue of '* Hsiao," piety
or filial duty — the root virtue from which
all others are deduced. In the strict etymo-
logical meaning of the word Religion, it is, in
Chinese eyes, " Religion," the bond which
unites men together in societies. The con-
ception is not Confucianism — though Con-

26 RELIGION IN CHINA

fucianism accepts it unreservedly, and the
classical literature dwells on it persistently,
on almost every page — but a conception
anterior to Confucius,

Indeed, it is historically established that
the tendency of Confucius and his disciples
was to restrain the exaggerations into which
ancestor worship has often been, and was,
especially in primitive times, liable to de-
generate ; to regulate it, in fact, into a more
tolerable and civilized institution than it might
otherwise have been. We see this especi-
ally in the minute care with which Con-
fucianists, from the compilers of the Book
of Rites downwards, have organized dress
and other observances connected with

mourning for the dead. It has
mourning. seemed to Chinese opinion a matter

of the utmost public importance
that the state should prescribe exactly for
what length of time people should wear
mourning garments, what garments they
should wear, of what materials and colour,
and for what relatives they should wear the
various prescribed degrees of mourning.
And, looking at the vast mass of intricate
regulations, ancient and modern, on this

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 27

subject, tracing the modifications worked in
them in the lapse of ages — modifications,
as I should Infer from the comparative lists
from different periods shown in De Groot's
work, mostly due to the gradual elimination
or softening down of feudal or aristocratic
ideas — we come upon instructive and impor-
tant conclusions as to what it all means.

To us the wearing of mourning Is merely
a personal indication of sorrow ; to the
Chinese it no doubt is an indication of sorrow
at the loss of the departed, but it Is much
else. The personal sorrow element Is a
detail — possibly an afterthought ; the
original, underlying Idea Is a symbol of
deprivation. Deprivation of what ? Not only
of the presence and moral support of the
dead relative, senior, or superior (only a low
degree of mourning, and for a very limited
time, Is ever worn for a junior or a depen-
dent, however closely related), but of the
material assistance which his family derived
from him. He Is gone, and has left us not
merely sorrowing, but helpless and destitute,
obliged to clothe ourselves in rags and sack-
cloth, or at least in colourless, plain garments
— white, or some unusual colour — so

28 RELIGION IN CHINA

deprived of a home that we cannot sleep in
our usual bed, in our usual room, but must
build a mud hut in the courtyard to occupy
for a few days, or a few months, or, if we
are to show perfect sentiments, as long as
three years ; so weakened by loss of food
that we need a staff for our support, or can
only crawl behind the coffin upheld by
stronger arms than our own. In the
extreme case, the symbolism is plainly
emblematic of absolute, total destitution.

All this, in modern times, is expressed
symbolically ; but was it always so .'*
Chinese history indicates pretty plainly that
it was not. The primitive Chinese man,
possibly not quite realizing the nature or the
irrevocability of death, left all his possessions to
the dead ; gave up to him his hut and his
weapons, his cattle and his household imple-
ments ; called on his soul for days or months
to return, and, when at length he was con-
vinced that no return of the wandering spirit
was to be expected, went away, destitute,
alone and in rags, and built himself another
hut in the wilderness elsewhere.

To this day a family graveyard, in the
north of China, gives us the truest picture we

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 29

can hope to have of a primeval Chinese
village. The graves are shaped like miniature
huts ; they are arranged strictly according
to prescribed rules about family precedence;
they are furnished with miniature images of
all that the dead may be supposed to want,
should they, after all, some day come to life
again ; or else these objects, made in paper
and bamboo, are burnt in effigy at the place
of burial. In older, but quite historical times,
things were not done so cheaply ; the grave
would be filled with earthenware or terra-
cotta models of all sorts of objects — horses
and carts, houses, furniture, and slaves — as
we find so plentifully in burial-places of the
T'ang Dynasty (seventh to tenth century a.d.).
In yet earlier times these articles were not
models, but the real thing ; for the ideal was
to supply the dead with all he could conceiv-
ably need. If he was a great chieftain, the
sacrifices were made on a most magnificent
scale. We have record of emperors — I am
thinking now of the period one or two
centuries before to an equal length of time
after the Christian Era — with whom ninety
or a hundred horses were buried, alive or
dead, and other possessions on the same

30 RELIGION IN CHINA

scale. Some of the chief's dependents, his
slaves, the ladies of his harem, or such at

least as had not borne children to
Soriflce. ^^^' either sacrificed themselves or

were sacrificed. The practice of
suttee by hanging or burying alive, now and
then by burning, if less widely prevalent than
in India, has never wholly ceased in China ;
instances are to be found, here and there, in
all periods of history, from the famous case
of the three statesmen of Ts'in, whose sad
fate in being made to go down into the pit
at the burialiof Duke Mu in the seventh century
B.C., is the subject of a pathetic ballad in the
Book of Odes, down to the present day.
Suicide on a parent's grave is accounted
honourable, and, like remaining through life
a faithful widow, may be, and often is, com-
memorated by [the erection of an ornamental
archway, or failou, as a record of the act of
self-sacrifice. A very few years ago it was
common to see in the Peking Gazette — and
such notices may, indeed be found in news-
papers to-day — memorials from local officials
recommending for some mark of honour
persons whose filial affection had led them to
cut flesh from or otherwise mutilate their own

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 31

bodies, as a sacrifice to secure the recovery
from illness of a sick parent ; and such acts
are regularly esteemed not only meritorious but
likely to effect the purpose desired. Sacrifice
of human beings, voluntary or involuntary,
is in fact a constant feature of Chinese
reverence towards ancestors and chieftains.

In the extreme case, the celebrations attend-
ing the burial of the great conqueror Ts'in
Shih Huanor-ti, the proceedinors

The burial of o x o

Ts'insMii went far beyond these limits. It
was in 209 b.c, a relatively modern
time, full in the light of authentic history,
that the mighty warrior was laid to rest under
a gigantic tumulus — the largest artificial hill
in the world, I suppose, 500 feet high and
about two miles in circuit — in a labyrinth of
underground passages, beside what is described
as a ''sea" of quicksilver, intended to preserve
the body for all time against decay, with many
hundreds of the women and slaves of his court
and a fabulous mass of treasure. And when
the work was completed, lest after ages
should ever know the clue of that labyrinth,
all the workmen, ten thousand in number, who
had been employed in its construction, were
driven into the underground passages and the

32 RELIGION IN CHINA

openings closed for ever. That tumulus is
there to this day, a few miles from Hsian in
Shensi, for whoever shall care to explore
its recesses, and whilst its construction is, as
I said, the supreme and crowning instance on
record of this sort of barbarity, it is only the
greatest example among many. As Ts'in
Shih Huang- ti was greater than other Chinese
potentates in life, so he went to what, in the
ideas of that age, was accounted a more
magnificent death ; but all through Chinese
history we may find the traces of the archaic
barbarism of which his funeral was the crown-
ing masterpiece.

In the ancient classical literature of China
we find human sacrifices sometimes reprobated
as an abomination, often as a vain display of
extravagance. Confucius himself seems to
regard them as a depraved aberration arising
from the practice common in his time of
burying straw effigies with the dead ; but
the real order of ideas is surely the reverse.
The straw images of the comparatively
advanced culture of so civilized a state as the
Lu (Western Shantung) of Confucius's time
were the relics of a prehistoric age when the
images were fiesh and blood.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 33

The picture I have in my mind of primitive
China is no Arcadian idyll of the golden days
of Yao and Shun, but a very hard
^^^ and cruel state of society, where
human life was held terribly cheap ;
where the interests of the poor and the helpless,
the young and the dependent, were ruthlessly
sacrificed ; where oppression and violence, war
and devastation scourged mankind into submis-
sion to the caprices of tyrannous chieftains ;
where abject slavery was the lot of all but a
favoured few, and where the only alternative
to feudal anarchy was a military despotism
depending on the life and vigour of one man,
and the only known conception of law was the
elaboration and punctilious observance of ritual
in which superstition and fear played a far
larger part than reason or enlightened concern
for morality or the public good.

Were these primeval Chinese, with their
burdensome ceremonial, their perpetual civil
strife, their infanticide, their suttee, their
horrible human sacrifices, bad men, outside
the law and grace of God? Surely not; no
more than their less savage descendants of
to-day ; no more than we ourselves. The
things they did, could, in that stage of growth,

3

U RELIGION IN CHINA

be done without degradation, without de-
generacy or corruption of the heart and mind.
They were natural acts, the result, maybe,
of earnest and sincere reflection. Do we
count cunninsT and falsehood and cruel t\'
sinful in the dweller in wild woods? Is the
Arab of the waste a criminal because he is a
robber, because he has fits of uncontrolled
animal emotion, like an ignorant, passionate
child? Do we blame lust in a monkey, or
murder when done bv a dosr?

Bv the wav. has the reader ever watched a
docf hunt down and kill another dosf in wanton-
ness or jealousy? I have seen it done. Straight
as an arrow she flew, a quarter of a mile
across the grass ; there was no fight, scarcely
a movement of resistance, as she overtook her
victim and pinned her to the earth : driving
her great teeth into the other "s windpipe and
holding them there till breathing had ceased.
It was mere murder. And she came to me
immediately afterwards, tingling with satisfac-
tion in every nerv^e, with no trace of uneasiness
or remorse, plainly exj>ecting that I would
sing over her deed just such a song as Deborah
sang over the deed of Jael.

No ; the savage is a savage — and we

GENERAL CHAPwACTERISTICS 35

must not blair.e hin: for it. And behind the
savage is the animal. At the level of
monkeys and dogs those things that we
reprobate most are but the natural outlet of
animal activit}-, the evidence of abounding
health or superior strength and wit They
are the natural weapons of wild, lonely
things, and so long as or in the degree that
men remain the wild lonely things they were
at their first emergence (rcrr. an:~al con-
ditions, they are the deeds which men
naturally do. Nature knows ncdning of
imconditioned moral good or moral eviL
The satisfaction of impulses is a natural act,
whose moral bearings depend on the time
and circumstances of the doing. U a
creature, human or other, satisfies its lust
or cupidit}' or vindictiveness by inflicting
humiliation or loss or su£fering on another,
it gets the momentar}' satisfection of its
animal desire, and if it is merely an animal^
incapable of looking before or after, of
weighing the more distant consequences of its
action, there is no more to be said about it. In
the measure that men outgrow the animal, in
that measure they are responsible beings and
moral standards become binding upon them.

36 RELIGION IN CHINA

And yet, though this is so, we know that
in human growth this irresponsibility passes
away ; we

. . . believe that in all ages
Every human heart is human,
That in even savage bosoms
There are longings, yearnings, strivings,
For the good they comprehend not;
That the feeble hands and helpless,
Groping blindly in the darkness,
Touch God's right hand in that darkness
And are lifted up and strengthened.

But the Law comes later, when men unite
for mutual assistance and society ; it is
meaningless before society begins, and in
the beginnings of society, where the units
are small groups, and every outsider is assumed
to be a Toe, it is rude and harsh and terrible.
The things that I have described would be
wrong and sinful in us, because we are no
longer wild things, but have passed a few
milestones of that road, have learnt a few
lessons of that teaching, along which it has
been appointed that we should be led,
through ever-widening mutual dependence
of one human group upon its neighbours
(and who is my neighbour?) to fuller co-

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS 37

operation and sympathy, past the imper-
fections of this our day, to some far-off
Divine event in which the purpose and
meaning of all our strivings and our blunders,
our failures and our trials shall at length be
made plain.

II

ANCIENT
CONFUCIANISM

CHAPTER II

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM

Primeval China was, as described in the
preceding pages, an essentially barbarous
country ; but when authentic history begins
there were already religious elements. There
was belief in an over-ruling T'ien — Heaven,
or God, sometimes spoken of more personally
as Shang Ti, the Lord or Lords Above.
There was worship of ancestors ; there was
worship of all manner of superhuman souls
or spirits ; there was some worship of the
powers of nature, sacred mountains, gods of
the soil and the grain, gods of the woods
and streams, and so forth ; there were
practices of divination by the use of occult
diagrams, markings on pieces of tortoise-
shell or bone, etc. ; there were observances
connected with death and burial, always
involving very heavy deprivations to the

survivors and, in the case of great chieftains

a

42 RELIGION IN CHINA

or heads of tribes and clans, human and
animal sacrifice on a scale varying with the
dignity of the departed chief. The idea of
a chief was not readily or completely dis-
sociated from that of an ancestor, and
the whole was bound up with an extreme
system of family despotism, possibly inevit-
able as the only bulwark against perpetual
violence and anarchy, in a state of society
where public law had hardly begun to
exist.

This primitive society, as it crystallized
into a system of states, developed institutions
curiously like those of the Feudal period of
our own history. There was a
Age. ^^ ^ king, to whom the local chieftains
— in those parts, that is the middle
Huang-ho valley and adjoining regions,
where population was settled and civilization
relatively advanced — acknowledged some sort
of deference or precedence ; he being the
lineal representative ('* continuator," as De
Groot would call him) of the senior trunk
of the same ancestral tree from whose
collateral or adoptive branches most of them
claimed to be descended. Most of the vassal
lords traced descent from Wen Wang, the

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 43

father of Wu Wang, founder of the Chou
Dynasty — traditional date, 1122 b.c. — a few
affected to perpetuate the ancestral sacrifices
of earlier royal lines, and all, it would seem,
regarded themselves as descendants of the
Patriarch Huang Ti, whose date tradition
puts at 2697 ^-c. But in historical times,
the king had little power to secure the
obedience of his vassals. Although, in
theory, every vassal held direct of the crown,
yet as time went on the majority became
'* attached " to a limited number of great
chieftains, of whom they were in practice the
sub-feudatories.

In some parts of the country a beginning
had been made of education ; arts, manu-
factures, and agriculture had made a certain
progress — the bronze sacrificial vessels of
quite the earliest historical age, for example,
are of rare excellence of design and workman-
ship— and war was carried on by more or less
disciplined armies. The people had a con-
siderable body of legends, largely embodied
in ballads or short lyrical poems, and, like
other peoples before and since, imagined that
there had once upon a time been a golden
age of purer manners and more enlightened

44 RELIGION IN CHINA

government. Maybe there had been ; at
least there were plentiful traditions of heroic
and saintly kings of old — of Wen Wang and
Wu Wang, the founders of the existing king-
ship ; of Ch eng Tang (T'ang, the Completer)
who had founded an earlier line ; beyond him,
the founder of a still more ancient monarchy,
Yii the Great, who had restored the world
from the Great Flood wherewith it had been
afflicted in the days of the yet hoarier patri-
archs, Yao and Shun, under whom the men
of the Golden Age had lived in the peaceful
practice of every virtue.

In this feudal China, in the Duchy of Lu,
in what we should now call Western Shantung
— in a land hallowed by old tales of Chou
Kung, the founder of the Duchy, the wise
and saintly brother and adviser of the beloved
reforming king, Wu Wang — there was born,
in the year 552 B.C., the great Sage

Confucius. , ,/r Tj-i ^1 >• m

and Master, K ung Ch lu, or K ung
Ch'ung-ni, or K'ung Fu-tzii — that is, K'ung
the Philosopher — whose title has been latin-
ized by Europeans into Confucius. He
taught the people; for some years he helped
his Duke to rule the state ; he gathered dis-
ciples round him ; he studied and collected

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 45

the ballads and the historical records of his
country. He was an archer and a devoted
lover of music. After ages collected his say-
ings and composed moral treatises embodying
his doctrine and describing his practices.

For instance, we have that very curious
document, the tenth book of the Lun Yii, or
" Confucian Analects," in which the personal
habits of the Sage are described : how he
always ate ginger with his meals, how he
would not sit down if his mat was not straight,
how he used to wear a sleeping suit half as
long again as his body, how — sportsmanlike
— he would not shoot an arrow at a bird
seated. Intense veneration prompted the
preservation of these memories, yet in reading
one wonders whether there are many among
the great, fundamental teachers of mankind
for whom the like veneration would have
survived so intimate a revelation of personal
peculiarities.

When the Duke of Lu, cajoled and tempted
by a neighbouring chieftain, was induced to
fall out with Confucius, Confucius went wan-
dering from court to court, and at length in
his old age returned to his native home, died
(478 B.C.), was buried, and, like all ancestors,

46 RELIGION IN CHINA

became in a measure an object of worship
to his descendants in blood and his disciples
in doctrine. Round his tomb grew up — but
that was later, when his doctrines had grown
to predominance — a mighty temple in a mag-
nificent park which to-day contains the graves
of many thousands of his descendants. The
clan continued to live in the old home — to
perpetuate by precept and example the Hsiao
(the ''filial piety") which he had inculcated.
Generation after generation its chiefs received
new dignities, and for many ages they have
borne the title of Duke or Prince — the present
Duke, K'ung Ling-yi, being of the seventy-
sixth generation in descent from the great
teacher. In 1906 I had the honour of an
interview with the present Duke, shortly after
the birth of his heir, and some while after-
wards I received an intimation of his mother's
death, date of the funeral, etc., with a long
biographical notice written on a sheet of paper
about thirteen feet long, giving numerous and
curious details of all the presents and honours
and compliments which had been conferred
on the venerable lady by the great Empress
Dowager Tzu Hsi, with much other in-
formation.

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 47

We see plainly enough what the underlying
idea of Confucianism is ; essentially it is a
worship of the family, of social relationships.
Confucius declared that he was a lover of
antiquity, a transmitter, not a creator. His
aim was to restore that higher and purer
morality which he conceived to have belonged
to the patriarchs and sages of old. His ideals
seem to cluster round one central conception
— that which he calls the chun-tzu — some
translate it the "superior man"; perhaps
the " civilized man " would suggest what he
means, or the word may be taken to denote
very much the group of qualities which we
would express by our word ** gentleman."

Mystical and supernatural things rather
repelled him ; he disliked talking about them ;
he bids us do reverence — the usual rever-
ence— to gods and spirits ; he clearly believed
and trusted in an over-ruling guidance from
on high controlling his own life ; but ex-
travagance and superstition went against his
grain and he avoided them, though he placed
great value on the due observance of cere-
monies. He declined to argue about the
unknowable. Asked what he thought of
death, he replied, *' Not knowing life, how

48 RELIGION IN CHINA

can we know death? "' He accepted the
family system of his time. One cannot help
thinking that his intense conservatism tended
to stereotype it; but he was always on the
side of the humaner and more rational practice
where there seemed to him room for choice.
It was a calm, measured, reasoning spirit ;
just, kindly, good - humoured, eminently
sensible and self - controlled ; deferential to
all constituted authority ; reverencing manli-
ness, yet eschewing violence and all out-
bursts of temper; hating war, yet, if war
were inevitable, inculcating courage and the
avoidance of mean spite or unfair advantages.
Love those who do good to you ; be just
even to those who do you evil ; do not do
to others what you would not have others do
to you ; in all things be guided by the prin-
ciple of reciprocity : such was the teaching
of Confucius.

In its time and place surely a very great
step forward in morals and in humanity.

Of his followers the greatest, Meng Ko

(Meng-tzu or Mencius), lived about two hundred

years afterwards, and has seemed to Western

students a more practical, a less formal and

' See note at end of chapter.

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 49

stately but a more intelligible teacher than
Confucius. In the work in which his sayings

and teachings are recorded we find
372^289^8.0. p^ssages of Very lofty inspiration;

that, for instance, where he con-
trasts the nobility which is of God — mercy,
truth, loyalty, to love right without weary-
ing— with the mere human nobility of earthly
rank and position, and shows how, if we
pretend to strive after the former with an
eye to attaining the latter, we are on the road
to lose both ; or that other passage where
he tells us that the great man is he who does
not lose his child's heart. Perhaps Mencius
is more intelligible because he deals more
directly with politics, and the politics of his
time were more definite and interesting than
those of the days of Confucius. He stands
out as the great radical of that time, the
upholder of the rights of the poor and the
oppressed, the denouncer of all forms of greed
and tyranny, the lecturer of kings and princes,
to whom he preached that righteousness was
a greater and more important thing than
selfish ambition.

By this time the Feudal Age was passing
away. The crowd of little chieftains had been

4

50 RELIGION IN CHINA

gathered up and merged into eight or nine

great principalities, whose sovereigns arrogated

to themselves the titles and powers

The Ts'in ,- , . -i r i • i

conquest; 01 kmgs, and fought one with

260-209 B.C. , .- -. ^

another until, some nfty years after
Mencius died, they were all swallowed up
under the overweening despotism of the great
king of Ts'in, Ts'in Shih Huang-ti, of whose
burial mound mention has already been
made — and the Chinese Empire arose on
their ruins.

The first generation of the Empire — just
about the time when Rome and Carthage

were engaged in their deadly
SSeT Struggle in Europe-was a brutal

tyranny, a reign of blood and iron
in which such ideas as those of the Con-
fucianists had but a poor reception. The
Confucianist or scholar party, no doubt, on
their side, did a good deal by their formalism
and unreasoning attachment to whatever was
ancient and '* respectable " to provoke a
catastrophe. At any rate the despot — the
** criminal of ten thousand ages" as orthodox
Chinese scholars have ever since called him —
set himself to destroy them and all their
works. It was decreed that all books other

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 51

than those deaHng with medicine, agriculture,
and magic should be ruthlessly burnt, and
their possessors were put to death by
hundreds. Especial efforts were made to
destroy all works of history, philosophy, and
poetry. How far this decree was actually
carried out may be questioned, but the de-
struction was certainly widespread. And, in
that age, before the invention of paper, when
books were written or engraved, like a sort of
poker work, on bamboo or wooden slabs, it
would be easier to carry out than we readily
realize. The matter that would fill a small
pocket volume, easy to stow away, would then
have spread over hundreds of bulky slabs and
occupied two or three large trunks, quite
impossible to conceal.

The power of the conqueror, however,
ceased with his life. The six years after his
death were a time of anarchy, but the work of
consolidation was not permanently destroyed.

Another dynasty, that of Han, succeeded to
the Imperial dignity and maintained itself
on the throne, with a short interval, for four
hundred years. China became the Great
Power of Eastern Asia, influencing, if not as
yet really ruling, all those regions which we

52 RELIGION IN CHINA

have in mind when we refer to-day to ** China."
But from our point of view the great work of

the Han Dynasty was the recon-
Dynasty ; re- ciliation which its Sovereigns effected
tSefchi^T between the Empire and the Con-
Emp*ire, 202 f^cian scholars. Confucianism came
220***^^' to be held in honour, to be a state

orthodoxy. Piece by piece its literary
monuments were recovered, edited, cast into
their abiding shape. The great ritual works,
the Li Chi, or Book of Rites, as they are
collectively called, in which the authorized
customs of antiquity are recorded, were com-
piled. They are an immense storehouse of
facts and suggestions about the manners and
ideas of very ancient times, and are, no doubt,
in part far older than the Han period, though
the date of their editing into their permanent
form cannot well be earlier than 150 or 100
B.C. A parallel may perhaps be seen here
with the corresponding portion of the Jewish
scriptures — the Pentateuch or Hexateuch, the
Books from Genesis to Deuteronomy, the
Books of the Law of Moses — which after ages
revered as the authentic composition of Moses
or the patriarchs, but which, as we have them,
only date from a rather late period of the

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 53

Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, though they
contain almost all we know of early Hebrew
origins.

By the reconciliation of the Chinese State
and the party of gentlemanliness and civiliza-
tion, the Confucian scholars identified them-
selves more and more with the Empire and
with all that order of ideas which regarded the
Emperor as the high priest of his people.
This is the age in which we can first plainly
see the great permanent features and institu-
tions of Chinese society and life — for instance,
the idea of holding competitive examinations
as a means of recruiting for public duty the
services of the **hsien" and the "neng" (the
*' worthy" and the "competent") as Con-
fucianists would express it — assuming shape
and consistency.

From of old the sovereign had been T*ien

Wang, the ** Heavenly King," or T'ien Tzu —

** Son of Heaven " or Son of God —

state worship ...

and worship the representative and vice-res^ent

of the state. .

of the Almighty, ruling by virtue of
of a T'ien Ming — a " Commission from God ''
— authorizing him to govern all mankind.

''T'ien wu erh Jih ; Kuo wu erh Wang;
Chia wu erh Chu," says the classic text :

U RELIGION IN CHINA

Heaven hath not two Suns ; the land
hath not two Kings; a house hath not two
Masters.

Now, in a great Empire, the ideas en-
shrined in this creed seemed to be fully
realized ; the facts of the Han dominion
seemed to combine with hazy traditions of
ancient patriarchs and heroes, and the belief
easily grew up that what visibly existed had
always existed by right and in theory, if not
at all times in actual reality. So, while the
emperors punctiliously performed their mid-
winter sacrifices at the altar of High Heaven,
or their ploughing and weaving in the shrines
of the Divine Husbandman or the Temple of
the Earth — and while eclipses and earth-
quakes, floods and pestilences were held to
be the symbols by which the Powers Above
expressed displeasure at Imperial sins, to be
averted and propitiated by Imperial prayers or
pilgrimages or confessions of contrition — their
subjects came to worship the sovereign as the
living embodiment of a power beyond the
human. Every attribute of the state was
invested with a halo of sanctity ; it was
''sheng" (holy) — to be spoken of with bated
breath, with a '* changed countenance " and

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 55

** trembling knees," as we see in the tenth
book of the Analects ; its edicts were to be
received '' with three kneelings and nine
prostrations " as the commands of a God.
And indeed, in any comprehensive survey of
human institutions, the only one that can be
compared in its duration and its influence with
the Chinese Empire is the Roman Papacy,
which equally claimed to be divine. But in
China the Caesar and the Pope were one
individual from the first.

Yet, with all this worship of constituted
authority, Confucianism supplied a powerful
corrective or deterrent to the abuse of power,
in its doctrine that ''T'ien Ming pu tsai yu
ch'ang" (**The Commission of God is not
irrevocable "). When by misrule a sovereign
proves his unworthiness, or by continued
disaster — natural disasters counting quite as
heavily as political disasters — his inability to
rule, this is held to indicate that the Com-
mission is revoked, and in that event it
becomes not merely the right but the duty
of a subject to rebel. Sovereignty must be
Wang Tao, or *' Wang Cheng," as Mencius
calls it — a "Kingly Rule"; it must not
degenerate into Pa Tao, "tyranny." It must

56 RELIGION IN CHINA

be founded on right principles, not merely
supported by force ; it must act in accordance
with precedent, custom, and law.

By about a.d. 175, when the Han Dynasty,
long sapped by the usurpations of ambitious

dowagers and their families, by the
S?con-^ intrigues of eunuchs and by count-
a!d.T75.^°°^' ^^ss corruptions, was sinking to its

fall, and something very like the old
local feudal lordships was making ready to
take its place on every hand, we find it
recorded that the thirteen books of the
Confucian Canon were engraved on stone
tablets or pillars to secure the permanency
and unalterableness of the text, and set up in a
state temple. This is the close of the ancient
era of Confucianism — indeed of China — the
fixing of the Canon, the identification of
scholarship with the State, and both with that
conservative orthodoxy which has always
been so attractive to the official Chinese mind.
In dealing with Confucianism I ought not
to pass over, though I can only refer to them
in passing, certain controversies on funda-
mental questions of ethics which agitated the
scholars of the Classical Age. Early scholars
did not always accept the conclusions of

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 57

Confucius, but, while possessing what we
should call in general a Confucian outlook,
sometimes took up positions very different
from those of the Sage. Two of these con-
troversies are of special importance. First,
the point raised by Mo Ti (Motzu) that the
true basis of conduct is not, as Confucius
alleged, reciprocity or justice to all men, but
''universal love."

The work of Mo Ti (probably fourth century
B.C.) has either come down to us in a form too
mutilated to do him full justice, or it was a
feeble production ; Mencius regarded the doc-
trine as impracticable and subversive — a denial
of parental claims which his reverence for filial
piety led him to put on a level with the notions
of anarchical dreamers. Yet it continued for
some centuries to find disciples and defenders.
A recent native writer on Chinese history,
Hsia Tseng-yu, represents that Mo Ti 's teach-
ings existed for a while as a separate school,
alongside Confucianism and Buddhism ; but
they failed because, while requiring entire
self-abnegation, they held out no prospect of
future reward for virtue or compensation for
undeserved suffering. This school has natur-
ally evoked interest among Christian students

58 RELIGION IN CHINA

of Chinese literature, but as far as I know they
have not found the existing remains of the
party of Mo Ti as helpful as they could have
wished. Secondly, there was a controversy
as to the Confucianist doctrine that human
nature is essentially good and only becomes
corrupted by circumstances. In the age of
the Ts'in conquest writers and politicians,
Hsiin Ch'ing, Yang Chu, and others, antici-
pating Nietzsche and von Bernhardi, argued
that the nature of man is radically bad, only
to be restrained by force ; that self-interest
is the only real motive of action ; Yang Chu
being "the least erected spirit," as Legge
expresses it, '*who ever professed to reason
concerning the life and duties of man." Others
again contended that the essential nature was
neutral, the mere sport of education and en-
vironment.

It would be an interesting speculation to
trace out in all their ramifications the effects
on human society of, respectively, the orthodox
Confucian dogma that all men are by nature
good, and the orthodox Christian doctrine of
an original sin, implanted in the first man
through his first disobedience, and transmitted
as an inherited taint only to be washed out in

ANCIENT CONFUCIANISM 59

his descendants by the vicarious sacrifice of
an innocent atoning blood. Certainly such
Christian graces as humility have found Con-
fucianism on the whole but a stony ground,
yet its teaching —

Jen chih ch'u hsing pen shan
(Man's beginning, a nature at root virtuous),

which Chinese children learn as the first line
of their school primer, has nobility and hope-
fulness to its credit.

NOTE.
Confucian Reticence regarding Death.

Legge and others have censured Confucius for the answer
which he gave to Chi Lu's famous inquiry regarding death,
seeing in it a burking, or evasion, of a most important
question.

But Confucius never claimed omniscience ; he acknow-
ledged with singular frankness that his own progress had
been the slow growth of many years. The Analects, in
which his sayings are recorded, are for the most part so
scrappy and innocent of any trace of system that it is perhaps
dangerous to found any argument upon the order in which
these memoranda are dotted down. Yet, just at this place,
there does seem to be a consecutive train of thought, and it
may be fair, before passing a judgment, to consider the
passage as a whole.

Here it is (Lun Yii, Book XI, sections 8 to ii) : —

8. When Yen Yiian died the Master cried, "Alas,
Heaven is killing me ! Heaven is killing me ! "

9. When Yen Yiian died the Master wept for him
excessively. The disciples said, "Master, your grief is

60 RELIGION IN CHINA

excessive." He said, " Is it excessive ? For whom may
I mourn excessively if not for this man ? "

10. When Yen Yiian died the disciples wished to give
him a sumptuous funeral. The Master said, " You may
not." The disciples did give him a sumptuous funeral.
The Master said, " Oh, Hui ! " (personal name of Yen
Yiian). " He looked on me as a father ; I have been
unable to treat him as a son. It is not I, it is you, surely,
my two or three disciples, who are at fault."

11. Chi Lu asked about serving ghosts and spirits. The
Master said, " We have not been able to serve the living ;
how can we serve ghosts ? " Chi Lu added, " I venture
to ask about death." " We have not known life.; how can
we know death ? "

Does the whole passage, after all, amount to anything
more than a record of what Confucius felt and said under
the influence of exceeding grief at the death of a dearly
loved disciple ; and if so, can it be fairly judged as though
representing his reasoned, deliberate opinion ?

Ill

TAOISM

CHAPTER III

TAOISM

The preceding chapter gives, I hope, an idea

of what classical Confucianism stands for, and

it will be realized that, powerful as

Taoism; a ^

name cover- the appeal of such a system may

ingaU those ^^ . ; ^

elements be, whether we meet it in the lofty

whicli Con- . . . r T •

fncianism moralizing- wisdom of Mencius or

dislikes. . .

the puerilities of the " Twenty-four
Examples of Filial Piety," it cannot answer all
the needs of humanity. It is, after all, but one
mood of Chinese nature. When he is at ease,
in the possession of health and waking senses,
with his home in order, busy with his daily
task, man readily takes the Confucian view of
things. It deals with visible facts ; it is formal ;
it values self-restraint, order, ceremonious cor-
rectness of deportment ; it cultivates propriety.
But when work is done, when shadows play
upon the walls and the night winds howl out-
side, this same man huddles with his comrades

63

64 RELIGION IN CHINA

on the warm stove-bed, and they talk together
of strange, uncanny happenings ; for then there
are spooks abroad, and the mind becomes filled
with wonder, imagination, fear, and all sorts of
fancy.

We have seen that Confucius avoided and
disliked mysticism in all its forms, though not
always distinctly rejecting it. Yet ancient
China was full of mystics, ascetic recluses or
jovial tramps, living the simple life in solitary
places — like the dreamers on whom Mencius
inflicted his searching dissertation regarding
the necessity and usefulness of a division of
labour — or earning a livelihood among the
multitude by interpreting dreams and omens,
by pretensions to magical skill, by practising
hypnotism, by working miracles, by holding
communion with all kinds and orders of
spiritual beings. Everywhere man is sur-
rounded by mystery ; everywhere there are
men who believe themselves to be, or are
believed by others to be, endowed with the
faculty of seeing farther than their fellows into
the heart of those things which are hidden
from the ordinary channels of human know-
ledge.

That is the order of ideas which is at the

TAOISM 65

root of Tao Chiao — Taoism. It is not a
purely Chinese phenomenon ; indeed you
have only to go down any back street in
any town in England or Wales and buy a
Zadkiel's Almanack, and you will find that
Taoism of the purest water flourishes in the
midst of our civilization. It flourishes, I may
add, in drawing-rooms as well as in back
streets.

What is special to China is that among
the Chinese Taoism has become rather more
systematized than elsewhere ; in itself it is
just the reflection of the universal human
craving to dabble with the occult.

In China it is everywhere, high and low.
In 1890 there was a very trying spell of hot,
dry weather ; harvest prospects were seriously
endangered. So the Emperor and many
high officials left Peking and proceeded to
a certain temple, whence they escorted in
state to the city a certain miracle-working
t'ieh p'ai-tzu, an oblong slab of iron about
four inches long, that is usually kept in a
well there, but which, on exposure to the
heat of the isun, becomes a weather-com-
pelling talisman. The t'ieh p'ai-tzu worked
its miracle all too thoroughly ; for the next

5

66 RELIGION IN CHINA

six weeks or so rain was continuous and
excessive ; the country was badly flooded.
Thereupon a little land snake, which was
being carried down on some flood-borne
rubbish past Tientsin, was seized upon as an
incarnation of Lung Wang, the Water God.
The snake was lodged in a temple where
the Viceroy of Chihli— the famous Li Hung-
chang— and all the provincial officials visited
it and burnt incense before it till the floods
abated.

Seven years later, in Shashih in Hupei,
during the typhus epidemic of 1897, it was
announced that a great ten-headed crow was
hovering over the town. One of its heads
had been cut off, and wherever the blood
from the severed neck fell on a house, the
inmates were sure to get typhus and die.
Accordingly a day was appointed on which
everybody was to burn fire-crackers and
incense-sticks on his doorstep to propitiate
the bird, and I heard of an instance where
a certain native, who regarded the affair as
superstitious vanity in which he declined to
take part, was served with an immediate
notice to quit from his landlord. And surely
the processions and drum-beating that occur

TAOISM 67

during eclipses of the sun — whereby the sun
is saved from being devoured by the
*' Heavenly dog," however much the extensive
preliminaries required for getting up these
performances may depend on previous study
of the calendar — belong to the same order of
ideas.

Obviously the origins of Taoism are to be

sought in the remotest barbaric past ; it is

no new invention, thousfh every

Mythology. i i • . i

age and place has had its special
variations of the tune. In the course of
time it has developed an immense mythology
— belief in all manner of gods, bogeys, and
demqns : Yii Huang, the Jewelled Emperor
of the Sky, with his court of attendant
divinities; the god of health, whose shrine,
alas ! at Kiukiang, is but a small one beside
the majestic temple dedicated, next door, to
the spirit of small-pox; the Eight Immortals,
a merry crew, about whom so many traditions
are afloat, and whose images are everywhere ;
river spirits and mountain spirits ; star spirits
who guide the influences of the planets and
heavenly bodies ; patron deities of all kinds
of trades and occupation, like the kitchen god
who has to be fed, bamboozled, and treated

68 RELIGION IN CHINA

at New Year, lest he send a too incriminating
report up the chimney ; Lu P'an the god
of carpenters ; the spinning maiden who
resides in the star Vega but meets her lover
across the Milky Way once a year ; local
spirits of all sorts, such as the Ch'eng Huang,
or "tutelary angels," whose temples will be
found in every Chinese town ; T'u-ti, or
earth spirits that watch over the crops ;
marvellous monsters and animals, snakes and
dragons and unicorns, cranes and phoenixes,
tigers and monkeys, magpies, foxes and
tortoises, which symbolize long life or pros-
perity, or announce the birth of sages and
heroes, or convey messages of wondrous
import to mankind, or merely serve as local
or tribal totems ; not forgetting T'an, the
beast of covetousness, whose image is painted
on the walls of yamens, as a warning to their
inmates against the too prevalent weakness
of official personages.

Then there is the belief in magic numbers,
developed into a wonderful system of cate-
^ .^ gories and diagrams, held to be

the summary and crown of all
knowledge and wisdom — an immense play-
ground wherein the imagination of mankind

TAOISM 69

has run riot for a hundred generations, or
however long it may be since the ''dragon-
horse " presented the patriarch Fu Hsi with
the " river plan " of eight diagrams, whose
amplification into sixty-four double diagrams
is the foundation of that enigmatical " Book
of Changes " — the Yi Ching — which Con-
fucius edited and tried to rationalize, but
which neither he, nor Terrien de Lacouperie,
who said it was a glossary of Accadian
words, nor those who say it is a calculation
of the value of tt to five hundred places of
decimals, nor, we imagine, any one else, has
ever succeeded in making much sense of.

Medicine in China has never freed itself
from the empire of Taoist ideas : charms and
incantations ; precious stones or rare herbs •
drugs concocted of every strange, generally
of every nauseous and horrible and terrify-
ing, thing — like the contents of the witches'
caldron in *' Macbeth " — are all mixed up with
suggestion and faith-healing into a hotch-pot
that defies analysis or description.

I myself have not seen much of devil-
possession, but it appears to be a common
belief. Once, in a village near Ichang in
Hupei, I came upon a freshly severed child's

70 RELIGION IN CHINA

head lying in the roadway by some cottages.
Inquiry as to how it came there had to be
conducted with some caution, so as not to
awake suspicion, but a messenger whom I
asked to find out the facts returned with the
tale that the villagers reported that the child,
a boy of some three or four years, had been
rightfully put to death by his parents because
the bewitching, sickening, and death of several
other children in the village had been traced
to a demon which resided in him.

All manner of diseases, mental and physical,
are held to be caused by the presence of evil
spirits, who must be frightened away by noise
and burning of crackers or burnt out by scari-
fying the skin with red-hot copper coins;^ but
the case above related is the only instance of
murder as a penalty for witchcraft that I have
met with.

An amazing collection of rules have been
handed down from of old, and are still
appealed to, for the holding of inquests ; for
example, to determine whether an accused
person is criminally implicated in the death
of a person found dead, place a few drops of
the blood of each in a saucer ; if the drops
coalesce, there is guilt ; if not, it is an

TAOISM 71

evidence of innocence. Somewhat similar
approximations to our old Saxon trial by
ordeal may be found in use to decide whether
relationship in blood exists between two per-
sons, or to substantiate or clear up a charge
of adultery, and in one case I knew of it
was proposed to determine by ordeal which
of several suspected persons was the one on
whom a charge of theft should be fastened.

Then there is the so-called science of
physiognomy, whose adepts profess to inspect
the character and foretell the fortune of their
clients by examining their faces ; we have
something like that in England, too, by the
way. Magic, divination, witchcraft, love
potions and hate potions, fortune-telling, the
reading of horoscopes and dreams, alchemy,
the making of elixirs of life, the reading of
the stars, the study of portents and omens
of all sorts — all this, and much else, is the
stock in trade of the Taoist.

But, above all, he is a professor of Feng-
shui, the art of "Wind and Water" — geo-
y^ ^ . mancy, as some translate the word.
This is an order of ideas only
less deeply ingrained in the Chinese mind
than the worship of ancestors ; indeed, the

72 RELIGION IN CHINA

two run into one another in all manner of
ways. „^ It is assumed that good and evil for-
tune depend in some subtle and mysterious
manner upon the situation of things. Feng-
shui, we are assured, travels in straight lines.
Good Fengshui can be attracted and evil
Fengshui deflected by the conformation of
hills, rivers, and buildings. A little blank
wall, built as a screen opposite the gateway
of a house or courtyard, will protect it from
evil influences coming from that particular
side. It is most important that the walls
and gates of cities should be laid out with
due reference to Fengshui. If the surround-
ing hills do not attract the right Fengshui,
a pagoda may have to be built as a sort of
lightning-conductor to counteract their evil
effects. It is very unlucky to live in a house
so placed that it faces down a cross street.
Should it be necessary to incur the risk of
occupying such a dwelling, the occupier will
be careful to procure a stone from T'aishan
or some other holy mountain and have it in-
serted in his building, facing the unpropitious
roadway, with an inscription : '* The stone
from T'aishan accepts the responsibility."
The objection to tall houses and church

TAOISM 73

spires, so widely prevalent in China, mainly
depends on consideration for Fengshui, which
such constructions are considered liable to
spoil. It is often found in China that the
rents of houses favourably situated in regard
to Fengshui are very considerably higher
than those of otherwise equally desirable
dwellings. A house built on the extreme
top of a hill, although itself perhaps com-
manding the very best of Fengshui, may fail
altogether to find a tenant, for no one will
dare to provoke the resentment of those whose
Fengshui may be damaged by the interposi-
tion of such a building between them and
their accustomed Fengshui outlook. As has
been said, where we should think of drainage
and subsoil, access to railways, a sunny south
aspect, or ** ancient lights,*' a Chinese thinks
of Fengshui.

But the chief function of Fengshui and its
professors is to determine the location and
proper construction of graves ; indeed the
ideas are so much identified that in some
districts the word "Fengshui," or its Fukienese
equivalent *' Hongsui," has come to bear the
meaning of a grave. Where it is believed
that the welfare of descendants depends upon

74 RELIGION IN CHINA

the reverence that they pay to the last rest-
ing-places of their ancestors, it is obvious that
graves must be carefully planned and located
so as to secure, both for their occupants and
for the survivors, every possible comfort and
advantage that favourable Fengshui can afford.
A grave must be in the right place ; it must
be planted with the right kind of trees ; it
must be a work of art whose making calls
for the skilled advice of a professional expert.
I have known a case where about ;^300 was
paid as a fee for selecting a suitable grave-site
for a wealthy family. Indeed, the profession
of a Fengshui Hsien-sheng is not without its
rewards !

It is common knowledge that the Chinese
are apt to be mercilessly victimized by their
professors of Fengshui ; it must involve an
annual outlay of several million pounds ; an
annual loss, through all the otherwise pro-
ductive activities that it renders unproductive,
of millions more. Fengshui, with its attendant
belief in earth dragons, etc., has much to say
about locating springs of water, veins of metal,
mines, etc., generally by way of restraining
all such grubbing in the recesses of mother-
earth, and so has been one of the most

TAOISM 75

potent causes of the opposition to the opening
up of the mineral resources of China and to
the construction of railways.

Yet, fanciful as are the forms in which it
is expressed, it is impossible to regard so deep
a feeling as the Chinese Fengshui sentiment
as merely a piece of self-deception. It must
stand for something deep down in Chinese
consciousness ; and who can doubt what that
something is? Surely it is the sentiment of
the sanctity of old familiar home surround-
ings. The very hills and streams of our little
world have made each of us what we are ;
there is attached to our memories of them a
fund of tender associations which it is sacrilege
to uproot. They lie very near the base of
much that is most inspiring and most per-
manent in human relationships. Without
them we should certainly be something other,
very likely something worse, than we actually
are. None of us like to have the scenes
among which we grew up, still less the places
which are sanctified by the memories of those
who lived before us, wantonly invaded and
defaced by modern utilitarian vulgarities. I
lately came across the suggestion that much
of the British objection to the making of the

76 RELIGION IN CHINA

proposed Channel Tunnel is essentially due to
a belief in Fengshui, though we in England
have not learned to call it by that name.
Britain would, it was maintained, be just as
safe with the tunnel as far as actual danger
of attack goes, but she would lose the pro-
pitious Fengshui that comes of insularity.

The Taoist outlook on life is, in fact, one
common all the world over. You have but
to contemplate the phenomena of Bond Street,
or of Epping Forest on a Bank Holiday, to
see that among us there are persons of all
grades who live upon Taoism. Some gather
sixpences from shop-girls ; some fly to higher
game ; but their methods are much the same,
the temper of mind they minister to is very
similar to those which we find in China.
Now and then we may find it in far more
dignified company. The last time that I was
in Paris I was given a handful of tracts about
Saint Anthony of Padua. From these it
appeared that the Saint undertook the re-
covery of lost property : so many candles, so
many intercessions ; so much expenditure of
money and devotion, and such and such
articles could be restored to their owners ; it
was all scheduled like a tradesman's price list.

TAOISM 77

But again, is it all nonsense? We begin
with those who dare not sit down thirteen to
table ; that is quite on the Taoist level. By
and by we come to those who attach an
importance to points of the compass which
reason quite fails to explain. They would be
very uncomfortable, perhaps doubtful of the
efficacy of worship, in a church whose altar
was elsewhere than at the east end of the
building. And many more would be seriously
ill at ease, even deeply offended, if their dead
were not buried in ground consecrated by the
ministers of their Church and reserved for its
members alone. We may say that these
notions are inconsistent with enlightened faith
in the universality of God, but we cannot mock
them ; they are deep, they are real. Yet
they are in line with the Chinese Fengshui
in its insistence upon the importance of the
situation of things, especially of graves.

An important consequence of the belief in
Fengshui is that permanent burial, in China,
has frequently to be delayed for months or
years, until a satisfactory site has been found
and prepared, leading to the use of immensely
heavy, air-tight coffins, and their storage in
extensive mortuaries in places accounted lucky

78 RELIGION IN CHINA

for this purpose. At Hangchow, for instance,
one sees long rows of such establishments —
regular villages or towns of the dead. In all
parts of China one comes upon encoffined
bodies stored in temples, or, often enough,
merely deposited in open fields, either bricked
over or exposed to the wind and weather, for
years it may be, till the boards rot and the
contents are scattered abroad — awaiting burial !
That such sights should be so common as they
are in a country whose people profess such
veneration for their dead as the Chinese do,
is surely a curious example of the incongruity
of human nature — it is mainly a result of
Fengshui.

All Chinese life is permeated with Taoist

fancy: the symbolism of Chinese art depends

on it ; Chinese poetry is full of it ;

Popular g^ij Chinese les^end and folklore teems

Taoism. <=>

with it. Turn over the pages of such
a collection of fairy tales as the "LiaoChai'' of
P'u Sung-ling. Professor Giles has translated
a good many of them. What a wealth of Taoist
imagination has gone to the creation of the
weird world to which they introduce us !
Holidays and festivals ; the practices observed
at New Year ; the feast of lanterns ; the pro-

TAOISM 7d

cessions to " meet the spring " ; the spring
festival of Ch'ing Ming, when the graves are
decorated; the summer '* dragon boat" re-
gattas ; the mid-autumn celebrations on the
1 5th of the 8th moon ; the parading of the
streets with immense paper dragons — after a
fire, for instance ; the weird parading of the
town ** Ch eng Huang " in a decorated sedan
chair, amid howling and half-naked crowds,
who turn round and kneel in the road at in-
tervals as he passes along streets where every
door is adorned with green branches, during
time of drought — all these and a hundred other
things are unintelligible unless our minds are
accustomed to the Taoist outlook on life.
The Chinese drama is profoundly Taoist ; it
is, perhaps, as organizers of outdoor theatricals
that the Taoist priesthood enjoys its greatest
popularity. Every village has its holy grove
or spring ; its sacred tree decked out with
votive offerings or written prayers ; its ancient
weather-beaten stone fallen from heaven or
handed down since no one knows when ; its
dragon pool or its white deer grotto, round
which cluster the memories of ancient sages
or hermits, or tales of fairy marvel, of healing
or of terror, that it would require many a
volume to tell and explain in full.

80 RELIGION IN CHINA

Such Is popular Taoism. It is an atmo-
sphere that pervades childish and simple
peoples all the world over — their joys and
their fears, their holidays and their daily task.
I think that we have all breathed it sometime,
not only those who have seen it in China.
Survivals of its observances live everywhere,
as decorations round the festivals of far more
cultured creeds. But if we would know their
origin, it is not to the thoughtful and self-
conscious that we should turn, but to the
''pagans," the "heathen," the country folk,
who, roaming over the heath and the wild
wood, longest resisted the voice of civilization
and artificiality. All over the world every
unsophisticated person is often, every person
with a touch of poetry or sentiment in him
is sometimes, at heart a Taoist.

In the midst of Taoism there has arisen —
as in many other forms of mysticism — a Philo-
sophy. Many will tell you that this
pwioBophy of philosophy, or philosophical Taoism,

TaoiBm. . , . ... , . ^

IS the genume, origmal teachmg of
the Taoists ; that the mass of legends and
superstitions appeals to credulity and dabbling
with occult things, are only a depraved aberra-
tion, a later, comparatively modern, corrup-

TAOISM 81

tion of what began in the high and ethereal
doctrines connected with the half-fabulous
name of Lao-tzu — the *'01d Philosopher," whose
chief earthly incarnation is reputed to have
occurred shortly before the time of Confucius.
The two are, indeed, said to have met. They
did not appreciate one another. To Confucius,
Lao-tzu seemed to be a '' dragon " whose flights
no man could foretell. And later there was
Chuang-tzu, with his dissertations on the philo-
sophical quietism of Lieh-tzu ; but whether
Lieh-tzu ever lived, or is only a creation of
Chuang-tzu's dreams, who shall tell ? Have
they not all long since passed to the Islands
of the Genii, or the Western Heaven, where
Hsi-wano;-mu reig^ns over the sunset sum-
mits of K'un Lun ?

To Lao-tzu is attributed a little book, the
*• Tao-Te Ching " — the " Classic of the Way
and of Virtue," or, as we might
SSi.»^°"^^ say, the -Doctrine of the Way."

Every religious teaching has
adopted this metaphor of a Way. Taoism
has made of it its central and deepest con-
ception. In Taoist piety, Tag, the Way, is
that which guides, controls, inspires, precedes,
causes all things — the end and purpose as well

fO 6

o

82 RELIGION IN CHINA

as the means of all existence, the path of
quietude, the Way of Peace.

The opening words of this little treatise
are —

Tao k'o tao, fei ch'ang Tao ; Ming k'o ming, fei ch'ang

Ming.

(The Way that can be expressed is not the Eternal Way ;
The Name that can be named is not the Eternal
Name.)

The closing verse reads —

T'ien chih Tao, li erh pu hai ; Sheng-jen chih Tao, wei
erh pu cheng.

(The Way of God is to bless and not injure ;
The Way of the Holy men is conduct and not con-
troversy.)

There is something in these words that goes
to the root of things, that tells of the limitation
and fallibility of all human expression ; some-
thing, too, that might well serve as a definition
of the true, holy, universal catholic Church, or of
that communion of saints in which Christians
profess to believe.

One is often tempted to see in Taoism
nothing but a riotous chaos of childish super-
stitions ; it introduces us to a word of illusive,
undefinable imagery, where reason often gropes

TAOISM 83

in vain for any foothold of sober common sense ;
yet, after all, there is a higher element. What-
ever its origin may be, or the date of its
production ; whether it be, indeed, the work of
Lao-tzu, or whether, as some contend, it is a
reflection of some Buddhist or early Christian
influence of many centuries later, there is about
the Tao-Te Ching — as about other literature
of its class — a depth of feeling for the intenser
questionings of the human soul that is absent
from the stately classicalism of the Confucian
school. If not of the earth earthy, Confucian-
ism is of the home homely ; of the State
stately ; Taoism at its best soars into a region
of high and ethereal things. Little of it has
truth as the laboured transcript of positive,
external fact — facts and dates are not the sort
of thing that appeal to man in his Taoist mood
— but as poetry it has a truth that goes straight
to the heart of nature and of man.

In course of time Taoism developed a
regular priesthood, whose head, called T'ien
Shih, is a kind of Pope, whose see
Papacy. is at Shang Ch'ing Kung in the Pro-

vince of Kiangsi. Each successive
Pope is believed to be a reincarnation of a
certain Chang Tao-ling, a mystic of the first

84 RELIGION IN CHINA

and second centuries a.d., who, after a life of
marvels, concocted and swallowed a magic
elixir and attained to immortality at the ripe
age of 12 2. At any rate the Papacy seems
to go back authentically to about a.d. 400,
and has had something like its modern impor-
tance ever since the munificent endowment of
the see by the Emperor Sung Chen-Tsung
(a.d. 998 to 1023), that is, for some nine hundred
years.

I have never actually met the Pope of the
Taoists, but when I was at Kiukiang I saw
his sedan chair, draped in crimson and sur-
mounted by a gilded, flame-like ornament,
carried through the streets as he passed by on
his way to visit Peking, where I believe his
influence was exerted to make peace after the
Boxer troubles. The present Pope seems to
be a man of enlightened ideas, who has not
scorned to take a share in certain conferences
or exchanges of views on religious topics in
Shanghai, in connection with Christian and
educational endeavour there.

I cannot leave the subject of Taoism without
a reference to what I may call, for want of a
better word, Sects — guilds or fraternities, at
any rate, bound together by participation in

TAOISM 85

some sort of religious or magical rites.
These may be merely " blood fraternities,"
as among the native tribes of
FrateraitieB. Formosa, where brotherhood is at-
tained by mutual injection of a little
of one another's blood ; or they may be
social clubs of a festive character ; or they
may be organizations very similar to that of
Freemasonry among ourselves : such societies
as the San-ho Hui, or *' Three Harmonies "
Society, appear to be mainly of such a
character ; or they may be essentially gambling
associations, with a little spiritualism and
fortune-telling thrown in, as, for instance,
the Cantonese ''White Pigeon" Society, or
" White Pigeon " Lottery. Again, there are
sects like the Tsai-li Hui, that profess strict
vegetarian, teetotal, and anti-tobacconist prin-
ciples, but are at times suspected of mixing
them up, not only with a good deal of fanati-
cism, but with a certain laxity as to the
observance of the sixth, seventh, and eighth
Commandments, even to be the exciting force
behind popular convulsions and rebellions.
Others are in essence Trades Unions. Thus,
in all parts of China, traders from the Province
of Fukien or who have relations with that

86 KELIGION IN CHINA

province, meet in the temples of T'ien Hou,
the Queen of Heaven, and are under her
patronage. Or again, there is the Ko-lao Hui,
which was so largely implicated in the riots
and risings of 1891 — in its origin an associa-
tion of soldiers' clubs, bound together to agitate
for the redress of certain military grievances,
but gradually developing into a quasi-political,
or perhaps I should say anarchical party,
seriously endangering the internal tranquillity
as well as the foreign relations of the whole
Chinese Empire.

Constantly, in these associations, there is
found a tendency to pass from mere fraternity
or mutual assistance to dark channels of
mystery and intrigue. All these societies are
frowned upon by the civil powers ; most of
them are illegal, many of them are, or at times
have been, unquestionably implicated in highly
criminal practices. They are the happy hunting
ground of every sort of superstitious delusion,
the hotbed and forcing-house of fanaticism,
often of greed, cruelty, and all forms of terrorism
and violence. Again and again, as during
the decline of the Ming Dynasty in the first
half of the seventeenth century, or later, from
about 1797 onwards, so soon as the Manchu

TAOISM 87

Empire showed signs of weakening, almost
continuously to our own times, Chinese society
has been honeycombed by the machinations of
these so-called " Secret Societies." Not only
in China has it been found necessary to repress
them, but in our own colonies, in the Malay
Peninsula, or wherever a Chinese population
has settled they have had to receive the atten-
tions of the police. Their lodges breathe the
sort of atmosphere in which such phenomena
as Boxerism take their rise, where millions of
people become persuaded that by practising
certain kinds of drill they can render them-
selves invulnerable to the weapons of all
enemies, and end by inflicting the miseries of
civil war, ruin, and anarchy on entire provinces,
even in shaking the very foundations of the
Chinese state.

I

•4

I

IV

CHINA

AND

BUDDHISM

CHAPTER IV

CHINA AND BUDDHISM

I HAVE said that Confucianism is of the home
homely ; it belongs to the family, to the
Buddhism Ordered ways of a settled society.
It cultivates the amenities and some
of the elegances of a cultured life ; it finds
its centre round the ancestral shrine, its
piety clusters about the resting-places of the
dead. CTaoism deals more freely with the
mysteries of nature and the soul, with
emotions of poetry and of wonder, of quietism
and of terror. Yet there are wide areas of
human need to which neither of these schools
or tendencies of Chinese thought appeals.
Different as are the moods of the soul to
which they respectively minister, both agree
in assuming personal life, personal advance
ment, the development of natural faculties,
the gratification of personal wishes, to be in
themselves good things ; things perhaps to

01

92 RELIGION IN CHINA

be controlled by regard for others, yet in their
place to be desired and sought after. Both
seek happiness in success — to win something ;
in one case the enjoyment of a well-ordered,
peaceful private and public life, where rela-
tive duties are suitably fulfilled, in the other
the enjoyment of good luck, culminating in
blissful absorption into the ranks of genii
or immortals. To both life, the prolonging
and expanding of life and energy, are good
things, wherein we have a right to find per-
sonal satisfaction. But there is another mood
of the soul : a mood wherein we crave no
longer to live for ourselves, but if at all only
for others ; when we seek to rest and to
forget ; when desires seem vain things and
renunciation the highest virtue ; and wher-
ever this mood prevails neither the Confucian
nor the Taoist outlook suffices. So a third
religion comes in to supplement them — the
imported Indian system of Buddhism.

It is generally believed that the teachings
of the Gautama Buddha, Sakya Muni — Shih-
chia Mu-ni Fo-yeh, as he is called in Chinese
—percolated into China by way of Central
Asia at a very early date. But the first
clear reference to them is the tale, authentic

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 93

or legendary, of the Emperor Han Ming-Ti,
who is alleged to have been visited in the
year a.d. 65 by a dream regarding a golden
image to be found somewhere in the West.
He sent an embassy to discover and bring
to China this golden marvel, and, after years
of wandering, his envoys returned from India
bearing with them the Buddhist Sutra or
Scripture known as the Sutra of the Forty-
two Sections.

Be this as it may, Indian religion, with its
mission priests and its books— and with
abundance of gilded images — come into China ;
but I very much doubt whether the philo-
sophical, speculative, theoretic side of Buddhism
ever greatly affected Chinese thought. What-
ever may be true of individuals, there is little
in the popular Buddhist worship found in
China to connect it with the mental outlook
of our " esoteric Buddhists '* and Theosophists.
Buddhism came as a faith for the multitude,
as a rule of life for the devout, as a conso-
lation, much more than as a philosophy for
the cultured.

The time came when the great Han
Empire declined and perished. For four
hundred years China passed through ages of

94 RELIGION IN CHINA

strife and disruption ; renewal of feudal
anarchy ; division into three kingdoms for
The Dark ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ another ; then
^690^'^'"^ a momentary and nominal union,
broken up by civil dissensions and
barbarian invasions ; a long era of separation
between the North and the South, each con-
vulsed by constant rebellions, revolutions, and
dismemberments, one political system follow-
ing another amid kaleidoscopic changes whose
details it would be wearisome to relate. In
those times of anarchy and confusion literature
and learning languished, general civilization —
the rather hard, formal, matter-of-fact civiliza-
tion of Han times — made little or no progress ;
states and communities rarely crystallized
into that ordered way of life which Con-
fucian society requires and assumes, popu-
lation and wealth were stationary or dwindled
away. War and violence were everywhere, all
old ties were daily broken up ; mankind, after
a great experiment in organized life, seemed
in danger of relapsing into barbarism again.

But there was one refug-e for troubled souls.
A message had come among the Chinese
from India, telling them of renunciation of
all the vain pageantries of this world : to

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 96

retire into the forest glades ; to live there a

life of pious meditation, of celibacy ; to don the

rustic erarb of a monk ; to shave

Monasticism. ^

The ascetic the head ; to flee from the cares

life. ' . ,

of that public life whose ambitions
led only to bitterness, of that family life that
might so easily become a scene of sorrow
and bereavement ; to forget name and
race and personality ; to subdue all lusts and
earthly passions, whether of love or hate,
all desires, all selfish wishes ; to leave the
village where fire and bloodshed were so
often the reward of toil ; to abstain from the
taking of all life, animal life as well as human
life ; to chant the liturgies of the strange
Indian ritual till the mind was benumbed by
repetition of sounds ; finally, when death
brought perfect release from the terrors and
hazards of this sad and sin-stained world,
not to harbour a mass of fleshly corruption
in a pompous grave as the Confucianists did,
but to commit this corruptible body to the
purifying flames in the expectation that the
soul would pass on one stage farther in its
long journey of transmigrations to the Nirvana
of Buddhahood, to the final absorption where
Self ceases to exist.

96 RELIGION IN CHINA

To the active and strong Buddhism offered M
travel and a life of adventure as a missionary
all over Asia. To the sinful it held out the
prospects of buying pardon by works of piety,
or threatened the penalties of a dread under-
world of purgatory, the judgment-seat of
Yen-Wu (Yama), the hill of knives, the
oflowino: column of fire, the wheel of the law
whose turning causes bad men to be re-
incarnated as beasts ; to the multitude the
glamour of splendid services, images and
incense, or the excitements of popular pil-
grimages to hallowed, miracle-working shrines,
the amusement of accumulating merit by M
feeding, catching, and releasing again the ■
immense, fat carp with black and golden "
scales, kept stocked for the purpose in the
temple pond : to all, a communion of inward
tranquillity unshaken by the storms either of
worldly greatness or worldly failure—peace
to the weary ; sainthood to the devout lovers
of the gentle Buddha and his law.

Why should men strive and wrangle,
wearying their bodies and hardening their
souls, in the vain pursuit of gain or of
ambition? Does not spring still clothe the
hills in her azalea carpet of crimson and

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 97

gold, and was ever emperor arrayed in glory-
such as hers? Why need we toil through
the heat of summer, when overhead the
squirrels frolic on the pine boughs and at
our feet are limpid streams, along whose
margin the lizards disport themselves happily
in the chequered sunshine ? Can the hustling
life of cities yield such wine and such
delicacies as they enjoy ? When the autumn
air is heavy with the fragrance of the kuei-
hua, and the woods and fields yield their
ripened fruits, who would leave the quiet of
a rustic life to dwell in the courts of kings ?
What do they know of the fairyland of
winter whose eyes are not familiar with
the spotless snow of untrodden mountains,
whose ears are not filled with the rude music
of the forest storm ? To the simple and
humble of heart all nature and all seasons
spoke of Buddha and of peace.

Wherever a haunted grove evoked memo-
ries of the storied past, there was built a
temple or monastery whose bell called the
faithful to prayer. There the gong sounded
as the first grey of morning lighted the
wraiths of mist among the cryptomerias,
and anon the droning of chants that might

7

98 RELIGION IN CHINA

be taken for gregorian chants echoed across
the valley as sunlight gleamed on the feathery
bamboos, the shamu, the spreading banyan of
the south, or the cypress and white pine
of some northern sanctuary. Everywhere
pagodas arose to enshrine the relics of
Gautama and his saints. The names and
images of Buddha and the Bodhisattvas
were carved on every grey cliff; hundreds
of them flew to Hangchow from the western
shores of sunset and lodged themselves
miraculously in the niches of the rocks,
where you may see them to this day ; the
glory of Buddha was made visible in the
sunset reflections round the cloud-capped
summit of Omei, and on many another
mountain, while by the waves and islands
of the sea the surges beating on the shores
of P'uto droned their accompaniment to the
never-ending chorus of monkish prayer and
praise. In all the wild and lonely haunts of
the birds and beasts, in the Temple of the
"Purple Cloud," on the rock of the "Great
Orphan," standing alone on the waters of
the Foyang Lake, men came to live at one
with nature and their own souls.

In such retreats, age after age, the

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 99

faithful have been found willing to devote
their lives to the practice of the Buddhist
rule of life, after a period of instruction and
preparation to endure the torture of the
ordination service which is to part them for
ever from the world. Kneeling in rows
before the altar, litde cones of inflammable
powder (moxa), generally nine in number, but
sometimes twelve or more, are placed upon
their newly shaven heads, and, as each vow
is pronounced, of obedience, poverty, chastity,
renunciation of kith and kin, abstinence from
flesh, etc., each of these cones is successively
set alight to brand that promise ineffaceably
upon the person of the devotee. At first
the pain is endured in stoic silence, but with
each succeeding burning it becomes more and
more necessary to drown the cries of the
agonized and fainting future monks and nuns
under the beating of drums and gongs and
singing of loud chants by the attendant
ministers of this weird solemnity.

The assertion is sometimes heard that the
Buddhist priesthood is largely recruited from
criminals, outlaws, and social failures. Per-
haps it may be so. Once a Buddhist monk
told me his life-history, and why he had

100 RELIGION IN CHINA

taken the vows. It was in 1896, at a small
temple dependent- upon the great T'ien Mu
Shan monastery, on the border between
Chekiang and Anhui, a wild and beautiful
region of lofty mountains, clothed in magni-
ficent cryptomeria forests, perhaps more
frequented in old days than now. For,
though the place is a resort of pilgrims at
stated seasons, the whole neighbourhood had
been so ravaged during the T'aip'ing devasta-
tion that even then, in 1896, after nearly
forty years, all the surrounding villages were
in ruins, the roads mostly choked with jungle,
and so infested with robbers that innkeepers
kept spears lashed to the bedsteads in their
guest rooms for the use of travellers who
should pass the night in their humble hostel-
ries. This monk told me that, twenty-six
years before, he had lived "in the world,"
as a young man of good family and prospects,
somewhere in Kiangsi, but that, unfortunately,
he had had a violent altercation with the
father of a young lady of those parts to
whom he was betrothed. The result was
that the family broke off relations with him,
and he became a monk, living ever since
in various places, which he described, and

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 101

eventually drifting to T'ien Mu Shan. The
monastic life had, he said, this advantage —
that there were always superiors to order
him where to go and what to do instead
of leaving him to the risks of following his
own will

I have seen this religion in many provinces,
in Fukien, in Chekiang, in Anhui, in Hupei,
in Kiangsi, in Shantung, in Manchuria, on the
hills behind Peking. I have breathed the air
of it in scores of villages, among a rustic,
simple people, where thirty miles is reckoned
a long day's journey, and I know that in such
surroundings it is a beautiful and real faith,
supplying human needs. I have also seen it
in great popular pilgrim centres in the environs
of great cities, real still to many of the folk
who come, yet mixed and tainted with mendi-
cancy, impudence, tawdriness, and sham, for
the true delicacy of it all is stifled in the
bustle of a crowded, active world. It is not
to be learnt from books — though who can
deny that the works of F^ielding Hall, for
instance, reveal the very soul of the people
of Burma and breathe the spirit of true
Buddhism ? — but in the shadow of its own
sanctuaries, in the silence of the hills.

102 RELIGION IN CHINA

So it grew all through those dark and

troublous times from the fall of the Han,

A.D. loo, to the reunion of China

The Patri-
archate, under the Sui Dynasty in a.d. £;qo —

A.D. 526-730. • n • i , r i

especially m the last century of that
time, the age when Bodhidarma, the twenty-
eighth and last Indian patriarch of the Church,
transferred the patriarchate to Chinese shores
and engaged in pious controversy with the
Monk-Emperor, Wu-Ti of the Liang Dynasty,
about the respective merits of faith and
works, concluding that Buddha is not to be
learned from books, but must be sought by
every man in his own heart. The Kingdom
of Heaven, as another than Bodhidarma
teaches, is within you.

From 526 to 730 the patriarchate of the
northern Buddhist Church, the Buddhism of
the *' Greater Conveyance" — or Mahayana, as
it is called, to distinguish it from the purer
more primitive, and more speculative Budd-
hism of Southern Asia — resided in China, till
the last of the six Chinese patriarchs died,
leaving the begging bowl of Bodhidarma to
be burnt with his ashes, and ending what
we may regard as the times of the Chinese
saints.

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 103

China never became Buddhist in the sense
of rejecting other creeds in favour of an
exclusive acceptance of Buddhism.
SudThism^ The Church sometimes had per-
secutions to endure, and was at
other times in favour with the powers of this
world, but it never rose to the sort of political
dominance that fell to the lot of Christianity.
It combined with existing systems, even
with Confucianism, to which its ideals appear
so wholly 'opposite. To the stricter Confucian
formalist the Buddhist life has always seemed
an evasion and denial of those social duties,
that filial service of the living and the
dead, which is his notion of morality. To
him the nature of man is radically good ; to
the Buddhist, the whole world of human
activity is a scene of evil from which he
seeks salvation in flight. What could Budd-
hism have to say to the famous dictum of
Mencius, that of all forms of impiety the
most impious is to die without leaving
descendants ? Indeed all that is distinctive
of Buddhism was repugnant to the Confucian
mind. The tonsure of the priests was a
defacement of the body inherited from our
ancestors ; for ages the commonest form of

104 RELIGION IN CHINA

persecution was to compel monks and nuns
to return to the world and let their hair
grow ; vegetarianism involved not only a
flagrant defiance of national custom but im-
pugned the animal sacrifices prescribed in
Confucian books ; celibacy was a denial of
filial gratitude and social duty ; the chanting
and intoning of Sanscrit sutras was a detest-
able offence to people so proud of their
native language and literature as the Chinese.
Yet Buddhism triumphed over all these
obstacles and became, to a degree which
Confucianism never attained, the common
religious atmosphere of the masses of the
Chinese people.

With Taoism the Buddhist Church com-
bined in all manner of ways, each borrow-
ing or imitating countless features from the
other, so that their border-line has become
very hard to define. But Buddhism never
dreamed of supplanting or overthrowing local
creeds or observances ; at the most it some-
times softened and humanized them, as for
example when we find it stated that the
Buddhist leanings of Liang Wu-Ti fostered
the substitution of paper images for use at
funerals where animals had been sacrificed of

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 105

old. Many were the observances which it
took as its own, such as the practice of
sacrificing in autumn or late summer to the
souls of those whose bodies are lost or un-
buried, floating little paper boats containing
oil and a lighted wick along the rivers to
light the wandering ghosts upon their way.

While imposing strict vegetarianism on its
priesthood and commending abstinence from

flesh as a merit in all, the Buddhist
tar^anism. missionaries never succeeded in

making, perhaps never attempted
to make, the Chinese lay population copy
the devotees of a religious life in regarding
vegetarianism as an obligation. Even in
Burma and Siam, perhaps in Ceylon, a
Buddhism far stricter than that of China — a
Buddhism that has undertaken, as Chinese
Buddhism has never done, the function of
the education of the young — is found con-
sistent with plentiful indulgence in fish diet ;
in South China poultry, eggs, and pork,
besides fish of all sorts, are partaken of
freely and universally ; North China is a
country where the use of flesh food is only
limited by the poverty of the people, though it
is so far Buddhist in sentiment that a few weeks

106 RELIGION IN CHINA

of drought or the imminence of some danger
suffice to cause the authorities to proclaim a
fast during which the slaughtering of pigs
and cattle is forbidden ; Mongolia, of course,
is a country without agriculture, whose scat-
tered tribes depend wholly on their flocks.
Yet it is more Buddhist than any of the
regular provinces of China. Though there
is a distinct aversion among all except
Mahometans against eating the ploughing ox,
the servant of man, vegetarianism is, in fact,
in Eastern Asia, apart from priesthoods and
small sects or fraternities, a matter of climate
much more than of religion, and flesh-eating
steadily increases as we proceed from the
fruitful luxuriance of the Tropics to the arid
steppes and pasture-lands of the North.

The Buddhist religion had already become
a complicated system of ritual and idol wor-
ship before it reached China. The age of
the great doctrinal councils, of Asoka and
the Indian lawgivers and creed-makers, was
long since past ; indeed in its native Indian
home Buddhism was sinking under a revival
of the more ancient Hinduist or Brahmanist
faiths which it had at first sought to reform.
It was already a mixture of many things,

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 107

and in China it had Httle difficulty in mingling
into its structure many more. Yet in all its
endless variations it remained fairly faithful
to its underlying conception of an ascetic
withdrawal from the world, of a contemplative
life devoted to the worship of Buddha and
his saints.

Above all the Buddhas, past, present, and

to come ; above the eighteen Lohans (Arhats)

and the countless P'usas (Bodhi-

Worshipof . . ^, .

Kuanyin sattvas), One figure rises m Chma

P'usa. . _ 1 . 1

to a pre-emmence of w^orship — that
of Kuanyin P'usa, the Goddess of Mercy.
Her image is in every shrine, but, unlike other
images which sit, like emperors, facing the
genial south, or like attendants on the great,
flank the eastern and western walls, she, and
she alone, stands with her face turned north-
wards contemplating the distresses of the
cold world. In one of her personations she
is Matsu, the patroness of fishermen and
mariners ; in another she is T'ien Hou, the
Queen of Heaven ; in another, Kuanyin of
the Thousand Arms, her deeds of charity
extend to all the world ; in countless images
as Fo-Mu, the Buddha Mother, she carries a
child in her arms ; as Pai-i Ta-shih, the Great

108 RELIGION IN CHINA

White-robed Lady, otherwise called Tzu-sun
Niang-niang, the Mother of Offspring, she
fulfils the hopes of expectant mothers and
presides over the cradle of infancy ; in her own
name, as I saw the legend acted in a play
at Shanghai, she was the daughter of a king,
but, pitying the sorrows of the toiling world,
voluntarily renounced her rank, endured every
extremity of pain and deprivation, even to
visiting the dark prisons of Hell, and then
returned to convert and console mankind.

Just as in the Christian Church the adora-
tion of the Virgin Mother of Christ — the
Madonna, the Theotokos, the Bogoroditsa —
came to overshadow all other forms of piety,
so in China did the figure of Kuanyin come to
occupy the place of honour among all popular
objects of worship. Nor did she remain
wholly Buddhist, for her image is found in
many Taoist temples ; as T'ien Hou, she is
the counterpart of the distinctly Taoist
divinity Yii Huang, the Sovereign of the
Sky. Nor is her sex exclusively feminine,
for the learned say that she was originally
a male divinity whose gender was ignorantly
confounded by the superstition of the vulgar,
while others identify her with Avalokiteshvara,

CHINA AND BUDDHISM 109

a name of Samana, the **looking-down god"
who dwells on Adam's Peak in Ceylon, and
Sumana ao^ain with some Socotran or East
African object of worship.

But surely we need not look so far.
Whether we turn to Connemaira or to Russia
or to China — anywhere from Cadiz to
Kamchatka, shall we not find that " Ch'u ch'u
yu Fo-yeh ; Chia chia yu Kuanyin " ('* Every
place has its Buddha ; every home has its
Kuanyin ").

China owes to the Indian faith the enrich-
ment of its language by a whole vocabulary
of religious terms ; in art, it Is but yesterday
that we all supposed that Chinese art, with
its feeling for the wilder aspects of nature so
much earlier developed than among ' ourselves,
was wholly a product of Buddhism, and, if
this opinion needs qualifying in detail, the
fact that art in China is largely of Buddhist
inspiration remains unshaken. Many other
things too came with Buddhism Into China,
surely not least a gentler and humaner moral
code. Little as the pride of Chinese scholars
is inclined to admit it, an Immense change
came over the land through its permeation
by doctrines that did for China almost what

110 RELIGION IN CHINA

Christianity, in the same ages, was doing for
the West.

Buddhism comes to man as a consolation,
bringing rest from anxious labour and care.
It takes him out of himself; out of the petty
grinding worry of material things ; it purifies,
uplifts, softens, and refreshes. Yet the world
of duty is still with us, after all. Rest is not
an end in itself but a means only ; its purpose
is to recuperate and fit us with strength to
fight to-morrow's battles. Though we are
weary and heavy laden to-day, we cannot
safely shirk our due share of burden. What-
ever monastic piety may have urged either in
the East or in the West, strength for further
effort, for further thought, for wider usefulness
is our greater and more lasting need. Man
needs seasons of rest for his soul as for his
body, yet, let him once make that need an
excuse for mental sloth, or justify omission
to explore all paths and hold fast what is good,
then |the call of monasticism is no voice of
true religion, but a wile that tempts to yield
up his manhood, forgetting that they who
wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength,
that they shall mount upon wings like eagles,
shall run and not be weary, shall walk and
not faint.

THE

MINGLING
AND DECAY
OF FAITH

CHAPTER V

THE MINGLING AND DECAY OF FAITH

Prayer and fasting, conviction of sin, con-
version, renunciation of the world, salvation
of the soul, an afterworld of re-

Resemblances

between ward and punishment ; temples and

Buddhism . -i •

and images, pilgrimages and penances,

tonsure and beads, candles and in-
cense, gorgeous vestments, shrines and relics,
the celibacy of the priesthood ; monasteries and
nunneries, asceticism, hermits, monks and nuns;
the singing of liturgical services very suggestive
of the service of the Mass, the invocation of
saints, the worship of a Mother and Child : can
we not see that this is in essence the same
kind of religion, that if religion be a thing
of the spirit and not of the name invoked
only, it is the same religion as prevailed
universally in the same stage of society, as
still largely prevails among ourselves ? Its
outward forms suggest the forms of Christian

8 113

114 RELIGION IN CHINA

worship ; its inward, spiritual experiences are
among those with which Christians of all ages
have been familiar. To the early mission-
aries of the Roman Church the resemblances
seemed to be the work of the very Spirit
of Evil — a monstrous mockery, mimicking
every detail of the Christian faith and ritual.
We need not follow them in any such
theory. Human nature is human nature
everywhere, and meets the same needs by
the same devices ; it is out of the heart of
man that both Buddhism and Catholicism
arose.

And it may well be that there is a closer,

even an organic connection also. For, during

the ages of the Patriarchate, of the

Cbina under

the rang T'ang Dynasty (a.d. 624 to 907),
to Christian, wherein Chinese Buddhism mostly

Mahometan, i i i • • i •

and other developed its cosmogonies and its

influences. i . ^i . • r • i r

worship, China was in fairly frequent
and intimate contact with many influences from
Western Asia. The regions of Turkestan and
Kashgaria were under Chinese rule, and, as
is shown in Professor Stein's work ''The Sand-
buried Cities of Khotan," these countries, now
a desert wilderness, were, down to about the
year 790, and had been for four or five

MINGLING AND DECAY OF FAITH 115

centuries, the seat of a numerous, mainly
Buddhist, population, whose art shows a
curious mingling of Indian, Chinese, and
Greek, or Graeco-Bactrian forms. Through
that region Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, like
Fa Hsien about a.d. 400 and Hsiian Ts'ang
about A.D. 600, passed on their journeyings
to India, just as Indian monks had passed to
China in older and darker times.

Along the same road came other monks
and teachers : Persians who brought the
doctrines of Zoroaster ; Nestorian Christians
like the Syrian Bishop, Alopun, whose tenets
and history from their first arrival in 635 to
near the end of the eighth century are recorded
on the famous inscribed stone monument,
erected in 780 and still extant at Hsian.
These founded communities of whose history
we know all too little, though some were
still in existence when Marco Polo visited
China five hundred years later. Jews also
came, whose synagogue was established at
K'aifeng in Honan, and of whom a tiny
remnant still remains unabsorbed in the same
site to-day. All these had their influence
on China ; most of them became merged in
the Buddhist priesthood, but they did not

116 RELIGION IN CHINA

leave It, or its doctrines and practices,
unaltered.

After these came the Mahometans, to

whom the Chinese world, with Its infinite

variety of local associations, must have seemed

less congenial. In Turkestan, indeed, where,

as in Arabia, the vastness of the mountains

and deserts that surround the Roof of the

World forms a fitting setting to draw the

thoughts of men to contemplate the unity

and unapproachable majesty of the all-ruling

Allah, Mahometanism prevailed over older

faiths, and Buddhism there perished utterly.

But in China itself Its reception was colder.

The Mahometans no doubt penetrated far

and wide, partly of their own will, partly by

the planting of colonies of Turkish prisoners

of war in many parts of the Empire, partly

again through the operations of Arab sailors

and traders who came by sea to various

ports on the Chinese coast, so that at the

present day there are Mahometan communities

in most Chinese cities, and portions of the

country where they constitute a considerable

percentage of the people — perhaps in all

some twenty millions. They did their part

in modifying the general body of Chinese

MINGLING AND DECAY OF FAITH 117

belief, though never amalgamating entirely
with their '* Kaffir" neighbours, but living
a life apart, monopolizing certain trades and
occupations somewhat as the Jews do in
many parts of Europe.

In estimating the influence of Mahomet-
anism upon China we have to take into
account the fact that, both in the T'ang age
and later, it was the rise of warlike Mussal-
man States in Central Asia that brought
intercourse between China and both the
Indian and the Western worlds to a close.
For, when all is said, China and Mahomet-
anism have never been on good terms with
one another — they have too little in common.
With India, with the old pagan Europe of
the classical past, or with the Europe of the
Middle Ages, the Chinese mind has sympathy
and many points of contact ; but it has found
Mahometanism an indigestible thing, and
this antipathy must be reckoned with if we
would understand the exceeding bitterness of
the wars of rebellion and repression of which
the Mahometan provinces of the Chinese
Empire have so frequently been the scene.

We usually think of the T'ang period as
the golden age of Chinese poetry ; latterly we

118 RELIGION IN CHINA

have come to realize that it was also the age

of the best Chinese painting and sculpture.

But it was also an ap^e of faith,

The age of ^ , ,

saints sue- an acre when men busied their

ceeded bv

tueageof minds with all kinds of doctrines

parasites. i i • i

about the unseen world, with
creeds and rituals, with temples and with
priests. Yet somehow with this age of faith
— of many faiths — the older, simpler age of
saintly zeal passes away.

We have, for one thing, come to a period
of commerce and large towns. In the simple,
rural surroundings to which it is congenial,
Buddhism may remain pure and childlike, a
beautiful, attractive, idealized thing. But it
is a system incapable of transplantation into
mature, elaborate, active civilization. There
it can only turn into idolatry, idle repetition,
mockery, spiritual petrifaction, decay, corrup-
tion, death of the soul. Nor is this true only
of Buddhism ; in its proper time and place the
world of fancy and imagination that I have
tried to picture in the chapter on Taoism is
a natural and beneficent thing. As fairy tales
are the appropriate mental food for the
years of childhood, so does the shifting
imagery of Taoist wonder tales form the

MINGLING AND DECAY OF FAITH 119

natural atmosphere of communities in the
infancy of their growth, before positive know-
ledge has grown to be a sufficient guide for
man's expanding reason. If I believe that
a little, friendly T'u-ti spirit watches over my
fields, and makes my grain sprout and ripen
according as I burn incense-sticks before
his image, and that my neighbour across the
brook is helped or hindered by another little
T'u-ti spirit, we may call this a very inade-
quate conception of the ways of God and
Nature, but in its time and place it is the
only possible one, and an inevitable step in
the upward growth of the mind. But such
a faith belongs to the childhood of society ;
the fairy world to which such conceptions are
appropriate passes as men come to riper
development ; the form of it cannot be pre-
served without intellectual and moral degra-
dation.

Yet men cling everywhere to the passing
forms of their religion. Instead of seeking
new interpretations more in harmony with
their new knowledge and new experience, they
simply enshrine the old in gorgeous trappings.
We come to a period when religion is no longer
simple and pure, an age of endless speculation

120 RELIGION IN CHINA

and of works of piety. Temples and pagodas
and religious foundations of all sorts arise on
every side. Even the old wonder tales put
on an artificial, literary garb. Before long
we shall come to the time when that amazing
compendium, or epic as we may call it, of
Chinese marvel lore, the ** Hsi Yu Chi " — the
'' Wanderings in the West " — could be written
and taken for a genuine account of travel in
distant countries. Nor did the elaborating
spirit of the age touch popular mythology only ;
it turned history itself into a world of literary
romance, working up the annals of the " Three
Kingdom" period, a.d. 190 to 260, into a kind
of Arthurian Cycle, and covering even the
memory of Confucius with weird miracle
leo^ends such as we find enshrined in the sixth-
century picture-book called *' The Footsteps of
the Sage." Such a period not only elaborates
existing superstitions into works of art, it
touches nothing without dressing it up in
supernatural colours.

Services become splendid and elaborate ;
but the ministers of religion tend to become
parasites. In the ninth century we find no less
than five Chinese emperors, one after another,
dying poisoned by indulgence in magic elixirs,

MINGLING AND DECAY OF FAITH 121

administered by Taoist soothsayers on whom
they had pinned their faith. A century later
we have an instance of an emperor — a sove-
reign of one of the short, ephemeral dynasties
that battled for a precarious sway in part of the
dominions that had lately borne allegiance to
the great House of T'ang — proclaiming the
mountain T'aishan the patron of his throne.
Mount T'aishan being conceived to be a being-
capable of having children, to whom popular
superstition gave names, the eldest son of
T'aishan was gravely declared to be Com-
mander-in-chief of the Imperial Army. Then,
if T'aishan had sons, could not these sons
marry and have children in their turn ? So it
was announced that the son of T'aishan had
espoused a certain goddess, and that the off-
spring of their union was a daughter — the
goddess P'i-hsia Yiian-chiin. And before
another hundred years had elapsed we find,
early in the eleventh century, the worship of
T'aishan patronized and popularized by yet
another emperor (the same Sung Chen-Tsung
whose endowments enriched the Taoist Papacy
in Kiangsi), the ancient temples there enor-
mously enlarged and magnificently restored,
for a " Heavenly Decree " written on yellow

122 RELIGION IN CHINA

silk had floated down from the sky, and all the
Court followed their sovereign on a pilgrimage
to do honour to the wonder. All this in the
year 1008 — the very time when, as we shall
see in the next chapter, the intelligence of
China was turning to quite other ideas.

Thus P'i-hsia Yuan-chun became the god-
dess in whose honour the principal temple on
the sacred summit of T'aishan was dedicated.
And so it remains to this day — to such a
degree that in that particular part of Shantung
the cult of P'i-hsia Ylian-chiin, the T'ien Nai-
nai, or '' Nurse of Heaven," as she is called,
has almost displaced the worship of Kuanyin
herself. Thither, every year, about February,
thousands and tens of thousands of pilgrims
make their way, through the long winter
nights, mostly on foot, some devoutly on their
knees, a few comfortably in sedan chairs hired
from an exclusive guild of local chair-bearers,
up the steep windings of that mountain road,
to this loftiest of Chinese shrines that looks
down from a height of 5,000 feet upon the
plains of Lu. There, as the beams of the
rising sun light up the neighbouring temples of
Yii Huang, Emperor of the Skies, and of Con-
fucius (for Confucius is represented at T'aishan,

MINGLING AND DECAY OF FAITH 123

not, as usually, by a simple inscribed tablet, but
visibly in a gaudily decked image, behind an
altar), and the stern, square-faced monolith
erected on the mountain-top by the terrible
Ts'in Shih Huang-ti, the pilgrims flock to the
sanctuary of the Heavenly Nurse and fling
their votive offerinors throug^h the bars of the
grating which shields her from profane contact.
Evidently, once begun, the process of god-
making might expand indefinitely, and with it

the wealth and consideration enjoyed
of S?£ion! ^y their priests and priestesses. But

not their piety, for religion was be-
coming a trade. Pushed to its extremes, Con-
fucianism may become a soul-crushing domestic
and social tyranny ; Taoism a senseless con-
glomeration of conjuring tricks and dri veiling-
superstition ; Buddhism a dead weight of
monastic grovelling utterly fatal to the con-
tinued existence of society in any shape,
sacrificing all human progress to the support
of a crowd of idle, parasitical, mendicant monks
and nuns. And, in such a state of affairs, does
not our knowledo^e of human nature tell us
what those monks and nuns will become ?
The tender piety of the older days of saint-
hood and sincerity has all evaporated ; we are

124 RELIGION IN CHINA

in a mephltic atmosphere of form and sensuous
appeal where the old religion of the heart, in
its simple purity, cannot breathe ; we are pre-
paring for that stage in which a Provincial
Governor could report to the Throne that his
province was, indeed, full of nunneries, but that
the word "nunnery" had come to be used in
popular talk as a synonym for a house of
ill-fame, whose inmates were recruited by
systematic and wholesale kidnapping.

Lazy, sensual, vicious, cruel, ignorant,
greedy, cunning, murderous, harbourers of
robbers and prostitutes, deluders of the
ignorant, jugglers, grinders of the faces of
the poor, beasts of darkness, hypocrites, and
parasites. . . . But we all know that story of
the corruption of high ideals ; it is not peculiar
to Chinese Buddhism —

'Tis too much proved that with devotion's visage
And pious actions we do sugar o'er
The devil himself. ...

It came in China just as it has sometimes
come in Europe, and its phenomena were just
the same.

You have, I dare say, considered the deriva-
tion of the word " hocus pocus," how the

MINGLING AND DECAY OF FAITH 125

holiest words of the Christian Eucharistic
service, *' hoc est corpus " — this is the very-
body of God made flesh — were perverted into
**hoc est porcus," and used as a term of
opprobrium indicating all vileness and deceit.
Such is the depth of the hatred and contempt
which men pour out upon that which once
they held to be holy, when they find it used
for their enslavement and betrayal.

Buddhism and Taoism had both turned
into hocus pocus. They were, as other expres-
sions of religion nearer to us have been, rightly
and deservedly exposed to the indignant
disgust of all men with eyes to see the works
of their devotees, with hearts to feel for the
wrongs of their victims, with minds to reason
about the extravag^ances of their teachino;.
It is because one good custom, petrified into
a form and a fetter, putrified into the rotting
relic of its former self, might corrupt the
world, that God, in each succeeding age, must
fulfil Himself in many ways.

VI

THE

CONFUCIAN
RENAISSANCE

\

CHAPTER VI

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE

Thus the ground was prepared for the next
stage of our story, the revulsion of the con-
science and intelllo^ence of the

Rationalistic , ^ .

movement of Chinese people towards a rational-

the tenth and ... . -

fouowing istic interpretation of nature and

centuries. r ^ i • i i • i

of duty which begins to be
apparent In the tenth century and bears its
richest fruit In the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries.

In A.D. 907 the great Tang Dynasty had
gone — very much as the Han had gone seven
hundred years before — overborne by the
usurpations of dowagers, harem women and
their favourites, eunuchs and Turkish adven-
turers ; Its credit destroyed by the charlatans
and Impostors who had so long abused the
confidence of the weak but generally well-
meaning successors, who unworthily filled the
throne of the great T al-Tsung ; its power in

9 129

130 RELIGION IN CHINA

the provinces shattered both by the success
of local governors in asserting claims to
hereditary and all but independent rule, and
by devastating civil wars in which the Imperial
cause, if defended at all, owed such transient
support as it obtained to the prowess of
Tartar and Turkish champions ; and there
came an age of confusions and divisions, a
shifting panorama of rivalries and local and
personal ambitions that fills the sixty years
called in histories of China the time of the
Five Short Dynasties and the Twelve
Independent States.

In general it was a time of weakness and
of violence, but we can dimly trace the
beginnings of a worthier state of things.
Some of the local rulers — the kings of Wu-
Yiieh, for instance, who made Hangchow a
great and splendid city, and constructed the
famous sea-wall to restrain the tides of the
Ch'ient'ang Estuary — were promoters of
civilization and orderly progress Printing,
too, had been invented, or, to be accurate,
applied to the production of books, about 950 ;
and with printing came a vast multiplication
of books so soon as the Sung Dynasty (960
to 1 1 27 in all China, and to 1279 in the South)

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 131

had restored some degree of unity and order
to the land. Among the books of which
editions appeared were the ancient rituals
of classical or pre-classical times, now digested
into orderly codes of customary law, the
direct parents of the modern institutional
works by which Chinese statesmanship and
jurisprudence is guided to this day. Among
them too were the books of the Confucian
Canon, the Book of Odes, the History Classic,
the Spring and Autumn Chronicle, the Lun
Y(i or Sayings of the Sage, the Great
Learning, the Doctrine of the Middle
Wisdom, the Book of Mencius.

In the contemplation of these things China
turned away from the spinning of elaborate
mythologies, from the ravings of delusive
promisers of miracles, from the mumblings of
monks— from all those ideals, whethe'r of
sainthood reached by ascetic devotion and
meditation, or of attaining magic powers
beyond the human, with which the nation
had so long been unprofitably busied ; ideals
which, however widely they might differ from
one another, agreed in belittling and neglecting
the humdrum cares and duties of social
relationships and ordinary daily life. And

132 RELIGION IN CHINA

as many another nation has done in like case,
China thought by restoring the uncontaminated
beliefs and practices of her own past to
provide herself with a more reasonable and
more satisfying creed.

From the tenth to the thirteenth century,
mainly under the dynasty of the Sung
emperors, China passed through the phase
of the Confucian Renaissance. To those
times the return to the teachings of the Sages
was not only a renewal of moral enthusiasm —
it was a cleansing and cooling draught much
needed to clear away the intoxicating vapours
of alchemy and mystical superstition, of
mummery and imposture. It was altogether
a manlier thing. China had passed out of
her childhood ; and in politics, in social
organization, in literature, in art, and in
religion seemed determined to put away
childish things.

The old literature, so pure and stately, so

confidently manly, so free from all juggling

with supernatural and unknowable

Dynasty things, was Studied and commented

revival of , .

Confucian upon anew, erected mto a system

by which all life was henceforth to

be guided, at least among the educated, ruling

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 133

section of Chinese society. Yet the new,
mature Confucianism that emerged — that, for
instance, which we find in the writings of Chu
Hsi (i 140-1200), the greatest of the Sung
schoolmen, whose commentaries later ages
have learnt by heart as almost of equal
authority with the classic texts themselves — is
not altogether the old. Just as Confucius
himself had dreamed that he was merely a
transmitter, so they, to whom Confucius and
Mencius were patriarchs of a remote and hoary
antiquity, no doubt regarded themselves only
as restorers and explainers of an older and
purer teaching. But in fact they altered it.
Not consciously or intentionally, but inevit-
ably. They insisted on seeing system where
there had been no system. They compared
and collated texts, they made the interpreta-
tions of those texts agree with one another
and with their own preconceived notions and
theories of what ought to have been. Their
minds were filled with a picture, a highly
idealized picture, of the past. They trans-
ferred a mass of matter that had been inherited
from a rude and primitive age to an advanced
and far more mature society. In a word, their
sense of historical perspective was pretty much

134 RELIGION IN CHINA

that which some modern systematic theologians
among ourselves seem to possess when they
approach the critical problems presented by
the Bible.

An immense literary output marks the
activity of this time of revival of learhing.
Turning away, as they did, from all
pMios^ophy anthropomorphic conceptions, in their
achoilrJ!''^ disgust at the idolatrous extrava-
gances around them, the scholars of
the Sunof Renaissance had a rather serious task
to explain — or, shall we say, to explain away ?
— the theology, polytheist or other, which they
found embedded in the old classics. The way
they solved the problem first appears clearly in
the works of Chou-tzii about the middle of the
eleventh century. Beyond all human appre-
hension there is a something which it would be
impious to define, to which he gives the name
of T'ai Chi — the '* Extreme Ultimate." We
cannot call the T'ai Ghi a personal Being, for
personality implies limitation, specialization of
parts, organs, senses, and lands us in making a
God in man's image, as the Buddhists did.
But it is a Principle. We cannot grasp its
totality, but we can be conscious in some
measure of its various manifestations. All

\

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 135

nature is pervaded by the interaction of its
two primary developments, to which Chinese
philosophers, borrowing, perhaps, a terminology
that smacks of Taoism — or did the idea come
from Persia ? — crave the names of Yano^ and
Yin. Yang is the positive pole — the active
principle, the principle of light and heat, the
life-giving, impregnating male principle. Yin is
the negative pole — the passive, receptive prin-
ciple, the principle of cold and darkness, that
upon which Yang acts, which it impregnates,
the female principle. They are sym- ^^^^^
bolically represented by the diagram £® a. l .
It will be observed that Yang and Yin ^mm^
are equal and opposite ; also that there is a
centre, a soul of light in the darkness, a spot of
darkness in the light. By the interaction of
these equal and opposite emanations of the T'ai
Chi phenomena of all kinds come into existence.
T'ien — Heaven — is a Yang manifestation, of
which the Yin correlative is Ti, the Earth. Is
not T'ai Yang — the ''Supreme Yang" — the
colloquial Chinese word for the Sun ? Jen —
Man — makes up a trilogy of Powers with T'ien
and Ti, and is both Yang and Yin in his
nature. Shang Ti — the Upper God, or Upper
Gods — of the older theology of the ancient

136 RELIGION IN CHINA

classics, is a synonym of T'ien expressed,
metaphorically, in terms of personality. But
it did not escape the observation of the com-
mentators that, while the oldest records of the
past, the documents collected in the Shu
Ching, or History Classic, for example, refer
freely and constantly to Shang Ti as the
object of human prayer and as directing,
helping, or punishing his creatures, Confucius
distinctly prefers the less personal expression
T'ien. Developing this hint, mature Confucian
thouofht avoided and disliked the attribution of
personality to the Ultimate, holding such attri-
bution to be a mere compromise with the imper-
fections of human means of expression. All
moral qualities are manifestations of the same
essential principle : Shen, its manifestation in
superhuman, spiritual existences ; Hsing — the
"passion nature" of Mencius' teaching — its
manifestation in human or animal vitality ;
Hsiao, in filial obedience, extended, of course,
to the full Confucian significance and scope of
the word ; Li, in propriety, courtesy, ceremony,
orderly conduct, also extended in scope far
beyond Western ways of thought ; Jen, charity,
benevolence, or humanity ; I, unselfishness or
public spirit ; Ch'ih, modesty ; Hsin, truthful-

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 137

ness ; Chung, loyalty, and so forth. If we
speak of Confucius and the Sages of old as
Sheng, holy, we imply that there was mani-
fested in them an innate apprehension of the
ways of the ultimate reality which enabled
them, without effort, to attain to moral per-
fection— a notion strangely at variance with
Confucius' own account of his gradual growth
in self-control and confidence. And so on to
Hsien, acquired moral worthiness, Neng,
ability, and through the whole list.

Material nature, as well as moral principles,
is developed along the same order of ideas.
The ultimate quintessence of physical matter
is Ch'i, breath, which is a result of the inter-
action of Yang and Yin, and consequently
a vehicle for the manifestations of the T'ai
Chi. From this come the five elemental
substances — fire, water, earth, wood, and
metal.

It is evident how, working on this line, a
scheme of metaphysical speculation might be
elaborated — especially how much of the crude,
vague mythology of ancient times might be
rationalized, while the language of antiquity
was preserved ; and into this speculation the
scholars of the Sung plunged headlong, with as

138 RELIGION IN CHINA

much zest as ever did our mediaeval schoolmen
into their somewhat similar contests of wit. It
was not, of course, wholly original ; terms, root-
ideas, suggestions of it may be traced in far
earlier ages. Neither was it wholly indepen-
dent of the earlier traditionary notions ; men
do not abandon all at once the mental atmo-
sphere in which they have been brought up.
But whatever indications the Confucian school-
men found in the leo^ends and literature of the
past they rationalized and systematized, priding
themselves on the guiding principle that every
word which they found in the classics must be
interpreted as having the same, or at least a
consistent, meaning, wherever it might be
found. For to them, of course, the Sages
were the expounders of one single, coherent
teaching, which it was their duty as commen-
tators to recover and to explain.

Such was the speculative side of the revived

learning. But it had a practical side perhaps

even more important. As the

confucianist scholars of the Sun^ ao^e were

conception of .

Bociety; how also its Statesmen and legislators,

far realized. , ^

they had a magnificent opportunity
to convert their theories into practice. The
scholar class had at length won all along the

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 139

line, and before it the last remnants of
the old feudal aristocracy fell and passed —
in all the fully incorporated parts of China
— almost to oblivion, while the monks and
the fortune-tellers, banished from high places
and social influence, sank into humiliation
and obscurity among the ignorant masses of
the poor. Society and government underwent
a profound and lasting transformation. The
system of competitive examinations, outlined
long before, was developed into a sort of
projection of the whole intellectual life of the
nation, as well as the one legitimate channel
of admission into the public service. The
door was opened very wide, for the Con-
fucianist ideal is frankly democratic. A few
excepted castes — barbers, actors, etc. — were,
indeed, excluded from the examinations, but
otherwise they were open to all the men of the
nation — in theory, if not in actual practice. It
was a magnificent ideal — wonderful when we
compare it with anything that could have
prevailed in the Europe of those days, the
time of the Crusades and the Norman Con-
quest of England. And, subject to the
corruptions, imperfections, and qualifications
that mar the symmetry of all human en-

140 RELIGION IN CHINA

deavours, it was wonderfully perfect in its
carrying out. While Chinese public feeling
has often been tolerant to the point of
dangerous apathy with regard to all other
abuses of administration, it has, with the
rarest exceptions, been keenly alive to pre-
serve the national system of competitive
examinations from suspicion of venality.
Back doors have, indeed, been found for
entrance into the public service, but the
occasions have, I imagine, been rare when
this, the front door, has been forced by
corrupting or intimidating the examiners.

True, the system led to the creation of a
new aristocracy, for all those families whose
sons habitually competed in, or repeatedly won
success in the examinations became a favoured,
influential class, entitled to numerous privileges
and exemptions — the SMn-shih, or ''Gentry"
— among whom and in whose social and in-
tellectual atmosphere official China has ever
since lived. The officials being drawn from
and surrounded by this Shen-shih class, who
were everywhere the accepted, natural leaders
of local society, government became sensitive
to " min ch'ing " — public opinion — law took
the place of arbitrary caprice, and, though in

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 141

theory autocratic rule remained unimpaired,
much that we mean by liberty was in practice
secured. Moreover, as this Shen-shih aristo-
cracy was never, in theory, in the least
exclusive and, even in actual working, and
for all the weight that wealth, or family
connection, or old-established local influence
might carry, always open to the admission
of new blood, it excited singularly little
popular jealousy. On the contrary, the suc-
cesses of its members at the examinations —
the flagstaffs before their ancestral temples,
the gilded and lacquered panels over their
doors recording their academic distinctions —
were held to reflect glory on all their clan,
on all their neighbourhood, on all their
province, and were recorded with loving
pride by the local annalists who compiled
the innumerable topographical histories and
memoirs of Chinese districts and prefectures—
Hsien Chih, Fu Chih, etc.— as the crown-
ing honour and adornment of their native
place. To be a candidate, a graduate, a
scholar, became the fixed ambition of every
active mind. It was the one great avenue
to distinction, taking the place which all the
liberal professions fill among ourselves.

142 RELIGION IN CHINA

As I have mentioned the Chinese public
competitive examinations, it may be well to
^ describe how these contests were

The

Competitive Jn fact Carried out. Thousfh not

Examinations. , , ^ ^

a part of Chinese religion, they
filled so enormously important a place in
Chinese life for so many centuries that any
sketch of mature Confucian society would be
utterly inadequate and misleading without an
understanding of their nature. Imagine a
vast enclosure, several acres, perhaps many
acres in extent, with a broad alley down the
middle, spanned by ornamental gateways,
entrance hall, and central hall, but all the
rest of the space covered by line beyond line
of little brick and plaster, tile-roofed cubicles,
something like bathing-machines or sentry-
boxes. In these little cells the candidates
were shut up, separately, to the number of
10,000, perhaps 15,000 or even 20,000, each
provided with writing materials, a table, and
rough couch, and papers giving the subjects
on which they were to write. The whole
performance lasted eleven days. After being
immured three days and two nights the candi-
dates would be let out for one day. Then
came another like period of incarceration and

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 143

lastly a third. Though food was, of course,
handed round by attendants charged with the
care of the bodily needs of the students, it was
a severe test of bodily endurance. During the
time of examination no excuse of illness or
other plea could release a candidate from his
cell. The front door of the cell was sealed ;
even if, as sometimes happened, a candidate
died, his body had to be removed through
a hole in the back of the cell. In all the
contests, whether in the District city, for the
grade of T'ung-sheng — Licentiate — in the Pre-
fecture, for that of Hsiu-ts'ai — Graduate — in the
Provincial Capital for that of Chii-jen — Master
— or in the Metropolis, for that of Chin-shih —
Doctor — and for the still higher grades of
Member of the famous Hanlin College, the
subjects of examination were on the same
lines — essay-writing and verse-making on
texts taken out of the Confucian Canonical
Books, with perhaps some questions on history
and literary criticism. Adherence to the most
rigidly classical style was insisted upon ; the
themes had to be developed according to
regular orthodox model, and calligraphy was
regarded as of such high value in assessing
marks that one wrongly or slovenly written

Ui RELIGION IN CHINA

word might cancel a whole paper. This
system lasted with but slight and tentative
alterations till 1905, when it was found too
inconsistent with modern needs for reform
and unceremoniously swept away. What
practical thing is to take its place time alone
can show ; ideas and proposals are many
enough, but chaotic in their variety and
profusion. Sometimes it seems as though, in
sweeping away this link with the great ages
and memories of the past, modern reform
had destroyed one of the chief bonds that
hold the various sections of China together
as a united people.

But in the very completeness of the victory

of the Confucian literates lay concealed the

seeds of weakness and decay. The

Victory and scheme of education favoured by

ultimate ^

weatoiesB of ^^le latter scholasticism was, I

ortnoaoz

Confucian think, even from the first, narrower,

society.

relatively to the needs and know-
ledge of the time, than that which the old
classical age had known. In the Confucian
books music, horsemanship, chariot-driving,
and archery figure as an important part of
the equipment of a gentleman. To the later
scholar everything was sacrificed to the know

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 145

ledge of books, and, except that some history
and kindred studies entered into the curri-
culum, the books were exclusively those
dealing with canonical learning. Even history
often seemed to close — to cease, at any rate,
to be important or interesting, with the Han
Dynasty and the recovery of the Confucian
classics. All wisdom was held to be con-
tained or implied in the works of the Sages ;
therefore to know them and the commentators,
with some practice in essay-writing and verse
— all, of course, in studiously classical and
therefore artificial language — was all that
could be expected of a gentlemanly scholar.
It was, as will be seen, classicalism run
mad — a phenomenon, after all, not wholly
unknown to our schools and universities.

To the finished Confucian all else was
merely the mechanical skill of shopkeepers

and artisans — necessary but inferior
?in maT"" ^^^ers of society with whom he

disdained to be put in competition.
Secure in his proud conviction of the superi-
ority of his own national literary culture, he
rarely stooped to examine the learning and
civilization of other lands. And, indeed,
where could he profitably look ? Japan,

10

146 RELIGION IN CHINA

across the sea, could show him nothing but
a weak and recently imported imitation of
Chinese arts and literature, thinly veiling a
society where a little Buddhist piety and a
considerable element of chivalrous romance
were the only foil to a chaotic turmoil of
party strife and civil war, broken by the
occasional emergence of a piratical berserker
who diverted the martial energies of that
turbulent people to the ransacking of Chinese
or Korean coasts. India he had heard of as
the home of Buddhism, but he was very far
from inclined to respect Buddhism as a
serious factor in his conception of civilized
life. Rather he held it to be a delusion of
weak and vulgar minds, to be graciously
tolerated in the ignorant, but to which he
himself had risen superior. Besides, like
far-off Europe, India was effectually cut off
from the Chinese world both by trackless
glaciers and inhospitable deserts, and by the
exclusive bigotry of the Mahometan con-
querors of Central Asia. In every direction
there was no people within his range of access
or vision whose culture could for an instant
be held to compete with his own. The idea
of distant travel only entered his mind to

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 147

suggest the fooleries of silly monks, or the
weird expeditions of ancient mystics who had
launched off upon the boundless waters of
the Pacific — like the jumblies of our nonsense
rhymes — with crews of children to find the
fairy isles of Peng-lai, Fang-chang, and
Ying-chou, where the Genii dwell beyond
the rising of the sun. Botany and medicine
he left to Taoist quacks and wizards — con-
vinced, however, that all that ever could be
really useful in these subjects was recorded
in tomes of hoary wisdom dating back beyond
the feudal age. Astronomy he abandoned
to fortune-tellers, whose superstitions he was
sceptic enough to laugh at, though he would
have been horror-struck at the impropriety
of letting his son or daus^hter contract a
marriage with a person whose horoscope was
astrologically inharmonious. Of mathematics
he knew enough to reckon accounts, but he
rarely went farther ; to work the suan-p'an,
or counting board, was a fitter occupation for
a tradesman than for a scholar. The tradi-
tional scholar of Chinese novelists has, no
doubt, a pretty knack of impromptu verse-
making ; can play the p'ip'a and the hsien-tzu
and dash off impressionist sketches on fans

148 RELIGION IN CHINA

and scrolls with ready brush. His ancestral
home is adorned with two or three pieces
of priceless ancient carved jade, ivory, and
porcelain. But, in fact, art has become
either a trade or a toy ; so virile in all its
branches in the T'ang era, it is already
conventionalized under the Sung. In a
world where, as we shall presently see,
mechanical contrivances and inventions were
already numerous, the scholar left all physical
science on one side as no business of his, no
concern of the governing brain which it was
his function to supply to Chinese society.
All these thing^s were for mechanics and
tradesmen to deal in, people whom he might
employ, but who could not be his equals, and
for whose attainments he had the same kind
of feeline as some old-fashioned Oxford don
of unreformed days might have entertained
for the skill of a bricklayer. Morally, the
scholar aspired to be a "Chiin-tzu," and he
remembered that Confucius had laid it down
that the Chiin-tzu is not a "utensil." In a
word, Confucian scholarship was not slow to
produce a plentiful crop of insufferable prigs.
It was in many of its phases nothing but
erudite ignorance, and, when the classical

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 149

pedantry of China came into contact with
hardier, more energetic, and more varied
civilizations, the weakness of orthodox
Confucian society was inevitably laid bare.

Nevertheless, the Confucian Renaissance
was a great and memorable stage in the
moral and intellectual development
JfP^r^^^* of mankind. It represented a
RenaiBsance gig^^tic Stride towards reason,
towards the substitution of peaceful
suasion for the rule of brute force in the
world, towards freedom of thought, towards
the awakening and enlightenment of men's
minds. It democratized all Chinese society
almost from top to bottom. It made men —
scores of millions of men — familiar with the
conception that government must be lawful
and attentive to intelligent public opinion ;
that power is the rightful inheritance not of
force, or of birth, of rank, or of wealth, but
of talent and merit openly proved by public
competition, of moral worth and of individual
capacity in whatever rank of society they
might be found.

The neighbourhood of Kiukiang, where I
lived for four or five years, contains several
interesting memorials of the Confucian

150 RELIGION IN CHINA

Renaissance. Chou-tzu, the thinker who
first developed the speculative metaphysic
of the T'ai Chi, lies buried a few miles
outside the town. Farther away, among the
mountains overlooking the Poyang Lake —
right under the tremendous cliffs of Wulaofeng
— 'in a land teeming with far older fairy
legend, is Pailutung — the famous White Deer
Grotto — to which the standard commentator
and historian, Chu Hsi, the greatest of the
scholastics, retired in his old age, and where
grew up what is commonly spoken of as a
Confucianist University. To-day it is ruinous
and neglected, with perhaps thirty or forty
inmates instead of the hundreds or thousands
of ardent students by whom in old times it
was thronged. Even the White Deer itself
is not the original White Deer, sculptured
to commemorate the gentle creature that led
the philosopher's footsteps to this romantic
retreat. After surviving all the perils and
revolutions of six centuries — from the Mongol
conquest to the T'aip'ing rebellion — the
original stone image was broken up in the
year 1886 by a party of vandal rustics, and
has been replaced by a rude, modern abortion
representing no species with which zoology

THE CONFUCIAN RENAISSANCE 151

is acquainted, though it struck me as remin-
iscent of the inmates of the Noah's Arks of
infancy.

With all its greatness the Renaissance was
but a stage on the Way, not the Eternal
Way; Chu-Hsi and Chou-tzu, Ssu-ma
Kuang and Cheng-tzu, Ou-yang Hsiu and
Ma Tuan - lin, like the Sages whom they
loved and revered, are but names, and not
the Eternal Name. They served their time,
and their glory has passed away ; and when
we visit their tombs or their retreats, these
are but trifling incidents on a landscape where
the great shoulders of the Lushan tower
5,000 feet above the plain, as they did a
million years before we or they were born.

VII

STAGNATION
AND FAILURE OF
CONFUCIAN
SOCIETY. THE
MONGOL CONQUEST-
CONTACT OF
EAST AND WEST

CHAPTER VII

STAGNATION AND FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN
SOCIETY. THE MONGOL CONQUEST —
CONTACT OF EAST AND WEST

With all its maturity of thought and culture,
the Sung Dynasty, under which the Con-
fucian Renaissance was mostly de-
Loss of veloped, never possessed the same

virility in
CImia unc
the Svmg.

cnina under military vigour as the older Han

andTang Empires, but, almost from
the first, suffered humiliating entanglements
at the hands of the nomad peoples of Man-
churia and Mongolia. In all the older
periods of China the national ideal had in-
cluded a considerable element of hardy, out-
door life ; there are extant contemporary
native accounts — some of them translated in
Giles' ''Adversaria Sinica " — of polo matches,
in which even emperors had not disdained
to risk their sacred persons ; in the Tang
Dynasty football seems to have been almost

155

156 RELIGION IN CHINA

as much a national institution as the Saturday-
editions of our newspapers make it appear
to-day among us. As to charioteering, the
Chinese of the tenth or eleventh century
had progressed so far as to build a carriage
furnished with an automatic machine for
registering the distance travelled — a rather
clumsy form of taxi-cab, in fact ! But in the
exclusively literary and sedentary culture of
the Confucian schools these activities were
frowned upon as ungentlemanly.

And in the history of these times we may

trace a confession of o^rowino- weakness in

the curious series of socialistic and

Socialistic

and fiscal fiscal experiments whereby the

experiments. ^ ^ ^ '

reforming or innovating party
among the Confucianists — Wang An-shih, for
instance (in power at various dates from
about 1070 to 1090) — sought to find a short
cut out of all the economic woes and failures
with which mankind are afflicted. Founding
their proposals on certain indications in the
classical books as to ancient forms of land
tenure, taxation, and local administration —
or, as their opponents, Ssu-ma Kuang, etc.,
protested, altering and forcing the sacred text
to suit their own theories — the reformers in-

FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN SOCIETY 157

duced the Government to establish a great
system of advances to farmers, secured on the
credit of future harvests, and to revolutionize
the whole existing scheme of taxation.

These measures were designed to abolish
poverty entirely, but in their result profited
no one except the host of greedy, peculating
officials created to carry them out. The
former military system was, at the same time,
abolished in favour of an unworkable scheme
of conscription proportioned to population, that
broke down at the first serious outbreak of
war. Possibly the only really permanent and
beneficial result of all this curiously modern
activity was the extension to the estates of
the great provincial landowners of the libera-
tion of the former serf labourers, which had
been begun on the Imperial domains as early
as T'ang times, and, under the Sung, became
general throughout the settled and populous
parts of China. Neither serfdom nor domestic
slavery was ever abolished ; the latter is not
uncommon to this day, though far less so than
the minute regulation of its incidents in the
existing law codes of China would lead one
to suppose, and I have met the former both
on the estates of a scion of a former Imperial

158 RELIGION IN CHINA

house and in remote country villages, where
a poor and degraded serf clan, living mostly
in caves, were owned in common by a more
advanced landowning clan. But in general
the industry of China passed to guilds of free
traders and artisans, and the agricultural land,
subject to certain taxes or other obligations,
to the actual cultivating peasantry, being held
in common by village communities for their
own use and support or else let out by such
communities to tenants at a rent. It would,
I imagine, be commoner in China to find a
tenant farmer holding of a community, i.e.
of perhaps some hundreds of '* landlords,"
each of whom gets a tiny share of that
farmer's rent, than to find an individual
landowner whose estate is parcelled out to
any considerable number of tenants.

Along with these social changes we may
note — and doubtless it proved a source of
weakness — an excessive concentration of
population in a few large cities, such
as K'aifeng, the earlier, and Hangchow, the
later capital of the Sung emperors. The
chapters in Marco Polo in which he describes
the Hangchow (Kinsal, he calls it) of the
thirteenth century read like a romance, but

FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN SOCIETY 159

in the main they are but little exaggerated,
while Kaifeng is said to have had fifteen
million inhabitants ; rhetoric, no doubt, yet
evidence that it was an immense city. At
any rate, the successive Sung capitals must
have been far more populous, wealthy, and
splendid than any other cities existing in the
world. China as a whole was certainly far
less thickly peopled then than it has since
become, and one suspects that, if the capitals
were anything like the size represented, the
country districts must have been seriously
drained of resources for their support.

Lastly, there was, all through the Sung
period, the fatal policy of flooding the country
with repeated issues of unconvertible paper
currency, whose depreciation led to wide-
spread financial ruin and general distress.
Poverty and party strife paved the way for
barbarian invasion and China fell. All

through the eleventh century the
conquest of ^orth had been exposed to re-
the^north. pgated inroads of the Kitan

(Cathayan) Tartars, whose sove-
reigns, known as the Liao Dynasty, im-
posed one humiliating treaty after another
upon the Sung Empire and despoiled it of

160 RELIGION IN CHINA

many a border district. With the twelfth
century another tribe, the Kin or Niichen,
emerging from the recesses of Manchuria,
overwhelmed all the north (1127), and in the
thirteenth century the whole Chinese world
became subject to the invading hordes of the
Mongols.

In those days lived one who is perhaps the

greatest and most original of all the scholars

of the Confucian Renaissance, Ma

Ma Tuan-lin. t t i •

Tuan-hn. He lived about 1250 to
1300, though his works were not collected
and printed till a good many years after his
death. He may be reckoned to belong to the
Renaissance, yet in many ways he is not of it
but above it — a calm, lonely thinker ; his-
torian, critic, political economist, jurist, whose
thoughts sometimes read like anticipations of
Bentham or John Stuart Mill, but being in a
harsh, crabbed style of extreme erudition, the
language is beyond the attainment as the
matter is beyond the mental calibre not only
of his own age but of those that have followed.
He saw the fall of the re2:ime under which the
intellectual outburst of the Renaissance had
been possible, and I remember reading with
great interest, in a work by Vissering on

FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN SOCIETY 161

Chinese currency, a masterly analysis by Ma
Tuan-lin of the history of paper money in
China and the part it had played in under-
mining the Empire of the Sung.

The fall of the ''learned" was as natural an
event as the coming of the new Confucianism
had been. Form had become more prized
than matter ; artificial elegance had taken the
place of strength ; originality and spontaneous
thought were smothered by erudite and servile
imitation of ancient models ; for Ma Tuan-lin
and such as he, if there were any, wrote less
for the public of their own day than to their
own solitary souls ; and China found herself,
in the day of trial, no match for her secular
enemy, the nomads of the waste.

China is the tilled land, the home of a
settled agricultural and commercial people,
with farms and villages and market
iSdttwsown. towns, rich with cornfields, orchards,
ricefields, planted with sugar-cane,
cotton, and mulberry, whose rivers and roads
swarm with traffic and the busy competition
of peaceful industry and trade. But all
through their long history this people has
been engaged, with varying fortune, in an
unending struggle with the wandering, pas-

11

162 RELIGION IN CHINA

toral tribes beyond the borders of cultiva-
tion ; now carrying their sphere of influence
far and wide over Northern and Central Asia,
anon suffering devastating inroads at the
hands, alternately, of the herdsmen of the
desert and the hunters of the forest —
the Turks and Mongols of the steppes or
the Niichen and Manchus of the tree-clad
ranges that lie beyond the Liao.

The ancient Han times had seen a long
series of struggles with the Hsiung-nu con-
federacy result in the extension of Chinese
power almost to the Caspian Sea. The
nomads, so far as they were not conquered,
had been driven back, ever farther to the west
and north, beyond the range of Chinese know-
ledge, to break loose, some centuries later, on
the astonished peoples of Europe as the Huns.
Then came an era when Hsiung-nu invasions
from the north-west and Hsien-pi invasions
from the north-east had brought about a
strong infusion of Tartar blood all over the
north of China. Then, all through the Tang
epoch, many centuries of intercourse, warlike
and diplomatic, with Turks, Turfan, Tibetans,
Wei-hu, etc., while many another tribe and
nation finds a place in the long list of bar-

FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN SOCIETY 163

barian peoples as the panorama of the ages
unrolls. Not that they were really new
nations. These peoples gather as the clouds
gather, and burst as the clouds break in rain,
but they have no enduring form or substance.
From first to last they are combinations of
the same wild, elemental, lawless, tent-dwelling
wanderers, strong with the animal strength of
a free open-air life, who follow their flocks
and herds wherever the grass is sweet and
the water sufficient, but never settle down in
fixed habitations anywhere to learn habits of
industry. Once let them be encamped among
a settled, civilized people, and they sink, as
the Manchu bannermen of our times have
sunk, into a miserable caste of pauperized
idlers against whom, in the hour of collapse,
every man's hand is raised. All through the
history of China we meet with the same old
tale, such as the experiences of Egypt, Syria,
and Persia have made familiar, of a never-
ending conflict between the Desert and the
Sown. The stage which we have now
reached, that of the Mongol conquest and
Dynasty, shows us the shepherd and hunter
element, for a brief space, dominating over the
peaceful dwellers in fenced cities and ploughed
fields.

164 RELIGION IN CHINA

It was an inevitable thing, and, when the
first energies of barbaric conquest had spent
themselves, a benefit to the world,
tanisnf of the For instead of the intensely national
domSon. 3,nd exclusive culture of China, the
Mongols established a vast cosmo-
politan dominion. They simultaneously over-
ran Russia and Poland, Persia and China.
They penetrated to Delhi, to Hangchow, to
Buda-Pesth. They overthrew the Khalifate
of Baghdad. They threatened India, Ger-
many, and Japan. All distances were effaced,
all nations mingled under their rule. , Europe,
on hearing of their conquests, fell into such a
panic that one year — 1238, I think it was —
the alarm spread even to England and entirely
put a stop to the North Sea herring fishery
for that season. A special office of prayer
was ordained in Christian churches for de-
liverance from the wrath of the Mongols.

But the alarm subsided. In the next
generation the Mongols allied themselves
with the kings of France and England ; they
sent embassies to the Pope and received
missions from the Church of Rome, as well
as from Buddhist dignitaries of Tibet. And
what did the missionary friars find in the

FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN SOCIETY 165

depths of Tartary ? That a wandering Eng-
lishman had, in 1246, been already for several
years a captive or guest in the camp of the
Mongol Khan ; that their wants were minis-
tered to by a woman from Lorraine ; that
the Khan had mechanical toys made for his
entertainment by an artificer from Paris. For
every such instance that we find recorded in
the narratives of Rubruquis or John de Plan
Carpin, we may be sure that hundreds of
others existed whereof we have no memorial.
Yet a few years more and we find the Mongols
participating with Europe in the last Crusades,
for Europe and the Mongols had a common
enemy in the Mahometan Powers of the Near
East.

Between the years 1270 and 1307 fourteen
embassies from the Mongols to the various
Courts of Europe are recorded, of which the
last arrived in time to be received by
Edward II of England at Northampton and
to congratulate him on his accession. The
West, for its part, contributed to the success
of the Mongol arms in China, for both the
Chinese historians and Marco Polo relate,
though with curious differences of date and
detail that render the accounts hard to recon-

166 RELIGION IN CHINA

cile, that Kublai's generals employed, and
owed their success to, exceedingly powerful
mangonels of improved pattern made for their
use at the siege of Hsiangyang by Western
engineers. This was one of the most impor-
tant operations of the decisive phase of the
war against the Sung, and, whether we believe
the Chinese story that the mangonels were
ordered from Persia in the year 1271 or
Marco Polo's tale that they were made in
1274 by a German and a Nestorian on the
suggestion of Marco's father, uncle, and him-
self, the facts are equally illustrative of the
Mongols' readiness to welcome foreigners and
adopt their ideas.

In world history this cosmopolitanism of the
Mongol power is a greater fact than we com-
monly realize. For a moment only, as history
counts time, it brought the East and the West
together, but that moment sufficed to carry
to Europe the seeds of the great transforma-
tion whereby our modern civilization is separ-
ated from the society of the Middle Ages.
The use of printed books, the use of paper
money and negotiable instruments of ex-
change, the use of glass lenses for extending
and assisting the powers of the human eye,

FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN SOCIETY 167

the use of cotton as a material for weaving,
the use of the mariner's compass in naviga-
tion, the use of coal as a fuel and of gunpowder
as an explosive, of firearms and artillery as
weapons of war — all these things were known
to the Chinese of the Sung era ; all, with many
more — such trifles as playing-cards, for in-
stance— were carried to the West in the wake
of the Mongol conquests, and, fructuated and
improved in the soil of Europe, adapted some-
what to Western needs, are they not precisely
the material and mechanical scaffolding inside
which the whole fabric of our modern Western
life is built up ?

That is Europe's debt to the Far East ; the
Mongols and the Turks, whom we are apt to
look upon as the most destructive, the least
creative of all the peoples who have played
leading parts upon the stage of the world,
are the peoples by whom that debt was
transmitted.

I should like to dwell for a while upon this

moment in human history, to try to portray

the impression which the Chinese

The East in ^

mediavai world of the twelfth to fourteenth
eyes.

centuries must have made on the
imaginations of Western observers of that time.

168 RELIGION IN CHINA

Strange it must have seemed to them, strange
and distant and vast, yet, coming from the
rustic, barbaric castles and monasteries of
France or Flanders, or even from the little
city republics of Italy, it cannot have struck
them as a world inferior to their own. When
once the superficial, external differences were
surmounted, it must even have seemed
curiously familiar. Its religion was surely
much the same ; its laws were no harsher,
and were, very likely, better administered ;
peace and public order were at least as well
provided for ; if the junks of the Yangtze, or
those that followed the monsoons to the
Southern Archipelago, were less swift than
the keels of the English Channel, they were
certainly no more clumsy than the many-
oared galleys which navigated the Italian
and Levantine seas. The roads were not
such as the great highways of Imperial
Rome once had been, but they compared
very well with the robber-infested tracks of
Feudal Europe. Clothing was as rich and
as varied, houses were certainly no worse
built or furnished ; food, quite possibly, was
better and more skilfully prepared. With
the possible exception of Constantinople, fast

FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN SOCIETY 169

verging to decay, Europe had no city that
could compare for one moment in population,
wealth, splendour, or commercial activity with
the Hangchow of the Sung, no military camp
on anything approaching the scale of the new
Peking which was rising at the command of
the Mongol conqueror, Kublai. In arts and
inventions Europe had at least as much to
learn as to impart ; the one feature that
occurs to me as undeniably superior was the
splendid architecture of the West. China
had massive works, and works of much
beauty and taste of ornament, but nothing
that combined strength and permanence with
beauty of detail — nothing to match either the
remains of Greek and Roman magnificence
or the Gothic cathedrals with which Europe
was, at that very time, becoming covered.
But I know of no other feature in which
Europe could claim any marked superiority.

If this were true of externals, much the same
can be said of the things of the mind. There
was not much to choose intellectually, or, if
there was, it told in favour of the East.
Education was more general than in any
part of Europe, unless, possibly, the more
progressive cities of Italy ; and surely the

170 RELIGION IN CHINA

scholastics of Bologna, of Paris, or 'of Oxford,
as these centres of learning were in the
thirteenth century, could they have known,
would have had little reason to despise the
students who flocked round the feet of Chu
Hsi in the pinewoods of Pailutung.

It is difficult to reconstruct the past in its
true perspective ; there is much that is for
ever buried in oblivion. Yet, as I read my
Marco Polo, while the China that he
pictures agrees in many particulars with the
country which we know to-day, the thought
strikes me that where it differs is in being a
country less inclined than the China of our
days to cover under a mantle of exclusiveness
and pride an inward sense of defeat — it is
an unhumiliated China, with no cause to feel
itself inferior to its Western visitor. Nor
does the Western visitor feel that he is
among a people of lower culture ; he certainly
calls them ** idolaters," but in all the arts of
war and of peace he seems to acknowledge
them for at least his equals. He is, indeed,
somewhat overwhelmed by the sense of the
splendour and immensity of their world, so
that in after-life his talk is so constantly of
millions that he acquires the nickname of
" del Millione."

FAILURE OF CONFUCIAN SOCIETY 171

In that age it was easier for men to perform
long journeys than to describe what those
journeys had taught them. There was only
one Marco Polo, and it was only to the
chance that made him a prisoner in Genoa
that the world owes his description of the
East. But there were many who had seen
something of that world beyond the Tartar
hordes ; they were not great, they were not
learned, they did not move among the culture
of the time, but they scattered here and
there, by unperceived channels of communi-
cation, idea after idea to germinate in a fresh
soil and bring the stagnation of the Middle
Ages to an end.

I have no wish to disparage Mediaeval
Europe. On the contrary, all must acknow-
ledge its many elements of strength and
beauty, its chivalry, its piety, its poetry, its
artistic inspiration. But on the whole I do
not think it was a world of greater or more
varied culture than the China of the Confucian
Renaissance and the Mongol era ; I am quite
confident that it was not a wiser, a wealthier,
or a better-ordered world.

VIII

NATIONALIST
REACTION ;
LAMAISM

CHAPTER VIII

NATIONALIST REACTION ; LAMAISM

About the middle of the fourteenth century
Chinese society was profoundly agitated by
Nationau ^^^ expected coming of a Buddhist
revival of Messlah. Maltreya — MIlo Fo — the

fourteenth ^

century; the fat and jollv Buddha of the Future,

Ming Dynasty. -' ^

the Images of whose laughing face
and plump embonpoint irradiate so many
homes and shrines in China, was, it was
believed, about to visit the earth in human
guise, and in the year 1368, largely under
the impetus of the enthusiasm thereby aroused,
the Mongol power fell before a revival of
Chinese nationalism. The native Ming
Dynasty, descendants of Chu Yiian-chang,
himself in youth a Buddhist temple servant,
took the place of the house of Genghis.
China enjoyed many glories during the rule
of her Ming sovereigns, but, just because
their dominion was a nationalist revival and

175

176 RELIGION IN CHINA

a reversion to ancient ways, it is, from our
point of view, an age of stagnation, isolation,
and decay.

Outwardly the revolution of 1355 to 1368
has the appearance of a return to the condi-
tions of the age of the Confucian Renaissance,
but indications are not wanting that reaction
went farther. The heroes who had sur-
rounded the last Sung sovereigns in their
hopeless resistance to the armies of Kublai,
as well as the earlier champions of the struggle
against the Kin Tartars, became objects of
general veneration, and, as in the case of
Yo Fei, the most famous of them all, have
remained to this day the model patriots of
Chinese popular legend. It was ordained
that dress should revert to the fashions of
T'ang times. Those Mongols who were not
driven back into the wilderness were generally
reduced to a condition of serfdom, and for
ages their descendants formed, in many parts
of China, a pariah caste, excluded from par-
ticipation in the public examinations and in
many ways denied the usual rights of citizen-
ship. The extensive privileges secured by
the collateral branches of the new ruling
family created a sort of feudalism, which,

NATIONALIST REACTION; LAMAISM 177

with the rapid development of eunuch influ-
ences in the Court, seriously impaired the
unity and the administrative efficiency of the
Imperial Government. In regard to national
customs a change occurred that is not without
interest. Ever since the popularization of
Buddhism the old Chinese practice of burying
the dead had found a serious rival in the
Buddhist practice of cremation. During the
Sung period the Confucianist scholars had
constantly fulminated against the prevalence
of this, in their eyes, impious and pernicious
foreign innovation, but, it would seem, without
any great result. All foreign visitors to
China in that age bear witness to the fact
that the Chinese were a people who commonly
burnt their dead, nor is the native evidence
on this subject less uniform. Under the
Mongols, with their Tibetan affinities, the
practice continued in favour^. But with the
establishment of the Ming rule, it disappears
from the common usage, remaining as a special
rite of the Buddhist priesthood alone. With
the reversion to Confucianist ideas on the
subject of burial in general, we are not
altogether surprised to find instances, in
Imperial burials at least, of reversion to

12

178 RELIGION IN CHINA

even more primitive practices, suttee and
human sacrifices, not perhaps on the old
barbaric scale of Han times, yet curiously
inconsistent with the general level of civiliza-
tion that the literary culture of the age would
lead one to expect to find. Until the practice
was forbidden in 1465 it would seem that
every one of the Ming sovereigns was *' followed
in death " by his slaves and concubines much
as an old king of Ts'in might have been
two thousand years before.

While China was thus going back into her
own past, the consolidation of the Turkish
power in Western Asia, both through the
rise of Tamerlane's Empire and through the
later victories of his enemies, the Ottoman
Turks, barred the land routes between China
and the West, and brought the intercourse
which had characterized the era of the Mongol
rule abruptly to an end.

In China learning undoubtedly continued

to flourish, but it was no longer creative.

It is the ap^e of encyclopaedias, not

The age of • • i i t

encyciopse- of origmal work. its crownmg

achievement was the vast Yung-lo

Encyclopedia, dating from about 1405-1410 —

the labour of thousands of scholars, collectors,

NATIONALIST REACTION; LAMAISM 179

and copyists, enshrining the whole of tradi-
tional Confucian wisdom in its millions of pages
and myriads of volumes — to be exact, 22,877
volumes, of which 60 are occupied with the
table of contents. It was never printed. One
manuscript copy was long preserved at Nan-
king, another in the Hanlin College at Peking,
where most of the volumes were destroyed
by Boxer vandalism in 1900. Those that
were saved were collected by the defenders
of the Legations and are now, I believe,
scattered among the universities of Europe
and America. In the eighteenth century an
abstract, vast, yet more measurable in its
dimensions, was printed and published, and
this, known as the Ch'ien-lung Cyclopaedia,
forms the great storehouse of orthodox
Chinese learning. Now and then copies
come on the market. There are at least
two in England, one being In the British
Museum ; and I understand that the Univer-
sity of Cambridge has been negotiating for
the purchase of another, the cost, of a first
edition, in these revolutionary days, when there
is a slump in the market for ancestral wisdom,
being only ;^550, in place of the usual price
of about ;^2,ooo. Modern reprints are, how-
ever, obtainable in China for about ^30.

180 RELIGION IN CHINA

Yet, with all this massive erudition, it is
plain that the native schools of thought had

entered upon a phase of gradual
aad^ecay! decay. Law codes there were, also

some curious treatises on what we
are obliged to call natural science — but it is
a science of men ready to believe any tale
recorded in an ancient book, but who never
pause to verify statements by observation,
travel, or experiment. If we would seek for
real activity of mind in the Ming age, we
must turn away from the works of the
*' learned " altogether, and seek distraction
among a crowd of vernacular novelists and
writers of popular drama who, from the four-
teenth century onward, began to amuse their
countrymen by recording the national legends
and fairy tales in a colloquial, or semi-col-
loquial, idiom far removed from the stately
artificiality of classical pedantry.

Thus, although much work, some of it
good work, was being done in China during
the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth
centuries, the two native religious systems
and the great imported religious system
of the country had, to all appearance,
run their course, and degenerated into

NATIONALIST REACTION; LAMAISM 181

vain, mechanical, lifeless repetition of old
formulas.

In its essentials Religion itself is one, in
all countries and all times, for it is concerned
with universal and eternal things. Religious
systems are man's imperfect endeavours to
express those universal and eternal things in
terms of his local and momentary impres-
sions, needs, and knowledge. Of their very
nature they have their day and cease to be :
they are temporary and perishable, for no
man by searching can find out the Almighty
to perfection.

When their first enthusiasm has waned

the very forces of reverence, piety, and tender

feelinor which inspired their o^rowth

Divorce of ^ .

religion from are apt to become their fetters and,

daily life. . .^ 11.

in time, their sepulchre and their
shroud. Imitation is so much easier than
spontaneity : so much of pious association
attaches to the memories of the past — it is
so easy and so plausible to say that our duty
is to hand down from age to age to the
remotest future, whole, uncorrupted, and intact,
the faith once for all committed to the saints
of old, that men forget that those saints were,
as we are, fallible men, who in their age and

182 RELIGION IN CHINA

place battled with the problems of their day-
even as we do with those of ours — that faith
itself is not vision, but the substance of things
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,
or, as the Tao-Te Ching puts it, the Way
that man can go is not the Eternal Way, the
name that man can name is not the Eternal
Name. Thus men come to worship the very
words of books and creeds ; services and
ceremonies, hallowed by the traditions of
ages, come to be looked upon as in them-
selves sacred and religiously efficacious apart
from the spirit which gave them birth, or
the emotions they originally evoked and
symbolized, and men adhere to the letter of
rituals from which all life and reality are
ebbing away. Institutions and doctrines
appropriate to one stage of growth and
knowledge survive into another age to whose
expanding experience they are irrelevant, and
with which they are out of harmony. Mind
and soul no longer accord. Knowledge,
indeed, grows from more to more, but rever-
ence no longer accompanies its growth. Its
interpreters scoff at religion : the interpreters
of religion despise and try to proscribe
sciences which they deem ungodly, and for

NATIONALIST REACTION; LAMAISM 183

ever strive to confine men's minds in the
swaddling clothes of an older organization.
But the words of old are tongues that cease,
the knowledge of old is a knowledge that
passes away, whose expression may change.
The only things that abide are faith, hope,
and love ; for their life depends on no human
organization, rather the life of human organiza-
tions depends on them.

In the dim light of the sanctuary, sur-
rounded by images and gilding, drugged with
incense and solemn music, men still repeat
and half believe the old formulas, but they
cannot translate them into terms of their
daily life. In the dry, cool light of the open
street, among the bustle of actual conflict
with workaday realities, their lesson slips from
the mind as a forgotten dream, and there
seems to be no other idealism wherewith the
hard facts of life can be transfigured with
any ray of higher aspiration. Adhesion to
the letter slowly strangles the spirit : religion
and common life become divorced from one
another, and both suffer a descent to a lower
plane.

In China all this happened. We have
already seen how Buddhism and Taoism

184 RELIGION IN CHINA

could become a mere babbling and droning
of parasitic monks, a mechanical juggling
with the drivelling superstitions of impostors.
Confucianism sank also. Learning became
a means to pass examinations : subjects of
study were rigorously stereotyped ; examina-
tions were no longer a help to wide reading
and varied knowledge, but a mere step
towards place and power. Ethics were a
subject to be crammed from text-books : as
Mencius would have expressed it, men pro-
fessed to follow the ** nobility of God " in
order to attain the '' nobility which is of
man." Form had supplanted matter in all
literary endeavour. It is only in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, and then
perhaps under the influence of the percola-
tion of Western ways of thought, that Con-
fucian scholars began tentatively to question
the infallible authority of the great Sung
Dynasty commentators, and to suggest that
in some details the older editors of Han and
T'ang times had perhaps possessed a truer
appreciation of the Confucian age than
Chu-hsi and the schoolmen of the Renais-
sance.

Fresh life was needed before any new

NATIONALIST REACTION; LAMAISM 185

development could come into being. The

first breath of originality appears in the

fifteenth century with the emergence

Lamaism in

Tibet and of a new form of Buddhism, the

Mongolia.

Lamaist religion, which, during the
next two hundred years or so, came to
prevail among the Tibetan and Mongolian
hordes.

Buddhism had been introduced and vigor-
ously patronized in Tibet as early as the
seventh century a.d., under the first acknow-
ledged ruler of the country, Srongtan Ganpo,
who, in 641, had espoused a daughter of the
great Chinese Emperor Tang T'ai-Tsung.
From about the eleventh century the temporal
power of the kings had been largely over-
shadowed by that of the Buddhist hierarchy,
especially the heads of the famous monastery
of Sakya, practisers of a form of Buddhism
which came to be known as the Red Church.
In course of time the doctrines of the clergy
came to be largely mixed with Hinduism,
and even by departure from the rule of
celibacy. At length their corruptions and
pretensions provoked a revolt under the
leadership of a reformer named Tsongkhaba
(141 7 to 1478), a native of Hsining in the

186 RELIGION IN CHINA

Chinese border province of Kansu, whose
followers founded the ''Yellow Church" or
Lamaist form of Buddhism.

Under their influence the national character
of the border peoples has been gradually and
deeply transformed. Lamaism is much con-
cerned with curious ritual practices, such as
the mechanical making of prayers by the
revolving of inscribed wheels and cylinders,
or other toys, worked by the hand or the
wind, but its chief tenet is that its various
ecclesiastical dignitaries are successive incar-
nations of the different Buddhas and Saints
— a wide extension, in fact, of the notion
which we have already seen exemplified in
the succession to the Taoist Papacy. The
Dalai Lama of Lhassa is the incarnation of
Kuan-yin ; the Panshen Lama of Teshilumbo
that of Manchusri, the deity who was incar-
nate in Tsongkhaba ; the Hutuktu of Urga
and many more perpetuate Maitreya or other
Buddhas. Beneath these highest impersona-
tions are numerous " Living Buddhas." In
all countries where this faith has come to
prevail, it has taken so firm a hold on
popular sentiment that an enormous per-
centage of the people — a third to a half

NATIONALIST REACTION; LAMAISM 187

perhaps of the males — devote themselves to
a "religious" life as Lama-monks. Before
this intense absorption in piety all other
human activities have withered away. The
very nations who supplied the devastating
hordes of Attila or of Genghis have sunk
into passive, priest-ridden serfs of their
Church ; harmless camel-drivers or shepherds
or horse-breeders of the steppes, who are so
literally artless that they need to call in a
Chinese to do the work if ever they require
the services of a tinker or a carpenter. They
are the helpless prey of the Chinese money-
lender, and have no amusement except
attending pony races where the chief racing
owners are the local equivalent of bishops
and half the spectators are clergy.

With the growth of Lamaism the old danger

of invasion from the side of the desert nomads

passed silently away, and the Great

Lamaism ^ .

prepares tii« Wall which the earlier Ming

way for tlie

Manchu Sovereigns had been at pams to

Empire. hi i

restore — not needlessly, as the
capture of a Chinese emperor in the Mongol
War of 1450 sufficiently proves — became, as
it is to-day, an antiquarian curiosity. But, if
the desert was pacified, no sooner had the

188 RELIGION IN CHINA

decay of the Ming Dynasty exposed China to
the miseries of a generation of discord and
devastating civil war than the ground was
laid open for a new conquest by the nomads
of the north-eastern forests. Accordingly, just
about the time when Mongolia had followed
the example of Tibet in becoming thoroughly
permeated by the Lamaist faith, it, as well
as China, fell before a new race of conquerors,
the Manchus, who held sway until the recent
Chinese Revolution of 1911-1912. The
Lamaist movement paved the way for the
Manchu conquests and rendered them possible,
and it is observable how, all through the
period of Manchu dominion — although Lama-
ism never made much impression upon the
matter-of-fact settled populations of China
proper — the Imperial Government sedulously
cultivated and fostered it as a politically useful
force in all those regions where it had taken
root. There are two splendid Lamaseries
in Peking, adorned with the masterpieces of
Tibetan art, but the prudent will beware how
they visit them unescorted, for, unless their
inmates have changed greatly since I knew
Peking, they are the abode of a gang of
savage and greedy extortioners, whose manners

NATIONALIST REACTION; LAMAISM 189

and repute illustrate the wholesome truth that,
wherever men demand to be revered as
incarnations of the divine, they are in
imminent danger of sinking below the average
level of the human.

In Mongolia, by all accounts, the natural
gentleness and childlike simplicity of a
primitive people have, on the whole, pre-
served the virtues of hospitality to strangers ;
it is only the Chinese that are feared and
hated, with an intensity of passion that
makes the strife which at times afflicts the
border of the two races a sickening record
of atrocities ; the burning of Mongol encamp-
ments revenged by a raid on Chinese villages
where, the adults being slain or driven out,
the children are impaled wholesale upon the
cottage doors. In Tibet till a very few years
ago every foreigner lived the life of a hunted
wolf, unable to show his face in the daylight
lest the Lamas should seize him and torture
him to death. In both countries civil life,
under the rule of the Lamas, has been
brought well-nigh to an end.

IX

CHINA
AND THE
CHURCH OF
ROME

CHAPTER IX

CHINA AND THE CHURCH OF ROME

Some influence more far-reaching and in-
spiring than Lamaism was needed for the
awakening of China, and it could

Maritime ,

intercourse onlv come from abroad. The Far

with Europe. i i j • i

bast, as we have observed, equipped
Europe with the tools for a grand transforma-
tion scene of European life, and by the end of
the fifteenth century that grand transformation
was already bearing fruit in a wide outburst
of European energy. With the aid of the
compass, in ships armed with powder and
firearms, Western mariners pushed their way
across the Ocean to America, round the Cape
of Africa, along the southern shores of Asia,
exploring, conquering, colonizing — and they
were not long in appearing on the coast of
China. Confounded at first with Japanese
pirates, to whose depredations those coasts
had long been a prey, and whose doings the

13 193

194 RELIGION IN CHINA

Europeans sometimes copied too faithfully,
the Portuguese and Spaniards nevertheless
brought with them the first heralds of a
new religious and intellectual message. The
Apostle of Japan, Saint Francis Xavier, did
not indeed set foot on the Chinese mainland,
though he died on an island on the Chinese
coast. But in the next generation Jesuit
missionaries — men whose learning was as
wide as their zeal was enthusiastic — devoted
themselves to the task of converting the
Chinese to their Church.

The first great Jesuit Apostle of China,
Matteo Ricci, landed at Macao in 1579, and
after many years spent in various
mSsions. P^^ts ^f ^^^ south and centre, after
being imprisoned as a Japanese spy
and other adventures, made his way to Peking
in 1 60 1, and died there in 16 10. He had a
very warm reception from the Chinese ; many
of the higher classes thoroughly appreciated his
learning ; his mathematical and other treatises
on scientific matters rank as Chinese classics
in their subjects ; and a few among all
ranks enthusiastically accepted his religion.
A native Church was established that has
never ceased its ministrations, and whose

CHINA AND THE CHURCH OF ROME 195

adherents at the present day are numbered
by millions. The great observatory and
mission station of Sikawei, near Shanghai —
which, beside much and very varied literary
activity, supplies meteorological information
for the whole East Coast of Asia — traces its
origin back to the munificence of one of
Ricci's first converts. In his wanderingfs in
China Ricci, of course, came upon traces of
earlier Christian endeavours, for the Roman
Church had had a mission in Mongol times
— but it was reserved for the next o^eneration
to unearth, about 1625, the record of the
yet earlier activities of the Nestorians.

For a hundred years, under Ricci, Schaal,

Verbiest, and many another, the Catholic

Mission pursued a career that

Successes ^

andfauures seemed SO prosperous as to afford

of Roman

cathoucsin Pfood hope of a complete adherence

Cbina. o i. l

of China to the Papal fold, and it
seems to be a not uncommon opinion in the
Church of Rome that its victory would have
been complete but for two circumstances.
One was the overthrow of the old, native
Ming Dynasty in the Manchu conquest, which
threw power into hardier and less corrupt,
more vigorous but less enlightened and civi-

196 RELIGION IN CHINA

lized hands. The other was the quarrel
between the Jesuits on the one part and the
Franciscan and Dominican missionaries on the
other. The Jesuits had been the first in the
field. They had adopted on the whole a
very tolerant attitude towards native observ-
ances, holding that the worship of ancestors,
for instance, was .a purely national, civil, or
political rite that could be incorporated
into Christianity without offence. It might
need some purifying from idolatrous taint,
but in itself was at least as consistent with
Christianity as the Invocation of Saints. To
the others, who came later, it appeared
a piece of pagan idolatry against which
Christians must set a face of steel. There
were other disputes as well, about the correct
rendering of Christian religious terms, e.g.
whether the word *' T'ien," in view of its
various popular, Confucianist, and other asso-
ciations, could be regarded as an adequate
word for " God " in the Christian sense, and
so forth, which aggravated the quarrel. The
controversies were submitted both to the
Chinese, or, to be accurate, the Manchu
Emperor, and to the Pope, and, as might
have been expected, decided by each in

CHINA AND THE CHURCH OF ROME 197

opposite senses. The missionaries were, of
course, bound in a matter of faith to submit
to the decree of Rome, and in so doing sealed
their death-warrant as an important and active
influence on the course of Chinese politics.
If the Church of Rome was ever to prevail
in China, its victory was indefinitely post-
poned, for it had, by impugning Chinese
national customs and by appealing to and
preferring the judgment of a foreign autho-
rity, in matters submitted to the decision of
the Emperor, proclaimed itself a politically
dangerous institution.

The first Manchu emperors were, on the
whole, friendly to the missionaries. They
keenly appreciated their services, for instance,
in correcting the calendar, just as the last
Ming emperors had welcomed the assistance
of the Jesuit Adam Schaal in casting cannon
of improved pattern for the war against the
Manchu invaders. But, as the scope of the
claims of the Church of Rome came to be
more plainly realized, the formal system of
historic ecclesiastical Christianity was per-
ceived to be incompatible with much that
China held to be sacred and supremely im-
portant, and the tone changed. Welcome

198 RELIGION IN CHINA

was followed by coldness, coldness by per-
mitting local persecutions and popular out-
breaks, local vexation by general suppression
at the hands of the law. A counterblast to
Christian propaganda was framed in the
famous " Sacred Edict " of K'ang-hsi — sixteen
maxims of orthodox Confucian morality —
which was to be the watchword of China
in her resistance to alien creeds. These
maxims, in the next reign, that of Yung-
cheng (1723 to 1736), were expanded into
a set of official homilies which were ordained
to be read and expounded in public twice a
month throughout the Empire.

At the same time Christianity was formally
proscribed under severe penalties — banishment,

confiscation of property, imprison-
Persecutions, •• i 1

ment, torture, and death. A tew
missionaries were retained by the Court as
astronomers, or for other assistance as scien-
tific experts, but the rest were driven to exile
or concealment ; the propagation of their re-
ligion was only possible under cover of the
profoundest secrecy ; and the Church entered
upon a long agony of a hundred years of
bitter and continuous persecution at the
hands of the Chinese state. Its property

CHINA AND THE CHURCH OF ROME 199

went to endow Buddhist monasteries or other
similar institutions, but it was mainly the
state, not the priesthoods, that dealt the
blow.

Nothing can be more certain than that the

Catholic missions effected a great work in

making the West and China better

Estimate of • ^ j vi. ^i,

Catholic acquamted with one another.
o^ratLns. Almost to our day our detailed
knowledge of China has depended
on the works of Navarette, De Mailla, Du
Halde, etc., or on the ** Annales de la Foi,"
the ** Lettres Edifiantes," and other Catholic
publications of that age, and all our maps
of the interior are developments, far too
little corrected and modernized, of Jesuit
surveys taken mostly in the early years of
the eighteenth century. Chinese knowledge
of the West is similarly founded on what
was taught by the missionaries of Rome in
their palmy days. It is evident that there
is much in the system and ideals of the
Church of Rome calculated to make its
ministrations appeal with powerful attraction
to the Chinese mind. It is a Church that
founds strong communities among the Chinese,
which strike their roots deep into the soil of

200 RELIGION IN CHINA

Chinese society, continuing generation after
generation a generally quiet, unobtrusive
life.

Yet I shall be expressing no unfamiliar
thought if I should suggest that in the
eighteenth century, or the seventeenth cen-
tury, or even in the sixteenth century, the
Church of Rome no longer stood for what
was most vital in the religious life of Europe,
and was no longer, as it might at an earlier
stage have been, the agency best fitted to
awaken China to the highest developments
of either Western civilization or even Chris-
tian standards of life and conduct. It had
a great deal to teach. Its ministers were
often men of broad culture ; they were almost
always men of picked ability ; their courage
and devotion were beyond praise ; they were
distinguished in works of charity, and in the
piety and purity of their lives. By the vows
of their calling their lives were given wholly
to the work they had in hand : China was
not for them merely a place of temporary
residence, but the land wherein they were to
labour till the hour of their death — if need
be, till the day of martyrdom for their
faith.

CHINA AND THE CHURCH OF ROME 201

Yet their teaching was necessarily bound
up with forms of ritual, with habits of thought
and belief, with which Europe had long been
dissatisfied, from which Europe — both in
Protestant countries and in those which re-
mained outwardly Catholic — was endeavour-
ing, not without success, to emancipate itself.
Many of their Church's observances were
scarcely less superstitious than those of the
Buddhist and Taoist creeds which it sought
to correct, and it was widely defaced by a
spirit of exclusiveness, sometimes degenerat-
ing into savage bigotry, towards those out-
side its fold, from which the native Chinese
religions were, at least as a rule, comparatively
free. To many in Europe it had long seemed
to stand for a mediaeval scholasticism, for an
arbitrary traditional authority, for a priestly
control under which no man could call his
soul his own, and to press this side of its
activity with far more insistence than those
universal and eternal experiences which
uplift the heart, than modesty, mercy, and
justice, out of which all living religious in-
spiration springs. Its mechanical claim to
obedience to every detail of its system seemed
to bring it, over and over again, into conflict

202 RELIGION IN CHINA

with the knowledge, the reason, the conscience,
the sense of truth and faith and hope, and
widening charity of the world which it pro-
fessed to enlighten and guide.

However little the Chinese might be
acquainted with Western controversies, there
were and are many among them to whom
the system of the Church of Rome seemed
to be very much the same thing as the
popular temple worships of China. Disguised
under a change of name, its Virgin and Saints
seemed to be Kuanyin and the Bodhisattvas,
its Chiao-Huang or Pope to be simply a
Western variant upon a well-known Tibetan
theme. In a word, for all its profession of
catholicity, may it not have been that the
Church of Rome was not sufficiently catholic,
and that it was the fact of this want of catho-
licity that provoked the disasters which it had
to encounter ?

In addition to the missions of the Church
of Rome, the Church of Russia has main-
tained, ever since the Treaty of Nerchinsk,
1689, a college at Peking, but it has not, as
it has in Japan, succeeded in making any
deep impression on native religious life.

CHINA AND THE CHURCH OP ROME 203

There are Russian churches at a few of
the Chinese ports, but, except that they
minister to the local Russian communities,
they are as yet of little importance in the
country.

X

THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY: THE
CONTACT OF
CHINA AND
MODERN IDEALS

CHAPTER X

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE CONTACT
OF CHINA AND MODERN IDEALS

It was not till the nineteenth century that
China became in any real sense aware that
Europe had other religious or intellectual
ideas to impart than those of the Roman
Catholic Missions. It is true that Dutch
and English traders had visited the country
from the third and fourth decades of the
seventeenth century, and, as time went on,
their enterprises grew to a certain import-
ance. During the Dutch occupation of
Formosa, down to the conquest of the island
by the Manchus, about 1670, a very credit-
able effort was made by Protestant mission-
aries to civilize the native tribes, but it never
extended to the mainland, and it perished in
the conquest. Sixty years later, at the very
moment when Christian mission enterprise
was proscribed, foreign maritime trade of

207

208 RELIGION IN CHINA

all sorts was restricted to the one port of
Canton, and even there harassed by elaborate
and burdensome conditions ; and this con-
tinued during all the remaining period of the
greatness of the Manchu Dynasty. Efforts
were made from time to time to secure open-
ings for a wider intercourse, but until the
'thirties of the last century they came to very
little. China was practically a closed country,
living its own life, recovering amazingly from
the terrible convulsions which had afflicted
it before, during, and for a generation after
the conquest, but conscious of no reason why
its people should question the all-sufficiency
of the organization and equipment which
they had inherited from their ancestors.

Christianity was not again officially tolerated

until treaties came to be negotiated with the

Western Powers after the close

Reasons of

opposition of the unsuccessful war with Eng-

to foreign i , r ^i i

mission land of 1840-1842. The tolera-

enterprise.

tion then accorded, being naturally
regarded as imposed on China from outside
by superior force, was widely resented both
by the masses and by the upholders of the
old political order, and this fact led in many
respects to a most unfortunate state of affairs.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 209

On the one hand, Christian missions were
tempted to rely on the support of the govern-
ments and consuls of their home lands : on
the other, governments and their representa-
tives could not avoid frequent interferences
to check acts of persecution and annoyance,
if they were to see that the provisions of
treaties were not made a laughing-stock or
reduced to a dead letter. To permit a
foreigner to suffer pillage or insult or murder
without insisting upon proper reparation
might at any moment and easily provoke a
storm of riot whose reverberations involved
a whole province, and might lead to very
delicate political, diplomatic, and commercial
complications. Even if humanity had per-
mitted, it could never be a question simply
of letting individuals court martyrdom by
taking their lives in their own hands. Native
converts, again, feeling the attitude of their
own officials to be prejudiced or unfriendly,
came to regard themselves as permanently
in opposition to those officials, and behaved
so as to create the suspicion of either being
infected with disloyalty or of aiming to form
an imperium in imperio under the protection
of foreigners. Some, at any rate, of the

14

210 RELIGION IN CHINA

missions, especially those of the Roman
Church, also assumed the airs of official
rank : bishops would expect the recognition
due to their hierarchical position, and to be
treated as the social equals of governors of
provinces ; priests, perhaps, as those of
district magistrates. Attempts to resume
Church property, that had been sequestrated
over a century before, also led to much
bitterness. And other causes of offence on
both sides were not lacking.

It is easy to see how, among a suspicious,
credulous, and ignorant population, proud of
its national traditions and resentful of any
suggestion of inferiority, an atmosphere could
be created, under such circumstances, in
which Christian mission work, either Pro-
testant or Catholic, could only be carried on
under grave disabilities, in the face of con-
stant opposition, growing at times to deadly
and murderous hatred. Even if there had
never been a tactless word spoken, or a
foolish act done by any missionary in China,
the progress of mission work in such an
atmosphere could only be slow and partial,
for every institution, however inspired by
purely unworldly, unselfish, and humanitarian

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 211

.aims — schools, hospitals, medical work,
orphanages, everything — laboured under the
taint of a suspicion of dark, ulterior, un-
friendly motives, which It long seemed im-
possible to shake off.

In the days of persecution a habit of secrecy
naturally grew up. Secrecy begat suspicion :
suspicion was ready to believe all evil of the
stranger In the land. The unction of the
sick and dying, the rescuing and baptism of
abandoned foundlings, were widely believed
to be connected with, or to cloak, ritual
practices and dark magic of the most revolt-
ing kinds. " Hao hua," say the Chinese,
*' pu pel jen : pel jen mel hao hua." — -Good
words are not said behind men's backs ; what
is said behind the back Is not good.

And It would be foolish to pretend that no
provocation was ever given. The mission-
aries were a section of the foreign community
which grew up with the opening of trade in
and around the seaports of China, and that
community was composed of a very mixed
population, of many nationalities and blend-
ings of nationalities. I would not have you
suppose that their lives are, or ever have
been, worse in the mass than those of other

212 RELIGION IN CHINA

people. The proportion of men of high
personal character and of strict commercial
integrity, as well as of energy, enterprise,
and administrative ability — of picked men, in
fact, in all departments of activity — has been,
I venture to maintain, at all times unusually
high among the foreign communities of
China. But these communities were, especi-
ally in the early days, peculiarly situated. I
take it that in every seaport town in the
world there are elements that do not show
human nature at its best. Long severance
from home ties and associations, the sense
of exile in some, the love of adventure in
others, in others, again, the proud and over-
bearing attitude of conscious superiority
which race prejudice engenders in vulgar
minds, contact with a people with whom real
intellectual intercourse is difficult, climatic
influences, either depressing or unduly stimu-
lating, numerous opportunities and tempta-
tions to indulgence and excess, the cheapness
of some kinds of service, the extreme rarity
and expensiveness, even total absence of
worthier distractions in time of leisure from
business cares, the difficulty of carrying on
family life as it is understood in the home

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 213

lands, the dally immersion in the monotony
of petty, local, or personal cares, varied by
occasional sudden and unforeseen storms of
stress and crisis, upsetting all calculations of
the normal and probable, the imperfect com-
munication with and knowledge of the living
interests of the wider world outside, have
very likely lowered the tone of some sections
of the foreign communities in China. At
any rate the accusation is sometimes made
that the evil example of the lives of the
foreign lay population of the ** ports " has
had a deleterious effect upon missionary
prospects, and, much as I am inclined to
discount the accusation, it is not possible to
dismiss it as an absurdity. The European
in China is liable to be judged by his native
critics in the mass : if foreign teachers are
to have a hearing, they must meet the native
who insists that foreigners should practise
what they preach.

This applies, too, to the action of foreign
states in their corporate dealings with the
Chinese people, and here again we are con-
fronted with a record that is not always
ideal. There have been prolonged and
tangled controversies, of which some have

214 RELIGION IN CHINA

been the cause, or at least the occasion, of
wars, wherein it is by no means impossible
to uphold the argument that, on the balance,
the foreign, Christian Power was the more to
blame. It would be out of place to attempt
a reasoned disquisition on such matters, as,
e.g. the importation of Indian opium into
China, the treatment of Chinese labourers
and emigrants abroad, or the question whether
the redress of injuries has not sometimes
been sought in a spirit of arrogance and
vindictiveness. Summary judgments on such
questions are apt to be more unjust than
epigrams usually are : the facts are curiously
complex, and well - informed men, equally
animated with the desire to be fair-minded,
have come to discrepant and contradictory
conclusions : those who have tried most
earnestly to see both sides have, perhaps,
balanced longest. Yet the existence of such
questions, admittedly involving important
moral issues, has notoriously been a stumbling-
block in the path of mutual understanding
and the growth of good-will.

It must be freely granted that among the
missionary body there has been little ground
for personal, moral scandal ; but it would be

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 215

by no means impossible to quote cases of
ignorant or fanatical narrow-mindness, of zeal
outrunning discretion, of bigotry and theo-
logical bitterness, both between competing
Christian denominations and between all
exponents of Christianity and the people they
had come to influence and convert. And
there has sometimes been, in some native
circles, a certain element of hypocrisy and self-
seeking, a tendency to see in the Church a
benefit society whose by-laws and formulas
could be learnt by heart, and when learnt used
as a lever for purchasing immunity from civil
embarrassments, from the consequences of
wrongdoing, even as a means for indulging
vengeance upon private enemies. Some
strange doings that came to my knowledge in
the province of Kiangsi in the years 1901 and
1902 rather opened my eyes to the possible
developments of things in China, should
religion become the battle-ground of contend-
ing factions, and I dare say they could be
matched in many provinces.

When to these causes of offence we add
the claim of some professing Christians to
be members of the only true Church, that
Church being in their eyes the exclusive

216 RELIGION IN CHINA

vehicle of Divine grace, or of salvation for
mankind, and the attitude of superiority to
all outsiders, "heathen" or other, which such
a claim is apt to encourage, we can have no
difficulty in seeing how enormous the handicap
has been under which all forms of Christian
endeavour have necessarily laboured.

Indeed, had there been any probability that

the net result of Christian activity in China

would only be to substitute for

Spread of the . .

cnristian Buddhist rites and forms the rites

spirit.

and forms of some professedly
Christian sectarianism, for the superstitions
of the Taoist other superstitions that have
grown up around the organizations of Rome
or of Little Bethel, for the pretensions of the
Confucian orthodox some other '* orthodoxy "
equally arrogant, it might well be questioned
whether we should be justified in regarding
the success of Christianity, of any kind, as
a subject for satisfaction. Fortunately, apart
from all other causes, the very divisions of
the Christian Church were in themselves
security enough against the realization of any
such result. Wherever a Chinese observer of
Christianity had sufficient intelligence to go
beneath the superficialities of its phenomena,

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 217

or to compare one body with another, he
would be bound to inquire what it was, after
all, that all these sects and missions had in
common. If they co-operated with one
another — and, in justice to them all, it must
be said that they generally co-operated, and
co-operated increasingly as time went on — why
did they co-operate? What was the common
element that really inspired at bottom all this
various activity ? What was the general outfit,
mental, moral, material, of the societies in
which Christianity, of any kind, prevailed ?
Plainly there was a common element, and it
must be something more fundamental than the
outward forms, the ceremonies, the services,
even the theological statements of belief, how-
ever insistent the teachers of Christianity
themselves might be that these things were
essential to the substance of their faith.

Might these not, one and all, be merely
institutions of human ordinance, of temporary
and local utility, if of any utility at all — the
garments with which the Christian spirit had
clothed itself duringr the centuries of its g^rowth
as a Western thing — and Christianity itself be
a temper of the human soul ? Might not all
the paraphernalia of organization be simply

218 RELIGION IN CHINA

the by-laws adopted by Western Christian
societies for their own convenience in their
attempt to explain the workings of that spirit
in the examples of it whom they revered ?
What if the test of true priesthood should be,
not adherence to this or that form of com-
munion, or ordination in this or that society,
but a ministry known by its fruits, and Hugh
Latimer have been right when he declared
that a bishop is ''that man, whatsoever he
be, that hath a flock to be taught of him " ?
What if it be true, as said by one who lighted
an even brighter candle in the world than
Latimer, that all men shall know who are
Christ's disciples by their loving one another ?
Some form, some organization is necessary if
men are to combine together for any common
purpose, but may not the choice of form be
solely a question of practical utility, open to
human judgment and human revision and
amendment, not part of the substance of
Christianity at all?

It would be difficult enough to select among
the existing Christian teachings any doctrinal
basis from which a message could be ad-
dressed, in the name of them all, to the people
of China. Not only would there be no agree-

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 219

ment as to those questions upon which con-
tention and division have arisen in the West,
but China herself would supply a plentiful
crop of fresh dividing lines. There is litde
more chance now than there was three
hundred years ago that students of Chinese
phenomena should agree as to the exact point
where commemoration of ancestors ceases to
be an innocent, useful, and laudable bond
of civil society, and becomes an idolatry which
no Christian community could consent to bind
itself to observe.

Yet I believe Christianity has a message to
impart and that Christians have, in a very con-
siderable measure, got that message delivered
to the Chinese and understood by them.

Some will, I believe, be found to agree
with me that, beyond all the forms in which
Christian teaching has sought to express
itself, there exists, creating them, not created
by them, a Christian spirit and a Christian
life ; that this spirit and life are perfectly
definite and characteristic, and, wherever they
are manifested, that there is the reality behind
Christian teaching.

Florence Nightingale, if she had denomi-
national leanings at all, was a Unitarian ;

220 RELIGION IN CHINA

Father Damien was a Roman Catholic ; Dr.
Jackson of Mukden was a Presbyterian ;
the men, women, and children who met their
martyrdom at T'aiyuan in 1900 belonged to
many communions — just as those did who
went down with the Titanic ; it does not
matter what Church Captain Scott of the
Terra Nova belonged to. There are thou-
sands and thousands more. They are the
salt of the earth ; they are the light of the
world : their theological opinions have nothing
to do with it. But this is true : one and all
they walk, or try to walk, in the same foot-
steps. According to their various lights and
various opportunities they meet life and death
as followers of one example. They may not
meet by the same altars to partake of the
same bread and wine, but wherever they
meet, it is with reconciled hearts, with minds
full of the memory of their Master, communi-
cating His spiritual presence one to another.
Where that spirit dwells, no outward form
can make such fellowship more, no absence
of form can make it less, than the Eucharist
of the universal Church of Christ. They are
Christians, whatever they believe or disbelieve
about services or creeds.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 221

Dr. Gore, Bishop of Oxford, has lately
said, *' If I am to judge by the fruits of re-
ligion as I see them in life, I should be dis-
posed to rank the Friends among the highest
in the Kingdom of God, and they have no
ministry and no sacraments." Why not, if
they deserve it, so rank them ? In the long
run it is by its fruits that religion is judged.

Let us try to see what Christianity, so
understood, might find to say to China.

In the face of many of the phenomena
presented by China — in the face of prevent-
ible famine and pestilence, of official corrup-
tion, judicial torture, family oppression, the
stagnant deadness of an arrested civilization,
where public opinion seems paralysed as a
force for dealing with patent evils ; in the
face of the buying and selling of human
beings, or of justice, of infanticide and occa-
sional suttee, of brigandage and civil war,
of foot-binding and enslavement to the opium
habit, and all the breed of ignorance, misery,
and impurity which are such constant features
of every part of the country — Christians will,
no doubt, have different suggestions to make
in regard to details. They may not be pre-
pared with any cut -and -dried remedy, but

222 RELIGION IN CHINA

they will see these things from a common
standpoint, and we know instinctively what
that standpoint will be ; they will regard
these, and all such evils all the world over,
as they regard them in their own lands —
that is, as problems to be wrestled with,
w^hich no failures and no disappointments
can permit us to set on one side. Every-
where, at all times, the Christian conscience
knows that it stands or falls by a judgment
less concerned with forms and professions
than with ministry to its great Awakener,
throuofh service done to the least of His
brethren in their hours of hunger or thirst
or loneliness or bondage.

And in some measure the Christian stand-
point is bound to be taken up by every man
of Western race who finds himself confronted
with these problems of Chinese life — with
the facts of the Chinese world. It is not
that there is such a thing as a Christian
nation in the world. Western man is not
anywhere thoroughly or even generally
Christian in the mass. But at the back of
his consciousness there is almost always some
echo of the Christian life that sooner or later
will tell upon some part of his conduct, re-

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 223

proving even where it fails to overcome the
promptings of indolence, vindictiveness, selfish-
ness, sensuality, or dishonesty. He is not
a consistent Christian all the time : he is
carried away in all sorts of other directions.
Yet there are moments of reflection which
cause him to feel and act as a Christian
part of the time, from pride or from shame,
even where sustained religious motives are
lacking. And so there is an approximation
between the average standard of Western
conduct and the conduct that the acceptance
of the Christian standpoint would enjoin.

This Christian standpoint is not wholly
different in principle from the high - water
marks of Confucian or Buddhist teaching :
all that can be claimed for it is that it is
more energetic, more active, more hopeful.
In the face of the things to which I have
alluded, it will be inclined, in a way that
has never been widely characteristic of Con-
fucian or Buddhist communities, to get up,
to TO out, to do something. Some, no
doubt, will counsel prudence, patience, study
of causes, delay — to measure obstacles, at any
rate, before attacking them blindfold — but no
Christian will consent to sit down resignedly

224 RELIGION IN CHINA

with idle hands and see evil have its way.
He sees in it a problem which it is his
duty to deal with. Some will remember that
there are similar, just as pressing, evils nearer
home, but on the whole you will find that the
charity which is for ever reminding itself that
charity begins at home is of a sort that is
apt to stay there, never getting beyond its
beginnings, even if it does not let those
beginnings perish from neglect and inanition.
The spirit, the reality behind Christian teach-
inof, embraces the whole world in its brother-
hood. At its best it is a thing neither
obtrusive nor noisy : its operation is not to
destroy the varieties of human character and
equipment, but to use the diverse talents of
each individual, to show each how he can
rise to the fullest stature of his own self,
by causing each to feel that he is living in
a presence, like that described in the little
story or parable called ''The Passing of the
Third Floor Back," before which the mean-
ness of his lower impulses cannot stand.
Expand that tale of a London lodging-house
to the world, and you will see what the
Christianizing of the world would be. That
is the reality which Christian forms seek to

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 225

explain, and in some measure the opening
of China to the Western world has brought
that reality to the conscious notice of the
Chinese people.

To that reality, that inward spirit, wherever
and with whatever qualifications and incon-
sistencies it has showed itself, many in China
have been attracted to whom the letter of
all Western forms of worship was meaning-
less or repellent or suspect. In this sense
Christianity extended far and wide beyond
the limits of formal conversion or church
membership. The missionaries had, in fact,
planted a leaven in the midst of China,
working slowly and imperceptibly, but in
the end leavening the whole lump. It was
seen in a measure that Christianity was not
merely a foreign thing, but a thing that
could be expressed in terms of Chinese
thought for Chinese needs.

When we think of it, can we doubt in what
spirit Jesus Himself would have lived and
suffered had He appeared among men in
Chinese instead of Syrian surroundings ?
Might He not have quoted the Odes as He
quoted the Psalms? Might not the Book of
Rites have stood for the " Law " ; the Lun-yii,

15

226 RELIGION IN CHINA

the Tao-Te Ching, Mencius, for the
''Prophets"? Might He not have found a
similar field for similar parables among the
villages and cypress groves that nestle under
the shadow of T'ai-shan as among the hills
and along the lake shores of Galilee ? Would
there not have been scribes and Pharisees
around him in Loyang and Ch'angan and
Pien-liang, even as there were in Jerusalem?
Many details of the setting would have been
Chinese instead of Jewish, but the main action
of the drama might well have been the same ;
it would have been the same gospel conveying
the same inward message ; its appeal would
have lost nothing for being expressed in terms
of Chinese thought and illustrated with
Chinese examples. The Kingdom might still
have been likened to leaven mixed in measures
of native meal.

I am speaking of things whereof it is
perhaps sometimes difficult to judge, for
Chinese are commonly reticent about their
deeper feelings. Yet I have gathered from
conversations with natives, and other observa-
tion, many an indication of the value that
they — not being professed Christians — attached
to the Christian message. I have several

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 227

times found such a state of things as this :
that a man would have read the whole or
greater part of the New Testament, to find
that while it contained incidents and implica-
tions which seemed to him either incredible or
of no interest, yet he perceived a '' T'ien
Tao" — a "Way of God" — in it, which lifted
its teaching high above the traditional Three
Teachings of China, so that it was a living
thing, while they, in spite of much utility and
many excellences, were dead things now, which
had run their course and had their day. I
remember one such conversation with a man
who was in my service as a Chinese clerk in
the years 1897 ^^^ 1898, but afterwards took
a better place in the Postal Department —
following on a talk about the anti-foreign riots
of 1 89 1. In 1 89 1 he had been very young,
and had more than half believed, as did his
relations and companions, the inflammatory
tales then current about foreign missionaries
mutilating Chinese children, drugging, poison-
ing, and outraging people, covering every
enormity with a hypocritical mask of pretended
zeal for charity and good works, etc., etc.,
which, circulated in millions by means of
posters, picture-books, verses, and tracts,

228 RELIGION IN CHINA

frequently through the agency of pawnshops
owned and managed by a syndicate of agita-
tors from the *' anti-foreign " province of
Hunan, were setting the whole of Central China
in a blaze of indignant excitement. Where
there was so much smoke, decent people felt
confident that these tales, however embellished
by exaggeration, must have some basis in
fact ; and my clerk had thought so too and had
been indignant accordingly. Yet that agita-
tion led him to look into the question, to
procure and read the foreigners' books, par-
ticularly the New Testament, with the result
that, while he told me that, being unable to
accept the missionaries' doctrine, on such
points as the divinity of Jesus, he could not
join their Church as a member, yet he felt sure
that Christianity was the live force in China
in our days, in that it taught that God lives in
man, that we are the temples of a living God.

NOTE

An illustration of the hold that Christianity has taken on
Chinese thought meets me as I revise these pages. The
local native newspaper of the Port of Newchwang, published
by the Chinese merchants' guild of the port, for November
13, 1914, has a leading article entitled "The Cost of the War
Fever in Europe." The article contains two quotations, both
from Saint Matthew's Gospel, to enforce upon the peoples of

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 229

Europe that the good tree bears good fruit and the evil tree
evil fruit, and that men should lay up for themselves treasure
in heaven. Allow that the subject lends itself to lecturing
the European out of his own sacred books, yet it is remark-
able that a Chinese newspaper, writing for a Chinese com-
mercial public, should go to this source for its illustrations,
apparently quite confident that the force and application of
the passages cited will come home to and be familiar to
native readers.

XI

THE

MODERN

TRANSFORMATION

CHAPTER XI

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION

In the last chapter we have in a sense antici-
pated the course of events to describe a result
which eventually followed from the modern
intercourse of China with the outside world :
it is therefore necessary to retrace our steps to
a point of time when the isolation of the
Chinese world had not been seriously infringed.
To the date of the abdication, full of years and
glory, of the great Manchu Emperor Ch'ien
Lung in 1796 it was possible for Europe and
China to live lives apart, an occasional subject
of speculative interest each to the other, but
not practically influencing one another in any
way. But that state of things was wholly
incompatible with the needs, ambitions, and
equipment of the age that had dawned : inter-
course, even widening in its scope, had to
come, and with intercourse some accommo-
dation and understanding of points of view.
Evidently the Protestant Europe of a hun-

234 RELIGION IN CHINA

dred years ago could no more consent than
could the commercial or the political forces
of the world to be wholly indifferent to China.
As early as 1807 Robert Morrison commenced
his labours as a missionary to the Chinese ;
in 181 5 he had produced the first translation of
the Scriptures and was at work upon the first
Chinese - English dictionary ; and he was
followed by an unbroken stream of colleagues
and successors. Few at first, but making up
in industry and ardour what they lacked in
numbers, and representing perhaps, in some
respects, what the present generation would
style a rather narrow type of Protestantism,
they nevertheless introduced a leaven of
modern ideas which was destined in the course
of time, and in co-operation with all manner of
other influences, to set in motion a train of
transformations the importance of whose work-
ings the world is at length beginning to realize.
The beginning of this movement coincides
in point of time with the decline of the Manchu
Dynasty. In 1796, with the abdica-
lltween old ^^0^ ^t the age of eighty-two of the
weaS^^ magnificent and venerable Ch'ien
Lung — the last of the great Manchu
emperors — China entered upon one of her

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 236

recurrent eras of political weakness and de-
crepitude. A generation had been born who
could not look the facts of the world in the
face and remain satisfied with the simple faith
in the all-sufficiency of Chinese organization
which had seemed an axiom to their fathers.
The old order could only maintain its prestige
in so far as it was buttressed by ignorance : it
had to be obscurantist to live. Rebellions and
agitations of all sorts convulsed the country,
particularly the southern provinces, where
Manchu rule, even before it had revealed itself
to be corrupt and incompetent, had always
been profoundly detested as alien and bar-
barian. And now, under the successors, always
weak and often unworthy, of the great Manchu
sovereigns, the effete Manchus of the nine-
teenth century, idle paupers of the state,
drawing their doles for military service that
they had long been utterly unfitted to render,
were not only detested but despised.

It was inevitable that some among these

disturbances should be coloured by the new

ideas slowly filterino; in from the

Hung Hslu- ' ^

oh'uanand European world. The o^reatest of

the T'ai-p'ings.

the rebellions of the century, that
known as the Ch'ang-mao (Long Hair) or

236 RELIGION IN CHINA

T'ai-p'ing Rebellion, traced its origin to a
movement which, with all its vagaries and
excesses, drew its inspiration directly from the
Bible and from the circulation of Protestant
tracts. A Cantonese schoolmaster, Hung
Hsiu-ch'uan, disappointed at failure in the
Public Examinations, became the founder of
a new sect — the Pai Shang-ti Hui, or '• God
Worshippers." At one period he had been
under the influence of a Protestant missionary
— a certain Mr. J. J. Roberts — from whom he
and his colleagues, Liang Ah-fa and others,
obtained literature which seemed to open up
a new world to their minds. By and by they
beheld visions and dreamed dreams. It was
revealed to Hung Hsiu-ch'uan in a trance that
he was no other than the younger brother of
Jesus Christ, and equally the Son of God.
He was taken up in the spirit into heaven
and received a mandate from the Father to
resist and destroy idolatry, especially to free
the land from the tyranny of the Manchu
"imps." Official opposition and persecution
supplied the needed stimulus and provocation
to swell this fancy into a formidable rebellion.
Purely local at first — indeed, very similar in
its manifestations to many another outflowing

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 237

of religious revivalist enthusiasm or reform-
ing zeal which men of after-ages have learnt
to remember with affectionate and grateful
veneration, it quickly gathered to itself all
the forces of southern discontent — all the
fanaticism and all the misery and all the blind,
unreasoning passion that had festered for a
hundred and fifty years throughout half a
dozen provinces. By 1853 the Heavenly
Prince of the Kingdom of Great Peace- -T'ai-
p'ing Kuo T'ien Wang — had established a
government — of a strange and terrible sort —
at Nanking, and his armies were spreading
terror and devastation far and wide over the
country. He had ascended into a high moun-
tain of success whence the devil of self-esteem
and worldly ambition had shown him all the
kingdoms of the earth and their glory — and,
bowing down to secure that possession, he
found for himself insanity and a suicide's
death, for his country fifteen years of the most
destructive civil war in the modern annals of
mankind. Twenty million lives is the lowest
estimate at which we have ever seen put- the
cost of that rebellion and its suppression.

China in those middle years of the century
passed through a terrible agony. The

238 RELIGION IN CHINA

foreigner was battering at her gates, imposing

humiliating treaties, insisting on the opening

of ports for trade, driving her
Dark days.

emperor — a very worthless emperor

— from her capital, bending to submission a
proud and ignorant, but hopelessly corrupt,
decrepit, and distracted government. Misrule
of every kind was rampant. Flood and famine
and pestilence on a huge scale brought death
to millions and ruin to scores of millions in
province after province. A despairing attach-
ment to ancient forms, a haughty exclusiveness
of conservatism, seemed to be the only answer
that the ruling class had to make to the
imperious insistence of the West to be
admitted into the Chinese world. And all the
while the whole of the Mahometan provinces
were ablaze in a series of rebellions, wherein
the loss of life, the battles, and the massacres,
one side and another, were scarcely less than
those of the T'ai-p'ing War.

For a while it seemed as if the old party,
as the party of order, the party possessed of
administrative experience, the party that could
appeal to the old traditional loyalties and
reverences of the Chinese people, had reseated
itself in power — or, at any rate, that the

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 239

conflict between the Chinese world and modern
ideas would result in a compromise that would
leave the essential institutions of the country-
still erect, if not wholly unaltered. Over and
over again men said that the choice lay-
between the "Manchus" and ''anarchy," and,
remembering as they did the days of the
T'ai-p'ing Terror, they elected to give the old
order another chance.

But the leaven at work was far too powerful
for any such partial result to be permanent.
Little by little, as the nineteenth century ran
its troubled and tragic course, one element of
reaction, of ignorance, of ancient tradition
after another, weakened and yielded.

This is not the place to relate the whole
modern history of China. In many respects
it is a very terrible story, written in characters
of fire and blood — a story of warfare and
passion, of vain, extravagant hopes, of failures,
disillusionments and disappointments, often
of what has seemed sheer blindness and
stupidity, wherein the voices of statesmanship,
of reason, and of religion have had a difficulty
to make themselves heard. Backwards and
forwards the pendulum has swung, from the
hot fit of precipitancy to the cold fit of

240 RELIGION IN CHINA

cowardice and despair, from wild belief in an
immediate millennium to cynical assertion of
the vested rights of every hoary abuse. Yet
it is in such purging fires that all great for-
ward movements of mankind are born : they
are the price of human progress, the pledge
that advancement will be permanent, will be
valued, will be worth while.

We cannot and do not defend all that is
done in such crises of human development.
It is stupid to persecute, it is cruel to burn and
slay. Yet without martyrdom and suffering
what cause in the world has ever come to
fruition, has ever come even to understand
itself.^ What China was entering upon was no
little superficial change, but the equivalent to
her of all that the Revival of Learning, the
Protestant Reformation, and the struggles for
political, religious, and social freedom of the
last four hundred years have been to us. It
is a movement on the same scale ; indeed,
it is an extension to Asiatic surroundings of
the same movement — the same break-up of
medisevalism. It would be contrary to all
human experience if such a process were not
marked by similar phenomena, similar alterna-
tions of fortune, similar violences, similar

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 2^1

victories and defeats. Through it all we have
to look at the broad, big results, and not be
either over sanguine or over despondent if the
surface currents seem to sway at any given
moment overwhelmingly this way or that.
A vast paper reformation one day may be
only the prelude to a storm of reactionary
bigotry the next, but through both, under the
surface, the trend of events goes steadily,
irresistibly onward.

There have been moments when the West
has seemed in Chinese society a great dis-
ruptive force, breaking all ties and
J?jap?r^^^ all traditions, as if its message
were to bring not peace but a
sword — the Western Terror, the " White
Peril." But along with this Western Terror,
this pressure of the ''White Peril" upon the
old and crumbling fabric of Chinese ideas,
traditions, and institutions, there arose a great
example of how such changes as were daily be-
coming more visibly inevitable in China could
be carried through — had, in fact, been carried
through — without national disruption — the
example of Japan. There, right at her doors,
China could see a country, which had lately
been just as reactionary and secluded as her-

16

242 RELIGION IN CHINA

self, renewing its life by drinking freely of
all that the West had to offer, yet animated
with an intensity of passionate patriotism the
like of which the world has perhaps never
witnessed. And when that new Japan had
proved itself not only capable of humili-
ating China, but victorious over a first-class
European Power, the hour for revolution had
struck for China. The contagion of the
Japanese example was the one stimulus needed
to fire the whole magazine of combustible
elements fermenting in China.

The preparations for this revolution had

long been brewing. They include all the

strup^g'les of which the present

The contend- . i , • -r-

ing forces generation has been a witness. To
relate them, I should have to ex-
plain how, if foreigners have sometimes taken
a mean advantage of Chinese weakness and
disunion, native Chinese have at all times
inflicted on their country wrongs and injuries
that no foreign enemy could have brought
upon her, till her best friends felt, despair-
ingly, that, however beset by actual and
possible foes, China was certain to be her
own worst enemy in every crisis. I should
have to describe the various parties and the

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 243

forces they represent — the anti - Christian
propaganda of Chou Han and the old Hunan
faction of blind fanaticism, with Its campaign
of filth and riot ; the fatal alliance of the
Manchus and the mob which culminated in
the chaotic madness of Boxerism and sealed
the discredit of the old order in 1900 — to
show how truculence and obsequiousness are
but opposite faces of the same character, to
thread the mazes of an exasperating diplo-
macy which held cunning to be the crown of
statecraft, but also to admit that the constant
endeavour to set one foreign Influence against
another, in the — very human — desire of
" dishing " them all, was too often admirably
seconded by the selfishness, jealousy, and
ignorance of those foreigners whose discom-
fiture and humiliation it was desired to
bring about. Having dealt with the forces
of reaction, I should have to depict the
tendencies on the other side — the gradual
development of trade and wealth, the shifting
of weight and Influence, year by year, from
the old mandarin and narrowly Confucian
literate class to classes less hidebound in
antique ruts, the introduction of new con-
veniences, modern inventions, facilities for

244 RELIGION IN CHINA

travel, communication, interchange of ideas
as well as of goods, the influence of news-
papers, of hospitals, of schools, of churches,
of emigration to the Straits Settlements,
to the Dutch and British Colonies of the
Southern Seas, later to America and other
Western countries, and especially of the rush
of students to Japan — to tell of colleges which
profess to impart complete instruction in all
branches of the New Learning in a three
months' course, to dilate upon the features
of ''Young China," too often superficial,
crude, anarchic, unmannerly, ardent, puerile,
preposterously vain — ignorantly playing with
every Western idea and invention like a child
with a new toy — concerned too often merely
with the external and the trivial, thinking it
can buy the results of modern knowledge
without the labour of modern training, with
no sort of appreciation of the intellectual,
still less of the moral forces that have gone
to the shaping of the civilization in whose
vulgarities it is in such a hurry to masquerade.
Yet I should have to probe beneath the sur-
face of this ebullition, and tell that, however
some of its exponents may burn their inex-
perienced fingers to-day or to-morrow, there

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 245

are among this party those who hold the
keys of the future, and who are engaged in
an enterprise of reform in which there can
be neither flinching nor turning back.

The intellectual basis of all this movement

is plain enough. There has arisen before the

eyes of the East a dazzlinor and

InteUectual .... . . . ,

basis of the bewildermg vision — the material

revolution, . . . .^

greatness, the variety, the scientific
appliances and inventions of Western civil-
ization. To realize that vision among them-
selves, to be in all outward things the equals
of the white man, is the very natural ambi-
tion of Young China. China is not prepared
to admit any sort of inherent inferiority in
herself as compared with the modern, Western
world. Her people are not less ingenious,
and are almost if not quite as numerous as
the people of Europe. The natural resources
of their country are as great, its soil as fertile,
its contribution in art, in history, in useful
inventions, in literary and intellectual achieve-
ments, to the common stock of mankind, is
enough to inspire its people with pride in
themselves and in their past. What is there
to prevent them being the equals, the success-
ful competitors, of the white races ? What,

246 RELIGION IN CHINA

indeed — except the dead-weight of an anti-
quated outfit of hoary traditions, the tyranny
of rites and systems of ceremony and rever-
ence, whose usefulness has long since passed
away ?

For, whether we view the fact with satis-
faction or with misgiving, the old ties — the old
belief in a divinely appointed emperor and
the old belief in the sufficiency of the classical
Confucian examination system, for instance —
that were for ages the moral support upon
which the unity of the Chinese people rested,
have suffered irrevocable shipwreck, and
ceased to carry conviction to minds equipped
with a sense of the realities of the modern
world.

And besides this dazzling vision, there has
come over large sections of China a great
fear — the fear of the West, of Western inter-
ference and conquest ; the fear that, unless
China arms herself at all points and at once
with the full panoply of Western material force,
so that she can meet the white man on equal
terms in war, she must perish, enslaved or
destroyed by the white races, sooner or later ;
that the ultimate ambition of the foreigners
within her gates is to "fen kua," to '* split

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 247

up the melon" among themselves, after who
knows how much mutual struggling — mainly at
the cost of her own devastation— over the
pieces. This fear— and dare we say it is an
unnatural and wholly baseless fear ? — is the one
platform that the old party and the bulk of the
new party in China have in common.

That much is plain, but were that all the
upshot could only be choice between a relent-
less despotism, native or foreign, and the
dissolution of civilized society. Yet, whether
or not approaches must be endured to one or
both of these alternatives (and symptoms of
both are not lacking : almost any issue of
newspapers dealing with Chinese affairs for
the last year would afford suggestions of the
possible imminence of either or both), it
is plain too that, in some degree, these
modern movements have found a moral
basis in ethical conceptions suggested or
greatly strengthened by contact with Western
ideas, as well as in the glamour of Western
material success. One must gratefully admit
that despite many ugly incidents — outbreaks of
massacre and pillage of the helpless, reckless
rebellions ruthlessly repressed— the recent re-
volution and its sequels have so far been, by

248 RELIGION IN CHINA

comparison with previous Chinese political
typhoons — with the agony which preceded the
collapse of the Mings, for instance, or the
T'ai-p'ing War — under the control of an
awakened public conscience, open to the
appeals of reason and humanity. And it is
clear that, so far as this has been the case, that
awakened public conscience has based itself,
not so much upon whatever it might find in
the old traditional moralities of China, as on
the influence, direct or indirect, of Christian
teaching, of a percolation of Christian thought
which not only includes those who accept the
systematic doctrine of distinctive Christian
Churches but overflows far beyond their
borders.

Nevertheless, no one contemplating recent
events, or attempting to estimate the tempta-
tions and trials throus^h which

Need of a . ^ .

firmer moral Chma IS bound to pass m this
period of transformation and transi-
tion, can avoid misgiving of the gravest
kind unless the moral side of the new move-
ments should come to rest upon a far surer
and firmer basis than any that is at present
generally apparent.

Efforts are indeed being made, from the

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 249

standpoint of native Chinese culture, to find
such a basis, but they do not look convincingly-
hopeful. For instance, in the last few years,
and especially since the proclamation of the
republic, a tendency has shown itself in
influential native quarters towards the deifica-
tion of Confucius, the assertion of a formal
dogma that Confucius is the ''equal of
Heaven," and is himself God — coupled with
a demand that Confucianism, so dogmatized,
should be promulgated as the national state
religion. From other quarters these develop-
ments of ''orthodoxy" are opposed, and it is
difficult to believe that so artificial a dogma-
mongering can meet with much acceptance
among minds even partially awake to the
broadening tendencies of the age. The
modern world, in China as elsewhere, craves
for a streno^thenino: of the inward forces that
work for seriousness, for earnest pursuit of
truth and right, for more light, more under-
standing, not for a tightening of externally
imposed schemes of dogma and ritual
observance.

I am not a prophet. It is given to no
man to see the details of the future, even if
the lessons of the past may help in guessing

250 RELIGION IN CHINA

the probable tendencies of the time to come.
But evidently the great need of China Is a con-
vincing and satisfying restatement of Religion,
a restatement in harmony with the require-
ments and the knowledge of the present day.
Such a restatement, like all reformations, may
very likely — nay, It must certainly — comprise a
return to the true, underlying principles of
older expressions of religious inspiration. It
must study, understand, and take into account
the whole past. It cannot be wholly de-
structive nor wholly exotic.

Nor Is such a reformation from within
Illoofical or inconsistent with devotion to
abstract truth, for the root principles of re-
ligion are eternal and catholic, not confined to
any age or any people, or any Church, or any
body of tradition. Just as Christianity, by
widening, generalizing, and '* depolarizing " the
earlier, transitory system of the Jews, expanded
into a restatement of religious principles ade-
quate to the needs and hopes of the entire
Western world, may not the present or the
next age, as a time wherein — In spite of
temporary whirlwinds of reaction — all national
and racial distinctions are visibly softening to
effacement in an Intricacy of mutual intercourse

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 251

and mutual obligations embracing all mankind,
such as no earlier period of history ^ has
witnessed or imagined, give birth to a widen-
ing, generalizing, and '^ depolarizing " of all local
fakhs, before which the transitory elements of
all will be winnowed out from whatever each
contains of abiding and indestructible spiritual

strength.

The revelation of God is a continuing
revelation, manifested in each generation to
the living, not to the dead, given to the
East as well as to the West. What is
required of all men is to do jusdy, to love
mercy, to walk modestly, and under whatever
forms of worship they shall ascend into the hill
of the Lord and stand in His holy place, who
are of clean hands and a pure heart, who do
not lift their souls to vanity nor swear deceit-
fully. That is the only condition of member-
ship of the one universal Church, the catholicity
which extends to all men, everywhere, always,
the protestantism that protests against every-
thing that is insincere and unreal, every sub-
stitution of the letter that kills for the spirit
which gives life.

In what has preceded it is possible that

252 RELIGION IN CHINA

readers who have not lived in China may seem
to see a world portrayed that contains unfamiliar
features. Yet I shall have wholly failed if the
general impression is one of novelty and dis-
tance from the experiences of our own race. To
say that China is another world, contradictory,
upside down, incomprehensible, is a facile and
superficial burking of the problems it presents,
and would only fortify the barriers whereby
we and the Chinese are parted from one
another.

Of course there are differences between
them and us, differences which it would be
foolish to minimize, yet in the main they are
the result of quite measurable and accountable
differences in geographical surroundings and
historical development. They may, I think, be
chiefly summarized under two headings : first,
differences due to the fact that Chinese institu-
tions and ideas derive predominantly from one
source, while European civilization is the
resultant of many competing influences, no one
of which has ever overshadowed the rest in
importance ; secondly, differences due to the
inflexible nature of the Chinese language.
With a vast facility for phrase-making, and a
wealth of fine distinctions that make it an

THE MODERN TRANSFORMATION 253

admirable medium for many forms both of
colloquial speech and of literary composition,
Chinese labours under the great disability that
it possesses so small a stock of separate syllabic
sounds as to make it structurally incapable of
incorporating words of foreign origin without
distorting them under clumsy and often almost
unrecognizable disguises ; and this peculiarity
is, of course, aggravated by the use of an
ideographic instead of an alphabetic system of
writing. How serious a handicap this fact
constitutes will be readily understood if we ask
ourselves where we should be if the various
tongues of modern Europe had been so con-
stituted that they could not assimilate hosts
of words from Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and
from one another. It is a real and a grave
barrier.

Yet under these and other differences the
nature of man and the working of his spirit
are the same as among ourselves, and this I
have tried to show. In particular, I hope I
have struck a blow at a notion which I always
like to hit on the head wherever I meet it —
the notion that We are an inherently pro-
gressive, and They an inherently stationary
kind of man. The things which I have

254 RELIGION IN CHINA

attempted to describe are not specifically
Chinese characteristics, but simply human
characteristics, exemplified in Chinese sur-
roundings. We too have our conservative
classical orthodoxies, very like that of the
Confucian pedant ; we too have our Taoism,
both of the higher and the lower kind ;
we too have, if I mistake not, as much of
the heathen heart in us — the heart which
mistrusts the final worth of right — as the
Chinese ; we too have our Buddhist moods.
As with them, our various dispositions of
the soul enshrine much that is beautiful
and true, and they are liable to the same
kind of corruptions and diseases as are to be
found among the Chinese.

There are dark arid terrible things to be
found in China ; but is there any that cannot be
matched among ourselves ? At bottom we are
one with them. So our religion, like our man-
hood, is not just a religion, and that of China
another religion, for religion in its proper
meaning is a word that admits no plural : in
both subservience to the letter kills, but within
all and before all and beyond all there breathes
a spirit which gives and is life.

INDEX

Adam's Peak, Ceylon, abode of god

Sumana, 109
Alopun, Bishop of Nestorian

Christians, 115
Al':ar of Heaven, imperial sacrifices

at, 54
Analects, Confucian, 45, 55, 59,

131. 225
Ancestor worship, 21 et seq.
Ancestor worship in relation, to

Christianity, 196, 219
Anthropomorphic conceptions, dis-
carded by Sung schoolmen, 134
Arhat, see also Lohan, 107
Art, Chinese, largely of Buddhist

inspiration, 109
Art, Chinese, symbolism depends on

Taoism, 78
Asoka, age of, long past before

Buddhism reached China, 106
Avalokiteshvara, see also Kuanyin,

109

Ballad poetry of early Chinese, 43

Bannermen, Manchu, 163

Blood fraternities of Formosa, 58

Bodhidharma, 102

Bodhisattvas, see also P'usas, 98,
107, 202

Book of Changes (Yi Ching), 69

Book of Odes, 30 (43), 225

Book of Rites, 26, 52, 225

Boxerism, 87, 243

Buddha, 92, 97, 98, etc.

Buddhism and China, ^l et seq.

Buddhism and Christianity, resem-
blances between, w^ et seq.., 202

Buddhism as a consolation, 94
et seq., 109

Buddhism, corruption of, 118, 123

Buddhism in Tibet, 185
Buddhist faith, reality of, loi
Burial, 'jS, 79, 177
Burial of Ts'in Shih Huang-ti, 31

Calendar, missionaries correct the,

197
Cannon, Schaal assists in casting,

197
Canon, Confucian, 56, 131
Canonization, name of, see Shih-

ming, 23
Canton, foreign trade confined to,

under Manchus, 207
Caspian Sea, Chinese influence

extends almost to, under Han

Dynasty, 162
Cathayan Tartars, see Kitan and

Liao, 159
Chang Tao-ling, 83
Ch'ang Mao, see T'ai-p'ing rebellion,

235
Chen-Tsung, see Sung Chen-Tsung,

84, 121
Cheng chiao, or Cheng Tao (ortho-
doxy), 16
Cheng Huang, or "tutelary angel,"

68, 79
Cheng T'ang (T'ang the Completer),

44
Cheng-tzu, 151
Chi Lu, note on, 59, 60
Ch'i (breath), the quintessence of

matter, 137
Ch'ien Lung, Emperor, 233, 234
Chin-shih, degree of, 143
Chinese Empire, rise of, 50
Ch'ing Ming festival, 22, 79
Chou Han, anti-Christian propa-
ganda of, 243

355

256

INDEX

Chou Kung, founder of the state of

Lu, 44
Chou-tzii, and doctrine of the T'ai

Chi, 134
Chou-tzu, grave of, near Kiukiang,

150
Christian spirit, hope for spread of,

216-29
Christianity, official toleration of,

208
Chu Hsi, 133, 150, 151, 170, 184
Chu YUan-chang, founder of the

Ming Dynasty, 175
Chii-jen, degree of, 143
Chuang-tzii, 81
Chiin-tzu, Confucian ideal character,

47,. 148
Classicalism run mad, 145
Classics, Confucian, 45, 56, 131
Confucian Canon, 56, 131
Confucian Renaissance, 129 et seq,^

149
Confucian society, decay of, 144

tt seq.
Confucian society, failure of, 155

et seq.
Confucian studies, revival of, 132

et seq.
Confucian Temple, see Wen Miao,

24
Confucianism, ancient, 41 «/ seq.
Confucianism, the cheng tao or

orthodox doctrine, 16
Confucianism, persecuted by Ts'in

Shih Huang-ti, 50
Confucius, 44-8

Confucius, disliked mysticism, 64
Confucius, edited the Yi Ching, 69
Confucius, meeting of, with Lao-
tzu, 81
Confucius, preferred the term

«*T'ien" to "Shang Ti," 136
Confucius, proposed deification of,

249
Confucius, regarded himself only as

a transmitter, 133
Confucius, temple and image of,

at T'aishan, 122
Confucius, tomb of, 46
Confucius, views of, about death,

47. 48, 59, 60
Cremation, 177

Crusades, the Mongols participate

in, 165
Currency, inconvertible paper, 159,

161

Dalai Lama, 186
Dark Ages of China, the, 94
Death, Confucian reticence regard-
ing, 48, 59, 60
Desert and the Sown, the, 161
Devil-possession, 69, 70
Divination, 41
Dominicans, 196
Dragon Boat festival, the, 79
Drama, Chinese, 79, 180

EcHpses, 54, 67

Education, Confucian classical, 144

etscq., 155, 156
Eight Diagrams, the, 68
Eight Immortals, the, 67
Elements, the five, 137
Elixir of Life, 71, 121
Empire, the Chinese, 50
Empress Dowager Tzii Hsi, 46
Encyclopaedias, 178, 179
Europe, ^maritime intercourse with,

l^-i^etseq.
Europe mediaeval, compared with

China, 167-71
Europe, Mongol intercourse with,

164-7
Examinations, competitive, 53, 139,

142-4

Fa Hsien, 115

Faith, decay of, 120 et seq.

Fengshui, 71-8

Feudal Age, the, of China, 42 et seq.

Filial duty, see "Hsiao," 25, 46,
136

" Filial Piety, Twenty-four ex-
amples of," 63

Fiscal experiments, under Sung
dynasty, 156 et seq.

Flood, the Great, 44

Fo-Mu, the Buddha-Mother, 107

Football, popular in the T'ang
period, 155

Formosa, the Dutch in, 207

Franciscans, 196

Fu Hsi, 20, 69

INDEX

257

Gautama, see Buddha, 92 ei seq.

Genghis, 175, 187

Genii, the Islands of the, 81, 147

Giles, Professor H. A., 78, 155

** God," controversy as to Chinese

rendering of, 196
God of War, Chinese, see Kuan Ti,

23
Goddess of Mercy, see Kuanyin,

107 ei seq.
Golden Age, the, see Yao and Shun,

44
Gore, Dr., Bishop of Oxford,

quoted, 221
Graves, affected by Fengshui, 73,

Graves, arrangement of, 28, 29
Groot, Professor de, 11, 12, 27, 42

Hall, Fielding, loi

Han Dynasty, the, 52, 93

Han Ming-ti, Emperor, 93

Hangchow, 130, 158

Hanlin College, 143, 179

Hart, Sir Robert, his ancestors

ennobled, 23
Histories, topographical, 141
** Hocus pocus," 124
"Hsi YuChi," 120
Hsia Ts6ng-yu, view as to followers

of Mo Ti, 57
Hsiangyang, siege of, 166
•♦ Hsiao" (Filial duty). 25, 46, 136
Hsien-jen (Worthies), 24
Hsien-pi, the, 162
Hsiu-ts'ai, degree of, 143
Hsiung-nu, the, 162
HsuanTs'ang, 115
Hsiin Ch'ing, 58
Huang Ti, 20, 43
Human sacrifices, 30 «/ seq., l^^
Hunan, " anti-foreign " agitation,

227, 243
Hung Hsiu-ch'uan, 236
Hutuktw, the, of Urga, 186

Incarnations, 66, 83, 186

Inquests, 70, 71

Intellectual basis of Chinese Revo-
lution, 245

Intercourse, maritime, with Europe,
193

Japan, 146

Japan, example of, eflfect on China

of, 241, 242
Japanese pirates, 1 93
Jesuits, 194 et seq.
Jews in China, 115
Ju chiao (the ** learned teaching "),

17

K'aif^ng, 115, 158, 159
K'ang-hsi, Emperor, 17
K'ang-hsi, " Sacred Edict" of, 18,

Kin Tartars, see NUchen, 160, 162,

176
Kinsai, see Hangchow, 158
Kitan Tartars (Cathayan, or Liao),

159
Kiukiang, 67, 149, 151
Ko-lao Hui, 86
Kuan Ti, 23

Kuanyin P'usa, 107, 108, 122, 202
Kuan Yii, 23
Kublai, 166, 169, 176
K'ung Ch'iu, or K'ung Ch'ung-ni,

see Confucius, 44
K'ung Fu-tzii, see Confucius, 44
K'ung Ling-yi (lineal descendant O-

Confucius), Duke, 46

Lamaism, 185 et seq.

Language, Chinese, its inflexible

nature, 253
Lao-tzu, 81, 83
Latimer, Bishop, quoted, 218
Legge, his judgment on Yang Chu,

58
Li Chi, see Book of Rites, 26, 52»

225
Li Hung-chang, worships incama*

tion of Lung Wang, 66
Liang Wu-ti, Emperor, 102, 104
•'Liao Chai," the (collection of

Fairy Tales), 78
Liao Dynasty, 159
Lieh-tzu, 81

•• Living Buddhas," 186
Lohans, the Eighteen, see a!s9

Arhats, 107
Lu, State^ or duchy of, 32, 44,

45
Lu P'an, god of carpenters, 68

17

258

INDEX

Lun Yii, see Analects, Confucian,

45> 55, 59. 131, 225
Lung Wang (Water god), 66
Lushan, 151

Ma Tuan-lin, 151, 160, 161

Magic, 68 e/ set/., 85

Mahayana, 102

Mahometan rebellions, 117, 238

Mahometanism, effects on China,
116, 117

Maitreya Buddha [see als9 Milo
Fo), 175, 186

Manchu conquest, 188, 195

Manchuria, 155, 160

Manchus, the, 162, 188, 235

Manchusri Buddha, 186

Mangonels, made by foreigners for
the Mongols, 166

Marco Polo, 115, 158, 165, 170,
171

Matsu, patron goddess of fishers
and seamen, 107

Medicine in China, 69, 147

Mencius, 48, 49, 50, 57, 63, 103,
133, 136, 184, 226

Mencius, Book of, 131

Mcng Ko or Meng-tzu, see Mencius,
48, etc.

Miao hao ("Temple Name "), 23

Mid-autumn festival, 79

Milky Way, crossed annually by
the "Spinning Maiden." 68

Milo P'o, the laughing Buddha of
the Future, 175

Ming Dynasty, the, 175 ^/ set/.

Missionaries, Buddhist, 93, 96

Missionaries, Nestorian, 115

Missionaries, Protestant, 207, 233
et seq.

Missionaries, Roman Catholic,
assume official rank, 210

Missionaries, Roman Catholic, com-
ing of, 194 et seq.

Missionaries, Roman Catholic, con-
tribute to knowledge of China,
199

Missionaries, Roman Catholic, em-
ployed by Manchu Emperors, 197,
198

Missionary enterprise, reasons of
opposition to, 208-16

Missionary prospects, affected by
foreign politics, 214, 215

Missionary prospects, effects of
Treaty ports on, 211, 213

Missions from the Pope, received
by Mongols, 164

Mo Ti, see also Mo-tzii, 57, 58

Monasticism, 95, no

Mongol dominion, the, 164

Mongol intercourse with Europe,
164, 165, 166

Mongolia, 106, 155, 188, 189

Mongols, 160 et seq.

Monks, 95 et seq., 115, 123

Moral qualities, in Confucian specu-
lation, 136

Morrison, Robert, 234

Mo-tzii, see Mo Ti, 57, 58

Mourning, 26 et seq.

Mu, Duke of Ts'in, burial of. 30

Mythology, 21, 67 et seq.

Nationalist revival in fourteenth

century, 175 et seq.
Nationality, as basis of Chinese

religion, 19
Nerchinsk, Treaty of, 202
Neslorian Christians, 115, 166, 195
Nirvana, 95
Nuchen, the, 160, 162, 176

Old and new ideals, conflict be-
tween, 234-41
Omei, Mount, 98
Ordination service, Buddhist, 99
Original sin, 58
Orthodoxy, Confucian, 15, 56
Ou-yang Hsiu, 151

Pagodas, 72, 98

Pai Shang-ti Hui, 236

Pailutung (W^hite Deer Grotto), 150,

170
Panshen Lama, 186
Paper currency, 159, 166
Patriarchate, the Buddhist, 102, 114
Patriarchs, founders of Chinese

national polity, 20, 21, 44
Peking, 169
Persecutions, 17, 50, 103, 198, 211,

240
Philosophy, speculative, of Sung

schoolmen, 134 et seq.

INDEX

259

S'hysiognomy, science of, 71
?'i-hsia Yuan-chun, see also T'ien

Nai-nai, 121, 122
Pilgrimages, 96, 100, lOi, 122
Plan Carpin, John de, 165
Polo, game of, 155
Polo, Marco, see Marco Polo, 115,

158, 165, 170, 171
Pope, the Taoist, see also T'ien Shih,

83, 84, 186
Pope, the, 55, 164, 196
Posthumous honours, 23
Prayers for rain, 65
Priests, Buddhist, recruiting of, 99,

ICO

Printing applied to production of
books, 130

Public opinion, Government be-
comes sensitive to, 140

Purgatory, Buddhist, 96

P'usas, see also Bodhisattvas, 107

P'u Sung-ling, 78

P'uto, Island of, 98

Queen of Heaven, sec T'ien Hou, 86,
107

Rationalistic movement of tenth to

thirteenth centuries, 129 et seq.
" Red Church," the, 185
Religion, restatement of, required,

250

Renaissance, Confucian, 129 et seq.

Revolution, Chinese, intellectual

basis of, 245 ,

Revolution, Chinese, moral basis

needs strengthening, 248
Revolution, Chinese, preparations

for, 242
Ricci, Matteo, 194, I95
Roberts, J. J., 136
Rome, Church of, 55, 164, 193 et seq.
Rubruquis, 165
Russian Church in China, 202, 203

Sacred Edict, the, 18, 198

Sacred groves, springs, trees, stones,

etc., 79
Sacrifices, performed by Emperor,

54
Sacrifices, human, 30 etseq., i77
Sacrifices to the dead, 29, 42, 104

"Sage," 24,137 ^ ^
Sakya, monastery of, 185
Sakya Muni, see Buddha, 92, etc.
San Chiao, see '* Three Teachings,'

12 et seq.
San ho Hui Society, 85
Schaal, Adam, 195' ^97
Sects or Fraternities, 84-7
Sects, the "Three Teachings" not

separate, 13
Serfdom, 157, 158, 176
Shang Ch'ing Kung, 83
Shang Ti, see also T'ien, 21, 41,

135, 136
Shen-shih or "gentry," 140, 141
Shen Nung, 20
Shih-chia Mu-ni Fo-yeh, see Buddha,

92
Sikawei, 195
Socialistic experiments under Sung

Dynasty, 156 et seq.
Societies, secret, 85-7
Society, mature Confucian concep-
tion of, 138 et seq.
Srongtan Ganpo, 185
Ssu-ma Kuang, 151, 156
State worship, 53 et seq.
Stein, Professor, 114
Sui Dynasty, the, 102
Sumana, the " looking-down god,

see Kuanyin, 109
Sung Chen-Tsung, Emperor, 84,

121
Sung Dynasty, 130, 132 et seq.^
" Superior Man," see Chun-tzu, 47,

148
Sutras, Buddhist, 93, 104
Suttee, 30, 33, 178

T'ai Chi (the "Extreme Ultimate "),

134. 135, 137, 150
T'ai Yang, 135

T'ai-p'ing Rebellion, 100, 235 et seq,
T'aishan, 72, 121-3
T'ai-Tsung, Emperor (T'ang

Dynasty), 129, 185
Tamerlane, 175

T'an, the beast of covetousness, 68
T'ang Dynasty, 29, 114 &t ^^9 . '29
Tao Chiao, see Taoism, 1 3, 63 ^^ seq.
Tao-Te Ching, 81, 83, 182, 226
Tao, the Way, 81

260

INDEX

Taoism, 63 et stq.

Taoism, mystical philosophy of, 80

It scq.
Taoism, natural in infancy of

society, 118, 119
Taoism, popular, 78-80
Taoism, prevalence of, in England

and elsewhere, 65, 76
Taoist Papacy, 83, 84, 186
Tartars, 159, 162, 171
'* Temple Name," see Miao-hao, 23
Temple of the Earth, 54
Ten-headed crow, typhus attributed

to, 66
** Three Teachings," 12 et seg.
Tibet, 185, 188, 189
Tibetans, 162

T'ieh p'ai-tzu, rain produced by, 65
T'ien, or Shang Ti, 21, 41, 135,

136, 196
T'ien Hou, su also Queen of

Heaven, 86, 107, 108
T'ien Ming ("Commission of

God "), 53 et scq.
T'ien Nai-nai, set also P'i-hsia

Yiian-chun, 122
T'ien Shih, see Pope, Taoist, 83, 84,

186
T'ien-tzu or T'ien Wang, 53
Trade Unions, 85
Treaty ports, foreign communities

at, 211
Trilogy of Powers— Heaven, Earth,

and Man, 135
Tsai-li Hui Society, 85
Ts'in conquest, the, 50, 58
Ts'in Shih Huang-ti, 31, 32, 50, 123
Tsongkhaba, 185, 186
T'u-ti or earth spirits, 68, 1 19
T'ung-sheng, degree of, 143
Turfans, the, 162
Turkestan, 1x4, 116
Turkish adventurers, 129, 1 30
Turks, the, 162, 178
Tiu-sun Niang-niang, 108

Vegetarianism, 105, 106
Verbiest, 195

Virgin, the, compared with Kuanyin,
108, 202

Wall, the Great, restored by Ming

sovereigns, 187
Wang An-shih, 156
Way, the, see Tao, 81 et stq.
Wei-hu, the, 162
W5n Miao, 24
Wen Wang, 42, 44
West, fear of the, 246, 247
Western Heaven, the, 81, 107
White Deer Grotto, see Pailutung,

150, 170
"White Peril," the, 241
White Pigeon Society or Lottery, 85
Witchcraft, 70
Wulaofeng, 150
Wu-ti, Emperor (Liang Dynasty)^

102
Wu Wang, 43, 44
Wu-Yueh, kings of, promoters of

civilization, 130

Xavier, St. Francis, 194

Yama, set also Yen-Wu, 96

Yang and Yin, 135

Yang Chu, 58

Yao and Shun, 21, 33, 44

♦'Yellow Church," the, 186

Yen-Wu, see Yama, 96, 107

Yen Yiian, 60 (note)

Yi Ching, see Book of Changes,

69
Yo Fei, 176
"Young China," 243-5
Yii the Great, 21, 44
Yung Ch^g, Emperor, 198
Yung-lo encyclopaedia, 178

Zadkiel's Almanack, 65
Zoroastrians, 115

I

I

PrinM in Great Britain by
fKWIN BROTHERS, LIWITED, THE GRESUAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON