Like his contemporary Diogenes, he would have his dead body cast out to the vultures; but the spirit of his wish was by no means cynical. "When Chwangtse was about to die," he writes (anticipating things pleasantly), "his disciples expressed a wish to give him a splendid funeral. But he said: 'With heaven and earth for my coffin and shell, and the sun, moon, and stars for my burial regalia; with all creation to escort me to the grave— is not my funeral already prepared?'"
He speaks of the dangers of externalism, even in the pursuit of virtue; then says: "The man who has harmony within, though he sit motionless like the image of a dead man at a sacrifice, yet his Dragon Self will appear; though he be absorbed in silence, his thunder will be heard; the divine power in him will be at work, and heaven will follow it; while he abides in tranquillity and inaction, the myriads of things and beings will gather under his influence."—"Not to run counter to the natural bias of things," he says, "is to be perfect." It is by this running counter—going aginst the Law, following our personal desires and so forth,—that we create karma,—give the Universe something to readjust,—and set in motion all our troubles. "He who fully understands this, by storing it within enlarges the heart, and with this enlargement brings all creation to himself. Such a man will bury gold on the hillside, and cast pearls into the sea."— sink a plummet into that, I beseech you; it is one of the grand utterances of wonder and wisdom.—"He will not struggle for wealth or strive for fame; rejoice over longevity, or grieve at an early death. He will get no elation from success, nor chagrin from failure; he will not account the throne his private gain, no look on the empire of the world as glory personal. His glory is to know that all thigns are one, and life and death but phases of the same existence."
Why call that about burying gold and casting pearls into the sea one of the supreme utterances?—Well; Chwangtse has a way of putting a whole essay into a sentence; this is a case in point. We have discussed Natural Magic together many times; we know how the ultimate beauty occurs when something human has flowed out into Nature, and left its mysterious trace there, upon the mountains, or by the river-brink,
"By paved fountain, or by rushy brook.
Or on the beached margent of the sea."
Tu Fu saw in the blues and purples of the morning-glory the colors of the silken garments of the lost poet Ssema Hsiangju, of a thousand years before—that is, of the silken garments of his rich emotion and adventures. China somehow has understood this deep connexion between man and Nature; and that it is human thought molds the beauty and richness, or hideousness and sterility of the world. Are the mountains noble? They store the grandeur and aspirations of eighteen millions of years of mankind. Are the deserts desolate and terrible? It was man made the deserts: not with his hands, but with his thought. Man is the fine workshop and careful laboratory wherein Nature prepares the most wonderful of her wonders. It is an instinct for this truth that makes Chinese poetry the marvel that it is.—So the man of Tao is enriching the natural world: filling the hills with gold, putting pearls in the sea.
I do not know where there is a more pregnant passage than this following,—a better acid (of words) to corrode the desperate metal of selfhood; listen well, for each clause is a volume. "Can one get Tao to possess it for one's own?" asks Chwangtse; and answers himself thus: "Your very body is not your own; how then should Tao be?—If my body is not my own, whose is it, pray?—It is the delegated image of God. Your posterity is not your own; it is the delegated exuviae of God. You move, but know not how; you are at rest, but know not why; you taste, but know not the cause; these are the operations of universal law. How then should you get Tao so as to possess it for your own?"
Now then, I want to take one of those clauses, and try to see what Chwangtse really meant by it. "Your individuality is not your own, but the delegated adaptability of God."—There is a certain position in the Scheme of Things Entire,—a point, with a relation of its own to the rest of the Scheme, to the Universe;— as the red line has a relation of its own to the rest of the spectrum and the ray of light as a whole….. From that point, from that position, there is a work to be done, which can be done from no other. The Lonely Eternal looks out through these eyes, because it must see all things; and there are things no eyes can see but these, no other hands do. This point is an infinitesimal part of the whole; but without its full and proper functioning, the Whole falls short in that much:—because of your or my petty omissions, the Universe limps and goes lame.—Into this position, as into all others impartially, the One Life which is Tao flows, adapting itself through aeons to the relations which that point bears to the Whole: and the result and the process of this adaptation is—your individuality or mine.
You are not the point, the position: because it is merely that which you hold and through which you function; it is yours, but not you. What then are you? That which occupies and adapts itself to the point? But that is Tao, the Universal. You can only say it is you, if from you you subtract all you-ness. Your individuality, then, is a temporary aspect of Tao in a certain relation to the totality of Tao, the One Thing which is the No Thing:—or it is the "delegated adaptability of God."
How and wherein adaptable?—The Infinite, occupying this position, has formed therein all sorts of attachments and dislikes; and each one of them hinders it adaptability. Your surroundings have reflected themselves on you: and the sum of the reflexions is your personality,—the little cage of I-am-ness from which it is so hard to escape. Every reflected image engraves itself on the stuff of yourself by the sensation of attachment or repulsion which it arouses. When it says, "The One becomes the Two"—which is the way in one form or another all ancient philosophy sums up the beginning of things;—this is what is meant: the 'One' is Tao; the 'Two' is this conditioned world, whose nature and essence is to appear as pairs of opposites—to be attractive, or to repel. The pigs' point of view was that it was better to live on bran and escape the shambles; the Grand Augur's, that the pomp and ceremony of the sacrifice, the public honor, ought more than to compensate them for the momentary inconvenience of being killed. Opposite ways of thinking; points of view: which cherishing, Grand Augur and pigs alike dwelt on the plane of externals; and so there was no real difference between them. When you stand for you, and I for myself, it is six of one and half a dozen of the other; but when either of us stand for That which is both of us, and all else,— then we touch reality; then there is no longer conflict, or opposites; no longer false appearances,—but the presence and cognition of the True.
Here let me note what seems to me a radical superiority in Chinese methods of thought. You may take the Bhagavad-Gita, perhaps, as the highest expression of Aryan religio-philosophic thinking. There we have the Spirit, the One, shown as the self of the Universe, but speaking through, and as, Krishna, a human personality. Heaven forbid that I should suggest there is anthropomorphism in this. Still, I think our finest mystical and poetic perceptions of the Light beyond all lights do tend to crystallize themselves into the shape of a Being; we do tend to symbolize and figure that Wonder as ….. an Individuality …..in some indefinable splendid sort. Often you find real mystics, men who have seen with their own eyes so to say, talking about God, the Lord, the Great King, and what not of the like; and though you know perfectly well what they mean, there was yet that necessity on them to use those figures of speech. But in China, no. There, they begin from the opposite end. Neither in Laotse nor in Confucius, nor in their schools, can you find a trace of personalism. Gods many, yes; as reason and common sense declare; but nothing you can call a god is so ancient, constant, and eternal as Tao, "which would appear to have been before God." Go to their poets, and you find that the rage is all for Beauty as the light shining through things. The grass-blade and the moutain, the moonlit water and the peony, are lit from within and utterly adorable: not because God made them; not as reminding you of the Topmost of any Hierarchy of Being; but, if you really go to the bottom of it, because there is no personality in them,—and so nothing to hinder the eternal wonder, impersonal Tao, from shining through.—As if we came through our individuality to a conception of the Divine; but they, through a perception of the divine, to a right understanding of their individuality. It amounts to us to fall into gross hideous anthropomorphism; the worst of them into superstitions of their own.—When one quotes Chwangtse as speaking of "the delegated adaptability of God," one must remember that one has to use some English word for his totally impersonal Tao or Tien, or even Shangti, or whatever it may be.
This Tao, you say, something far off,—a principle in philosophy or a metaphysical idea,—may be very nice to discuss in a lecture or write poetry about; but dear me! between whiles we have a great deal to do, and really—But no! it is actually, as Mohammed said, "nearer to thee than thy jugular vein." It is a simple adjustment of oneself to the Universe,—of which, after all, one cannot escape being a part; it is the attainment of a true relationship to the whole. What obscures and hinders that, is simply our human brain-mind consciousness. "Consider the lilies of the field," that attain a perfection of beauty. The thing that moves us, or ought to move us, in flowers, trees, seas and mountains, is this: that lacking this fretting, gnawing sense of I-am-ness, their emanations are pure Tao, and may reach us along the channel we call beauty: may flood our being through "the gateway of the eyes." Beauty is Tao made visible. The rose and peony do not feel themselves 'I,' distinct from 'you' and the rest; they are in opposition to nothing; they do not fall in love, and have no aversions: they simply worship Heaven and are unanxious, and so beautiful. When we know this, we see what beauty means; and that it is not something we can afford to ignore and treat with stoic indifference or puritan dislike. It is Tao visible; I call every flower an avatar of God. Now you see how Taoism leads to poetry; is the philosophy of poetry; is indeed Poetics, rather than Metephysics. Think of all the little jewels you know in Keats, in Shelley, or Wordsworth: the moments when the mists between those men and the divine "defecated to a thin transparency";—those were precisely the moments when the poets lost sight of their I-am-ness and entered into true relations with the Universe. A daffodil, every second of its life, holds within itself all the real things poets have ever said, or will ever say, about it; and can reach our souls directly with edicts from the Dragon Throne of the Eternal.—I watched the linarias yesterday, and their purple delicacy assured me that all the filth, all the falsehood and tragedy of the world, should pass and be blown away; that the garden was full of dancing fairies, joy moving them to their dancing; that it was my own fault if I could not see Apollo leaning down out of the Sun; and my own fatuity, and that alone, if I could not hear the Stars of Morning singing together, and all the sons of God shouting for you. And it was the truth they were telling; the plain, bald, naked truth;—they have never learned to lie, and do not know what it means. There is no sentimentalism in this; only science. We live in a Universe absolutely soaked through with God,—or with Poetry, which is perhaps a better name for It; a Universe peopled thick with Gods. But it is all very far from our common thoughts and conceptions; that is why it sounds to most people like sentimental nonsense and 'poetry.' No wonder Plato hated that word;—since it is made a hand-grenade, in the popular mind, to fling at every truth. And yet Poetry 'gets in on us,' too, occasionally, and accomplishes for
"the woods and waters wild"
the work they cannot do for themselves;—the work they cannot do, cause we will not look at them, cannot see them, and have forgotten their ancient language, being too much immersed in a rubbishing gabble of our own.
What Toism, and especially Chwangtse as I think, did for the Chinese was to publish the syntax and vocabulary of that ancient language; to make people understand how to take these grand protagonists of Tao; how to communicate familiarly with these selfless avatars of the Most High. Listen to this: the thought is close-packed, but I think you will follow it:—
"The true Sage rejects all distinction of this and that," that is to say, of subjective, or that which one perceives within one's own mind and consciousness, and objective, or that which is perceived as existing outside of them;—he does not look upon the mountain or the daffodil as things different or apart from his own conscious being. "He takes his refuge in Tao, and places himself in subjective relations with all things"; he keeps the mountain within him; the scent of the daffodil, and her yellow candle-flame of beauty, are within the sphere and circle of himself;
"…the little wave of Breffny goes stumbling through his soul."
"Hence it is said"—this is Chwangtse again—"that there is nothing like the light of Nature.
"Only the truly intelligent understand this principle of the identity of things. They do not view things as apprehended by themselves, but transfer themselves into the position of the things viewed."—And there, I may say, you have it: the last is the secret of the wonder-light in all Far Eastern Poetry and Art; more, it is the explanation of all poetry everywhere. It is the doctrine, the archeus, the Open Sesame, the thyme- and lavender- and sweetwilliam-breathed Secret Garden of this old wizardly Science of Song;—who would go in there, and have the dark and bright blossoms for his companions, let him understand this. For Poetry is the revelation of the Great Life beyond the little life of this human personality; to tap it, you must evict yourself from the personal self; "transfer yourself into the position of the things viewed," and not see, but be, the little stumbling wave or the spray of plum-blossom, thinking its thoughts.—"Viewing things thus," continues our Chwangtse, "you are able to comprehend and master them. So it is that to place oneself in inner relation with externals, without consciousness of their objectivity,—this is Tao. But to wear out one's intellect in an obstinate adherence to the objectivity—the apartness—of things, not recognizing that they are all one—this is called Three in the Morning.—'What do you mean by Three in the Morning?' asked Tse Yu.—'A keeper of monkeys,' Tse Chi replied, 'said with regard to their daily ration of chestnuts that each monkey should have three in the morning and four at night. At this the monkeys were very angry; so he said that they might have four in the morning and three at night; whereat they were well pleased. The number of nuts was the same; but there was an adaptation to the feelings of those concerned.'"— which, again, means simply that to follow Tao and dodge until it is altogether sloughed off the sense of separateness, is to follow the lines of least resistance.
All these ideas are a natural growth from the teachings of Laotse; but Butterfly Chwang, in working them out and stating them so brilliantly, did an inestimable service to the ages that were to come.
XIV. THE MANVANTARA OPENS
Laotse's Blue Pearl was already shining into poetry. Ch'u Yuan, the first great poet, belongs to this same fourth century; it is a long step from the little wistful ballads that Confucius gathered to the "wild irregular meters," * splendid imagery, and be it said, deep soul symbolism of his great poem the Li Sao (Falling into Trouble). The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain. At last, banished by the prince whose minister he had been, he retired into the wilds, and was meditating at the tomb of Shun in Hupeh, in what was then the far south. There the Phoenix and the Dragon came to him, and bore him aloft, past the West Pole, past the Milky Way, past even the Source of the Hoangho, to the Gates of Heaven. Where, however, there was no admittance for him; and full of sorrow he returned to earth.
——— * Chinese Literature, by Dr. H. A. Giles. What is said about the Li Sao here comes from that work—except the suggestions as to its inner meaning. ———
On the banks of the Mi-lo a fisherman met him, and asked him the cause of his trouble.—"All the world is foul," answered Ch'u Yuan, "and I alone am clean."—"If that is so," said the fisherman, "why not plunge into the current, and make its foulness clean with the infection of your purity? The Man of Tao does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adjusts himself to them." Ch'u Yuan took the hint: leaped into the Mi-lo;—and yearly since then they have held the Dragon-boat Festival on the waters of Middle China to commemorate the search for his body.— Just how much of this is in the Li Sao,—where the poem ends,— I do not clearly gather from Professor Giles's account; but the whole story appears to me to be a magnificent Soul Symbol: of that Path which leads you indeed on dragon flights to the borders of the Infinite, but whose end, rightly considered, is in this world, and to be as it were drowned in the waters of this world, with your cleanness infecting them to be clean,—and lighting them for all future ages with beauty, as with little dragon-boats luminous with an inner flame. Ch'u Yuan had followers in that and the next century; but perhaps his greatness was hardly to be approached for a thousand years.
But we were still in Tiger-time, and with quite the worst of it to come. Here lay the Blue Pearl scintillating rainbows up through the heavy atmosphere; but despite its flashing and up-fountaining those strange dying-dolphin hues and glories, you could never have told, in Tiger-time, what it really was. The Dragon was yet a long way off; though indeed it must be allowed that flight, when Chwangtse wrote and Ch'u Yuan sung, was surprised with the far churr of startling wings under the stars. Ears intent to listen were surprised; but only for a moment;— there was that angry howling again from the northern hills and the southern forests: the two great Tigers of the world face to face, tails lashing;—and between them and in their path, Chow quite prone,—the helpless Black-haired People trembling or chattering frivolously. Not for such an age as that Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan wrote, but indeed you may say for all time. What light from the Blue Pearl could then shine forth and be seen, would, in the thick fog and smoke-gloom, take on wild fantastic guise; which, as we shall see, it did:—but what Chwangtse had written remained, pure immortality, to kindle up better ages to come. When China should be ready, Chwangtse and the Pearl would be found waiting for her. The manvantara had not yet dawned; but we may hurry on now to its dawning.
The Crest-Wave was still in India when China plunged into the abyss from which her old order of ages never emerged. Soon after Asoka came to the throne of Magadha, in 284 B.C., Su Tai, wise prime minister to the Lord of Chao, took occasion to speak— seriously to his royal master as to the latter's perennial little wars with Yen.* "This morning as I crossed the river," said he, "I saw a mussel open its shell to the sun. Straight an oyster-catcher thrust in his bill to eat the mussel; which promptly snapped the shell to and held the bird fast.—'If it doesn't rain today or tomorrow,' said the oyster-catcher, 'there'll be a dead mussel here.'—'And if you don't get out of this by today or tomorrow,' said the mussel, 'there'll be a dead oyster-catcher.' Meanwhile up came a fisherman and carried them both off. I fear Ts'in will be our fisherman."
——— * The tale is taken from Dr. H.A. Gile's Chinese Literature. ———
Which duly came to pass. Even in Liehtse's time Ts'in characteristics were well understood: he tells a sly story of a neighboring state much infested by robbers. The king was proud of a great detective who kept them down; but they soon killed the Pinkerton, and got to work again. Then he reformed himself,—and the robbers found his kingdom no place for them. In a body they crossed the Hoangho into Ts'in;—and bequeathed to its policy their tendencies and aptitudes.
Ts'in had come to be the strongest state in China. Next neighbor to the Huns, and half Hun herself, she had learned warfare in a school forever in session. But she had had wise rulers also, after their fashion of wisdom: who had been greatly at pains to educate her in all the learning of the Chinese. So now she stood, an armed camp of a nation, enamored of war, and completely civilized in all external things. Ts'u, her strongest rival, stretching southward to the Yangtse and beyond, had had to deal with barbarians less virile than the Huns; and besides, dwelling as Ts'u did among the mountains and forests of romance, she had some heart in her for poetry and mysticism, whereas Ts'in's was all for sheer fighting. Laotse probably had been a Ts'u man; and also Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan; and in after ages it was nearly always from the forests of Ts'u that the great winds of poetry were blown. Still—he had immense territories and resources, and the world looked mainly to her for defense against the northern Tiger Ts'in. Soon after Su Tai told his master the parable of the mussel and the oyster-catcher the grand clash came, and the era of petty wars and raidings was over. Ts'u gathered to herself most of the rest of China for her allies, and there was a giant war that fills the whole horizon, nearly, of the first half of the third century B. C. New territories were involved: the world had expanded mightily since the days of Confucius. "First and last," says Ssema Tsien, "the allies hurled a million men against Ts'in." But to no purpose; one nation after another went down before those Hun-trained half-Huns from the north-west. In 257 Chau Tsiang king of Ts'in took the Chow capital, and relieved Nan Wang, the last of the Chows, of the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu, the symbols of his sacred sovereignty; —the mantle of the Caliphate passed from the House of Wen Wang and the Duke of Chow.
The world had crumbled to pieces: there had been changes of dynasty before, but never (in known history) a change like this. The Chows had been reigning nearly nine hundred years; but their system had been in the main the same as that of the Shangs and Hias, and of Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu: it was two millenniums, a century, and a decade old. A Chinaman, in Chau Tsiang's place, would merely have reshaped the old order and set up a new feudal-pontifical house instead of Chow; which could not have lasted, because old age had worn the old system out. But these barbarians came in with new ideas. A new empire, a new race, a new nation was to be born.
Chau Tsiang died in 251; and even then one could not clearly foresee what should follow. In 253 he had performed the significant sacrifice to Heaven, a prerogative of the King-Pontiff: but he had not assumed the title. Resistance was still in being. His son and successor reigned three days only; and his son, another nonentity, five years without claiming to be more than King of Ts'in. But when this man died in 246, he left the destinies of the world in the hands of a boy of thirteen; who very quickly showed the world in whose hands its destinies lay. Not now a King of Ts'in; not a King-Pontiff of Chow;—not, if you please, a mere wang or king at all;—but Hwangti, like that great figure of mythological times, the Yellow Emperor, who had but to sit on his throne, and all the world was governed and at peace. The child began by assuming that astounding title: Ts'in Shi Hwangti, the First August Emperor: peace to the ages that were past; let them lie in their tomb; time now should begin again!—Childish boyish swank and braggadocio, said the world; but very soon the world found itself mistaken. Hwangti;—but no sitting on his throne in meditation, no letting the world be governed by Tao, for him!
If you have read that delightful book Through Hidden Shensi, by Mr. F. A. Nichols, the city of Hienfang, or Changan, or, by its modern name, Singanfu or Sian-fu in Shensi, will be much more than a name to you. Thither it was that the Dowager Empress fled with her court from Pekin at the time of the Boxer Rebellion; there, long ago, Han Wuti's banners flew; there Tang Taitsong reigned in all his glory and might; there the Banished Angel sang in the palace gardens of Tang Hsuantsong the luckless: history has paid such tribute of splendor to few of the cities of the world. At Hienfang now this barbarian boy and Attila-Napoleon among kings built his capital;—built it right splendidly, after such ideas of splendor as a young half-Hun might cherish. For indeed, he had but little and remote Chinese heredity in him; was of the race of Attila and Genghiz, of Mahmoud of Ghazna, Tamerlane, and all the world-shaking Turkish conquerors. —Well, but these people, though by nature and function destroyers, have been great builders too: building hugely, monumentally, and to inspire awe, and not with the faery grace and ephemeral loveliness of the Chinese;—though they learned the trick of that, too,—as they learned in the west kindred qualities from the Saracens. Grand Pekin is of their architecture; which is Chinese with a spaciousness and monumental solemnity added. Such a capital Ts'in She Hwangti built him at Hien fang or Changan. In the Hall of audience of his palace within the walls he set up twelve statues, each (I like this barbarian touch) weighing twelve thousand pounds. Well; we should say, each costing so many thousand dollars; you need not laugh; I am not sure but that the young Hun had the best of it. And without the walls he built him, too, a Palace of Delight with many halls and courtyards; in some of which (I like this too) he could drill ten thousand men.
All of this was but the trappings and the suits of his sovereignty: he let it be known he had the substance as well. No great strategist himself, he commanded the services of mighty generals: one Meng-tien in especial, a bright particular star in the War-God's firmament. An early step to disarm the nations, and have all weapons sent to Changan; then, with these, to furnish forth a great standing army, which he sent out under Meng-tien to conquer. The Middle Kingdom and the quondam Great Powers were quieted; then south of the Yangtse the great soldier swept, adding unknown regions to his master's domain. Then rorth and west, till the Huns and their like had grown very tame and wary;—and over all these realms the Emperor spread his network of fine roads and canals, linking them with Changan: what the Romans did for Europe in road-building, he did for China.
He had, of course, a host of relatives; and precedent loomed large to tell him what to do with them: the precedent of the dynasty-founders of old. Nor were they themselves likely to have been backward in reminding him. Wu Wang had come into possession of many feudal dominions, and had made of the members of his family dukes and marquises to rule them. Ts'in Shi Hwangti's empire was many times the size of Wu Wang's; so he was in a much better position to reward the deserving. We must remember that he was no heir to a single sovereignty, but a Napoleon with a Europe at his feet. Ts'in and Ts'u and Tsin and the others were old-established kingdoms, with as long a history behind them as France or England has now; and that history had been filled with wars, mutual antagonisms and hatreds. Chow itself was like an Italy before Garibaldi;—with a papacy more inept, and holding vaguer sway:—it had been at one time the seat of empire, and it was the source of all culture. He had to deal, then, with a heterogeneity as pronounced as that which confronted Napoleon; but he was not of the stuff for which you prepare Waterloos. No one dreamed that he would treat the world other than as such a heterogeneity. His relations expected to be made the Jeromes, Eugenes, and Murats of the Hollands, Spains, and Sicilies to hand. The world could have conceived of no other way of dealing with the situation. But Ts'in Shi Hwangti could, very well.
He abolished the feudal system. He abolished nationalities and national boundaries. There should be no more Ts'in and Tsin and Ts'u; no more ruling dukes and marquises. Instead, there should be an entirely new set of provinces, of which he would appoint the governors, not hereditary; and they should be responsible to him: promotable when good, dismissable and beheadable on the first sign of naughtiness. It was an idea of his own; he had no foreign history to go to for models and precedents, and there had been nothing like it in Chinese History. Napoleon hardly conceived such a tremendous idea, much less had he the force to carry it out. Even the achievement of Augustus was smaller; and Augustus had before him models in the history of many ancient empires.
Now what was the ferment behind this man's mind;—this barbarian —for so he was—of tremendous schemes and doings? The answer is astonishing, when one thinks of the crude ruthless human dynamo he was. It was simply Taoism: it was Laotse's Blue Pearl;— but shining, of course, as through the heart of a very London Particular of Hunnish-barbarian fogs. No subtleties of mysticism; no Chwangtsean spiritual and poetry-breeding ideas, for him!—It has fallen, this magical Pearl, into turbid and tremendous waters, a natural potential Niagara; it has stirred, it has infected their vast bulk into active Niagarahood. He was on fire for the unknown and the marvelous; could conceive of no impossible—it should go hard, he thought, but that the subtler worlds that interpenetrate this one should be as wonderful as this world under Ts'in Shi Hwangti. Don't argue with him; it is dangerous!—certainly there was an Elixir of Life, decantable into goblets, from which Ts'in Shi Hwangti might drink and become immortal,—the First August Emperor, and the only one forever! Certainly there were those Golden Islands eastward, where Gods dispensed that nectar to the fortunate;—out in your ships, you there, and search the waves for them! And certainly, too, there were God knew what of fairylands and paradises beyond the western desert; out, you General Meng-tien, with your great armies and find them! He did tremendous things, and all the while was thus dreaming wildly. From the business of state he would seize hours at intervals to lecture to his courtiers on Tao;—I think not in a way that would have been intelligible to Laotse or Chwangtse. Those who yawned were beheaded, I believe.
How would such a prodigy in time appear to his own age? Such cataclysmic wars as Ts'in had been waging for the conquest of China take society first, so to say, upon its circumference, smash that to atoms, and then go working inwards. The most conservative and stable elements are the last and least affected. The peasant is killed, knocked about, transported, enclaved; but when the storm is over, and he gets back to his plough and hoe and rice-field again, sun and wind and rain and the earth-breath soothe him back to and confirm in what he was of old: only some new definite spiritual impulse or the sweep of the major cycles can change him much,—and then the change is only modification. At the other end of society you have the Intellectuals. In England, Oxford is the home and last refuge of lost causes. A literary culture three times as old as modern Oxford's, as China's was then, will be, you may imagine, fixed and conservative. It is a mental mold petrified with age; the minds participating must conform to it, solidify, and grow harder in the matrix it provides than granite or adamant. We have seen how in recent times the Confucian literati resisted the onset of westernism. All these steam-engines and telegraphs seemed to them fearfully crude and vulgar in comparison with the niceties of literary style, the finesses of time-taking ceremonious courtesies, that had been to them and to their ancestors time out of mind the true refinements of life, and even the realities. China rigid against the West was not a semi-barbarism resisting civilization, but an excessively perfected culture resisting the raw energies of one still young and, in its eyes, still with the taint of savagery: brusque manners, materialistic valuations.
Ts'in Shi Hwangti in his day had to meet a like opposition. The wars had broken up the structure of society, but not the long tradition of refined learning. That had always seemed the quarter from which light and leading must come; but it had long ceased to be a quarter from which light or leading could come. Mencius had been used to rate and ridicule the ruling princes; and scholars now could not understand that Mencius and his ruling princes and all their order were dead. They could not understand that they were not Menciuses, nor Ts'in Shi Hwangti a kinglet such as he had dealt with. Now Mencius had been a great man,—a Man's son, as they say;—and very likely he and Ts'in Shi Hwangti might have hit it off well enough. But there was no Mencius, no Man's son, among the literati now. The whole class was wily, polite, sarcastic, subtle, unimaginative, refined to a degree, immovable in conservatism. The Taoist teachers had breathed in a new spirit, but it had not reached them. How would Ts'in Shi Hwangti, barbarian, wild Taoist, and man of swift great action, appear to them?
Of course they could not abide him; and had not the sense to fear. They were at their old game of wire-pulling: would have the feudal system back, with all the old inefficiency; in the name of Ta Yu and the Duke of Chow they would do what they might to undo the strivings of this Ts'in upstart. So all the subtleties of the old order were arrayed against him,—pull devil, pull baker.
He knew it; and knew the extreme difficulty of striking any ordinary blow to quiet them. He had challenged Time Past to the conflict, and meant to win. Time Future was knocking at the doors of the empire, and he intended it should come in and find a home. His armies had crossed the Gobi, and smelt out unending possibilities in the fabulous west; they had opened up the fabulous south, the abode of Romance and genii and dragons. It was like the discovery of the Americas: a new world brought over the horizon. His great minister, Li Ssu had invented a new script, the Lesser Seal, easier and simpler than the old one; Meng-tien, conqueror of the Gobi, had invented the camel's-hair brush wherewith to write gracefully on silk or cloth, instead of difficultly with stylus on bamboo-strips as of old. It was the morning stir of the new manvantara; and little as the emperor might care for culture, he heard the Future crying to him. He heard, too, the opposing murmur of the still unconquered Past. The literati stood against him as the Papacy against Frederick II of Sicily: a less open opposition, and one harder to meet.
He did not solve the problem till near the end of his reign. In 213 he called a great meeting in the Hall of Audience at Changan. See the squat burly figure enthroned in grand splendor; the twelve weighty statues arranged around; the chief civil and military officers of the empire, thorough Taoists like himself, gathered on one side; the Academies and Censorates, all the leaders of the literati, on the other. The place was big enough for a largish meeting. Minister Li Ssu rises to describe the work of the Emperor; whereafter the latter calls for expressions of opinion. A member of his household opines that he "surpasses the very greatest of his predecessors": which causes a subdued sneer to run through the ranks of scholars. One of them takes the floor and begins to speak. Deprecates flattery guardedly, as bad for any sovereign; considers who the greatest of these predecessors were:—Yao, Shun, and Yu, 'Tang the Completer, Wu Wang; and—implies a good deal. Warms to his work at last, and grows bitter; almost openly pooh poohs all modern achievements; respectfully—or perhaps not too respectfully—advocates a return to the feudal—
"Silence!" roars Attila-Napoleon from his throne; and motions Li Ssu to make answer. The answer was predetermined, one imagines. It was an order that five hundred of the chief literati present should retire and be beheaded, and that thousands more should be banished. And that all books should be burned. Attila-Napoleon's orders had a way of being carried out. This was one.
He had meanwhile been busy with the great material monument of his reign: the Wall of China; and with cautious campaigns yearly to the north of it; and with personal supervision of the Commissariat Department of all his armies everywhere; and with daily long hikes to keep himself in trim. Now the Wall came in useful. To stretch its fifteen hundred miles of length over wild mountains and valleys in that bleak north of the world, some little labor was needed; and scholars and academicians were many and, for most purposes, useless; and they needed to be brought into touch with physical realities to round out their characters;—then let them go and build the wall. He buried enough of them—alive, it is to be feared: an ugly Ts'in custom, not a Chinese,—to make melons ripen in mid-winter over their common grave; the rest he sentenced to four years of wall-building,—which meant death. That, too, was the penalty for concealing books. He was now in dead earnest that the Past should go, and history begin again; to be read forever afterwards in this order,—the Creation, the Reign of Ts'in Shi Hwangti.
But he spared books on useful subjects: that is to say, on
Medicine, Agriculture, and Magic.
So ancient China is to be seen now only as through a glass darkly; if his great attempt had been quite successful, it would not be to be seen at all. His crimes made no karma for China; they are not a blot on her record;—since they were done by an outside barbarian,—a mere publican and Ts'inner. From our standpoint as students of history, he was a malefactor of the first order; even when you take no account of his ruthless cruelty to men;—and so China has considered him ever since. Yet Karma finds ruthless agents for striking its horrible and beneficial blows; (and woe unto them that it finds!). It seems that Ts'in Shi Hwangti did draw the bowstring back—by this very wickedness,—far back—that sent the arrow China tearing and blazing out through the centuries to come. The fires in which the books were burned were the pyre of the Phoenix,—the burning of the astral molds,—the ignition and annihilation of the weight and the karma of two millenniums. The Secular Bird was to burn and be consumed to the last feather, and be turned to ashes utterly, before she might spring up into the ether for her new flight of ages.
One wonders what would happen if a Ts'in Shi Hwangti were to arise and do by modern Christendom what this one did by ancient China. I say nothing about the literati, but only about the literature. Would burning it be altogether an evil? Nearly all that is supremely worth keeping would live through; and its value would be immensely enhanced. First the newspapers would go, that sow lies broadcast, and the seeds of national hatreds. The light literature would go, that stands between men and thought. The books of theology would go, and the dust of creedalism that lies so thick on men's minds. A thousand bad precedents that keep us bound to medievalism would go with the law-books: there would be a chance to pronounce, here and now as human beings, on such things as capital punishment;—which remains, though we do not recognise the fact, solely because it has been in vogue all these centuries, and is a habit hard to break with. History would go; yes;—but a mort of pernicious lies would go with it. Well, well; one speaks of course in jest (partly). But when all is said, China was not unfortunate in having a strong giant of a man, a foreigner withal, at her head during those crucial decades. Ts'in Shi Hwangti guarded China through most of that perilous intermission between the cycles. It was the good that he did that mostly lived after him.
In 210 he fell ill, took no precautions, and died,—in his fiftieth year. A marvelous mausoleum was built for him: a palace, with a mountain heaped on top, and the floor of it a map of China, with the waters done in quicksilver. Whether his evil deeds were interred with his bones, who can say?—certainly his living wives were, and the thousands of living workmen who had built the mausoleum. Ts'innish doings, not Chinese. In the Book of Odes, Confucius preserved a Ts'in ballad mourning over men so buried alive with their dead king.
The strong hand lifted, rebellion broke out, and for awhile it looked as if Chu Hia must sink into the beast again. His feeble son got rid of Meng-tien, poisoned Li Ssu, offered the feeblest resistance to the rebels, and then poisoned himself. After four years of fighting,—what you might call "unpleasantness all round,"—one Liu Pang achieved the throne. He had started life as a beadle; joined Ts'in Shi Hwangti's army, and risen to be a general; created himself after the emperor's death Prince of Han; and now had the honor to inaugurate, as Emperor Kaotsu, the greatest of the Chinese dynasties.
In the two-fifties strong barbarous Ts'in had swallowed unmanly worn-out China, and for half a century had been digesting the feast. Then—to mix my metaphors a little—China flopped up to the surface again, pale, but smiling blandly. In the sunlight she gathered strength and cohesion, and proceeded presently to swallow Ts'in and everything else in sight; and emerged soon young, strong, vigorous, and glowing-hearted to the conquest of many worlds in the unknown. What was Ts'in, now is Shensi Province, the very Heart of Han: the Shensi man today is the Son of Han, Ts'in Englished; but in Shensi, the old Ts'in, in their tenderest moods, they call it Han still,—the proudest most patriotic name there is for it.
Not at once was the Golden Age of Han to dawn: half a thirteen-decade cycle from the opening of the manvantara in the two-forties had to pass first. Ts'in Shi Hwangti had mapped out a great empire; it fell to the Hans to consolidate it. Han Kaotsu followed somewhat in the footsteps of his predecessor, less the cruelty and barbarism, and most of the strength. The sentiment of the empire was Chinese, not Ts'innish; so, though not a brilliant or always a fortunate soldier, he was able to assert his sway over the greater part of China Proper. Chinesism had spread over territories never before Chinese, and wherever it had spread, the people were glad of a Chinese dynasty; besides, his rule was tactful and kindly. They were glad that the Gods of the Soil of Han were to be worshipped now, and those of Ts'in disthroned; and that the Ts'in edicts were annulled;—as they were with one important exception: those relating to literature. A cultureless son of the proletariat himself. Han Kaotsu felt no urge towards resurrecting that; and perhaps it was as well that the sleeping dogs should be let lie awhile. The wonder is that the old nationalities did not reassert themselves; but they did not, to any extent worth mentioning; and perhaps this is the best proof of Han Kaotsu's real strength. Ts'in Shi Hwangti had dealt soundly with the everlasting Hun in his time; but when he died, the Hun recovered. They kept Han Kaotsu busy, so that his saddle, as he said, was his throne. They raided past the capital and down into Ssechuan; once very nearly captured the emperor; and had to be brought out at last with a Chinese princess for the Hun king. Generally speaking, the Hans would have lived at peace with them if they could, and were ready to try better means of solving the problem than war. But it certainly was a problem; for in these Huns we find little traces of human nature that you could work upon. But China was a big country by that time, and only a part of it, comparatively small, suffered from the Huns. For the rest, Han Kaotsu was popular, his people were happy, and his reign of twelve years was a breathing-time in which they gathered strength. He kept a hundred thousand workmen busy on public works, largely road- and bridge-building: a suspension bridge that he built, a hundred and fifty yards long, and crossing a valley five hundred feet below, is still in use,—or was during the last century. He died in 194.
He was succeeded, nominally, by his son Han Hweiti; really by his widow, the empress Liu Chi: one of the three great women who have ruled China. At this time the Huns, under their great Khan Mehteh, were at the height of their power. Khan Mehteh made advances to the Empress: "I should like," said he, "to exchange what I have for what I have not." You and I may think he meant merely a suggestion for mutual trade; but she interpreted it differently, thanked him kindly, but declined the flattering proposal on the score of her age and ugliness. Her hair and teeth, she begged him to believe, were quite inadequate, and made it impossible for her to think of changing her condition.—I do not know whether it was vanity or policy.
But it was she, or perhaps her puppet son the emperor, who started the great Renaissance. A commission was appointed for restoring the literature: among its members, K'ung An-kuo, twelfth in descent from Confucius. Books were found, that devotion had hidden in dry wells and in the walls of houses; one Fu Sheng, ninety years old, repeated the Classics word for word to the Commissioner, all from his memory. The restrictions gone, a mighty reaction set in; and China was on fire to be her literary self again. A great ball was set rolling; learning went forward by leaps and bounds. The enthusiasm, it must be said, took directions legitimate and the reverse;—bless you, why should any written page at all be considered lost, when there were men in Han with inventive genius of their own, and a pretty skill at forgery? The Son of Heaven was paying well; to it, then, minds and calligraphic fingers!
So there are false chapters of Chwangtse, while many true ones have been lost. And I can never feel sure of Confucius' own Spring and Autumn Annals, wherein he thought lay his highest claim to human gratitude, and the composition of which the really brilliant-minded Mencius considered equal to the work of Ta Yu in bridling China's Sorrow;—but which, as they come down to us, are not impressive.—The tide rolled on under Han Wenti, from 179 to 156: a poet himself, a man of peace, and a reformer of the laws in the direction of mercy. Another prosperous reign followed; then came the culmination of the age in the Golden Reign of Han Wuti, from 140 to 86.
The cyclic impulse had been working mainly on spiritual and intellectual planes: Ssema Tsien, the Father of Chinese History, gives gloomy pictures of things economic.*
"When the House of Han arose," says Ssema, "the evils of their predecessors had not passed away. Husbands still went off to the wars; old and young were employed in transporting food, production was almost at a standstill, and money was scarce. The Son of Heaven had not even carriage horses of the same color; the highest civil and military authorities rode in bullock carts; the people at large knew not where to lay their heads. The coinage was so heavy and cumbersome that the people themselves started a new issue at a fixed standard of value. But the laws were lax, and it was impossible to prevent the grasping from coining largely, buying largely, and then holding for a rise in the market. Prices went up enormously:"—it sounds quite modern and civilized, doesn't it?—"rice sold at a thousand cash per picul; a horse cost a hundred ounces of silver."
——— * The passages quoted are taken from Dr. Giles's work on Chinese Literature. ———
Under the Empress Liu Chi and her successors these conditions were bettered; until, when a half cycle had run its course, and Han Wuti had been some twenty years on the throne, prosperity came to a culmination. Says Ssema Tsien:
"The public granaries were well-stocked; the government treasuries full… The streets were thronged with the horses of the people, and on the highroads, whole droves were to be seen, so that it became necessary to forbid the public use of mares. Village elders ate meat and drank wine. Petty government clerkships lapsed from father to son, and the higher offices of state were treated as family heirlooms. For a spirit of self-respect and reverence for the law had gone abroad, and a sense of charity and duty towards one's neighbor kept men aloof from disgrace and crime."
There had been in Kansuh, the north-westernmost province of China Proper, a people called the Yueh Chi or White Scythians, whom the Huns had driven into the far west; by this time they were carving themselves an empire out of the domains of the Parthians, and penetrating into north-west India, but Han Wuti knew nothing of that. All that was known of them was, that somewhere on the limits of the world they existed, and were likely to be still at loggerheads with their ancient foes the Huns. Han Wuti had now been on the throne seven years, and was and had been much troubled by the Hun problem: he thought it might help to solve it if those lost Yueh Chi could be raked up out of the unknown and made active allies. To show the spirit of the age, I will tell you the story of Chang Ch'ien, the general whom he sent to find them.
Chang Ch'ien set out in 139; traversed the desert, and was duly captured by the Huns. Ten years they held him prisoner; then he escaped. During those ten years he had heard no news from home: a new emperor might be reigning, for aught he knew; or Han Wuti might have changed his plans. Such questions, however, never troubled him: he was out to find the Yueh Chi for his master, and find them he would. He simply went forward; came presently to the kingdom of Tawan, in the neighborhood of Yarkand; and there preached a crusade against the Huns. Unsuccessfully: the men of Tawn knew the Huns, but not Han wuti, who was too far away for a safe ally; and they proposed to do nothing in the matter. Chang Ch'ien considered. Go back to China?—Oh dear no! there must be real Yueh C'hi somewhere, even if these Tawanians were not they. On he went, and searched that lonely world until he did find them. They liked the idea of Hun-hurting; but again, considered China too far away for practical purposes. He struck down into Tibet; was captured again; held prisoner a year; escaped again,—and got back to Changan in 126. A sadder and a wiser man, you might suppose; but nothing of the kind! Full, on the contrary, of brilliant schemes; full of the wonder and rumor of the immense west. These he poured into Han Wuti's most sympathetic ears; and the emperor started now in real earnest upon his Napoleonic career.
The frontier was no longer at the Great Wall. Only the other day Sir Aurel Stein discovered, in the far west, the long straight furrows traced by the feet of Han Wuti's sentinels on guard; the piles of reed-stalks, at regular intervals, set along the road for fire-signals; documents giving details as to the encampments, the clothes and arrows served out to the soldiers, the provisions made for transforming armies of conquest into peaceful colonies. All these things the sands covered and preserved.
And behind these outposts was a wide empire full of splendor outward and inward; full of immense activities, in literature, in engineering, in commerce. New things and ideas came in from the west: international influences to reinforce the flaming up of Chinese life.
The moving force was still Taoism; the Blue Pearl, sunk deep in the now sunlit waters of the common consciousness, was flashing its rainbows. Ts'in Shi Hwangti, for all his greatness, had been an uncouth barbarian; Han Wuti was a very cultured gentleman of literary tastes,—a poet, and no mean one. He too was a Taoist; an initiate of the Taoism of the day; which might mean in part that he had an eye to the Elixir of Life; but it also meant (at least) that he had a restless, exorbitant, and gorgeous imagination. Such, indeed, inflamed the whole nation; which was rich, prosperous, energetic, progressive, and happy. Ts'in ideas of bigness in architecture had taken on refinement in Chinese hands; the palaces and temples of Han Wuti are of course all lost, but by all accounts they must have been wonderful and splendid. Very little of the art comes down: there are some bas-reliefs of horses, fine and strong work, realistic, but with redeeming nobleness. How literature had revived may be gathered from this: in Han Wuti's Imperial Library there were 3123 volumes of the Classics and commentaries thereupon; 2705 on Philosophy; 1318 of Poetry; 2528 on Mathematics; 868 on Medicine; 790 on the Science of War. His gardens at Changan were famous; he had collectors wandering the world for new and ornamental things to stock them; very likely we owe many of our garden plants and shrubs to him. He consecrated mountains and magnificent ceremonies; and for the sake of the gods and genii appeared as flaming splendors over Tai-hsing and the other sacred heights. For the light of Romance falls on him; he is a shining half faery figure.—Outwardly there was pomp, stately manners, pageantry, high magnificence; inwardly, a burning-up of the national imagination to ensoul it. The Unseen, with all its mystery and awe or loveliness, was the very nearly visible: not a pass nor lake nor moor nor forest but was crowded with the things of which wonder is made. Muh Wang, the Chow king, eight centuries before, had ridden into the West and found the garden of that Faery Queen whose Azure Birds of Compassion fly out into this world to sweeten the thoughts of men. Bless you, Han Wuti married the lady, and had her to abide peaceably in his palace, and to watch with him
"The lanterns glow vermeil and gold,
Azure and green, the Spring nights through,
When loud the pageant galeons drew
To clash in mimic combating,
And their dark shooting flames to strew
Over the lake at Kouen Ming."
From about 130 to 110 Han Wuti was Napoleonizing: bringing in the north-west; giving the Huns a long quietus in 119; conquering the south with Tonquin; the southern coast provinces, and the lands towards Tibet. Ssema Tsien tells us that "mountains were hewn through for many miles to establish a trade-route through the south-west and open up those remote regions"; that was a scheme of Chang Ch'ien's, who had ever an eye to penetrating to India.
There was a dark side to it. Vast sums of money were eaten up, and estravagance in private life was encouraged. Says Ssema:
"From the highest to the lowest, everyone vied with his neighbor in lavishing money on houses and appointments and apparel, altogether beyond his means. Such is the everlasting law of the sequence of prosperity and decay…. Merit had to give way to money; shame and scruples of conscience were laid aside; laws and punishments were administered with severer hand."
It is a very common thing to see signs of decline and darkness in one's own age; and Ssema himself had no cause to love the administration of Han Wuti; under which he had been punished rather severely for some offense. Still, what he says is more or less what you would expect the truth to be. And you will note him historian of the life of the people; not mere recounter of court scandals and chronicler of wars: conscious, too, of the law of cycles;—all told, something a truer historian than we have seen too much of in the West.—Where, indeed, we are wedded to politics, and must have our annalists chronicle above all things what we call political growth; not seeing that it is but a circle, and squirreling round valiantly in a cage to get perpetually in high triumph to the place you started from; a foolish externality at best. But real History mirrors for us the motions of the Human Spirit and the Eternal.
I said that what Ssema tells us is what you would expect the truth to be; this way:—After half a cycle of that adventurous and imaginative spirit, eyes jaundiced a little would surely find excuse enough for querulous vision. There is, is there not, something Elizabethan in that Chang Ch'ien, taking the vast void so gaily, and not to be quenched by all those fusty years imprisoned among the Huns, but returning only the more fired and heady of imagination? If he was a type of Han Wuti's China, we may guess Ssema was not far out, and that vaulting ambition was overleaping itself a little; that men were buying automobiles who by good rights should have ridden in a wheelbarrow. Things did not go quite so well with the great emperor after his twenty flaming Napoleonic years; his vast mountain-cleaving schemes were left unfinished; Central Asia grew more troublesome again, and he had to call off Chang Ch'ien from an expedition into India by way of Yunnan and Tibet and the half-cleaved mountains, to fight the old enemy in the north-west. But until the thirteen decades were passed, and Han Chaoti, his successor, had died in 63 B.C., the vast designs were still upspringing; high and daring enterprise was still the characteristic of the Chinese mind. The thirteen decades, that is, from the accession of Han Hueiti and the beginning of the Revival of Literature in 194.
XV. SOME POSSIBLE EPOCHS IN SANSKRIT LITERATURE
Han Chaoti died in 63 B.C.; his successor is described as a "boor of low tastes";—from that time the great Han impetus goes slowing down and quieting. China was recuperating after Han Wuti's flare of splendor; we may leave her to recuperate, and look meanwhile elsewhere.
And first to that most tantalizing of human regions, India; where you would expect something just now from the cyclic backwash. As soon as you touch this country, in the domain of history and chronology, you are certain, as they say, to get 'hoodooed.' Kali-Yuga began there in 3102 B.C., and ever since that unfortunate event, not a single soul in the country seems to have had an idea of keeping track of the calendar. So-and-so, you read, reigned. When?—Oh, in 1000 A.D. Or in 213 A.D. Or in 78 A.D. Or in a few million B.C., or 2100 A.D. Or he did not reign at all. After all, what does it matter?—this is Kali-Yuga, and nothing can go right.—You fix your eyes on a certain spot in time, which, according to your guesses at the cycles, should be important. Nothing doing there, as we say. Oh no, nothing at all: this is Kali-Yuga, and what should be doing? …. Well, if you press the point, no doubt somebody was reigning, somewhere.—But, pardon my insistence, if seems—. Quite so, quite so! as I said, somebody must have been reigning.—You scrutinze; you bring your lenses to bear; and the somebody begins to emerge. And proves to be, say, the great Samundragupta, emperor of all India (nearly); for power and splendor, almost to be mentioned with Asoka. And it was the Golden Age of Music, and perhaps some other things.—Yes, certainly; the Guptas were reigning then, I forgot. But why bother about it? This is Kali-Yuga, and what does anything matter?—And you come away with the impression that your non-informant could reveal enough and plenty, if he had a mind to.
Which is, indeed, probably the case. All this nonchalant indefiniteness means nothing more, one suspects, than that the Brahmans have elected to keep the history of their country unknown to us poor Mlechhas. Then there are Others, too: the Guardians of Esotericism in a greater sense; who have not chosen so far that Indian history should be known. So we can only take dim foreshadowings, and make guesses.
We saw the Maurya dynasty,—that one seemingly firm patch to set your feet on in the whole morass of the Indian past,—occupy the thirteen decades from 320 to 190 B.C., (or we thought we did); now the question is, from that pied-a-terre whither shall we jump? If you could be sure that the ebb of the wave would be equal in length to its inrush,—the night to the day:—that the minor pralaya would be no longer or shorter than the little manvantara that preceded it—why, then you might leap out securely for 60 B.C., with a comfortable feeling that there would be some kind of turning-point in Indian history there or thereabouts. Sometimes things do happen so, beautifully, as if arranged by the clock. But unfortunately, enough mischief may be done in thirteen decades to take a much longer period to disentangle; and again, it is only when you strike an average for the whole year, that you can say the nights are equal to the days. We are trying to see through to the pattern of history; not to dogmatize on such details as we may find, nor claim on the petty strength of them to be certain of the whole. So, our present leap (for we shall make it), while not quite in the dark, must be made in the dusk of an hour or so after sunset. There must be an element of faith in it: very likely we shall splash and sink gruesomely.
Well, here goes then! From 190 B.C. thirteen decades forward to 60 B.C., and,—squish! But, courage! throw out your arm and clutch—at this trailing root, 57 B. C., here within easy reach; and haul yourself out. So; and see, now you are standing on something. What it is, Dios lo sabe! But there is an Indian era that begins in 57 B.C.; for a long time, dates were counted from that year. That era rises in undefined legendary splendor, and peters out ineffectually you don't just know where. There is nothing to go upon but legends, with never a coin nor monument found to back them;—never mind; dates you count eras from are generally those in which important cycles begin. The legends relate to Vikramaditya king of Ujjain,—which kingdom is towards the western side of the peninsula, and about where Hindoostan and the Deccan join. He is the Arthur-Charlemain of India, the Golden Monarch of Romance. In the lakes of his palace gardens the very swans sang his praises daily—
"Glory be to Vikramajeet
Who always gives us pearls to eat";
and when he died, the four pillars that supported his throne rose up, and wandered away through the fields and jungle disconsolate: they would not support the dignity of any lesser man.* Such tales are told about him by every Indian mother to her children at this present day, and have been, presumably, any time these last two thousand years.
——— * India through the Ages, by Mrs. Flora Annie Steel. ———
Of his real existence Historical Research cannot satisfy itself at all;—or it half guesses it may have discovered his probable original wandering in disguise through the centuries of a thousand years or so later. But you must expect that sort of thing in India.
At his court, says tradition, lived the "Nine Gems of Literature," —chief among them the poet-dramatist Kalidasa; whom Historical Research (western) rather infers lived at several widely separated epochs much nearer our own day. Well; for the time being let us leave Historical Research (western) to stew in its own (largely poisonous) juices, and see how it likes it,—and say that there are good cyclic chances of something large here, in the half-cycle between the Ages of Han Wuti and Augustus.
We may note that things Indian must be dealt with differently from things elsewhere. You take, for example, the old story about the Moslem conquerors of Egypt burning the Alexandrian Library. The fact that this is mentioned for the first time by a Christian who lived six hundred years after the supposed event, while we have many histories written during those six hundred years which say nothing about it at all,—is evidence amounting to proof that it never happened; especially when you take into account the known fact that the Alexandrian Library had already been thoroughly burnt several times. But you can derive no such negativing certainty, in India, from the fact that Vikramaditya and Ujjain and Kalidasa may never have been mentioned together, not associated with the era of 57 B.C., in any extant writing known to the west that comes from before several centuries later. Because the Brahman were a close corporation that kept the records of history, and kept them secret; and gave out bits when it suited them. Say that in 1400 (or whenever else it may have been) they first allowed it to be published that Kalidasa flourished at Vikrmaditya's court:—they may have been consciously lying, but at least they were talking about what they knew. They were not guessing, or using their head-gear wrongfully, their lying was intentional, or their truth warranted by knowledge. And no motive for lying is apparent here.—It would be very satisfactory, of course, were a coin discovered with King Vikrmaditya's image and superscription nicely engraved thereon: Vikramaditya De Gratia: Uj. Imp.; Fid. Def.; 57 B.C. But in this wicked world you cannot have everything; you must be thankful for what you can get.
You may remember that Han Wuti, to solve the Hun problem, sent Chang Ch'ien out through the desert to discover the Yueh Chi' and that Chang found them at last in Bactria, which they had conquered from Greeks who had held it since Alexander's time. He found them settled and with some fair degree of civilization; spoke of Bactria under their sway as a "land of a thousand cities";—they had learned much since they were nomads driven out of Kansuh by the Huns. Also they were in the midst of a career of expansion. Within thirty years of his visit to them, or by 100 B.C., they had spread their empire over eastern Persia, at the expense of the Parthians; and thence went down into India conquering. By 60 B.C. they held the Punjab and generally the western parts of Hindoostan; then, since they do not seem to have got down into the Deccan, I take it they were held up. By whom?—Truly this is pure speculation. But the state of Malwa, of which Ujjain was the capital, lay right in their southward path; if held up they were, it would have been, probably, by some king of Ujjain. Was this what happened?—that the peril of these northern invaders roused Malwa to exert its fullest strength; the military effort spurring up national feeling; the national feeling, creative energies spiritual, mental and imaginative;—until a great age in Ujjain had come into being. It is what we often see. The menace of Spain roused England to Elizabethanism; the Persian peril awakend Athens. So King Vikramaditya leads out his armies, and to victory; and the Nine Gems of Literature sing at his court. It is a backwash from Han Wuti's China, that goes west with Chang Ch'ien to the Yueh Chi, and south with them into India. And we can look for no apex of literary creation at this time, either in China or Europe. In the Roman literature of that cycle it is the keen creative note we miss: Virgil, the nearest to it, cannot be said to have possessed quite; and Han literature was probably its first culmination under Han Wuti, and its second under the Eastern Hans. One suspects that great creation is generally going on somewhere, and is not displeased to find hints of its presence in India; is inclined to think this may have been, after all, the Golden Age of the Sanskrit Drama.—At which there can be at any rate no harm in taking a glance at this point; and, retrospectively, at Sanskrit literature as a whole;—a desperately inadequate glance, be it said.
I ask you here to remember the three periods of English Poetry, with their characteristics; and you must not mind my using my Welsh god-names in connexion with them. First, then, there was the Period of Plenydd,—of the beginnings of Vision; when the eyes of Chaucer and his lyricist predecessors were opened to the world out-of-doors; when they began to see that the skies were blue, fields and forests green; that there were flowers in the meadows and woodlands; and that all these things were delectable. Then there was the Period of Gwron, Strength; when Marlowe and Shakespeare and Milton evolved the Grand Manner; when they made the great March-Music, unknown in English before, and hardly achieved by anyone since:—the era of the great Warrior-poetry of the Tragedies and of Paradise Lost. Then came, with Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley, the Age of Alawn, lasting on until today; when the music of intonation brought with it romance and mystery and Natural Magic with its rich glow and wizard insight. And you will remember how English Poetry, on the uptrend of a major cycle, is a reaching from the material towards the spiritual, a growth toward that. Though Milton and Shakespeare made their grand Soul-Symbols,—by virtue of a cosmic force moving them as it has moved no others in the language,—you cannot find in their works, or in any works of that age, such clear perceptions or statements of spiritual truth as in Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise; nor was the brain-mind of either of those giants of the Middle Period capable of such conscious mystic thought as Wordsworth's. There was an evolution upward and inward; from Chaucer's school-boy vision, to Swinburne's (in that one book) clear sight of the Soul.
We appear to find in Sanskrit literature,—I speak in a very general sense,—also such great main epochs or cycles. First a reign of Plenydd, of Vision,—in the Age of the Sacred Books. Then a reign of Gwron,—in the Age of the heroic Epics. Then a reign of Alawn, in the Age of the Drama.
But the direction is all opposite. The cycle is not upward, from the sough of a beastly Iron Age towards the luminance of a coming Golden; but downward from the peaks and splendors of the Age of Gold to where the outlook is on to this latter hell's-gulf of years. Plenydd, when he first touched English eyes, he was Plenydd the Lord of Spiritual vision, the Seer into the Eternities. Wordsworth at his highest only approaches,— Swinburne in Hertha halts at the portals of, the Upanishads.
Now, what may this indicate? To my mind, this: that you are not to take these Sanskrit Sacred Books as the fruitage of a single literary age. They do not correspond with, say, the Elizabethan, or the Nineteenth-Century, poetry of England; but are rather the cream of the output of a whole period as long (at least) as that of all English literature; the blossoming of a Racial Mind during (at least) a manvantara of fifteen hundred years. I do not doubt that the age that gave birth to the Katha-Upanishad, gave birth to all manner of other things also; flippancies and trivialities among the rest;—just as in the same England, and in the same years, Milton was dictating Samson Agonistes, and Butler was writing the stinging scurrilities of Hudibras. But the Sanskrit Hudibrases are lost; as the English one will be, even if it takes millenniums to lose it. Full-flowing time has washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the palaces built upon the rock of the Soul. The Soul made the Upanishads, as it mide Paradise Lost; it made the former in the Golden Age, and the latter in this Age of Iron; the former through men gifted with superlative vision; the latter through a blind old bard. Therein lies the difference: all our bards, our very greatest, have been blind,—Dante and Shakespeare, no less than Milton. Full-flowing Time washed away the impermanencies of that ancient age, and left standing but the rock-built palaces of the Soul; and these,—not complete, perhaps;—repaired to a degree by hands more foolish;—a little ruinous in places,—but the ruins grander and brighter than all the pomps, all the new-fangled castles of genii, of later times, —come down to us as the Sacred Books of India, the oldest extant literature in the world. How old? We may put their epoch well before the death of Krishna in 3102 B. C.,—well before the opening of the Kali-Yuga; we may say that it lasted a very long time;—and be content that if all scholarship, all western and modern opinion, laughs at us now,—the laugh will probably be with us when we have been dead a long time. Or perhaps sooner.
They count three stages in this Vedic or pre-classical literature, wherefrom also we may infer that it was the output of a great manvantara, not of a mere day of literary creation. These three, they say, are represented by the Vedas, the Brahmanas, and the Upanishads. The Vedas consist of hymns to the Gods; and in a Golden Age you might find simple hymns to the Gods a sufficient expression of religion. Where, say, Reincarnation was common knowledge; where everybody knew it, and no one doubted it; you would not bother to make poems about it: —you do not make poems about going to bed at night and getting up in the morning—or not as a rule. You make poems upon a reaction of surprise at perceptions which seem wonderful and beautiful,— and in a Golden Age, the things that would seem wonderful and Beautiful would be, precisely, the Sky, the Stars, Earth, Fire, the Winds and Waters. Our senses are dimmed, or we should see in them the eternally startling manifestations of the Lords of Eternal Beauty. It is no use arguing from the Vedic hymns, as some folk do, a 'primitive' state of society; we have not the keys now to the background, mental and social, of the people among whom those hymns arose. Poetry in every succeeding age has had to fight harder to proclaim the spiritual truth proper to her native spheres: were all spiritual truth granted, she would need do nothing more than mention the Sky, or the Earth, and all the wonder, all the mystery and delight connoted by them would flood into the minds of her hearers. But now she must labor difficultly to make those things cry through; she gains in glory by the resistance of the material molds she must pierce. So the Vedas tell us little unless we separate ourselves from our preconceptions about 'primitive Aryans'; whose civilization may have been at once highly evolved and very spiritual.
The Brahmanas are priest-books; the Upanishads, it is reasonable to say are Kshattriya-books;—you often find in them Brahmans coming to Kshattriyas to learn the Inner Wisdom. The Brahmanas are books of ritual; the Upanishads came much later that the Brahmanas: that they represent a reaction towards spirituality from the tyranny of a priestly caste. But probably the day of the Kshattriyas was much earlier than that of the priests. The Marlow-Shakespear-Milton time was the Kshattriya period in English poetry; also the period during which the greatest souls incarnated, and produced the greatest work. So, perhaps, in this manvantara of the pre-classical Sanskrit literature, the Rig-Veda with its hymns represents the first, the Chaucerian period; but a Golden Age Chaucerian, simple and pure,—a time in which the Mysteries really ruled human life, and when to hymn the Gods was to participate in the wonder and freeddom of their being. Think, perhaps, as the cycle mounted to its hour of noon, esotericism opened its doors to pour forth an illumination yet stronger and more saving: mighty egos incarnated, and put in writing the marvelous revelations of the Upanishads: there may have been a descent towards matter, to call forth these more explicit declarations of the Spirit. The exclusive caste-system had not been evolved by any means, nor was to be for many ages: the kings are at the head of things; and they, not the priests, the chief custodians of the Deeper Wisdom.—And then, later, the Priest-cast made its contribution, evolving in the Brahmanas the ritual of their order; with an implication, ever growing after the beginning of the Kali-Yuga, that only by this ritual salvation could be attained. Not that it follows that this was the idea at first. Ritual has its place: hymns and chantings, so they be the right ones, performed rightly, have their decided magical value; we can understand that in its inception and first purity, this Brahmana literature may have been a growth or birth, under the aegis of Alawn of the Harmonies, of the magic of chanted song.