of the northern provinces. The chiefs of these
mountaineers, in feudal days, were not admitted to the assembly of the Shu
nobles, and their uncouth appearance and rough language, compared by the
northerners to the croaking of ravens, were matters of ridicule, even as late
as the period of the Hâng dynasty. But, gradually impregnated with Shu culture,
these southern people found art-expression of their own loves and ideals, in
forms widely divergent from those of their northern countrymen.
This poetry, as exemplified in Kutsugen, of tragic memory,
abounds in the intense adoration of nature, the worship of great rivers, the
delight in clouds and lake-mists, the love of freedom, and the assertion of
self. The last point finds striking illustration in the Tao-tei-king, or
Book of Virtue, of Laotse, the great rival of Confucius. In this work,
five thousand ideographs long, we hear of the greatness of retiring into self
and
freeing ego from the trammels of convention.
Laotse, who was born in the then southern province of So,
and was custodian of the Shu archives, was revered as a master by Confucius, in
spite of the difference of their doctrines, and describes him in turn as
"the dragon," saying, "I know that fish can swim, I know that
birds can fly, but the dragon's power I cannot gauge." Laotse's successor,
Soshi, also a Southerner, followed in his footsteps, and enlarged on the
relativity of things and mutability of forms.
The book of Soshi, rich in splendid imagery, is in great
contrast to the Confucian works, with their dry and prosy maxims. He speaks of
the bird of magic, whose wings are ninety thousand miles long, whose flight
darkens the sky, and which takes half a year till it alights. Meanwhile,
thrushes and sparrows twitter in their amusement, "Rise we not up from the
grass to the tree-tops in a
moment? What is the use of this great long flight?"
Again, "The wind, Nature's flute, sweeping across trees and waters, sings
many melodies. Even so, the Tao, the great Mood, expresses Itself through
different minds and ages and yet remains ever Itself." Or again, "The
art of living, whose secret lies not in antagonisms or criticisms, but in
gliding into the interstices that exist everywhere." This last point he
illustrates by the master-butcher, whose knife never needed sharpening, since
he cut between the bones, instead of attacking them. Thus he ridicules the
Confucian polity and conventions, which are but finite efforts, and can never
cover the great range of the impersonal Mood.
It is said that he was asked to take office, but he pointed
to a bull, decorated for sacrifice, saying, "Thinkest thou that the beast
will feel happy when the axe is on him, though he be bejewelled?" This
spirit of individualism shook Confucian socialism to its very foundations, so
that
welcomed on politics, sociology, and law, while the liberty
and complexity of the Southern Chinese nature enabled it to rise to the height
of the opportunity.
All this time China was being gradually eaten by the
encroachments of the Shin, and after the change of dynasties their imperialism
and the Confucianism of Hâng seemed likely to prove fatal to the Laoist school.
But the stream of philosophic energy found an underground channel, from which
it emerged, towards the end of the Hâng period, in the freedom and vagaries of
the Conversationalists.
In the three kingdoms into which the Hâng dynasty divided -
thus lessening the prestige of Confucian unity - the spirit of Laoism was
rampant. New commentaries on the Tao-tei-king were written by Kaan and
Ohitsu, and though such thinkers did not openly attack Confucianism, yet their
lives were consciously directed as demonstrations against convention.
Freedom is recognised as the essential characteristic by
Soshi. He relates a story of a great noble who sought for a distinguished
painter to execute a picture. One by one the candidates arrived, and, saluting
him decorously, inquired as to the subject and manner of treatment required by
him. With all this he was far from satisfied. At last an artist appeared, who
burst rudely into the room, and throwing off his garments sat down in some
rough posture before calling for his brushes and colours. "Here,"
exclaimed the patron, without further ado, "I find my man!"
Kogaishi was a poet-painter, of the latter part of the
fourth century, who belonged to the Laoist school, and was held admirable for
three virtues, being called "first in poetry, first in painting, and first
in foolishness." His is the earliest voice to speak of the necessity of
concentration on the dominant note, in an art-composition. "The secret of
portraiture," he
said, "lies in that, revealed in the eye of the
subject." For it is another fruit of the Laoist mind that the first
systematic criticism of painting and the first history of painters were begun
in China at this period, so giving the basis for a future generalisation of
æsthetics in that land and in Japan.
Shakaku in the fifth century lays down six canons of
pictorial art, in which the idea of the depicting of Nature falls into a third
place, subservient to two other main principles. The first of these is
"The Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of Things." For
art is to him the great Mood of the Universe, moving hither and thither amidst
those harmonic laws of matter which are Rhythm.
His second canon deals with composition and lines, and is
called "The Law of Bones and Brush-work." The creative spirit,
according to this, in descending into a pictorial conception must take upon
strong line, who could, as they say, give the whole fall of
Troy in the eyes of the prophetess, and we cannot refrain from saying that
European work, by following the later school, has lost greatly in power of
structural composition and line expression, though it has added to the facility
of realistic representation. The idea of line and line-composition has always
been the great strength of Chinese and Japanese art, though the Sung and
Ashikaga artists have added the beauty of dark and light-without forgetting
that the artistic, and not the scientific, was their goal - and the Toyotomi
epoch has contributed the notion of composing in colour.
The sacredness of calligraphy, which attains to great
heights for the first time in this Laoist period, is the worship of the line,
pure and simple. Each stroke of the brush contains in itself its principle of
life and death, inter-related with the other lines to form the beauty of an
ideograph.
challenge to the unknown terror of the spirit.
As was natural, the masses of the people could not be
carried by the Laoist movement. Neither Laotse-Soshi, nor their legitimate
descendants, the Conversationalists - delighting in their learned discussions
about the Abstract and Pure, waving the jade-handled yak-tails as they talked -
can be held responsible for that cult known as Taoism, which holds so much of
the Chinese race in its hands today, and claims "the old Philosopher"
as its founder.
In spite of the steady efforts of Confucian sages, the
Tartar superstitions which came with the Chinese from their early home, could
never be eradicated, and the uncultivated foresters of the Yang-tse-Kiang were
the guardians of this primitive inheritance, delighting in demoniac stories of
witchcraft and magic. Indeed, a necessary outcome of Confucianism itself,
ignoring as it did the problem of an after
life, and stating that the higher elements in man would
return to heaven, and his lower be united once more in the earth, was the quest
of immortality in the flesh.
Even so far back as the late, Shu literature, we find
frequent mention of the Sennin, or Wizard of the Mountains, who by strange
practices, and the discovery of a magic elixir, has attained the power of
living for ever, and now spends his time riding through the mid-day sky on the
backs of storks to join the secret meetings of his mysterious brotherhood.
The emperors of Shin sent out expeditions to search for the
potion of immortality in the Eastern seas, and the members, afraid to return
empty-handed, are believed to have settled in Japan, where whole families claim
descent from them to the present day.
The Hâng emperors, too, were not unaddicted to similar
pursuits, and time after
who found in it an advance on their own philosophy. The
early teachers of the Indian doctrine in China were mostly students of Laotse
and Soshi. And Yéon even taught these books as a necessary preparation for the
understanding of the abstract idealism of Ashvaghosha and Nagarjuna.
From its more concrete aspect, again, the early Taoists
welcomed the images of Buddha as those of one of their own gods. The golden
Sennin (Wizard of the Mountains) which Hanchow, one of the Hâng generals,
brought back as a trophy from an inroad on the borders of Thibet in the first
century, was considered, as the name implies, nothing different from the Taoist
images already extant in China, so that it was put amongst the Taoist deities
and worshipped with similar rites in the Kansen palace, or Hall of Sweet
Springs.
The King of So, in the second century of the Christian era,
being a pronounced
[paragraph continues] Taoist, was also at the same time a devout Buddhist. In the third
century, when the Emperor Korei cast an image of Buddha in gold he cast at the
same time an image of Laotse. All this proves that in this early period the two
religions were not defiant, as later Taoist works assert.
NOTES
Kutsugen. - A prince of So, a province on the
Yang-tse. His counsels were rejected by the King of So, and he was exiled. By
way of self-assertion he wrote great poems of solitude - of the man who stands
apart from men - seeking in Nature his only friend, in idealisation his only
home, and then committed suicide by drowning. To this day his death is mourned
annually by great concourses of people.
Mencius. - Moshi or Mencius lived about a century
after Confucius. With Bunno and Confucius benevolence had been preached as the
secret of human association. Mencius adds the note of duty, depicting mutual
obligation as the law. The ideograph for duty is very suggestive here; it
consists of sheep and ego. My sheep, that is, duty. The ideograph for
benevolence is man and two-in two, one forgets oneself.