The Crest-Wave of Evolution / A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19

"Aeschylus… had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after it. In the Electra this element is practically ignored. Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide, but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos! Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles. Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the Choephori—'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for blood?' —the Electra closes with an expression of entire satisfaction… Aeschylus takes the old bloody saga in an earnest and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as grand. His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would… Sophocles… takes the saga exactly as he finds it. He knows that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences; they killed in the fine old ruthless way. He does not try to make them real to himself at the cost of making them false to the spirit of the epos…

"The various bits of criticism ascribed to him—'I draw men as they ought to be drawn; Euripides draws them as they are'; 'Aeschylus did the right thing, but without knowing it'—all imply the academic standpoint…Even his exquisite diction, which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his predecessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist.Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman speech.It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments.But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes them.It is this which has established Sophocles as the perfect model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and grammarians; while the poets have been left to admire Aeschylus, who 'wrote in a state of intoxication,' and Euripedes, who broke himself against the bars of life and poetry."

You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the viewpoint of any critic: you must here weight the "natural superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view of your own.What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of the influx from plane to plane, as shown in these two tragedians.The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand thought.That of the second is to produce a work of flawless beauty, without regard to its spiritual import.What was to Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic—was to Sophocles the whole thing.Aeschylus was capable of wonderful psychological insight.Clytemnestra's speech to the Chorus, just before Agamemnon's return, is a perfect marvel in that way.But the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as

"…. gorgeous Tragedy In sceptered pall comes sweeping by."

—divests it of the personal, and robes it in a universal symbolic significance: because he has built like a titan, you do not at first glance note that he has labored like a goldsmith, as someone has said.But in Sophocles the goldsmithry is plain to see.His character-painting is exquisite: pathetic often; just and beautiful almost always.I put in the almost in view of that about the "hard unloveliness" of Electra's "daily wrangles" with her mother.The mantle of the religious Egyptians had fallen on Aeschylus: but Sophocles' garb was the true fashionable Athenian chiton of his day.He was personal, where the other had been impersonal; faultless, where the other had been sublime; conventionally orthodox, where through Aeschylus had surged the super-credal spirit of universal prophecy.

And then we come to third of the trio: Euripides, born in 480."He was," says Professor Murray, "essentially representative of his age, yet apparently in hostility to it; almost a failure of the stage—he won only four prizes in fifty years of production— yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece."Athens hated, jeered at, and flouted him just as much as she honored and adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides.Where, in later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens of times.The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive, to seven each of Aeschylus' and Sophocles', is proof of his larger and longer popularity.

He had no certain message from the Gods, as Aeschylus had; his intensely human heart and his mighty intellect kept him from being the 'flawless artist' that Sophocles was.He questioned all conventional ideas, and would not let the people rest in comfortable fat acquiescence.He came to make men 'sit up and think.'He did not solve problems, but raised them, and flung them at the head of the world.He must stir and probe things to the bottom; and his recurrent unease, perhaps, mars the perfection of his poetry.Admetus is to die, unless someone will die for him; recollect that for the Greekish mob, death was the worst of all possible happenings.Alcestis his wife will die for him; and he accepts her sacrifice.Now, that was the old saga; and in Greek conventional eyes, it was all right.Woman was an inferior being, anyhow; there was nothing more fitting that Alcestis should die for her lord.—Here let me make a point plain: you cannot look back through Greece to a Golden Age in Greece; it is not like Egypt, where the farther you go into the past, the greater things you come to;—although in Egypt, too, there would have been rises and falls of civilization.In Homer's days, in Euripides', they had these barbarous ideas about women; and these foolish exoteric ideas about death; historic Greece, like modern Europe from the Middle Ages, rises from a state of comparative barbarism, lightlessness; behind which, indeed, there were rumors of a much higher Past.These great Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, brought in ideas which were as old as the hills in Egypt, or in India; but which were new to the Greece of their time—of historic times; they were, I think, as far as their own country was concerned, innovators and revealers; not voicers of a traditional wisdom; it may have been traditional once, but that time was much too far back for memory.I think we should have to travel over long, long ages, to get to a time when Eleusis was a really effective link with the Lodge—to a period long before Homer, long before Troy fell.—But to return to the story of Alcestis:—

You might take it on some lofty impersonal plane, and find a symbol in it; Aeschylus would have done so, somehow; though I do not quite see how. Sophocles would have been aware of nothing wrong in it; he would have taken it quite as a matter of course. Euripides saw clearly that Admetus was a selfish poltroon, and rubbed it in for all he was worth. And he could not leave it at that, either; but for pity's sake must bring in Hercules at the end to win back Alcestis from death. So the play is great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together:—leaves you just a little uncomfortable. Browning calls him, in Balaustion's Adventure,

     "….     Euripides
     The human, with his droppings of warms tears";

—it is a just verdict, perhaps.Without Aeschylus' Divine Wisdom, or Sophocles' worldly wisdom, he groped perpetually after some means to stay the downward progress of things; he could not thunder like the one, nor live easily and let live, like the other.—I do not give you these scraps of criticism (which are not my own, but borrowed always I think), for the sake of criticism; but for the sake of history;—understand them, and you have the story of the age illumined.You can read the inner Athens here, in the aspirations and in the limitations of Euripides, and in the contempt in which Athens held him; as you can read it in the grandeur of Aeschylus, and the Athenian acceptance of, and then reaction against, him; and in the character of Sophocles and his easy relations with his age.When Euripides came, the light of the Gods had gone.He was blindish; he would not accept the Gods without question.Yet was he on the side of the Gods whom he could not see or understand; we must count him on their side, and loved by them.He was not panoplied, like Aeschylus or Milton, in their grim and shining armor; yet what armor he wore bore kindred proud dints from the hellions' batterings.Or perhaps mostly he wore such marks as wounds upon his own flesh. . . .Not even a total lack of humor, which I suppose must be attributed to him, can make him appear less than a most sympathetic, an heroic figure.He was the child and fruitage and outcast of his age, belonging as much to an Athens declining and inwardly hopeless, as did Aeschylus (at first) to Athens in her early glory.He was not so much bothered (like Sophocles) with no message, as bothered with the fact that he had no clear and saving message.His realism—for compared with the other two, he was a sort of realist—was the child of his despair; and his despair, of the atmosphere of his age.

He was, or had been, in close touch with Socrates (you might expect it); lived a recluse somewhat, taking no part in affairs; married twice, unfortunately both times; and his family troubles were among the points on which gentlemanly Athens sneered at him.A lovely lyricist, a restless thinker; tender-hearted; sublime in pity of all things weak and helpless and defeated:—women especially, and conquered nations.Prof. Murray says:

"In the last plays dying Athens is not mentioned, but her death- struggle and her sins are constantly haunting us; the Joy of battle is mostly gone; the horror of war is left.Well might old Aeschylus pray, 'God grant that I may sack no city!'if the reality of conquest is what it appears in the last plays of Euripides.The conquerors there are as miserable as the conquered; only more cunning, and perhaps more wicked."

He died the year before Aegospotami, at the court of Archelaus of Macedon.One is glad to think he found peace and honor at last.Athens heard with a laugh that some courtier there had insulted him; and with astonishment that the good barbarous Archelaus had handed said courtier over to Euripides to be scourged for his freshness.I don't imagine that Euripides scourged him though-to amount to anything.

VI.SOCRATES AND PLATO

By this time you should have seen, rather than any picture of Greece and Athens in their heyday, an indication of certain universal historical laws.As thus (to go back a little): an influx of the Spirit is approaching, and a cycle of high activities is about to begin.A great war has cleared off what karmic weight has been hanging over Athens;—Xerxes, you will remember, burnt the town.Hence there is a clearness in the inner atmosphere; through which a great spiritual voice may, and does, speak a great spiritual message.But human activities proceed, ever increasing their momentum, until the atmosphere is no longer clear, but heavy with the effluvia of by no means righteous thought and action.The Spirit is no more visibly present, but must manifest if at all through a thicker medium; and who speaks now, speaks as artist only,—not as poet—or artist-prophet.Time goes on, and the inner air grows still thicker; till men live in a cloud, through which truths are hardly to be seen.Then those who search for the light are apt to cry out in despair; they become realists struggling to break the terrible molds of thought:—and if you can hear the Spiritual in them at all, it is not in a positive message they have for men, but in the greatness of their heart and compassion.They do not build; they seek only to destroy.There seems nothing else for them to do.

So in England, Wordsworth opened this last cycle of poetry; coming when there was a clear atmosphere, and speaking more or less clearly through it his message from the Gods.You hear a like radiant note of hope in Shelley; and something of it in Keats, who stood on the line that divides the Poet-Prophet from the Poet-Artist.Then you come to the ascendency of Tennyson, whose business in life was to be the latter.He tried the role of prophet; he lived up to the highest he could: strove towards the light much more gallantly than did Sophocles, his Athenian paradigm.But the atmosphere of his age made him something of a failure at it: no clear light was there for him to find, such as could manifest through poetry.Then you got men like Matthew Arnold with his cry of despair, and William Morris with his longing for escape; then the influence of Realism.So many poets recently have an element of Euripides in them; a will to do well, but a despair of the light; a tendency to question everything, but little power to find answers to their questions.Then there were some few who, influenced (consciously or not) by H.P.Blavatsky, that great dawn-herald, caught glimpses of the splendor of a dawn—which yet we wait for.

Euripides, with the Soul stirring within and behind him, "broke himself on the bars of life and poetry," as Professor Murray says. He was so hemmed in by the emanations of the time that he could never clearly enunciate the Soul. Not, at any rate, in an unmixed way, and with his whole energies. Perhaps his favorite device of a Deus ex Machina—like Hercultes in the Alcestis —is a symbolical enunciation of it, and intended so to be. Perhaps the cause of the unrest he makes us feel is this: he knew that the highest artistic method was the old Aeschylean symbolic one, and tried to use it; but at the same time was compelled by the gross emanations of the age, which he was not quite strong enough to rise above, to treat his matter not symbolically, but realistically. He could not help saying: "Here is the epos you Athenians want me to treat,—that my artist soul forces me to treat; here are the ideas that make up your conventional religion;—now look at them!" And forth-with he showed them, in there exoteric side, sordid, ugly and bloody;— and then, on the top of that showing, tried to twist them round to the symbolic impersonal plane again; and so left a discord not properly solved, an imperfect harmony; a sense of loss rather than gain; of much torn down, and nothing built up to take its place. The truth was that the creative forces had flowed downward until the organs of spiritual vision were no longer open; and poetry and art, the proper vehicles of the higher teaching in any age approximately golden, could no longer act as efficient channels for the light.

To turn to England again: Tennyson was, generally speaking, most successful when most he was content to be merely the artist in words, and least so when he assumed the office of Teacher; because almost all he found to teach was brain-mind scientific stuff; which was what the age called for, and the desired diet of Mid-Victorian England.Carlyle, who was a far greater poet essentially, and a far greater teacher actually, fitted himself to an age when materialism had made unpoetic; and eschewed poetry and had no use for it; and would have had others eschew it also.In our own time we have realists like Mr. Masefield.They are called realists because they work on the plane which has come, in the absence of anything spiritual, to seem that of the realities; the region of outside happenings, of the passions in all their ugly nakedness, of sorrow, misery, and despair.Such men may be essentially noble; we may read in them, under all the ugliness and misery they write down, just one quality of the Soul;—its unrest in and distaste for those conditions; but the mischief of it is that they make the sordidness seem the reality; and the truth about them is that their outlook and way of writing are simply the result of the blindness of the Soul;—its temporary blindness, not its essential glory.But the true business of Poetry never changes; it is to open paths into the inner, the beautiful, the spiritual world.

Just when things were coming to this pass H. P. Blavatsky went to England; and though she did not touch the field of creative literature herself, brought back as you know a gleam of light and beauty into poetry that may yet broaden out and redeem it. She was born when the century was thirty-one years old; and, curiously enough, there was a man born in Attica about 469, or when his century was thirty-one years old, who, though he did not himself touch the field of literature, was the cause why that light rose to shine in it which has shone most brilliantly since all down the ages; that light which we could not afford to exchange even for the light of Aeschylus. If one of the two were about to be taken from us, and we had our choice which it should be, we should have to cry, Take Aeschylus, but leave us this! —Ay, and take all other Greek literature into the bargain! —But to return to the man born in 469.

He was the son of humble people; his father was a stone-cutter in a small way of business; his mother a midwife.He himself began life as a sculptor,—a calling, in its lower reaches, not so far above that of his father.A group of the Graces carved by him was still to be seen on the road to the Acropolis two hundred years after; and they did not adorn Athens with mean work, one may guess; the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias.But, successful or not, he seems soon to have given it up.Of his youth we know very little.Spintharus, one of the few that knew him then and also when he had become famous, said that he was a man of terrible passions: anger hardly to be governed, and vehement desires; "though," he added, "he never did anything unfair."* By 'unfair' you may understand 'not fitting'—a transgression of right action.He set out to master himself: a tremendous and difficult realm to master.

——— * Gilbert Murray: Ancient Greek Literature ———

We hardly begin to know him till he was growing old; and then he was absolute monarch of that realm.We do not know when he abandoned his art; or how long it was before he had won some fame as a public teacher.We catch glimpse of him as a soldier: from 432 to 429 he served at the siege of Potidaea; at Delium in 424; and at Amphipolis in 422.Thus to do the hoplite, carrying a great weight of arms, at forty-seven, he needed to have some constitution; and indeed he had;—furthermore, he played the part with distinguished bravery—though wont to fall at times into inconvenient fits of abstraction.Beyond all this, for the outside of the man, we may say that he was of fascinating, extreme and satyr-like ugliness and enormous sense of humor; that he was a perpetual joke to the comic poets, and to himself; an old fellow of many and lovable eccentricities; and that you cannot pick one little hole in his character, or find any respect in which he does not call for love.

And men did love him; and he them.He saw in the youth of Athens, whose lives so often were being wasted, Souls with all the beautiful possibilities of Souls; and loved them as such, and drew them towards their soulhood.Such love and insight is the first and strongest weapon of the Teacher: who sees divinity within the rough-hewn personalities of men as the sculptor sees the God within the marble; and calls it forth.He was wont to joke over his calling; his mother, said he, had been a midwife, assisting at the birth of men's bodies; he himself was a midwife of souls.How he drew men to him—of the power he had—let Alcibiades bear witness."As for myself," says Alcibiades, "were I not afraid you would think me more drunk than I am, I would tell you on oath how his words have moved me—ay, and how they move me still.When I listen to him my heart beats with a more than Corybantic excitement; he has only to speak and my tears flow.Orators, such as Pericles, never moved me in this way— never roused my soul to the thought of my servile condition: but this man makes me think that life is not worth living so long as I am what I am.Even now, if I were to listen, I could not resist.So there is nothing for me but to stop my ears against this siren's song and fly for my life, that I may not grow old sitting at his feet.No one would ever think that I had shame in me; but I am ashamed in the presence of Socrates."

Poor Alciabes!whom Socrates loved so well, and tried so hard to save; and who could only preserve his lower nature for its own and for his city's destruction by stopping his ears against his Teacher!Alcibiades, whose genius might have saved Athens…only Athens would not be saved…and he could not have saved her, because he had stopped his ears against the man who made him ashamed; and because his treacherous lower nature was always there to thwart and overturn the efficacy of his genius;—what a picture of duality it is!

Socrates gave up his art; because art was no longer useful as an immediate lever for the age. He knew poetry well, but insisted, as Professor Murray I think says, on always treating it as the baldest of prose. There was poetry about, galore; and men did not profit by it: something else was needed. His mission was to the Athens of his day; he was going to save Athens if he could. So he went into the marketplace, the agora, and loafed about (so to say), and drew groups of young men and old about him, and talked to them. The Delphic Oracle had made pronouncement: Sophocles is wise; Euripides is wiser; but Socrates is the wisest of mankind. Sometimes, you see, the Delphic Oracle could get off a distinctly good thing. But Socrates, with his usual sense of humor, had never considered himself in that light at all; oldish, yes; and funny, and ugly, by all means;—but wise! He thought at first, he used to say, that the Oracle must be mistaken, or joking; for Athens was full of reputed wise men, sophists and teachers of philosophy like Prodicus and Protagoras; whereas he himself, heaven knew—. Well, he would go out and make a trial of it. So he went, and talked, and probed the wisdom of his fellow-citizens; and slowly came round to the belief that after all the Delphic Oracle might not have been such a fool. For he knew his ignorance; but the rest were ignorant without knowing it. This was his own way of telling the story; and you can never be sure how much camouflage was in it;—and yet, too, he was a giant humorist. Anyhow, he did show men their ignorance; and you all know his solemn way of doing it. He drew them on with sly questionings to see what idiots they were; and then drew them on with more sly questionings to perceive at least a few sound ethical truths.

He took that humble patient means of saving Athens: by breaking down false opinions and instilling true ones.It was beginning quite at the bottom of things.Where we advertise a public lecture, he button-holed a passer-by; and by the great power of his soul won a following presently.To rouse up a desire for right living in the youth of Athens: if he could do that, thought he, he might save Athens for the world.I wonder what the cycles of national glory would come to, how long they might last, if only the Teachers that invade to save them could have their way.Always we see the same picture: the tremendous effort of the Gods to redeem these nations in the times of their creative greatness; to lift them on to a spiritual plane, that the greatness may not wane and become ineffective.There is the figure that stands before the world, about whose perfection or whose qualities you may wrangle if you will; he is great; he is wonderful; he stirs up love and animosity;—but behind him are the Depths, the Hierarchies, the Pantheons.Socrates' warning Voice, the Daimon that counseled him in every crisis, has always been a hard nut for critics to crack.He was an impostor, was he?Away with you for a double fool!His life meets you so squarely at every point; there was no atom in his being that knew how to fear or lie….Well, no; but he was deluded; he mistook—.Man, there is more value in the light word of Socrates affirming, than in a whole world full of evidence denying, of such maunderers as you!See here; he was the most sensible of men; balanced; keeping his head always;—a mind no mood or circumstances could deflect from rational self-control, either towards passion or ecstasy.One explanation remains—as in the case of Joan, or of H.P.Blavatsky;—he was neither deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear; and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all: a greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else.How dare we pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a crucible, that we know the limits of natural and spiritual law?

It is a strange figure to find in Greece; drawn thither, one would say, by the attraction of opposites. He must have owed some of his power to his being such a contrast to all things familiar. Personal beauty was extremely common, and he was comically ugly. The Athenians were one of the best-educated populations of ancient or modern times—far ahead of ourselves; and he was ill-educated, and acted as a public teacher. He was hen-pecked at home, in an age when the place of woman was a very subordinate and submissive one; and he was the butt of all joke-lovers abroad, and himself enjoyed the joke most of all. And he quietly stood alone, against the mob and his fellow-judges, for the hapless victors of Arginusae in 406; and he quietly stood alone against the Thirty Tyrants during their reign of terror in 404, disobeying them at peril of his life. But Strip him of the "thing of sinews and muscles," as he called his outer self; forget the queer old personality that appears in the Clouds of Aristophanes, or for that matter in the Memorabilia of Xenophon—and what kind of picture of Socrates should we see? The humor would not go, for it is a universal quality; it has been said no Adept was ever without it; could you draw aside the veil of Mother Isis herself, and draw it suddenly, I suspect you should surprise a laugh vanishing from her face. So the humor would remain; and with it there would be … something calm, aloof, unshakable, yet vitally affectioned towards Athens, the Athenians, humanity; something unsurprised at, far less hoping or fearing anything from, life or death; in possession of "the peace which passeth understanding"; native to "the eternity that baffles all faculty of computation";—something that drew all sorts and conditions of Athenians to him, good and bad, Plato and Alcibiades, by "that diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn." —In point of fact, to get a true portrait of Socrates you have to look at the Memnon's head. The Egyptian artists carved it to be the likeness of the Perfect Man, the Soul, always in itself sublime, absolute master of its flesh and personality. That was what Socrates was.

Well; the century ended, with that last quarter of it in which the Lodge makes always its outward effort.Socrates for the Lodge had left no stone unturned; he had made his utmost effort dally.The democracy had been reinstated, and he was understood to be a moderate in politics.And the democracy was conventional-minded in religion; and he was understood to be irreligious, a disturber and innovator.And the democracy was still smarting from the wound; imposed on it by Critias and Charmides, understood to have been his disciples; and could not forget the treacheries of Alcibiades, another.And there were vicious youths besides, whom he had tried and failed to save; they had ruined themselves, and their reputable parents blamed and hated him for the ruin, not understanding the position.And he himself had seen so many of his efforts come to nothing: Alcibiades play the traitor; Critias and Charmides, the bloody tyrant;—he had seen many he had labored for frustrate his labors; he had seen Athens fallen.He had done all he could, quietly, unfailingly and without any fuss; now it was time for him to go.But going, he might yet strike one more great blow for the Light.

So with quiet zest and humor he entered upon the plans of his adversaries, accepting his trial and sentence like—like Socrates; for there is no simile for him, outside himself. He turned it all masterfully to the advantage of the Light he loved. You all know how he cracked his grand solemn joke when the death sentence was passed on him. By Athenian law, he might suggest an alternative sentence; as, to pay a fine, or banishment. Well, said he; death was not certainly an evil; it might be a very good thing; whereas banishment was certainly an evil, and so was paying a fine. And besides, he had no money to pay it. So the only alternative he could suggest was that Athens should support him for the rest of his life in the Prytaneum as a public benefactor. Not a smile from him; not a tremor. He elected deliberately; he chose death; knowing well that, as things stood, he could serve humanity in no other way so well. So he put aside Crito's very feasible plan for his escape, and at the last gathered his friends around him, and discoursed to them.

On Reincarnation.It was an old tradition, said he; and what could be more reasonable than that the soul, departing to Hades, should return again in its season:—the living born from the dead, as the dead are from the living?Did not experience show that opposites proceed from opposites?Then life must proceed from, and follow, death.If the dead came from the living, and not the living from the dead, the universe would at last be consumed in death.Then, too, there was the doctrine that knowledge comes from recollection; what is recollected must have been previously known.Our souls must have existed then, before birth. . . .

Why did he talk like that: thus reasoning about reincarnation, and not stating it as a positive teaching? Well; there would be nothing new and startling about it, to the Greeks. They knew of it as a teaching both of Pythagoras and of the Orphic Mysteries: that is, those did who were initiates or Pythagoreans. But it was not public teaching, known to the multitude; and except among the Pythagoreans, sophistry and speculation had impaired its vitality as a matter of faith or knowledge. (So scientific discovery and the spread of education have impaired the vitality now of Christian presentations of ethics.) So that to have announced it positively, at that time, would have served his purpose but little: men would have said, "We have heard all that before; had he nothing better to give us than stale ideas from the Mysteries or Pythagoras?" What he wanted to do was to take it out of the region of religion, where familiarity with it had bread an approach to contempt; and restate it robbed of that familiarity, and clothed anew in a garb of sweet reasonableness. So once more, and as ususal, he assumed ignorance, and approached the whole subject in a quiet and rational way, thus: I do not say that this is positively so; I do not announce it as a dogma. Dogmas long since have lost their efficacy, and you must stand or fall now by the perceptions of your own souls, not by what I or any authority may tell you. But as reasoning human beings, does it not appeal to you?

And the very spirit in which he approached it and approached his death was precisely the one to engrave his last spoken ideas on the souls of his hearers as nothing else could.No excitement; no uplift or ecstasy of the martyr; quiet reasoning only; full, serene, and, for him, common-place command of the faculties of his mind.The shadow of death made no change in Socrates; how then should they misunderstand or magnify the power of the shadow of death?—"How shall we bury you?"asks Crito.Socrates turns to the others present, and says: "I cannot persuade Crito that I here am Socrates—I who am now reasoning and ordering discourse.He imagines Socrates to be that other, whom he will see by and by, a corpse."—So the scene went on until the last moment, when "Phaedo veiled his face, and Crito started to his feet, and Apollodorus, who had never ceased weeping all the time, burst out into a loud and angry cry which broke down everyone but Socrates."

Someone has said that there is nothing in tragedy or history so moving as this death of Socrates, as Plato tells it.And yet its tragic interest, its beauty, is less important, to my thinking, than the insight it gives us into the methods and mental workings of an Adept.Put ourselves into the mind of Socrates.He is going to his death; which to him is about the same as, to us, going to South Ranch or San Diego.You say I am taking the beauty and nobility out of it; but no; I am only trying to see what beauty and nobility look like from within.To him, then, his death is in itself a matter of no personal moment.But the habit of his lifetime has been to turn every moment into a blow struck for the Soul, for the Light, for the Cause of Sublime Perfection.And here now is the chance to strike the most memorable blow of all.With infinite calmness he arranges every detail, and proceeds to strike it.He continues to play the high part of Socrates,—that is all.You might go to death like a poet, in love with Death's solemn beauty, you might go to her like a martyr, forgetting the awe of her in forevision of the splendor that lies beyond.But this man broadly and publicly goes to her like Socrates.He will allow her no fascination, no mystery; not even, nor by any means, equality with the Soul of Man. . . .And Apollodorus might weep then, and burst into an angry cry; and Crito and Phaedo and the rest might all break down—then; but what were they to think afterwards? When they remembered how they had seen Death and Socrates, those two great ones, meet; and how the meeting had been as simple, as unaffected, as any meeting between themselves and Socrates, any morning in the past, in the Athenian agora? And when Death should come to them, what should they say but this: 'There is nothing about you that can impress me; formerly I conversed with one greater than you are, and I saw you pay your respects to Socrates.'

Could he, could any man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical ecstasy endued—with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable success, as in this simple way he elected?There are men whose actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical: it is cheap to speak of them as good, great, beautiful or sublime: these are but the appearances they assume as we look upwards at them.What they are in themselves is: (1) Compassionate;—it is the law of their being to draw men upwards towards the Spirit; (2) Impersonal;—there is a non-being or vacuity in them where we have our passions, likings, preferences, dislikes and desires.They are, in the Chinese phrase, "the equals of Heaven and Earth";

     "Earth, heaven, and time, death, life and they
     Endure while they shall be to be."

So Socrates, having failed in his life-attempt to save Athens, entered with some gusto on that great coup de main of his death: to make it a thing which first a small group of his friends should see; then that Greece should see; then that thirty coming centuries and more should see; presented it royally to posterity, for what, as a manifestation of the Divine in man, it might be worth.

And look!what is the result?Scarcely is the 'thing of muscles and sinews' cold: scarcely has high Socrates forgone his queer satyr-like embodiment: when a new luminary has risen into the firmament,—one to shine through thirty centuries certainly,

     "Brighter than Jupiter—a blazing star
     Brighter than Hesper shining out to sea"

—one that is still to be splendid in the heavens wherever in Europe, wherever in America, wherever in the whole vast realm of the future men are to arise and make question and peer up into the beautiful skies of the Soul. A Phoenix in time has arisen from the ashes of Socrates: from the glory and solemnity of his death a Voice is mystically created that shall go on whispering The Soul wherever men think and strive towards spirituality. —Ah indeed, you were no failure, Socrates—you who were disappointed of your Critias, your Charmides, your Alcibiades, your whole Athens; you were not anything in the very least like a failure; for there was yet one among your disciples—

He says, that one, that he was absent through illness during that last scene of his Teacher's life.I do not know; it has been thought that may have been merely a pretense, an artistic convention, to give a heightened value of impersonality to his marvelous prose:—for it was he who wrote down the account of the death of Socrates for us: that tragedy so transcendent in its beauty and lofty calm.But this much is certain: that day he was born again: became, from a gilded youth of Athens, an eternal luminary in the heavens, and that which he has remained these three-and-twenty hundred years: the Poet-Philosopher of the Soul, the Beacon of the Spirit for the western world….

He had been a brilliant young aristocrat among the crowd that loved to talk with Socrates: the very best thing that Athens could produce in the way of birth, charm, talent, and attainments;—it is a marvel to see one so worshiped of Fortune in this world, turn so easily to become her best adored in the heaven of the Soul. On his father's side he was descended from Codrus, last king of Athens; on his mother's, from Solon: you could get nothing higher in the way of family and descent. In himself, he was an accomplished athlete; a brilliant writer of light prose; a poet of high promise when the mood struck him— and he had ideas of doing the great thing in tragedy presently; trained unusually well in music, and in mathematics; deeply read; with a taste for the philosophies; a man, in short, of culture as deep and balanced as his social standing was high. But it seemed as though the Law had brought all these excellencies together mainly to give the fashionable Athenian world assurance of a man; for here he was in his thirty-first year with nothing much achieved beyond—his favorite pursuit—the writing of mimes for the delectation of his set: "close studies of little social scenes and conversations, seen mostly in the humorous aspect." * He had consorted much with Socrates; at the trial, when it was suggested that a fine might be paid, and the hemlock evitated, it was he who had first subscribed and gone about to raise a sum. But now the death of his friend and Teacher struck him like a great gale amidships; and he was transformed, another man; and the great Star Plato rose, that shines still; the great Voice Plato was lifted to speak for the Soul and to be unequaled in that speaking, in the west, until H. P. Blavatsky came.

———
* Murray: Ancient Greek Literature:—whence all this as to
Plato's youth.
———

But note what a change had taken place with the ending of the fifth century.Hitherto all the great Athenians had been great Athenians.Aeschylus, witness of eternity, had cried his message down to Athens and to his fellow-citizens; he had poured the waters of eternity into the vial of his own age and place.I speak not of Sophocles, who was well enough rewarded with the prizes Athens had to give him.Euripides again was profoundly concerned with his Athens; and though he was contemned by and held aloof from her, it was the problems of Athens and the time that ate into his soul.Socrates came to save Athens; he did not seek political advancement, but would hold office when it came his way; was enough concerned in politics to be considered a moderate-one cause of his condemnation; but above all devoted himself to raising the moral tone of the Athenian youth and clearing their minds of falsity.Finally, he gave loyalty to his city and its laws as one reason for rejecting Crito's plan for his escape.What he hoped and lived for was, to save Athens; and he was the more content to die, when he saw that this was no longer possible.

But Plato had no part nor lot in Athens. He loathed her doctrine of democracy, as knowing it could come to no good. He had affiliations, like Aeschylus, in Sicily, whither he made certain journeys; and might have stayed there among his fellow Pythagoreans, but for the irascible temper of Dionysius. But much more, and most of all, his affiliations were in the wide Cosmos and all time: as if he foresaw that on him mainly would devolve the task of upholding spiritual ideas in Europe through the millenniums to come. He dwelt apart, and taught in the Groves of Academe outside the walls. Let Athens' foolish politics go forward as they might, or backward—he would meddle with nothing. It has been brought against him that he did nothing to help his city 'in her old age and dotage'; well, he had the business of thousands of coming years and peoples to attend to, and had no time to be accused, condemned, and executed by a parcel of obstreperous cobblers and tinkers hot-headed over the petty politics of their day. The Gods had done with Athens, and were to think now of the great age of darkness that was to come. He was mindful of a light that should arise in Egypt, after some five hundred years; and must prepare wick and oil for the Neo-Platonists. He was mindful that there should be a thing called the Renaissance in Italy; and must attend to what claims Pico di Mirandola and others should make on him for spiritual food. He must consider Holland of the seventeenth century, and England: the Platonists of Cambridge and Amsterdam;—must think of Van Helmont; and of a Vaughan who 'saw eternity the other night'; of a Traherne, who should never enjoy the world aright without some illumination from his star; of a young Milton, penseroso, out watching the Bear in some high lonely tower with thrice-great Hermes, who should unsphere his spirit,

     "…..     to unfold
     What worlds and what vast regions hold
     The immortal mind that hath forsook
     Her mansion in this fleshy nook";

—no, but he must think of all times coming; and how, whenever there should be any restlessness against the tyranny of materialism and dogma, a cry should go up for Plato.—So let Isocrates, the 'old man eloquent,'—let a many-worded not unpeculant patriotic Demosthenes who knew nothing of the God-world—attend to an Athens wherein the Gods were no longer greatly interested;—the great Star Plato should rise up into mid-heaven, and shine not in, but high over Athens and quite apart from her; drawing from her indeed the external elements of his culture, but the light and substance from that which was potent in her no longer.

I said Greece served the future badly enough.Consider what might have been.The pivot of the Mediterranean world, in the sixth century, was not Athens, but in Magna Graecia: at Croton, where Pythagoras had built his school.But the mob wrecked Croton, and smashed the Pythagorean Movement as an organization; and that, I take it, and one other which we shall come to in time, were the most disastrous happenings in European history.Yes; the causes why Classical civilization went down; why the Dark Ages were dark; why the God in Man his been dethroned, and suffered all this crucifixion and ignominy the last two thousand years.Aeschylus, truly, received some needed backing from the relics of the Movement which he found still existent in Sicily; but what might he not have written, and what of his writings might not have come down to us, preserved there in the archives, had he had the peace and elevation of a Croton, organized, to retire to?Whither, too, Socrates might have gone, and not to death, when Athens became impossible; where Plato might have dwelt and taught; revealing, to disciples already well-trained, much more than ever he did reveal; and engraving, oh so deeply!on the stuff of time, the truths that make men free.And there he should have had successors and successors and successors; a line to last perhaps a thousand or two thousand years; who never should have let European humanity forget such simple facts as Karma and Reincarnation.But only at certain times are such great possibilities presented to mankind; and a seed-time once passed, there can be no sowing again until the next season comes.It is no good arguing with the Law of Cycles.Plato may not have been less than Pythagoras; yet, under the Law, he might not attempt— it would have been folly for him to have attempted—that which Pythagoras had attempted.So he had to take another line altogether; to choose another method; not to try to prevent the deluge, which was certain now to come; not even to build an ark, in which something should be saved; but, so to say, to strew the world with tokens which, when the great waters had subsided, should still remain to remind men of those things it is of most importance they should know.

This is the way he did it.He advanced no dogma, formulated no system; but what he gave out, he gave rather as hypotheses.His aim was to set in motion a method of thinking which should lead always back to the Spirit and Divine Truth.He started no world- religion; founded no church—not even such a quite unchurchly church as that which came to exist on the teachings of Confucius.He never had the masses practicing their superstitions, nor a priesthood venting its lust of power, in his name.Instead, he arranged things so, that wherever fine minds have aspired to the light of the Spirit, Plato has been there to guide them on their way.So you are to see Star-Plato shining, you are to hear that voice from the Spheres at song, when Shelley, reaching his topmost note, sang:

     "The One remains, the many change and pass;
          Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
     Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
          Stains the white radiance of Eternity";—

and when Swinburne sings of Time and change that:

     "Songs they can stop that earth found meet,
          But the Stars keep their ageless rhyme;
      Flowers they can slay that Spring thought sweet,
          But the Stars keep their Spring sublime,
     Actions and agonies control,
     And life and death, but not the Soul."

In a poetic age—in the time of Aeschylus, for example—Plato would have been a poet; and then perhaps we should have had to invent another class of poets, one above the present highest; and reserve it solely for the splendor of Plato.Because Platonism is the very Theosophic Soul of Poetry.But he came, living when he did, to loathe the very name of poetry: as who should say: "God pity you!I give you the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and you make answer, 'Charming Plato, how exquisitely poetic is your prose!'" So his bitterness against poetry is very natural.Poetry is the inevitable vehicle of the highest truth; spiritual truth is poetry.But the world in general does not know this.Like Bacon, it looks on poetry as a kind of pleasurable lying.Plato went through the skies Mercury to the Sun of Truth, its nearest attendant planet; and therefore was, and could not help being, Very-Poet of very-poets.But Homer and others had lied loudly about the Gods; and, thought Plato, the Gods forbid that the truth he had to declare—a vital matter— should be classed with their loud lying.

He masked the batteries of his Theosophy; camouflaged his great Theosophical guns; but fired them off no less effectively, landing his splendid shells at every ganglionic point in the history of European thought since.Let a man soak his soul in Plato; and it shall go hard but the fair flower Theosophy shall spring up there presently and bloom.He prepares the soil: suggesting the way to, rather than precisely formulating, the high teachings.The advantage of the grand Platonic camouflage has been twofold: on the one hand you could hardly dwarf your soul with dogmatic acceptation of Platonism, because he gave all his teachings—even Reincarnation—as hypotheses,—and men do not as a rule crucify their mental freedom on an hypothesis.On the other hand, how was any Church eager to burn out heresy and heretics to deal with him?He was not to be stamped out; because his influence depended on no continuity of discipleship, no organization; because he survived merely as a tendency of thought.No churchly fulminations might silence his batteries; because he had camouflaged them, and they were not to be seen.Of course he did not invent his ideas; they are as old as Theosophy.The Lodge sent him to proclaim them in the way he did: the best way possible, since the Pythagorean effort had failed of its greatest success.What we owe to him—his genius and inestimable gift to the world—is precisely that matchless camouflage.It has been effective, in spite of efforts—

That, for instance, of a forward youth who came to Athens and studied under him for twenty years, and whom Plato called the intellect of the school, saying that he spurned his Teacher as colts do their mothers.A youth, it is said, who revered Plato always; and only gradually grew away from thinking of himself as a Platonist.But he never could have understood the inwardness of Plato or Platonism, for his mind turned as naturally to scientific or brain-mind methods, as Plato's did to mysticism and the illumination of the Soul.He adopted much of the teaching, but gave it a twist brain-mindwards; yet not such a twist, either, but that the Neo-Platonists in their day, and certain of the Arab and Turkish philosophers after them, could re-Platonize it to a degree and admit him thus re-Platonized into their canon.I am not going to trouble you much with Aristotle; let this from the Encyclopedia suffice: "Philosophic differences" it says "are best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism is a philosophy of individual substances: practically, Plato makes us think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven, Aristotle of the natural and the whole world."

Or briefly, Aristotle took what he could of Plato's inspiration, and turned it from the direction of the Soul to that of the Brain-mind.The most famous of Plato's disciples, he did what he could, or what he could not help doing, to spoil Plato's message.But Plato's method had guarded that, so that for mystics it should always be there, Aristotle or no.But for mere philosophers, seeming to improve on it, he had something tainted it.It descended, as said, through the Neo-Platonists—who turned it back Plato-ward—to the Moslems: through Avicenna, who Aristotelianized, to Averroes, who Platonized it again; and from him to Europe; where Bacon presently gave it another twist to out-Aristotle Aristotle (as someone said) to stagger the Stagirite—and passed it on as the scientific method of today.According to Coleridge, every man is by nature either a Platonist or an Aristotelian; and there is some truth in it.

And meanwhile, though the huge Greek illumination could die but slowly, Greece was growing uninteresting.For Pheidias of the earlier century, we have in Plato's time Praxiteles, whose carved gods are lounging and pretty nincom—- well, mortals; "they sink," says the Encyclopedia, "to the human level, or indeed, sometimes almost below it.They have grace and charm in a supreme degree, but the element of awe and reverence is wanting."—We have an Aphrodite at the bath, a 'sweet young thing' enough, no doubt; an Apollo Sauroctonos, "a youth leaning against a tree, and idly striking with an arrow at a lizard."A certain natural magic has been claimed for Praxiteles and his school and contemporaries; but if they had it, they mixed unholy elements with it.—And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite expired; and after that Hellenism became Hellenisticism, and what remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one little wink of sleep over.

VII.THE MAURYAS OF INDIA

"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much. He was Aristotle's pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We shall find that Mr. Judge's phrase 'the Crest-Wave of Evolution' is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea, raising up splendors in one nation after another in order geographically, and with no haphazard about it. Its first and largest movement is from East to West; producing (as far as I can see) the great manvantaric periods (fifteen hundred years apiece) in East Asia, West Asia, and Europe; each of these being governed by its own cycles. But it has a secondary movement as well; a smaller motion within the larger one; and this produces the brilliant days (thirteen decades long for the most part) that recur in the manvantaras. Thus: China seems to have been in manvantara from 2300 to 850 B. C. ; West Asia, from 1890 to 390; Europe, from 870 B. C. to 630 A. D. So in the time of Alexander West Asia was newly dead, and China waiting to be reborn. The Crest-Wave, in so far as it concerned the European manvantara, had to roll westward from Greece (in its time) to awaken Italy; but in its universal aspect—in its strongest force—it had to roll eastward, that its impulse might touch more important China when her time for awaking should come. It is an impetus, of which sometimes we can see the physical links and lines along which it travels, and sometimes we cannot. The line from Greece to China lies through Persia and India. But Persia was dead, in pralaya; you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave's passing, there. So Alexander, rising by his genius and towering ideas to the plane where these great motions are felt, skips you lightly across dead Persia, knocks upon the doors of India to say that it is dawn and she must be up and doing; and subsides. I doubt he carried her any cultural impulse, in the ordinary sense; it is our Euro-American conceit to imagine the Greek was the highest thing in civilization in the world at that time. We may take it that Indian civilization was far higher and better in all esentials; certainly the Greeks who went there presently, and left a record, were impressed with that fact. You shall see; out of their own mouths we will convict them. It is the very burden of Megasthenes' song.

Alexander had certain larger than Greek conceptions, which one must admire in him.Though he overthrew the Persians, he never made the mistake of thinking them an inferior race.On the contrary, he respected them highly; and proposed to make of them and his Greeks and Mecedoinians one homogeneous people, in which the Persian qualities of aristocracy should supply a need he felt in Europeans.The Law made use of his intention, partially, and to the furtherance of its own designs.—His method of treating the conquered was (generally) far more Persian or Asiatic than Greek; that is to say, far more humane and decent than barbarous.He took a short cut to his broad ends, and married all his captains to Persian ladies, himself setting the example; whereas most Greeks would have dealt with the captive women very differently.So that it was a kind of enlightenment he set out with, and carried across Persia, through Afghanistan, and into the Punjab,—which, we may note, was but the outskirts of the real India, into which he never penetrated; and it may yet be found that he went by no means so far as is supposed; but let that be.So now, at any rate, enough of him; he has brought us where we are to spend this evening.

For a student of history, there is something mysterious and even —to use a very vile drudge of a word—'unique' about India. Go else where you will, and so long as you can posit certainly a high civilization, and know anything of its events, you can make some shift to arrange the history. None need boggle really at any Chinese date after about 2350 B. C. ; Babylon is fairly settled back to about 4000; and if you cannot depend on assigned Egyptian dates, at least there is a reasonably know sequence of dynasties back through four or five millennia. But come to India, and alas, where are you? All out of it, chronologically speaking; enough; very likely, the flotsam and jetsam of several hundred thousand years. I have no doubt the Puranas are crowded with history; but how much of what is related is to be taken as plain fact; how much as 'blinds'; how much as symbolism—only the Adepts know. The three elements are mingled beyond the wit of man to unravel them; so that you can hardly tell whether any given thing happened in this or that millennium, Root-Race period, or Round of Worlds, or Day of Brahma. You are in the wild jungles of fairyland; where there are gorgeous blooms, and idylls, dreamlit, beautiful and fantastical, all in the deep midwood lonliness; and time is not, and the computations of chronology are an insult to the spirit of your surroundings. History, in India, was kept an esoteric science, and esoteric all the ancient records remain now; and I dare say any twice-born Brahmin not Oxfordized knows far more about it than the best Max Mullers of the west, and laughs at them quietly. Until someone will voluntarily lift that veil of esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for little. Why it should be kept esoteric, one can only guess; I think if it were known, the cycles and patterns of human history would cease to be so abstruse and hidden from us: we should know too much for our present moral or spiritual status. As usual, our own savants are avid to dwarf all dates, and bring everything within the scope of a few thousand years; as for the native authorities, they simply try confusions with us; if you should trust them too literally, or some of them, events such as the Moslem conquest will not take place for a few centuries yet. They do not choose that their ancient history should be known; so all things are in a hopeless muddle.

One thing to remember is this: it is a continent, like Europe; not a country, like France.The population is even more heterogeneous than that of Europe.Only one sovereign, Aurangzeb —at least for many thousands of years—was ever even nominally master of the whole of it.There are two main divisions, widely different: Hindustan or Aryavarta, north of the Vindhya Mountains and the River Nerbudda; and Dakshinapatha or the Deccan, the peninsular part to the south.The former is the land of the Aryans; the people of the latter are mainly non-Aryan—a race called the Dravidians whom, apparently, the Aryans conquered in Hindustan, and assimilated; but whom in the Deccan, though they have influenced them largely, and in part molded their religion, they never quite conquered or supplanted.Well; never is a long day; dear knows what may have happened in the long ages of pre-history.

The Aryans came down into India through its one open door—that in the northwest. But when? —Oh, from about 1400 to 1200 B. C. , says western scholarship; which has spent too much ingenuity altogether over discovering the original seat of the Aryans, and their primal civilization. After Sir William Jones and others had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that Sanskrit was the parent of all these tongues, and that all their speakers had emigrated at different times from somewhere in Central Asia. But in the scientific orthodoxies fashion reigns and changes as incontinently as in dress. Scholars rose to launch a new name for the race: Indogermanic; and to prove Middle-Europe the Eden in which it was created. Then others, to dodge that Eden about through every corner of Europe; which at least must have the honor;—it could not be conceded to inferior Asia. All the languages of the group were examined and worried for evidence. Men said, 'By the names of trees we shall run it to earth'; and this was the doxy that was ortho-for some time. Light on a tree-name common to all the languages, and find in what territory that tree is indigenous: that will certainly be the place. As thus; I will work out for you a suggestion given in the encyclopaedia, that you may see what strictly scientific methods of reasoning may lead to:—

Perhaps the two plant names most universally met with in all Aryan languages, European or Asiatic, are potato and tobacco. 'From Greenland's icy mountains to Ceylon's sunny isle, Whereever prospect pleases, And only man is vile.' —you shall nearly always hear the vile ones calling the humble tuber of their mid-day meal by some term akin to potato, and the subtle weed that companions their meditations, by some word like tobacco. Argal, the Aryan race used these two words before their separation; and if the two words, the two plants also. You follow the reasoning? —Now then, seek out the land where these plants are indigenous; and if haply it shall be found they both have one original habitat, why, there beyond doubt you shall find the native seat of the primitive Aryans. And, glory be to Science! they do; both come from Virginia. Virginia, then, is the Aryan Garden of Eden.

Ah but, strangely enough, we do find one great branch of the race—the Teutons—unacquainted with the word potato. You may argue that the French are too: but luckily, Science has the seeing eye; Science is not to be cheated by appearances. The French say pomme de terre; but this is evidently only a corruption—potater, pomdeter—twisted at some late period by false analogy into pomme de terre, ('apple of the earth'.) But the Teuton has kartoffel, utterly different; argal again, the Teutons must have separated from the parent stem before the Aryans had discovered that the thing was edible and worth naming. They, therefore, were the first to leave Virginia: paddle their own canoes off to far-away Deutschland before ever the mild Hindoo set out for Hindustan, the Greek for Greece, or the Anglo-Saxon for Anglo-Saxony. But even the Teutons have the word tobacco. Come now, what a light we have here thrown on the primitive civilization of our forefathers! They knew, it seems, the virtures of the weed or ever they had boiled or fried a single murphy; they smoked first, and only ate long afterwards: and the Germans who led that first expedition out from the fatherland of the race, must have gone with full tobacco-pouches and empty lunch-bags. What a life-like picture rises before our eyes! These first Aryans were a dreamy contemplative people; tobacco was the main item in their lives, the very basis of their civilization. —Then presently, after the Teutons had gone, someone must have let his pipe go out for a few minutes—long enought to discover that he was hungry, and that a fair green plant was growing at his door, with a succulent tuber at the root of it which one could EAT. Think of the joy, the wonder, of that momentous discovery! Did he hide it away, lest others should be as happy as himself? Were ditectives set to watch him, to spy out the cause of a habit of sleek rotundity that was growing upon him at last visibly? We shall never know. Or did he call in his neighbors at once and annouce it? Did someone ask: 'What shall we name this God-given thing?' —and did another reply: 'It looks to me like a potato; let's call it that!' ? That at least must have been how it came by it name. They received the suggestion with acclamations: and all future out-going expeditions took sacks of it with them; and their descendants have continued to call it potato to this day. For you must not that being the only food with a name common to all the languages—or almost all —it must be supposed to have been the only food they knew of before their separation. Even the words for father, mother, fire, water, and the like, have a greater number of different roots in the Aryan languages than have these blessed two.

To say the truth, a dawning perception of the possibilities of this kind of reasoning chilled the enthusiasm of the Aryan-hunters a good deal; it was the bare bodkin that did quietus make for much philological pother and rout. No; if you are to prove racial superiority or exclusiveness, you had much better avail yourself of the simplicity of a stout bludgeon, than rely upon the subtleties of brain-mind argumentation; for time past is long, and mostly hidden; and lots of things have happened to account for your proofs in ways you would never suspect. The long and short of it is, that after pursuing the primitive Aryans up hill and down dale through all parts of Europe, Science is forced to pronouce her final judgement thus: We really know nothing about it.

The ancestors of this Fifth Root-Race emigrated to Central Asia to escape the fate of Atlantis; whither too went several Atlantean peoples, such as the forefathers of the Chinese,—who were not destined to be destroyed.It is a vast region, and there was room for them all.That emigration may have been as long a process as that of the Europeans in our own time to America; probably it was; or longer.But it happened, at any rate, a million years ago; and in a million years a deal of water will flow under the bridges.You may call English a universal language now; it might conceivably become so absolutely, after a few centuries.But history will go on and time, and the cyclic changes inherent in natural law.These are not to be dodged by railways, turbines, aeroplanes; you cannot evitate their action by inventing printing-presses;—which, I suppose, have been invented and forgotten dozens of times 'since created man.'In a million years from now the world will have contracted and expanded often.We have seen, in our little period called historical, hardly anything but expansion; though there have been contractions, too.But contractions there will be, major ones; it is quite safe to foretell that; because action and reaction are equal and opposite: it is a fundamental law.Geography will re-become, what it was in the times we call ancient, an esoteric science; the races will be isolated, and there will be no liners on the seas, and Europe and Asia will be fabulous realms of faerie for our more or less remote descendants.Then what will have become of the once universal English language?—It will have split into a thousand fragment tongues, as unlike as Dutch and Sanskrit; and philology—the great expansion having happened again—will have as much confusion to unravel in the Brito-Yankish, as it has now in the Indo-European.—In a million years?—Bless my soul, in a poor little hundred thousand!

The Aryan languages, since they began to be, have been spreading out and retreating, mixing and changing and interchanging; one imposed on another, hidden under another, and recrudescing through another; through ten or a hundred thousand years,—or however long it may be; just as they have been doing in historical times.You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic, and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek; Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts.Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing: a momentary aspect of racial expression.In a thousand years it becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon laws whose nature can be guessed.Yet ultimately all is a symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring; it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more than the fragment of a bar.

You all know the teaching of The Secret Doctrine about the Root-Races of Humanity, of which this present one, generally called the Aryan, is the fifth; and how each is divided into seven sub-races; each sub-race into seven family-races; and each family-race into innumerable nations and tribes. According to that work, this Fifth Root-Race has existed a million years. The period of a sub-race is said to be about 210,000 years; and that of a family-race, about 30,000. So then, four sub-races would have occupied the first 840,000 years of the Fifth Race's history; and our present fifth sub-race would have been in being during the last 160,000 years; in which time five family-races would have flourished and passed; and this present sixth family-race would be about ten millenniums old. Now, no single branch of the Aryans: by which term I mean the sixth family-race; I shall confine it to that, and not apply it to the Fifth Root-Race as a whole,—no single race among the Aryans has been universal, or dominant, or prominent even, during the whole of the last ten thousand years. The Teutons (including Anglo-Saxons), who loom so largely now, cut a very small figure in the days when Latin was, in its world, something more universal than English is in ours; and a few centuries before that, you should have heard Celtic, and little else, almost anywhere in Europe. This shows how fleeting a thing is the sovereignty of any language; within the three thousand years we know about, three at least of the Aryan language-groups have been 'universal'; within the last ten milleniums there has been time enough, and to spare, for a 'universality' each of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Slavonic, Latin, Teutonic, and Celtic. So evidently none of these is the language of the family-race: we may speak of the Aryan Family-Race; not of the Celtic or Slavonic.

But it does not follow that the whole sub-race is not Aryan too. Mr. Judge says somewhere that Sanskrit will be the universal language again. Supposing that there were some such scheme of evolution here, as in the world-chain? You know the diagram in The Secret Doctrine, with the teaching as to the seven rounds. As above, so below; when H. P. Blavatsky seems to be giving you a sketch of cosmic evolution, often she is at the same time, if you can read it, telling you about the laws that govern your own and the race's history. I suspect some such arrangement as this: when the sub-race began, 160,000 years ago, Sanskrit was its 'universal' language; spoken by all the Aryans that moved out over Europe and into India. An unaccountable Sanskrit inscription has been found in Asia Minor;* and there is Lithuania, a little speech-island in northeastern Central Europe, where a nearly Sanskrit language, I believe, survives. Then Sanskrit changed imperceptibly (as American is changing from English) into the parent language of the Persian group, which became the general speech of the sub-race except in India, where Sanskrit survived as a seed-speech for future resurrection. Then, perhaps pari passu with further westward expansion, Persian changed into the parent of the Slavonic group, itself living on as a seed-speech in Iran; and so on through all the groups; in each case the type-language of a group remaining, to expand again after the passage of ages and when its cycle should return, in or about its corresponding psychic center on the geographical plane. Then this evolution, having reached its farthest limit, began to retrace its course; I would not attempt to say in what order the language groups come: which is globe A in the chain, which Globe D, and so on; but merely suggest that a 'family race' may represent one round from Sanskrit to Sanskrit; and the whole Fifth Sub-race, seven such complete rounds.

——— * Ancient India, by E. J. Rapson ———

What came before? What was the Fourth Sub-race? Well: I imagine we may have the relic, the sishta or seed of it, in the Hamitic peoples and languages: the Libyans, Numidians, Egyptians, Iberians, and Pelasgians of old; the Somalis, Gallas, Copts, Berbers, and Abyssinians of today. We are almost able to discern a time—but have not guessed when it was—when this Iberian race, having perhaps its central seat in Egypt, held all or most lands as far as Ireland to the west, and Japan and New Zealand eastward; we find them surviving, mixed with, but by no means submerged under, Aryan Celts in Spain—which is Iberia; we find their name (I imagine) in that of Iverne, Ierine, Hibernia, or Ireland; we know that they gave the syntax of their language to that of the Celts of the British Isles; and that the Celtic races of today are mainly Iberian in blood—I daresay all Europe is about half Iberian in blood, as a matter of fact;—that the Greeks found them in Greece: I suspect that the main difference between Sparta and Athens lay in the fact that Sparta was pure Aryan, Athens mainly Iberian. —It seems to me then that we can almost get a glimpse of the sub-race preceding our own. Some have been puzzled by a seeming discrepancy between Katherine Tingley's statement that Egypt is older than India, and H. P. Blavatsky's, that Menes, founder of the Egyptian monarchy, went from India to Egypt to found it. But now suppose that something like this happened—would it not solve the problem? —In 158,000 B. C. , or at the time this present Aryan Sub-race began, Egypt, one state in the huge Iberian series, was already a seat of civilization as old as the Iberian race. There may have been an Iberian Empire, almost world-wide; which again may have split into many kingdoms; and as the star of the whole race was declining, we may suppose Egypt in some degree of pralaya; or again, that it may have been an outlying and little-considered province at that time. In Central Asia the Sanskrit-speaking tribe begins to increase and multiply furiously. They pour down into Iberian Hindustan. They are strong, and the Gods are leading them; the Iberians have grown world-weary with the habit of long empire. The Iberian power goes down before them; the Iberians become a subject people. But there is one Menes among the latter, of the royal house perhaps, who will not endure subjection. He stands out as long as he may; then sails west with his followers for Iberian lands that the Aryans have not disturbed, and are not likely to. In their contests with the invaders of India, they have thrown off all world-weariness, and become strong; Prince Menes is hailed in Egypt (as the last of the Ommevads, driven out from the East by the Abbasids, was hailed in Spain); he wakens Egypt, and founds a new monarchy there. —I am telling the tale of very ancient and unknown conditions in terms of historic conditions we know about and can understand; it is only the skeleton of the story I would stand for.

And to put Menes back at 160,000 years ago—what an amusing idea that will seem!—But the truth is we must wage war against this mischievous foreshortening of history.I have no doubt there have been empires going, from time to time, in Egypt, since before Atlantis fell; people have the empire-building instinct, and it is an eminently convenient place for empire-building.I have no doubt there have been dozens of different Meneses—that is, founders of Egyptian monarchies,—with thousands of years between each two.But I think probably the one that came from India to do it, came about the time when the fifth sub-race rose to supplant the fourth as that section of humanity in which evolution was chiefly interested.

Which last phrase in itself is rank heresy, and smacks of the 'white man's burden,' and all such nonsense as that.We might learn a lesson here.Think: since that time, during how many thousands of years, off and on, has not that old sub-race been the darling of evolution, the seat of the Crest-Wave, and place where all things were doing?All the Setis, the grand Rameseses and Thothmeses came since then; all the historic might and glory of Egypt.You never know rightly when to say that the life of a sub-race is ended; the two-hundred-and-ten-century period cannot, I imagine, include it from birth to death; but can only mark the time between the rise of one, and the rise of another.— But now to India.

We have no knowledge of the last time when Sanskrit was spoken: it has always been, in historic or quasi-historic ages, what it is now—literary language preserved by the high castes.In the days of the Buddha it had long given place to various vernaculars grown out of it: Pali, and what are called the Prakrits.—We have lost memory of what I may call the archetypal languages of Europe: the common ancestor of the Celtic group, for instance; or that Italian from which Latin and the lost Oscan and Savellian and the rest sprang.No matter; they remain in the ideal world, and I doubt not in the course of our cyclic evolution we shall return to them, take them up, and pass through them again.But it seems to me that in the land of Esoteric History, where Manu provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war, the archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved.The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of the Aryan world, enjoyed some of the advantages of isolation: they were in a backwater, over which the tides of the languages did not flow.By esotericizing their history, I imagine they have really kept it intact, continuous, and within human memory; as we have not done with ours.As if that which is to be preserved forever, must be preserved in secret; and silence were the only durable casket for truth.

The Greeks, they say, were very gifted liars; but I do not see why we should suppose them lying, when they sang the superiorities of Indian things and people;—as they did. The Indians, says Megasthenes, were taller than other men, and of greater distinction and prouder bearing. The air and water of their land were the purest in the world; so you would expect in the people, the finest culture and skill in the arts. Almost always they gathered two harvests in the years; and famine had never visited India.—You see, railways, quick communications, and all the appliances of modern science and invention cannot do as much for India in pralaya, as her own native civilization could do for her in manvantara. —Then he goes on to show how that civilization guarded against famine and many other things; and incidentally to prove it not only much higher than the Greek, but much higher than our own. I said Manu provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war: here was the custom, which may have been dishonored in the breach sometimes, but still was the custom.—The whole continent was divided into any number of kingdoms; mutually antagonistic often, but with certain features of homogeneity that made the name Aryavarta more than a geographical expression.I am speaking of the India Megasthenes saw, and as it had been then for dear knows how long.It had made concessions to human weakness, yes; had fallen, as I think, from an ancient unity; it had not succeeded in abolishing war.It was open to any king to make himself a Chakravartin, or world-sovereign, if he disposed of the means for doing so: which means were military.As this was a well-recognised principle, wars were by no means rare.But with them all, what a Utopia it was, compared to Christendom!There was never a draft or conscription.Of the four castes, the Kshatriya or warrior alone did the fighting.While the conches brayed, and the war- cars thundered over Kurukshetra; while the pantheons held their breath, watching Arjun and mightiest Karna at battle—the peasants in the next field went on hoeing their rice; they knew no one was making war on them.They trusted Gandiva, the goodly bow, to send no arrows their way; their caste was inviolable, and sacred to the tilling of the soil.Megasthenes notes it with wonder.War implied no ravaging of the land, no destruction of crops, no battering down of buildings, no harm whatever to non-combatants.

Kshatriya fought Kshatriya.If you were a Brahmin: which is to say, a theological student, or a man of letters, a teacher or what not of the kind—you were not even called up for physical examination.If you were a merchant, you went on quietly with your 'business as usual.'A mere patch of garden, or a peddler's tray, saved you from all the horrors of a questionnaire.Kshatriya fought Kshatriya, and no one else; and on the battlefield, and nowhere else.The victor became possessed of the territory of the vanquished; and there was no more fuss or botheration about it.

And the vanquished king was not dispossessed, Saint Helenaed, or beheaded.Simply, he acknowledged his conqueror as his overlord, paid him tribute; perhaps put his own Kshatriya army at his disposal; and went on reigning as before.So Porus met Alexander without the least sense of fear, distrust, or humiliation at his defeat."How shall I treat you?"said the Macedonian.Porus was surprised.—"I suppose," said he in effect, "as one king would treat another"; or, "like a gentleman."And Alexander rose to it; in the atmosphere of a civilization higher than anything he knew, he had the grace to conform to usage.Manu imposed his will on him.Porus acknowledged him for overlord, and received accretions of territory.—This explains why all the changes of dynasty, and the many conquests and invasions have made so little difference as hardly to be worth recording.They effected no change in the life of the people.Even the British Raj has been, to a great degree, molded to the will of Manu.Each strong native state is ruled by its own Maharaja, who acknowledges the Kaiser-i-Hind at London for his overlord, and lends him at need his Moslem or Kshatriya army.—All of which proves, I think, the extreme antiquity of the svstem: which is so firmly engraved in the prototypal world—the astral molds are so strong—that no outside force coming in has been able materially to change it.The Greek invasion goes wholy unnoticed in Indian literature.

Which brings us back to Alexander.If he got as far as to the Indus;—he got no farther.There were kingdoms up there in the northwest—perhaps no further east than Afghanistan and Baluchistan—which had formed part of the empire of Darius Hystaspes, and sent contingents to fight under Xerxes in Greece; and these now Alexander claimed as Darius Codomannus's successor.But even in these outlying regions, he found conditions very different from those in Persia: there was no "unquestionable superiority of the European to the Asiatic," nor nothing like.Had he gone further, and into the real India of the Ganges valley, his name, it is likely, would not have come down synonymous with victory; presentlv we will call Megasthenes to witness again as to the "unquestionable superiority of the Asiatic to the European."But thither the Macedonians refused to follow their king; and I suppose he wept rather over their insubordination, than for any overwhelmment with a sense of terrene limits.For he knew well that there was plenty more world to conquer, could one conquer it: rich and mighty kingdoms beyond that Thar Desert his soldiers are said to have refused to cross.He knew, because there were many to tell him: exiled princes and malcontents from this realm and that, each with his plan for self-advancement, and for using the Macedonia as a catspaw.Among them one in particular: as masterful a man as Alexander, and a potential world-conqueror himself.He was (probably) a more or less illegitimate scion of the House of Nanda, then reigning in Magadha; which country, now called Behar, had been growing at the expense of its Gangetic neighbors for some centuries.King Suddhodana, the Buddha's father, had reigned over the Sakyas in Nepaul as a tributary under the king of Magadha; which statement I let pass, well aware that the latest western scholarship has revolutionized the Sakyas into a republic—perhaps with soviets,—and King Suddhodana himself into a mere ward politician.

This Sandrakottos, as the Greeks called him, had many tales to tell of the wealth of his kinsman's kingdom, and of the extreme unpopularity of its ruler:-and therefore of the ease with which Alexander might conquer it and hand it over to him.But two of a trade seldom agree; both he and his host were born to rule empires; and presently he offended susceptibilities, and had to flee the camp.Whereupon he shortly sharked up a list of landless reprobates, Kshatriyas at a loose end, for food and diet; and the enterprise with a stomach in't was, as soon as Alexander's back was turned, to drive out the Macedonian garrisons.This done, he marched eastward as king of the Indus region, conquered Magadha, slew his old enemy the Nanda king with all male members of the family, and reigned in his stead as Chandragupta I, of the house of Maurya.That was in 321.Master then of a highly trained army of about 700,000, he spread his empire over all Hindustan.In 305, Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in Asia, crossed the Indus with an army, and was defeated; and in the treaty which followed, gave up to Chandragupta all claim to the Indian provinces, together with the hand of his daughter in marriage.—and received by way of compensation 500 elephants that might come in useful in his wars elsewhere.Also he sent Megisthenes to be his ambassador at Pataliputra, Chandragupta's capital; and Megasthenes wrote; and in a few quotations from his lost book that remain, chiefly in Arrian,—we get a kind of window wherethrough to look into India: the first, and perhaps the only one until Chinese travelers went west discovering.

Here let me flash a green lantern.If at some future time it should be shown that the Chandragupta Maurya of the Sanskrit books was not the same person as the Sandacottos of Megasthenes; nor his son Bindusara Amitraghata, the Amitrochidas of the Greeks; nor his son and successor, Asoka, the Devanampiya Piadasi whose rock-cut inscriptions remain scattered over India; nor the Amtiyako Yonaraja—the "Ionian King Antiochus" apparently,—Atiochus Theos, Selecus Nicator's granson: as is supposed; nor yet the other four kings mentioned in the same instricption in a Sanskrit disguise as contemporaries, Ptolemy Philadelphos of Egypt (285-247); Magas of Cyrene (285-258); Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon (277-239), and Alexander of Epirus, who began to reign in 272;—if all these identifications should fall to the ground, let no one be surprised.There are passages in the writings of H.P.Blavatsky that seem to suggest there is nothing in them; and yet, after studying those passages, I do not find that she says so positively: her attitude seems rather one of withholding information for the time being; she supplies none of a contrary sort.The time may not have been ripe then for unveiling so much of Indian history; nor indeed, in those days, had the pictures of these kings, and particularly of Asoka, so clearly emerged: inscriptions have been deciphered since, which have gone to fill out the outline; and the story, as it his been pieced together now, has an air of verisimilitude, and hangs together.Without the Greek identifications, and the consequent possibility of assigning dates to Chandragupta and his son, we should know indeed that there was a great Maurya empire, which lasted a matter of thirteen decades and a few odd years; but we should hardly know when to place it.Accepting the Greek identifications, and placing the Mauryas where we do in time—you shall see how beautifully the epoch fits into the universal cycles, and confirms the teaching as to Cyclic Law.So, provisionally, I shall accept them, and tell the tale.

First a few more items from Megasthenes as to India under Chandragupta.There was no slavery, he notes; all Indians were free, and not even were there aliens enslaved.Crime of any kind was rare; the people were thoroughly law-abiding.Thievery was so little known, that doors went unlocked at all times; there was no usury, and a general absence of litigation.They told the truth: as a Greek, he could not help noticing that.The men were exceptionally brave; the women, chaste and virturous.But "in contrast to the general simplicity of their style, they loved finery and ornaments.Their robes were worked in gold, adorned with precious stones, and they wore flowered garments of the finest muslin.Attendants walking behind held umbrellas over them…."

The system of government was very highly and minutely evolved."Of the great officers of state, some have charge of the markets, others of the city, others of the soldiers; others superintend the canals, and measure the land, or collect the taxes; some construct roads and set up pillars to show the by-roads and distances from place to place.Those who have charge of the city are divided into six boards of five members apiece: The first looks after industrial art.The second attends to the entertainment of strangers, taking care of them, sound or sick, and in the event of their death, burying them and sending their property to their relatives."The third board registered births and deaths; the fourth, fifth and sixth had supervision of things commercial.Military affairs were as closely organized: there were Boards of Infantry, Cavalry, War Chariots, Elephants, Navy, and Bullock Transport.And behind all these stood Chandragupta himself, the superman, ruthless and terrifically efficient; and Chanakya, his Macchiavellian minister: a combination to hurry the world into greatness.And so indeed they did.

Under Asoka, Chandragupta's grandson, the age culminated.H.P.Blavatsky says positively that he was born into Buddhism; this is not the general view; but one finds nothing in his edicts, really, to contradict it.His father Bindusara, of whom we know nothing, may have been a Buddhist.But it would appear that Asoka in his youth was the most capable, and also the most violent and passionate of Bindusara's sons.During his father's lifetime, he held one of the great vice-royalties into which the empire was divided; he succeeded to the throne in 271.His domains at that time included all Aryavarta, with Baluchistan, and as much of Afghanistan as lies south of the Hindoo Koosh; and how much of the Deccan it is difficult to determine.Nine years later he extended this realm still further, by the conquest of the Kalingas, whose country lay along the coast northward from Madras.At the end of that war he was master of all India north of a line drawn from Pondicherry to Cannanore in the south; while the tip of the Deccan and Ceylon lay at least within his sphere of influence.

He was easily the strongest monarch of his day.In China—between which country and India there was no communication: they had not discovered each other, or they had lost sight of each other for ages—an old order was breaking to pieces, and all was weakness and decay.In the West, Greek civilization was in decadence, with the successors of Alexander engaged in profitless squabbles.Rome, a power only in Italy, was about to begin her long struggle with Carthage; overseas nobody minded her.The Crest-Wave was in India, the strongest power and most vigorous civilization, so far as we can tell, in the world, and at the head of India stood this Chakravartin, victorious Asoka, flushed with conquest, and a whole world tempting him out to conquer.—

He never went to war again.For twenty-nine years after that conquest of the Kalingas, until his death in 233, he reigned in unbroken peace.He left his heart to posterity in many edicts and inscriptions cut on rocks and pillars; thirty-five of these remain, or have so far been discovered and read.In 257, or five years after the Kalinga War, he published this:

"Devanamipiya Piadasi"—

It means literally 'the Beloved of the Gods, the Beautiful of
Countenance'; but it is really a title equivalent to "His
Gracious Majesty,' and was borne by all the Maurya kings;—

"Devanampiya Piadasi feels remorse on account of the conquest of the Kalingas; because, during the subjugation of a preciously unconquered country slaughter, death, and taking away captives of the people necessarily occur; whereat His Majesty feels profound sorrow and regret…"

It would be in keeping with the Southern Buddhist tradition as to the ungovernable violence of Asoka's youth, that he should have introduced into war horrors quite contrary to Manu and Indian custom; but here I must say that H.P.Blavatsky, though she does not particularize, says that there were really two Asokas, two 'Devanampiya Piadasis,' the first of whom was Chandragupta himself, from whose life the tradition of the youthful violence may have been drawn; and there remains the possibility that this Kalinga War was waged by Chandragupta, not Asoka; and that it was he who made this edict, felt the remorse, and became a Buddhist.However, to continue (tentatively):—

"The loss of even the hundredth or the thousandth part of the persons who were then slain, carried away captive, or done to death in Kalinga would now be a matter of deep regret to His Majesty.Although a man should do him any injury, Devanampiya Piadasi holds that it must patiently be borne, so far as it possibly can be borne…for His Majesty desires for all animate beings security, control over the passions, peace of mind, and joyousness.And this is the chief of conquests, in His Majesty's opinion: the Conquest of Duty."

Some time later he took the vows of a Buddhist monk, 'entered the
Path'; and, as he says, 'exerted himself strenuously.'

He has been called the 'Constantine of Buddhism'; there is much talk among the western learned, about his support of that movement having contributed to its decay. They draw analogy from Constantine; even hint that Asoka embraced Buddhism, as the latter did Christianity, from political motives. But the analogy is thoroughlv false. Constantine was a bad man, a very far-gone case; and there was little in the faith he adopted, or favored, as it had come to be at that time, to make him better;—even if he had really believed in it. And it was a defined religio- political body, highly antagonistic to the old state religion of Rome, that he linked his fortunes with. But no sovereign so mighty in compassion is recorded in history as having reigned, as this Asoka. He was the most unsectarian of men. Buddhism as it came to him, and as he left it, was not a sect, but a living spiritual movement. For what is a sect? —Something cut off— from the rest of humanity, and the sources of inner life.But for Asoka, as for the modern Theosophical Movement, there was no religion higher than—Dharma—which word may be translated, 'the (higher) Law,' or 'truth.' or 'duty.' He never ceased to protect the holy men of Brahminism. Edict after edict exhorts his people to honor them. He preached the Good Law; he could not insist too often that different men would have different conceptions as to this Dharma. Each, then, must follow his own conception, and utterly respect his neighbors'. The Good Law, the Doctrine of the Buddhas, was universal; because the objective of all religions was the conquest of the passions and of self. All religions must manifest on this plane as right action and life; and that was the evangel he proclaimed to the world. There was no such sharp antagonism of sects and creeds.

There is speculation as to how he managed, being a world-sovereign —and a highly efficient one—to carry out the vows of a Buddhist monk.As if the begging bowl would have been anything of consequence to such an one!It is a matter of the status of the soul; not of outward paraphernalia.He was a practical man; intensely so; and he showed that a Chakravartin could tread the Path of the Buddhas as well as a wandering monk.One can imagine no Tolstoyan playing at peasant in him.His business in life was momentous."I am never satisfied with my exertions and my dispatch of business," he says.

"Work I must for the public benefit,—and the root of the matter is in exertion and dispatch of business, than which nothing is more efficacious for the public welfare.And for what end do I toil?For no other end than that I may discharge my debt to animate beings."

And again:

"Devanampiya Piadasi desires that in all places men of all religions may abide, for they all desire purity of mind and mastery over the senses."

Well; for nine and twenty years he held that vast empire warless; even though it included within its boundaries many restless and savage tribes.Certainly only the greatest, strongest, and wisest of rulers could do that; it has not been done since (though Akbar came near it).We know nothing as to how literature may have been enriched; some think that the great epics may have come from this time.If so, it would only have been recensions of them, I imagine.But in art and architecture his reign was everything.He built splendid cities, and strewed the land with wonderful buildings and monoliths.Patna, the capital, in Megasthenes' time nine miles long by one and a half wide, and built of wood, he rebuilt in stone with walls intricately sculptured.Education was very widespread or universal.His edicts are sermons preached to the masses: simple ethical teachings touching on all points necessary to right living.He had them carved on rock, and set them up by the roadsides and in all much-frequented places, where the masses could read them; and this proves that the masses could read.They are all vibrant with his tender care, not alone for his human subjects, but for all sentient beings."Work I must….that I may discharge my debt to all things animate."And how he did work without one private moment in the day or night, as his decrees show, in which he should be undisturbed by the calls of those who needed help.He specifies; he particularizes; there was no moment to be considered private, or his personal own.

And even then he was not content.There were foreign lands; and those, too, were entitled to his care.I said that the southern tip of India, with Ceylon, were within his sphere of influence: his sphere of influence was much wider than that, however.Saying that a king's sphere of influence is wherever he can get his will done, Asoka's extended westward over the whole Greek world.Here was a king whose will was benevolence; who sought no rights but the right to do good; whose politics were the service of mankind:—it is a sign of the Brotherhood of Man, that his writ ran, as you may say—the writ of his great compassion,—to the Mediterranean shore:—

"Everywhere in the dominions of Devanampiya Piadasi, and likewise in the neighboring realms, such as those of the Chola, Pandya, Satiyaputra and Keralaputra, in Ceylon, in the dominions of the Greek king Antiochus, and in those of the other kings subordinate to that Antiochus—everywhere, on behalf of His Majesty, have two kinds of hospitals been founded: hospitals for men, and hospitals for beasts.Healing herbs, medicinal for man and medicinal for beasts, wherever they were lacking, have been imported and planted.On the roads, trees have been planted, and wells have been dug for the use of men and beasts."

And everywhere, in all those foreign realms, he had his missionaries preaching the Good Law.And some of these came to Palestine, and founded there for him an order at Nazareth called the Essenes; in which, some century or two later, a man rose to teach the Good Law—by name, Jesus of Nazareth.—Now consider the prestige, the moral influence, of a king who might keep his agents, unmolested, carrying out his will, right across Asia, in Syria, Greece, Macedonia, and Egypt; the king of a great, free, and mighty people, who, if he had cared to, might have marched out world-conquering; but who preferred that his conquests should be the conquests of duty.Devanampiya Piadasi: the Gracious of Mien, the Beloved of the Gods: an Adept King like them of old time, strayed somehow into the scope and vision of history.

VIII.THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE

Greece shone between 478 and 348,—to give the thirteen decades of her greatest spiritual brightness.Then came India in 321; we lose sight of her after the death of Asoka in the two-thirties, but know the Maurya Empire lasted its thirteen decades (and six years) until 185.Then China flamed up brilliantly under the Western House of Han from 194 to 64;—at which time, however, we shall not arrive for a few weeks yet.

Between these three national epochs there is this difference: the Greek Age came late in its manvantara; which opened (as I guess), roughly speaking, some three hundred and ninety years before:—three times thirteen decades, with room for three national flowerings in Europe—among what peoples, who can say?— We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle.But in China we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all.A manvantara, a fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B.C.; this Age of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another day.Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning of the manvantara has passed.Thus in our own European cycle, Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240 to 1500: twenty-six decades;—whereas the nations that have held hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.

And now to take bird's-eye views of China as a whole; and to be at pains to discover what relation she bears, historically, to ourselves and the rest of the globe.

Do you remernber how Abraham haggled with the Lord over the Cities of the Plain?Yahveh was for destroying them off hand for their manifold sins and iniquities; but Abraham argued and bargained and brought him down till if peradventure there should be found ten righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord promised he would spare them.But ten righteous there were not, nor nothing near; so the Cities of the Plain went down.

I suppose the Crest-Wave rarely passes from a race without leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake.The life forces are strong; the human organisms through which they play are but—as we know them.Commonly these organisms are not directed by the Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of fountaining up; and exhaust these their vehicles, and leave them played out and mentally—because long since morally—deficient.So come the cataclysmic wars and reigns of terror that mark the end of racial manvantaras: it is a humanity gone collectively mad.On the other hand, none can tell what immense safeguarding work may be done by the smallest sane co-ordinated effort upwards.If peradventure the ten righteous shall be found—but they must be righteous, and know what they are doing—I will spare, and not destroy, saith the Lord.

(He said nothing about respectabilities.I dare say there was quite a percentage of respectable chapel-going Sabbath-observing folk in the Cities of the Plain.)

And yet there must be always that dreadful possibility—which perhaps has never become actual since the fall of Atlantis—that a whole large section of mankind should go quite mad, and become unfit to carry on the work of evolution.It is a matter of corrupting the streams of heredity; which is done by vice, excess, wrong living; and these come of ignorance.Heaven knows how near it we may be today; I do not think Christendom stands, or has stood, so very far, from the brink.And yet it is from the white race, we have supposed, that the coming races will be born; this is the main channel through which human evolution is intended to flow.—We are in kall-yuga; the Mysteries are dead, and the religions have taken their place: there has been no sure and certain link, organized on this plane, between the world and its Higher Self.Each succeeding civilization, under these circumstances, has run a greater risk.

Of what race are we?I say, of no race at all, but can view the matter as Human Souls, reincarnating egos, prepared to go where the Law bids us.Races are only temporary institutions set up for the convenience of the Host of Souls.

We see, I suppose, the results of such a breakdown in Africa.Atlanteans were segregated there; isolated; and for a million years degenerated in that isolation to what they are.But their ancestors, before that segregation began, had better airships than we have; were largely giants, in more respects than the physical, were we are pygmies.Now they are—whatever may be their potentialities, whatever they may become—actually an inferior reace.And it is a racial stock that shows no signs of dying out.What then?—I suppose indeed there must be backward races, to house backward egos;—though for that matter you would think that our Londons and Chicagos and the rest, with their slums, would provide a good deal of accommodation.

Or consider the Redskins, here and in South America: whether Atlanteans, or of some former subrace of the Fifth, at least not Aryans. Take the finest tribes among them, such as the Navajos. Here is a very small hereditary stream, kept pure and apart: of fine physique; potentially of fine mentality; unsullied with vices of any sort: a people as much nearer than the white man to natural spirituality, as to natural physical health. It is no use saying they are so few. Two millenniums ago, how many were the Anglo-Saxons? Three millenniums ago, how many were the Latins? Supposing the white race in America failed. The statistics of lunacy—of that alone—are a fearful Mene, Tekel Upharsin written on our walls, for any Daniel with vision to read. I think Naure must also take into account these possibilities. Does she keep in reserve hereditary streams and racial stocks other than her great and main ones, in case of accidents? Are the Redskins among these?

The Secret Doctrine seems to hint sometimes that the founders of our Fifth Root Race were of Lemurian rather than Atlantean descent. Nowhere is it actually said so; but there are a number of passages that read, to me, as if they were written with that idea, or theory, or fact, in mind. Is it, possibly, that a small pure stream of Lemurian heredity had been kept aloof through all the years of Atlantis, in reserve;—some stream that may have been, at one time, as narrow as the tribe of Navajos? —This may be a very bold conclusion to draw from what is said in The Secret Doctrine; it may have no truth in it whatever: other passages are to be found, perhaps, that would at least appear to contradict it. But if it is true, it would account for what seems like a racial anomaly—or more than one. Science leans to the conclusion that the Australian aborigines are Aryan: they are liker Aryans than anything else. But we know from The Secret Doctrine that they are among the few last remnants of the Lemurians. Again, the Ainos of Japan are very like Europeans: they have many physical features in common with the Caucasians, and none in common with the peoples of East Asia. Yet they are very low down in the scale of evolution:—not so low as the Australian Blackfellow, but without much occasion for giving themselves airs. A thousand years of contact with the much- washing Japanese have never suggested to them why God made soap and water. Like many other people, they have the legend of the flood: remember, as you may say, the fall of Atlantis; but unlike us upstarts of the Fourth and Fifth Races, they have also a legend of a destruction of the world by fire and earthquake—a cataclysm that lasted, they say, a hundred days. Is it a memory of the fate of Lemuria?

Is a new Root-Race developed, not from the one immediately preceding it, but from the one before? Is Mercury's caduceus, here too, a symbol of the way evolution is done? Did the Law keep in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race from Lemuria, holding it back from Atlantean development during the whole period of the Atlanteans;—holding it, all that while, in seclusion and purity —and therefore in a kind of pralaya;—at the right moment, to push its development, almost suddenly, along a new line, not parallel to the Atlantean, but sui generis, and to be Aryan Fifth presently? —Is the Law keeping in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race of Atlantean stock, holding that in reserve and apart all through our Aryan time, to develop from it at last the beginnings of the Sixth, on the new continent that will appear? Or to do so, at any rate, should the main Aryan stock fail at one of the grand crises in its evolution, and become of too corrupt heredity to produce fitting vehicles for the egos of the Sixth to inhabit?

When we have evolved back to Sanskrit for the last time: when the forces of civilization have played through and exhausted for the last time the possibilities of each of the groups of Aryan languages, so that it would be impossible to do anything more with them—for languages do become exhausted: we cannot write English now as they could in the days of Milton and Jeremy Taylor; not necessarily because we are smaller men, but because the fabric of our speech is worn much thinner, and will no longer take the splendid dyes;—and when that final flowering of Sanskrit is exhausted too—will the new Sixth Race language, as a type, be a derivation from the Aryan?Then how?—Or will it, possibly, be as it were a new growth sprung out of the grave of Fourth Race Chinese, or of one of that Atlantean group through which, during all these millions of years, such great and main brain-energies have not on the whole been playing as they have been through the Aryans; and which might therefore, having lain so long fallow, then be fit for new strange developments and uses?

All of which may be, and very likely is, extremely wide of the mark.Such ideas may be merest wild speculation, and have no truth in them at all.And yet I think that if they were true, they would explain a thing to me otherwise inexplicable: China.

We are in the Fifth Root-Race, and the fifth sub-race thereof: that is, beyond the middle point.And yet one in every four of the inhabitants of the globe is a Fourth Race Chinaman; and I suppose that if you took all the races that are not Caucasian, or Fifth Race, you would find that about half the population of the world is Atlantean still.

Take the languages. A Sanskrit word, or a Greek, or Old Gothic, or Latin, is a living organism, a little articulate being. There is his spine, the root; his body, the stem; his limbs and head, the formative elements, prefixes and suffixes, case-endings and what not. Let him loose in the sentence, and see how he wriggles gaily from state to state: with a flick of the tail from nominative to genitive, from singular to plural: declaring his meaning, not by means of what surroundings you put about him, but by motions, changes, volitions so to say, of his own. 'Now,' says he, 'I'm pater, and the subject; set me where you will, and I am still the subject, and you can make nothing else of me.' Or, 'Now,' says he, 'I'm patrem, and the object; go look for my lord the verb, and you shall know what's done to me; be he next door, or ten pages away, I am faithful to him.' Patrem filius amat, or filius amat patrem, or in whatever order it may be, there is no doubt who does, and who (as they say) suffers the loving. —But now take a word in English. You can still recognise him for the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy: father is no such far cry from pater:—but oh what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just lumps backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in him, as you may say. No longer will he declare his meaning of himself; it must depend on where you choose to put him in the sentence. —Among the mountains of Europe, the grand Alps are the parvenus; the Pyrenees look down on them; and the Vosges on the Pyrenees; and—pardon me! —the little old time-rounded tiny Welsh mountains look down on them all from the heights of a much greater antiquity. They are the smallest of all, the least jagged and dramatic of all; time and the weather have done most to them. The storm, like the eagle of Gwern Abwy in the story, has lighted on their proud peaks so often, that that from which once she could peck at the stars in the evening, rises now but a few thousand feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the crags and chasms. French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the Welsh mountains. Every word is worn perfectly smooth and round. There is no sign left at all of prefix or suffix, root or stem. There are no parts of speech: any word without change can do duty for any part of speech. There is no sign of case or number: all has been reduced to an absolute simplicity, beyond which there is no going. Words can end with no consonant but the most rounded of all, the nasal liquids n and ng. There is about as much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages—you can trace about as much analogy between them—as you can between a centipede and a billiard-ball.

There are definite laws governing the changes of language. You know how the Latin castrum became in English ciaster and then chester; the change was governed by law. The same law makes our present-day vulgar say cyar for car; that word, in the American of the future, will be something like chair. The same law makes the same kind of people say donchyer for don't you; some day, alas! even that will be classical and refined American. Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times even on the Chinese billiard-ball: where Confucius said Ts'in like a gentleman, the late Yuan Shi Kai used to say Ch'in. So did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to do. So we ourselves have turned Ts'in into China.—And that is the one little fact—or perhaps one of the two or three little facts—that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin.

But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan might some day—after millions of years—wear down or evolve back even into billiard-ball Chinese? That human language is one thing; and all the differences, the changes rung on that according to the stages of evolution?

In the Aryan group of languages, the bond of affinity is easily recognisable: the roots of the words are the same: Pitri, pater, vater, are clearly but varying pronunciations of the same word. In the Turanic group, however—Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Tatar, Mongol and Manchu—you must expect no such well-advertised first-cousinship. They are grouped together, not because of any likeness of roots: not because you could find one single consonant the same in the Lappish or Hungarian, say, and in the Mongol or Manchu words for father—you probably could not;—but because there may be syntactical likenesses, or the changes and assimilations of sounds may be governed by the same laws. Thus in Turkic—I draw upon the Encyclopaedia Britannica—there is a suffix z, preceded by a vowel, to mean your: pederin is 'father'; 'your father' becomes pederiniz; dostun means 'friend'; 'your friend' becomes not dostuniz, but dostunus; and this trick of assimilating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish the relationship of the group. As for likeness of roots, here is a specimen: gyordunus is the Turkish for the Finnish naikke.—So here you see a degree of kinship much more remote than that you find in the Aryan.Where, say, Dutch and Gaelic are brothers—at least near relations and bosom friends,—Turkish and Mongol are about fifteenth cousins by marriage twice removed, and hardly even nod to each other in passing.And yet Turks and Mongols both claim descent from the sons of a common father: according to legends of both peoples, the ancestor of the Turks was the brother of the ancestor of the Mongols.(Always remember that in speaking of Turks thus scientifically, one does not mean the Ottomans, who inherit their language, but are almost purely Caucasian or even Aryan, in blood.)

Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group: Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan. Here there are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relationship. They do not meet on the street; they pass by on the other side, noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other's existence. They suppose they are akin—through Adam; but whould tell you that much has happened since then. Their kinship consists in this: the words are each are billiard-balls—and yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes. Thus I should call a Tibetan name like nGamri-srong-btsan a good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one like T'ang Tai-tsong a perfectly round smooth one of the kind we know. —The languages are akin, because each say, where we should say 'the horse kicked the man,' horse agent man kicking completion, or words to that effect,—dapped out nearly in spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables. But the words for horse and man, in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively as much phonetic likeness as geegee and equus, and Smith and Jones. As to the value and possibilities of such languages, I will quote you two pronouncements, both from writers in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. One says: "Chinese has the greatest capacity of any language ever invented"; the other, "The Chinese tongue is of unsurpass jejuneness."

In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, shih, pronounced like the first three letters in the word shirt in English. That vocable may mean: history, or to employ, or a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time, poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a house, and all such things as that;—I mention a few out of the list by way of example. * Now of course, were that all to be said about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused: would think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus Ts'in meant one country, and Tsin another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them, for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You pronounce shih one tone—you sing it on the right note, so to say, and it means poetry; you take that tone away, and give it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes a corpse:—as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress on you it really does. —Of course the hieroglyphs, the written words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of elements from those all our languages depend on. We have solid words that you can spell: articles built up with the bricks of sound-stuff we call letters: c-a-t cat, d-o-g dog, and so on;—but their words, no; nothing so tangible: all depends on little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,—and above all, musical tones. Now then, which is the more primitive? Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the spiritual, pole?

———- * Encyclopaedia Britannica: article, China: Language. ———-

More primitive—I do not know.Only I think when the Stars of Morning sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy; when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies of our ancestors; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight, quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;

     "They prayed, but their worship was only
          The wonder of nights and of days,"

—when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the poems of the earth was made:—it was song, it was tone, it was music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language: seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps: and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the Glory of God.And then—was it like this?—they grew material, and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit; and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis with its complex civilization—its infinitely more complex civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing human brain; and a thousand languages were formed—many of them to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America—as much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese: highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up and filigreed beyond telling;—and that was at the midmost point and highest material civilization of Atlantis.And then the Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of the first sub-race;—till you had something in character not intellectual, but spiritual:—Chinese.And meanwhile—I am throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second appears to contradict the first: presently a unity may come of them;—meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,— but also spiritual: not without tonalistic elements: a thing to be chanted, and not dully spoken:—and there, when the time came for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.

But now for the Sixth Root-Race: is that to figure mainly on the plane of intellect? Or shall we then take intellectual things somewhat for granted, as having learnt them and passed on to something higher? Look at those diagrams of the planes and globes in The Secret Doctrine, and see how the last ones, the sixth and seventh, come to be on the same level as the first and second. Shall we be passing, then, to a time when, in the seventh, our languages will have no need for complexity: when our ideas, no longer personal but universal and creative, will flow easily from mind to mind, from heart to heart on a little tone, a chanted breath of music; when mere billiard-balls of syllables will serve us, so they be rightly sung:—until presently with but seven pure vowel sounds, and seven tones to sing them to, we shall be able to tell forth once more the whole of the Glory of God?

Now then, is Chinese primitive, or is it an evolution far away and ahead of us?Were there first of all billiard-balls; and did they acquire a trick of coalescing and running together; this one and that one, in the combination, becoming subordinate to another; until soon you had a little wriggling creature of a word, with his head of prefix, and his tail of suffix, to look or flicker this way or that according to the direction in which he wished to steer himself, the meaning to be expressed;—from monosyllabic becoming agglutinative, synthetic, declensional, complex—Alpine and super-Sanskrit in complexity;—then Pyrenean by the wearing down of the storms and seasons; then Vosges, with crags forest-covered; then green soft round Welsh mountains; and then, still more and more worn down by time and the phonetic laws which decree that men shall (in certain stages of their growth) be always molding their languages to an easier and easier pronunciation,—stem assimilating prefix and suffix, and growing intolerant of changes within itself;—fitting itself to the weather, rounding off its angles, coquetting with euphony;— dropping harsh consonants; tending to end words with a vowel, or with only the nasal liquids n and ng, softest and roundest sounds there are;—till what had evolved from a billiard-ball to an Alpine crag, had evolved back to a billiard-ball again, and was Chinese?Is it primitive, or ultimate?I am almost certain of this, at any rate: that as a language-type, it stands somewhere midway between ours and spiritual speech.

How should that be; when we are told that this people is of the Fourth, the most material of the Races; while we are on the proud upward arc of the Fifth?And how is it that H.P.Blavatsky speaks of the Chinese civilization as being younger than that of the Aryans of India, the Sanskrit speakers,—Fifth certainly?Is this, possibly, the explanation: that the ancestors of the Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years, until some time later than 160,000 years ago—the time of the beginning our our sub-race?A pralaya, like sleep, is a period of refreshment, spiritual and physical; it depends upon your mood as you enter it, to what degree you shall reap its benefits: whether it shall regenerate you; whether you shall arise from it spiritually cleansed and invigorated by contact with the bright Immortal Self within.Africa entered such a rest-period from an orgy of black magic, and her night was filled with evil dreams and sorceries, and her people became what they are.But if China entered it guided by white Atlantean Adepts, it would have been for her Fairyland; it would have been the Fortunate Islands; it would have been the Garden of Siwang Mu, the paradise of the West; and when she came forth it would have been—it might have been—with a bent not towards intellectual, but towards spiritual achievements.

Compare her civilization, in historic times, with that of the West. Historic times are very little to go by, but they are all we have at present. —She attained marvelous heights; but they were not the same kind of heights the West has attained. Through her most troublous, stirring, and perilous times, she carried whole provinces of Devachan with her. It was while she was falling to pieces, that Ssu-K'ung T'u wrote his divinely delicate meditations. When the iron most entered her soul, she would weep, but not tear her hair or rage and grow passionate; she would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar. In her gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot herself to give utterance to the unseemly. There is no line in her poetry to be excused or regretted on that score. She worshipped Beauty, as perhaps only Greece and France in the West have done; but unlike Greece or France, she sought her divinity only in the impersonal and dispassionate: never mistook for its voice, the voices of the flesh. She sinned much, no doubt; but not in her pursuit of the Beautiful; not in her worship of Art and Poetry. She was faithful to the high Gods there. She never produced a figure comparable to, nor in the least like, our Homers and Aeschyluses, Dantes and Miltons and Shakespeares. But then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k'ung T'us: giants in lyricism—one might name a hundred of them—beside whom our Hugos and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies. Nor have we had any to compare with her masters of landscape-painting: even the Encyclopaedia Britannica comes down flat-footed with the statement that Chinese landscape-painting is the highest the world has seen. —And why? —Because it is based on a knowledge of the God-world; because her eyes were focused for the things 'on the other side of the sky'; because this world, for her, was a mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists between her and the Divine 'defecate' constantly, in Coleridge's curious phrase, 'to a clear transparency.' Things seen were an open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and begrimed with passion and egotism and individualism and all the smoke and soot of the brain-mind, that given an artist with a natural tendency to see through, he has to waste half his life first in cleaning it with picks and mattocks and charges of dynamite. So it becomes almost inevitable that when once you know Chinese painting, all western painting grows to look rather coarse and brutal and materialistic to you.

But, you say, no Aeschylus or Shakespeare?No Dante or Homer?No epic—no great drama!Pooh!you say, where is the great creative energy?Where is the sheer brain force?—

It is to us a matter of course that the type of our great ones is the highest possible type.Well; it may be: but the deeper you go into thinking it over, the less certain you are likely to become as to the absoluteness of standards.The time to award the prizes is not yet; all we can do is to look into the nature of the differences.Warily let us go to work here!

Where, you asked, are the great creative energies? Well; in the West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be seen as energies. I think, through channels nearer this material plane: nearer the plane of intellect, at any rate. —No: there is no question where the sheer brain force has been: it has been in the West. But then, where was it more manifest, in Pope or in Keats? In Pope most emphatically. But off with your head if you say he gave the greater gift. —Or I will leave Pope, and go to his betters; and say that Keats, when he caught in his net of words the fleeting beauty of the world, was far nearer the Spirit than was Bacon when with tremendous intellectual energy he devised his philosophy: there was a much longer evolution behind the ease and effortless attainment of the one, than behind the other's titanic brain-effort. Yet, so far as the putting forth of brain energies is concerned, there is no question: Bacon was much the greater man.

So in all creative work, in all thought, we must call the West incomparably greater in brain energy.And I am not making such a foolish comparison as between modern or recent conditions in the two races.You see it if you set the greatest Eastern ages, the Han, the T'ang, the Sung, or the Fujiwara, against the Periclean, Augustan, Medicean, Elizabethan, or Louis Quatorze.In the West, the spiritual creative force came down and mingled itself more forcefully with the human intellect: had a much more vigorous basis in that, I think, to work in and upon.It has reached lower into the material, and played on matter more powerfully— and, be it said, on thought and intellection too.

We are so accustomed to thinking of spirituality as something that, outside the plane of conduct, can only play through thought and intellection, or perhaps religious emotion, that to speak of the high spirituality of China will sound, to most, absurd.On the whole, you must not go to China for thought or intellection.Least of all you must go there for what we commonly understand by religious emotion;—they don't readily gush over a personal god.It will seem entirely far-fetched to say that in China the creative forces have retained much more of their spirituality: have manifested perhaps not less greatly than in the West, but on planes less material, nearer their spiritual source.It will seem so the more because until very recently China has been constantly misrepresented to us.And yet I think it is pretty much the truth.

In all their creative art the Spirit has been busy suggesting itself, not through ideas, or the forms of intellection, but through the more subtle perceptions and emotions that lie behind.It gives us, if we are at all gifted or educated to see, pure vistas of Itself.Compare Michelangelo's Moses with the Dai Butsu at Kamakura:—as I think Dr. Siren does in one of his lectures.The former is a thing of titanic, even majestic energies; but they are energies physical and mental: a grand triumph on what is called in Sanskrit philosophy the Rajasic plane.The second suggests, not energy and struggle, but repose and infinite calm.In the Moses, we sense warfare, with victory, to attain and to hold its attainment; in the Dai Butsu, something that has passed through all that aeons ago.In which is the greater sum of energies included?In the Dai Butsu certainly; wherein we see no sign of what we commonly call energies at all.The one is human struggling up towards Godhood; the other, Godhood looking down with calm limitless compassion upon man.Such need no engines and dynamics to remove the mountains: they bid them rise up, and be cast into the sea; and are obeyed.

Or take a great Chinese landscape and a great Western one: a Ma Yuan, say, and a—whom you please.To the uninstructed it seems ridiculous to compare them.This took a whole year to paint; it is large; there is an enormous amount of hard work in it; huge creative effort, force, exertion, went to make it.That—it was done perhaps in an hour.That mountain is but a flick of the brush; yonder lake but a wash and a ripple.It is painted on a little trumpery fan—a mere square foot of silk.Yes; but on that square foot, by the grace of the Everlasting Spirit, are 'a thousand miles of space': much more—there is Infinity itself.Watch; and that faint gray or sepia shall become the boundless blue; and you shall see dim dragons wandering: you shall see Eternal Mystery brooding within her own limitless home.Far, far more than in the western work, there is an open window into the Infinite: that which shall remind us that we are not the poor clay and dying embers we seem, but a pat of the infinite Mystery.The Spirit is here; not involved in human flesh and intellection, but impersonal and universal.What do you want:—to be a great towering personality; or to remember that you are a flame of the Fire which is God?Oh, out upon these personal deities, and most ungodly personalities of the West!I thank China for reminding me that they are cheap and nasty nothingnesses at the best!

We rather demand of our art, at its highest, that it shall be a stimulant, and call to our minds the warfare in which we are engaged: the hopeless-heroic gay and ever mournful warfare of the soul against the senses.Well; that battle has to be fought; there is nothing better than fighting it—until it is won.Let us by all means hear the snarling of the trumpets; let us heed the battle-cries of the Soul.But let us not forget that somewhere also the Spirit is at peace: let us remember that there is Peace, beyond the victory.In Chinese art and poetry we do not hear the war-shouts and the trumpets: broken, there, are the arrow and the bow; the shield, the sword, the sword and the battle.—But—the Day-Spring from on high hath visited us.

What element from the Divine is in it, does not concern itself with this earth-life; tells you nothing in criticism of life.There is naught in it of the Soul as Thinker, nor of the Soul as Warrior.But surely it is something for us, immersed here in these turbid Rajasika regions, to be reminded sometimes that the Sattvic planes exist; it is something for us to be given glimpses of the pure quietudes of the Spirit in its own place.I am the better, if I have been shown for an instant the delicate imperishable beauty of the Eternal.

     "We are tired who follow after
          Truth, a phantasy that flies;
      You with only look and laughter
          Stain our hearts with richest dyes."           —

They do indeed; with look and laughter—or it may be tears.

Now, what does it all mean?Simply this, I think: that the West brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought and passion; brings it down right here upon this bank and shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of the Spirit.We do not as a rule allow the validity of the Chinese method.We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough Chinaman, 'merely beautiful.'

I have rather put the case for China; because all our hereditary instincts will rise with a brief for the West. But the truth is that the Spirit elects its own methods and its own agents, and does this through the one, that through the other. When I read Hamlet, I have no doubt Shakespeare was the greatest poet that ever lived. When I read Li Po, I forget Shakespeare, and think that among those who sing none was ever so wonderful as this Banished Angel of the Hills of Tang. I forget the Voice that cried 'Sleep no more!' and Poetry seems to me to have spoken her final word in what you would perhaps call trivialities about the Cold Clear Spring or the White Foam Rapid: she seems to me to have accomplished all she can in such bits of childlike detachment and wonder as this:

"The song-birds, the pleasure-seekers, have flown long since; but this lonely cloud floats on, drifting round in a circle.He and Ching-ting Mountain gaze and gaze at each other, and never grow weary of gazing";

—the 'lonely cloud' being, of course, Li Po himself.He has shown me Man the brother of the Mountains, and I ask no more of him.The mountains can speak for themselves.

He had no moral purpose, this Banished Angel for whose sake the Hills of T'ang are a realm in the Spirit, inerasible, and a beautiful dream while the world endures. Po Chu-i, says Mr. Arthur Waley, blamed him for being deficient in feng and ya,—by which we may understand, for present purposes, much what Matthew Arnold meant by 'criticism of life.'But does it not serve a spiritual purpose that our consciousness should be lifted on to those levels where personality is forgotten: that we should be made to regain, while reading, the child-state we have lost?Li Po died a child at sixty: a magical child: always more or less naughty, if we are to believe all accounts, especially his own; but somehow never paying the penalty we pay for our naughtiness,—exile from the wonder-world, and submersion in these intolerable personalities.You read Milton, and are cleaned of your personality by the fierce exaltation of the Spirit beating through.You read Li Po-type of hundreds of others his compatriots—and you are also cleaned of your personality; but by gentle dews, by wonderment, by being carried up out of it into the diamond ether.It seems to me that both affirmed the Divine Spirit.Milton waged grand warfare in his affirmation.Li Po merely said what he saw.

So I think that among the Aryans the Spirit has been fighting in and into the great turbid current of evolution; and that among the Chinese it has not been so much concerned with that stream, but rather to sing its own untrammeled expression.A great drama or epic comes of the presence and energy of the Spirit working in a human mind.A great lyric comes of the escape of the consciousness from the mind, and into the Spirit.The West has produced all the great dramas and epics, and will persist in the view that the Spirit can have no other expression so high as in these forms. Very likely the West is right; but I shall not think so next time I am reading Li Po or Ssu-k'ung T'u—or Keats.

And I have seen small mild Japanese jujitsu men 'put it all over,' as they say, big burly English wrestlers without seeming to exert themselves in any way, or forgoing their gentle methods and manner; and if you think of jujitsu rightly, it is, to our wrestling and boxing, much what Wu Taotse and Ku Kai-chih are to Rembrandt and Michelangelo, or the Chinese poets to ours.

If we go into the field of philosophy, we find much the same thing. Take Confucianism. It is inappropriate, in some ways, to call Confucius a great thinker (but we shall see that he was something very much more than that). He taught no religion; illuminated in nowise the world of mind; though he enabled millions to illumine it for themselves. He made hardly a ripple in his own day; and yet, so far as I can see, only the Buddha and Mohammed, of the men whose names we know, have marshaled future ages as greatly as he did. Flow his way! said he to history; and, in the main, it did. He created an astral mold for about a quarter of humanity, which for twenty-four centuries has endured. He did it by formulating a series of rules for the conduct of personal and national life; or rather, by showing what kind of rules they should be, and leaving others to formulate them;—and so infused his doctrine with his will and example, that century after century flowed into the matrix he had made for them. To create such a stable matrix, the Aryan mind, in India, worked through long spiritual-intellectual exploration of the world of metaphysics: an intensive culture of all the possibilities of thought. We in the West have boggled towards the same end through centuries of crass political experiment. Confucius, following his ancient models, ignored metaphysics altogether: jumped the life to come, and made his be-all and his end-all here:—in what was necessary, in deeds and thought and speech, to make individual, social, and political life staid, sincere, orderly, quiet, decent, and happy. He died a broken- hearted failure; than whom perhaps no man except the Lord Buddha ever succeeded more highly.

Laotse is his complement. Laotse's aim is not the activity, but the quiescence of mind, self, intellect: "in the NO THING seeking the lonely Way." You forgo everything—especially selfhood;—you give up everything; you enter upon the heritage of No Thing;—and you find yourself heir to the Universe, to wonder, to magic. You do with all your complicated egoity as the camel did with his cameltiness before he could enter the needle's eye; then—heigh presto! —it is the Elixir of Life you have drunk; it is freedom you have attained of the roaming-place of Dragons! —It amounts, truly, to the same thing as Aryan Theosophy; but where the latter travels through and illuminates immense realms of thought and metaphysic, Taoism slides gently into the Absolute; as who should laugh and say, You see how easy it is! And you do not hear of the Path of Sorrow, as with the Aryans; Tao is a path of sly laughter and delight.

Then from Japan we get Shinto; still less a system of metaphysics or dogma.The Shinto temple, empty but for air, is symbolic of the creed whose keynotes are purity and simplicity.Taoism, Confucianism, and Shinto are the three great native creations, in religion, of what I shall call the Altaic mind.There have been, indeed, profound thinkers and metaphysicians both in Japan and China; but their mental activities have been for the most part fruitage from the Aryan seed of Buddhism.

A word here as to that phrase 'Altaic mind.' What business has one to class the Chinese and Japanese together, and to speak of them (as I shall) as 'Altaic'—the Altaic Race? In the first place this term, like 'Latin' or 'Anglo-Saxon,' has the virtue of being quite meaningless. It is utterly silly and inappropriate from every standpoint; but as I need a term to include China and all the peoples that have derived their historic culture from her, I shall beg leave to use it. Neither Japanese nor Corean belong to the billiard-ball group of languages. There is a syntactical likeness between these two, but none in vocabulary; where the Japanese vocabulary came from, Omniscience perhaps may know. —A syntax outlasts a vocabulary by many ages: you may hear Celts now talk English with a syntax that comes from the sub-race before our own: Iberian, and not Aryan. So we may guess here a race akin to the Coreans conquered at some time by a race whose vocables were Japanese—whence they came, God knows. Only one hears that in South America the Japanese pick up the Indian languages a deal more easily than white folk do, or than they do Spanish or English. But this is a divergence; we should be a little more forward, perhaps, if we knew who were the Coreans, or whence they came. But we do not. They are not Turanic—of the Finno-Turko-Mongol stock (by language); they are not speakers of billiard-balls, allied to the Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetans. But the fact is that neither blood-affinity nor speech-affinity is much to the purpose here; we have to do with affinities of culture. During the period 240 B. C. —1260 A. D. a great civilization rose, flowered, and waned in the Far East; it had its origin in China, and spread out to include in its scope Japan, Corea, and Tibet; probably also Annam and Tonquin, though we hear less of them;—while Burma, Assam, and Siam, and those southerly regions, though akin to China in language, seem to have been always more satellite to India. Mongols and Manchus, though they look rather like Chinese, and have lived rather near China, belong by language and traditionally by race to another group altogether—to that, in fact, which includes the very Caucasian-looking Turks and Hungarians; as to what culture they have had, they got it from China after the Chinese manvantara had passed.

The Chinese themselves are only homogeneous in race in the sense that Europe might be if the Romans had conquered it all, and imposed their culture and language on the whole continent.The staid, grave, dignified, and rather stolid northern Chinaman differs from the restless and imaginative Cantonese not much less than the Japanese does from either.This much you can say: Chinese, Japanese, and Coreans have been molded into a kind of loose unity by a common culture; the peoples of China into a closer homogeneity by a common culture-language, written and spoken,—and by the fact that they have been, off and on during the last two thousand years, but most of the time, under the same government.As to Corea, though in the days of Confucius it was unknown to the Chinese, the legends of both countries ascribe the founding of its civilization and monarchy to a Chinese minister exiled there during the twelfth century B.C.Japanese legendary history goes back to 600 B.C.;—that is, to the closing of the Age of the Mysteries, and the opening of that of the Religions:— I imagine that means that about that time a break with history occurred, and the past was abolished: a thing we shall see happen in ancient China presently.But I suppose we may call Shotoku Daishi the Father of historical Japan;—he who, about the end of the sixth century A.D., brought in the culture impetus from the continent.About that time, too, Siam rose to power; and soon afterwards T'ang Taitsong imposed civilization on Tibet.—So there you have the 'Altaic' Race; Altaic, as Mr. Dooley is Anglo-Saxon.To speak of them as 'Mongolian' or 'Mongoloid,' as is often done, is about as sensible as to speak of Europeans and Americans as 'Hunnoid,' because the Huns once conquered part of Europe.It conveys derogation—which Altaic does not.

I have compared their achievement with that of the West: we have one whole manvantara and a pralaya of theirs to judge by, as against two fragments of western manvantaras with the pralaya intervening.It is not much; and we should remember that there are cycles and epicycles; and that Japan, or old China herself, within our own lifetime, may give the lie to everything.But from the evidence at hand one is inclined to draw this conclusion: That in the Far East you have a great section of humanity in reserve;—in a sense, in a backwater of evolution: nearer the Spirit, farther from the hot press and conflict of the material world;—even in its times of highest activity, not in the van of the down-rush of Spirit into matter, as the western races have been in theirs;—but held apart to perform a different function.As if the Crest-Wave of Evolution needed what we might call Devachanic cycles of incarnation, and found them there during the Altaic manvantaras of manifestation.Not that their history has been empty of tragedies; it has been very full of them; and wars—some eight or nine Napoleons in their day have sat on the Dragon Throne.But still, the worlds of poetry, delight, wonder, have been nearer and more accessible to the Chinaman, in his great ages, than to us in ours; as they have been, and probably are now, nearer to the Japanese.And I do not know how that should be, unless the Law had taken those Atlanteans away, kept them apart from the main stream—not fighting the main battle, but in reserve—for purposes that the long millenniums of the future are to declare.

IX.THE DRAGON AND THE BLUE PEARL

The horizon of Chinese history lies near the middle of the third millennium B.C.The first date sinologists dare swear to is 776; in which year an eclipse of the sun is recorded, that actually did happen: it is set down, not as a thing interesting in itself, but as ominous of the fall of wicked kings.Here, then, in the one place where there is any testing the annals, it appears they are sound enough; which might be thought to speak well for them.But our scholars are so damnebly logical, as Mr. Mantalini would say, that to them it only proves this: you are to accept no date earlier.One general solar indorsement will not do; you must have an eclipse for everything you believe, and trust nothing unless the stars in their courses bear witness.

Well; we have fortunately Halley's Comet in the Bayeux Tapestry for our familiar 1066; but beware!everything before that is to be taken as pure fudge!

The fact is there is no special reason for doubting either chronology or sequence of events up to about 2357 B.C., in which year the Patriarch Yao came to the throne.He was the first of those three, Yao, Shun, and Yu, who have been ever since the patterns for all Chinese rulers who have aspired to be Confucianly good."Be like Yao, Shun, and Yu; do as they did";— there you have the word of Confucius to all emperors and governors of states.

Yao, it is true, is said to have reigned a full century, or but one year short of it.This is perhaps the first improbability we come to; and even of this we may say that some people do live a long time.None of his successors repeated the indiscretion.Before him came a line of six sovereigns with little historic verisimilitude: they must be called faint memories of epochs, not actual men.The first of them, Fo-hi (2852-2738), was half man, half dragon; which is being interpreted, of course, an Adept King;—or say a line of Adept Kings.As for the dates given him, I suppose there is nothing exact about them; that was all too far back for memory; it belongs to reminiscence.Before Fo- hi came the periods of the Nest-Builders, of the Man-Kings, the Earth-Kings, and the Heaven-Kings; then P'an K'u, who built the worlds; then, at about two and a quarter million years before Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One.All this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at least that—the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the West, with our creation six trumpery millenniums ago.

This much we may say: about the time when Yao is said to have come to the throne a manvantara began, which would have finished its course of fifteen centuries in 850 or so B.C.It is a period we see only as through a glass darkly: what is told about it is, to recent and defined history, as a ghost to a living man.There is no reason why it should not have been an age of high civilization and cultural activities; but all is too shadowy to say what they were.To its first centuries are accredited works of engineering that would make our greatest modern achievements look small: common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of something actual.Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into daylight history, not primitive but effete: senile, not childlike.That may be only a racial peculiarity, a national prejudice, of course.

And where should you look, back of 850 B. C. , to find actual history—human motives, speech and passions—or what to our eyes should appear such? As things near the time-horizon, they lose their keen outlines and grow blurred and dim. The Setis and Thothmeses are names to us, with no personality attaching; though we have discovered their mummies, and know the semblance of their features, our imagination cannot clothe them with life. We can hear a near Napoleon joking, but not a far-off Rameses. We can call Justinian from his grave, and traverse the desert with Mohammed; but can bold no converse with Manu or Hammurabi;— because these two dwell well this side of the time-horizon, but the epochs of those are far beyond it. The stars set: the summer evenings forget Orion, and the nights of winter the beauty of Fomalhaut: though there is a long slope between the zenith Now and the sea-rim, what has once gone down beyond the west of time we cannot recall or refashion. So that old Chinese manvantara is gone after the Dragon Fo-hi and the Yellow Emperor, after the Man-Kings and the Earth-Kings and the Heaven-Kings; and Yao, Shun, and Yu the Great, and the kings of Hia, and Shang, and even Chow, are but names and shadows,

Quo pater, Aeneas, quo dires Tullus et Ancus,

—we cannot make them interestingly alive.But it does not follow that they did not live when they are supposed to have lived, or do the things attributed to them.Their architecture was ephemeral, and bears no witness to them; they built no pyramids to flout time; they raised no monument but a people, a culture, an idea, that still endures.

Then, too, we shall see that at the beginning of the last Chinese manvantara a conscious attempt was made to break wholly with the past,—to wipe it from human memory, and begin all anew.Such a thing happened in Babylon once; there had been a Sargon in remote antiquity with great deeds to his credit; thousands of years after, another Sargon arose, who envied his fame; and, being a kind, and absolute, decreed that all the years intervening should never have existed—merged his own in the personality of his remote predecessor, and so provided a good deal of muddlement for archaeologists to come.Indeed, such a thing almost happened in France at the Revolution.It is said that in some French schools now you find children with a vague idea that things more or less began with the taking of the Bastille: that there was a misty indefinable period between the 12th of October (or on whatever day it was Eve's apple ripened) and the glorious 14th of July:—an age of prehistory, wandered through by unimportant legendary figures such as Jeanne Darc, Henri Quatre, Louis Quatorze, which we may leave to the superstitious—and come quickly to the real flesh and blood of M.de Mirabeau and Citizen Danton.—Even so, in our own time, China herself, wearied with the astral molds and inner burdens of two millenniums, has been writhing in a fever of destruction: has burnt down the Hanlin College, symbol and center of a thousand years of culture; destroyed old and famous cities; sent up priceless encyclopaedias in smoke; replaced the Empire with a republic, and the Dragon of wisdom with five meaningless stripes;—breaking with all she was in her brilliant greatness, and all she has been since in her weakness and squalid decline.— We ask why history is not continuous; why there are these strange hiatuses and droppings out?—the answer is simple enough.It is because Karma, long piled up, must sometime break out upon the world.The inner realms become clogged with the detritus of ages and activity, till all power to think and do is gone: there is no room nor scope left for it.The weight of what has been thought and done, of old habit, presses down on men, obstructs and torments them, till they go mad and riot and destroy.The manvantara opens: the Crest-Wave, the great tide of life, rushes in.It finds the world of mind cluttered up and encumbered; there is an acute disparity between the future and the past, which produces a kind of psychic maelstrom.Blessed is that nation then, which has a man at its head who can guide things, so that the good may not go with the bad, the useful with the useless!The very facts that Ts'in Shi Hwangti, when the manvantara opened at the beginning of the third century B.C., was driven (you may say) to do what ruthless drastic things he did.— and that his action was followed by such wonderful results—are proof enough that a long manvantara crowded with cultureal and national activities had run it course in the past, and clogged the astral, and made progress impossible.But what he did do, throws the whole of that past manvantara, and to some extent the pralaya that followed it, into the realm of shadows.—He burnt the literature.

In a few paragraphs let me summarize the history of that past age whose remnants Ts'in Shi Hwangti thus sought to sweep away.—Yao adopted Shun for his successor; in whose reign for nine years China's Sorrow, that mad bull of waters, the Hoangho, raged incessantly, carrying the world down towards the sea.Then Ta Yu, who succeeded Shun on the throne presently, devised and carried through those great engineering works referred to above: —cut through mountains, yoked the mad bull, and saved the world from drowning.He was, says H.P.Blavatsky, an Adept; and had learnt his wisdom from the Teachers in the snowy Range of SiDzang or Tibet.His dynasty, called the Hia, kept the throne until 1766; ending with the downfall of a cruel weakling.Followed then the House of Shang until 1122; set up by a wise and merciful Tang the Completer, brought to ruin by a vicious tyrant Chousin.It was Ki-tse, a minister of this last, and a great sage himself, who, fleeing from the persecutions of his royal master, established monarchy, civilization, and social order in Corea.

Another great man of the time was Won Wang, Duke of the Palatinate of Chow, a state on the western frontier whose business was to protect China from the Huns.Really, those Huns were a thing to marvel at: we first hear of them in the reign of the Yellow emperor, two or three centuries before Yao; they were giving trouble then, a good three millenniums before Attila.Won Wang, fighting on the frontier, withstood these kindly souls; and all China looked to him with a love he deserved.Which of course roused King Chousin's jealousy; and when a protest came from the great soldier against the debaucheries and misgovernment at the capital, the king roused himself and did what he could; imprisoned the protestant, as he dared not kill him.During the three years of his imprisonment Won Wang compiled the mysterious I-King, of Book of Changes; of which Confucius said, that were another half century added to his life, he would spend them all in studying it.No western scholar, one may safely say, has ever found a glimmer of meaning in it; but all the ages of China have held it profounder than the profound.

His two sons avenged Won Wang; they roused the people, recruited an army in their palatinate—perhaps enlisted Huns too—and swept away Chousin and his dynasty. They called their new royal house after their native land, Chow; Wu Wang, the elder of the two, becoming its first king, and his brother the Duke of Chow, his prime minister. I say king; for the title was now Wang merely; though there had been Hwangtis or Emperors of old. Won Wang and his two sons are the second Holy Trinity of China; Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu being the first. They figure enormously in the literature: are stars in the far past, to which all eyes, following the august example of Confucius, are turned. There is a little to be said about them: they are either too near the horizon, or too little of their history has been Englished, for us to see them in their habit as they lived; yet some luster of real greatness still seems to shine about them. It was the Duke of Chow, apparently, who devised or restored that whole Chinese religio-political system which Confucius revivified and impressed so strongly on the stuff of the ideal world—for he could get no ruler of his day to establish it in the actualities—that it lasted until the beginning of a new manvantara is shatter it now. That it was based on deep knowledge of the hidden laws of life there is this (among a host of other things) to prove: Music was an essential part of it. When, a few years ago, the tiny last of the Manchu emperors came to the throne, an edict was published decreeing that, to fit him to govern the empire, the greatest care should be taken with his education in music. A wisdom, truly, that the west has forgotten!

When William of Normandy conquered England, he rewarded his followers with fiefs: in England, while English land remained so to be parceled out; afterwards (he and his successors) with unconquered lands in Wales, and then in Ireland.they were to carve out baronies and earldoms for themselves; and the Celtic lands thus stolen became known as the Marches: their rulers, more or less independent, but doing homage to the king, as Lords Marchers.The kings of Chow adopted the same plan.Their old duchy palatinate became the model for scores of others.China itself—a very small country then—southern Shansi, northern Homan, western Shantung—was first divided up under the feudal system; the king retaining a domain, known as Chow, in Homan, for his own.Then princes and nobles—some of the blood royal, some of the old shang family, some risen from the ranks—were given warrant to conquer lands for themselves from the barbarians beyond the frontier: so you go rid of the ambitious, and provided Chow with comfortable buffers.They went out, taking a measure of Chinese civilization with them, and conquered or cajoled Huns, Turks, Tatars, Laos, shans, Annamese, and all that kind of people, into accepting them for their rulers.It was a work, as you may imagine, of centuries; with as much history going forward as during any centuries you might name.The states thus formed were young, compared to China; and as China grew old and weak, they grew into their vigorous prime.The infinity of human activities that has been!These Chow ages seem like the winking of an eye; but they were crowded with great men and small, great deeds and trivialities, like our own.The time will come when our 'Anglo-Saxon' history will be written thus: England sent out colonies, and presently the colonies grew stronger and more populous than England;—and it will be enough, without mention of the Pitts and Lincolns, the Washingtons and Gladstones, that now make it seem so full and important.

By 850 the balance of power had left or was leaving the Chow king at Honanfu.His own subjects had grown unwarlike, and he could hardly command even their allegiance; for each man's feudal duty was first to his own duke, marquis, earl, viscount, or baron;— strangely enough, there were those five degrees of nobility in ancient China as in modern England.Of these nobles, each with his court and feudal dominion, there were in what we may call China Proper some unascertainable number between thirteen and a hundred and fifty: mostly small and insignificant, but mostly, too, full of schemes and ambitions.

But it was the Lords Marchers that counted. One after another of them had wrested from the Chow the title of Wang or King; it was not enough for them to be dukes and marquises. Then came a time when a sort of Bretwalda-ship was established; to be wielded by whichever of them happened to be strongest—and generally to be fought for between whiles: a glorious and perpetual bone of contention. International law went by the board. The Chow domain, the duchies and marquisates, lay right in the path of the contestants—midmost of all, and most to be trampled. Was Tsin to march all round the world, when a mere scurry across neutral (and helpless) Chow would bring it at the desired throat of Ts'u? —A question not to be asked! —there at Honanfu sat the Chow king, head of the national religion, head of the state with its feudatories, receiving (when it suited them to pay it) the annual homage of all those loud and greedy potentates, who for the rest kicked him about as they pleased, and ordered each other to obey him,—for was he not still the son of Heaven, possessor of the Nine Tripods of sovereignty, the tripods of Ta Yu? —So the centuries passed, growing worse and worse ever, from the ninth to the sixth: an age of anarchy, bad government, disorder, crime and clash of ambitions: when there was a decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world;—and we know what manner of incarnation, at such times, is likely to happen.

Conditions had outgrown the astral molds made for them in the last manvantara: the molds that had been made for a small homogeneous China.The world had expanded, and was no longer homogeneous: China herself was not homogeneous; and she found on all sides of her very heterogeneous Ts'ins, Tsins, Ts'is, Ts'us, Wus and Yuehs; each of whom, like so many Great Powers of our own times, had the best of intentions to partake of her sacramental body when God's will so should be.—Indeed, the situation was very much as we have seen it.

Then, as now (or recently), China was old, inert, tired, and unwarlike; must depend on her cunning, and chiefly on their divisions, for what protection she might get against the rapacious and strong. She was dull, sleepy and unimaginative, and wanted only to be left alone; yet teemed, too, with ambitious politicians, each with his sly wires to pull. Her culture, ancient and decrepit, was removed by aeons from all glamor of beginnings. —For a good European parallel, in this respect, you might go to Constantinople in the Middle Ages, when it hung ripe on the bough, so to say, and waiting to fall into Latin, Turkish, Bulgar, or even Russian jaws, whichever at the psychic moment should be gaping and ready beneath. There too was the sense of old age and sterility; of disillusionment; of all fountains and inspirations run dry. —In ancient Grecce, it was no such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles' or of Plato's time to the antiquity of Homer's. In India, the faery light of an immemorial dawn mingles so with the facts of history that there is no disentangling myth from matter-of-fact; if you should prove almost any king to have reigned quite recently, his throne would still be somehow set in the mellow past and near the fountains of time. Augustan Rome, modern in all its phases, stands not so far in front of a background peopled with nymphs and Sibyls: a past in which the Great Twin Brothers might fight at Lake Regillus, and stern heroes make fantastic sacrifices for Rome. Even modern Europe is much less modern than Medieval Constantinople or Chow China. We can breathe still the mysterious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; you shall find still, and that not in remote countries only, fairy-haunted valleys; a few hours out from London, and you shall be in the heart of druidry, and among peoples whose life is very near to Poetry. But China, in those first pre-Confucian centuries, was desperately prosaic: not so much modern, as pertaining to an ugly not impossible future. Antiquity was far, far away. The dawn with its glow and graciousness; noon and the prime with their splendor, were as distant and unimaginable as from our Amercan selves the day when Charlemain with all his peers went down. If you can imagine an American several hundred years from now—one in which Point Loma had never been; several hundred years more unromantic than this one; an America fallen and grown haggard and toothless; with all impulse to progress and invention gone; with centrifugal tendencies always loosening the bond of union; advancing, and having steadily advanced, further from all religious sanctions, from anything she may retain of the atmosphere of mystery and folklore and the poetry of racial childhood; you may get a picture of the mental state of that China. A material civilization, with (except in war areas) reasonable security of life and goods, remained to her. Her people lived in good houses, wore good clothes, used chairs and tables, chopsticks, plates and dishes of pottery; had for transit boats, carts and chariots,* wheelbarrows I suppose, and "cany wagons light." They had a system of writing, the origin of which was lost in remote antiquity; a large literature, of which fragments remain. They were home-loving, war-hating, quiet, stagnant, cunning perhaps, quite un-enterprising; they lived in the valley of the Hoangho, and had not discovered, or had forgotten, the Yangtse to the south of them, and the sea to the east. They might have their local loyalties and patriotism of the pork-barrel, and a certain arrogance of race: belief in the essential superiority of the Black-haired People to the barbarians on their borders; but no high feeling for Chu Hia— All the Chinas;—no dream of a possible national union and greatness. Some three hundred of their folk-ballads come down to us, which are as unlike the folk-ballads of Europe as may be. They do not touch on the supernatural; display no imagination; there are no ghosts or fairies; there is no glory or delight in war; there is no glory in anything;—but only an intense desirability in home,—in staying at home with your family, and doing your I work in the fields. And nothing of what we should call romance, even in this home-love: the chief tie is that between parents and children, not that between husband and wife, and still less that between lovers. There is much moralizing and wistful sadness. —Such was the life of the peasants; at the other pole was the life of the courts: intrigue and cunning, and what always goes with cunning—ineptitude; a good measure of debauchery; some finicking unimportant refinement; each man for self and party, and none for Gods and Men. We have to do, not with the bright colors of the childhood of a race, but with the grayness of its extreme old age. Those who will may argue that you can have old age with never a prime, youth, or childhood behind it. Some say that Laotse was born at sixty-one, or seventy, or eighty-two years old—a few decades more or less are not worth bothering about—whence his name lao tse, the old son (but tse may also mean Teacher or Philosopher). But I misdoubt the accuracy of such accounts, myself. I think it likely he was a baby to begin with, like the majority of us. And I imagine his country had been young, too, before she grew old;—as young as America, and as vigorous.

——— * Chinese Literature: Giles;—whence also much else in these articles. ———

Among such a people, how much should you expect to find of the Sacred Mysteries?—There were the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu with the king at Honanfu, to say that his kinghood had behind it symbolic sanctions; there was the Book of Changes; there was the system of the Duke of Chow, more dishonored in the breach than honored in the observance….For the rest, you might as well look for the Eleusinia in Chicago.Who could believe in religion, those days?—Well; it was the pride of some of the little duchies and marquisates to keep up a reputa-tion for orthodoxy: there was Lu in Shantung, for example,-very strict.* (As strictness went, we may say.)And if you wished to study ritual, you went up to Honanfu to do so; where, too, was the National or Royal Library, where profitable years might be spent.But who, except enthusiasts, was to treat religion seriously?—when one saw the doddering Head of Religion yearly flouted, kicked about and hustled in his own capital by his Barbarian Highness the 'King'—so he must now style himself and be styled, where in better days 'Count Palatine' or 'Lord Marcher' would have served his turn well enough—of Ts'in or Tsin or Ts'i or Ts'u, who would come thundering down with his chariots when he pleased, and without with-your-leave or by-your-leave, march past the very gates of Honanfu;—and lucky if he did march past, and not come in and stay awhile; —on his way to attacking his Barbarian Highness the 'King' of somewhere else.The God that is to be sincerely worshiped must, as this world goes, be able now and then to do some little thing for his vicegerent on earth; and Heaven did precious little in those days for the weakling King-pontiff puppets at Honanfu.A mad world, my masters!

——— * Ancient China Simplified: E. Harper Parker;—also much drawn on. ———

Wherein, too, we had our symbols:—the Dragon, the Sky-wanderer, with something heavenly to say; but alas!the Dragon had been little visible in our skies of Chu Hia these many years or centuries;—the Tiger, brute muscularity, lithe terrible limbs, fearful claws and teeth,—we knew him much better!This, heaven knew, was the day of the Tiger of earthly strength and passions; were there not those three great tigers up north, Ts'in, Tsin, and Ts'i; and as many more southward; and all hungry and strong?—And also, some little less thought of perhaps, the Phoenix, Secular Bird, that bums itself at the end of each cycle, and arises from its ashes young and dazzling again: the Phoenix —but little thought of, these days; for was not the world old and outworn, and toppling down towards a final crash?The days of Chu Hia were gone, its future all in the long past; no one dared dream of a time when there should be something better than Yen diddling Lu, or Ts'u beating Ts'i at a good set-to with these new sixty-warrior-holding chariots.Who should think of the Phoenix—and of a new age to come when there should be no more Yen and Lu and Chow and Tsin and Ts'in, but one broad and mighty realm, a Middle, a Celestial Kingdom,—such a Chu Hia as time had no memory of;—to whose throne the Hun himself should bow, or whose hosts should drive him out of Asia;—a Chu Hia to whom tribute should come from the uttermost ends of the earth?Who should dream of the Secular Bird now,— as improbable a creature, in these dark days of the Tiger, as that old long-lost Sky-wanderer the Dragon himself?

Let be; let three little centuries pass; let the funeral pyre but be kindled, and quite burn itself out; and let the ashes grow cold—

And behold you now, this Phoenix of the World, bright and dazzling, rising up from them!Behold you now this same Black-haired People, young, strong, vigorous, gleaming with all the rainbow hues of romance and imagination; conquering and creative, and soon to strew the jewels of faerie over all the Eastern World. . . .

But this is to anticipate: to take you on to the second century B.C.; whereas I want you now in the sixth.—I said that you should find better chances for study in the Royal Library at Honanfu, could you get together the means for journeying thither, than anywhere else in Chu Hia.That was particularly true in the latter part of that sixth century: because there was a man by the name of Li Urh, chief librarian there, from whom, if you cared to, you might hear better things than were to be found in the books in his charge.His fame, it appears, has gone abroad through the world; although his chief aim seems to be to keep in the shadows and not be talked about.Scholars resort to him from far and near; one of them, the greatest of all, who came to him in the year 517 and was (if we are to believe accounts) treated without too much mercy, came out awestruck, and said: "Today I have seen the Dragon."—What!that little old man with the bald head and straggly lank Chirese beard?—Like enough, like enough!—they are not all, as you look at them with these physical eyes, to be seen winged and wandering the heavens. . . .

But wandering the heavens, this one, yes! He has the blue ether about him, even there in the Library among the books. —He has a way of putting things in little old quiet paradoxes that seem to solve all the problems,—to take you out of the dust and clatter of this world, into the serenity of the Dragon-world where all problems are solved, or non-existent. Chu Hia is all a fuss and turmoil, and running the headlong Gadarene road; but the Old Philosopher—as he has come to be called—has anchorage right outside of and above it, and speaks from the calmness of the peaks of heaven. A kind of school forms itself around him; his wisdom keeps provincials from returning home, and the young men of the capital from commonplace courses. Though he has been accredited with much authorship, I think he wrote nothing; living among books, he had rather a contempt for them,—as things at the best for patching up and cosseting life, new windings and wrappings for its cocoon;—whereas he would have had the whole cocoon stripped away, and the butterfly beautifully airing its wings. Be that as it may, there are, shall we say, stenographers among his disciples, and his sayings come down to us. They have to do with the Way, the Truth, and the Life; which things, and much else, are included in Chinese in the one word Tao.

"The main purpose of his studies" says Ssema Tsien (the 'Father of Chinese History'), "was to keep himself concealed and unknown." In this he succeeded admirably, so far as all future ages were to concerned; for Ssema himself, writing in the reign of Han Wuti some four centuries later, could be by no means sure of his identity. He tells us all we know, or think we know, about Laotse:—that he was born in a village in southern Honan; kept the Royal Library at Honanfu; met Confucius there in 517; and at last rode away on his ox into the west, leaving the Tao Teh King with the Keeper of the Pass on the frontier;—and then goes on to say that there were two other men "whom many regarded as having been the real Laotse"; one of the Lao Lai, a contemporary of Confucius, who wrote fifteen treatises on the practices of the school of Tao; the other, a "Grand Historiographer of Chow," Tan by name, who lived some century and a quarter later. To me this is chiefly interesting as a suggestion that the 'School of Tao' was a thing existent and well-established at that time, and with more than one man writing about it.

It may we'll have been.Taoists ascribe the foundation of their religion to the Yellow Emperor, twenty-eight centuries B.C.; but there never was time Tao was not; nor, I suppose, when there was quite no knowledge of it, even in China.In the old manvantara, past now these three hundred years, the Black-haired People had wandered far enough from such knowledge;—with the accumulation of complexities, with the piling up of encumberments of thought and deed during fifteen hundred busy years of intensive civilization.As long as that piling up had not entirely covered away Tao, the Supreme Simplicity, the Clear Air;—as long as men could find scope to think and act and accomplish things;—so long the manvantara lasted; when nothing more that was useful could be accomplished, and action could no longer bring about its expectable results (because all that old dead weight was there to interpose itself between new causes set in motion and their natural outcome)—then the pralaya set in.You see, that is why pralayas do set in; why they must;—why no nation can possibly go on at a pitch of greatness and high activity beyond a certain length of time.—And all that activity of the manvantara—all that fuss and bustle to achieve greatness and fortune—it had all been an obscuration of and moving away from Tao.

The Great Teachers come into this world out of the Unknown, bringing the essence of their Truth with them. We know well what they will teach: in some form or another it will be Theosophy; it will be the old self-evident truths about Karma and the two natures of man. But how they will teach it: what kind of sugar-coating or bitter aloes they will prescribe along with it: —that, I think, depends on reactions from the age they come in and the people whom they are to teach. It is almost certain, as I said, that Li Urh the Old Philosopher left no writings. "Who knows, does not tell," said he; and Po Chu-i quotes this, and pertinently adds: "What then of his own five thousand words and more. —the Tao Teh King." That book was proved centuries ago, in China, not to have come, as it stands, even from Laotse's age; because there are characters in it that were invented long afterwards.The wisest thing to believe is that it is made up mostly of his sayings, taken down by his disciples in the Pitman of the time; and surviving, with accretions and losses perhaps, through the disquiet of the next two centuries, and the burning of the books, and everything.Because whatever vicissitudes may have befallen it, one does hear in its maxims the tones of a real voice: one man's voice, with a timbre in it that belongs to the Lords of Wisdom.And to me, despite Lao Lai and Tan the Grand Historiographer, it is the voice of an old man in the seclusion of the Royal Library: a happy little bald-headed straggly-bearded old man anxious to keep himself unknown and unapplauded; it is a voice attuned to quietness, and to mental reactions from the thunder of the armies, the drums and tramplings and fuss and insolence of his day.I thoroughly believe in the old man in the Royal Library, and the riding away on oxback at last into the west,—where was Si Wang Mu's Faery Garden, and the Gobi Desert, with sundry oases therein whereof we have heard.I can hear that voice, with childlike wonder in it, and Adept-like seriousness, and childlike and Adept-like laughter not far behind, in such sayings as these: "Tao is like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency.How deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things!We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications of things. . . .How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with the semblance of permanence!I do not know whose son it is.It might appear to have been before God."

We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal God, and also the inefficacy of mere ethics. Believers make their God in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an imitation of themselves. At the best of times they take their New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of their Deity:—the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds the whole together. It is after all but a swollen personality; and whether you swell your personalitv with virtues or vices, the result is an offense. There is a bridge, razor-edged, between earth and heaven; and you can never carry that load across it. Laotse, supremely ethical in effect, had a cordial detestation— take this gingerly! —of un-re-enforced ethics. "When the great Tao is lost," says he, "men follow after charity and duty to one's neighbor." Again: "When Tao is lost, virtue takes its place. When virtue is lost, benevolence succeeds to it. When benevolence is lost, justice ensues. When justice is lost, then we have expediency." He does not mean, of course, that these things are bad; but simply that they are the successive stages of best, things left when Tao is lost sight of; none of them in itself a high enough aim. They are all included in Tao, as the less in the greater. He describes to you the character of the man of Tao; but your conduct is to be the effect of following Tao; and you do not attain Tao by mere practice of virtue; though you naturally practise virtue, without being aware of it, while following Tao. It all throws wonderful light on the nature of the Adept; about whom you have said nothing at all when you have accredited him with all the virtues. Joan was blemishless; but not thereby did she save France;—she could do that because, as Laotse would have said, being one with Tao, she flowed out into her surroundings, accomplishing absolutely her part in the universal plan. No compilation of virtues would make a Teacher (such as we know): it is a case of the total absence of everything that should prevent the natural Divine Part of man from functioning in this world as freely and naturally as the sun shines or the winds blow. The sun and the stars and the tides and the wind and the rain—there is that perfect glowing simplicity in them all: the Original, the Root of all things, Tao. Be like them, says Laotse, impersonal and simple. "I hold fast to and cherish Three Precious Things," he says: "Gentleness, Economy, Humility." Why? So, you would say, do the ethics of the New Testament; such is the preaching of the Christian Churches. But (in the latter case) for reasons quite unlike Laotse's. For we make of them too often virtues to be attained, that shall render us meek and godly, acceptable in the eyes of the Lord, and I know not what else: riches laid up in heaven; a pamperment of satisfaction; easily to become a cloak for self- righteousness and, if worse can be, worse. But tut! Laotse will not be bothered with riches here or elsewhere. With him these precious things are simply absences that come to be when obstructive presences are thrown off. No sanctimoniousness for the little Old Man in the Royal Library!

He would draw minds away to the silence of the Great Mystery, which is the fountain of laughter, of life, the unmarred; and he would have them abide there in absolute harmony.Understand him, and you understand what he did for China.It is from that Inner Thing, that Tao, that all nourishment comes and all greatness.You must go out with your eyes open to search for it: watch for Dragons in the sky; for the Laugher, the Golden Person, in the Sun: watch for Tao, ineffably sparkling and joyous—and quiet— in the trees; listen for it in the winds and in the sea-roar; and have nothing in your own heart but its presence and omnipresence and wonder-working joy.How can you flow out to the moments, and capture the treasure in them; how can you flow out to Tao, and inherit the stars, and have the sea itself flowing in your veins;—if you are blocked with a desire, or a passion for things mortal, or a grudge against someone, or a dislike?Beauty is Tao: it is Tao that shines in the flowers: the rose, the bluebell, the daffodil—the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, the peony—they are little avatars of Tao; they are little gateways into the Kingdom of God.How can you know them, how can you go in through them, how can you participate in the laughter of the planets and the angelic clans, through their ministration, if you are preoccupied with the interests or the wants of contemptible you, the personality?Laotse went lighting little stars for the Black-haired People: went pricking the opacity of heaven, that the Light of lights might filter through.If you call him a philosopher, you credit him with an intellectualism that really he did not bother to possess.Rather he stood by the Wells of Poetry, and was spiritual progenitor of thousands of poets.There is no way to Poetry but Laotse's Way.You think you must go abroad and see the world; you must not; that is only a hindrance: a giving the eyes too many new externals, to hinder them from looking for that which you may see, as he says, 'through your own window.'If you traverse the whole world seeking, you will never come nearer to the only thing that counts, which is Here, and Now.Seek to feed your imagination on outward things, on doings and events, and you will perhaps excite, but surely soon starve it.But at the other pole, the inner "How deep and mysterious is Tao, as if it were the author of all things!"And then I hear someone ask him whence it originated—someone fishing for a little metaphysics, some dose of philosophy.What!catch Laotse?"I know," said Confucius, "how birds fly, beasts run, fishes swim.But the runner may be snared, the swimmer hooked, the flyer shot with an arrow.But there is the Dragon; I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds and rises into heaven."No; you cannot hook, snare, or shoot the Dragon."I do not know whose son Tao is," says Laotse."It might appear to have been before God."

So I adhere to the tale of the old man in the Royal Library, holding wonderful quiet conversations there; that "it might appear to have been before God" is enough to convince me. There was a man once*—I forget his name, but we may call him Cho Kung for our purposes; he was of affable demeanor, and an excellent flautist; and had an enormous disbelief in ghosts, bogies, goblins, and 'supernatural' beings of every kind. It seized him with the force of a narrow creed; and he went forth to missionarize, seeking disputants. He found one in the chief Librarian of some provincial library; who confessed to a credulousness along that line, and seemed willing to talk. Here then were grand opportunities—for a day's real enjoyment, with perchance a creditable convert to be won at the end of it. Behold them sitting down to the fray, in the shadows among the books: the young Cho Kung, affable (I like the word well), voluble and earnest; the old Librarian, mild, with little to say but buts and ifs, and courteous even beyond the wont in that "last refuge of good manners," China. All day long they sat; and affable Cho, like Sir Macklin in the poem,

     "Argued high and argued low,
     And likewise argued round about him";

—until by fall of dusk the Librarian was fairly beaten.So cogent were Cho's arguments, so loud and warm his eloquence, so entirely convincing his facts adduced—his modern instances, as you may say—that there really was nothing for the old man to answer.Ghosts were not; genii were ridiculously unthinkable; supernatural beings could not exist, and it was absurd to think they could.The Librarian had not a leg to stand on; that was flat.Accordingly he rose to his feet—and bowed.—"Sir," said he, with all prescribed honorifics, "undoubtedly you are victorious.The contemptible present speaker sees the error of his miserable ways.He is convinced.It remains for him only to add"—and here something occurred to make Cho rub his eyes—"that he is himself a supernatural being."—And with that his form and limbs distend, grow misty—and he vanishes in a cloud up through the ceiling.—You see, those old librarians in China had a way of doing things which was all their own.

———
* The story is told in Dr. H. H. Giles' Dictionary of Chinese
Biography.
———

So Li Urh responded to the confusions of his day.Arguments?— You could hardly call them so; there is very little arguing, where Tao is concerned.The Tiger was abroad, straining all those lithe tendons,—a tense fearful symmetry of destruction burning bright through the night-forests of that pralaya: grossest and wariest energies put forth to their utmost in a race between the cunning for existence, a struggle of the strong for power.—"It is the way of Tao to do difficult things when they are easy; to benefit and not to injure; to do and not to strive."Come out, says Laotse, from all this moil and topsey- turveydom; stop all this striving and botheration; give things a chance to right themselves.There is nothing flashy or to make a show about in Tao; it vies with no one.Let go; let be; find rest of the mind and senses; let us have no more of these fooleries, war, capital punishment, ambition; let us have self- emptiness.Just be quiet, and this great Chu Hia will come right without aid of governing, without politics and voting and canvassing and such.—Here and Now and What comes by were his prescriptions. He was an advocate of the Small State. Aristotle would have had no government ruling more than ten thousand people; Laotse would have had his State of such a size that the inhabitants could all hear the cocks crowing in foreign lands; and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad. What he taught was a total bouleversement of the methods of his age. "It is the way of Tao not to act from personal motives, to conduct affairs—without feeling the trouble of them, to taste without being aware of the flavor, to account the great as the small and the small as the great, to recompense injury with kindness."

The argument went all against him.Their majesties of Ts'in and Tsin and Ts'i and Ts'u were there with their drums and tramplings; the sixty warrior-carrying chariots were thundering past;—who should hear the voice of an old quiet man in the Royal Library?Minister This and Secretary That of Lu and Chao and Cheng were at it with their wire-pullings and lobbyings and petty diddlings and political cheateries—(it is all beautifully modern); what had the world to do with self-emptiness and Tao?The argument was all against him; he hadn't a leg to stand on.There was no Tao; no simplicity; no magic; no Garden of Si Wang Mu in the West; no Azure Birds of Compassion to fly out from it into the world of men.Very well then; he, being one with that non-existent Tao, would ride away to that imaginary Garden; would go, and leave—

A strand torn out of the rainbow to be woven into the stuff of Chinese life.You could not tell it at the time; you never would have guessed it—but this old dull tired squalid China, cowering in her rice-fields and stopping her ears against the drums and tramplings, had had something—some seed of divinity, thrown down into her mind, that should grow there and be brooded on for three centuries or so, and then—

There is a Blue Pearl, Immortality; and the Dragon, wandering the heavens, is forever in pursuit or quest of it.You will see that on the old flag of China, that a foolish republicanism cast away as savoring too much of the Manchu.(But it was Laotse and Confucius, Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong, and Wu Taotse and the Banished Angel that it savored of really.)Well, it was this Blue Pearl that the Old Philosopher, riding up through the pass to the Western Gate of the world, there to vanish from the knowledge of men;—it was this Blue Pearl that, stopping and turning a moment there so high up and near heaven, he tossed back and out into the fields of China;—and the Dragon would come to seek it in his time.—You perhaps know the picture of Laotse riding away on his ox.I do not wonder that the beast is smiling.

For it really was the Blue Pearl: and the Lord knew what it was to do in China in its day.It fell down, you may say, from the clear ether of heaven into the thick atmosphere of this world; and amidst the mists of human personality took on all sorts of iridescences; lit up strange rainbow tints and fires to glow and glisten more and more wonderfully as the centuries should pass; and kindle the Chinese imagination into all sorts of opal glowings and divine bewilderments and wonderments;—and by and by the wonder-dyed mist-ripples floated out to Japan, and brought to pass there all sorts of nice Japanese cherry-blossomy and plum- blossomy and peonyish things, and Urashima-stories and Bushido- ish and Lafcadioish and badger-teakettle things:—reawakened, in fact, the whole of the faery glow of the Eastern World.

It is not to be thought that here among the mists and personalities the Pearl could quite retain all its pure blueness of the ether.It is not to be thought that Taoism, spread broadcast among the people, could remain, what it was at the beginning, an undiluted Theosophy.The lower the stratum of thought into which it fell, the less it could be Thought-Spiritual, the stuff unalloyed of Manas-Taijasi.Nevertheless, it was the Pearl Immortality, with a vigor and virtue of its own, and a competence for ages, on whatever plane it might be, to work wonders.Among thinking and spiritual minds it remained a true Way of Salvation.Among the masses it came to be thought of presently as personal immortality and the elixir of life.Regrettable, you may say; but this is the point: nothing was ever intended to last forever.You must judge Taoism by what it was in its day, not by what it may be now.Laotse had somehow flashed down into human consciousness a vision of Infinity: had confronted the Chinese mind with a conviction of the Great Mystery, the Divine Silence.It is simply a fact that that is the fountain whose waters feed the imagination and make it grow and bloom.Search for the Secret in chatter and outward sights and deeds, and you soon run to waste and nothingness; but seek here, and you shall find what seemed a void, teeming with lovely forms. He set the Chinese imagination, staggered and stupefied by the so long ages of manvantara, and then of ruin, into a glow of activity, of grace, of wonder; men became aware of the vast world of the Within; as if a thousand Americas had been discovered.It supplied the seed of creation for all the poets and artists to come.It made a new folklore; revivified the inner atmosphere of mountains and forests; set the fairies dancing; raised Yellow Crane Pagodas to mark the spot where Wang Tzu-chiao flew on the Crane to heaven in broad daylight.It sent out the ships of Ts'in Shi Hwangti presently to seek the Golden Islands of Peng-lai, where the Immortals give cups of the elixir to their votaries; in some degree it sent the armies of Han Wuti in search of the Garden of Si Wang Mu.The ships found (perhaps) only the Golden Islands of Japan; the armies found certainly Persia, India, and even the borders of Rome;—and withal, new currents, awakening and inter-national, to flow into China and make splendid the Golden Age of Han.

X."SUCH A ONE"

"I produce myself among creatures, O son of Bharata, whenever there is a decline of Virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world: and thus I incarnate from age to age for the preservation of the just, the destruction of the wicked, and the establishment of righteousness."—Bhagavad-Gita

"The world had fallen into decay, and right principles had perished.Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds had grown rife; ministers murdered their rulers and sons their fathers.Confucius was frightened at what he saw, and undertook the work of reformation."—Mencius

Men were expecting an avatar in old Judaea; and, sure enough, one came.But they were looking for a national leader, a Messiah, to throw off for them the Roman yoke; or else for an ascetic like their prophets of old time: something, in any case, out of the way;—a personality wearing marks of avatarship easily recognisable.The one who came, however, so far from leading them against the Romans, seemed to have a good deal of sympathy with the Romans.He consorted with centurions and tax-gatherers, and advised the Jews to render unto Roman Caesar the things which were his: which meant, chiefly, the tribute.And he was not an ascetic, noticeably; bore no resemblance to their prophets of old time; but came, as he said, 'eating and drinking'; even went to marriage-feasts, and that by no means to play killjoy;— and they said, 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber!'(which was a lie).—Instead of supporting the national religion, as anyone with half an eye to his interests would have done, he did surprising things in the temple with a whip of small cords.— "Here," said they, "let us crucify this damned fellow!"And they did.

Aftertimes, however, recognised him as an avatar; and then so perverse is man!—as the one and only possible avatar.If ever another should appear, said our western world, it could but be this one come again; and, because the doctrine of avatars is a fundamental instinct in human nature, they expected that he would come again.So when the pressure of the times and the intuition of men warned them that a great incarnation was due, they began to look for his coming.

That was in our own day, say in the last half-century; during which time a mort of books have been written about a mysterious figure turning up in some modern city, whom you could not fail to recognise by certain infallible signs. Generally speaking, the chief of these were: long hair, and a tendency to make lugubrious remarks beginning with Verily, verily I say unto you. In actual life, too, lots of men did grow their hair long and cultivate the verily-verily habit; hoping that, despite their innate modesty, their fellow-men might not fail to take the hint and pierce the disguise afforded, often by a personal morality you might call oblique.

But if an avatar had come, it is fairly certain that he or she would have followed modern fashions in hair and speech; first, because real avatars have a sense of humor; and secondly, because his or her business would have been to reform, not the language or style of hair-dressing, but life. —'He or she' is a very vile phrase; for the sake of novelty, let us make the feminine include the masculine, and say 'she' simply. —Her conversation, then, instead of being peppered with archaic verilies and peradventures, would have been in form much like that of the rest of us. It is quite unlikely she would have shone at Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, or Bazaars of the Young Women's Christian Association; quite unlikely that she would have been in any sense whatever a pillar of the orthodoxies. As she would have come to preach Truth, you may suppose Truth needed, and therefore lacking; and so, that her teachings would have been at once dubbed vilest heterodoxy, and herself a charlatan.

     "Below with eddy and flow the white tides creep
          On the sands."

Says Ssu-k'ung T'u,—

     "…..     in no one form may Tao abide.
          But changes and shifts like the wide wing-shadows asweep
               On the mountainside";

—the sea is one, but the tides drift and eddy; the roc, or maybe the dragon, is one, but the shadow of his wings on the mountain sward shifts and changes and veers.When you think you have set up a standard for Tao: when you imagine you have grasped it in you hands:—how fleet it is to vanish!"The man of Tao," said the fisherman of the Mi-lo to Ch'u Yuan, "does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adapts himself to them";—and perhaps there you have the best possible explanation of the nature of those Great souls who come from time to time to save the world.

I think we take the Buddha as the type of them; and expect not only a life and character that we can recognise as flawless, but also a profundity of revelation in the philosophy and ethics. But if no two blades of grass are alike, much less are two human Souls; and in these Great Ones, it is the picture of Souls we are given. When we think that if all men were perfect, all would be alike, we err with a wide mistake. The nearer you get to the Soul, and the more perfect is the expression of it, the less is there monotony or similarity; and almost the one thing you may posit about any avatar is, that he will be a surprise. Tom and Dick and Harry are alike: 'pipe and stick young men'; 'pint and steak young men'; they get born and marry and die, and the grass grows over them with wondrous alikeness; but when the Masters of Men come, all the elements are cast afresh.

Everyone has a place to fill in the universal scheme; he has a function to perform, that none else can perform; a just what he can do,—which commonly he falls far short of doing.When he does it, fully and perfectly, then he is on the road of progress; that road opens up to him; and presently, still exercising the fulness of his being, he becomes a completeness, like Heaven and Earth; their 'equal,' in the Chinese phrase; or as we say, a Perfect Man or Adept.Does anyone know what place in history he is to fill?I cannot tell; I suppose an Adept, incarnated, would be too busy filling it to have time or will to question.But here perhaps we have the nearest thing possible to a standard for measuring them; and here the virtue of Taoism, and one greatest lesson we may learn from it.Are we to judge by the impressiveness of the personality?No; the Man of Tao is not a personality at all.He makes one to use, but is not identified with it; his personality will not be great or small, or enchanting or repellent, but simply adapted to the needs.—Is it the depth and fulness of the philosophv he gives out?No; it may be wiser and also more difficult to keep silent on main points, than to proclaim them broadcast; and for this end he may elect even not to know (with conscious brain-mind) too much;—not to have the deep things within his normal consciousness.But he comes into the world to meet a situation; to give the course of history a twist in a desired direction; and the sign and measure of his greatness is, it seems to me, his ability to meet the situation at all points, and to do just what is necessary for the giving of the twist,—no more and no less.And then, of course, it takes a thousand years or so before you can judge.One is not speaking of common statesmen, who effect quick changes that are no changes at all, but of the Men who shepherd the Host of Souls.

I like to imagine, before the birth of Such a One, a consultation of the Gods upon the Mountain of Heaven.A synod of the kind (for China) would have taken place in the sixth century B.C., no doubt; because in those days certainly there was a "decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world."Transport yourselves then, say in the year 552, to the peaks of Tien Shan of Kuen Lun, or high Tai-hsing, or the grand South Mountain; and see the Pantheon assembled.

They look down over Chu Hia; they know that in three centuries or so a manvantara will be beginning there, and grow anxious lest anything has been left undone to insure its success.They note Laotse (whom they sent some fifty years earlier) at his labors; and consider, what those labors would achieve for the Black- haired People.He would bring light to the most excellent minds; the God of Light said, "I have seen to that."He would in time waken the lute-strings of the Spirit, and set Chu Hia all a-song; the God of Music said, "I have seen to that."They foresaw Wu Taotse and Ma Yuan; they foresaw Ssu-k'ung T'u and the Banished Angel; and asked "Is it not enough?"And the thought grew on them that it was not enough, till they sighed with the apprehensions that troubled them.Only a few minds among the millions, they foresaw, would have proper understanding of Tao.

Now, Gods of whatever land they may be, there are those three Bardic Brothers amongst them: He of Light, who awakens vision; He of Song, who rouses up the harmonies and ennobling vibrations; and He of Strength, whose gloves hold all things fast, and neither force nor slipperiness will avail against them.It was this third of them, Gwron, who propounded the plan that satisfied the Pantheon.I will send one among them, with the "Gloves for his treasure," said he.

They considered how it would be with Such a One: going among men as the Gods' Messenger, and with those two Gloves for his treasure.—"This way will it be," they said."Not having the treasure of the God of Light, he will seem as one without vision of the God-world or remembrance whence he came.Not having the treasure of the God of Music, he will awaken little song with the Bards.But having the Gloves, he will hold the gates of hell shut, so far as shut they may be, through all the cycle that is coming."

With that the council ended.But Plenydd God of Light and Vision thought: "Though my treasure has gone with the Old Philosopher, and I cannot endow this man with it, I will make him Such a One as can be seen by all men; I will throw my light on him, that he may be an example through the age of ages."And Alawn God of Music thought: "Though my lute has gone with Laotse, I will confer boons on this one also.Such a One he shall be, as draws no breath but to tunes of my playing; the motions of his mind, to my music, shall be like the motions of the ordered stars."— And they both thought: "It will be easy for me to do as much as this, with his having the Gloves of Gwron on his hands."

At that time K'ung Shuhliang Heih, Commander of the district of Tsow, in the Marquisate of Lu in Shantung, determined to marry again.

Now China is a vast democracy: the most democratic country in the world.Perhaps I shall come to proving that presently; for the moment I must ask you to let it pass on the mere statement, satisfied that it is true.Despite this radical democracy, then, she has had two noble families.One is descended from a famous Patriot-Pirate of recent centuries, known to Westerners as Koxinga; with it we have no concern.The other is to be found in the town of K'iuh-fow in Shantung, in the ancient Marquisate of Lu.There are about fifty thousand members of it, all bearing the surname K'ung; its head has the title of 'Duke by Imperial Appointment and hereditary right'; and, much prouder still, 'Continuator of the Sage.'

Dukes of England sometimes trace their descent from men who came over with William the Conqueror: a poor eight centuries is a thing to be proud of.There may be older families in France, Italy, and elsewhere.Duke K'ung traces his, through a line of which every scion appears more of less in history, to the son of this K'ung Shuhliang Heih in the sixth century B.C.; who in turn traced his, through a line of which every scion appeared in history, and all, with one possible exception, very honorably, to a member of the Imperial House of Shang who, in 1122 B.C., on the fall of that house, was created Duke of Sung in Honan by the first of the Chows.The House of Shang held the throne for some five centuries, beginning with Tang the Comnpleter in 1766, who traced his descent from the Yellow Emperor in mythological times.Duke K'ung, then, is descended in direct male line from sovereigns who reigned beyond the horizon of history,—at the latest, near the beginning of the third millennium B.C.The family has been distinguished for nearly five thousand years.

The matter is not unimportant; since we are to talk of a member of this family.We shall understand him better for remembering the kind of heredity that lay behind him: some seventy generations of nobility, all historic.Only one royal house in the world now is as old as his was then: that of Japan.

Some generations before, the K'ung family had lost their duchy of Sung and emigrated to Lu; where, in the early part of the sixth century, its head, this Shuhliang Heih, had made a great name for himself as a soldier. He was now a widower, and seventy years old; and saw himself compelled to make a second marriage, or the seventy illustrious generations of his ancestors would be deprived of a posterity to offer them sacrifices. So he approached a gentlman of the Yen family, who had three eligible daughters. To these Yen put the case, leaving to them to decide which should marry K'ung. —"Though old and austere," said he, "he is of the high descent, and you need have no fear of him." Chingtsai, the youngest, answered that it was for their father to choose. —"Then you shall marry him," said Yen. She did; and when her son was to be born, she was warned in a dream to make pilgrimage to a cave on Mount Ne. There the spirits of the mountain attended; there were signs and portents in the heavens at the nativity. The k'e-lin, a beast out of the mythologies, appeared to her; and she tied a white ribbon about its single horn. It is a creature that appears only when things of splendid import are to happen.

Three years after, the father died, leaving his family on the borders of poverty.At six, Ch'iu, the child, a boy of serious earnest demeanor, was teaching his companions to play at arranging, according to the rites, toy sacrificial vessels on a toy altar.Beyond this, and that they were poor, and that he doted on his mother—who would have deserved it,—we know little of his boyhood."At fifteen," he tells us himself, "his mind was bent on learning."Nothing in the way of studies, seems to have come amiss to him; of history, and ritual, and poetry, he came to know all that was to be known.He loved music, theory and practice; held it to be sacred: "not merely one of the refinements of life, but a part of life itself."It is as well to remember this; and that often, in after life, he turned dangerous situations by breaking into song; and that his lute was his constant companion.He used to say that a proper study of poetry—he was not himself a poet, though he compiled a great anthology of folk-poems later—would leave the mind without a single depraved thought.Once he said to his son: "If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to talk to.""Poetry rouses us," said he, "courtesy upholds us; music is our crown."You are, then, to see in him no puritan abhorring beauty, but a man with artistic perceptions developed.At what you might call the other pole of knowledge, he was held to know more about the science of war than any man living; and I have no doubt he did.If he had consented to use or speak about or let others use that knowledge, he might have been a great man in his day; but he never would.

At nineteen, according to the custom, he married; and soon afterwards accepted minor official appointments: Keeper of the Granaries, then Superintendent of the Public Parks in his native district.He made a name for himself by the scrupulous discharge of his duties, that came even to the ears of the Marquis; who, when his son was born, sent the young father a complimentary present of a carp.—It would have been two or three years before the beginning of the last quarter of the century when he felt the time calling to him, and voices out of the Eternal; and threw up his superintendentship to open a school.

Not an ordinary school by any means.The Pupils were not children, but young men of promise and an inquiring mind; and what he had to teach them was not the ordinary curriculum, but right living, the right ordering of social life, and the right government of states.They were to pay; but to pay according to their means and wishes; and he demanded intelligence from them; —no swelling of the fees would serve instead.—"I do not open the truth," said he, "to one not eager after knowledge; nor do I teach those unanxious to explain themselves.When I have presented one corner of a subject, and the student cannot learn from it the other three for himself, I do not repeat the lesson."He lectured to them, we read, mainly on history and poetry, deducing his lessons in life from these.

His school was a great success.In five years he had acquired some two thousand pupils: seventy or eighty of them, as he said, "men of extraordinary ability."It was that the Doors of the Lodge had opened, and its force was flowing through him in Lu, as it was through the Old Philosopher in Honanfu.—By this time he had added archery to his own studies, and (like William Q.Judge) become proficient.Also he had taken a special course in music theory under a very famous teacher."At thirty he stood firm."

Two of his disciples were members of the royal family; and Marquis Chao regarded him with favor, as the foremost educationist in the state.He had an ambition to visit the capital (of China); where, as no where else, ritual might be studied; where, too, was Laotse, with whom he longed to confer.Marquis Chao, hearing of this, provided him with the means; and he went up with a band of his pupils.There at Loyang, which is Honanfu, we see him wandering rapt through palaces and temples, examining the sacrificial vessels, marveling at the ancient art of Shang and Chow.But for a few vases, it is all lost.

He did interview Laotse; we cannot say whether only once or more often. Nor, I think, do we know what passed; the accounts we get are from the pen of honest Ben Trovato; Vero, the modest, had but little hand in them. We shall come to them later.

And now that he stands before the world a Teacher, we may drop his personal name, K'ung Ch'iu, and call him by the title to which paeans of praise have been swelling through all the ages since: K'ung Futse, K'ung the Master; latinized, Confucius.It is a name that conveys to you, perhaps, some associations of priggishness and pedantry: almost whereever you see him written of you find suggestions of the sort.Forgo them at once: they are false utterly.Missionaries have interpreted him to the West; who have worked hard to show him something less than the Nazarene.They have set him in a peculiar light; and others have followed them.Perhaps no writer except and until Dr. Lionel Giles (whose interpretation, both of the man and his doctrine, I shall try to give you), has shown him to us as he was, so that we can understand why he has stood the Naional Hero, the Savior and Ideal Man of all those millions through all these centuries.

We have been told again and again that his teaching was wholly unspiritual; that he knew nothing of the inner worlds; never mentions the Soul, or 'God'; says no word to lighten for you the "dusk within the Holy of holies."He was all for outwardness, they say: a thorough externalist; a ritualist cold and unmagnetic.—It is much what his enemies said in his own day; who, and not himself, provide the false-interpreters with their weapons.But think of the times, and you may understand.How would the missionaries feel, were Jesus translated to the Chinese as a fine man in some respects—considering—but, unfortunately!too fond of the pleasures of the table; "a gluttonous man and a winebibber "?

They were stirring times, indeed; when all boundaries were in flux, and you needed a new atlas three times a year.Robbers would carve themselves new principalities overnight; kingdoms would arise, and vanish with the waning of a moon.What would this, or any other country, become, were law, order, the police and every restraining influence made absolutely inefficient?Were California one state today; a dozen next week; in July six or seven, and next December but a purlieu to Arizona?—Things, heaven knows, are bad enough as they are; there is no dearth of crime and cheatery.Still, the police and the legal system do stand between us and red riot and ruin.In China they did not; the restraints had been crumbling for two or three centuries.Human nature, broadly speaking, is much of a muchness in all lands and ages: I warrant if you took the center of this world's respectability, which I should on the whole put in some suburb of London;—I warrant that if you relieved Clapham,—whose crimes, says Kipling very wisely, are 'chaste in Martaban,'—of police and the Pax Britannica for a hundred years or so, lurid Martaban would have little pre-eminence left to brag about.The class that now goes up primly and plugly to business in the City day by day would be cutting throats a little; they would be making life quite interesting.Their descendants, I mean.It would take time; Mother Grundy would not be disthroned in a day.But it would come; because men follow the times, and not the Soul; and are good as sheep are, but not as heroes.So in Chow China.

But the young Confucius knew his history. He looked back from that confusion to a wise Wu Wang and Duke of Chow; to a Tang the Completer, whose morning bath-tub was inscribed with this motto from The New Way: "If at any time in his life a man can make a new man of himself, why not every morning?" Most of all he looked back to the golden and sinless age of Yao and Shun and Yu, as far removed from him, nearly, as pre-Roman Britain is from us: he saw them ruling their kingdom as a strong benevolent father rules his house. In those days men had behaved themselves: natural virtue had expressed itself in the natural way. In good manners; in observation of the proprieties, for example. —In that wild Martaban of Chow China, would not a great gentleman of the old school (who happened also to be a Great Teacher) have seen a virtue in even quiet Claphamism, that we cannot? It was not the time for Such a One to slight the proprieties and 'reasonable conventions of life.' The truth is, the devotion of his disciples has left us minute pictures of the man, so that we see him … particular as to the clothes he wore; and from this too the West gathers material for its charge of externalism. Well; and if he accepted the glossy top-hats and black Prince Albert coats;—only with him they were caps and robes of azure, carnation, yellow, black, or white; this new fashion of wearing red he would have none of:—I can see nothing in it but this: the Great Soul had chosen the personality it should incarnate in, with an eye to the completeness of the work it should do; and seventy generations of noble ancestry would protest, even in the matter of clothing, against red riot and ruin and Martaban.

He is made to cite the 'Superior Man' as the model of excellence; and that phrase sounds to us detestably priggish. In the Harvard Classics it is translated (as well as may be) 'true gentleman,' or 'princely man'; in which is no priggish ring at all. Again, he is made to address his disciples as "My Children," at which, too, we naturally squirm a little: what he really called them was 'My boys,' which sounds natural and affectionate enough. Supposing the Gospels were translated into Chinese by someone with the gluttonous-man-and-winebibber bias; —what, I wonder, would he put for Amen, amen lego humin? Not "Verily, verily I say unto you"!

But I must go on with his life.

Things had gone ill in in Lu during his absence: threee great clan chieftains had stopped fighting among themselves to fight instead against their feudal superior, and Marquis Chao had been exiled to Ts'i.It touched Confucius directly; his teaching on such matters had been peremptory: he would 'rectify names': have the prince prince, and the people his subjects:—he would have law and order in the state, or the natural harmony of things was broken.As suggested above, he was very much a man of mark in Lu; and a protest from him,—which should be forth-coming— could hardly go unnoticed.With a band of disciples he followed his marquis into Ts'i: it is in Chihli, north of Lu, and was famous then for its national music.On the journey he heard Ts'i airs sung, and 'hurried forward.'One of the first things he did on arriving at the capital was to attend a concert (or something equivalent); and for three months thereafter, as a sign of thanksgiving, he ate no flesh."I never dreamed," said he, "that music could be so wonderful."

The fame of his Raja-Yoga School (that was what it was) had gone abroad, and Duke Ching of Ts'i received him well;—offered him a city with its revenues; but the offer was declined.The Duke was impressed; half inclined to turn Confucianist; wished to retain him with a pension, to have him on hand in case of need;— but withal he was of doubtful hesitating mind about it, and allowed his prime minister to dissuade him."These scholars," said the latter, "are impractical, and cannot be imitated.They are haughty and self-opinionated, and will never rest content with an inferior position.Confucius has a thousand peculiarities";—this is the gluttonous-man-and-winebibber saying, which the missionary interpreters have been echoing since;—"it would take ages to exhaust all he knows about the ceremonies of going up and down.This is not the time to examine into his rules of propriety; your people would say you were neglecting them."—When next Duke Ching was urged to follow Confucius, he answered: "I am too old to adopt his doctrines."The Master returned to Lu; lectured to his pupils, compiled the Books of Odes and of History; and waited for the disorders to pass.

Which in time they did, more or less.Marquis Ting came to the throne, and made him chief magistrate of the town of Chungtu.

Now was the time to prove his theories, and show whether he was the Man to the core, that he had been so assiduously showing himself, you may say, on the rind.Ah ha!now surely, with hard work before him, this scholar, theorist, conventional formalist, ritualist, and what else you may like to call him, will be put to shame,—shown up empty and foolish before the hard-headed men of action of his age.Who, indeed,—the hard-headed men of action— have succeeded in doing precisely nothing but to make confusion worse confounded; how much less, then, will this Impractical One do!Let us watch him, and have our laugh…—On the wrong side of your faces then; for lo now, miracles are happening!He takes control; and here at last is one city in great Chu Hia where crime has ceased to be.How does he manage it?The miracle looks but the more miraculous as you watch.He frames rules for everything; insists on the proprieties; morning, noon, and night holds up an example, and, says he, relies on the power of that.—Example?Tush, he must be beheading right and left!—Nothing of the sort; he is all against capital punishment, and will have none of it.But there is the fact: you can leave your full purse in the streets of Chung-tu, and pick it up unrifled when you pass next; you can pay your just price, and get your just measure for it, fearing no cheateries; High Cost of Living is gone; corners in this and that are no more; graft is a thing you must go elsewhere to look for;—there is none of it in Chung-tu.And graft, let me say, was a thing as proper to the towns of China then, as to the graftiest modern city you might mention.The thing is inexplicable—but perfectly attested.Not quite inexplicable, either: he came from the Gods, and had the Gloves of Gwron on his hands: he had the wisdom you cannot fathom, which meets all events and problems as they come, and finds their solution in its superhuman self, where the human brain-mind finds only dense impenetrability.—Marquis Ting saw and wondered.—"Could you do this for the whole state?"he asked.—"Surely; and for the whole empire," said Confucius.The Marquis made him, first Assistant-Superintendent of Works, then Minister of Crime.

And now you shall hear Chapter X of the Analects, to show you the outer man. All these details were noted down by the love of his disciples, for whom nothing was too petty to be recorded; and if we cannot read them without smiling, there is this to remember: they have suffered sea-change on their way to us: sea-change and time-change. What you are to see really is: (1) a great Minister of State, utterly bent on reproving and correcting the laxity of his day, performing the ritual duties of his calling—as all other duties—with a high religious sense of their antiquity and dignity; both for their own sake, and to set an example. what would be thought of an English Archbishop of Canterbury who behaved familiarly or jocularly at a Coronation Service? —(2) A gentleman of the old school, who insists on dressing well and quietly, according to his station. That is what he would appear now, in any grade of society, and among men the least capable of recognising his inner greatness: 'race' is written in every feature of his being; set him in any modern court, and with half an eye you would see that his family was a thousand years or so older than that of anyone else present, and had held the throne at various times. Here is a touch of the great gentleman: he would never fish with a net, or shoot at a bird on the bough; it was unsportsmanlike. (3) A very natural jovial man, not above "changing countenance" when fine meats were set on his table:—a thing that directly contradicts the idea of a cold, ever play-acting Confucius. A parvenu must be very careful; but a scion of the House of Shang, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, could unbend and be jolly without loss of dignity;—and, were he a Confucius, would. "A gentleman," said he, "is calm and spacious"; he was himself, according to the Analects, friendly, yet dignified; inspired awe, but not fear; was respectful, but easy. He divided mankind into three classes: Adepts or Sages; true Gentlemen; and the common run. He never claimed to belong to the first, though all China knows well that he did belong to it. He even considered that he fell short of the ideal of the second; but as to that, we need pay no attention to his opinion. Here, then, is Chapter X: