about the time of the Christian era, and what the Chinese Buddhists thought and wrote, we have seen in the preceding volume. Taoism we shall leave to a later one. Our present theme is of Confucianism, its sacred books and its remarkable preservation of the oldest literature of China.

The name of Confucius was really Kung, to which his adoring countrymen added a title, calling him Kung-fu-tze, which means, "Kung, the Master Teacher." From this interweaving of name and title the first European visitors to China supposed that the sage's name was what we have since called him- Confucius.

This Kung, this Master Teacher, stands in an amazing fashion as the center of all Chinese history, whether literary, religious, or political. Politically, China before his time. was a chaos of warring and changing little States, like medieval Europe. From the teachings of Kung arose the China of more recent centuries, a single vast empire, nonmilitary, in love with peace.

In religion also Confucius stands between the old and the new; for in Chinese civilization we must call that new which has existed for only some twenty-four hundred years or so. Confucius was born in 551 B.C., in that same wonderful century of awakening religious thought when men listened also to Buddha in India, to Solon and Pythagoras in Greece, and to the great Chinese teacher of Taoism, Lao-tze.

Before this widespread and stupendous uplifting of human thought China had possessed no established church. Religious ideas existed, but in a confused form which we can no longer clearly see. Confucius taught little that was new. He himself in one of his most important utterances describes himself as "a transmitter, not a creator; one who believed in the wisdom of the ancients, and loved them." In this transmission, however, he so emphasized the importance of both religion and morality, brought them so prominently before men's minds, that gradually the entire Chinese nation molded themselves upon his pattern. The scattered ideas of an older day were thus formulated into a clearly outlined faith. Apparently they were also elevated, purified, in pass

ing through the mind of the Master Teacher. So that Confucianism became a higher as well as a far stronger religious influence than had before existed.

Unfortunately this higher teaching was accepted as being also a finished teaching. The schools of China have ever since studied the precepts of Confucius; but until just within the present century they studied nothing else. All further progress thus became impossible. All conceivable wisdom was supposed to be bound up within the words of the Master Teacher. The Chinese have never forgotten than Confucius was only a man; but they have thought of him as the perfect man, and extended to him the honors of a god. Within this twentieth century of ours the Chinese Empress decreed that he should be given equal worship with the highest God.

What Confucius taught can best be gathered from his writings and sayings as presented in this volume. For the earthly life his precepts are quite clear: morality, reverence, a calm dignity and clinging to formalities, a turning away from trivial things and fleshly pleasures, constant study and communion with whatever seems best and highest. He preached truthfulness also, but with a practical limitation which has had unfortunate effects upon the Chinese character. He declared that truth could not always be followed in actual life. He himself broke a solemn pledge, explaining that it had been forced upon him. In brief, China has suffered because the precepts of Confucius, while of high human standard, never reached the superhuman, never upheld impossible ideals. If man is taught nothing higher than he can achieve, he will soon drag his teachings down to a much more convenient level.

In regard to the after-life the doctrines of Confucius are less clear. He found among the older religious ideas the conception of a supreme god, called vaguely Heaven, or Ti, and he retained the thought. He found also the worship of ancestors, "the spirits of the mighty dead." These semihuman gods were emphasized in his teaching rather more than the supreme god; but neither was given such prominence as man himself. Human beings were to grow nobler;

but not by worship of God, not by adoration, prayer, submission, the breaking of the human spirit. Rather they were to rise by the strengthening of this human spirit, by contemplation of themselves, their own powers and possibilities of righteousness. Growth was to be from within, not from without. It was to come neither from life's teaching nor from God's gift, but from man's own will.

Of course no such contrast as this is deliberately emphasized by Confucianism. God's side is merely ignored, left scarcely seen; man's power is taught. That is why Confucianism had no quarrel with Buddhism or with other religions. Man, in his struggle against his own folly and weakness, is welcome to find any help he can, whether from gods or from the cloudy borderland to which we of to-day have given many names, but which simpler men of old called

magic." For the main portion of two thousand years Confucianism has been the State religion of China, and through all that time it has never objected to the company of other religions or philosophies.

Turn now to the ancient literature of China, upon which Confucianism is chiefly built. Here also the Master Teacher stands at the dividing line between the China of a remote past and the China that we know. Before his day a literature existed, but was not highly treasured. Confucius pointed out its value, based all his teachings on it, read into it a meaning which perhaps had not before existed. Thus he elevated this literature, or rather what fragments of it time and chance had left, to the rank of a sacred treasure. It became a Holy Scripture. The later followers of Confucius interpreted its simple words as having vast symbolical meanings. Chinese scholars admitted that these subtle precepts might be misexpounded and misunderstood; but when correctly interpreted, their truth was no more to be questioned than that of the Master himself.

The ancient writings thus rescued from oblivion by Confucius are classed with the books attributed to him or to his chief disciples of the next two centuries; and these form the sacred literature of China. The Confucianism of later

ages never produced anything but commentaries upon these books, scraps of tradition and interpretations which, as the years drifted idly by, became ever more and more far-fetched and fantastic.

THE FIVE CLASSICS

The writings which Confucius preserved consist of four collections of documents of different classes. With them is included a single historical work by the Master himself; and these five are called the Five King, or Five Ancient Classics.

THE YI KING

First of these comes the YI KING (pronounced "yee keeng"), which means the Book of Changes, or perhaps we might better call it the Book of Divination or of Magic. If we accept Chinese tradition, the oldest portion of this curious and puzzling book had its origin in the very beginning of Chinese civilization, in the year 3322 B.C. This date is given for the founding of the first Chinese kingdom by Fu-hsi, and may be accepted as fairly correct, though some scholars would reduce it by about four centuries. Chronology was not an exact science in the days of Fu-hsi; yet the Chinese annals are much better preserved and give us closer and more reliable figures than any of our recent guesses and approximations upon Babylonian and Egyptian antiquity.

To speak of the Yi, however, as the oldest piece of Chinese literature involves a misconception. All that Fu-hsi contributed to this Yi was its wholly unintelligible foundation. This consists of a series of diagrams, a merely mathematical arrangement of plain, straight lines. These diagrams were used for thousands of years as a basis for magic, for divination of the future; and then, a little before 1100 B.C., two celebrated kings wrote successive explanations, mystical explanations, of the magic meaning of the ancient diagrams. Later commentators added further explanations. Probably Confucius himself wrote some; and all this mass of interpretation upon interpretation constitutes the YI KING.

What was the original source or meaning of these most

ancient, mystic diagrams? We do not know. A recent writer has argued that they are a vocabulary, or rather a syllabary, of the writing of some still more ancient people, preserved by the Chinese long after the earlier use and meaning of the signs had been forgotten. This may be true, but if so the mathematical abstractness and precision of this ancient writing argue for man's intellect a previous epoch of growth and thought almost inconceivable. And whatever these silent diagrams may once have been, they have been dignified now by five thousand years of human reverence. They are reverenced to-day. There is no other letter, sign, or sacred symbol of our time that can claim anything like the antiquity of worship which surrounds these irresponsive ancient diagrams. If Chinese scholarship still pores over their every outline and invests them with mysteries of meaning which we can not admit, their age at least gives to the study a fascination which we all can feel.

THE SHU KING

The second of the ancient classics is the SHU KING (pronounced "shoo keeng"), or collection of historic writings. Some of the short books or documents preserved in the Shu are of much earlier date than the written parts of the Yi. With the oldest documents of the Shu therefore, the “literature" of China may be said to commence. There are no present manuscripts of any of the Five Classics which date back more than a thousand years or two; but Chinamen have been talking and writing about the classics ever since Confucius's time, and we can be sure that they have come down to us practically unchanged. As to their existence before the days of the Master, the Shu shows itself clearly for what it is, not a continuous history, but a collection from among older records, many of which had been lost. The surviving documents are of different classes, boastful records of kings not unlike those of Assyria, earnest prayers from humblerminded rulers, solemn moral councils like those of Egyptian scribes, speeches made before battle, outbursts of lamentation. Of these fragmentary records, the oldest speak, and speak