ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME XI

FACING PAGE

The Chinese Buddha (a sculptured Buddha of the year
A.D. 543)

The God of Fire (an ancient Chinese sculpture)

Frontispiece

96

✓ Chinese Civil Service Examinations (the twelve thousand cells for the candidates in Canton)

256

✓ The Ancient Pagoda of Soo-Chow (a temple sixteen hundred years old, or older, devoted to Confucianism). 352

SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE

OF

CHINA

INTRODUCTION

HOW CONFUCIUS SAVED AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

HINA has been aptly called "the treasure-house of old

Creligions."

religions." This is because Chinese thought is so calmly meditative that there is no record of any religious sect having been driven from the land by persecution. Sects have occasionally been persecuted, but only when they became politically dangerous. The general tolerance, and even welcoming, of new religious ideas has been such that, when China was opened to the world less than a century ago, we found that Christian sects had persisted there through all the Dark Ages of Europe, and that Jewish communities were still existing, the date of whose coming into the land was lost in a remote antiquity. Mohammedanism is also established in China, as is many another less-known creed. Chiefly, however, the land and its people are given over to three faiths, often called the THREE GREAT RELIGIONS of China. These are Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism.

These three faiths are not mutually exclusive. Indeed it is characteristic of the national attitude of easy tolerance that many a Chinaman professes himself a believer in all three. He gathers his ideas of a future life from Buddhism, takes his moral precepts for the present world from Confucianism, and soothes his superstitious fears, his yearnings for the mystic, with Taoism. How Buddhism came to China

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.

new;

In religion also Confucius stands between the old and the 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;