THE CHINESE CLASSICS.*

• The Chinese-Classics. Translated into English, with Preliminary Essays and Explanatory Notes. By James Legge, D.D. 'Vol. IL London ; Trubner. 1875. THE people who proudly call their country Chung-Kwoh, the Central Empire, might, it would seem, take for their motto, "We suffer prigs gladly, seeing we ourselves are priggish." It is incon- ceivable that any nation save that which has chosen the pig-tail for its appropriate head-gear would have put up with so consum- mate a specimen of the order as Mencius, or that kings or princes anywhere else but in China would have habitually welcomed similar "Superior Men" (as they unaffectedly called themselves) to come and lecture them on their regal duties and behaviour.

Mencius, Mang- Tsze (Philosopher Mang) made it his business in life to be a Teacher of Kings, and never, says Dr. Legge, "did Christian priest lift up his mitred front, or wear his Geneva gown more loftily in courts and palaces than he demeaned himself." He did not, however, assume to be in any way an emissary of Heaven, neither a Prophet with his "Thus saith the Lord," nor a Priest with his "Thus decreeth the Church," but only a Sage speaking authoritatively on the strength of his own wisdom. He desired, as his able editor and biographer observes, "to meet with some ruler who would look to him as guide, philosopher, and friend, regulating himself by his counsels, and there- after committing to him the entire administration of his government." Several other men, we imagine, beside Mencius have sighed for some such amenable" ruler," and when, in Europe, they have succeeded in finding one, as in the case of a Ximenes or a Richelieu, we have been wont to call them not Sages, but ambitious and despotic Ministers. Not so the Chinese, among whom Mencius was able to point to a whole series of Superior Men trusted and consulted by princes before his time (he was born B.C., 371)—Shun, and Yu, and Eyin, and Tae-kung, and Wang, and Chow-kung, and Tsze-sze—and also to a number of their imitators, his own contemporaries and rivals, to whom he referred with not inexplicable disgust and abhorrence. In justice to Mencius, it must be admitted, however, that his motives in seeking to govern provinces and kingdoms from behind &throne were subservient to the public good to the best of his understand- ing thereof. Whenever he obtained influence he employed it to check abuses and promote beneficent government. He even went so far as to tell his pupil kings that "the People are the most import- ant elements in a country and the Ruler the lightest," and startled King Senen by the admonition that "If a ruler have great faults, f-1 his relatives ought to remonstrate with him, and if he do not listen to them when they have done so again and again, they ought to appoint another in his place." His ideal of government was much

the same as that of Confucius, who answered his disciple Yen- Yew's remark on the populousness of Wei, and his question "What should be done for the people?" "Enrich them," quoth Con- fucius, "and when they are enriched, teach them." Abundance must come first, according to all Chinese philosophy, and educa- tion afterwards. Mencius, like Tennyson's Northern Farmer, thought a great deal of "regular meals" as moral agents, and was rather of opinion that "the poor as a loomp, is bad." "In good years," he says, "the children of the people are most of them good, and in bad years they are most of them evil." (Book VI., Pt. 1). "When pulse and grain are as abundant as water and fire, how shall there be among the people any that are not virtuous?" (Book VII. Pt. 1). "They are only men of education who, without a certainty of livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart, there is nothing they will not do in the way of self-abandonment, of moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license." Punishment in his view was not only useless but unjust towards persons whom the uncer- tainty of the means of existence drove to lawlessness and crime.

"When they have thus been involved in crime, to follow them up and punish them is to entrap the people." (Book 1., Pt. 1). Thus the regulation and encouragement of agriculture and commerce are, in the opinion of Mencius, the primary concerns of a ruler, and only when success has followed his endeavours, and "when pulse and grain are as plenty as water and fire," should he proceed to the cares of education. At this point of his instructions the Sage seems to have been met by a very vexatious political heresy, which gave him a great deal of trouble. Some Jack Cade of the "Flowery Land" had broached the doctrine that Kings should plough and reap with their own hands as well as other men, and Mencius took infinite pains to show that such a system would not

work, and that men who ruled (and we presume a fortiori men who taught rulers how to rule) had enough to do without other

labour. "The Superior Man," as he told his disciple Pang Kang (who ventured to question him about taking presents greater than Confucius had ever accepted, from Princes whom he lectured and denounced), "deserves to be supported, and should be supported.

Another topic which intensely interested Mencius and all the Sages of China, was somewhat of the nature of the query which a certain little Miss Eden asked her Whig parent some fifty years

ago,—" Mamma, are Tories born wicked, or do they only become so ?" Whether all men are naturally good or naturally bad, or

some men good and some bad, and whether virtue be always the result of education, were questions debated with vast expenditure of rhetoric. Confucius had said, "Man is born for uprightness."

Tsze-sze said, "What Heaven has conferred, is called the Nature; in accordance with this, nature is called the Path; the regulation of this path is called Instruction." Kaou said, "Man's nature is

neither good nor bad." The philosopher Seun (whose little book Dr. Legge translates at large in an Appendix, and who lived just after Mencius) taught that "The nature of Man is evil, the good which it shows is factitious ;" and that "propriety and righteous- ness are the artificial production of the Sages." As Plato argues in "The Banquet" that Love must itself be ugly, because (as Shelley

says) "it desires what it bath not,—the Beautiful," so Seuen in- geniously demonstrated that our wishing to do what is good is because our nature is evil,—as rich men do not wish for wealth, nor noblemen for rank. Mencius taught the contrary of all this, and insisted that "the nature of Man is good." The tendency of man's nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow down- wards. By leading and driving water you may cause it to go up- hill. When men are made to do what is not good their natures are dealt with in this way. (Bk. vi., Pt. i.)

Dr. Legge, whose learned and interesting comments on his author have a little too much tendency to assume the shape of

Bampton Lectures, deplores Mencius's ignorance of the Fall and of Original Sin, and justly enough points out how little sense his writings show of all the deeper phenomena of human existence which those doctrines shadow forth. There is, indeed, -with much admirable common-sense, considerable clearness of insight, and an immense wealth of illustration, —a lack—which makes itself painfully felt all through these works of Mencius, and generally through all the classical books of China—of any spark of super-secular life, any evidence of the existence in the writers of elements of feeling and thought tran- scending mere worldly wisdom and political craft, and elevating Speculation into the region of Philosophy rightly so called. In reading them en gros, with much to approve and somewhat to

admire, we yet seem to find the satisfactory solution of the enigma : How does it come to pass that the ancient, wide-spread, and generally-accepted religions of China have exercised so little elevating influence on the three hundred millions of human beings to whom, alas ! they represent the light of life ? The

wonder would be, in truth, if the dry husks of such lessons— Morality minus Magnanimity, and Religion minus the love of God —should in any soil have sprung up and borne flowers of saintly sentiment or fruit of heroic virtue. It has happened almost as a matter of course that on the one side, among the higher intel- lectual classes, Confucianism rapidly dried up into a formal rever- ence for Tien, Heaven (more often spoken of still more imperson- ally as Tai-ke, the " Summit " ), and a perpetual talk about Le, "order," the characteristic Chinese conception of the moral law. On the other hand, among the masses wherein Fo-ism (Buddhism) andTao-ism have prevailed, the nobler part of each creed has almost disappeared, and religion has dribbled down into the channels of idolatry and sorcery, wherein it seems always to run when not drawn up by a Sun of Righteousness,—a living and loving God,

—unlike to him who sleeps in Nirvana. There is throughout all Chinese classic literature, and pre-eminently in the works of the "Sage" before us, an absence of any perceptible desire to pene- trate the veil which hides eternal things, or any hunger and thirst after a righteousness and purity excelling the "propriety of con- duct" of "the Superior Man." There is no trace of any sense of

inward failure and weakness, such as made Marcus Aurelius write "What art thou, 0 Man? A living soul chained to a decaying carcase." Much leas is there the cry of St. Paul, "Oh! wretched man that I am ! who shall deliver me from this body of death ?" Such a lesson as that "The pure in heart shall see God," or such a prayer as "Give me the comfort of thy help again, and estab- lish me with thy free Spirit," is foreign to the whole genius of Chinese philosophy. Confucius insisted on the Golden Rule both in its negative form as given by the Greek Isocrates : "Thou shalt not do to another what thou would not have done to thyself," and in its Christian form, "Thou shalt do to another what thou wouldest he should do to thee ;" and one and all of the Chinese sages frequently announced their conviction that Tien blessed and approved such righteousness. But at this limit Morality and Religion together pretty nearly reached their Great Chinese Wall. The boundaries which Positivism would place on human aspiration are tacitly assumed, and cheerfully accepted, throughout Chinese classic thought, as Comte's followers may, we think, vainly hope to behold them respected by men of Aryan or Semitic blood even for thousands of years after they have assured us that the ages of theology and metaphysics have long been past.

One notable exception to this sweeping conclusion must, however, be made, as regards the non-religiousness of Chinese religion. A Buddhistic sect in China devoted to the worship of a certain mysterious Kwan Yin (variously rendered the "Goddess of Mercy," the "Manifested Voice," or "Great Compassionate Heart,") seem in a marvellous way to have leaped at a bound to a very high spiritual altitude indeed. The Rev. Samuel Beal has translated the liturgy of this sect, the Confessional Service of the Great Compassionate Kwan-Yin, and of this work the Rev. W. H. Channing gives several very remarkable extracts in his Address on the Religions of China (Boston, 1870). We must close our observations of Chinese literature briefly by quoting a few of these excerpts, which certainly prove that even in the arid wilderness of Chinese religion there are oases of vivid spiritual life. The liturgy is an "act of consecration to the service of a beneficent and com- passionate Being, who is manifested to all creatures for their deliverance from sin and error." The vow made in this service, after the Invocation of Buddha, &c., is as follows :— " Never will I seek nor receive private individual salvation, never enter into final peace alone, but for ever and everywhere will I live and strive for the universal redemption of every creature throughout all worlds. Until all are delivered, never will I leave the world of sin, sorrow, and struggle, but will remain where I am."

The liturgy proceeds to Confession, after this rubric "The wor- shippers having finished the sentences, ought to consider that all the obstacles which prevent spiritual progress spring from sins committed in our condition as sentient creatures. Every age has entertained its own peculiar crimes, which, descending from parent to child [the hereditary transmission of psychical habits,' as Dr. Carpenter would say] have caused the sorrows of our pre- sent state. Without repentance there can be no remission. Our

sins, therefore, ought to be well considered, that so they may be forgiven and destroyed. Bowing low, therefore, say thus : 'We have followed only the courses of this evil world. Hitherto we have only gone astray, but now we return. Oh! would that the Merciful would receive our vows of amendment." The con- clusion of this very noteworthy service is an intercessory prayer for the moral good of all mankind.