THE PROBLEM OF CHINESE RELIGION.
WE wonder whether Sir Alfred Lyall's most impressive account of what he calls "Official Polytheism in China" will stir up the "Society for the Liberation of Religion from State Patronage and Control" to establish a branch in China for the conversion of that great nation from their apparent subserviency, in religious belief, to State decrees. In it he gives a most curious account of the manner in which the Emperor of China assumes the final religious authority over various great and distinct faiths, promotes dead men to the position of tutelary deities, promotes tutelary deities to higher places in the Pantheon, decrees the various re- incarnations of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, and disposes at will of the various claims supposed to be made by spirits for their re-embodiment, allowing some of them and refusing others, or partly allowing and partly refusing them, and publishing all his decisions in the official Gazette of Pekin (by far the oldest newspaper in the world), so as to accustom the Chinese to the conception that in the Emperor or Empress of China, there resides absolute authority not only to determine things civil, but to determine things spiritual. Sometimes a decree is published promoting a municipal divinity to the guardianship of a province ; some- times promoting a river-god to a higher place, or giving him an additional title "in recognition of his s•Irvices to mankind." Sometimes a question is brought before the Emperor as to the asserted re-embodiment of some particular spirit who bad not received the official sanction for his re-embodiment. For example, a certain person called Awang Chiamnbalch'uch- ‘engchiateeo was said to be the re-embodiment of a great Buddhist dignitary called the Nomen Han, "who in a previous reign had committed offences so serious that the privilege of successive births in this world had been withdrawn from him for ever," and who had died in 1844. The Tibetan Lamas asked permission for this person with the long name to become a Lama, offering at the same time to provide one thousand horse for the public service by way of bribe. The Emperor in the Pekin Gazette so far grants the request that he declares that Awang may join the priest- hood and return to Tibet ; "but the request that he shall be recognised as the embodiment of the Nomen Han is refused." If Mr. Edward Miall could be re-embodied, surely he would make it his first duty to preach the liberation of Chinese religion "from State patronage and control," and to publish in China the gospel that embodiments and re-embodiments, and religious authority generally are not at the disposal of any human Government, Chinese or otherwise. But how far his gospel would make way in China against this singular acquiescence of centuries in the absolute power of the State over things spiritual as well as secular, no human foresight could determine. It is of course possible that this acquiescence in the decisions of the Emperor on things spiritual is more apparent than real,—that it resembles the neutrality of Western agnostics with regard to religious conceptions to which they are personally indifferent, but which they do not in any sense accept. That supposition would more or less fit the secularistic tendencies of the Chinese character, which appear to attach more sacredness to custom and convention, than to any kind of hope or aspiration. Sir Alfred Lyall does not tell us, probably he does not himself know, how far the undisputed officialism of Chinese religion affects profoundly the minds and creeds of the Chinese, as distinguished from their mere ex- ternal professions. It may be that the Chinese people, though they do not resemble the religious sects whom the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis exhorted in vain to put down frankly in the Census paper, "not what they believed, but only what they professed," still do not at all believe what they neverthe- less never think of disputing. It may be that the whole fabrics of Buddism, Taoism, and Confucianism in China are
hollow, and that they do not positively collapse simply because the Chinese do not care enough about the matter to resist the formal authority of the State.
But if this is not the case,—and it is very difficult to imagine that it is the case, or we should not hear of popular applica- tions to the Government to canonise this or that departed worthy,—what a picture it gives us of religions which seem the very antitheses of what we mean by religion, inasmuch as, instead of appealing to the ruler of the spiritual world to redress the apparent anomalies and paradoxes of the visible world, the Chinese worshipper appeals to the ruler of a portion of the visible world to sanction the spiritual arrange- ments of the invisible world ! We should have been disposed to say that the most fruitful of all the roots of religions belief is the irresistible impression that the restlessness which agitates us under the experience of injustice, evil, misery, sin, is due to the light which we derive from him who is always trying to bring home to us the life at. which we should aim, and to stir us to humiliation at our failure to realise it. That "every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and eometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning," is perhaps the deepest of all the convictions from which religions spring. Yet here, apparently, is a great people who hold that every spiritual gift and every divine gift is from below, and passes upward from the throne set over the crowded and often miserable millions of the Chinese Empire, into the regions of immortal life. In other words, if China is full of injustice and needless misery, what possible reason can there be for a Chinese to suppose that the world beyond the grave is not quite as full, or even fuller, of injustice and needless misery than China itself An administration which fails to make this visible life just and desirable to many millions, will certainly fail to make the invisible life more so, for it sees some at least of the conditions of just rule here, but can merely guess in the dark at those of the invisible world. In fact, one wonders almost helplessly, after reading Sir Alfred Lyall's sketch of the Imperial dealings with gods and heroes of the world of spirits, as portrayed by the decrees in the Imperial Gazette of Pekin, what those Chinese who accept these decrees as representing real acts of power, think of the order of the invisible world, whether, indeed, they attribute to it any order at all, seeing that they make its order dependent on the endorsement of a creature who makes so little of a success of his work on earth. Amongst our Western peoples, it is the conscience urging us to cease to do evil and learn to do well, that bears witness to the existence of a spiritual power that hates evil and loves good ; but by men who seriously think that any such power, if it exists at all, is dependent for its efficiency on the pass-word of a monarch who cannot punish a hundred-thousandth part of the iniquities of his own realm, or secure justice to one in a hundred thousand of his own subjects, it is hardly possible that the penitence for wrong-doing and the stimulus to right-doing can be attri- buted to the inspiration of beings so impotent. The power that promotes gods to higher stations in the pantheon must surely be regarded as above those gods. In other words, spiritual vitality cannot come from any higher or deeper source than the Throne in Pekin, supposing that the invisible world itself is subject to that Throne. Doubtless a Chinese would answer that the Emperor of China is himself regarded as the reincarnation of some great spiritual power which has ruled for unnumbered centuries, as well in the invisible as the visible world. But even on that assumption he is the reincarnation of a power who has left, and still leaves, the Chinese themselves in great disorder and misery, and subject to the scourge of awful wickedness, of awful calamities, of awful injustice ; and if he can do so little for the realm which he sees, it can hardly be expected that he will either do more or care to do more for that part of it which he does not see. It can hardly be he who prompts the con-
sciences of men to repentance and reparation, when he prompts those visibly around him to little except abject submission to his own will. What, then, is the root of the religious spirit in those immense provinces where men believe, or at all events do not actually disbelieve, that the throne of the universe and the throne of the Chinese Empire is one and the same ?
It is, however, worthy of note that the reasons for which the Emperor promotes divinities to higher stations in the invisible world, appear to be acts of beneficence to men. During one of the devastating floods caused by the overflow of
the Yellow River, it is said that a deceased worthy named Pal Ma Chiang "was constantly present, and at a critical moment, when the embankment was giving way, he calmed down the flood by a most timely apparition, whence he has justly merited an additional title in recognition of his services to mankind. Another memorial claims honorary titles for a spirit who guarded the fields from a swarm of locusts ; while a famous virgin, who served in the army like Joan of Arc, and died in great honour, is reported for decoration on the ground of having twice, since her death, saved a fort that was besieged by rebels." This looks as if the power of the invisibles to do good were conceived as inde- pendent of the authority which rewards them for doing it, and suggests that the Chinese conception of the central spiritual Court at Pekin is rather that of a sort of grand Herald's office which regulates the etiquettes of the spiritual world, than that of the power which promotes beneficence and protects from evil. Do not the Chinese, after all, perhaps regard the decrees of the Pekin Gazette as rather registering than con- stituting the rank of the spiritual world, as overruled by a sort of formal inspiration which cannot go wrong as to the true title of honour, rather than as sending forth the great forces of righteousness and purity and pity by which the heart of man is strengthened and guided P There is something in the great Mandarin system which suggests a discrimination in the Chinese mind between the power which does the good, and the conferring of formal rank as the conventional attestation of that power; and perhaps, after all, the Emperor of China is only regarded as a sort of Ulster king-at-arms who has the solemn duty of manifesting to both worlds the merits which voluntary services have gained. But even on that supposition, the problem of Chinese religion is to us a very difficult one. Even the recog- nition of a Celestial etiquette which only an earthly power can regulate, though the deeds which earn the distinctions so declared are not within its reach, is a conception so utterly alien to all that we call religions conviction, that we hardly know how to compute its place in our spiritual world.
Previous page
