Chapter 2 part 1 EP 2
The Chinese view of man also arrived at the idea that man is ‘the
Lord of the Creation (“Spirit of the Ten Thousand Things”), and in the
Confucianist view, man ranks as the equal of heaven and earth in
the “Trio of Geniuses.” The background was animistic: everything
was alive or inhabited by a spirit—mountains, rivers, and everything
that reached a grand old age. The winds and thunder were spirits
themselves; each of the great mountains and each river was ruled by
a spirit who practically owned it; each kind of flower had a fairy in
heaven attending to its seasons and its welfare, and there was a
Queen of All Flowers whose birthday came on the twelfth day of the
second moon; every willow tree pine tree, cypress, fox or turtle that
reached a grand old age, say over a few hundred years, acquired by
that very fact immortality and became a “genius.”
With this animistic background, it is natural that man is also
considered a manifestation of the spirit. This spirit, like all life in the
entire universe, is produced by the union of the male, active, positive
or yang principle, and the female, passive, negative or yin principle—
which is really no more than a lucky, shrewd guess at positive and
negative electricity. When this spirit becomes incarnated in a human
body, it is called p’o; when unattached to a body and floating about
as spirit it is called hwen. (A man of forceful personality or “spirits” is
spoken of as having a lot of p’oil, or p’o-energy.) After death, this
hwen continues to wander about- Normally it does not bother people,
but if no one buries and offers sacrifices to the deceased, the spirit
becomes a “wandering ghost,” for which reason an All Souls’ Day is
set apart on the fifteenth day of the seventh moon for a general
sacrifice to those drowned in water or dead and unburied in a
strange land. Also, if the deceased was murdered or died suffering a
wrong, the sense of injustice in the ghost compels it to hang about
and cause trouble until the wrong is avenged and the spirit is
satisfied. Then all trouble is stopped.
While living, man, who is spirit taking shape in a body, necessarily
has certain passions, desires, and a flow of “vital energy,” or in more
easily understood English, just “nervous energy.” In and for
themselves, these are neither good nor bad, but just something
given and inseparable from the characteristically human life. All men
and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and
also a conscience; they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are
subject to sickness, pain, suffering and death. Culture consists in
bringing about the expression of these passions and desires in
harmony. That is the Confucianist view, which believes that by living
in harmony with this human nature given us, we can become the
equals of heaven and earth, as quoted at the end of Chapter VI. The
Buddhists, however, regard the mortal desires of the flesh essentially
as the medieval Christians did—they are a nuisance to be done
away with. Men and women who are too intelligent, or inclined to
think too much, sometimes accept this view and become monks and
nuns; but on the whole, Confucian good sense forbids it. Then also,
with a Taoistic touch, beautiful and talented girls suffering a harsh
fate are regarded as “fallen fairie,” punished for having mortal
thoughts or some neglect of duty in heaven and sent down to this
earth to live through a predestined fate of mortal sufferings.
Man’s intellect is considered as a flow of energy. Literally this
intellect is “spirit of a genius” (chingshen), the word “genius” being
essentially taken in the sense in which we speak of fox genii, rock
genii and pine genii. The nearest English equivalent is, as I have
suggested, “vitality” or “nervous energy,” which ebbs and flows at
different times of the day and of the person’s life. Every man born
into this world starts out with certain passions and desires and this
vital energy, which run their course in different cycles through
childhood, youth, maturity, old age and death. Confucius said, “When
young, beware of fighting; when strong, beware of sex; and when
old, beware of possession,” which simply means that a boy loves
fighting, a young man loves women, and an old man loves money.
Faced with this compound of physical, mental and moral assets,
the Chinese takes an attitude toward man himself, as toward all
other problems, which may be summed up in the phrase: “Let us be
reasonable.” This is an attitude of expecting neither too much nor too
little. Man is, as it were, sandwiched between heaven and earth,
between idealism and realism, between lofty thoughts and the baser
passions. Being so sandwiched is the very essence of humanity; it is
human to have thirst for knowledge and thirst for water, to love a
good idea and a good dish of pork with bamboo shoots, and to
admire a beautiful saying and a beautiful woman. This being the
case, our world is necessarily an imperfect world. Of course there is
a chance of taking human society in hand and making it better, but
the Chinese do not expect either perfect peace or perfect happiness.
There is a story illustrating this point of view. There was a man who
was in Hell and about to be re-incarnated, and he said to the King of
Re-incarnation, “If you want me to return to the earth as a human
being, I will go only on my own conditions.” “And what are they?”
asked the King. The man replied, “I must be born the son of a
cabinet minister and father of a future ‘Literary Wrangler’ (the scholar
who comes out first at the national examinations). I must have ten
thousand acres of land surrounding my home and fish ponds and
fruits of every kind and a beautiful wife and pretty concubines, all
good and loving to me, and rooms stocked to the ceiling with gold
and pearls and cellars stocked full of grain and trunks chockful of
money, and I myself must be a Grand Councilor or a Duke of the
First Rank and enjoy honor and prosperity and live until I am a
hundred years old,” And the King of Re-incarnation replied, “If there
was such a lot on earth, I would go and be re-incarnated myself, and
not give it to you!”
The reasonable attitude is, since we’ve got this human nature,
let’s start with it. Besides, there is no escaping from it anyway,
Passions and instincts are originally good or originally bad, but there
is not much use talking about them, is there? On the other hand,
there is the danger of our being enslaved by them. Just stay in the
middle of the road. This reasonable attitude creates such a forgiving
kind of philosophy that, at least to a cultured, broad-minded scholar
who lives according to the spirit of reasonableness, any human error
or misbehavior whatsoever, legal or moral or political, which can be
labeled as “common human nature” (more literally, “man’s normal
passions”), is excusable- The Chinese go so far as to assume that
Heaven or God Himself is quite a reasonable being, that if you live
reasonably, according to your best lights, you have nothing to fear,
that peace of conscience is the greatest of all gifts, and that a man
with a clear conscience need not be afraid even of ghosts. With a
reasonable God supervising the affairs of reasonable and some
unreasonable beings, everything is quite all right in this world.
Tyrants die; traitors commit suicide; the grasping fellow is seen
selling his property; the sons of a powerful and rich collector of
curios (about whom tales are told of grasping greed or extortion by
power) are seen selling out the collection on which their father spent
so much thought and trouble, and these same curios are now being
dispersed among other families; murderers are found out and dead
and wronged women are avenged. Some-times, but quite seldom,
an oppressed person cries out, “Heaven has no eyes!” (Justice is
blind.) Eventually, both in Taoism and in Confucianism, the
conclusion and highest goal of this philosophy is complete
understanding of and harmony with nature, resulting in what I may
call “reasonable naturalism,” if we must have a term for
classification. A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life
with a sort of animal satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it,
“Others gave birth to us and we give birth to others. What else are
we to do?”
There is a terrible philosophy in this saying, “Others gave birth to
us and we give birth to others.” Life becomes a biological procession
and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the
exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the
hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought
that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his
ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall
not have sons and grandsons of whom we need be ashamed. The
whole pattern of Chinese life is organized according to this one idea.
