China Learn

Our Animal Heritage on Being Mortal

There are grave consequences following upon our having this mortal body: first our being mortal, then our having a stomach, having strong muscles and having a curious mind. These facts, because of their basic character, profoundly influence the character of human civilization. Because this is so obvious, we never think about it. But we cannot understand ourselves and our civilization unless we see these consequences clearly.

I suspect that all democracy, all poetry, and all philosophy start out from this God-given fact that all of us, princes and paupers alike, are limited to a body of five or six feet and live a life of fifty or sixty years. On the whole, the arrangement is quite handy. We are neither too long nor too short. At least I am quite satisfied with five feet four. And fifty or sixty years seems to me such an awfully long time; it is, in fact, a matter of two or three generations. It is so arranged that when we are born, we see certain old grandfathers, who die in the course of time, and when we become grandfathers ourselves, we see other tiny tots being born. That seems to make it just perfect. The whole philosophy of the matter lies in the Chinese saying that “A man may own a thousand acres of land, and yet he still sleeps upon a bed of five feet” or sixty inches. It doesn’t seem as if a king needed very much more than seven feet at the outside for his bed, and there he will have to go and stretch himself at night. I am therefore as good as a king. And no matter how rich a man is, few exceed the Biblical limit of threescore and ten. To live beyond seventy is to be called in Chinese “ancient-rare,” because of the Chinese line that “it is rare for man to live over seventy since the ancient times.”

And so in respect of wealth. Of this life, everybody has a share, but no one owns the mortgage. And so we are enabled to take this life more lightly; instead of being permanent tenants upon this earth, we become its transient guests, for guests we all are of this earth, the owners of the land no less than the share-croppers. It takes something out of the meaning of the word “landlord.” No one really owns a house and no one really owns a field. As a Chinese poet says:

What pretty, golden fields against a hill! Newcomers harvest crops that others till. Rejoice not, 0 newcomers, at your harvest; One waits behind-a new newcomer still!

The democracy of death is seldom appreciated. Without death, even St. Helena would have meant nothing to Napoleon, and I do not know what Europe would be like. There would be no biographies of heroes or conquerors, and even if there were, their biographers certainly would be less forgiving and sympathetic. We forgive the great of this world because they are dead. By their being dead, we feel that we have got even with them. Every funeral procession carries a banner upon which are written the words, “Equality of Mankind.” What joy of life is seen in the following ballad that the oppressed people of China composed about the death of Ch’in Shihhuang, the builder of the Great Wall and the tyrant, who, while he lived, made “libelous thoughts in the belly” punishable by death, burned the Confucian books and buried hundreds of Confucian scholars alive:

Ch’in Shih-huang is going to die! 2 He opened my door,

And sat on my floor,

He drank my gravy,

And wanted some more.

He sipped my wine, and couldn’t tell what for; I’ll bend my bow,

And shoot him at the wall.

When he arrives at Shach’iu, Then he is going to fall!

From this, then, a sense of human comedy and the very stuff of human poetry and philosophy take their rise. He who perceives death perceives a sense of the human comedy, and quickly becomes a poet. Shakespeare became a deep poet, when he had Hamlet trace the noble dust of Alexander, “till he find it stopping a bunghole”; “Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?” There is, after all, no more superb sense of comedy in Shakespeare than when he let King Richard II talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs and the antic that keeps court within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of a king, or where he speaks of “a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizance’s, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries,” with all his fines ending in a “fine pate full of fine dirt.” Omar Khayyam and his Chinese counterpart, Chia Fuhsi (alias Mup’itse, an obscure Chinese poet), derived all their comic spirit and comic interpretation of history from the sense of death itself, by pointing to the faxes making their homes in the kings’ graves. And Chinese philosophy first acquired depth and humor with Chuangtse, who based his entire philosophy, too, on a comment on the sight of a skull:

Chuangtse went to Ch’u and saw an empty skull with its empty and dried outline. He struck it with a horsewhip and asked it, “Hast thou come to this because thou loved pleasures and lived inordinately? Wert thou a refugee running away from the law? Didst thou do something wrong to bring shame upon thy parents and thy family? Or wert thou starved to death? Or didst thou come to thy old age and die a natural death?” Having said this, Chuangtse took the skull and slept upon it as a pillow…

When Chuangtse’s wife died, Hueitse went to express his condolence but found Chuangtse squatting on the ground and singing a song, beating time by striking an earthen basin. “Why, this woman has lived with you and borne you children. At the worst, you might refrain from weeping when her old body dies. Is it not rather too much that you should beat the basin and sing?”

And Chuangtse replied, “You are mistaken. When she first died, I could not also help feeling sad and moved, but I reflected that in the beginning she had no life, and not only no life, she had no bodily shape; and not only no bodily shape, she had no ghost. Caught in this ever-changing flux of things, she became a ghost, the ghost became a body, and the body became alive. Now she has changed again and become dead, and by so doing she has joined the eternal procession of spring, summer, autumn and winter. Why should I make so much noise and wail and weep over her while her body lies quietly there in the big house? That would be a failure to understand the course of things. That is why I stopped crying.”

Thus I see both poetry and philosophy began with the recognition of our mortality and a sense of the evanescence of time. This sense of life’s evanescence is back of all Chinese poetry, as well as of a good part of Western poetry-the feeling that life is essentially but a dream, while we row, row our boat down the river in the sunset of a beautiful afternoon, that flowers cannot bloom forever, the moon waxes and wanes, and human life itself joins the eternal procession of the plant and animal worlds in being born, growing to maturity and dying to make room for others. Man began to be philosophical only when he saw the vanity of this earthly existence. Chuangtse said that he once dreamed of being a butterfly, and while he was in the dream, he felt he could flutter his wings and everything was real, but that on waking up, he realized that he was Chuangtse and Chuangtse was real. Then he thought and wondered which was really real, whether he was really Chuangtse dreaming of being a butterfly, or really a butterfly dreaming of being Chuangtse. Life, then, is really a dream, and we human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard. Half of the poetry of life would be gone, if we did not feel that life was either a dream, or a voyage with transient travelers, or merely a stage in which the actors seldom realized that they were playing their parts. So wrote a Chinese scholar, Liu Tasheng, to his friend:

Of all the things in the world, that in which we are most earnest is to be an official and that which we call the most frivolous is to be an actor in a play. But I think this is all foolishness. I have often seen on the stage how the actors sing and weep and scold each other and crack jokes, believing that they are real people. But the real thing in a play is not the ancient characters thus being enacted, but rather these actors who enact them. They all have their parents, wives and children, all want to feed their parents, wives and children, and all do so by singing and weeping and laughing and scolding and cracking jokes. They are the real ancient characters that they try to portray. I have also seen how some of these actors, who wear an official cap and gown and by their own acting believe themselves to be real officials, so much so that they think no one in the world ever suspects they are acting. They do not realize that while they bow and kowtow to each other and sit and talk and look about, and even while they are the dignified officials before whom the prisoners tremble, they are only actors who by their singing and weeping and laughing and scolding and cracking jokes are trying to feed their parents, wives and children! Alas! that there are people who stick to a certain play, a certain role, a certain text and a certain accent or style of delivery, until the entire asset of their bowels and internal organs (i.e., instincts and emotions) are dominated by the play, without realizing once that they are really actors!