China Learn

I think that, from a biological standpoint, human life almost reads like a poem. It has its own rhythm and beat, its internal cycles of growth and decay. It begins with innocent childhood, followed by awkward adolescence trying awkwardly to adapt itself to mature society, with its young passions and follies, its ideals and ambitions; then it reaches a manhood of intense activities, profiting from experience and learning more about society and human nature; at middle age, there is a slight easing of tension, a mellowing of character like the ripening of fruit or the mellowing of good wine, and the gradual acquiring of a more tolerant, more cynical and at the same time a kindlier view of life; then in the sunset of our life, the endocrine glands decrease their activity, and if we have a true philosophy of old age and have ordered our life pattern according to it, it is for us the age of peace and security and leisure and contentment; finally, life flickers out and one goes into eternal sleep, never to wake up again. One should be able to sense the beauty of this rhythm of life, to appreciate, as we do in grand symphonies, its main theme, its strains of conflict and the final resolution. The movements of these cycles are very much the same in a normal life, but the music must be provided by the individual himself. In some souls, the discordant note becomes harsher and harsher and finally overwhelms or submerges the main melody. Sometimes the discordant’ note gains so much power that the music can no longer go on, and the individual shoots himself with a pistol or jumps into a river. But that is because his originalleit-motif has been hopelessly over-shadowed through the lack of a good self-education. Otherwise the normal human life runs to its normal end in a kind of dignified movement and procession. There are sometimes in many of us too many staccatos or impetuosos, and because the tempo is wrong, the music is not pleasing to the ear; we might have more of the grand rhythm and majestic tempo of the Ganges, flowing slowly and eternally into the sea.

No one can say that a life with childhood, manhood and old age is not a beautiful arrangement; the day has its morning, noon and sunset, and the year has its seasons, and it is good that it is so. There is no good or bad in life, except what ‘is good according to its own season. And if we take this biological view of life and try to live according to the seasons, no one but a conceited fool or an impossible idealist can deny that human life can be lived like a poem. Shakespeare has expressed this idea more graphically in his passage about the seven stages of life, and a good many Chinese writers have said about the same thing. It is curious that Shakespeare was never very religious, or very much concerned with religion. I think this was his greatness; he took human life largely as it was, and intruded himself as little upon the general scheme of things as he did upon the characters of his plays. Shakespeare was like Nature herself, and that is the greatest compliment we can pay to a writer or thinker. He merely lived, observed life and went away.

There are tales, long whispered in my family, which, if true, explain the two strains that mingled when my father and mother married. One strain - my mother’s - was of a hardworking, gentle, and devout folk. The other consisted of rebels, wanderers, tellers of tall tales, singers of songs.

My father eloped with my mother before she was of age.

Her father, John, found them in the home of my father’s sister, Mary. Aunt Mary was a widow with many children, but a woman of unusual capacity and determination. Her eyes fell approvingly on Grandfather John, a frail, gentle man resembling pictures of Jesus Christ. John’s wife was still alive and, to judge by a faded tintype, very beautiful. But she died shortly after, following a long illness, and my grandfather married Aunt Mary. In the small, drab villages and isolated farmhouses of northern Missouri little rumors often grew to gargantuan proportions. The gossips specialized most of all in the gruesome and more than one farm woman was thereafter seen wagging her head and heard talking of the strange things that were supposed to have happened in my grandfather’s house - of evil widows … and poor ailing wives… and poison…

Finally Grandfather wasted away and died of tuberculosis. Mary cared for him with infinite tenderness, uttering never a harsh word at his endless exactions, warning her many children, and his, to behave as she did. There lingers in my memory a vision of this tall, strong woman, sitting or kneeling by his bedside, engaged in low conversation or silent waiting.

So, John had died, said the gossips, shaking their heads knowingly. What else could you expect, when, as everyone knew, he had spent his declining years walking the floor complaining that his first wife’s spirit haunted him? As he lay dying, rumor ran, he wanted to cleanse his soul of the sin of poisoning his first wife, but Mary had smothered his confession by placing her hand across his mouth! Anything could be expected of that big woman, who came from God only knew where and could do anything from curing diseases with herbs to managing a big farm and rearing more than a dozen children!

If Aunt Mary had lived in an earlier period, her abilities might have caused her to be burned as a witch. Instead, she was well over ninety before she laid down her corncob pipe for the last time. People said she sped around the country in a Ford until her dying day, her white hair flying, her pipe in her mouth. She was so tall that when she died a special coffin had to be built for her. I have not yet heard just how many men were needed to carry the coffin, but by the time I get around to investigating the story, I’m sure the number will be fabulous. I’ve heard it said by the gentle branch of our family that Mary is most certainly not taking any back seat in the Hereafter.

All my mother’s people died young - which, considering their goodness, was only natural, On the other hand, all my father’s people, save one uncle who turned Christian missionary, lived to a ripe old age. The two family strains, meeting in me, made my spirit a battlefield across which a civil war raged endlessly.

When I was very young, my father dragged us from northern Missouri to southern Colorado, where Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company owned everything but the air. My father went to this region to make his fortune, but fell victim to a system the fruits of which were poverty, disease and ignorance for the miners.

We lived a primitive life in the camps, but I now understand that our intellectual poverty was far worse than our physical condition. When I try to recollect the impact of so-called cultural influences, I can recall only Scotch and English folk-songs, cowboy songs, and such ballads as those in praise of Jesse James - all of them sung by my father. I do not remember hearing my mother sing; she was too unhappy.

Until I was fifteen years old I knew little of the world beyond that Rockefeller domain of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. My father did unskilled labor and drank to forget his hopes, and my mother worked intermittently as a washwoman and a keeper of boarders. We Smedley children - there were five of us - somehow managed to get to the poor local primary schools. But I never finished grade school and never attended a high school. Most highschool graduates of today inspire no regret in me, but I have always believed that had I had some basic knowledge of science, mathematics, literature, and language, I would have been better equipped to meet life. I have long felt that the poverty and ignorance of my youth were the tribute which I, like millions of others, paid to “private interests.”

The schools my brothers and sisters and I attended were perhaps no more boring than most. However, my thinking was not to be disciplined, and not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could teach me grammar or arithmetic. Even in later years my efforts to learn languages ended in dismal failure, although in the case of German I managed to absorb what I needed or whatever sounded beautiful or powerful. If I disliked a person, my mind closed and I could learn nothing from him. So I took from schools and from life what I found interesting, not what people thought good for me. But my mother and a red-haired woman schoolteacher in Tercio, a mining camp, must have regarded me with hope, for they kept urging me to get an education. Education seemed to consist in reading many books, but just which I did not know. For years I groped, reading anything between covers, often understanding hardly a sentence, but believing mystically that the key to knowledge lay buried in words. My reading covered everything from trashy romance to a ghastly book on school law and one called Behaviorist Psychology.

The nearest I ever came to the classics was a large volume of something called “poetry.” Because it was printed on very thin paper, it quite naturally hung from a string in a privy. A man by the name of Shakespeare seemed to have written it but I could make neither head nor tail of it. In later years I often read of men who received their first noble impulses from contacts with great minds; I was in my early twenties before I learned who Shakespeare was, and in my forties before I read his plays. In the mining camps he had made no impression whatsoever and I returned the volume of thin paper to its nail on the privy wall.

I disliked so many things in life and received so many humiliations from rich little girls that my teachers used to keep me after school and lecture me on the bourgeois virtues. It was in vain. I fought boys with jimson weeds and rocks, and nothing could make a little lady of me. When I was nine my mother put me out to work washing dishes and caring for squawling babies. I was later promoted to stripping tobacco leaves in a cigar store, but I dawdled so much over my work that I was fired. One employer told me that I was a bad worker because I read too many books. “Here’s your wages for the week, and you needn’t come back,” he said. He gave me two dollars and a half. For years after that I did all kinds of unskilled labor.

The human mind, you say, is probably the noblest product of the Creation. This is a proposition that most people will admit, particularly when it refers to a mind like Albert Einstein’s that can prove curved space by a long mathematical equation, or Edison’s that can invent the gramaphone and the motion picture, or the minds of other physicists who can measure the rays of an advancing or receding star or deal with the constitution of the unseen atoms, or that of the inventor of natural-color movie cameras. Compared with the aimless, shifting and fumbling curiosity of the monkeys, we must agree that we have a noble, a glorious intellect that can comprehend the universe in which we are born.

The average mind, however, is charming rather than noble. Had the average mind been noble, we should be completely rational beings without sins or weaknesses or misconduct, and what an insipid world that would be! We should be so much less charming as creatures. I am such a humanist that saints without sins don’t interest me. But we are charming in our irrationality, our inconsistencies, our follies, our sprees and holiday gaieties, our prejudices, bigotry and forgetfulness. Had we all perfect brains, we shouldn’t have to make new resolutions every New Year. The beauty of the human life consists in the fact that, as we review on New Year’s Eve our last New Year resolutions, we find we have fulfilled a third of them, left unfulfilled another third, and can’t remember what the other third was. A plan that is sure to be carried out down to its last detail already loses interest for me. A general who goes to battle and is completely sure of his victory beforehand, and can even predict the exact number of casualties, will lose all interest in the battle, and might just as well throw up the whole thing. No one would play chess if he knew his opponent’s mind-good, bad or indifferent-was infallible. All novels would be unreadable did we know exactly how the mind of each character was going to work and were we able consequently to predict the exact outcome. The reading of a novel is but the chase of a wayward and unpredictable mind making its incalculable decisions at certain moments, through a maze of evolving circumstances. A stern, unforgiving father who does not at some moment relax ceases to impress us as human, and even a faithless husband who is forever faithless soon forfeits the reader’s interest. Imagine a renowned, proud composer, whom no one could induce to compose an opera for a certain beautiful woman, but who, on hearing that a hated rival composer is thinking of doing it, immediately snatches at the job; or a scientist who in his life has consistently refused to publish his writings in newspapers, but who, on seeing a rival scientist make a slip with one single letter, forgets his own rule and rushes into print. There we have laid our finger upon the singularly human quality of the mind.

The human mind is charming in its unreasonableness, its inveterate prejudices, and its waywardness and unpredictability. If we haven’t learned this truth, we have learned nothing from the century of study of human psychology. In other words, our minds still retain the aimless, fumbling quality of simian intelligence.

Consider the evolution of the human mind. Our mind was originally an organ for sensing danger and preserving life. That this mind eventually came to appreciate logic and a correct mathematical equation I consider a mere accident. Certainly it was not created for that purpose. It was created for sniffing food, and if after sniffing food, it can also sniff an abstract mathematical formula, that’s all to the good. My conception of the human brain, as of all animal brains, is that it is like an octopus or a starfish with tentacles, tentacles for feeling the truth and eating it. Today we still speak of “feeling” the truth, rather than “thinking” it. The brain, together with other sensory organs, constitutes the feelers. How its tentacles feel the truth is still as great a mystery in physics as the sensitivity to light of the purple in the eye’s retina. Every time the brain dissociates itself from the collaborating sensory apparatus and indulges in so-called “abstract thinking,” every time it gets away from what William James calls the perceptual reality and escapes into the world of conceptual reality, it becomes devitalized, dehumanized and degenerate. We all labor under the misconception that the true function of the mind is thinking, a misconception that is bound to lead to serious mistakes in philosophy unless we revise our notion of the term “thinking” itself. It is a misconception that is apt to leave the philosopher disillusioned when he goes out of his studio and watches the crowd at the market. As if thinking had much to do with our everyday behavior!

The late James Harvey Robinson has tried to show, in The Mind in the Making, how our mind gradually evolved from, and is still operating upon, four underlying layers: the animal mind, the savage mind, the childish mind and the traditional civilized mind, and has further shown us the necessity of developing a more critical mind if the present human civilization is to continue. In my scientific moments, I am inclined to agree with him, but in my wiser moments, I doubt the feasibility, or even the desirability, of such a step of general progress. I prefer to have our mind charmingly unreasonable as it is at present. I should hate to see a world in which we are all perfectly rational beings. Do I distrust scientific progress? No, I distrust sainthood. Am I anti-intellectualistic? Perhaps yes; perhaps no. I am merely in love with life, and being in love with life, I distrust the intellect profoundly. Imagine a world in which there are no stories of murder in newspapers, everyone is so omniscient that no house ever catches fire, no airplane ever has an accident, no husband deserts his wife, no pastor elopes with a choir girl, no king abdicates his throne for love, no man changes his mind and everyone proceeds to carry out with logical precision a career that he mapped out for himself at the age of ten-good-by to this happy human world! All the excitement and uncertainty of life would be gone. There would be no literature because there would be no sin, no misbehavior, no human weakness, no upsetting passion, no prejudices, no irregularities and, worst of all, no surprises. It would be like a horse race in which everyone of the forty or fifty thousand spectators knew the winner. Human fallibility is the very essence of the color of life, as the upsets are the very color and interest of a steeplechase. Imagine a Doctor Johnston without his bigoted prejudices! If we were all completely rational beings, we should then, instead of growing into perfect wisdom, degenerate into automatons, the human mind serving merely to register . certain impulses as unfailingly as a gas meter. That would be inhuman, and anything inhuman is bad.

My readers may suspect that I am trying a desperate defense of human frailties and making virtues of their vices, and yet it is not so. What we gained in correctness of conduct through the development of a completely rational mind, we should lose in the fun and color of life. And nothing is so uninteresting as to spend one’s life with a paragon of virtue as a husband or wife. I have no doubt that a society of such perfectly rational beings would be perfectly fitted to survive, and yet I wonder whether survival on such terms is worth having. Have a society that is well-ordered, by all means -but not too well-ordered! I recall the ants, who, to my mind, are probably the most perfectly rational creatures on earth. No doubt ants have evolved such a perfect socialist state that they have been able to live on this pattern for probably the last million years. So far as complete rationality of conduct is concerned, I think we have to hand it to the ants, and let the human beings come second (I doubt very much whether they deserve that). The ants are a hard-working, sane, saving and thrifty lot. They are the socially regimented and individually disciplined beings that we are not. They don’t mind working fourteen hours a day for the state or the community; they have a sense of duty and almost no sense of rights; they have persistence, order, courtesy and courage, and above all, self-discipline. Weare poor specimens of self-discipline, not even good enough for museum pieces.

Run across any hall of honor, with statues of the great men of history lining the corridor, and you will perceive that rationality of conduct is probably the last thing to be recalled from their lives. This Julius Caesar, who fell in love with Cleopatra-noble Julius Caesar, who was so completely irrational that he almost forgot (as Anthony did entirely forget) an empire for a woman. That Moses, who in a fit of rage shattered the sacred stone tablets which had taken him forty days on Mount Sinai to inscribe in company with God, and in that he was no more rational than the Israelites who forsook God and took to worshiping the Golden Calf during his absence. That King David, who was alternately cruel and generous, alternately religious and impious, who worshiped God and sinned and wrote psalms of repentance and worshiped God again. King Solomon, the very image of wisdom, who couldn’t do a thing about his son… Confucius, who told a visitor he was not at home and then, as the visitor was just outside the door, sang upstairs in order to let him know that he was at home… Jesus, with his tears at Gethsemane and his doubts on the cross . . . Shakespeare, who bequeathed his “second-best bed” to his wife… Milton, who couldn’t get along with his seventeen-year-old wife and therefore wrote a treatise on divorce and, being attacked, then burst forth into a defense of the liberty of speech in Areopagitica…

Goethe, who went through the Church’s wedding ceremony with his wife, their nineteen-year-old son standing by their side… Jonathan Swift and Stella… Ibsen and Emilie Bardach (he kept rational-good for him) …

Is it not plain that passion rather than reason rules the world?

And that what made these great men lovable, what made them human, was not their rationality, but their lack of rationality? Chinese obituary notices and biographical sketches of men and women written by their children are so unreadable, so uninteresting and so untrue, because they make all their ancestors appear abnormally and wholly virtuous beings … The great criticism of my book on China by my countrymen is that I make the Chinese too human, that I have painted their weaknesses as well as their strength. My countrymen (at least the little bureaucrats) believe that if I had painted China as a paradise inhabited by Confucianist saints only, living in a millennium of peace and reason, I could have done more effective propaganda for my country! There is really no limit to the stupidity of bureaucrats… But the very charm of biography, its very readability, depends on showing the human side of a great character which is so similar to ours. Every touch of irrational behavior in a biography is a stroke in convincing reality. On that alone, the success of Lytton Strachey’s portraits depends.

An excellent illustration of a perfectly sound mind is provided

by the English. The English have got bad logic, but very good tentacles in their brains for sensing danger and preserving life. I have not been able to discover anything logical in their national behavior or their rational history. Their universities, their constitution, their Anglican Church are all pieces of patchwork, being the steady accretions of a process of historical growth. The very strength of the British Empire consists in the English lack of cerebration, in their total inability to see the other man’s point of view, and in their strong conviction that the English way is the only right way and English food is the only good food. The moment the Englishmen learn to reason and lose their strong confidence in themselves, the British Empire will collapse. For no one can go about conquering the world if he has doubts about himself. You can make absolutely nothing out of the English attitude toward their king, their loyalty to, and their quite genuine affection for, a king who is deprived by them of the liberty of speech and is summarily told to behave or quit the throne… When Elizabethan England needed pirates to protect the Empire, she was able to produce enough pirates to meet the situation and glorified them. In every period, England was able to fight the right war, against the right enemy, with the right ally, on the right side, at the right time, and call it by a wrong name. They didn’t do it by logic, did they? They did it by their tentacles.

The English have a ruddy complexion, developed no doubt by the London fog and by cricket. A skin that is so healthy cannot but help playing an important part in their thinking, that is, in the process of feeling their way through life. And as the English think with their healthy skin, so the Chinese think with their profound intestines. That is a pretty generally established matter in China. We Chinese know that we do think with our intestines; scholars are said to have “a bellyful of ideas,” or “of scholarship,” “of poetry and literature,” or “a bellyful of sorrow,” or “of anger,” “remorse,” “chagrin,” or ‘longing.” Chinese lovers separated from each other write letters to say that “their sorrowful intestines are tied into a hundred knots,” or that at their last parting “their intestines were broken.” Chinese scholars who have arranged their ideas for an essay or a speech, but have not written them down on paper, are said to have their “belly manuscript” ready. They have got their ideas all arranged down there. I’m quite sure they have. This is, of course, all strictly scientific and capable of proof, especially when modern psychologists come to understand better the emotional quality and texture of our thought. But the Chinese don’t need any scientific proof. They just feel it down there. Only by appreciating the fact that the emotional quality of Chinese melodies all starts from below the diaphragm of the singers, can one understand Chinese music with its profound emotional color.

One must never deprecate the capacity of the human mind when dealing with the natural universe or anything except human relationships. Optimistic about the conquests of science, I am less hopeful about the general development of a critical mind in dealing with human affairs, or about mankind reaching a calm and understanding far above the sway of passions. Mankind as individuals may have reached austere heights, but mankind as social groups are still subject to primitive passions, occasional back-slidings and outcroppings of the savage instincts, and occasional waves of fanaticism and mass hysteria.

Knowing then our human frailties, we have the more reason to hate the despicable wretch who in demagogue fashion makes use of our human foibles to hound us into another world war; who inculcates hatred, of which we already have too much; who glorifies self-aggrandizement and self-interest, of which there is no lack; who appeals to our animal bigotry and racial prejudice; who deletes the fifth commandment in the training of youth and encourages killing and war as noble, as if we were not already warlike enough creatures; and who whips up and stirs our mortal passions, as if we were not already very near the beast. This wretch’s mind, no matter how cunning, how sagacious, how worldly-wise, is itself a manifestation of the beast. The gracious spirit of wisdom is tied down to a beast or a demon in us, which by this time we have come to understand is nothing but our animal heritage, or rather it ties this demon down by an old and worn leash and holds it but in temporary submission. At any time the leash may snap, and the demon be unleashed, and amidst hosannas the car of Juggernaut will ride roughshod over us, just to remind us once more how terribly near the savage we have been all this time, and how superficial is our civilization. Civilization will then be turned into a magnificent stage, on which Moors will kill Christians and Christians kill Moors and Negroes fall upon whites and whites stab Negroes and field mice emerge from sewers to eat human corpses and hawks circle in the air over an abundant human feast-all just to remind ourselves of the brotherhood of animals. Nature is quite capable of such experiments.

Psychoanalyists often cure mental patients by making them review their past and see their life objectively. Perhaps if mankind will think more of their past, they will also have a better mastery over themselves. The knowledge that we have an animal heritage and that we are very near the beasts might help to check our behaving like beasts. This animal heritage of ours makes it easier to see ourselves as we are in animal fables and satires, as in Aesop’s Fables, Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Anatole France’s Penguin Island. These animal fables were good in Aesop’s day and will still be good in the year A. D. 4000•

How can we remedy the situation? The critical mind is too thin and cold, thinking itself will help little and reason will be of small avail; only the spirit of reasonableness, a sort of warm, glowing, emotional and intuitive thinking, joined with compassion, will insure us against a reversion to our ancestral type. Only the development of our life to bring it into harmony with our instincts can save us. I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the education of our ideas.

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!