Frederic Henry Balfour

“ Yang Chu said, "A man who lives to be a hundred has a great allowance of years. There is not one in a thousand who attains to it. . . . Yet what, after all, is a man's life worth to him? What true joy does it afford? Well, he may get elegance and comfort—enjoy beautiful sounds and sights. Yet comfort and elegance cannot suffice him for ever; beautiful sounds and sights cannot be enjoyed indefinitely. Over and above this, there are punishments to deter and rewards to stimulate; and there are various methods of acquiring fame to guide one's policy of action. ”

“ The peach-gardens of China are a fair sight in all the glory of their springtide bloom, when the trees are laden with blossoms of delicate pink and white and the air sweetened with their rich fragrance. The Chinese, in celebrating their admiration for flowers, give a high place to the blossoms of fruit, which English poets appear generally rather to ignore. ”

“ Be advised by me; if you will only repent by dawn, you may enjoy emoluments from the State ere night."
"We have known all that for a long time," replied Chao and Mu, "and we made our choice ages ago. Do you really suppose we have had to wait for you to tell us? Life is not to be had for the asking, while death comes only too easily; and which, pray, is the more earnestly desired? What? To struggle after rectitude and decorum in order to make a show before others; to feign virtues we don't possess in order to acquire fame,—why, we would very much sooner die at once. ”

“ Shang Ch'iu-k'ai bore all their rudeness without the slightest appearance of anger, until the ingenuity of his assailants was exhausted and they themselves tired with their game. Then they drove him to the top of a high tower, and one of them cried with a loud voice, "A thousand ounces of gold to any man who will jump down!" The rest all vied with one another in professing their willingness to do it; but Shang Ch'iu-k'ai, believing them to be in earnest, threw himself over at once. His body looked like a flying bird, and he alighted on the ground without sustaining the slightest injury. ”

“ The incorruptible brothers Po I and Shu Ch'i died of hunger, while the traitor Chi Shih waxed rich. Now, pray, if you, Mr. Free Will, are as powerful as you say you are, how is it that all the good men died early and all the bad ones flourished till they were old?—that the Sage was reduced to misery, while a rebel gained his ends?—that the wise were slighted and the foolish held in honour?—that the virtuous were poor, while the wicked rolled in wealth? ”

“ TAOIST HERMITS.
The tendency of nearly all religions in the direction of asceticism is proved by the existence, in almost every quarter of the globe, of hermits. A desire to flee from the cares and enticements of the world, to shun the face of one's fellow-man, and to devote oneself entirely to the contemplation of the unseen constitutes, in most instances, that frame of mind which impels its subject to abjure the claims of family and friendship and all that makes life sweet. With the growth of enlightenment and the rationalistic spirit, the hermit-race has gradually been dying out. ”

“ When Lieh-tzŭ heard this, he smiled, and said, "Both those who say that Heaven and Earth will disrupt, and those who say they will not, make a great blunder. Whether disruption will or will not take place is a question about which I cannot know anything; yet each of the two theories has its advocate. Thus the living know nothing of death, the dead know nothing of life; the coming know nothing of their departure, the departing know nothing of their return. Whether there is to be disruption or not, why should I trouble myself about it either way?" ”

“ No one will dispute the propriety of the Chinese in placing the relation of paternity and sonhood among the five primary relationships of mankind. But where it is pushed to such an extreme as it is in China, where the father is endowed with the authority of an absolute and irresponsible despot, and the son lowered to being the slave of another man simply because that other man was instrumental in bringing him into the world, it becomes an outrage, a mischief, and a folly. ”

“ Their idea of happiness is, after all, a very wise and very pure one. Perfect indifference to love and hate—the annihilation of all passions, desires, and even preferences—no striving, or wishing to strive—nothing but absolute apathy and profound insensibility to those things which, painful or pleasurable, tend to wear out the bodies and souls of men; such is the Taoist heaven. It is a return to the pure, original, self-existent nature of men, which has been despoiled and injured by contact with worldly matters. ”

“ The moon increased in splendour, till the room was as bright as day; rich perfumes rose into the air, sweet and heavy, permeating the persons of the revellers; host and guests drank to each other repeatedly; cups and goblets were mixed together on the table, presenting a scene of most luxurious confusion. At last, when the fumes of the wine were beginning to take effect, a sylph in a red robe filled a huge goblet to the brim and presented it to the Lady Wind, saying, "I have a song to sing to you." ”

“ In the Book of the Yellow Emperor it is written:—"When a form moves, it does not produce another form, but a shadow; when a sound is emitted, it does not produce another sound, but an echo. Immobility does not produce nothing; it produces a something. Forms must come to an end; the Cosmos is finite in point of time, just as I am myself; but where the end leads to nobody knows. . . . It is the destiny of the living to be finite; the finite cannot but come to an end, just as that which is born cannot but give birth in its turn ”

“ Apart from his depravity, Shih Huang Ti aspired to be, and was, a great reformer. He sought to build the world afresh; to substitute new and better things for old ones to wean men's minds from their slavish adherence to the past; to instil into them the great truth that intellect and energy must march with the times; and to remodel worn-out institutions on a new basis. Was not this admirable? Was it not, indeed, the very thing that China needs to-day, and that we foreigners are spasmodically attempting to bring about? ”

“ Take them, then, dear friend; long may you live to be the guardian of our race, and then our own lives will be long and happy too!" So the philosopher took the blossoms, and ate them; when suddenly his face grew young again, the wrinkles disappeared from his brow, his complexion became fair and delicate, and he felt a new strong current of energy coursing through his veins. ”

“ The carter looked round in trepidation for the approaching cortège, and heartily wished himself a mile underground; when his shabby fare, jumping out, indulged in a good-natured laugh at the poor man's terror, telling him he need not fear, for he was no other than the Prince of Tun himself. That was the last occasion, however, on which the carter drove that cart and donkey, for the next day the Fifth Prince sent him a present of a new and handsome vehicle, with a good stout mule, by means of which he has been earning a comfortable living ever since. ”

“ The unpopularity of the reforms he made required the utmost conciliatoriness of policy to reconcile men's minds to them; instead of which we find remonstrances the most respectful being met with punishments of unequalled cruelty, and barbarous tortures being inflicted by way of example on those he knew were guiltless. Who can wonder, then, that the very word Reform should be hateful to the Chinese people, and that they should view any move in that direction with unfeigned suspicion and distrust? ”

“ In no country, for instance, are morals more highly esteemed as a basis of public administration and private conduct. Nothing could be more unexceptionable than the theories on which the government of the country is professedly carried on. Foreign writers have over and over again applauded the Chinese for resting all their rules of life on right reason, and bringing to the test of principle, rather than to that of material welfare or advantage, their general policy of action. In spite of this, China is one of the most miserably misgoverned countries in the whole world. ”

“ Then his mental equilibrium became upset, and he used to dream every night that he was the king of a state, high exalted over the heads of the people, with all the affairs of his realm upon his hands; roaming and taking his pleasure amid palaces and temples, and giving free rein to all his passions and desires, so that his enjoyment was beyond compare. During his waking hours he was nothing but a hard-worked drudge, and people would pity him, and condole with him upon his arduous life. But the old fellow would reply, "A man's life is passed under two separate conditions—day and night. ”

“ Forty thousand prisoners of war were beheaded in Han and ninety thousand in Chao. Like a swarm of hungry locusts, the troops of Ts'in found lands as the garden of Eden before them which they left a desolate wilderness; nothing escaped their devastations, and the terror of them spread over the whole country. In despair, the King, or Emperor as he has been called, of Chou, ordered a blind attack to be made upon the advancing army by the other princes in a body, but it was too late ”

“ Then the sylphs trooped back, and, taking a graceful leave of their entertainer, moved towards a place where the flowers grew thickest, and disappeared.
Up sprang the philosopher, and gave chase. But in his hurry his foot slipped, and he fell sprawling upon his back; and when he picked himself up again there was not one of them in sight. Then he sat down and began to think seriously over what had happened. Could it have been a dream? He was sure he had not been asleep. Were they ghosts? Surely not; their robes were too beautiful, their utterance too distinct, for anything evil. ”

“ Treat us as clods, as deaf and blind! And then we will venture to ask you to instruct us."
"I have no doctrine," replied Shang. "I am perfectly unconscious of possessing any special power. Nevertheless, there is one point which bears upon the matter, and I will try and explain it to you. Lately, two of your number passed a night in my cottage, and I overheard them expatiate upon the great fame and influence of Mr. Fan; saying how he held men's lives in his hand, and how he could enrich the poor and impoverish the rich. ”

“ On the whole, we should say that Lü Tsû succeeded in acquiring far more fame as a soothsayer and mystic than he would have done had he contented himself with less transcendental studies and risen to be a humble magistrate. There are people in the world not unlike him now; and though we do not suppose that future generations will canonise Madame Blavatsky, or build temples to her coadjutor the quondam editor of the Hong-Kong Daily Press, both persons enjoy an amount of fame, or notoriety, that would never have fallen to their share had they stuck to more commonplace pursuits. ”

“ They never ask the why or the wherefore of a fact; suffice it for them that such a thing exists—that such a custom is followed, such a theory held—and it would never occur to a Chinese to inquire into the reason of it, or to test its truth. Innovations are regarded with suspicion almost amounting to horror; and no arguments have any force to a Chinese mind in proving the elementary and insufficient nature of the methods so long in vogue. It is, indeed, undeniable that the Chinese are bound hand and foot by custom. ”

“ The epoch whose events we have thus hastily and imperfectly sketched is perhaps the saddest in the whole of China's history. Sad, not because of the tyranny, the treachery, the bloodshed, and the crime which were its salient characteristics, but because of the fatal influence it has had upon the minds of the Chinese people ever since. A merely wicked sovereign does no harm to posterity. The memories of Chieh Kuei and Chou Hsin are execrated, but men are no worse for the wretches having lived. The mischief worked by Ts'in Shih Huang, however, is well-nigh irreparable ”

“ China may justly be said, in many ways, to be the country of pretensions. There are few things in which the Chinese do not claim pre-eminence, and it is this habit of self-complacency which renders them so very much averse to being enlightened on those points on which they habitually are found wanting. The belief in their own infallibility cannot but be a standing obstacle to the progress of the people in all departments where it prevails, and the difficulty of getting a Chinaman to acknowledge that he is beaten in an argument is but another phase of the same phenomenon. ”

“ Fanaticism and its offspring cruelty—the spirit that leads men to bind each other's souls and torture each other's bodies—constitute, to our mind, a sin for which a new name ought to be discovered. It may almost be called sacrilege against the human race, and this is the unpardonable sin, or what should be considered such by all wishers for the mental and corporeal enfranchisement of their fellow-men. ”

“ Indeed, it seems wonderful that the unfortunate people ever reaped any harvests at all, when we read the list of forces arrayed against them. If there were no inundations, sweeping away the produce of their fields, to say nothing of the houses in which they lived and occasionally the men themselves, there was pretty sure to be a drought; or if not a drought, a swarm of grasshoppers or of locusts would devastate the plains, selecting, as, with a sort of infernal instinct, such creatures do, the richest and most fertile districts as their prey. ”

“ Not a sign of devastation was visible; every flower bloomed upon its stalk; and there was something strange about their appearance—the more one looked at them the more beautiful they seemed to grow, till at last each flower bore a mysterious resemblance to a smiling human face. ”

“ No; what we want is to exhaust all the pleasure we can in the course of our lives, and to get all possible delights out of the present time; all we are afraid of is, that our stomach may overflow, and our mouth be unable to enjoy unrestrained indulgence in wine, or that our strength may give out and leave us impotent to go to extremes in the sweets of lechery. We have no time to grieve over the foulness of our reputation or the danger to which we expose our health. ”

“ All this is robbery; for, seeing that corn and harvests, soil and trees, birds and beasts, fish and turtles, are all produced by Heaven, how can they belong to me? Yet in thus robbing Heaven I incur no retribution. But gold, jewels, precious stones, food, silken fabrics, wealth, and property are accumulated by men; Heaven does not bestow them. ”