by Will Durant
One of the earliest forms of block printing was the manufacture of paper money. Appearing first in Szechuan in the tenth century, it became a favorite occupation of Chinese governments, and led within a century to experiments in inflation. In 1294 Persia imitated this new mode of creating wealth; in 1297 Marco Polo described with wonder the respect which the Chinese showed for these curious scraps of paper. It was not till 1656 that Europe learned the trick, and issued its first paper currency.14
Movable type was also a Chinese invention, but the absence of an alphabet, and the presence of 40,000 characters in written Chinese, made its use an impossible luxury in the Far East. Pi Sheng formed movable type of earthenware as early as 1041 A.D., but little use was found for the invention. In 1403 the Koreans produced the first metal type known to history: models were engraved in hard wood, moulds of porcelain paste were made from these models, and from these moulds, baked in an oven, the metal type was cast. The greatest of Korean emperors, T’ai Tsung, at once adopted the invention as an aid to government and the preservation of civilization. “Whoever is desirous of governing,” said that enlightened monarch, “must have a wide acquaintance with the laws and the Classics. Then he will be able to act righteously without, and to maintain an upright character within, and thus to bring peace and order to the land. Our eastern country lies beyond the seas, and the number of books reaching us from China is small. The books printed from blocks are often imperfect, and moreover it is difficult to print in their entirety all the books that exist. I ordain therefore that characters be formed of bronze, and that everything without exception upon which I can lay my hands be printed, in order to pass on the tradition of what these works contain. That will be a blessing to us to all eternity. However, the costs shall not be taken from the people in taxes. I and my family, and those ministers who so wish, will privately bear the expense.”15
From Korea the casting of movable type spread to Japan and back again to China, but not, apparently, until after Gutenberg’s belated discovery in Europe. In Korea the use of movable type continued for two centuries and then decayed; in China its use was only occasional until merchants and missionaries from the West, as if returning an ancient gift, brought to the East the methods of European typography. From the days of Feng Tao to those of Li Hung-chang the Chinese clung to block-printing as the most feasible form for their language. Despite this limitation Chinese printers poured out a great mass of books upon the people. Dynastic histories in hundreds of volumes were issued between 994 and 1063; the entire Buddhist canon, in five thousand volumes, was completed by 972.16 Writers found themselves armed with a weapon which they had never had before; their audience was widened from the aristocracy to the middle, even to part of the lower, classes; literature took on a more democratic tinge, and a more varied form. The art of block-printing was one of the sources of the Sung Renaissance.
Stimulated with this liberating invention, Chinese literature now became an unprecedented flood. All the glory of the Humanist revival in Italy was anticipated by two hundred years. The ancient classics were honored with a hundred editions and a thousand commentaries; the life of the past was captured by scholarly historians, and put down for millions of readers in the new marvel of type; vast anthologies of literature were collected, great dictionaries were compiled, and encyclopedias like mastodons made their way through the land. The first of any moment was that of Wu Shu (947-1002); for lack of an alphabet it was arranged under categories, covering chiefly the physical world. In 977 A.D. the Sung Emperor T’ai Tsung ordered the compilation of a larger encyclopedia; it ran to thirty-two volumes, and consisted for the most part of selections from 1,690 preexisting books. Later, under the Ming Emperor Yung Lo (1403-25), an encyclopedia was written in ten thousand volumes, and proved too expensive to be printed; of the one copy handed down to posterity all but one hundred and sixty volumes were consumed by fire in the Boxer riots of 1900.17 Never before had scholars so dominated a civilization.
3. The Rebirth of Philosophy
Chu Hsi—Wang Yang-ming—Beyond good and evil
These scholars were not all Confucians, for rival schools of thought had grown up in the course of fifteen centuries, and now the intellectual life of the exuberant race was stirred with much argument about it and about. The seepage of Buddhism into the Chinese soul had reached even the philosophers. Most of them now affected a habit of solitary meditation; some of them went so far as to scorn Confucius for scorning metaphysics, and to reject his method of approach to the problems of life and mind as too external and crude. Introspection became an accepted method of exploring the universe, and epistemology made its first appearance among the Chinese. Emperors took up Buddhism or Taoism as ways of promoting their popularity or of disciplining the people; and at times it seemed that the reign of Confucius over the Chinese mind was to end.
His saviour was Chu Hsi. Just as Shankara, in eighth-century India, had brought into an intellectual system the scattered insights of the Upanishads, and had made the Vedanta philosophy supreme; and just as Aquinas, in thirteenth-century Europe, was soon to weave Aristotle and St. Paul into the victorious Scholastic philosophy; so Chu Hsi, in twelfth-century China, took the loose apothegms of Confucius and built upon them a system of philosophy orderly enough to satisfy the taste of a scholarly age, and strong enough to preserve for seven centuries the leadership of the Confucians in the political and intellectual life of the Chinese.
The essential philosophic controversy of the time centered upon the interpretation of a passage in the Great Learning, attributed by both Chu Hsi and his opponents to Confucius.* What was meant by the astonishing demand that the ordering of states should be based upon the proper regulation of the family, that the regulation of the family should be based upon the regulation of one’s self, that the regulation of one’s self depended upon sincerity of thought, and that sincerity of thought arose from “the utmost extension of knowledge” through “the investigation of things”?
Chu Hsi answered that this meant just what it said; that philosophy, morals and statesmanship should begin with a modest study of realities. He accepted without protest the positivistic bent of the Master’s mind; and though he labored over the problems of ontology at greater length than Confucius might have approved, he arrived at a strange combination of atheism and piety which might have interested the sage of Shantung. Like the Book of Changes, which has always dominated the metaphysics of the Chinese, Chu Hsi recognized a certain strident dualism in reality: everywhere the Yang and the Yin—activity and passivity, motion and rest—mingled like male and female principles, working on the five elements of water, fire, earth, metal and wood to produce the phenomena of creation; and everywhere Li and Chi—Law and Matter—equally external, coöperated to govern all things and give them form. But over all these forms, and combining them, was T’ai chi, the Absolute, the impersonal Law of Laws, or structure of the world. Chu Hsi identified this Absolute with the T’ien or Heaven of orthodox Confucianism; God, in his view, was a rational process without personality or figurable form. “Nature is nothing else than Law.”18
This Law of the universe is also, said Chu, the law of morals and of politics. Morality is harmony with the laws of nature, and the highest statesmanship is the application of the laws of morality to the conduct of a state. Nature in every ultimate sense is good, and the nature of men is good; to follow nature is the secret of wisdom and peace. “Choi Mao Shu refrained from clearing away the grass from in front of his window, ‘because,’ he said, ‘its impulse is just like my own.’”19 One might conclude that the instincts are also good, and that one may follow them gayly; but Chu Hsi denounces them as the expression of matter (Chi), and demands their subjection to reason and law (Li).20 It is difficult to be at once a moralist and a logician.
There were contradictions in this philosophy, but these did not disturb its leading opponent, the gentle and peculiar Wang Yang-ming. For Wang was a saint as well as a philosopher; the meditative spirit and habits of
Mahayana Buddhism had sunk deeply into his soul. It seemed to him that the great error in Chu Hsi was not one of morals, but one of method; the investigation of things, he felt, should begin not with the examination of the external universe, but, as the Hindus had said, with the far profounder and more revealing world of the inner self. Not all the physical science of all the centuries would ever explain a bamboo shoot or a grain of rice.
In former years I said to my friend Chien: “If, to be a sage or a virtuous man, one must investigate everything under heaven, how can at present any man possess such tremendous power?” Pointing to the bamboos in front of the pavilion, I asked him to investigate them and see. Both day and night Chien entered into an investigation of the principles of the bamboo. For three days he exhausted his mind and thought, until his mental energy was tired out and he took sick. At first I said that it was because his energy and strength were insufficient. Therefore I myself undertook to carry on the investigation. Day and night I was unable to understand the principles of the bamboo, until after seven days I also became ill because of having wearied and burdened my thoughts. In consequence we mutually sighed and said, “We cannot be either sages or virtuous men.”21
So Wang Yang-ming put aside the examination of things, and put aside even the classics of antiquity; to read one’s own heart and mind in solitary contemplation seemed to him to promise more wisdom than all objects and all books.22 Exiled to a mountainous wilderness inhabited by barbarians and infested with poisonous snakes, he made friends and disciples of the criminals who had escaped to those parts; he taught them philosophy, cooked for them, and sang them songs. Once, at the midnight watch, he startled them by leaping from his cot and crying out ecstatically: “My nature, of course, is sufficient. I was wrong in looking for principles in things and affairs.” His comrades were not sure that they followed him; but slowly he led them on to his idealistic conclusion: “The mind itself is the embodiment of natural law. Is there anything in the universe that exists independent of the mind? Is there any law apart from the mind?”23 He did not infer from this that God was a figment of the imagination; on the contrary he conceived of the Deity as a vague but omnipresent moral force, too great to be merely a person, and yet capable of feeling sympathy and anger toward men.24
From this idealistic starting-point he came to the same ethical principles as Chu Hsi. “Nature is the highest good,” and the highest excellence lies in accepting the laws of Nature completely.25 When it was pointed out to him that Nature seems to include snakes as well as philosophers, he replied, with a touch of Aquinas, Spinoza and Nietzsche, that “good” and “bad” are prejudices, terms applied to things according to their advantage or injury to one’s self or mankind; Nature itself, he taught, is beyond good and evil, and ignores our egoistic terminology. A pupil reports, or invents, a dialogue which might have been entitled Jenseits von Gut und Böse:
A little later he said: “This view of good and evil has its source in the body, and is probably mistaken.” I was not able to comprehend. The Teacher said: “The purpose of heaven in bringing forth is even as in the instance of flowers and grass. In what way does it distinguish between good and evil? If you, my disciple, take delight in seeing the flowers, then you will consider flowers good and grass bad. If you desire to use the grass you will, in turn, consider the grass good. This type of good and evil has its source in the likes and dislikes of your mind. Therefore I know that you are mistaken.”
I said: “In that case there is neither good nor evil, is there?” The Teacher said: “The tranquillity resulting from the dominance of natural law is a state in which no discrimination is made between good and evil; while the stirring of the passion-nature is a state in which both good and evil are present. If there are no stirrings of the passion-nature, there is neither good nor evil, and this is what is called the highest good.” . . .
I said: “In that case good and evil are not at all present in things?” He said: “They are only in your mind.”26
It was well that Wang and Buddhism sounded this subtle note of an idealist metaphysic in the halls of the correct and prim Confucians; for though these scholars had the justest view of human nature and government which philosophy had yet conceived, they were a trifle enamored of their wisdom, and had become an intellectual bureaucracy irksome and hostile to every free and creatively erring soul. If in the end the followers of Chu Hsi won the day, if his tablet was placed with high honors in the same hall with that of the Master himself, and his interpretations of the Classics became a law to all orthodox thought for seven hundred years, it was indeed a victory of sound and simple sense over the disturbing subtleties of the metaphysical mind. But a nation, like an individual, can be too sensible, too prosaically sane and unbearably right. It was partly because Chu Hsi and Confucianism triumphed so completely that China had to have her Revolution.
II. BRONZE, LACQUER AND JADE
The rôle of art in China—Textiles—Furniture—Jewelry—Fans—The making of lacquer—The cutting of jade—Some masterpieces in bronze—Chinese sculpture
The pursuit of wisdom and the passion for beauty are the two poles of the Chinese mind, and China might loosely be defined as philosophy and porcelain. As the pursuit of wisdom meant to China no airy metaphysic but a positive philosophy aiming at individual development and social order, so the passion for beauty was no esoteric estheticism, no dilettante concoction of art forms irrelevant to human affairs, but an earthly marriage of beauty and utility, a practical resolve to adorn the objects and implements of daily life. Until it began to yield its own ideals to Western influence, China refused to recognize any distinction between the artist and the artisan, or between the artisan and the worker; nearly all industry was manufacture, and all manufacture was handicraft; industry, like art, was the expression of personality in things. Hence China, while neglecting to provide its people, through large-scale industry, with conveniences common in the West, excelled every country in artistic taste and the multiplication of beautiful objects for daily use. From the characters in which he wrote to the dishes from which he ate, the comfortable Chinese demanded that everything about him should have some esthetic form, and evidence in its shape and texture the mature civilization of which it was a symbol and a part.
It was during the Sung Dynasty that this movement to beautify the person, the temple and the home reached its highest expression. It had been a part of the excellence of T’ang life, and would remain and spread under later dynasties; but now a long period of order and prosperity nourished every art, and gave to Chinese living a grace and adornment which it had never enjoyed before. In textiles and metalworking the craftsmen of China, during and after the Sung era, reached a degree of perfection never surpassed; in the cutting of jade and hard stones they went beyond all rivals anywhere; and in the carving of wood and ivory they were excelled only by their pupils in Japan.27 Furniture was designed in a variety of unique and uncomfortable forms; cabinet-makers, living on a bowl of rice per day, sent forth one objet de vertu—one little piece of perfection—after another; and these minor products of a careful art, taking the place of expensive furniture and luxuries in homes, gave to their owners a pleasure which in the Occident only connoisseurs can know. Jewelry was not abundant, but it was admirably cut. Women and men cooled themselves with ornate fans of feathers or bamboo, of painted paper or silk; even beggars brandished elegant fans as they plied their ancient trade.
The art of lacquer began in China, and came to its fullest perfection in Japan. In the Far East lacquer is the natural product of a tree* indigenous to China, but now most sedulously cultivated by the Japanese. The sap is drawn from trunk and branches, strained, and heated to remove excess liquid; it is applied to thin wood, sometimes to metal or porcelain, and is dried by exposure to moisture.28 Twenty or thirty coats, each slowly dried and painstakingly polished, are laid on, the applications varying in color and depth; then, in China, the finished lacquer is carved with a sharp V-shaped tool, each incision reaching to su
ch a layer as to expose the color required by the design. The art grew slowly; it began as a form of writing upon bamboo strips; the material was used in the Chou Dynasty to decorate vessels, harness, carriages, etc.; in the second century A.D. it was applied to buildings and musical instruments; under the T’ang many lacquered articles were exported to Japan; under the Sung all branches of the .industry took their definite form, and shipped their products to such distant ports as India and Arabia; under the Ming emperors the art was further perfected, and in some phases reached its zenith;29 under the enlightened Manchu rulers K’ang-hsi and Ch’ien Lung great factories were built and maintained by imperial decree, and made such masterpieces as Ch’ien Lung’s throne,30 or the lacquered screen that K’ang-hsi presented to Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.31 The art continued at its height until the nineteenth century, when the wars brought on by European merchants, and the poor taste of European importers and clients, caused the withdrawal of imperial support, lowered the standards, debased the designs, and left the leadership in lacquer to Japan.
Jade is as old as Chinese history, for it is found in the most ancient graves. The earliest records attribute its use as a “sound-stone” to 2500 B.C.: jade was cut in the form of a fish or elsewise, and suspended by a thong; when properly cut and struck it emitted a clear musical tone, astonishingly long sustained. The word was derived through the French jade from the Spanish ijada (Lat. ilia), meaning loins; the Spanish conquerors of America found that the Mexicans used the stone, powdered and mixed with water, as a cure for many internal disorders, and they brought this new prescription back to Europe along with American gold. The Chinese word for the stone is much more sensible; jun means soft like the dew.32 Two minerals provide jade: jadeite and nephrite—silicates in the one case of aluminium and sodium, in the other of calcium and magnesium. Both are tough; the pressure of fifty tons is sometimes required to crush a one-inch cube; large pieces are usually broken by being subjected in quick succession first to extreme heat and then to cold water. The ingenuity of the Chinese artist is revealed in his ability to bring lustrous colors of green, brown, black and white out of these naturally colorless materials, and in the patient obstinacy with which he varies the forms, so that in all the world’s collections of jade (barring buttons) no two pieces are alike. Examples begin to appear as far back as the Shang Dynasty, in the shape of a jade toad used in divine sacrifice;33 and forms of great beauty were produced in the days of Confucius.34 While various peoples used jadeite for axes, knives and other utensils, the Chinese held the stone in such reverence that they kept it almost exclusivly for art; they regarded it as more precious than silver or gold, or any jewelry;35 they valued some small jades, like the thumb rings worn by the mandarins, at five thousand dollars, and some jade necklaces at $100,000; collectors spent years in search of a single piece. It has been estimated that an assemblage of all existing Chinese jades would form a collection unrivaled by any other material.36