Our Oriental Heritage

by Will Durant

  Out of these beginnings grew the two elements of the orthodox religion of China: the nation-wide worship of ancestors, and the Confucian worship of heaven and great men. Every day some modest offering—usually of food—was made to the departed, and prayers were sent up to their spirits; for the simple peasant or laborer believed that his parents and other forbears still lived in some ill-defined realm, and could bring him good or evil fortune. The educated Chinese offered similar sacrifice, but he looked upon the ritual not as worship so much as commemoration; it was wholesome for the soul and the race that these dead ones should be remembered and revered, for then the ancient ways which they had followed would also be revered, innovation would hesitate, and the empire would be at peace. There were some inconveniences in this religion, for it littered China with immense inviolable graves, impeding the construction of railroads and the tillage of the soil; but to the Chinese philosopher these were trivial difficulties when weighed in the balance against the political stability and spiritual continuity which ancestor worship gave to civilization. For through this profound institution the nation, which was shut out from physical and spatial unity by great distances and the poverty of transport, achieved a powerful spiritual unity in time; the generations were bound together with the tough web of tradition, and the individual life received an ennobling share and significance in a drama of timeless majesty and scope.

  The religion adopted by the scholars and the state was at once a widening and a narrowing of this popular faith. Slowly, by increments of reverence from century to century, Confucius was lifted up, through imperial decrees, to a place second only to that of Heaven itself; every school raised a tablet, every city a temple, in his honor; and periodically the emperor and the officials offered incense and sacrifice to his spirit or his memory, as the greatest influence for good in all the rich memories of the race. He was not, in the understanding of the intelligent, a god; on the contrary he served for many Chinese as a substitute for a god; those who attended the services in his honor might be agnostics or atheists, and yet—if they honored him and their ancestors—they were accepted by their communities as pious and religious souls. Officially, however, the faith of the Confucians included a recognition of Shang-ti, the Supreme Ruling Force of the world; and every year the emperor offered ceremonious sacrifice, on the Altar of Heaven, to this impersonal divinity. Nothing was said, in this official faith, of immortality.78 Heaven was not a place but the will of God, or the order of the world.

  This simple and almost rationalistic religion never quite satisfied the people of China. Its doctrines gave too little room to the imagination of men, too little answer to their hopes and dreams, too little encouragement to the superstitions that enlivened their daily life. For the people, here as everywhere, brightened the prose of reality with the poetry of the supernatural; they felt a world of good or evil spirits hovering in the air about them and the earth beneath, and longed to appease the enmity or enlist the aid of these secret powers by magic incantation or prayer. They paid diviners to read the future for them in the lines of the 1-Ching, or on the shells of tortoises, or in the movements, of the stars; they hired magicians to orient their dwellings and graves to wind and water, and sorcerers to bring them sunshine or rain.79 They exposed to death such children as were born to them on “unlucky” days,80 and fervent daughters sometimes killed themselves to bring good or evil fortune to their parents.81 In the south, particularly, the Chinese soul inclined to mysticism; it was repelled by the frigid rationalism of the Confucian faith, and hungered for a creed that would give China, like other nations, deathless consolations.

  Therefore some popular theologians took the misty doctrine of Lao-tze and gradually transformed it into a religion. To the Old Master and to Chuang-tze the Tao had been a way of life for the attainment of individual peace on earth; they do not seem ever to have dreamed of it as a deity, much less as a price to be paid here for a life beyond the grave.82 But in the second century of our era these doctrines were improved upon by men who claimed to have received, in direct line from Lao-tze, an elixir that would confer immortality. This drink became so popular that several emperors are said to have died from pious indulgence in it.83 A mystagogue in Szechuan (ca. 148 A.D.) offered to cure all diseases with a simple talisman to be given in exchange for five packages of rice. Apparently miraculous cures were effected, and those who were not cured were told that their faith had been too weak.84 The people flocked to the new religion, built temples for it, supported its priesthood generously, and poured into the new faith some part of their inexhaustible superstitious lore. Lao-tze was made a god, and was credited with a supernatural conception; he had been born, the faithful believed, already old and wise, having been in his mother’s womb for eighty years.85 They peopled the world with new devils and deities, frightened away the one with firecrackers exploding merrily in the temple courts, and with mighty gongs called the others out of slumber to hear their importunate prayers.

  For a thousand years the Taoist faith had millions of adherents, converted many emperors, and fought long battles of intrigue to wrest from the Confucians the divine right to tax and spend. In the end it was broken down not by the logic of Confucius, but by the coming of a new religion even better suited than itself to inspire and console the common man. For the Buddhism that began its migration from India to China in the first century after Christ was not the hard and gloomy doctrine that the Enlightened One had preached five hundred years before; it was no ascetic creed, but a bright and happy faith in helping deities and a flowering paradise; it took the form, as time went on, of the Greater Vehicle, or Mahayana, which Kanishka’s theologians had adapted to the emotional needs of simple men; it presented China with freshly personal and humane gods, like Amitabha, Ruler of Paradise, and Kuan-yin, god-then-goddess of mercy; it filled the Chinese pantheon with Lohans or Arhats—eighteen of the original disciples of Buddha—who stood ready at every turn to give of their merits to help a bewildered and suffering mankind. When, after the fall of the Han, China found itself torn with political chaos, and life seemed lost in a welter of insecurity and war, the harassed nation turned to Buddhism as the Roman world was at the same time turning to Christianity. Taoism opened its arms to take in the new faith, and in time became inextricably mingled with it in the Chinese soul. Emperors persecuted Buddhism, philosophers complained of its superstitions, statesmen were concerned over the fact that some of the best blood of China was being sterilized in monasteries; but in the end the government found again that religion is stronger than the state; the emperors made treaties of peace with the new gods; the Buddhist priests were allowed to collect alms and raise temples, and the bureaucracy of officials and scholars was perforce content to keep Confucianism as its own aristocratic creed. The new religion took possession of many old shrines, placed its monks and fanes along with those of the Taoists on the holy mountain Tai-shan, aroused the people to many pious pilgrimages, contributed powerfully to painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and the development of printing, and brought a civilizing measure of gentleness into the Chinese soul. Then, it, too, like Taoism, fell into decay; its clergy became corrupt, its doctrine was permeated more and more by sinister deities and popular superstitions, and its political power, never strong, was practically destroyed by the renaissance of Confucianism under Chu Hsi. Today its temples are neglected, its resources are exhausted, and its only devotees are its impoverished priests.86

  Nevertheless it has sunk into the national soul, and is still part of the complex but informal religion of the simpler Chinese. For religions in China are not mutually exclusive as in Europe and America, nor have they ever precipitated the country into religious wars. Normally they tolerate one another not only in the state but in the same breast; and the average Chinese is at once an animist, a Taoist, a Buddhist and a Confucianist. He is a modest philosopher, and knows that nothing is certain; perhaps, after all, the theologian may be right, and there may be a paradise; the best policy would be to
humor all these creeds, and pay many diverse priests to say prayers over one’s grave. While fortune smiles, however, the Chinese citizen does not pay much attention to the gods; he honors his ancestors, but lets the Taoist and the Buddhist temples get along with the attentions of the clergy and a few women. He is the most secular spirit ever produced, as a type, in known history; this life absorbs him; and when he prays he asks not for happiness in paradise, but for some profit here on earth.87 If the god does not answer his prayers he may overwhelm him with abuse, and end by throwing him into the river. “No image-maker worships the gods,” says a Chinese proverb; “he knows what stuff they are made of.”88

  Hence the average Chinese has not taken passionately to Mohammedanism or Christianity; these offered him a heaven that Buddhism had already promised, but what he really wanted was a guarantee of happiness here. Most of the fifteen million Chinese Moslems are not really Chinese, but people of foreign origin or parentage.89 Christianity entered China with the Nestorians about 636 A.D. The Emperor Tai Tsung gave it a sympathetic hearing, and protected its preachers from persecution. In 781 the Nestorians of China raised a monument on which they recorded their appreciation of this enlightened tolerance, and their hope that Christianity would soon win the whole land.90 Since then Jesuit missionaries with heroic zeal and lofty learning, and Protestant missionaries backed with great American fortunes, have labored to realize the hope of the Nestorians. Today there are three million Christians in China; one per cent of the population has been converted in a thousand years.*

  V. THE RULE OF MORALS

  The high place of morals in Chinese society—The family—Children—Chastity—Prostitution—Premarital relations—Marriage and love—Monogamy and poly gamy—Concubinage—Divorce—A Chinese empress—The patriarchal male—The subjection of woman—The Chinese character

  Confucianism and ancestor worship survived so many rivals and so many attacks, during twenty centuries, because they were felt to be indispensable to that intense and exalted moral tradition upon which China had founded its life. As these were the religious sanctions, so the family was the great vehicle, of this ethical heritage. From parents to children the moral code was handed down across the generations, and became the invisible government of Chinese society; a code so stable and strong that that society maintained its order and discipline through nearly all the vicissitudes of the unsteady state. “What the Chinese,” said Voltaire, “best know, cultivate the most, and have brought to the greatest perfection, is morality.”92 “By building the house on a sound foundation,” Confucius had said, “the world is made secure.”93

  The Chinese proceeded on the assumption that the purpose of a moral code was to transform the chaos of sexual relations into an orderly institution for the rearing of children. The family’s reason for being lay in the child. There could not, from the viewpoint of China, be too many children: a nation was always subject to attack, and needed defenders; the soil was rich, and could support many millions; even if there should be a bitter struggle for existence in large families and crowded communities, the weakest would be eliminated, and the ablest would survive and multiply to be a support and an honor to their aging parents, and to tend the ancestral graves religiously. Ancestor worship forged an endless chain of reproduction, and gave it a double strength; the husband must beget sons not only to sacrifice to him after his death, but to continue the sacrifices to his ancestors. “There are three things which are unfilial,” said Mencius; “and the greatest of them is to have no posterity.”94

  Sons were prayed for, and mothers were shamed forever if they had none; for sons could work better than girls in the fields, and could fight better in war; and a regulation not unconscious of this had long since decreed that only sons should be permitted to offer the ancestral sacrifice. Girls were a burden, for one had to rear them patiently only to see them go off, at maturity, to their husbands’ homes, to labor there, and beget laborers, for another family. If too many daughters came, and times were very hard, the infant girl might without sin be left exposed in the furrows, to be killed by the night’s frost or eaten by prowling swine.95 Such progeny as survived the hazards and ailments of childhood were brought up with the tenderest affection; example took the place of blows in their education; and occasionally they were exchanged for a while for the children of kindred families, so that they might not be spoiled by an indulgent love.96 The children were kept in the women’s division of the home, and seldom mingled with the adult males until the age of seven. Then the boys, if the family could afford it, were sent to school, and were severely separated from the girls; from the age of ten they would be limited in their choice of associates to men and courtesans; and the frequency of homosexuality and male prostitution sometimes made this choice unreal.97

  Chastity was exalted and rigidly enforced in daughters, and was inculcated with such success that Chinese girls have been known to kill them selves because they believed that they had been dishonored by the accidental touch of a man.98 But no effort was made to maintain chastity in the unmarried man; on the contrary, it was considered normal and legitimate that he should visit brothels; sex (in the male) was an appetite like hunger, and might be indulged in without any other disgrace than that which would in any case attach to immoderation.99* The supply of women to meet these demands had long since been an established institution in China; the famous premier of T’si, Kuan Chung, had provided a lupanar where traders from other states might leave their gains before departing for their homes.101 Marco Polo described the courtesans of Kublai Khan’s capital as incredibly numerous and ravishingly beautiful. They were licensed, regulated and segregated; and the most beautiful of them were supplied without charge to the members of foreign embassies.102 In later times a special variety of charmers was developed, known as “sing-song girls,” who, if that were preferred, would provide educated conversation for young men or for respectable husbands entertaining guests. Such girls were often versed in literature and philosophy, as well as skilled in music and the dance.103

  Premarital relations were so free for men, and premarital association with men was so restricted for respectable women, that small opportunity was given for the growth of romantic love. A literature of such tender affection appeared under the T’angs, and some indication of the sentiment may be found as far back as the sixth century before Christ in the legend of Wei Sheng, who, having promised to meet a girl under a bridge, waited vainly for her there, though the water rose above his head and drowned him.104 Doubtless Wei Sheng knew better than this, but it is significant that the poets thought that he might not. In general, however, love as a tender solicitude and attachment was more frequent between men than between the sexes; in this matter the Chinese agreed with the Greeks.105

  Marriage had little to do with love; since its purpose was to bring healthy mates together for the rearing of abundant families, it could not, the Chinese thought, be left to the arbitrament of passion. Hence the sexes were kept apart while the parents sought eligible mates for their children. It was considered immoral for a man not to marry; celibacy was a crime against one’s ancestors, the state and the race, and was never quite condoned even in the case of the clergy. In the ancient days a special official was appointed to see to it that every man was married by the age of thirty, and every woman by twenty.106 With or without the help of professional intermediaries (mei-ren, “go-betweens”), parents arranged the betrothal of their children soon after puberty, sometimes before puberty, sometimes before birth.107 Certain endogamic and exogamic limits were placed on the choice: the mate had to be of a family long known to the match-seeking parents, and yet sufficiently distant in relationship to be outside the clan. The father of the boy usually sent a substantial present to the father of the girl, but the girl in her turn was expected to bring a considerable dowry, chiefly in the form of goods, to her husband; and gifts of some value were ordinarily exchanged between the families at the marriage. The girl was kept in strict seclusion until the wedding. Her fut
ure mate could not see her except by stratagem—though that was often managed; in many cases he saw her for the first time when he removed her veil in the wedding cermony. This was a complex and symbolic ritual, in which the essential matter was that the bridegroom should be sufficiently wined to guard against the chance of a criminal bashfulness on his part;108 as for the girl, she had been trained to be at once shy and obedient. After the marriage the bride lived with her husband in or near the house of his father; there she labored in servitude to her mate and his mother, until such time as the normal course of life and death liberated her from this slavery and left her ready to impose it upon the wives of her sons.

  The poor were monogamous; but so eager was China for vigorous children that such men as could afford it were permitted by custom to take concubines, or “secondary wives.” Polygamy was looked upon as eugenic, on the ground that those who could bear its expense would on the average be the abler men in their communities. If the first wife remained childless she would in most cases urge her husband to take an additional mate, and would often adopt as her own the child of the concubine. There were many instances in which wives, anxious to keep their husbands home, suggested that they should marry the courtesans to whom they were giving their attention and their substance, and should bring them home as secondary wives.109 The wife of the Emperor Chuang-tchu was much praised in Chinese tradition because she was reported to have said: “I have never ceased to send people to all the neighboring towns to look for beautiful women in order that I might represent them as concubines to my lord.”110 Families rivaled one another in seeking the honor of providing a daughter for the royal harem. To guard the harem, and to attend to other duties at his court, the emperor was entitled to three thousand eunuchs. Most of these had been mutilated by their parents before the age of eight, in order to ensure their livelihood.111