In the popular religion demonology and magic play a constant part, and numerous growths out of the worship of ancestors provide ever fresh additions to the higher ranks of spirits. These are regulated by decrees of the Board of Rites, one of the most ancient religious institutions in China. The spirit of a departed governor, perhaps two centuries ago, is believed to have appeared in time of flood, and by his beneficent influence dangers have been averted. Memorials are sent up to Peking by the local authorities, and after repeated manifestations divine honours are awarded. Beneath these august personages are the spirits which preside over the trades and professions, over the parts of a house—the door, the bed, or the kitchen range—over the breeding of domestic animals, and a large variety of occupations, to say nothing of medicine and disease, the limbs of the body, and the stars. They are analogous to the Kami, the equivalent powers in Japan (p. [91]); and they are not without parallel in religions further west.
Half a century before Confucius, in 604, was born another sage, known in history as Lao Tsze. Fragments of his teaching are embodied in a small book of aphorisms, concerned with the doctrine of the Tao, the way, the path, or course. In nature this corresponded to the ordered round of the seasons, and the regularities which we call laws. In man it might be seen in the line of right conduct, and the inner principles which pointed to it. On this conception, which was much older than Lao Tsze himself, a kind of metaphysical mysticism was reared by later disciples, not without affinities with some aspects of the Brahmanical philosophy. They have been explained by suggestions of travel and contact which more careful study cannot justify. The religion of the Tao (whence the name Taoism) could never have been popular had it not become strangely entangled with alchemy and transformed under the influence of its later rival, Buddhism, from which it derived much both in ritual, in ethics, and in doctrine.
The statements about the appearance of Buddhist teachers and Buddhist books in China before our era have been much disputed: the first trustworthy record relates that in the year A.D. 65, a deputation of eighteen persons was sent to Khotan to make inquiries, and they returned two years later with books and images and a teacher. A second teacher arrived shortly after, a temple was built at the imperial capital, Lo-Yang, and the laborious work of translation was begun. A stream of missionaries, Hindus, Parthians, Huns, slowly flowed into the Flowery Land, "moved," says the chronicler, "by the desire to convert the world." After a while the Chinese students sought the holy places in India, and learned Sanskrit at the great Buddhist university at Nalanda, near Buddha Gaya. Vast collections of sacred literature were gathered. The first Chinese catalogue, dated A.D. 520, enumerates 2,213 distinct works. Twelve successive revisions were made under imperial order, and to the last, in 1737, the Emperor himself, following the example of some of his predecessors, contributed a preface.
Opposed again and again by the Confucian literati, its temples destroyed, its religious houses suppressed, its monks and nuns driven back into the world, Buddhism has still lived on. It has created impressive devotions, and generated numerous sects. It has spread through Corea, Mongolia, and Japan; on the west it is planted in Tibet. It has exercised immense influence on Chinese culture; architecture, art and letters being all deeply indebted to it. In numerical estimates of different religions common in the last century Buddhism always headed the list, for the whole population of China—vaguely reckoned at 400,000,000—was included in its fold. Such estimates are no longer trustworthy.[[3]] The ancestral cultus of the dead under the shelter of Confucianism, the rites of Taoist and of Buddhist priests, are strangely blended. The incidents of life from birth to death are never completed without help from one or other of the two faiths once rivals, and now so curiously intertwined. As early as the sixth century a famous Buddhist scholar Fu Hhi was asked by the Emperor Wu-ti if he was a Buddhist, and he pointed to his Taoist cap. "Are you a Taoist?" he showed his Confucian shoes. "Are you a Confucian?" he wore a Buddhist scarf. When the Abbé Hue made his famous journey two generations ago, he observed that when strangers met, politeness required that each should ask his neighbour, "To what sublime religion do you belong?" The first might be a Confucian, the second a Taoist, the third a disciple of the Buddha. Each would then begin to commend the religion not his own, and they would conclude by saying, "Religions are many, reason is one, we are all brothers." It was the maxim of Lu Shun Yang (a distinguished Buddhist) centuries ago that "the teaching of the sects is not different. The large-hearted man regards them as embodying the same truths. The narrow-minded man observes only their differences."
[[3]] The latest official estimate, February 1911, based on a reckoning of families, gives 312,400,590 for the total Chinese people.
Yet another great religion, the latest born among the higher faiths of the world, has established itself in both India and China. The first Mohammedan invasion of India took place in A.D. 664. The followers of the prophet are now reckoned at more than 66 millions. In 628 Mohammed himself sent his uncle to China with presents to the Emperor. He travelled by sea to Canton, where the first mosque was afterwards built. Good observers number the Mohammedans in China to-day at 30 millions, mostly in the north and west; and it is supposed that there are about as many more in the Malay Archipelago. In Africa, especially among the negroes of the west, their numbers have increased enormously in the last century, and some two-fifths of the multitudinous peoples of the Dark Continent, 80 millions out of 200, are believed to live in the obedience of Islam.
Islam, resignation or submission to the will of God, was the name given to his religion by the prophet himself, who died in A.D. 632. But in the hands of his first followers submission was no passive virtue. Tradition ascribed to him the idea of addressing all known sovereigns, and promising them safety if they accepted the faith. His successors, therefore, conceived that the fulfilment of Allah's will demanded a resolute effort to make known the new revelation. A fierce burst of missionary effort carried the Moslem armies far and wide. In the year of Mohammed's death they attacked Persia and Syria; a few years later they invaded Egypt. Within the first century they had entered India, and had swept through north Africa into Spain. But they had twice been obliged to retreat from Constantinople, and in 732 they were defeated on the Loire by Charles Martel near Tours, and forced to retire behind the Pyrenees.
With the same astonishing energy they created centres of culture from Baghdad to Cordova. Through Syriac versions of Aristotle's works Arabian teachers carried Greek philosophy into Western Europe when the light of ancient learning had grown dim. The contact with new thought stimulated theological discussion, and the Moslem had to justify himself against the Christian, the Zoroastrian, the Manichæan and the Buddhist. Above the simple ritual demands of the prophet, the recital of the creed—"There is no god but God (Allah), Mohammed is the apostle of God"—the observance of prayer five times daily, the annual fast in the month of Ramadhān, the bestowal of alms, and the pilgrimage to Mecca, arose the debates of the schools and the divisions of sects. The nature of the divine attributes, and their relation to the being or essence of the Deity, the problems of predestination and free will, of reason and revelation, excited eager interest. Beside the Koran vast numbers of traditions concerning religious life and practice were gradually put in circulation, and in the third century after Mohammed's death they were reduced to writing in six great collections. To these sources of truth and rules of conduct the jurists and theologians added two others: agreement or universal consent, where beliefs and practices are generally received though not specially sanctioned by the Koran or tradition; and analogy, by which a doctrine or usage may be accepted as valid because of its resemblance to something legitimated by revelation.
Like the higher religions of India, like Judaism in its long and chequered career whether in Palestine or in the Dispersion, like the "universal religions" of Buddhism and Christianity, Mohammedanism has known how to accommodate itself to very different levels of culture. In the Arabian deserts much of the earlier animism still remains. It is not rudely expelled either at the present day as Islam advances through Africa. Other impulses have worked in different directions. There are religious orders and mendicant ascetics. There are mystical schools of refined spirituality, to which the influences of Neo-platonism, of Christianity, and Buddhism, have all contributed. Sūfiism (as this type of thought is called) was fed from various sources, and has assumed different forms in different countries, but its best-known literary products came from the great poets of Persia.
From that subtle race issues the most remarkable movement which modern Mohammedanism has produced. In 1844 a young man not twenty-five years of age, named Ali Mohammed, of Shiraz, appeared under the title of the "Bab" or Gate. Disciples gathered round him, and the movement was not checked by his arrest, his imprisonment for nearly six years, and his final execution in 1850. Thirteen years later one of his disciples named Bahá-ullah, "Splendour of God," announced himself as "He whom God shall manifest," whose advent the Bab had foretold. Exiled to Acre, he died in 1892, and was succeeded in the leadership by his son Abbas Efendi. The new faith declared that there was no finality in revelation, and while recognising the Koran as a product of past revelation, claimed to embody a new manifestation of the divine Unity. Carried to Chicago in 1893 by a Bâbî merchant, it succeeded in establishing itself in the United States; and its missionaries are winning new adherents in India. It, too, claims to be a universal teaching; it has already its noble army of martyrs and its holy books; has Persia, in the midst of her miseries, given birth to a religion which will go round the world?