With the Empress Dowager of China

by Katharine A. Carl

Poor lady! Private sorrows and sad memories were not all she had to grieve her now. I had noticed her growing anxiety for many days! She seemed to feel all the gravity of the political situation of China. As the rumors of war between Russia and Japan grew, her anxiety increased and she was looking sad and careworn. She seemed to be full of doubt and fear, and quite unlike her usual self. I fancy she thought of the unprepared state of her country and feared that it might be drawn into this struggle. She seemed to be in doubt as to the course that was best to be taken. Even should the Empire not be drawn into the conflict, two hostile nations were to meet within its borders. The struggle was to take place in Manchuria, the cradle of the Dynasty. That beautiful, smiling country would be ravished by war, and the awful possibility of the ancestral tombs being desecrated, loomed up before her. The desecration of the tombs of one’s ancestors in China is supposed to bring dire consequences upon the family, and a pious Chinaman would face any material loss rather than run the risk of these tombs being desecrated. She felt it all, and was sad indeed.

CHAPTER XXIX RELIGIOUS RITES IN CHINA

There are three great religions in China—Buddhism, Taoism, and the worship of Nature. The worship of Nature, in which is embodied their highest idea of an Invisible Deity, is the purest form of religion in China. Its Temples are situated in a magnificent Park in the Chinese City of Peking. The Temple of Heaven, the most imposing of the group, spherical and triple-domed, rears its proud height here and is visible from afar. Its triple dome tiled, without, in the sacred green of Nature and vaulted within in Heaven’s own blue, is surrounded by groves of century-old arbor-vitæ. In other parts of the great Park are the scarcely less splendid Temples to the Earth, to the Sun and Moon and to Agriculture, and grandest, most unique of these Temples, is that to the Invisible Deity. Its foundations are the Earth, its walls are limitless Ether, its dome Heaven’s own vault! On its great open altar this Nature worship has its culmination and reaches its highest fulfilment. This altar is the Holy of Holies, the tabernacle of the group of Temples consecrated to the worship of Nature.

It is built in the center of a great marble-paved space with the secular arbor-vitæ radiating therefrom in long concentric avenues. It is of pure white marble, round as is the Earth. The Trinity in Nature and its Infinity are symbolized in its three superposed circles. Each of the circular platforms is surrounded by an exquisitely carved balustrade and approached by flights of nine steps each, to the north, south, east, and west. The central point of the great upper circle thus represents the center of the Universe, accessible from every point of the compass.

Here in this symbolic center of the world, in this great Temple, whose walls are Space, whose towers are Infinity, on this great triple altar, canopied with Heaven itself, the Emperor of China, “Son of Heaven,” glorifies the Invisible Deity and sacrifices for the prosperity of “the Great, Pure Kingdom” and his people. This worship of the Invisible Deity has no Priestly Hierarchy. The Emperor of China is its one High Priest. He alone is worthy, as the Son of Heaven, to perform its unique ceremonies, on its one great Altar, in its single great Temple of China.

The Emperor prepares himself for the great ceremony of the semi-annual celebration on this altar by a rigorous fast of three days, spending the final night before the celebration in a vigil in the Great Park of the Nature Temples, where there is a Purifying Palace set aside for his use. This glorification of the Invisible Deity at the summer and winter solstices is the most solemn act performed by the Emperor in his quality of Son of Heaven.

TEMPLE OF HEAVEN—PEKING

The Emperor is not only the one High Priest worthy to sacrifice on the great altars to the Invisible Deity, the Priestly [Hierarchy] of the whole of this Cult of Nature is vested in his Sacred Person. He alone offers sacrifices in the Temples of Heaven and the other Great Temples, at times set aside in the Book of Rites, and on special occasions. When famine devastates the land, when drought or any other National Calamity is visited upon the Empire, the Emperor prays in these Temples for its cessation, for he is not only the High Priest, but as “Son of Heaven” is the expiator for the afflictions visited upon his people by Heaven, and he publicly holds himself responsible for the misfortunes of the Empire. According to the Book of Rites, he says in time of trouble, “I will purify myself by sacrifice that these calamities may be lifted from the Empire and the people. I alone am responsible.”

The great semi-annual celebration to the Invisible Deity is not only the most solemn of the religious rites the Emperor performs; it is at the same time the most formal of his official acts as ruler of the Great Empire. He prepares himself, by fasting and subduing the body, for the religious rite; for the official ceremony as Emperor of China, he is accompanied by all his ministers and the highest nobles of the land and surrounded by splendid pomp and Imperial pageantry.