"Argued high and argued low,
And likewise argued round about him";
—until by fall of dusk the Librarian was fairly beaten. So cogent were Cho's arguments, so loud and warm his eloquence, so entirely convincing his facts adduced—his modern instances, as you may say—that there really was nothing for the old man to answer. Ghosts were not; genii were ridiculously unthinkable; supernatural beings could not exist, and it was absurd to think they could. The Librarian had not a leg to stand on; that was flat. Accordingly he rose to his feet—and bowed.—"Sir," said he, with all prescribed honorifics, "undoubtedly you are victorious. The contemptible present speaker sees the error of his miserable ways. He is convinced. It remains for him only to add"—and here something occurred to make Cho rub his eyes—"that he is himself a supernatural being."—And with that his form and limbs distend, grow misty—and he vanishes in a cloud up through the ceiling.—You see, those old librarians in China had a way of doing things which was all their own.
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* The story is told in Dr. H. H. Giles' Dictionary of Chinese
Biography.
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So Li Urh responded to the confusions of his day. Arguments?— You could hardly call them so; there is very little arguing, where Tao is concerned. The Tiger was abroad, straining all those lithe tendons,—a tense fearful symmetry of destruction burning bright through the night-forests of that pralaya: grossest and wariest energies put forth to their utmost in a race between the cunning for existence, a struggle of the strong for power.—"It is the way of Tao to do difficult things when they are easy; to benefit and not to injure; to do and not to strive." Come out, says Laotse, from all this moil and topsey- turveydom; stop all this striving and botheration; give things a chance to right themselves. There is nothing flashy or to make a show about in Tao; it vies with no one. Let go; let be; find rest of the mind and senses; let us have no more of these fooleries, war, capital punishment, ambition; let us have self- emptiness. Just be quiet, and this great Chu Hia will come right without aid of governing, without politics and voting and canvassing and such.—Here and Now and What comes by were his prescriptions. He was an advocate of the Small State. Aristotle would have had no government ruling more than ten thousand people; Laotse would have had his State of such a size that the inhabitants could all hear the cocks crowing in foreign lands; and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad. What he taught was a total bouleversement of the methods of his age. "It is the way of Tao not to act from personal motives, to conduct affairs—without feeling the trouble of them, to taste without being aware of the flavor, to account the great as the small and the small as the great, to recompense injury with kindness."
The argument went all against him. Their majesties of Ts'in and Tsin and Ts'i and Ts'u were there with their drums and tramplings; the sixty warrior-carrying chariots were thundering past;—who should hear the voice of an old quiet man in the Royal Library? Minister This and Secretary That of Lu and Chao and Cheng were at it with their wire-pullings and lobbyings and petty diddlings and political cheateries—(it is all beautifully modern); what had the world to do with self-emptiness and Tao? The argument was all against him; he hadn't a leg to stand on. There was no Tao; no simplicity; no magic; no Garden of Si Wang Mu in the West; no Azure Birds of Compassion to fly out from it into the world of men. Very well then; he, being one with that non-existent Tao, would ride away to that imaginary Garden; would go, and leave—
A strand torn out of the rainbow to be woven into the stuff of Chinese life. You could not tell it at the time; you never would have guessed it—but this old dull tired squalid China, cowering in her rice-fields and stopping her ears against the drums and tramplings, had had something—some seed of divinity, thrown down into her mind, that should grow there and be brooded on for three centuries or so, and then—
There is a Blue Pearl, Immortality; and the Dragon, wandering the heavens, is forever in pursuit or quest of it. You will see that on the old flag of China, that a foolish republicanism cast away as savoring too much of the Manchu. (But it was Laotse and Confucius, Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong, and Wu Taotse and the Banished Angel that it savored of really.) Well, it was this Blue Pearl that the Old Philosopher, riding up through the pass to the Western Gate of the world, there to vanish from the knowledge of men;—it was this Blue Pearl that, stopping and turning a moment there so high up and near heaven, he tossed back and out into the fields of China;—and the Dragon would come to seek it in his time.—You perhaps know the picture of Laotse riding away on his ox. I do not wonder that the beast is smiling.
For it really was the Blue Pearl: and the Lord knew what it was to do in China in its day. It fell down, you may say, from the clear ether of heaven into the thick atmosphere of this world; and amidst the mists of human personality took on all sorts of iridescences; lit up strange rainbow tints and fires to glow and glisten more and more wonderfully as the centuries should pass; and kindle the Chinese imagination into all sorts of opal glowings and divine bewilderments and wonderments;—and by and by the wonder-dyed mist-ripples floated out to Japan, and brought to pass there all sorts of nice Japanese cherry-blossomy and plum- blossomy and peonyish things, and Urashima-stories and Bushido- ish and Lafcadioish and badger-teakettle things:—reawakened, in fact, the whole of the faery glow of the Eastern World.
It is not to be thought that here among the mists and personalities the Pearl could quite retain all its pure blueness of the ether. It is not to be thought that Taoism, spread broadcast among the people, could remain, what it was at the beginning, an undiluted Theosophy. The lower the stratum of thought into which it fell, the less it could be Thought-Spiritual, the stuff unalloyed of Manas-Taijasi. Nevertheless, it was the Pearl Immortality, with a vigor and virtue of its own, and a competence for ages, on whatever plane it might be, to work wonders. Among thinking and spiritual minds it remained a true Way of Salvation. Among the masses it came to be thought of presently as personal immortality and the elixir of life. Regrettable, you may say; but this is the point: nothing was ever intended to last forever. You must judge Taoism by what it was in its day, not by what it may be now. Laotse had somehow flashed down into human consciousness a vision of Infinity: had confronted the Chinese mind with a conviction of the Great Mystery, the Divine Silence. It is simply a fact that that is the fountain whose waters feed the imagination and make it grow and bloom. Search for the Secret in chatter and outward sights and deeds, and you soon run to waste and nothingness; but seek here, and you shall find what seemed a void, teeming with lovely forms. He set the Chinese imagination, staggered and stupefied by the so long ages of manvantara, and then of ruin, into a glow of activity, of grace, of wonder; men became aware of the vast world of the Within; as if a thousand Americas had been discovered. It supplied the seed of creation for all the poets and artists to come. It made a new folklore; revivified the inner atmosphere of mountains and forests; set the fairies dancing; raised Yellow Crane Pagodas to mark the spot where Wang Tzu-chiao flew on the Crane to heaven in broad daylight. It sent out the ships of Ts'in Shi Hwangti presently to seek the Golden Islands of Peng-lai, where the Immortals give cups of the elixir to their votaries; in some degree it sent the armies of Han Wuti in search of the Garden of Si Wang Mu. The ships found (perhaps) only the Golden Islands of Japan; the armies found certainly Persia, India, and even the borders of Rome;—and withal, new currents, awakening and inter-national, to flow into China and make splendid the Golden Age of Han.