In those South-eastern states there was no prospect for him, and after a while he returneci to Wei. He liked Duke Ling personally, and the liking was mutual; time and again he went back there, hoping against hope that something might be done,—or seeing no other horizon so hopeful. Now Ling had a consort of some irregular kind: Nantse, famed for her beauty and brilliance and wickedness. Perhaps ennuyee, and hoping for contact with a mind equal to her own, she was much stirred by the news of Confucius' return, and sent to him asking an interview. Such a request was a characteristic flouting of the conventions on her part; for him to grant it would be much more so on his. But he did grant it; and they conversed, after the custom of the time, with a screen between, neither seeing the other. Tse Lu was much disturbed; considering it all a very dangerous innovation, inconsistent in Confucius, and improper. So in the eyes of the world it would have seemed. But Nantse held the Duke, and Confucius might influence Nantse. He never let conventions stand in his way, when there was a chance of doing good work by breaking them.
One suspects that the lady wished to make her vices respectable by giving them a seeming backing by incarnate virtue; and that to this end she brought about the sequel. Duke Ling was to make a Progress through the city; and requested Confucius to follow his carriage in another. He did so; not knowing that Nantse had seen to it that she was to be sitting at the Duke's side. Her position and reputation even in those days needed some regularizing; and she had chosen this means to do it. But to the people, the spectacle was highly symbolic; and Confucius heard their jeers as he passed:—Flaunting Vice in front, Slighted Virtue in the rear.—"I have met none," said he, "who loves virtue more than women." It was time for him to go; and now he would try the south again. In reality, perhaps, it matter little whither he went or where he stayed: there was no place for him anywhere. All that was important was, that he should keep up the effort.
An official in Sung, one Hwan Tuy, held the roads against him, accusing him of "a proud air and many desires; an insinuating habit and a wild will." From this time on he was subject to persecution. The "insinuating habit" reminds one of an old parrot-cry one has heard: "She hypnotizes them." He turned westward from this opposition, and visited one state, and then another; in neither was there any disposition to use him. He had found no more likely material than Duke Ling of Wei, who at least was always glad to see and talk with him:—might not be jade to carve, but was the wood least rotten at hand. But at Wei, as usual, there was nothing but disappointment in store.
Pih Hsih, a rebel, was holding a town in Tsin, modern Shansi, against the king of that state; and now sent messengers inviting Confucius to visit him. Tse Lu protested: had he not always preached obedience to the Powers that Were, and that the True Gentleman did not associate with rebels?—"Am I a bitter gourd," said Confucius, "to be hung up out of the way of being eaten?" He was always big enough to be inconsistent. He had come to see that the Powers that Were were hopeless, and was for catching at any straw. But something delayed his setting out; and when he reached the Yellow River, news came of the execution of Tsin of two men whom he admired. "How beautiful they were!" said he; "how beautiful they were! This river is not more majestic! And I was not there to save them!"
The truth seems to be that he would set out for any place where the smallest opening presented itself; and while that opening existed, would not be turned aside from his purpose; but if it vanished, or if something better came in sight, he would turn and follow that. Thus he did not go on into Tsin when he heard of these executions; but one, when he was on the road to Wei and a band of roughs waylaid him and made him promise never to go there again, he simply gave the promise and went straight on.
At Wei now Duke Ling was really inclined to use him;—but as his military adviser. It was the last straw; he left, and would not return in Ling's lifetime. He was in Ch'in for awhile; and then for three years at Ts'ae, a new state built of the rebellion of certain subjects or vassals of the great sourthern kingdom of Ts'u. On hearing of his arrival, the Duke of Ts'ae had the idea to send for Tse Lu, who had a broad reputation of his own as a brave and practical man, and to inquire of him what kind of man the master really was. But Tse Lu, as we have seen, was rigid as to rebels, and vouchsafed no answer.—"You might have told him," said Confucius, "that I am simply one who forgets his food in the pursuit of wisdom, and his sorrows in the joys of attaining it, and who does not perceive old age coming on."
Missionary writers have cast it at him, that were of old he had preached against rebellion, now he was willing enough to "have rebels for his patrons";—"adversity had not stiffened his back, but had made him pliable." Which shows how blind such minds are to real greatness. "They have nothing to draw with, and this well is deep." He sought no "patrons," now or at another time; but tools with which to work for the redemption of China; and he was prepared to find them anywhere, and take what came to hand. His keynote was duty. The world went on snubbing, ignoring, insulting, traducing, and persecuting him; and he went on with the performance of his duty;—rather, with the more difficult task of searching for the duty he was to perform. This resorting to rebels, like that conversing with Nantse, shows him clearly not the formalist and slave of conventions he has been called, but a man of highest moral courage. What he stood for was not forms, conventions, reules, proprieties, or anything of the sort; but the liens of least resistance in his high endeavor to lift the world: lines of least resistance; middle lines; common sense.—As ususal, there was nothing to be done with the Duke of Ts'ae.
Wandering from state to state, he came on recluses in a field by the river, and sent Tse Lu forward to ask one of them the way to the ford. Said the hermit:—"You follow one who withdraws from court to court; it would be better to withdraw from the world altogether."—"What!" said Confucius when it was told him; "shall I not associate with mankind? If I do not associate with mankind, with whom shall I associate?"
In which answer lies a great key to Confucianism; turn it once or twice, and you get to the import of his real teaching. He never would follow the individual soul into its secrecies; he was concerned with man only as a fragment of humanity. He was concerned with man as humanity. All that the West calls (personal) religion he disliked intensely. Any desire or scheme to save your own soul; any right-doing for the sake of a reward, either here or hereafter, he would have bluntly called wrong- doing, anti-social and selfish. (I am quoting in substance from Dr. Lionel Giles.) He tempted no one with hopes of heaven; frightened none with threats of hell. It seemed to him that he could make a higher and nobler appeal,—could strike much more forcibly at the root of evil (which is selfishness), by saying nothing about rewards and punishments at all. The one inducement to virtue that he offered was this: By doing right, you lead the world into right-doing. He was justified in saying that Man is divine; because this divine appeal of his was effective; not like the West's favorite appeal to fear, selfish desire, and the brutal side of our nature. "Do right to escape a whipping, or a hanging, or hell-fire," says Christendom; and the nations reared on that doctrine have risen and fallen, risen and fallen; a mad riot of people struggling into life, and toppling back into death in a season; so that future ages and the far reaches of history will hardly remember their names, too lightly graven upon time. But China, nourished on this divine appeal, however far she may have fallen short of it, has stood, and stood, and stood. In the last resort, it is the only inducement worth anything; the only lever that lifts.—There is that li,—that inevitable rightness and harmony that begins in the innermost when there is the balance and duty is being done, and flows outward healing and preserving and making wholesome all the phases of being;—let that harmony of heaven play through you, and you are bringing mankind to virtue; you are pouting cleansing currents into the world. How little of the tortuosity of metaphysics is here;—but what grand efficacity of super-ethics! You remember what Light on the Path says about the man who is a link between the noise of the market-place and the silence of the snow-capped Himalayas; and what it says about the danger of seeking to sow good karma for oneself,—how the man that does so will only be sowing the giant weed of selfhood. In those two passages you find the essence of Confucianism and the wisdom and genius of Confucius. It is as simple as A B C; and yet behind it lie all the truths of metaphysics and philosophy. He seized upon the pearl of Theosophic thought, the cream of all metaphysics, where metaphysics passes into action,—and threw his strength into insisting on that: Pursue virtue because it is virtue, and that you may (as you will,—it is the only way you can) bring the world to virtue; or negatively, in the words of Light on the Path: "Abstain (from vice) because it is right to abstain—not that yourself shall be kept clean." And now to travel back into the thought behind, that you may see if Confucius was a materialist; whether or not he believed in the Soul;—and that if he was not a great original thinker, at least he commanded the ends of all great, true and original thinking. Man, he says, is naturally good. That is, collectively. Man is divine and immortal; only men are mortal and erring. Were there a true brotherhood of mankind established, a proper relation of the parts to the whole and to each other,—you would have no difficulty with what is evil in yourself. The lower nature with its temptations would not appear; the world-old battle with the flesh would be won. But separate yourself in yourself,—consider yourself as a selfhood, not as a unit in society;—and you find, there where you have put yourself, evil to contend with a-plenty. Virtue inheres in the Brotherhood of Man; vice in the separate personal and individual units. Virtue is in That which is no man's possession, but common to all: namely, the Soul—though he does not enlarge upon it as that; perhaps never mentions it as the Soul at all;—vice is in that which each has for himself alone: the personality. Hence his hatred of religiosity, of personal soul-saving. You were to guard against evil in the simplest way: by living wholly in humanity, finding all you motives and sources of action there. If you were, in the highest sense, simply a factor in human society, you were a good man. If you lived in yourself alone,—having all evil to meet there, you were likely to succumb to it; and you were on the wrong road anyway. Come out, then; think not of your soul to be saved, nor of what may befall you after death. You, as you, are of no account; all that matters is humanity as a whole, of which you are but a tiny part.—Now, if you like, say that Confucius did not teach Theosophy, because, so far as we know, he said nothing about Karma or Reincarnation. I am inclined to think him one of the two or three supreme historical Teachers of Theosophy; and to say that his message, so infinitely simple, is one of the most wonderful presentations of it ever given.
It is this entire purity from all taint of personal religion; this distaste for prayer and unrelish for soul-salvation; this sweet clean impersonality of God and man, that makes the missionary writers find him so cold and lifeless. But when you look at him, it is a marvelously warm-hearted magnetic man you see: Such a One as wins hearts to endless devotion. Many of the disciples were men who commanded very much the respect of the world. The king of Ts'u proposed to give Confucius an independent duchy: to make a sovereign prince of him, with territories absolutely his own. But one of his ministers dissuaded him thus: "Has your majesty," said he, "any diplomatist in your service like Tse Kung? Or anyone so fitted to be prime minister as Yen Huy? Or a general to compare with Tse Lu? . . . If K'ung Ch'iu were to acquire territory, with such men as these to serve him, it would not be to the prosperity of Ts'u."—And yet those three brilliant men were content—no, proud—to follow him on his hopeless wanderings, sharing all his long sorrow; they were utterly devoted to him. Indeed, we read of none of his disciples turning against him;—which also speaks mighty well for the stuff that was to be found in Chinese humanity in those days.