Once he was passing through a by-street when a man of the district shouted:—"Great is Confucius the Philosopher! Yet for all his wide learning he has nothing which can bring him fame!" The Master turned to his disciples and said:—"What shall I take up? Shall I take up charioteering?—or archery?—I must certainly take up charioteering!"
His disciples once were expecting him at the city of Ch'ing; and Tse Kung asked a man who was coming from the east gate if he had seen him there.—"Well," said the man, "there is a man there with a forehead like Yao, a neck like Kao Yao, his shoulders on a level with those of Tse-ch'an, but wanting below the waist three inches of the height of Yu;—and altogether having the forsaken appearance of a stray dog." Tse Kung recognised the description and hurried off to meet the Master, to whom he reported it verbatim. Confucius was hugely delighted. "A stray dog!" said he; "fine! fine!" Unluckily, no contemporary photographs of Yao and Yu and the others have come down; so the description is not as enlightening now as it may have been then.
"Tse Kung," we read, "would compare one man with another." The Master said:—"What talents Tse has! Now I have no time for such things!"
I keep on hearing in his words accents that sound familiar.
When he was at Loyang—Honanfu—one of the things that struck him most was a bronze statue in the Temple of the Imperial Ancestors, with a triple, clasp on its mouth. One does not wonder. A Great Soul from the God World, he kept his eyes resolutely on the world of men; as if he remembered, nothing of the splendor, and nothing foresaw. . . . Indeed, I cannot tell; one would give much to know what really passed between him and Laotse. If you say that no word of his lightens, for you that 'dusk within the Holy of holies',—at least he gives you the keys, and leaves you to find and open the 'Holy of holies' for yourself if you can. There are lost chapters, that went at the Burning of the Books; and an old-fashioned Chinaman would often tell you of any Western idea or invention his countrymen may not have known, that you should have found all in the lost chapters of Confucius. It may be;—and that you should have found there better things, too, than Western ideas and inventions. There is a passage in the Analects that tells how the disciples thought he was 'keeping back from them some part of his doctrine: "No, no," he answered; "if I should not give it all to you, to whom should I give it?" Distinctly, then, this suggests that there was an esotericism, a side not made public; and there is no reason to suppose that it has been made public since. But it is recorded that he would lift no veils from the Other-worlds. "If you do not understand life," said he, "how can you understand death?"
Well; we who are stranded here, each on his desert island of selfhood, thrust out after knowledge: peer for signs at all the horizons;—are eager to inquire, and avid of the Unknown—which also we imagine to be something outside of our own being. But suppose a man, as they say one with Tao, in which all knowledge rests in solution: what knowledge would he desire? After what would he be inquisitive? And how much, desiring it, would he possess? What is the end of being, after all? To perform your function, your duty; what men and the world,—ay, and the far suns and stars,—are requiring of you:—that is all. Not to gain infinite knowledge; but to have at, every step what knowledge you need; that so you may fill your place in the Universe, meeting all contours and flowing into them; restoring and maintaining the Harmony of Things. So we hear much about this performance of duty. But in reality, to do one's duty is to sing with the singing spheres; to have the Top of Infinity for the roof of one's skull, and the bottom of the Great Deep for one's footsoles: to be a compendium, and the Equal, of Heaven and Earth. The password into the Tao of Laotse is Silence; Confucius kept the great Silence more wonderfully than Laotse did—or so it seems to me now. Laotse said: Sing with the singing spheres, and behold, your duty is doing itself uder your hands. The password into the Tao of Confucius is Duty: he said merely Do that, and,—the rest is silence. He may have played that rest on his lute; we are not to hear it in his words. There was a knowledge that Laotse, enthroned in his silence, had no means of using; that Confucius riding the chariot of duty, had no occasion to possess.
Now whether you call Tao duty, or silence,—what should the Man of Tao desire beyond the fulness of it? All the light is there for him; all the suns are kindled for him;—why should he light wax candles? That is, for himself: he will light them fast enough where others may be in need. To us, a great poem may be a great thing: but to them who have the fulness of which the greatest poem is but a little glimpse—what should it matter to them? And of the infinite knowledge at his disposal, would the Man of Tao choose to burden himself with one little item of which there was no present need?
So when they say, "Confucius was nobody; there is no evidence that he knew the great secrets"; answer them:—"Yes, there is. He knew that supreme secret, how to teach, which is the office of a Teacher: he knew how to build up the inner life of his disciples; to coax, train, lure the hidden god into manifestation in them." And for evidence you can give them this: Tse Kung—who, you remember, was always comparing this man with that—asked which was the better, Shih or Shang. (They were two disciples.) Confucius answered: "Shih goes too far; Shang not far enough." Said Tse Kung (just as you or I would have done):— "Then Shih is the better man?"—"Too far," replied Confucius, "is not better than not far enough."—To my ears there is more occultism in that than in a thousand ethical injunctions.—Or answered;—"Whilst thy father and they elder brother are alive, how canst thou do all thou art taught?" Jan Yu said:—"Shall I do all I am taught?" The Master said:—"Do all thou art taught." Kung-hsi Hua said: "Yu asked, 'Shall I do all I am taught?' and you spoke, Sir, of father and elder brother. Ch'iu asked, 'Shall I do all I am taught?' and you answered: 'Do all thou art taught.' I am puzzled, and make bold to ask you, Sir." The Master said:—"Ch'iu is bashful, so I egged him on. Yu has the pluck of two, so I held him back."
Think it over! Think it over!
This though occurs to me: Was that sadness of his last days caused by the knowledge that the School could not continue after his death; because the one man who might have succeeded him as the Teacher, Yen Huy, was dead? So far as I know, it did not go on; there was no one to succeed him. That supreme success, that grand capture of future ages for the Gods, was denied him; or I daresay our own civilization might have been Confucian—BALANCED —now. But short of that—how sublime a figure he stands! If he had known that for twenty-five centuries or so he was to shine within the vision of the great unthinking masses of his countrymen as their supreme example; their anchor against the tides of error, against abnormalities, extravagances, unbalance; a bulwark against invading time and decay; a check on every bad emperor, so far as check might be set at all; a central idea to mold the hundred races of Chu Hia into homogeneity; a stay, a prop, a warning against headlong courses at all times of cyclic downtrend;—if he had known all this, he would, I think, have ordered his life precisely as he did. Is there no strength implied, as of the Universal, and not of any personal, will, however titanic, in the fact that moment after moment, day after day, year after year, he built up this picture, gave the world this wonderful assurance of a man? In his omissions, no less than in his fulfilments. He taught,—so far as we know,—nothing but what the common mind might easily accept; nothing to miss the mark of the intelligence of dull Li or Ching toiling in the rice-field;—nor yet too paltry for the notice of the Hwangti on the Dragon Throne. Laotse had come in the spirit of Plenydd the Light-bringer; in the spirit of Alawn, to raise up presently sweet profusions of song. He illuminated the inner worlds; his was the urge that should again and again, especially later when reinforced by Buddhism, prick up the Black-haired People to heights of insight and spiritual achievement.—But the cycles of insight and spiritual achievement, these too, must always run their course and fall away; there is no year when it is always Spring. Dark moments and seasons come; and the Spirit becomes hidden; and what you need most is not illumination,—which you cannot get; or if you could, it would be hell, and not heaven, that would be illuminated for you; not a spur to action,—for as things are constituted, any spur at such a time would drive you to wrong and exorbitant action:—what you need is not these, but simply stability to hold on; simply the habit of propriety, the power to go on at least following harmless conventions and doing harmless things; not striking out new lines for yourself, which would certainly be wrong lines, but following as placidly as may be lines that were laid down for you, or that you yourself laid down, in more righteous and more luminous times. A strong government, however tyrannical, is better than an anarchy in which the fiend in every man is let loose to run amuck. Under the tyranny, yes, the aspiring man will find himself hindered and thwarted; but under the anarchy, since man is no less hell than heaven, the gates of hell will be opened, and the Soul, normally speaking, can only retire and wait for better times:—unless it be the Soul of a Confucius, it can but wait till Karma with ruthless hands has put down the anarchy and cleared things up. Unless it be the Soul of a Confucius; and even Such a One is bound to be a failure in his own day.