But see what he did. The gates of hell were swung wide, and for the time being, not the hosts of the Seraphim and Cherubim,—not the armed Bodhisatvas and Dhyanis,—could have forced them back on their hinges: "the ripple of effect," we read, "thou shalt let run its course." But in the ideal world he erected a barrier against them. He set up a colossal statue with arms outthrown to bar the egress; the statue of Confucius preaching the Balanced Life. With time it materialized, so to say, and fell into place. You can never certainly stop the gates of hell,—in this stage of our evolution. But perhaps as nearly as it can be done, he did it. Rome fell, and Christendom made a mess of things; it has never yet achieved that union which is the first condition of true civilization. But China, older than Rome, despite her sins and vicissitudes, has made a shift to stand. I shall come to comparing the two histories presently; then you will see. When the pralaya came on her, and the forces of life all went elsewhere—as they do and must from every civilization in their season,—China lost two of her treasures: Plenydd's vision, and Alawn's gift of song, were taken from her. But this stability; these Gloves of Gwron; this instinct for middle courses and the balance, this Doctrine of the Mean and love of plain sane doings: she has retained enough of this to keep her in being. And it was K'ung Ch'iu of Lu that gave it to her. Shall we not call him Such a One as only the Gods send?
Someone told me the other day what he had seen a couple of Chinamen do in a Californian garden. They had a flower-bed to plant, about forty feet long; and each a basket of seedlings to plant it with, and a slip of wood for a model, with mystic unintelligible signs inscribed thereon: WELCOME HOME in English capitals. One went to one end of the bed and the other to the other, and they began their planting. They made no measurements or calculations; used no rod or line; but just worked ahead till they met in the middle. When that happened, and the job was done, the bed was inscribed, in perfectly formed and proportioned English capitals made of young plants, WELCOME HOME. There was no crowding or omission. To account for it you have twenty-four centuries of Confucianism,—of Katherine Tingley's doctrine of Middle Lines, the Balanced Life.
It is a very small thing; but it may help us to understand.
XII. TALES FROM A TAOIST TEACHER
Confucius died in 478: the year, it may be noted, in which Athens attained her hegemony: or just when the Greek Cycle thirteen decades was opening. Looking backward thirteen decades from that, we come to 608 B.C.; four years after which date, according to the usually accepted tradition, Laotse was born. Thus we find the cycle preceding that of Greece mainly occupied, in China, by the lives of the two great Teachers.
We should have seen by this time that these two lives were, so to say, parts of a single whole: co-ordinated spiritually, if not in an organization on this plane. Laotse, like H.P. Blavatsky, brought the Teachings; he illuminated the inner worlds. That was his work. We can see little of him as he accomplished it: and only the smallest fragment of his doctrine remains:—five thousand words, out of his whole long life. But since we have had in our own time an example of how these things are done, we may judge him and his mission by this analogy; also by the results. Then came Confucius, like Katherine Tingley, to link this wisdom with individual and national life. The teachings were there; and he had no need to restate them: he might take the great principles as already enounced. But every Teacher has his own method, and his need to accentuate this or that: so time and history have had most to say about the differences between these two. What Confucius had to do, and did, was to found his school, and show in the lives of his disciples, modeled under his hands, how the wisdom of the Ages (and of Laotse) can be made a living power in life and save the world.
Contrasting the efforts of that age and this, we may say that then, organization, such as we have now, was lacking. Confucius did not come as the official successor of Laotse; Laotse, probably, had had no organized school that he could hand over to Confucius. He had taught, and his influence had gone far and wide, affecting the thought of the age; but he had had no trained and pledged body of students to whom he could say: 'Follow this man when I am gone; he is my worthy successor.'— All of which will be laughed at: I firmly believe, however, that it is an accurate estimate of things. When you come to think of it, it was by the narrowest margine that H. P. Blavatsky, through Mr. Judge—and his heroism and wisdom alone to be thanked for it!—had anything beyond the influence of her ideas and revelation to hand on to Katherine Tingley. In the way of an organization, I mean. Very few among her disciples had come to have any glimmering of what discipleship means, or were prepared to follow her accredited successors.
And Confucius, in his turn, had no established center for his school; it was a thing that wandered the world with him, and ceased, as in organization (however hazy) to exist when he died. Nothing remained, then, of either Teacher for posterity except the ideas and example. And yet I have hinted, and shall try to show, that tremendous results for good followed: that the whole course of history was turned in an upward direction. You may draw what inferences you will. The matter is profoundly significant.
Thirteen decades after the death of Confucius, Plato died in Greece; and about that time two men arose in China to carry forward, bring down, and be the expositors of, the work of the two great Teachers of the sixth and seventh centuries. These were Chwangtse for Taoism, and Mangtse or Mencius for Confucius: the one, the channel through which spiritual thought flowed to the quickening of the Chinese imagination; the other, the man who converted the spiritual thought of Confucius into the Chinese Constitution. Alas! they were at loggerheads: a wide breach between the two schools of thought had come to be by their time; or perhaps it was they who created it. We shall arrive at them next week; tonight, to introduce you to Liehtse, a Taoist teacher who came sometime between Laotse and Chwangtse;—perhaps in the last quarter of the fifth century, when Socrates was active in Greece.
Professor De Groot, of Holland, speaks boldly of Confucius as a Taoist; and though I dislike many of this learned Dutchman's ideas, this one is excellent. His thesis is that Laotse was no more an innovator than Confucius; that both but gave a new impulse to teachings as old as the race. Before Laotse there had been a Teacher Quan, a statesman-philosopher of the seventh century, who had also taught the Tao. The immemorial Chinese idea had been that the Universe is made of the interplay of two forces, Yang and Yin, positive and negative;—or simply the Higher and the Lower natures. To the Yang, the Higher, belong the Shen or gods,—all conscious beneficent forces within and without man. To the Yin or lower belong the kwei, the opposite of gods: fan means foreign; and Fan Kwei is the familiar Chinese term for white men. From Shen and Tao we get the term Shentao, which you know better as Shinto,—the Way of the Gods; or as well, the Wisdom of the Gods; as good an equivalent of our term Theosophy as you should find; perhaps indeed better than Theosophy itself; for it drives home the idea that the Wisdom is a practical Way of Life. Shentao, the Taoism of the Higher Nature, then, was the primeval religion of the Chinese;—Dr. De Groot arrives at this, though perhaps hardly sees how sensible a conclusion he has reached. In the sixth century B.C. it was in a fair way to becoming as obsolete as Neoplatonism or Gnosticism in the nineteenth A.D.; and Laotse and Confucius simply restated some aspects of it with a new force and sanction;—just as H.P. Blavatsky, in the Key to Theosophy, begins, you will remember, with an appeal to and restatement of the Theosophy of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists of Alexandria.