[384] Serpent-worship was as we know common in Egypt, and also among the Hebrews up to the time of Hezekiah, and among certain Indian and other Asiatic races. As for "dragons," they existed even in Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire (see County Folk-lore, vol. x. p. 33; and County Folk-lore: Gloucestershire, p. 23). It is unnecessary to remind the English reader of St. George and his feats. For further parallels see Dennys's Folk-lore of China, pp. 92, 102 seq., 107, 110.
[385] Sir Robert Douglas mentions a case in point in his Confucianism and Taouism (5th ed.), p. 277. He says of a certain great serpent that "Li Hung-chang, the viceroy of the province, came in person to pay reverence to it as the personification of the Dragon-king." For a discussion of snake-demons in China see De Groot's Religious System of China, vol. v. pp. 626 seq. See also J.R.A.S. (China Branch), vol. xxxiv. p. 116. For a famous snake-demon legend that has been widely accepted in lands other than China, the reader need not look further than Genesis, chap. iii.
[386] A belief of the kind exists in Japan. See Griffis, The Religions of Japan (4th ed.), p. 32. For China, see also De Groot, Religious System of China, vol. iv. pp. 214-19.
[387] Large snakes are very rare in Shantung, though pythons are common enough in south China.
[388] Shinto, p. 42.
[389] Near the village of Hsing-lin ("Almond-Grove").
[390] The Five Sacred Mountains are T'ai Shan in Shantung, Hêng Shan in Shansi (and a rival claimant of the same name in Chihli), Sung Shan in Honan, Hua Shan in Shensi, and the Nan Yüeh in Hunan. The Spirits of these Mountains are known as Ta Ti—"Great Gods." The most famous of them, so far as literature and tradition go, is T'ai Shan; the most popular (judging from my own observation of the number of worshippers during the pilgrim season) is the Nan Yüeh; the most beautiful, as well as the loftiest, is Hua Shan, which—when there is a railway from Honan-fu to Hsi-an-fu—will become a European tourists' Mecca. See supra, pp. [71], [73], [74].
[391] The so-called Four Famous Mountains (Ssŭ Ta Ming Shan) of Buddhism are Wu-t'ai Shan in Shansi, Omei Shan in Ssŭch'uan, Chiu Hua Shan in Anhui and Pootoo Shan off the coast of Chehkiang. After visits to all these hills I am inclined to give the palm of beauty to Omei Shan, though the others have great charms of their own, more especially the little fairyland of Pootoo, with its silver sands, its picturesque monasteries, its tree-clad slopes and the isle-studded deep-blue sea that laps its rock-fringed coast. But apart from the Five Sacred Mountains (still predominantly Taoist) and the Four Famous Hills (almost exclusively Buddhist) there are very many other beautiful and famous temple-studded hills in China. Wu-tang in Hupei, T'ai Pai in Shensi, T'ien-t'ai in Chehkiang, Huang Shan in Anhui, Shang-Fang near Peking, Wu-i and Ku Shan in Fuhkien, the Lo-fou hills near Canton, are only a few of those of which the fame has spread furthest.
[392] Shang Ti is the term that the majority of Protestant missionaries in China have adopted to represent the word God. T'ien Chu (Lord of Heaven) is the name selected by the Roman Catholics. The Chinese know Protestantism as Ye-su Chiao (the Jesus Doctrine) and Roman Catholicism as T'ien Chu Chiao (the Lord-of-Heaven Doctrine).
[393] The simple uncarved stones seem to gain in interest when we go back in thought to the days of the early Greeks and the early Babylonians and Assyrians. Of the ancient Greeks Pausanias tells us that they worshipped the gods through the medium of images, and that these images were unwrought stones. Some of the T'u Ti and other images that one finds everywhere in Weihaiwei—with their short, squat, scarcely human bodies—suggest a transition from the mere unwrought stone to the carved and finished statue. Similarly in Greece we find first the absolutely rough, unhewn stone, such as that which represented Eros at Thespiæ, next the legless, angular, ugly images such as the well-known square Hermes—of which, one would have thought, both gods and men should be ashamed—and finally the exquisite statues of idealised boyhood and youth such as are still a source of the purest delight to all lovers of beauty and of art. Unfortunately the desire to make the gods appear different from ordinary mankind led the Chinese, as it led the Indian and other Eastern races, to what may be called the cultivation of the grotesque, so that there is very little that is grand or beautiful, as a rule, even in the best of their divine images. The finest statues, generally speaking, are undoubtedly those of Sakya Buddha. Tradition, in this respect, has been comparatively merciful to the memory of the great Indian philosopher and sage. Europeans often find fault with the Buddha-faces for their alleged insipidity: whereas what the artist has really aimed at is an ideal of passionless repose.