If Confucius could return to the old town he would certainly be disappointed—or am I imbuing him with a modern point of view to which he could not attain even by reincarnation? Judging by the effect several hundred centuries of his philosophy have had on his countrymen, I doubt on second thought whether he would lose any sleep over the insignificant fact that before he could reach his own compound he would have to wade at least calf-deep in oozy black mud for a mile or so, between mud hovels at which our pigs would curl their tails in wrath, stared upon by a redundancy of people to whom his native soil seems preferred as covering to cotton or wool. At worst he would probably quickly forget it, once inside his own private domain, especially if the thought of the streets and of “Peking carts” were not embittered by the necessity of returning to the station. The wall of Chufou has a circuit of four miles, and a third of the area within is taken up by the temple of Confucius and the residence of his lineal descendant. One steps directly from an unspeakable street into the vast enclosure, broken up by wall behind wall and building behind building in the style common to Chinese construction. First comes a forest of tile roofs, each covering a single turtle-supported stone shaft set up by this or that Chinese emperor. There are several rows of these, with perhaps a dozen in a row, larger and many times better built than the home of the average living Chinese. Above them, as through all the subdivisions of the great enclosure, rise old cypress-trees affording the sylvan pleasures of shade, the singing of birds, and the murmur of swaying branches. In the principal courtyard the stump of a pagoda-tree reputed to have been planted by the sage himself is preserved under a little glass-sided temple, a miniature of those in the outer yard. This is popularly believed to take on new life through another sprout as often as one dies, thus bridging all the centuries between the planter and present-day China, and certainly a large old tree of the same variety now leans forth from what seems to be the same root. Beyond is an open temple of kiosk shape where Confucius sat under a plum-tree and taught—even in winter no doubt, for he was probably as impervious to cold and discomfort as are the Chinese of to-day in their cotton-padded garments.
The great main temple about which all else centers has often been described in detail, so that all who read of such things should know that it is a hundred and thirty-five by eighty-four feet in area and seventy-eight high, with a portico upheld by nine far-famed stone pillars intricately carved with dragons. What seems to be less widely known is the impressive simplicity of that great structure, especially of the interior, dimly yet amply lighted through paper windows, and as strikingly free from the cluttering of painted idols which crowd most Chinese temples as is the whole enclosure from beggars and sycophant priests. A seated statue of the sage, ten feet high, occupies an alcove in the center of the room, facing the great doors. He wears the ancient scholar costume, culminating in a head-dress from which our mortarboard cap might have been derived, being a flat thing some two feet long, with ropes strung with beads, hanging well down over his face, which greatly resemble the warnings that our railroads hang on either side of low bridges as a caution to their brakemen to duck their heads. Above the alcove a slab of wood bearing four characters boldly announces Confucius the “Master Exemplar of All Ages”; before it stands the spirit tablet, the table on which sacrificial food is offered, and a great iron urn filled with the ashes of countless joss-sticks. On the right and left are the images of the “twelve disciples” of Confucius, a number which seems to have been purposely reached, by including the “boob” among his pupils and the commentator on his Classics who lived during the Sung dynasty—something like adorning the tombstone of Shakspere with the name of some professor who had edited a school edition of his works. Yet spaciousness on either hand, and upward to the old painted beams supporting the tile roof, is the impression likely to stay longest with the visitor from the West.
The original temple was built on this spot in 478 B.C., and to realize how slightly Chinese worship of the illustrious dead has changed during all the centuries since, one has only to drop into the former home of Li Hung-chang in Tientsin and note how similar in all its details is the temple in which his spirit tablet is enthroned. With each renovation there came an increase in size, until the shrine of Confucius became the vast cypress-shaded enclosure it is to-day. Many priests are attached to it, but they spend their time in learning the elaborate ritual and intricate forms of ceremony used during the spring and autumn festivals, so that regular and frequent worship, as we who live in Christian lands understand it, is scarcely practised. At stated periods the lineal descendant of Confucius comes to burn incense and offer food before the statue, as every Chinese son is expected to do before the graves of his ancestors. Pilgrims, too, come in great numbers, especially at certain seasons; but there is nothing similar to the daily mass or the weekly service of our churches.
Behind this main temple—which means on the cold north side of it, since every properly constructed Chinese temple faces south—is a smaller, much more severely simple hall containing the spirit tablet of Mrs. Confucius, though just which one is not specified. A spirit tablet, by the way, is a varnished or painted piece of wood a foot or two high, narrow and thin, bearing in three carved and usually gilded characters the posthumous name under which the deceased is honored, and set upright in the place sacred to him. At one side are two other temples, of the parents of Confucius, identically arranged. That is, the father is represented by a statue, in scholar’s costume, and the mother by a mere tablet, in a building following as meekly after that of her lord and master as does the Chinese wife in the flesh to this day. Why not statues of the wife and mother also, I asked the first man of learning willing to strain his understanding to catch my mispronounced meaning, though almost certain what the answer would be. It would be improper, he explained, politely, as to one with the ignorance of a new-born child, indecent, to speak plainly, to have a female statue, particularly in a sacred place. Given the ramshackle, filthy condition of a very large number of Chinese temples, the care with which all these were kept up was striking. But even these were not fleckless, especially those of the wife and the mother, where everything was covered with dust and the bare resounding chambers had a lonely air, as if very few ever took the trouble to come and burn incense to mere females.
I might, with a little effort or foresight, have come to Chufou properly introduced to meet the present head of the Kung family, which is the one we know by the name Confucius. But he is a mere boy—the prince who long held that position having recently died—and was certain to be in no manner different from a million other Chinese youths of the well-to-do class. Besides, though he passes as the seventy-fourth descendant in direct male line from the sage, he is in plain fact nothing of the sort. For the Confucius family, like many others in China, illustrious or commonplace, has now and then been forced to adopt a son to keep the line unbroken; even if a generation is not entirely sterile mere daughters are wasted effort in preserving a Chinese lineage. T’ai Tsung, nearly fifteen centuries after the death of the sage, bestowed posthumous honors upon the descendants of Confucius for the past forty-four generations, and exempted those to come from taxation, a privilege they still enjoy.
It is some two miles from the town itself to the grave of Confucius, by a worn-out avenue of ancient and bedraggled cypresses. “Those with letters of introduction, or persons of distinction,” explains the nearest approach to a guide-book of this region that is to be had, “are the only ones admitted; but others may be by tipping the guardian.” As if any one could possibly have gotten this far afield in China without knowing as much! The custodian was an unsoaped, one-eyed coolie who lay in wait just inside the first ornamental gateway, before which a pair of stone tigers, two lin (sacred animals unknown to natural history), and stone statues of two gigantic gentlemen known as Weng and Chung, stood on guard. A tablet over this, or one of the other several entrances we passed on the half-mile walk that remained to the grave itself, announced it the “Tomb of the All-Accomplished and Most Saintly Prince Wen Hsüan,” a posthumous title by which the sage would scarcely recognize himself. There were fields to be crossed, sometimes along ways lined by trees, a landscape covered far and wide with ordinary graves, a small stream, finally a locked and bolted gateway through a temple-like building, before our walk ended. But when it did it was at a last resting-place that even the Western world would have approved, perhaps have envied. Venerable old trees whispering with last year’s dead leaves rose above the secluded spot, yet not so thickly as to cut off the arch of the blue heavens or to more than filter the brilliant sunshine. Birds flitted here and there. It was such a spot as could scarcely be found in any Occidental cemetery, for not even the formality of granite tombstones or graveled walks between the graves was there to mar the sylvan charm. Stones there were, a single plain slab before each of the three mounds, but with only three characters in the old rounded script on each of them, and the softening hand of time, perhaps of centuries, to bring them into harmony with the scene, they seemed as naturally in place as did the old trees stretching their arms above them. Cone-shaped, as is the custom in China, but many times larger than the graves strewn by millions throughout the land, the mounds were simple hillocks, covered now with winter-brown grass. The slightly larger one, the characters on its stone in gold instead of red, was of the sage himself; that on the east covered the remains of his only son, while before the main mound rose a third that caused dispute among the several hangers-on who had accompanied me, so that I have no certain means of knowing whether it is that of the sage’s brother, his father, or his grandson.
Kung Fu-tze, as he is known in his native land, was born some twelve miles eastward from Chufou, in the village of Ni-San, now under the rule of bandits, and has been dead only a little more than twenty-four hundred years. In those days the small states that eventually coagulated into what we know as China were separate principalities, of which modern Shantung alone contained four, Confucius being a native of the one called Lu. He was already teaching at twenty-two, and studied much history. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that there was not much of anything more exciting to do for a young man wading the streets of Chufou twenty-five centuries ago; hence undue credit should not be given this particular youth for frequenting libraries rather than pool-rooms. A few decades of his life seem to have passed without anything particularly worth recording; but what are a few decades in China? Whatever else he passed this time at, there is no question that the studious young man was doing everything in his power, short of overstepping the easy marital laws of Lu, to beget him a son, in which he eventually succeeded. At length he emerges again from obscurity “at the early age of fifty-five,” as a chief city magistrate. The elections seem to have run his way, for we behold him soon afterward the acting minister of state—that unsatisfactory prefix probably being due to the fact, if one may judge by the politics of present-day China, that his appointment was not confirmed by Parliament. As such he “put an end to all crime,” evidently a simple little matter in those days, perhaps because “squeeze” was not included. But the old prince of Lu died and the new one abandoned himself to sensual pleasures, and at length Confucius quit the job and went on the road. Once it broke out, he seems to have had as serious a case of wanderlust as any ordinary mortal, for he rambled for thirteen years, looking in vain—so at least he told the story to sympathetic listeners—for a prince who would follow his advice and set up a model administration. The briefest reflection will remind the most thoughtless how times have changed in this matter of reformers since then.
If it were not improper to be critical toward so venerable an old gentleman, one might voice the suspicion that Confucius did not suffer severely from lack of self-confidence, for he repeatedly stated that he would produce a faultless administration and do away with all crime within three years in the domain of any prince who would hire him. Alas, if only he were back, be it only in the principality of Lu! No present member of the human race, unless perhaps a “practical politician,” will have the cynicism to suppose that the offer of this wandering Luluite was not eagerly competed for from the eight points of the Chinese compass. Yet the truth is far worse than that: he found no takers whatever! What was left for him, then, but to come back home and write a book? In fact, during those last three years of his life in Chufou he wrote five books, bringing himself unquestionably into the class with almost any of our modern novelists, though he succeeded in gathering about him only three thousand disciples. Population was scarcer in China twenty-five hundred years ago, of course, and publicity hardly a science at all. However, whatever he lacked in numbers he made up in quality, for no fewer than seventy-two of this handful became “proficient in the six departments of learning.” From these he chose ten as “master disciples,” granting them whatever passed for sheepskins in those days “for attainment in Virtue, Literature, Eloquence, and—and Politics!”
It is chiefly through these chosen followers, who wrote his “Discourses and Dialogues,” that Confucius became famous—and, like Christ, greatly misconstrued—and laid the foundation of China’s ethical and political life. But he could scarcely have had more than an inkling of the fame that was to accrue to him in later centuries, for his honors have been mainly posthumous, and it was not until twelve hundred and seventeen years after his death that he was made the “Prince of Literary Enlightenment!” Why, then, this hectic eagerness of modern man to attain to fame even before the sod has closed over him? I wonder, too, if the great sage would swell with pride at his achievements if he could come back and wander again through the grave-strewn, soiled and hungry, wickedly overpopulated, politically chaotic China of to-day. Surely he could not plead innocence of helping to bring about her present woes, for one of the most famous of his dictums, which have had so much influence on Chinese life for many centuries, runs “He who is not in office has no concerns with plans for the administration of its duties.” Where can be found, in so few words, the explanation of what is mainly wrong with the ancient empire which so erroneously now calls itself a republic?
Personally I should have preferred to Chufou the birthplace of Mencius, some thirty miles still farther southward, for there hills rise above the plain, growing larger beyond. Tsowhsien is a more enterprising town, too, with an electric light plant that had just been installed by an American company, and less of the air of making an easy living out of pilgrims than either Taianfu or the home of Confucius. Perhaps it has to thank the lesser fame of Mencius for this more manly attitude, for though he is reckoned second, or at worst third, among China’s sages, not one person in ten, even in his native province of Shantung, seemed to know where he lived and died. Pilgrims do come to Tsowhsien, for it is on the direct line of places of pilgrimage through this holy land of China; but Mencius has only dozens or scores of visitors where Confucius has thousands.