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The Crest Wave of Evolution by Kenneth Morris

K >> Kenneth Morris >> The Crest Wave of Evolution




And now we must turn to China.

Dusk came on in Rome with the death of Tiberius in A.D. 37; but
what is dusk in the west is dawn in the east of the world. In 35
Han Kwang-wuti had put down the Crimson-Eyebrow rebellion, and
seated himself firmly on the throne. The preceding half-cycle,
great in Rome under Augustus and Tiberius, had been a time, first
of puppet emperors, then of illegalism and usurpation, then of
civil war. Han Kwang-wuti put an end to all that, and opened, in
35, a new cycle of his own.

But there is also an old cycle to be taken into account: the
original thirteen-decade period of the Hans, that began in 194,
and ended its first "day" in 63 or so,--to name convenient dates.
I should, if I believed in this cyclic law, look for a recurrence
of that: a new day to dawn, under its influence, in 66 or 67
A.D., thirteen decades after the old one ended,--and to last
until 196 or 197. But on the other hand, here is Han Kwang-wuti
starting things going in 35, a matter of thirty-two years ahead
of time,--catching the flow of force just as it diminished in
Rome.--And this thirty-two years, you may note, with what odd
months we may suppose thrown in, is in itself a quarter-cycle.

Now cyclic impulses waste; a second day of splendor will
commonly be found a Silver Age, where the first was Golden: it
will often be more perfect and refined, but much less vigorous,
than the first. So I should look for the second "day" of the
Hans to come on the whole with less light to shine and less
strength to endure than its predecessor; I should expect a
gentleness as of late afternoon in place of the old noontide
glory. But then there is the complication induced by Han
Kwang-wuti, who started his cycle in 35.... or more probably
his half-cycle;--I should look for it to be no more than that,
on account of this same wastage of the forces;--this also has
to be taken into consideration.

Brooding over the whole situation, I should foretell the history
of this second Han Dynasty in this way: from 35 to 67,--the
latter date the point where the old and new cycles intersect,--
would be a static time: of consolidation rather than expansion;
of the gathering of the wave, not of its outburst into any
splendor of foam. Between 67 and 100, or when the two cycles
coincide, I should look for great things and doings; for some
echo or repetition of the glories of Han Wuti,--perhaps for a
finishing and perfecting of his labors. From then on till 197 I
should expect static, but weakening conditions: static mainly
till 165, weakening rapidly after. Advise me, please, if this is
clear.--Well, if you have followed so far, you have a basis for
understanding what is to come.

The dynasty, as thus re-established by Kwang-wuti, is known as
that of the Eastern Hans; for this reason:--just as late in the
days of the Roman empire, Diocletian was stirred by cyclic
flowing east-ward to move his capital from Rome to Nicomedia,--
Constantine changed it afterwards to Byzantium,--so was Han
Kwang-wuti to move his from Changan in Shensi, in the west,
eastward to Loyang or Honanfu,--the old Chow capital,--in Honan.

While Rome was weltering under Caligula, Claudius, and Nero,
China was recovering herself, getting used to a calm equanimity,
under Haii Kwang-wuti: the conditions in the two were as
opposite as the poles. She dwelt in quietness at home, and held
her own, and a little more, on the frontiers. In 57, two years
before Nero went mad and took the final plunge into infamy, Han
Kwang-wuti died, and Han Mingti succeeded him. As Nero went
down, Han Mingti went up. His ninth or tenth year, remember, was
to be that of the recurrence of the old Han cycle. It was the
year in which the provinces rose against Nero,--the lowest point
of all in Rome. I do not know that it was marked by anything
special in China; the fact being that all the Chinese sixties
were momentous.

In the third Year of his reign Han Mingti dreamed a dream: he
saw a serene and "Golden Man" descending towards him out of the
western heavens. It would mean, said his brother, to whom he
spoke of it, the Golden God worshiped in the West,--the Buddha.
Buddhism had first come into China in the reign of Tsin Shi
Hwangti; but that imperial ruffian had made short work of it:--
he threw the missionaries into prison, and might have dealt worse
with them, but that a "Golden Man" appeared in their cell in
the night, and opened all doors for their escape. Buddhist
scriptures, probably, were among the books destroyed at the great
Burning. So there may have been Buddhists in China all through
the Han time; but if so, they were few, isolated and inconspicuous;
it is Han Mingti's proper glory, to have brought Buddhism in.

He liked well his brother's interpretation, and sent inquirers
into the west. In 65 they returned, with scriptures, and an
Indian missionary, Kashiapmadanga,--who was followed shortly by
Gobharana, another. A temple was built at Loyang, and under the
emperor's patronage, the work of translating the books began.--We
have seen before how some touch from abroad is needed to quicken
an age into greatness: such a touch came now to China with these
Indian Buddhists;--who, in all likelihood, may also have been in
their degree Messengers of the Lodge.

In the usual vague manner of Indian chronology, the years 57 and
78 A.D. are connected with the name of a great king of the Yueh
Chi, Kanishka, whose empire covered Northern India. Almost every
authority has a favorite point in time for his habitat; but
these dates, not so far apart but that he may well have been
reigning in both, will do as well as another. You will note that
72 A.D. (which falls between them) is a matter of thirteen
decades from 58 B.C., the date sometimes ascribed to that
much-legended Vikramaditya of Ujjain. Or, if we go back to the
(fairly) settled 321 B.C. of Chandragupta Maurya, and count
forward thirteen-decade periods from that, we get 191 for the end
of the Mauryas (it happened about then); 61 for Vikramaditya
(which may well be); 69 for Kanishka,--which also is likely
enough, and would make him contemporary with Han Mingti. As the
years 57 and 78 are both ascribed to him, it may possibly be that
they mark the beginning and end of his reign respectively.

We know very little about him, except that he was a very great
king, a great Buddhist, a man of artistic tastes, and a great
builder; that he loved the beautiful hills and valleys of
Cashmere; and that his reign was a wonderful period in sculptue,
--that of the Gandhara or Greco-Buddhist School. Again,
he is credited (by Hiuen Tsang) with convening the Fourth
Buddhist Council: following in this, as in other matters, the
example of Asoka. We are at liberty I suppose, if we like, to
assign that cyclic year 69 to the meeting of this Council: this
year or its neighborhood. So that all this may have had
something to do with the missionary activity that responded to
Han Mingti's appeal. But there is something else to remember;
something of far higher importance; namely, that during all this
period of her most uncertain chronology, India was in a peculiar
position: the Successors of the Buddha were more or less openly
at work there;--a long line of Adept leaders and teachers that
can be traced (I believe) through some thirteen centuries from
Sakya-muni's death. We may suppose, not unreasonably, that
Kashiapmadanga and Gobharana were disciples and emissaries of the
then Successor.

It is, so far, and with so little translated, extremely hard to
get at the undercurrents in these old Chinese periods; but I
suspect a strong spiritual influence, Buddhist at that, in the
great events of the years that followed. For China proceeded to
strike into history in such a way that the blow resounded, if not
round the world, at least round as much of it as was discovered
before Columbus; and she did it in such a nice, clean, artistic
and quiet way, and withal so thoroughly, that I cannot help
feeling that that glorious warriorlike Northern Buddhism of the
Mahayana had something to do with it.

It was not Han Mingti himself who did it, but one of his sevants;
of whom, it is likely, you have never heard; although east or
west there have been, probably, but one or two of his trade so
great as he, or who have mattered so much to history. His name
was Pan Chow; his trade, soldiering. He began his career of
conquest about the time the major Han Cycle was due to recur,--in
the sixties; maintained it through three reigns, and ended it at
his death about when the Eastern Han half-cycle, started in 35,
was due to close;--somewhere, that is, about 100 A.D., while
Trajan was beginning a new day and career of conquest in Rome.




XXI. CHINA AND ROME: THE SEE-SAW (CONTINUED)


During the time of Chinese weakness Central Asia had relapsed
from the control the great Han Wuti had imposed on it, and that
Han Suenti had maintained by his name for justice; and the Huns
had recovered their power. One wonders what these people were;
of whom we first catch sight in the reign of the Yellow Emperor,
nearly 3000 B.C.; and who do not disappear from history until
after the death of Attila. During all those three millenniums
odd they were predatory nomads, never civilized: a curse to
their betters, and nothing more. And their betters were, you may
say, every race they contacted.

It seems as if, as in the human blood, so among the races of
mankind, there were builders and destroyers. I speculate as to
the beginnings of the latter: they cannot be . . . races apart,
of some special creation;--made by demons, where it was the Gods
made men. . . . "To the Huns," says Gibbon, "a fabulous origin
was assigned worthy of their form and manners,--that the witches
of Scythia, who for their foul and deadly practices had been
driven from society, had united in the desert with infernal
spirits, and that the Huns were the offspring of this execrable
conjunction." But it seems to me that it is in times of
intensive civilization, and in the slums of great cities, that
Nature--or anti-Nature--originates noxious human species. I
wonder if their forefathers were, once on a time, the hooligans
and yeggmen of some very ancient Babylon Bowery or the East End
of some pre-Nimrodic Nineveh? Babylon was a great city,--or
there were great cities in the neighborhood of Babylon, before
the Yellow Emperor was born. One of these may have had, God
knows when, its glorious freedom-establishing revolution, its
up-fountaining of sansculottes,--patriots whose predatory
proclivities had erstwhile been checked of their free brilliance
by busy-body tyrannical police;--and then this revolution may
have been put down, and the men of the underworld who made turned
out now from their city haunts, driven into the wilderness and
the mountains,--may have taken,--would certainly have taken, one
would say,--not to any industry, (they knew none but such as are
wrought by night unlawfully in other men's houses); not to
agriculture, which has ever had, for your free spirit, something
of degradation in it;--but to pure patriotism, freedom and
liberty, as their nature was: first to cracking such desultory
cribs as offered,--knocking down defenseless wayfarers and the
like: then to bolder raidings and excursions;--until presently,
lo, they are a great people; they have ridden over all Asia like
a scirocco; they have thundered rudely at the doors of proud
princes,--troubling even the peace of the Yellow Emperor on
his throne.

Well,--but isn't the stature stunted, physical, as well as mental
and moral, when life is forced to reproduce itself, generation
after generation, among the unnatural conditions of slums and
industrialism? . . . Can you nourish men upon poisons century by
century, and expect them to retain the semblance of men?

They had bothered Han Kwang-wuti; who could do little more than
hold his own against them, and leave them to his successor to
deal with as Karma might decree. Karma, having as you might
say one watchful eye on Rome and Europe, and what need of
chastisement should arise after awhile at that western end of the
world, provided Han Mingti with this Pan Chow; who, being a
soldier of promise, was sent upon the Hun war-path forthwith.
Then the miracles began to happen. Pan Chow strolled through
Central Asia as if upon his morning's constitutional: no fuss;
no hurry; little fighting,--but what there was, remarkably
effective, one gathers. Presently he found himself on the
Caspian shore; and if he had left any Huns behind him, they were
hardly enough to do more than pick an occasional pocket. He
started out when the Roman provinces were rising to make an end
of Nero; in the last year of Domitian, from his Caspian
headquarters he determined to discover Rome; and to that end
sent an emissary down through Parthia to take ship at the port of
Babylon for the unknown West. The Parthians (who were all
against the two great empires becoming acquainted, because they
are making a good thing of it as middle-men in the Roman-Chinese
caravan trade), knew better, probably, than to oppose Pan Chow's
designs openly; but their agents haunted the quays at Babylon,
tampered with west-going skippers, and persuaded the Chinese
envoy to go no farther. But I wonder whether some impulse
achieved flowing across the world from east to west at that
time, even though its physical link or channel was thus left
incomplete? It was in that very year that Nerva re-established
constitutionalism and good government in Rome.

Pan Chow worked as if by magic: seemed to make no effort, yet
accomplished all things. For nearly forty years he kept that
vast territory in order, despite the huge frontier northward, and
the breeding-place of nomad nations beyond. All north of Tibet
is a region of marvels. Where you were careful to leave only the
village blacksmith under his spreading chestnut-tree, or the
innkeeper and his wife, for the sake of future travelers, let a
century or two pass, and their descendants would be as the
sea-sands for multitude; they would have founded a power, and be
thundering down on an empire-smashing raid in Persia or China or
India: Whether Huns, Sienpi, Jiujen, Turks, Tatars, Tunguses,
Mongols, Manchus: God knows what all, but all destroyers. But
as far as the old original Huns were concerned, Pan Chow settled
their hash for them. Bag and baggage he dealt with them; and
practically speaking, the land of their fathers knew them no
more. Dry the starting tear! here your pity is misplaced. Think
of no vine-covered cottages ruined; no homesteads burned; no
fields laid waste. They lived mainly in the saddle; they were
as much at home fleeing before the Chinese army as at another
time. A shunt here; a good kick off there: so he dealt with
them. It is in European veins their blood flows now;--and prides
itself on its pure undiluted Aryanism and Nordicism, no doubt. I
suppose scarcely a people in continental Europe is without some
mixture of it; for they enlisted at last in all foraying armies,
and served under any banner and chief.

Pan Chow felt that they belonged to the (presumably) barbarous
regions west of the Caspian. Ta Ts'in in future might deal with
them; by God's grace, Han never should. He gently pushed them
over the brink; removed them; cut the cancer out of Asia. Next
time they appeared in history, it was not on the Hoangho, but on
the Danube. Meanwhile, they established themselves in Russia;
moved across Central Europe, impelling Quadi and Marcomans
against Marcus Aurelius, and then Teutons of all sorts against
the whole frontier of Rome. In the sixties, for Han Mingti, Pan
Chow set that great wave in motion in the far east of the world.
Three times thirteen decades passed, and it broke and wasted in
foam in the far west: in what we may call the Very First Battle
of the Marne, when Aetius defeated Attila in 451. I can but
think of one thing better he might have done: shipped them
eastward to the remote Pacific Islands; but it is too late to
suggest that now. But I wonder what would have happened if Pan
Chow had succeeded in reaching his arm across, and grasping hands
with Trajan? He had not died; the might of China had not begun
to recede from its westward limits, before the might of Rome
under that great Spaniard had begun to flow towards its limits
in the east.

Through the bulk of the second century China remained static, or
weakening. Her forward urge seems to have ended with the death
of Pan Chow, or at the end of the half-cycle Han Kwang-wuti began
in 35. We might tabulate the two concurrent Han cycles, for the
sake of clearness, and note their points of intersection, thus:

--Western Han Cycle, 130 years

--Eastern Han Half-Cycle, 65 yrs

--35 A.D. Opened by Han Kwang-wuti.

--A static and consolidating time until 67 A.D., thirteen decades
from the death of Han Chaoti. Introduction of Buddhism in 65.

--The period of Pan Chao's victories; the Golden Age of the
Eastern Hans, lasting until (about):

--100 A. D. the end of the Eastern Han 'Day'; death of Pan Chow.

--Continuance of Day under this, and supervention of Night under
this Cycle, produce:

--A static, but weakening period until:

--165, the year in which a new Eastern Han Day should begin. A
weak recrudescence should be seen.

--197: the year in which the main or original Han Cycle should
end. We should expect the beginnings of a downfall. By or before:

--230, the end of the second, feeble, Eastern Han Day, the
downfall would have been completed.

Now to see how this works out.

The first date we have to notice is 165. Well; in the very
scant notices of Chinese history I have been able to come on, two
events mark this date; or rather, one marks 165, and the other
166. To take the latter first: we saw that at a momentous point
in Roman history,--in the year of Nerva's accession, 96,--China
tried to discover Rome. In 166 Rome actually succeeded in
discovering China. This year too, as we shall see, was momentous
in Roman history. You may call it a half cycle after the other;
for probably the ambassadors of King An-Tun of Ta Ts'in who
arrived at the court of Han Hwanti at Loyang in 166, had been a
few years on their journey. You know King An-tun better by his
Latin name of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

The event for 165 is the foundation of the Taoist Church, under
the half-legendary figure of its first Pope, Chang Taoling;
whose lineal descendants and successors have reigned Popes of
Taoism from their Vatican on the Dragon-Tiger Mountain in Kiangsi
ever since. They have not adverertised their virtues in their
names, however: we find no Innocents and Piuses here: they are
all plain Changs; his reigning Holiness being Chang the
Sixth-somethingth. It was from Buddhism that the Taoists took
the idea of making a church of themselves. Taoism and Buddhism
from the outset were fiercely at odds; and yet the main
splendor of China was to come from their inner coalescence.
Chu Hsi, the greatest of the Sung philosophers of the brilliant
twelfth century A.D., says that "Buddhism stole the best
features of Taoism; Taoism stole the worst features of Buddhism:
as if the one took a jewel from the other, and the other
recouped the loss with a stone." * This is exact: the jewel
stolen by Buddhism was Laotse's Blue Pearl,--Wonder and Natural
Magic; the stone that Taoism took instead was the priestly
hierarchy and church organization, imitated from the Buddhists,
that grew up under the successors of Chang Taoling.

------
* _Chinese Literature:_ H.A. Giles
------

If Laotse founded any school or order at all, it remained quite
secret. I imagine his mission was like Plato's, not Buddha's:
to start ideas, not a brotherhood. By Ts'in Shi Hwangti's time,
any notions that were wild, extravagant, and gorgeous were
Taoism; which would hardly have been, perhaps, had there been a
Taoist organization behind them;--although it is not safe to
dogmatize. It was, at any rate, mostly an inspiration to the
heights for the best minds, and for the masses (including Ts'in
Shi Hwangti) a rumor of tremendous things. After Han Wuti's next
successor, the best minds took to thinking Confucianly: which
was decidedly a good thing for China during the troublous times
before and after the fall of the Western Hans. Then when
Buddhism came in, Taoism came to the fore again, spurred up to
emulation by this new rival. I take it that Chang Taoling's
activities round about this year 165 represent an impulse of the
national soul to awakenment under the influence of the recurrence
of the Eastern Han Day half-cycle. What kind of reality Chang
Taoling represents, one cannot say: whether a true teacher in
his degree, sent by the Lodge, around whom legends have gathered;
or a mere dabbler in alchemy and magic. Here is the story told
of him; you will note an incident or two in it that suggest the
former possibility.

He retired to the mountains of the west to study magic, cultivate
purity of life, and engage in meditation; stedfastly declining
the offers of emperors who desired him to take office. Laotse
appeared to him in a vision, and gave him a treatise in which
were directions for making the 'Elixir of the Dragon and the
Tiger.' While he was brewing this, a spirit came to him and
said: "On the Pesung Mountain is a house of stone; buried
beneath it are the Books of the Three Emperors (Yao, Shun, and
Yu). Get these, practise the discipline they enjoin, and you
will attain the power of ascending to heaven." He found the
Pesung Mountain; and the stone house; and dug, and discovered
the books; which taught him how to fly, to leave his body at
will, and to hear all sounds the most distant. During a thousand
days he disciplined himself; a goddess came to him, and taught
him to walk among the stars; then he learned to cleave the seas
and the mountains, and command the thunder and the winds. He
fought the king of the demons, whose hosts fled before him
"leaving no trace of their departing footsteps." So great
slaughter he wrought in that battle that, we are told, "various
divinities came with eager haste to acknowledge their faults."
In nine years he gained the power of ascending to heaven. His
last days were spent on the Dragon-Tiger Mountain; where, at the
age of a hundred and twenty-three, he drank the elixir, and
soared skyward in broad daylight;--followed (I think it was he)
by all the poultry in his barnyard, immortalized by the drops
that fell from the cup as he drank. He left his books of magic,
and his magical sword and seal, to his descendants; but I think
the Dragon-Tiger Mountain did not come into their possession
until some centuries later.

I judge that the tales of the Taoist _Sennin_ or Adepts, if told
by some Chinese-enamored Lafcadio, would be about the best
collection of fairy-stories in the world; they reveal a
universe so deliciously nooked and crannied with bewildering
possibilities:--as indeed this our universe is;--only not all its
byways are profitable traveling. It is all very well to cry out
against superstition; but we are only half-men in the West: we
have lost the faculty of wonder and the companionship of
extrahuman things. We walk our narrow path to nowhere safely
trussed up in our personal selves: or we not so much walk at
all, as lie still, chrysalissed in them:--it may be just as well,
since for lack of the quality of balance, we are about as capable
of walking at ease and dignity as is a jellyfish of doing Blondin
on the tight-rope. China, in her pralaya and dearth of souls,
may have fallen into the perils of her larger freedom, and some
superstition rightly to be called degrading: in our Middle Ages,
when we were in pralaya, we were superstitious enough; and being
unbalanced, fell into other evils too such as China never knew:
black tyrannies of dogmatism, burnings of heretics wholesale.
But when the Crest-Wave Egos were in China, that larger freedom
of hers enabled her, among other things, to achieve the highest
heights in art: the Yellow Crane was at her disposal, and she
failed not to mount the heavens; she had the glimpses Wordsworth
pined for; she was not left forlorn. This merely for another
blow at that worst superstition of all: Unbrotherliness, and our
doctrine of Superior Racehood.--Many of the tales are mere
thaumatolatry: as of the man who took out his bones and washed
them once every thousand years; or of the man who would fill his
mouth with rice-grains, let them forth as a swarm of bees to
gather honey in the valley,--then readmit them into his mouth as
to a hive, where they became rice again,--presumably "sweetened
to taste." But in others there seems to be a core of symbolism
and recognition of the fundamental things. There was a man
once,--the tale is in Giles's Dictionary of Chinese Biography,
but I forget his name--who sought out the Sennin Ho Kwang (his
name might have been Ho Kwang); and found him at last in a
gourd-flask, whither he was used to retire for the night. In
this retreat Ho Kwang invited our man to join him; and he was
enabled to do so; and found it, once he had got in, a fair and
spacious palace enough. Three days he remained there learning;
while fifteen years were passing in China without. Then Ho Kwang
gave him a rod, and a spell to say over it; and bade him go his
ways. He would lay the rod on the ground, stand astride of it,
and speak the spell; and straight it became a dragon for him to
mount and ride the heavens where he would. Thenceforth for many
years he was a kind of Guardian Spirit over China: appearing
suddenly wherever there was distress or need of help: at dawn in
mountain Chungnan by Changan town in the north; at noon, maybe,
by the southern sea; at dusk he might be seen a-dragon-back
above the sea-mists rolling in over Yangtse;--and all in the same
day. But at last, they say, he forgot the spell, and found
himself riding the clouds on a mere willow wand;--and the wand
behaving as though Newton had already watched that aggravating
apple;--and himself, in due course dashed to pieces on the earth
below.--There is some fine symbolism here; the makings of
a good story.

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