it will be impossible for her to stop? This is a plausible and a pretty picture, and even its approximate realisation might enable the Chinese-a nation superbly gifted and possessing unique advantages of character, country, and clime-once again to repeat the history of the ages and to overrun the world. Is this the future that awaits them? Is this the fate that threatens us?

The reality of standstill.

I must have argued feebly if I have not already shown that in my judgment this consummation is not either to be expected or to be feared. Reform, it is true, cannot altogether be hustled out of the door. Its force is like the wind, that bloweth where it listeth, and can penetrate even through the chinks and crannies. Doubtless in time, as from different quarters foreign railways touch the confines of China, native railways will be made to meet them. A day will come when mines will be exploited, a decent currency adopted, and rivers will be navigated by steam. Neither, though China may be overrun, and may even, as she has often done before, accept a change of masters, is she likely to be submerged. She is for ever proof against such a fate by reason of her moral character, her swarming millions, and her territorial extent. The continued national existence of the Yellow Race may be regarded as assured. But that the Empire which in the last fifty years has lost Siam, Burma, Annam, Tongking, part of Manchuria, Formosa, and Korea, which has already seen a foreign army in Peking, and the maritime approaches to whose capital have been for a year in the armed occupation of a victorious enemy; whose standard of civil and political perfection is summed up in the stationary idea; which, after half a century of intercourse with ministers, missionaries, and merchants, regards all these as intolerable nuisances, and one of the number with peculiar aversion; which only adopts

the lessons that they have taught her when the surrender is dictated by her necessities or her fears; and which, after a twenty years' observation of the neighbouring example of Japan, looks with increasing contempt upon a frailty so feeble and impetuous—that this Empire is likely to falsify the whole course of its history and to wrench round the bent of its own deep-seated inclinations, simply because the shriek of the steam-whistle or the roar of cannon is heard at its gates-is a hypothesis that ignores the accumulated lessons of political science and postulates a revival of the age of miracles. I have narrated the stages of China's tardy advance, and I have shown how far she has condescended to reform. But it remains a mechanical and not a moral advance; it is an artificial and not an organic reform. She may still continue to play an important part in the development of the Asiatic world. Her hardy colonists may sail to every quarter of the Eastern hemisphere, and by their frugal toil may enrich themselves, while they fail to aggrandise her. But, politically speaking, her star is a waning and not a rising orb. Sedet æternumque sedebit is the limit of China's own aspirations. It may even turn out to be beyond the limit of her powers. 1

1 This problem is further discussed in Chapter xiii.

CHAPTER XI

MONASTICISM IN CHINA

Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.

LUCRETIUS: De Rerum Natura, Lib. i. 101.

In a previous chapter I have said something about Buddhism in Korea, where it is the discredited but not wholly disavowed survival of a once dominant creed. I

Chinese

propose in this chapter to deal with Buddhism Buddhism. in China, where, though decadent, it is still dominant, and where the explanation of its influence provides a clue to many of the dark riddles of the national character. Buddhism in China is indeed a curious mixture of perishing rites and popular superstitions. There is probably no country where there are fewer evidences of faith or devotion, or where, on the other hand, an apparently doomed system dies so hard. From the squalid and dilapidated condition of the temples, from the indifference and irreverence with which the worshippers enact their artificial parts, and from the miserable status of the priesthood, it might be inferred that the days of Buddhism were numbered, and that a rival system was driving it from dishonoured shrines. Such, however, would be a most superficial view of the case. This mysterious religion, which has survived the varied competition of Rationalism, Confucianism, and Ceremonialism, and which has an antiquity not far short of two thousand years in China, is yet the favourite creed of a community numbering 350,000,000; and despised and de

Its superstitious sanction.

generate though it be, it will still lift its head and smile its serene Buddha-smile long after its purer and prouder and more splendid counterpart in Japan has crumbled into the dust. The explanation of this strange anomaly is that the popular faith has with rare discretion intertwined itself with the popular superstitions. Partly creating and partly accommodating itself to them, Buddhism, involved in the sacred ties of Ancestor-Worship, and claiming to dispense the portions of another life, has wrapped itself in a covering of triple brass, and can afford to laugh at its enemies. It has found the key to the inner being of this inscrutable people, and, in secure command of the lock, takes good care that none other shall tamper with the wards. It may safely be contended that, were it not for the uneasy anxieties of the Chinese about their souls, and the universal and cherished cult of the Family Tree, and for the part played in relation to both by the Buddhist priesthood, Chinese Buddhism would long ere now have languished and disappeared. Dogmas, tenets, ritual, and liturgy in themselves are of small import to the Celestials. The stately ceremonial of the official creed, the intellectual axioms of Confucius, the painted imageworship of the Buddhist temple, the mysticism of the Rationalists, or sect of Lao-tzu, produce little permanent

1 In an interesting letter, the late Sir T. Wade, formerly British Minister in l'eking, wrote to me on this subject as follows :-'The original capture of the lettered classes of China by the apostles of Buddhism was largely due to the fact that the period of their greatest activity as writers or translators (viz. the Tang Dynasty, A.D. 600-900) was at the same time eminently remarkable for the elegance of its prose and its poetry. It was, as we should say, the Augustan age of Chinese composition. It has also been due to the support which it received with tolerable steadiness from the Central Government, notably under the two last dynasties. And yet, almost universal as is the thraldom of its puerile superstitions, it has never supplanted Confucianism as the national code of ethics, nor has its literature ever been able to maintain a footing in the national education."

effect upon their stolid imaginations. The beautiful teaching enshrined in the sacred writings as they came from India, the precepts that made white lives and brought tearless deaths, that almost Christianised idolatry and might have redeemed a world, have long ago died down into frigid calculations, tabulating in opposite columns with mathematical nicety the credit and debit accounts of the orthodox disciple. Thus, on the one hand, the people are plunged in gloomy dread of a hereafter, determined by the exact laws of moral retribution; on the other, deeply embedded in the springs of their nature, is a fanatical attachment to their Lares and Penates, and to the worship of the dead; and hence it comes about that the religion which, whatever its shortcomings and disqualifications, ministers to their requirements in both these respects, is simultaneously derided and advocated, neglected and espoused.

Contradictory opinion of

monks.

No better illustration of this anomalous state of affairs can be given than the condition and public estimation of the Buddhist monks. A stranger will at first be puzzled by the opposite verdicts which he hears passed upon this class of men. He will hear them denounced as contemptible outcasts, as pariahs from society, who have forfeited all the sympathies of humanity by cutting themselves adrift from all human ties. And this is a sentence which to some extent finds its corroboration in their forlorn and decrepit appearance, in their cheerless mode of life, and in their divorce from the haunts and homes of men. On the other hand, he will find these despised exiles supported by popular contributions, recruited by voluntary adherents, and engaged in the discharge of essential rites at the most solemn moments of life and death, and in the service to the dead. A grosser seeming contradiction can scarcely be imagined.