The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Philosopher Kwang
THE PHILOSOPHER KWANG
THE older texts of Taoism, as we get them translated by James Legge in Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East, make up but a small fraction of the two volumes in the Oxford Edition devoted to this cult. The larger portion of both these fascinating books is filled with the writings of Kwang-tze, the "laughing philosopher" of the kingdom of Liang.
The earlier texts are arresting enough to any mystical-minded person; but one cannot help feeling, as one turns these pages, that the real genius of the Taoist tradition is not the legendary Lao-tze, its portentous prophet, but the much more whimsical and irresponsible Kwang, its Voltairian high-priest.
This extraordinary and imaginative man of letters lived, it appears, about three and a half centuries before Christ and about two centuries after Lao-tze and Confucius.
For some mysterious reason, however, Kwang, compared with his great forerunners, still lacks the homage, still lacks the intellectual recognition, that seems his due. And yet the quality of his thought strikes us as more original, as more imaginative, than that of either Lao-tze or Confucius. Perhaps it is that his chaos-loving thought besieges our purer reason and—it may well be—corrupts it, in the very manner against which the whole elaborate ritual of the Confucian ethics was especially directed!
Very little is known of Kwang's life. He appears to have guarded his freedom from official responsibility with a Montaignesque sagacity; for when a certain monarch sent messengers with large gifts to bring him to Court his response is characteristic of his habits of mind, both in its rudeness and in its quaint gaiety:
"Have you seen the victim-ox for the sacrifice? It is fed and robed to enter the temple. When the time comes for it to do so, it would prefer to be a little pig; but it cannot get to be so. Go away! Do not soil me with your presence! I would rather enjoy myself in a filthy ditch than be subject to court regulations."
The most characteristic quality in Kwang's writings is his peculiar sense of humour. This humour is something quite unique in literature; and more than unique to our Western minds!
No doubt other Chinese classics approximate to its penetrating flavour; but I doubt whether they attain it. It is certainly unmistakably Chinese in its quips and turns; but it is also—surely one cannot be mistaken here—redolent of a certain saltish, turpentine-like pungency which is native to Kwang alone.
Everything that it approaches is given a little twist, a little turn, a perceptibly new taste in the mouth. It is the body and pressure of Kwang's whole mental vision. It is at once his rebellion against what is intolerable in life and his way of escaping into a freer world.
The closeness of the connexion between Kwang's humour and Kwang's thought can be seen in his mania for the heterogeneous and the casual, as contrasted with the homogeneous and the inevitable. His philosophy is nothing more nor less than a worship of chaos, tempered by a sly and crafty salutation to whatever "Unutterable"—beyond all Monism and all Pluralism—may lie behind chaos!
His humour therefore delights to concentrate itself upon the most disconnected and inconsequential details; isolating such details arbitrarily and at random; and yet managing to squeeze out of them a pungent metaphysical sap.
One might indeed compare the humour of Kwang to the fantastic hoppings of a whimsical long-necked bird, who every now and then stands gravely upon some object or another, one thin leg curled up under its tail, with its head and beak twisted grotesquely to one side, and makes its comment on the motley world! The Confucian superiorities of Benevolence and Righteousness, with the rather meticulous moral system which they imply, prove a most provocative source of merriment to this "queer son of chaos."
He is never weary of girding at the "Know-Alls" of life:
"Men all honour that which lies within the sphere of their knowledge, but they do not know their dependence on what lies outside that sphere;—may we not call their case one of great perplexity? Ah! Ah! There is no escaping from this dilemma. So it is! So it is!"
The whimsicality of Kwang's bird-like hoppings through the peat-bogs of chance assumes sometimes an enchanting picturesqueness; but this picturesqueness always seems to float and drift like moon-lit sea-weed upon a bottomless ocean of mystery. The following passage, for example, is almost word for word a parallel to William Blake's famous distinction between the power that creates and the eye that records. It is interesting to note, however, the difference between Blake’s tempestuous anger with the unimaginative and the querulous, supercilious little sigh with which Kwang dismisses the subject:
"He who uses only the sight of the eyes is acted on by what he sees; it is the intuition of the spirit that gives the assurance of certainty. And yet stupid people rely on what they see, and will have it to be the sentiment of all men;—all their success being with what is external—is it not sad?"
There are many passages in these volumes that compel us to think of Nietzsche's Zarathustra; but the terror of that silver bow is always grandiose and Olympian; whereas the rogueries of Kwang remain rusticated, quizzical, irresponsible, as if Pan himself were scratching little moral vignettes on the bark of the beech-trees, indulging now and again in a skip of his goat-shanks when his mischiefs especially tickle his fancy.
"Tung-kwo asked Kwang, saying, "Where is what you call the Tao to be found? Kwang replied, 'Everywhere.' The other said, 'Specify an instance of it—that will be more satisfactory.' 'It is here in this ant.' 'Give a lower instance.' 'It is in this panic-grass.' 'Give a still lower instance.' 'It is in this earthenware tile.' 'Surely that is the lowest instance?' 'It is in that excrement!' To this Tung-kwo gave no reply."
But there are passages too, where, as in some piece of discordant Russian music, we grow conscious of a singular trembling of the veil of Isis:
"Starlight asked Non-entity, saying, 'Master, do you exist? Or do you not exist?' He got no answer to his question, however, and looked steadfastly to the appearance of the other, which was that of a deep void. All day long he looked to it but could hear nothing; he clutched at it but got hold of nothing. Starlight then said, 'Perfect! Who can attain to this? Non-existing non-existence; and non-existing existence! How is it possible to reach to this? Perfect!'"
It is a very nice and a very delicate question though one obviously beyond the scope of this sketch, whether the great doctrine of the Tao was actually modified by Kwang; whether in fact, Kwang's Tao departs from the original and orthodox Tao. One suspects that it does depart from this not a little; but Kwang has so plausible a manner of presenting his own temperamental vision that it is very hard to catch him in the act of "glossing" the older oracles.
For our part we are unable to see why the Taoism of Kwang should not be a finer and a deeper philosophy than the Taoism of Lao-tze. It is certainly more daring and more amusing. The Tao probably had interpreters long before Lao-tze appropriated it; and it may well be that what are called the "Classical Texts of Taoism" represent a philosophical articulation of a much more primitive and mythological cult, towards which the poetic imagination of Kwang fumbles its own way.
His doctrine of the Tao remains in any case, as it is disclosed to us in these extraordinary pages, a piece of human speculation that may be enjoyed on its own merits. What it seems to reveal is nothing less than what may well have been the religion of the human race in some incredibly early period of its history; the worship in plain words, of Chaos and Chance, combined with an awful recognition of Something Unutterable—neither to be named as Existence nor as Nothingness, neither as the One nor as the Many—out of the womb of which Chaos and Chance emerged and into which they will sink.
It is the underlying presence of this Unutterable—a different thing altogether from the Hindu Brahma—which makes it possible for Kwang to speak as if Life and Death themselves were only temporary aspects of something that was beyond them both, and as if neither Benevolence nor Righteousness could ever reach that depth of clairvoyance which the mere "lying back" upon one's own essential nature, such as it may be, in unmitigated simplicity and sincerity, can enable us to attain.
Certain enchanting dialogues between mysterious figures that seem to resemble those dehumanized persons that one sees on china tea-cups, take place now and again. We will condense one of these for the reader's benefit:
"Knowledge had rambled northwards to the region of the Dark Water where he ascended the Imperceptible Slope, when it happened that he met Dumb Inaction. He addressed him, saying, 'How do we know the Tao? Where do we find our rest in the Tao? Where is the path to the Tao?' Dumb Inaction gave him no reply. Not only did he not answer; but he did not know how to answer. Knowledge then ascended the height of the End of Doubt where he saw Heedless Blurter, to whom he put his questions. Heedless Blurter replied at once, 'Ah! I know and I will tell you.' But while he was about to speak, he forgot what he wanted to say. Knowledge returned to the palace of Ti and he saw Hwang-ti, and Hwang-ti said, 'To dwell nowhere and to do nothing is the first step; to start from nowhere and pursue no path is the first step—Dumb Inaction was truly right because he did not know the thing. Heedless Blurter was nearly right because he forgot it. I and you are not nearly right because we know it.' Heedless Blurter heard of all this and considered that Hwang-ti knew how to express himself on the subject."
It is strange how, in the historic struggle for survival among human ideas, a philosophy as delicately original as that of Kwang should have fallen by the wayside. One cause of this, however, is doubtless inherent in the doctrine itself. It is not for all men, it is not for all moods, this fleeting phosphorescence of the great waters. To many modern minds the naïveté of the style, the queer twists of the humour, the smiling rigidity of the images, stiff and abrupt as figures on an archaic frieze, will be all that emanates from the writings of Kwang-tze. But to others, to a few here and there, it may well happen that out of these whispered oracles from the immense past, out of the Ailanthus groves of Mount Kwai-Khi, out of the gardens of Hwang-ti, out of the rivers of Khu-yuan, there will come a hint, a sign, a token, not altogether irrelevant, not altogether without a deep philosophic significance, even for these days, "so far retired from happy pieties"!