The Crest-Wave of Evolution: A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19Morris, Kenneth
Philosophy
The Crest-Wave of Evolution: A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-19
Morris, Kenneth
Theosophy
And now that he stands before the world a Teacher, we may drop
his personal name, K'ung Ch'iu, and call him by the title to
which paeans of praise have been swelling through all the ages
since: K'ung Futse, K'ung the Master; latinized, Confucius. It
is a name that conveys to you, perhaps, some associations of
priggishness and pedantry: almost whereever you see him written
of you find suggestions of the sort. Forgo them at once: they
are false utterly. Missionaries have interpreted him to the
West; who have worked hard to show him something less than the
Nazarene. They have set him in a peculiar light; and others
have followed them. Perhaps no writer except and until Dr.
Lionel Giles (whose interpretation, both of the man and his
doctrine, I shall try to give you), has shown him to us as he
was, so that we can understand why he has stood the Naional Hero,
the Savior and Ideal Man of all those millions through all
these centuries.
We have been told again and again that his teaching was wholly
unspiritual; that he knew nothing of the inner worlds; never
mentions the Soul, or 'God'; says no word to lighten for you the
"dusk within the Holy of holies." He was all for outwardness,
they say: a thorough externalist; a ritualist cold and
unmagnetic.--It is much what his enemies said in his own day;
who, and not himself, provide the false-interpreters with their
weapons. But think of the times, and you may understand. How
would the missionaries feel, were Jesus translated to the Chinese
as a fine man in some respects--considering--but, unfortunately!
too fond of the pleasures of the table; "a gluttonous man
and a winebibber "?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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