The Egyptian mind, which was essentially religious, saw the “god who is
immanent in all things” yet standing outside these things to sustain
them with a guiding providence; the highly trained Chinese mind, with
its philosophic trend, saw the divine indivisible intelligence without
volition illuminating all that lived: “The mind of man and the mind of
trees, birds and beasts, is just the one mind of heaven and earth, only
brighter or duller by reflection: as light looks brighter when it falls
on a mirror than when it falls on a dark surface, so divine reason is
less bright in cow or sheep than in man.” This fine definition was given
by Choo-Foo-Tsze, the great exponent of Confucianism, who, when he was
four years old, surprised his father by asking, on being told that the
sky was heaven, “What is above it?” Choo-Foo-Tsze in the thirteenth
century anticipated some modern conclusions of geology by remarking that
since sea shells were found on lofty mountains as if generated in the
middle of stones, it was plain “that what was below became lifted up,
what was soft became hard”; it was a deep subject, he said, and ought to
be investigated. Long before the Nolan, Confucius had conceived the idea
of the great Monad: “one God who contains and comprehends the whole
world.” It was an idea entirely incomprehensible to all but a few
educated men in any age. Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism left the
Chinese masses what they found them—a people whose folk-lore was their
religion. Were they asked to believe in the Wheel of Being? They made
that folk-lore too. Dr. Giles tells the folk-tale of a certain gentleman
who, having taken a very high degree, enjoyed the privilege (which is
admitted to be uncommon) of recollecting what happened between his last
death and birth. After he died, he was cited before a Judge of Purgatory
and his attention was attracted by a quantity of skins of sheep, dogs,
oxen, horses, which were hanging in a row. These were waiting for the
souls which might be condemned to wear them; when one was wanted, it was
taken down and the man’s own skin was stripped off and the other put on.
This gentleman was condemned to be a sheep; the attendant demons helped
him on with his sheep-skin when the Recording Officer suddenly mentioned
that he had once saved a man’s life. The Judge, after looking at his
books, ruled that such an act balanced all his misdoings: then the
demons set to work to pull off the sheep-skin bit by bit, which gave the
poor gentleman dreadful pain, but at last it was all got off except one
little piece which was still sticking to him when he was born again as a
man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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