CHAPTER V.
ON THE TRACTATE OF ACTIONS AND THEIR RETRIBUTIONS.
Peculiar style and nature of the Kan Ying Phien.
1. The contrast is great between the style of the Tâo Teh King
and the Books of Kwang-dze and that of the Kan Ying Phien, a translation
of which is now submitted as a specimen of the Texts of Tâoism.
The works of Lâo and Kwang stand alone in the literature of the
system. What it was before Lâo cannot
be ascertained, and in his chapters it comes before us not as
a religion, but as a subject of philosophical speculation, together
with some practical applications of it insisted on by Lâo himself.
The brilliant pages of Kwang-dze contain little more than his
ingenious defence of his master's speculations, and an aggregate
of illustrative narratives sparkling with the charms of his composition,
but in themselves for the most part unbelievable, often grotesque
and absurd. This treatise, on the other hand, is more of what
we understand by a sermon or popular tract. It eschews all difficult
discussion, and sets forth a variety of traits of character and
actions which are good, and a still greater variety of others
which are bad, exhorting to the cultivation and performance of
the former, and warning against the latter. It describes at the
outset the machinery to secure the record of men's doings, and
the infliction of the certain retribution, and concludes with
insisting on the wisdom of repentance and reformation. At the
same time it does not carry its idea of retribution beyond death,
but declares that if the reward or punishment is not completed
in the present life, the remainder will be received by the posterity
of the good-doer and of the offender.
A place is given to the treatise among the Texts of Tâoism in
'The Sacred Books of the East,' because of its popularity in China.
'The various editions of it,' as observed by Mr. Wylie, 'are innumerable;
it has appeared from time to time in almost every conceivable
size, shape, and style of execution. Many commentaries have been
written upon it, and it is frequently published with a collection
of several hundred anecdotes, along with pictorial illustrations,
to illustrate every paragraph seriatim. It is deemed a great act
of merit to aid by voluntary contribution towards the gratuitous
distribution of this work.'
The origin of the treatise.
2. The author of the treatise is not known, but, as Mr. Wylie
also observes, it appears to have been written during the Sung
dynasty. The earliest mention of it which I have met with is in
the continuation of Ma-twan Lin's encyclopedic
work by Wang Khî, first published in 1586, the fourteenth year
of the fourteenth emperor of the Ming dynasty. In Wang's supplement
to his predecessor's account of Tâoist works, the sixth notice
is of 'a commentary on the Thâi Shang Kan Ying Phien by a Lî Khang-ling,'
and immediately before it is a commentary on the short but well-known
Yin Fû King by a Lû Tien, who lived 1042-1102. Immediately after
it other works of the eleventh century are mentioned. To that
same century therefore we may reasonably refer the origin of the
Kan Ying Phien.
The meaning of the title.
As to the meaning of the title, the only difficulty is with the
two commencing characters Thâi Shang. Julien left them untranslated,
with the note, however, that they were 'l'abréviation de Thâi
Shang Lâo Kün, expression honorifique par laquelle les Tâo-sze
désignent Lâo-dze, le fondateur de leur secte.' This is the interpretation
commonly given of the
phrase, and it is hardly worth while to indicate any doubt of
its correctness; but if the characters were taken, as I believe
they were, from the beginning of the seventeenth chapter of the
Tâo Teh King, I should prefer to understand them of the highest
and oldest form of the Tâoistic teaching.
Was the old Tâoism a religion?
3. I quoted on page 13 the view of Hardwick, the Christian Advocate
of Cambridge, that 'the indefinite expression
Tâo was adopted to denominate an abstract Cause, or the initial
principle of life and order, to which worshippers were able to
assign the attributes of immateriality, eternity, immensity, invisibility.'
His selection of the term worshippers in this passage was unfortunate.
Neither Lâo nor Kwang says anything about the worship of the Tâo,
about priests or monks, about temples or rituals. How could they
do so, seeing that Tâo was not to them the name of a personal
Being, nor 'Heaven' a metaphorical term equivalent to the Confucian
Tî, 'Ruler,' or Shang Tî, 'Supreme Ruler.' With this agnosticism
as to God, and their belief that by a certain management and discipline
of the breath life might be prolonged indefinitely, I do not see
how anything of an organised religion was possible for the old
Tâoists.
The Tâoist proclivities of the founder of the Khin dynasty are
well known. If his life had been prolonged, and the dynasty become
consolidated, there might have arisen such a religion in connexion
with Tâoism, for we have a record that he, as head of the Empire,
had eight spirits to which he offered sacrifices. Khin, however, soon
passed away; what remained in permanency from it was only the
abolition of the feudal kingdom.
The family of Kang.
4. We cannot here attempt to relate in detail the rise and growth
of the Kang family in which the headship of Tâoism has been hereditary
since cur first Christian century, with the exception of one not
very long interruption. One of the earliest members of it, Kang
Liang, must have been born not long after the death of Kwang-dze,
for he joined the party of Liû Pang,
the founder of the dynasty of Han, in B. C. 208, and by his wisdom
and bravery contributed greatly to his success over the adherents
of Khin, and other contenders for the sovereignty of the empire.
Abandoning then a political career, he spent the latter years
of his life in a vain quest for the elixir of life.
Among Liang's descendants in our first century was a Kang Tâo-ling,
who, eschewing a career in the service of the state, devoted himself
to the pursuits of alchemy, and at last succeeded in compounding
the grand elixir or pill, and at the age of 123 was released from
the trammels of the mortal body, and entered on the enjoyment
of immortality, leaving to his descendants his books, talismans
and charms, his sword, mighty against spirits, and his seal. Tâo-ling
stands out, in Tâoist accounts, as the first patriarch of the
system, with the title of Thien Shih, 'Master or Preceptor of
Heaven.' Hsüan Zung of the Thang dynasty in 748, confirmed the
dignity and title in the family; and in 1016 the Sung emperor
Kän Zung invested its representative with large tracts of land
near the Lung-hû mountain in Kiang-hsî. The present patriarch—for
I suppose the same man is still alive—made a journey from
his residence not many years ago, and was interviewed by several
foreigners in Shanghai. The succession is said to be perpetuated
by the transmigration of the soul of Kang Tâo-ling into some infant
or youthful member of the family; whose heirship is supernaturally
revealed as soon as the miracle is effected.
Influence of Buddhism on Tâoism.
This superstitious notion shows the influence of Buddhism on Tâoism.
It has been seen from the eighteenth of the Books of Kwang-dze
what affinities there were between Tâoism and the Indian system;
and there can be no doubt that the introduction of the latter
into China did more than anything else to affect the development
of the Tâoistic system. As early as the time of Confucius there
were recluses in the country, men who had withdrawn from the world,
disgusted with its vanities and in despair
from its disorders. Lâo would appear to have himself contemplated
this course. When their representatives of our early centuries
saw the Buddhists among them with their images, monasteries, and
nunneries, their ritual and discipline, they proceeded to organise
themselves after a similar fashion. They built monasteries and
nunneries, framed images, composed liturgies, and adopted a peculiar
mode of tying up their hair. The 'Three Precious Ones' of Buddhism,
emblematic to the initiated of Intelligence personified in Buddha,
the Law, and the Community or Church, but to the mass of the worshippers
merely three great idols, styled by them Buddha Past, Present,
and To Come: these appeared in Tâoism as the 'Three Pure Ones,'
also represented by three great images, each of which receives
the title of 'His Celestial Eminence,' and is styled the 'Most
High God (Shang Tî).' The first of them is a deification of Chaos,
the second, of Lâo-dze, and the third of I know not whom or what;
perhaps of the Tâo.
But those Three Pure Ones have been very much cast into the shade,
as the objects of popular worship and veneration, by Yü Hwang
Tî or Yü Hwang Shang Tî. This personage appears to have been a
member of the Kang clan, held to be a magician and venerated from
the time of the Thang dynasty, but deified in 1116 by the Sung
emperor Hui Zung at the instigation of a charlatan Lin Ling-sû,
a renegade Buddhist monk. He is the god in the court of heaven
to whom the spirits of the body and of the hearth in our treatise
proceed at stated times to report for approval or condemnation
the conduct of men.
Since the first publication of the Kan Ying Phien, the tenets
of Buddhism have been still further adopted by the teachers of
Tâoism, and shaped to suit the nature of their own system. I have
observed that the idea of retribution in our treatise does not
go beyond the present life; but the manifestoes of Tâoism of more
recent times are much occupied with descriptions of the courts
of purgatory and threatenings of the everlasting misery of hell
to those whom their sufferings in those courts
fail to wean from their wickedness. Those manifestoes are published
by the mercy of Yü Hwang Shang Tî that men and women may be led
to repent of their faults and make atonement for their crimes.
They emanate from the temples of the tutelary deities which
are found throughout the empire, and especially
in the walled cities, and are under the charge of Tâoist monks.
A visitor to one of the larger of these temples may not only see
the pictures of the purgatorial courts and other forms of the
modern superstitions, but he will find also astrologers, diviners,
geomancers, physiognomists, et id genus omne, plying their trades
or waiting to be asked to do so, and he will wonder how it has
been possible to affiliate such things with the teachings of Lâo-dze.
Other manifestoes of a milder form, and more like our tractate,
are also continually being issued as from one or other of what
are called the state gods, whose temples are all in the charge
of the same monks. In the approximation which has thus been going
on of Tâoism to Buddhism, the requirement of celibacy was long
resisted by the professors of the former; but recent editions
of the Penal Code contain sundry regulations framed to enforce celibacy,
to bind the monks and nuns of both systems to the observance of
the Confucian maxims concerning filial piety, and the sacrificial
worship of the dead; and also to restrict the multiplication of
monasteries and nunneries. Neither Lâo nor Kwang was a celibate
or recommended celibacy. The present patriarch, as a married man,
would seem to be able still to resist the law.
1
Notes on Chinese Literature, p. 179.
2
See 'Le Livre des Récompense et des Peines en Chinois et en François'
(London, 1835)
3
The designation of Lao-dze as Thâi Shang Lâo Kün originated probably
in the Thang dynasty. It is on record that in 666 Kao Zung, the
third emperor, went to Lâo-dze's temple at Po Kâu (the place of
Lao's birth, and still called by the same name, in the department
of Fäng-yang in An-hui), and conferred on him the title of Thâi
Shang Yüan Yüan Hwang Tî, 'The Great God, the Mysterious Originator,
the Most High.' 'Then,' says Mayers, Manual, p. 113, 'for the
first time he was ranked among the gods as "Great Supreme, the
Emperor (or Imperial God) of the Dark First Cause."' The whole
entry is ### (or ###) ###. Later on, in 1014, we find Kän Zung,
the fourth Sung emperor, also visiting Po Kâu, and in Lao's temple,
which has by this time become 'the Palace of Grand Purity,' enlarging
his title to Thai Shang Lao Kün Hwun Yüan Shang Teh Hwang Tî,'
The Most High, the Ruler Lao, the Great God of Grand Virtue at
the Chaotic Origin.' But such titles are not easily translated.
4
The eight spirits were:—1. The Lord of Heaven; 2. The Lord
of Earth; 3. The Lord of War; 4. The Lord of the Yang operation;
5. The Lord of the Yin operation; 6. The Lord of the Moon; 7.
The Lord of the Sun; and 8. The Lord of the Four Seasons. See
Mayers's C. R. Manual, pp. 327, 328. His authority is the sixth
of Sze-ma Khien's monographs. Khien seems to say that the worship
of these spirits could be traced to Thai Kung, one of the principal
ministers of kings Wän and Wû at the rise of the Kâu dynasty in
the twelfth century B. C., and to whom in the list of Taoist writings
in the Imperial Library of Han, no fewer than 237 phien are ascribed.
5
See Mayers's C. R. Manual, Part I, article 35.
6
Called Khäng Hwang Miâo, 'Wall and Moat Temples,' Palladia of
the city.
7
See Dr. Eitel's third edition of his 'Three Lectures on Buddhism,'
pp. 36-45 (Hongkong: Lane, Crawford & Co., 1884). The edition
of the Penal Code to which he refers is of 1879.
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