# Four and Twenty Minds/Chapter 21

XXI
KWANG-TZE
I
The idea may or may not be original with me: that doesn’t matter. In any case, I have had it for a long time, and what is more, I believe it to be true.
I believe that the so-called Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had the discovery of classic culture as one of its causes and one of its effects, will ultimately prove to be but a slight affair in comparison with the Renaissance of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which will be due to the discovery of oriental culture.
This new Renaissance will bring not a complete overturn—the human spirit is not an omelet—but an eager change in the direction of European and American thought and life.
We talk of a universal society of nations—and we have not yet formed a universal society of intelligence. It has been attempted now and then during the last hundred years, but the ​prepatory work has never been done, and without that work no man, though he be a Titan, can improvise the results.
When once we have finished sampling and can really proceed to assimilate the four or five civilizations of the unknown East, there will ensue profound changes in our ideas about the world and about life, and in the range of our imagination and sensibility.
Just one type of oriental culture, the Hebraic, is really known to the Western world. That culture, in its religious forms, and particularly in its Christian form, was assimilated by Europe in the days of the Roman Empire. And our moral life still centers about a collection of Palestinian writings.
But as yet we have hardly glanced at the other oriental cultures. We stand only in the vestibule. The immense storehouses of Asiatic nurture are scarcely opened. All we have done is to taste a few sips, a few morsels.
Just as in the two centuries that preceded our own Renaissance there were teachers and poets who found the Greeks and Romans for themselves without waiting for the humanists, so for the last two centuries there has been in Europe a considerable importation of oriental thought and art. Translations, contributions, studies, histories. Here and there the light has shone through. Some marvels have become almost ​familiar: Arabian fancy in the Thousand and One Nights; Persian lyric in the Rubaiyat; Indian thought in the Upanishads and in Buddha; Japanese painting.
But with respect to the whole, these importations are but the slightest of promises. And they have been limited to a few hundred specialists and a few thousand lovers of poetic, pictorial, and metaphysical curiosities.
The work of the future must be two-fold; to select the best from the entire mass, and to bring that best to universal knowledge. There are marvels of poetry to be found, prodigies of painting and of sculpture, triumphs of invention, depths of wisdom. There is enough in the East to change our opinions as to the very nature of the most essential realities, and to double the keyboard of our sentiments.
II
In this coming Renaissance a major part will fall to China, which now lies prostrate. We are better acquainted with the Arabs, who are nearer neighbors, and with the Indians, through a sense of philological affinity, and because India is a European possession.
China, far greater, but more distant, more enclosed, more heterogeneous, and more timid, ​is for us less familiar and less adored. It was once the fashion to exalt China: the Chinese, it was claimed, had invented everything. But reaction led to mockery. And now we talk of Mandarinism, of immobility, of petrifaction. But even supposing that a civilization that has lasted for some dozens of centuries has come to a stop (and who can say that it has stopped indeed?), it remains true that before it stopped it had progressed for a long, long time. And of this living past there remain thousands of works in millions of volumes. What do we know of these works? We know the King, translated but seldom read and little understood; the Tâo Teh King, often translated and none the less obscure; a few romances; a few brief poems. The Sinologues do not like to translate. What is more, they make their own selections. And on what basis do they choose? They know the Chinese characters and bibliographies and historical systems, but how much taste have they for poetry? Consider, for instance, the translations of poems of the Tang dynasty by Hervey de Saint Denis. Alas! The good man confesses that he has selected for translation those poems which seem to him most significant as historical documents. What a treatment for poetry! The Tang poems are like the dust on a butterfly’s wing, and those which have most lyric beauty are still untranslated.
​So it goes. China has a marvelous and limitless literature—drama, philosophy, history, romance. No genre is missing. One may draw in one’s nets heavy-laden, as in a lake where no one has fished before. Who in Europe is really familiar with the poets Li-po, Tu-fu, Wen-kiun, Wang-wei, Po-kin-i, Su-kung-tu? Or the dramatists Wang-chi-fu, Ma-h-yuen, Pe-gen-fu? Or the philosophers Lieh-tze, Yang-min, Kwang-tze, Yang-chu? These are the first names that occur to me out of many that I have seen or heard. They are but a handful drawn from a full granary. And no one of these men is inferior in art or in profundity to the most famous writers of Europe. Yet in Europe there are scarcely fifty people who could read them in the original, and five thousand at the most who may have read some fragments or pronounced their names.
In Italy it is worse yet. The very first Sinologues were Italians—Ricci and Desideri—and there have been others since. But they have either translated little or have translated in verse. Andreozzi has rendered The Tooth of Buddha of Shenai-ghan (the one Chinese romance that has come to be fairly well known, thanks to a popular edition); Severini has translated several poems, but more from the Japanese than from ​the Chinese. Massarani’s Book of Jade is translated from the French of Judith Gautier; Mario Chini has given us an Italian rendering of the Si-siang-ki of Wang-chi-fu, but it is based on the French of Julien, and is merely a verse translation of the poetic portions of the work. The most active Italian translator, who is at the same time the dean of European Sinologues and one of the most truly learned of them all, is Carlo Puini. To him and to Giovanni Vacca, his scholar and my friend, I owe my knowledge of Kwang-tze, one of the noblest of Chinese philosophers, and at the same time an excellent writer.
III
Kwang-tze was a Tâoist, and lived in the fourth century before Christ. Very little is known about his life. The Chinese are not greedy for biographies. They say: “He flourished under such and such a dynasty”—and they ask nothing further.
​To be a Tâoist means to be a follower—but an intelligent follower—of the doctrine attributed to Lâo-tze, which is condensed in the famous and obscure Tâo Teh King.
Tâo means “the way.” But in Tâoism it means the principle, the germinating force of the world. This principle, from which all being is derived, animates the world continually as Teh, that is, as potential energy. The development of Teh is Wû-wei, or “inaction.” In other words, when nature acts spontaneously it is perfect. Even so man should act, relaxing himself. If he tries to modify, to check, to rule, to find a purpose, he ruins everything. Man has set reason and knowledge over against natural spontaneousness, has tried to do too much; and for this cause he is unhappy. On the contrary, he should but obey his own body, living in purity, that is, in accordance with nature. Thus the spirit itself is saved, all else is transformed into spirit, and perfection and immortality are attained.
Tâoism in its most constant aspect is then a sort of Rousseauism extended from the human creature to the entire field of existence. It implies acceptance, non-resistance, inaction. It is, in short, a recognition of that uselessness which is inscribed at the end of all human exertion. When Tâoism got down to the poets and the people it lost itself in incantations, in materialistic ​attempts to win a forced immortality, in semi-scientific formalism. But in Lâo-tze and in the greatest philosophers of the school, it is illumined with paradoxical magnificence. Confucianism seems by comparison a meticulous and utilitarian system of morality designed to bring up honest subjects for the State, and Buddhism a desperate renunciation of nature and of reason alike, a refined anæsthetic for the annihilation of universal grief. Lâo-tze does not seek to change men or to annihilate them, but he points out the path by which, following again the line of natural destiny, they may obtain peace and immortality. “For Lâo-tze,” Puini says, “the man who enters into society is the comic figure par excellence. And his ridiculousness increases in proportion as he complicates the artificial manner of his life.” Putting it roughly, and leaving aside the other points of the doctrine, we may say that Lâo-tze was a Rousseau who appeared six centuries before Christ, instead of coming eighteen centuries after Christ.
By way of a final comparison with Europeans, let me recall the fact that Kwang-tze, since he lived in the fourth century before Christ, was the contemporary of Plato and of Aristotle—to remain in the philosophical field. Unlike them, however, he did not limit himself to the study of logic, physics, and metaphysics, but concerned ​himself almost exclusively with that which is of most importance to man: life.
IV
Though he was contemporary with Plato, he makes us think rather of Gorgias or of the Pyrrhonists. Not only is man’s knowledge of little or no extent, according to Kwang-tze, but it is almost impossible to transmit it:
What the world thinks the most valuable exhibition of the Tâo is to be found in books. But books are only a collection of words. Words have what is valuable in them;—what is valuable in words is the ideas they convey. But those ideas are a sequence of something else;—and what that something else is cannot be conveyed by words. When the world, because of the value which it attaches to words, commits them to books, that for which it so values them may not deserve to be valued;—because that which it values is not what is really valuable.
Thus it is that what we look at and can see is (only) the outward form and colour, and what we listen to and can hear is (only) names and sounds. Alas! that men of the world should think that form and colour, name and sound, should be sufficient to give them the real nature of the Tâo. The form and colour, the name and sound, are certainly not sufficient to convey its real nature; and so it is that “the wise do not speak and those who do speak are not wise.” How should the world know that real nature?
​And it is worse yet in the case of the writings of the ancients:
Duke Hwan, seated above in his hall, was (once) reading a book, and the wheelwright Phien was making a wheel below it. Laying aside his hammer and chisel, Phien went up the steps, and said, “I venture to ask your Grace what words you are reading?” The duke said, “The words of the sages.” “Are those sages alive?” Phien continued. “They are dead,” was the reply. “Then,” said the other, “what you, my Ruler, are reading are only the dregs and sediments of those old men.” The duke said, “How should you, a wheelwright, have anything to say about the book which I am reading? If you can explain yourself, very well; if you cannot, you shall die!” The wheelwright said, “Your servant will look at the thing from the point of view of his own art. In making a wheel, if I proceed gently, that is pleasant enough, but the workmanship is not strong; if I proceed violently, that is toilsome and the joinings do not fit. If the movements of my hand are neither (too) gentle nor (too) violent, the idea in my mind is realised. But I cannot tell (how to do this) by word of mouth;—there is a knack in it. I cannot teach the knack to my son, nor can my son learn it from me. Thus it is that I am in my seventieth year, and am (still) making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, and what it was not possible for them to convey, are dead and gone:—so then what you, my Ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments!”
In the time of (the Ti) Ho-hsü, the people occupied their dwellings without knowing what they were doing, and walked out without knowing where they were going. They filled their mouths with food and were glad; they slapped their stomachs to express their satisfaction. This was all the ability which they possessed. But when the sagely men appeared, with their bendings and stoppings in ceremonies and music to adjust the persons of all, and hanging up their benevolence and righteousness to excite the endeavours of all to reach them, in order to comfort their minds, then the people began to stump and limp about in their love of knowledge, and strove with one another in their pursuit of gain, so that there was no stopping them:—this was the error of those sagely men.
​That which is the perfectly correct path is not to lose the real character of the nature with which we are endowed. Hence the union (of parts) should not be considered redundance, nor their divergence superfluity; what is long should not be considered too long, nor what is short too short. A duck’s legs, for instance, are short, but if we try to lengthen them, it occasions pain; and a crane’s legs are long, but if we try to cut off a portion of them, it produces grief.
Therefore if an end were put to sageness and wisdom put away, the great robbers would cease to arise. If jade were put away and pearls broken to bits, the small thieves would not appear. If tallies were burned and seals broken in pieces, the people would become simple and unsophisticated. If pecks were destroyed and steelyards snapped in two, the people would have no wrangling. If the rules of the sages were entirely set aside in the world, a beginning might be made of reasoning with the people.
The less one does, so Kwang-tze seems to say, the better off one is. That dolce far niente which the Abbé Galiani praised in our golden ​eighteenth century is the ideal of Tâoism—not in the beggar’s sense of not working, but in the sense of not changing that which nature establishes and impels. Such inaction is regarded by the Tâoists as the indispensable means of ascending to the state of primal spontaneity:
Come and I will tell you the perfect Tâo. … You must be still; you must be pure; not subjecting your body to toil, not agitating your vital force;—then you may live for long. When your eyes see nothing, your ears hear nothing, and your mind knows nothing, your spirit will keep your body, and the body will live long. Watch over what is within you, shut up the avenues that connect you with what is external;—much knowledge is pernicious. … Watch over and keep your body, and all things will of themselves give it vigour. I maintain the (original) unity (of these elements), and dwell in the harmony of them. In this way I have cultivated myself for one thousand and two hundred years, and my bodily form has undergone no decay.
It is with life as it is with implements. Thus spake the cook of King Hui:
A good cook changes his knife every year;—(it may have been injured) in cutting; an ordinary cook changes his every month;—(it may have been) broken. Now my knife has been in use for nineteen years; it has cut up several thousand oxen, and yet its edge is as sharp as if it had newly come from the whetstone.
Kwang-tze does not exalt deathlessness as do the orthodox Tâoists. He knows how little worth ​while life really is to one who looks at it with clear eyes and a strong heart:
I will now tell you, Sir, my views about the condition of man. The eyes wish to look on beauty; the ears to hear music; the mouth to enjoy flavours; the will to be gratified. The greatest longevity man can reach is a hundred years; a medium longevity is eighty years; the lowest longevity is sixty. Take away sickness, pining, bereavement, mourning, anxieties, and calamities, the times when, in any of these, one can open his mouth and laugh, are only four or five days in a month. Heaven and earth have no limit of duration, but the death of man has its (appointed) time.
Death has no terror for Kwang-tze. Man comes and goes; the life of the spirit continues:
He has life; he has death; he comes forth; he enters; but we do not see his form;—all this is what is called the door of Heaven.
Long before the time of Calderón, life seemed to Kwang-tze a dream and nothing more:
Nay more, death is preferable to life: long before the time of Hamlet, Kwang-tze questioned the skulls of the dead and learned from mouths of bone such truths as mouths of flesh do not reveal:
Some reader will exclaim, at this point, that Kwang-tze brings us nothing new, that he is just a mixture of Montaigne, Rousseau, and Leopardi, with a Chinese coloring.
Even if this were true, would the fact that he preceded these men by a score of centuries be of no significance? If intellectual contacts between the East and the West had always been as free as they are today, how many men who have seemed to us the discoverers of new worlds of thought would have appeared rather as late comers and copyists! How many truths we should have learned far earlier!
But the kernel of Kwang-tze’s doctrine is new for modern Europe. His Wû-wei, or inaction, is the absolute opposite of our energetic and exhausting manner of life. Our age seems to have as its motto the words of Ibsen: “It makes little difference what one does; the important thing is to be doing. All in all, we may call ourselves a race of doers.” Jesus, an oriental, felt the folly ​of this perpetual concern for the body and the needs of the body, and expressed it in imaginative form in his sayings about food and clothing: the fowls of the air sow not, yet God feedeth them; the lilies of the field spin not, yet even Solomon was not so gloriously arrayed. But these words of Jesus have been either misunderstood or distorted into some sense other than the true sense, which is the Tâoist sense. They express a profound confidence that nature will provide for all that is really needful if only man will refrain from stirring up vain desires for superfluous goods. In Europe the praise of inaction is hardly to be found before the eighteenth century, and even then it is rather a witty tour de force than the utterance of a serious conviction.
Christian Europe, instead of converting the Jews, has been converted to the Jewish attitude: Christ has been crucified again and again by the demons of industrial and mercantile civilization. For the essential purpose of that civilization is this: to create as many needs as possible in order that we may work to satisfy them as best we can.
The Tâoists in general, and Kwang-tze in particular, have an excellent antidote for that European malady of doing, undoing, doing over, and overdoing, which wastes and annihilates us all. ​In weakness and in docility lies true strength, according to Lâo-tze and his followers. Consider, they say, the instance of water: there is nothing more gentle, yet nothing that so overwhelms. Christianity prescribes non-resistance to evil, as a consequence of love. Tâoism, long before, had taught that perfection and wisdom consist in non-resistance to the entire universe. Thus at the heart of this apparent pessimism there is an implicit optimistic faith, faith in the original goodness of reality and of its principle, the Tâo. In other Chinese writers this assumption of natural goodness is crystallized in the idea of the natural goodness of man, and—in sharp contrast with the doctrine of original sin, the most profound and terrible doctrine of Christianity—becomes the postulate of common morality centuries before Rousseau. The Book of the Three Words (San-tze-king) of Wang-pe-heu, which is used for teaching children to read, begins thus: “The character of man is essentially good.”
But it is not impossible to dissociate the theories of primitive perfection and of inaction—as indeed Kwang-tze has done in some measure. No Christian and no European philosopher doubts that man was an evil beast to start with, and that such in essence he has remained. And it is perfectly clear, to any one who reviews the daily round of human activities, that man does ​too much, and that by this excess he well-nigh prevents the true inner humanization of his bestial self—for nearly all of our daily acts tend rather to satisfy our native bestial instincts in a more complex, refined, safe, and expensive manner, than to correct the original sin of our swinish and tigerish nature. The primitive man had but his nails and his teeth to fight his rival for the body of a stag: the civilized man has submarines, airplanes, torpedoes, bombs, flame-throwers, gas, hand-grenades, shrapnel, and high explosives to fight his rival for a province. Greed and ferocity have been magnified and armed by science: the human beast is unchanged.
Now the Chinese idea of inaction may help us Europeans to discredit the type of action that is merely an agonizing struggle to obtain satisfactions that do not satisfy. Such, indeed, is all action that does not subserve the only purpose worthy of man: the overcoming of his bestial nature by the substitution of sentiments, habits, checks, and reason. Christianity tells us what to do; Tâoism tells us what not to do. In order that we may do what is essential and divine, we must refrain from doing that which is transitory and useless. Tâoism does not regard the immortal soul as something perfect and ready-made, placed in the body to give it life: the soul is a conquest, a terminus, a reward, a sublimation and a trans-substantiation of the body. We have at birth but ​a potential soul: we must fashion our souls for ourselves, without wasting our strength in external endeavors, in bodily labors for the service of the body. While Aristotle was plodding through the commonplaces of formal morality, Kwang-tze was setting up one of the pillars of Christian super-wisdom. Twenty-three centuries ago his voice condemned the exhausting mercantile superstition of our day.
* ↑ The translator assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of the Chinese names cited incidentally in this essay.
* ↑ Translations of passages from Kwang-tze are to be found in several of the works of Puini, and chiefly in his recent Taoismo (Lanciano, 1917). Translations by Vacca appear in the Leonardo (Florence, 1906). Selections appear in Buber’s Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse (Leipzig, 1910). There are complete English translations by Giles and by James Legge. Legge’s translation appears in The Texts of Tâoism (Oxford, 1891), Volumes XXXIX and XL of The Sacred Books of the East. In the present translation Papini’s quotations from an Italian version of Kwang-tze are replaced by the corresponding passages of Legge’s translation.
* ↑ Legge’s translation (see preceding note), Vol. XXXIX, p. 343.
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, pp. 343–44.
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, pp. 277–78.
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, pp. 279–80. Compare Dostoevsky’s Journal of an Author, April, 1877: “They came to know and to love sadness; they longed for suffering; and said that truth could be achieved by suffering alone. Then science appeared among them. When they were angered, they began to talk of brotherhood and humanity, and conceived those ideas. When they committed crime, they invented justice and prescribed for themselves whole codes of laws to maintain it, and to maintain the codes they set up a guillotine.” (This translation is quoted from Pages from the Journal of an Author, translated by S. Koteliansky and J. M. Murry, Boston, 1916. Papini quotes in Italian.)
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, p. 270.
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, p. 286.
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, p. 284.
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, pp. 298–99.
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, p. 199.
* ↑ Vol. XL, pp. 174–75.
* ↑ Vol. XL, p. 85.
* ↑ Vol. XXXIX, pp. 194–95. On this passage see Farinelli, La vita è un sogno, Turin, 1916, Vol. I, pp. 21 and 256. Farinelli, however, does not refer to a Chinese comedy which is built entirely on this idea. It is by Chi-yuen, and is called Hoang-liang-mong (The Dream of the Yellow Millet) and has a Tâoist thesis.
* ↑ Vol. XL, pp. 6–7.
* ↑ The idea of inaction is treated, with historical notes as to its development, in my book L’altra metà, Milan, 1912.