# Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII.
A TAOIST PATRIARCH.
Although there is no country in the world in which official position and emoluments are more highly thought of than in China, there are, on the other hand, but few countries where they are more despised by certain schools of thought. The ideal man of Confucius was, first and foremost, an officer or Minister of State; and this conception has lived and flourished among the Chinese down to the present day. As a recoil, however, from the worldliness of the Confucian standard, we have the bright ideal of the Taoists, who look upon wealth and honours as illusory, and see the true Sage rather in him who abandons himself to quietism, contemplation, and the culture of his natural endowments. One of the most illustrious representatives of this persuasion was the patriarch Lü Tsû, about whom many curious stories are told, and to whom is attributed a very original and abstruse commentary upon the Tao Tê Ching. Now it must be remembered, at the outset, that a great many of the fairy tales and legends familiar to all children are common to many countries. Mr. W. E. S. Ralston is well known as an indefatigable investigator of what may be called the science of comparative romance, and while his public story-tellings are crowded with children as delighted and ​spell-bound as if they were witnessing their first pantomime, he can write as learnedly in the Nineteenth Century about Cinderella or Puss in Boots as Max Müller upon the science of language. One of these stories common to so many lands is that of Rip Van Winkle, the Chinese prototype of whom was a person called Wang Chih. Another is that of the King who put his head into a basin of water and took it out again, but in that brief second lived a long, chequered, and laborious career, rose from poverty to wealth, married, had a family, suffered disgrace, and was reduced to penury and old age. The Chinese counterpart of this fabled monarch—who was, if we remember rightly, a Persian—is the illustrious sage of whom we are now writing. It is said that early in life Lü Tsû was animated by ambition, and longed to distinguish himself in the affairs of state. In this he was opposed by the wise counsels of a Taoist philosopher, who expatiated to him on the vanity of earthly things. It was not, however, until a very remarkable dream occurred to him that he was induced to give up his design. Entering an inn one evening, he ordered some rice for his supper, and while it was being cooked fell asleep. Immediately he commenced a long and adventurous career. He thought he rose high in office, passing through all the proper grades, until, when at the pinnacle of greatness, he incurred the imperial displeasure, and was disgraced. Waking with a start, he found that his rice was just ready; and the lesson he laid to heart was, that, for so unsatisfactory a career, which, in spite of its wearisome prolongation, really only lasted a few minutes, it would be foolish to surrender the truer pleasures of indifferentism. He therefore abandoned his high schemes, ​cheered his heart with copious libations of wine, and devoted himself to the practice of what may be called the convivial phase of Taoist philosophy. Numbers of disciples followed in his footsteps, convinced that the world was very vain; and from this time Lü Tsû became a shining light of the school whose doctrines he had embraced. His mystically conceived interpretation of the great Taoist classic we have already referred to; but what gave him the widest celebrity he enjoyed was his wonderful talent in working the planchette. He became, in fact, a sort of planchette professor. There are very few of our readers, we suppose, who have witnessed a planchette séance in China. The board is suspended over a tray of clean sand, and through a hole in it hangs a pencil. Incense is burnt, prostrations are performed, and the passing spirit is invoked. Then the planchette begins slowly to wave to and fro, and the pencil traces characters in the sand, which are of a somewhat obscure and oracular signification. A capital description of a fu luan or planchette séance, is given in the novel P'in Hua Pao Chien, or "Precious Mirror of Choice Beauties," a translation of which appeared in the China Review a few years ago. Through the medium of the planchette Lü Tsu was enabled to purvey much highly-prized information, and his success in the art was such that he is invoked to this very day in Peking, and probably elsewhere, whenever the native mediums can be prevailed upon to give a séance. Among the most valued revelations vouchsafed through the mediumship of Lü Tsû were directions with regard to the cure of diseases. In fact, his fame became so great in this department of spiritualistic art, that he has since been canonised as the Patron ​of Medicine, and temples are erected to his honour in all the provinces of China. There are four in the capital—one near the Jesuit Observatory, called the Lü Kung T'ang, close by the shrine built in commemoration of the great Jesuit, Adam Schaal, by the Emperor Shun Chih; one just outside the Front Gate, called the Lü Tsû Tien; and two others, both of which are known as Lü Tsû T'sz. There is also a sanctuary dedicated to him in the Temple of the White Cloud, the great stronghold of Taoism, outside the western wall. On the whole, we should say that Lü Tsû succeeded in acquiring far more fame as a soothsayer and mystic than he would have done had he contented himself with less transcendental studies and risen to be a humble magistrate. There are people in the world not unlike him now; and though we do not suppose that future generations will canonise Madame Blavatsky, or build temples to her coadjutor the quondam editor of the Hong-Kong Daily Press, both persons enjoy an amount of fame, or notoriety, that would never have fallen to their share had they stuck to more commonplace pursuits. Spiritualists and mystery-mongers flourish to-day much as they did in China a thousand years ago; and, albeit that comparisons are odious, we cannot help remarking that they do not seem to have improved. There is often a grubbiness about the finger-nails of professional mediums, and a certain shakiness about the proper use of the eighth letter of the alphabet, which go far towards counteracting the effect upon one's mind of their most astonishing performances; whereas our old friend of the T'ang dynasty was a person of undeniable erudition and most cultured tastes, and could lay claim, besides, to a very high position in the philosophic school ​he joined. Jargon as his poetry upon the "Cultivation of the Pure Essence" may sound to us to-day, it represented to the scholars of his time a distinct and fashionable phase—or craze—of philosophy and speculation, to the pursuit of which many eminent and pure men devoted their entire lives, and which exercised a profound influence upon more than one Emperor of China.