CHINESE LITERATURE is especially remarkable (I) for its antiquity, coupled with an almost unbroken continuity down to the present day; (2) for the variety of subjects presented, and for the exhaustive treatment which not only each subject but also each subdivision has received, as well as for the colossal scale on which many literary monuments have been conceived and car ried out; and (3) for the accuracy of many of its historical state ments, so far as it has been possible to test them.
Poetry.—Proceeding, with only partial reference to Chinese classification, we begin with the last of the above four classes. Among the oldest Chinese records in our possession are songs and ballads. The earliest were for ritual purposes in religious ceremonies, and may belong to about the ninth century B.C. These and later poems of the Chou period are collected in the S1ii1D Ching, popularly known as the odes, which forms an important portion of the Confucian Canon. The odes treat of a variety of subjects of war and love, of eating and drinking and dancing, of the virtues and vices of rulers, and of the misery and happiness of the people. Many are for religious purposes, and others are satires, or love songs, or complaints of soldiers against their commander, or are for popular festivals.
Passing over the intervening centuries we come to the most glorious age of Chinese poetry, the T'ang dynasty. From the long string of names which have shed lustre upon it, the following, all of the first rank, may be mentioned. Meng Hao-jan (A.D. 689 740) failed to succeed at the public competitive examinations and retired to the mountains, where he led the life of a recluse. Later he obtained an official post ; but he was of a timid disposition, and once when the emperor, attracted by his fame, came to visit him, he hid himself under the bed. His hiding-place was revealed by Wang Wei, a brother poet. The latter (A.D. 699-759), in addi tion to being a first-rank poet, was also a landscape-painter of great distinction. He was further a firm believer in Buddhism; and after losing his wife and mother, he turned his mountain home into a Buddhist monastery. Of all poets, no one has made his name more widely known than Li Po, or Li T'ai-po (A.D. 705-762), popularly known as the Banished Angel, so heavenly were the poems he dashed off, often under the influence of wine. Although a genial companion and at times in high favour at court, he was of a roving disposition, and a strain of melancholy, of unsatisfied longing, runs through his verses. Tu Fu (A.D. 712-770) is generally ranked with Li Po, the two being jointly spoken of as the chief poets of their age. Tu Fu, like the latter, led a chequered and wandering life. Po Chii-i (A.D. 772-846) held several high official posts, but found time for a considerable output of some of the finest poetry in the language. His poems were collected by imperial command and engraved upon tablets of stone.
The poets of the Sung dynasty (A.D. 960-1260) were many and varied in style; but their work, much of it of the very highest order, was more formal and precise. Life seemed to be taken more seriously than under the gay and pleasure-loving T'ang. The long list of Sung poets includes such names as Ssu-ma Kuang, Ou-yang Hsiu and Wang An-shih. A still more familiar name in popular estimation is that of Su Tung-p'o (A.D. I031–I 101), known partly for his romantic career, but still more as a brilliant poet and writer of fascinating essays.
The Mongols (A.D. 1260-1368), who succeeded the Sungs, and the Mings who followed the Mongols and bring us down to the year 1644, helped, especially the Mings, to swell the volume of Chinese verse, but without reaching the high level of the two great periods above mentioned. Then came the Manchu dynasty, of which the same tale must be told, in spite of two highly cultured emperors, K'ang Hsi and Ch'ien Lung, both of them poets and one of them author of a collection containing no fewer than pieces, the majority of which are but four-line stanzas of little literary value.
The chief moods of the Chinese poet are a pure delight in the varying phenomena of nature, and a boundless sympathy with the woes and sufferings of humanity. Erotic poetry is not absent, but it is not proportionate to the great body of Chinese verse. In his love for hill and stream, which he peoples with genii, and for tree and flower. which he endows with sentient souls, the Chinese poet is seen at his best. His views of life are deeply tinged with melan choly and often loaded with an overwhelming sadness "at the doubtful doom of humankind." In his lighter moods he draws inspiration, and in his darker moods consolation, from the wine cup. The present day, with its use of the colloquial for literary purposes and its break with old conventions, is witnessing many interesting new schools of poetry, some of them strongly Chinese, others with Western prototypes.
History.—The oldest of Chinese histories is a series of ancient documents now passing under a collective title as Shu Ching and popularly known as the canon or book of history. Some of its documents are genuine remains of the Chou dynasty and a few are possibly even of earlier date, but others are fabrications of later times. The work opens with an account of the legendary emperors Yao, Shun and Yu, and continues down into the 8th century B.c. The next step brings us to Confucius. Among his other literary labours, the great sage undertook to produce the an nals of Lu, his native State, basing them on the officially kept chronicle of that principality. The work is known as the Ch'un Ch'iu (i.e., the Spring and Autumn), Annals. It consists of a varying number of brief entries under each year of the reign of each successive ruler of Lu which scarcely make possible the re construction in any detail of the age they profess to record. The Tso Clivan, a so-called commentary on the Ch'un Ch'iu, in reality is only in part that. It is mainly an independent history of another one of the feudal states of the Chou period.
Historiography took its next great step under Ssu-ma Chien (145-87 B.c. ), the son of an hereditary grand astrologer who was also an eager student of history and the actual planner of the great work so successfully carried out after his death. By the time he was ten years of age, Ssii-ma Ch'ien was already well ad vanced with his studies, and at 20 he set forth on a round of travel which carried him to all parts of the empire. Entering the public service, he was employed upon a mission of inspection to the newly conquered regions of Ssuch'uan and Yunnan. In no B.C. his father died, and he stepped into the post of grand astrologer. Af ter devoting some time and energy to the reform of the calendar, he took up the work which had been begun by his father and which was ultimately given to the world as the Shih Chi, or historical record. This was arranged under five great headings, viz., (1) Annals of Imperial Reigns, (2) Chronological Tables, (3) Mono graphs, (4) Annals of Vassal Princes and (5) Biographies. The historical record begins with the so-called Yellow Emperor, a shadowy and probably mythical figure, and continues down into the Han dynasty. Ssu-ma Ch'ien's great work has been accepted as the model for all subsequent dynastic histories, of which 26 have now been published. As a rule each dynasty found its his torian in the dynasty which supplanted it ; and as a group the dynastic histories are notable for the fairness with which the conquerors have dealt with the vanquished, accepting without de mur such records of their predecessors as were available from official sources. The output of history, however, does not begin and end with the voluminous records above referred to. History has been a favourite study with the Chinese, and innumerable histories of a non-official character, long and short, complete and partial, political and constitutional, have been showered from age to age upon the Chinese reading world. One of the chief of these is the T'ung Chien, or mirror of history, so called because "to view antiquity as though in a mirror is an aid in the administration of government." It was the work of a statesman of the II th cen tury, whose name, by a coincidence, was Ssu-ma Kuang. It em braces a period from the 4th century B.C. down to A.D. 96o. It is written in a picturesque style, but the arrangement was found to be unsuited to the systematic study of history. Accordingly, it was subjected to revision, and was to a great extent reconstructed under the direction of Chu Hsi (A.D. 1130-1200), the famous philosopher.
In regard to biography, the student is by no means limited to the dynastic histories. Many hundreds of biographies have been written and huge biographical collections have been compiled and published.
Geography and Travel.—There is a considerable volume of Chinese literature which comes under this head, but if we exclude relatively few accounts of foreign countries, nothing in the way of general geography had been produced prior to the arrival of the Jesuit Fathers at the close of the i6th century. Up to that period geography meant the topography of the Chinese empire, and of topographical records there is a very large and valuable collection. Most of the prefectures and departments have their individual topographies, compiled with great fullness from records and from tradition. The buildings, bridges, monuments of archae ological interests, etc., in each district are all carefully inserted, side by side with biographical and other local details. The Chinese have been fond of travel, and hosts of travellers have published notices, more or less extensive, of the different parts of the empire, and even of adjacent nations. With Buddhism came the desire to see the country which was the home of the faith, and several im portant pilgrimages were undertaken with a view to bringing back images and sacred writings to China. Chief among these pilgrims, from the standpoint of the records which they left, were Fa Hsien, whose travels covered the years A.D. and Hsuan Tsang, who was away from China from A.D. 629 to Philosophy.—In philosophy China has almost as long a his tory as the Occident. A brief can only name a few out standing figures and indicate some of the main trends of thought. As has been hinted (see CHINA, HISTORY), the Chou dynasty wit nessed the beginning of philosophical speculation and before its close the main schools of native thought had begun to take f orm. Most of the founders served the State as officials and the prob lem common to them all was one of government. The empire was broken into many warring States, injustice and oppression were rife, and an awakening conscience sought a remedy. The early philosophers, then, were concerned chiefly with social and ethical questions. They were interested only incidentally, if at all, in theories of knowledge or of a future life. What in time came to be the dominant school found its great formulator in Confucius (6th and 5th centuries B.c.). Born in the feudal State of Lu in what is now Shantung, for part of his life he was in office. His standards were too high to permit him to remain permanently in official position, and during most of his career he was a teacher, for years travelling from place to place hoping that a prince would accept his services on his own exacting terms. He believed social salvation to lie chiefly in a return to the best of the past. This he interpreted as emphasis on the cultivation of morality in the gov erning classes (for he believed that political problems were funda mentally ethical and that the example of the rulers determined the character of the people), on bringing into the service of the State the men of highest integrity and education, the perpetua tion of the ceremonies, religious, social and political, of antiquity, and on loyalty to the chief social relations, particularly those of the family. He declined to discuss the future life and was re served about the supernatural, but he had a profound belief that directing the universe was a righteous Being before whom man should stand in awe and conscious dependence.
Mencius, who lived in the second half of the 4th century, revered Confucius but placed greater emphasis upon the innate goodness of human nature and, as a natural corollary to it, enun ciated the duty of princes to listen to the voice of the people and the right of the people to revolt against injustice in high places. Hsiin Tzu, of the 3rd century B.C., also claiming to be of the spirit ual lineage of Confucius, held man to be bad by nature but capable of improvement through proper ethical standards and regulation by himself and the State. He denied all belief in the supernatural and ir. spirits, and depersonalized the ruling element in the universe by describing it as unvarying law.
A second school of thought, commonly called Taoism and also beginning in the Chou dynasty, has as its basic classic the Tao Te Ching. The authorship of this is usually ascribed, although on de cidedly dubious grounds, to a shadowy Lao Tzu, said to have been an older contemporary of Confucius. The Tao Te Ching held up as ideal conformity to the way of nature (the Tao). Conformity to the way of nature, it maintained, involved the absence of regu lations and of the artificialities of civilization. In a rough way this early Taoism corresponded to the philosophical anarchism of the West. Chuang Tzu, of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., was of the same school, and by his vivid style did much to give it cur rency—and prepared the way for its eventual degradation.
Mo Ti, of the 4th and 5th centuries B.c., was very influential. He held that all institutions should be judged by their ability to promote human welfare, and on that ground condemned, among other things, music and elaborate funerals. He also believed that ruling the universe is a Being whose dominant characteristic is love, and that love of man for man should be the basic principle of human conduct. He was followed by two schools, one of which developed his principle of utility into a logical method based on empiricism, and the other emphasized the religious side of his teaching.
Yang Chu, also of the 4th century B.C., was an ethical egoist, who would have each man seek happiness for himself in ways dictated by prudence, but with no care for the happiness of others.
The Legalists, who flourished chiefly in the fourth and third centuries B.C., emphasized, as their name indicates, well-devised laws, adjusted to the needs of the time as a means of bringing order into the disturbed society of their day.
With the Han dynasty, Confucianism was made the established philosophy of the State, and free speculation tended to die. Mohism disappeared, although not without influencing Confucian ism ; and Taoism, while at times popular at court, degenerated into a search for the elixir of life and a means of effecting the trans mutation of metals. At least one semi-independent thinker of im portance, Wang Ch'ung (A.D. 27-97), appeared, teaching, among other things, that man might be either good or bad by nature, and declaring spirits and miracles to be hallucinations. With the en trance of Buddhism in the latter part of the Han dynasty and the rapid spread of the new faith in the next few centuries, new ele ments were brought into Chinese philosophy. Descriptions of Buddhism and of Buddhist thought are given elsewhere and need not be repeated here. Buddhism greatly influenced Taoism, but for several centuries orthodox Confucianism was but little modi fied by it. During the Sung dynasty, however, Confucian scholars came to grips with some of the fundamental issues raised by Bud dhism and several interpretations contended for the mastery. That finally accepted by the State had as its greatest exponent Chu Hsi (A.D. 113o-1200), who by his lucid pen aided its triumph. Chu Hsi made Confucianism an orderly philosophical system, which, while professedly grounded solidly on the ancient clas sics, showed distinctly the influence of Buddhism, and had a cosmology that would have seemed strange to many of the Chou period.
Until the beginning of the 2oth century Chu Hsi dominated official scholarship. Here and there was an influential rebel, the most prominent being Wang Yang-ming (A.D. 1472-1528), who, after attempting to arrive at knowledge in the way commended by the orthodox (the investigation of the outward world), had an experience of enlightenment resembling that of the Buddhist, and henceforth sought by looking within his own mind and heart to understand the universe. Some modern radical scholars, more over, regard a small group in the Manchu dynasty as having pre pared the way for the intellectual revolution of to-day. During the last few years, with the breakdown of the older structure of government and its support of orthodoxy, and with the New Tide or Renaissance movement, interest in philosophical speculation has again awakened. Many schools of thought are represented.
In spite of the high place accorded to farmers, who rank sec ond only to officials and before artisans and traders, and in spite of the assiduity with which agriculture has been practised in all ages, most of what agricultural literature the Chinese possess may be said to belong to modern times. Until the present century the standard work was the Nung Cheng Ch'iian Shu, compiled by Hsu Kuang-ch'i (1562-1634). It is in 6o sections, the first three of which are devoted to classical references. Then follow two sec tions on the division of land, six on the processes of husbandry, nine on hydraulics, four on agricultural implements, six on plant ing, six on rearing silkworms, four on trees, one on keeping and breeding animals, one on food and 18 on provision against a time of scarcity.
At the conclusion of this brief survey of Chinese literature, it may well be asked how such an enormous and ever-increasing mass has been handed down from generation to generation. When the Chinese began to write in a literary sense, as opposed to mere scratchings on bones, they traced their characters on slips of bam boo and tablets of wood with a bamboo pencil, frayed at one end to carry an ink of lacquer made from tree sap. About 200 B.C. a brush of hair was substituted for the bamboo pencil; after which, silk was called into requisition as an appropriate vehicle in con nection with the more delicate brush. Under the later Han dy nasty paper was developed, the traditional date of its invention being A.D. Io5. Printing was preceded by rubbings from inscrip tions, printed silk, stencils, seals and stamps. The earliest extant examples of true printing, by means of engraved blocks of wood, date from A.D. 7 7o and are from Japan, but these were preceded by earlier steps in China for the purpose of reproducing the Bud dhist Scriptures. Moveable types were invented in the II th cen tury, but the prevailing method even to-day is by engraved blocks of wood, one block for each two pages of text.
(K. S. L.)