The Crest-Wave of Evolution eBook

Kenneth Morris
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 850 pages of information about The Crest-Wave of Evolution.

The Crest-Wave of Evolution eBook

Kenneth Morris
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 850 pages of information about The Crest-Wave of Evolution.
and Yin, positive and negative;—­or simply the Higher and the Lower natures.  To the Yang, the Higher, belong the Shen or gods,—­all conscious beneficent forces within and without man.  To the Yin or lower belong the kwei, the opposite of gods:  fan means foreign; and Fan Kwei is the familiar Chinese term for white men.  From Shen and Tao we get the term Shentao, which you know better as Shinto,—­the Way of the Gods; or as well, the Wisdom of the Gods; as good an equivalent of our term Theosophy as you should find; perhaps indeed better than Theosophy itself; for it drives home the idea that the Wisdom is a practical Way of Life. Shentao, the Taoism of the Higher Nature, then, was the primeval religion of the Chinese;—­Dr. De Groot arrives at this, though perhaps hardly sees how sensible a conclusion he has reached.  In the sixth century B.C. it was in a fair way to becoming as obsolete as Neoplatonism or Gnosticism in the nineteenth A.D.; and Laotse and Confucius simply restated some aspects of it with a new force and sanction;—­just as H.P.  Blavatsky, in the Key to Theosophy, begins, you will remember, with an appeal to and restatement of the Theosophy of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists of Alexandria.

It may seem a kind of divergence from our stream of history, to turn aside and tell stories from the Book of Liehtse; but there are excuses.  Chinese history, literature, thought—­ everything—­have been such a closed book to the West, that those scholars who have opened a few of its pages are to be considered public benefactors; and there is room and to spare for any who will but hold such opened pages up;—­we are not in the future to dwell so cut off from a third of mankind.  Also it will do us good to look at Theosophy from the angle of vision of another race.  I think Liehtse has much to show us as to the difference between the methods of the Chinese and Western minds:  the latter that must bring most truths down through the brain-mind, and set them forth decked in the apparel of reason; the former that is, as it seems to me, often rather childlike as to the things of the brain-mind; but has a way of bringing the great truths down and past the brain-mind by some circuitous route; or it may be only by a route much more direct than ours.  The West presents its illuminations so that they look big on the surface; you say, This is the work of a great mind.  A writer in the Times Literary Supplement brought out the idea well, in comparing the two poetries.  What he said was, in effect, as follows:—­the Western poet, too often, dons his singing robe before he will sing; works himself up; expects to step out of current life into the Grand Manner;—­and unless the Soul happens to be there and vocal at the time, achieves mostly pombundle. The Chinaman presents his illumination as if it were nothing at all,—­just the simplest childish-foolish

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The Crest-Wave of Evolution from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.