All these ideas are a natural growth from the teachings of Laotse; but Butterfly Chwang, in working them out and stating them so brilliantly, did an inestimable service to the ages that were to come.

XIV.  THE MANVANTARA OPENS

Laotse’s Blue Pearl was already shining into poetry.  Ch’u Yuan, the first great poet, belongs to this same fourth century; it is a long step from the little wistful ballads that Confucius gathered to the “wild irregular meters,” * splendid imagery, and be it said, deep soul symbolism of his great poem the Li Sao (Falling into Trouble).  The theme of it is this:  From earliest childhood Ch’u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain.  At last, banished by the prince whose minister he had been, he retired into the wilds, and was meditating at the tomb of Shun in Hupeh, in what was then the far south.  There the Phoenix and the Dragon came to him, and bore him aloft, past the West Pole, past the Milky Way, past even the Source of the Hoangho, to the Gates of Heaven.  Where, however, there was no admittance for him; and full of sorrow he returned to earth.

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* Chinese Literature, by Dr. H. A. Giles.   What is said about
the Li Sao here comes from that work—­except the suggestions as
to its inner meaning.
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On the banks of the Mi-lo a fisherman met him, and asked him the cause of his trouble.—­“All the world is foul,” answered Ch’u Yuan, “and I alone am clean.”—­“If that is so,” said the fisherman, “why not plunge into the current, and make its foulness clean with the infection of your purity?  The Man of Tao does not quarrel with his surroundings, but adjusts himself to them.”  Ch’u Yuan took the hint:  leaped into the Mi-lo;—­and yearly since then they have held the Dragon-boat Festival on the waters of Middle China to commemorate the search for his body.—­ Just how much of this is in the Li Sao,—­where the poem ends,—­ I do not clearly gather from Professor Giles’s account; but the whole story appears to me to be a magnificent Soul Symbol:  of that Path which leads you indeed on dragon flights to the borders of the Infinite, but whose end, rightly considered, is in this world, and to be as it were drowned in the waters of this world, with your cleanness infecting them to be clean,—­and lighting them for all future ages with beauty, as with little dragon-boats luminous with an inner flame.  Ch’u Yuan had followers in that and the next century; but perhaps his greatness was hardly to be approached for a thousand years.

But we were still in Tiger-time, and with quite the worst of it to come.  Here lay the Blue Pearl scintillating rainbows up through the heavy atmosphere; but despite its flashing and up-fountaining those strange dying-dolphin hues and glories, you could never have told, in Tiger-time, what it really was.  The Dragon was yet a long way off; though indeed it must be allowed that flight, when Chwangtse wrote