For about half a cycle (sixty-five years) barbarian dynasties had been holding the north; with the result that the center of gravity of the real Black-haired People had been shifted from the puritan landscapes of North China to the pagan landscapes of the Yangtse Valley,—­a region of mountains and forests and lakes and wild waters:  Tsu the land of Laotse and Ch’u Yuan, and I think Chwangtse too.  It is here are the Hills of T’ang, the metropolis of Natural Magic perhaps for all the world; and the mind and imagination of China, centered here, were receiving a new polarization; something richer and more luminous was being born.  Contemporary with Tao Yuan-ming was Ku Kaichih, the first supreme name in painting.  Fenollosa speaks of a “White Lotus Club,” organized by Hui Yuan, A Buddhist priest, and consisteing of “mountain-climbers and thinkers,”—­Tao Yuan-ming being a member.

One would like to get at the heart of what happened in that last quarter of the fourth century.  This is what we see on our side:  Canton and Yangtse ports were being visited more and more by Hindu, Arab, and Sassanian traders, bringing in new things and ideas:  the Hindus, especially, an impetus towards culture from the splendor of the gupta period, then at its topmost height.  Also ther were new inventions, such as that of paper, which was an incentive to literary output.  The Chinese mind, in the south especially, was quickened on the one hand by the magical wind from the mountains, and on the other by a wind from the great world over-seas:  the necessary nationalistic and international quickenings.  But deeper quickenings also were taking place.  India was fast becoming, under the Gupta reaction towards Brahmanism, no place for the Buddhists; and the Hindu ships that put in at Canton and the Yangtse were bringing much to China besides merchandise.  A great propaganda of Buddhism was in process; by Indian monks, and now too for the first time by native Chinese.  We read of a missionary who went about preaching to an indifferent world; then in sorrow took to the mountains, and proclaimed the Good Law to the mountain boulders; and they “nodded as it were their heads in assent.” * But there is evidence that China was fast becoming the spiritual metropolis of the world:  Buddhism was drifting in, and mingling among the mountains with mountain Taoism, that dear and hoary magic of the Eastern World; and the result was an atmosphere in which astounding events were to happen.

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* Giles Dictionary of Chinese Biography; from which work,
and from the same author’s Chinese Literature, the facts,
quotations, and enecdotes given in this lecture are taken.
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In 401, Kumarajiva, the seventeenth Buddhist Patriarch, came from India and took up his residence at the court at Changan, where a Tibetan family was then reigning over the north; and this, when you think that these Patriarchs were (as I believe) no popes elected by