Each religion began early to borrow from the other.  In the words of the philosopher Chu Hsi, of the eleventh century, “Buddhism stole the best features of Taoism; Taoism stole the worst features of Buddhism.  It is as though one took a jewel from the other, and the loser recouped the loss with a stone.”

From Buddhism the Taoists borrowed their whole scheme of temples, priests, nuns, and ritual.  They drew up liturgies to resemble the Buddhist sutras; and also prayers for the dead.  They adopted the idea of a Trinity, consisting of Lao Tzu, the mythological Adam of China, and the Ruler of the Universe, before mentioned; and they further appropriated the Buddhist Purgatory with all its frightful terrors and tortures after death.

Nowadays it takes an expert to distinguish between the temples and priests of the two religions, and members of both hierarchies are often simultaneously summoned by persons needing religious consolation or ceremonial of any kind.

The pure and artless Tao of Lao Tzu, etherealised by the lofty speculations of Chuang Tzu, has long since become the vehicle of base and worthless superstition.

LECTURE VI

SOME CHINESE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

SOME CHINESE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

A foreigner arriving for the first time in China will be especially struck by three points to which he is not accustomed at home.

The people will consist almost entirely of men; they will all wear their hair plaited in queues; and they will all be exactly alike.

The seclusion of women causes the traveller least surprise of the three, being a custom much more rigorously enforced in other Oriental countries; and directly he gets accustomed to the uniform absence of beard and moustache, he soon finds out that the Chinese people are not one whit more alike facially than his own countrymen of the West.

A Chinaman cannot wear a beard before he is forty, unless he happens to have a married son.  He also shaves the whole head with the exception of a round patch at the back, from which the much-prized queue is grown.

There are some strange misconceptions as to the origin and meaning of the queue, more perhaps on the other side of the Atlantic, where we are not so accustomed to Chinamen as you are in America.  Some associate the queue with religion, and gravely state that without it no Chinaman could be hauled into Paradise.  Others know that queues have only been worn by the Chinese for about two hundred and fifty years, and that they were imposed as a badge of conquest by the Manchu-Tartars, the present rulers of China.  Previous to 1644 the Chinese clothed their bodies and dressed their hair in the style of the modern Japanese,—­of course I mean those Japanese who still wear what is wrongly known as “the beautiful native dress of Japan,”—­wrongly, because as a matter of fact the Japanese borrowed their dress, as well as their literature, philosophy, and early lessons in art, from China.  The Japanese dress is the dress of the Ming period in China, 1368-1644.