Chinese Literature. Faxian

Udyana—Traces of Buddha

       IX. Soo ho-to—Legends of Buddha

       X. Gandhara—Legends of Buddha

       XI. Takshasila—Legends—The Four Great Topes

       XII. Buddha's Alms-bowl—Death of Hwuy-king

       XIII. Festival of Buddha's Skull-bone

       XIV. Crossing the Indus to the East

       XV. Sympathy of Monks with the Pilgrims

       XVI. Condition and Customs of Central India

       XVII. Legend of the Trayastrimsas Heaven

       XVIII. Buddha's Subjects of Discourse

       XIX. Legend of Buddha's Danta-kashtha

       XX. The Jetavana Vihara—Legends of Buddha

       XXI. The Three Predecessors of Sakyamuni

       XXII. Legends of Buddha's Birth

       XXIII. Legends of Rama and its Tope

       XXIV. Where Buddha Renounced the World

       XXV. The Kingdom of Vaisali

       XXVI. Remarkable Death of Ânanda

       XXVII. King Asoka's Spirit-built Palace and Halls

       XXVIII. Rajagriha, New and Old—Legends Connected with It

       XXIX. Fâ-Hien Passes a Night on Gridhra-kuta Hill

       XXX. Srataparna Cave, or Cave of the First Council

       XXXI. Sakyamuni's Attaining to the Buddhaship

       XXXII. Legend of King Asoka in a Former Birth

       XXXIII. Kasyapa Buddha's Skeleton on Mount Gurupada

       XXXIV. On the Way Returning to Patna

       XXXV. Dakshina, and the Pigeon Monastery

       XXXVI. Fâ-Hien's Indian Studies

       XXXVII. Fâ-Hien's Stay in Champa and Tamalipti

       XXXVIII. At Ceylon—Feats of Buddha—His Statue in Jade

       XXXIX. Cremation of an Arhat—Sermon of a Devotee

       XL. After Two Years Fâ-Hien Takes Ship for China

      Conclusion

      THE SORROWS OF HAN

      Introduction

       Translator's Preface

       Dramatis Personae

       Prologue

       Act First

       Act Second

       Act Third

       Act Fourth

THE ANALECTS

       Table of Contents

      OF

      CONFUCIUS

      [Translated into English by William Jennings]

PRONUNCIATION OF PROPER NAMES

       Table of Contents

      j, as in French. ng, commencing a word, like the same letters terminating one. ai or ei, as in aisle or eider. au, as in German, or like ow in cow. é, as in fęte. i (not followed by a consonant), as ee in see. u (followed by a consonant), as in bull. iu, as ew in new. ui, as ooi in cooing. h at the end of a name makes the preceding vowel short. i in the middle of a word denotes an aspirate (h), as K'ung=Khung.

INTRODUCTION

       Table of Contents

      The strangest figure that meets us in the annals of Oriental thought is that of Confucius. To the popular mind he is the founder of a religion, and yet he has nothing in common with the great religious teachers of the East. We think of Siddartha, the founder of Buddhism, as the very impersonation of romantic asceticism, enthusiastic self-sacrifice, and faith in the things that are invisible. Zoroaster is the friend of God, talking face to face with the Almighty, and drinking wisdom and knowledge from the lips of Omniscience. Mohammed is represented as snatched up into heaven, where he receives the Divine communication which he is bidden to propagate with fire and sword throughout the world. These great teachers lived in an atmosphere of the supernatural. They spoke with the authority of inspired prophets. They brought the unseen world close to the minds of their disciples. They spoke positively of immortality, of reward or punishment beyond the grave. The present life they despised, the future was to them everything in its promised satisfaction. The teachings of Confucius were of a very different sort. Throughout his whole writings he has not even mentioned the name of God. He declined to discuss the question of immortality. When he was asked about spiritual beings, he remarked, "If we cannot even know men, how can we know spirits?"

      Yet this was the man the impress of whose teaching has formed the national character of five hundred millions of people. A temple to Confucius stands to this day in every town and village of China. His precepts are committed to memory by every child from the tenderest age, and each year at the royal university at Pekin the Emperor holds a festival in honor of the illustrious teacher.

      The influence of Confucius springs, first of all, from the narrowness and definiteness of his doctrine. He was no transcendentalist, and never meddled with supramundane things. His teaching was of the earth, earthy; it dealt entirely with the common relations of life, and the Golden Rule he must necessarily have stumbled upon, as the most obvious canon of his system. He strikes us as being the great Stoic of the East, for he believed that virtue was based on knowledge, knowledge of a man's own heart, and knowledge of human-kind. There is a pathetic resemblance between the accounts given of the death of Confucius and the death of Zeno. Both died almost without warning in dreary hopelessness, without the ministrations of either love or religion. This may be a mere coincidence, but the lives and teachings of both men must have led them to look with indifference upon such an end. For Confucius in his teaching treated only of man's life on earth, and seems to have had no ideas with regard to the human lot after death; if he had any ideas he preserved an inscrutable silence about them. As a moralist he prescribed the duties of the king and of the father, and advocated the cultivation by the individual man of that rest or apathy of mind which resembles so much the disposition aimed at by the Greek and Roman Stoic. Even as a moralist, he seems to have sacrificed the ideal to the practical, and his loose notions about marriage, his tolerance of concubinage, the slight emphasis which he lays on the virtue of veracity—of which indeed he does not seem himself to have been particularly studious in his historic writings—place him low down in the rank of moralists. Yet he taught what he felt the people could receive, and the flat mediocrity of his character and his teachings has been stamped forever upon a people who, while they are kindly, gentle, forbearing, and full of family piety, are palpably lacking not only in the exaltation of Mysticism, but in any religious feeling, generally so-called.

      The second reason that made the teaching of Confucius so influential is based on the circumstances of the time. When this thoughtful, earnest youth awoke to the consciousness of life about him, he saw that the abuses under which the people groaned sprang from the feudal system, which cut up the country into separate territories, over which the power of the king had no control. China was in the position of France in the years preceding Philippe-Auguste, excepting that there were no places of sanctuary and no Truce of God. The great doctrine of Confucius was the unlimited despotism of the Emperor, and his moral precepts were intended to teach the Emperor how to use his power aright. But the Emperor was only typical of all those in authority—the feudal duke,