Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/134

128 "Show me that they are."

"Did not Confucius say, in answer to Ke Lu's question about a future state, 'We do not know about life, and how, then, can we know about anything beyond the grave?' And if Confucius's intelligence stopped short with life, who can possibly hope to peer beyond it?"

"And are you really such a blind follower of the blind as that comes to? Has it never occurred to you to ask yourself whence you came and whither you are going? But I need not put the question to you, for if you had, you would never tremble so at the bare idea of stepping over the brink. To me, the knowledge that the executioner's sword will help me to return to the Great Mother of all things, from whence I came and to which, in common with all created things, I must return, is no unpleasing prospect. I have played my part on this stage. I have dreamed my earthly dream, with its fancies, its nightmares, and its moments of pleasurable excitement, and now I am ready and willing to pass into the loving arms of the 'Abyss Mother.' Here we Taouists have the advantage over you Confucianists. You strut about, talking loudly over the relations between man and man, parents and children, and sovereigns and ministers – all good things in their way – but you forget or close your eyes to the fact that existence does not end with what we call death. You limit your system to the short space of man's life upon earth, while we, overleaping all bounds of time, claim our right to immortality, and step with assurance into the grave."

"That is all very plausible," said Ts'èng, "but you have no evidence that there is any continuance of existence after death. No one has ever returned to life to give us his experiences, and your creed on this point must of necessity, therefore, be merely an assumption."

"Nay, it is more than that. Do we not see all around us that nothing in creation is ever absolutely destroyed? It suffers ceaseless changing, but always exists. Look at the wood on a fire: it ceases to be wood after the flames have consumed it, but it reappears as smoke and ashes. Look at the leaves which strew the ground in autumn: decay transforms their shapes, but they do but change into mould, which again enters into the life of plants and trees, – and so created things go on for ever."

"That is a kind of reasoning that I don't understand," replied Ts'èng. "If you can produce any positive evidence that there is a future existence, I will believe it; but I cannot accept a faith which is based on an analogy of burnt wood and decayed leaves. And so to call me to take comfort in the contemplation of a future state of happiness, is like telling a hungry man to satisfy his appetite by thinking of a feast, or a man shivering with cold to feel warm by imagining a roaring fire."

"So this is what it comes to; that Confucius serves as a guide through life when a man ought to be able to guide himself, and deserts you just at the moment when, in the face of death, you want some staff to support you, and some hand to lead you. But here comes the jailer, looking more like a demon than ever; he must have bad news for one of us."

At this moment the jailer entered with the list of those whose names had been marked with the vermilion pencil of the emperor for immediate execution, and turning to Lung, he told him, without any unnecessary verbiage, that