Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/136

 and death, and a regard for self in preference to the case of others. Thus Mencius"—his unsparing enemy — "rightly characterises his philosophy as that of Selfishness." The following illustrations of his theory are exceedingly curious and interesting:—

A Chinese Ecclesiastes.

Yang Chu said, "A man who lives to be a hundred has a great allowance of years. There is not one in a thousand who attains to it. . . . Yet what, after all, is a man's life worth to him? What true joy does it afford? Well, he may get elegance and comfort—enjoy beautiful sounds and sights. Yet comfort and elegance cannot suffice him for ever; beautiful sounds and sights cannot be enjoyed indefinitely. Over and above this, there are punishments to deter and rewards to stimulate; and there are various methods of acquiring fame to guide one's policy of action. Thus men get into a constant fluster of work, bustling about in their little hour to acquire empty praise, that they may secure posthumous glory; . . . so that, of course, they lose all the real pleasure there may be in life. For not one hour can they be at ease; for, hemmed up in a sort of prisoner's cage, bound and manacled hand and foot, how can it be otherwise with them? The sages of old knew that birth was just a Coming for a little while, and that death was just a Going; wherefore they followed the promptings of their own natures, and did no violence to their natural bent; never rejecting whatever delights there were to be had in life, never acting with a view to fame, but just following their own spontaneous inclinations," &c.

Now, this is not only a caricature of pure Taoism, but a gross libel on the sages of antiquity; for we shall soon see, in such a story, for instance, as The Virtuous Profligates, what Yang Chu meant by "doing no violence to their natural inclinations." Even the irreproachable