Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/150

 one. Perfect indifference to love and hate—the annihilation of all passions, desires, and even preferences—no striving, or wishing to strive—nothing but absolute apathy and profound insensibility to those things which, painful or pleasurable, tend to wear out the bodies and souls of men; such is the Taoist heaven. It is a return to the pure, original, self-existent nature of men, which has been despoiled and injured by contact with worldly matters. How infinitely higher, this, than the wretched superstitions which debased the self-tormentors of the Middle Ages! And there are a few of these Taoists yet to be found—men who are almost entirely uncontaminated by the follies and impostures of modern popular Taoism, and who may be said to represent the true apostolic succession in the Taoist Church. In certain instances some old worthies, who have been dead and gone for centuries, are believed by the simple mountaineers of China to be still alive. Far away in the mountain-range which stretches from Peking across the provinces of Chihli and Shantung there is one very sacred peak, called the Mount of a Hundred Flowers. It is covered with wild flowers, and its bosky dells are said, and with some truth, to be the lurking-place of wolves and panthers. There, according to the legend, live, partly embedded in the soil, certain ancient Taoist hermits. By a long course of absolute conformity with nature they have attained to immortality, and are now in the enjoyment of unearthly bliss. To use a Taoist phrase, their faces are washed by the rains of heaven, and their hair combed by the wind. Their arms are crossed upon their breasts, and their nails have grown so long that they curl round their necks. Flowers