A Lute of Jade | Page 8

angels. The teaching of the Semitic religions, "Do good to others that
you may benefit at their hands," does not occur in their pages, nor any
hints of sensuous delights hereafter.* In all the great Buddhist poems,

of which the Shu Hsing Tsan Ching is the best example,
there is the
same deep sadness, the haunting sorrow of doom. To look on beautiful
things is only to feel more poignantly the passing of bright days, and
the time when the petals must leave the rose. The form of desire hides
within it the seeds of decay. In this epic of which I have spoken,
Buddha sees the lovely and virtuous Lady Aruna coming to greet him,
says to his disciples:
--
* This is a simplistic and inaccurate picture of religious teachings.
Mr. Cranmer-Byng, like many cross-cultural scholars,
seems to have
fallen into the trap of seeing only noble things afar, and only ignoble
things at hand. As counter-examples, there are numerous schools of
Buddhism, some of which DO offer a type of heaven; and the
Confucian ideal of reciprocity can easily be, and often has been,
misinterpreted in the same way as Semitic religions. -- A. Light, 1995.
--
"This woman is indeed exceedingly beautiful, able to fascinate the
minds of the religious; so then keep your recollections straight! Let
wisdom keep your mind in subjection! Better fall into the fierce tiger's
mouth, or under the sharp knife of the executioner, than to dwell with a
woman. . . . A woman is anxious to exhibit her form and shape,
whether walking, standing, sitting, or even sleeping; even when
represented as a picture, she desires most of all to set off the
blandishments of her beauty, and thus rob men of their steadfast heart!
How then ought you to guard yourselves? By regarding her tears and
her smiles as enemies, her stooping form, her hanging arms, and all her
disentangled hair as toils designed to entrap man's heart. Then how
much more should you suspect her studied, amorous beauty! when she
displays her dainty outline, her richly ornamented form, and chatters
gaily with the foolish man! Ah, then! what perturbation and what evil
thoughts, not seeing underneath the sorrows of impermanence, the
impurity, the unreality! Considering these as the reality, all desires die
out."*
--
* `Sacred Books of the East', vol. 19 pp. 253-4.
--

How different is this meeting of beauty and Buddhism from the
meeting of Ssu-K`ung T`u, the great Taoist poet, with an unknown girl!
Gathering the water-plants
From the wild luxuriance of spring,

Away in the depth of a wild valley
Anon, I see a lovely girl.
With
green leaves the peach-trees are loaded,
The breeze blows gently
along the stream,
Willows shade the winding path,
Darting orioles
collect in groups.
Eagerly I press forward
As the reality grows upon
me. . . .
'Tis the eternal theme,
Which, though old, is ever new.*
Here is reality emerging from the unreal, spring renewing, love and
beauty triumphant over death and decay. The girl is the central type and
symbol. From her laughing eyes a thousand dead women look out once
more on spring, through her poets find their inspiration. Beauty is the
key that unlocks the secrets of the frozen world, and brings the dead to
life again.
--
* `History of Chinese Literature', by Professor Herbert Giles, p.
180. --
The Symbol of Decay!
The Symbol of Immortality!
It is perhaps both. There are times when the grave words of the
Dhammapada fall like shadows along the path: "What is life but the
flower or the fruit which falls when ripe, yet ever fears the untimely
frost? Once born, there is naught but sorrow; for who is there can
escape death? From the first moment of life, the result of passionate
love and desire, there is nought but the bodily form transitional as the
lightning flash." Yet apart from all transitory passions and the
ephemeral results of mortal love, the song of the Taoist lover soars
unstained, untrammelled. Man attains not by himself, nor woman by
herself, but,
like the one-winged birds of the Chinese legend, they
must rise together. To be a great lover is to be a great mystic, since in
the highest conception of mortal beauty that the mind can form there
lies always the unattainable, the unpossessed, suggesting the world of

beauty and finality beyond our mortal reach. It is in this power of
suggestion that the Chinese poets excel. Asked to differentiate between
European and Chinese poetry, some critics would perhaps insist upon
their particular colour sense, instancing the curious fact
that where we
see blue to them it often appears green, and vice versa, or the tone
theories that make their poems so difficult to understand; in fact, a
learned treatise would be written on these lines, to prove that the
Chinese poets were not human beings as we