Pp/IH/01/11
CHINA
King Alfred the Great, writing about nine centuries after the birth of Xt, said in a letter to the bishop of Worcester that the great days of civilization were over and everything passing into a decline: men were not as learned as they had been in his youth, theyno longer made such beautiful things, and the whole world was threatened by barbarians attacking from the east. About a hundred years later, a bishop by the name of Wulfstan, was so appalled at the state of England that he preached an excellent sermon, still studied by all those at Oxford who want a degree in English, announcing that the world was going to end in the year 1000 – that is about a few hundred years before xxx medieval civilization began to get into its stride. As a matter of fact he had been reading a Welsh author – who fortunately wrote in Latin so that he cd be understood – who said the same things about five hundred years before. In the reign of King Stephen – some of you can tell me perhaps when that was – a monk writing the English chronicle announced that things were so bad that there just wasn’t any hope for life to continue. I could go on with this catalogue for a very long time – but now I just want to add the more recent details. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when everything was much safer than the bank of England and the course of life as regular and even as the revolutions of the more well-behaved stars, a distinguished statesman declared that Britain was done for: in a few years everything wd be swallowed in an unparalleled disaster. Three years before I was born a war broke out that was going to bring civilization to an end; when I was 22 there was another, and xon September 3rd 1939 I sat with a number of other people, all nursing gas-masks and waiting really expecting to disappear in heat and smoke any moment. After an hour or so of this, I went out and found the evening very beautiful a night of clear stars in whose light the sea moved strongly and calmly, as it had done on many evenings before. Now, the universe – we gather – may go up tomorrow in a high temperature mushroom of atomic heat.
I don’t as a matter of fact view these things as calmly and gaily as this, but
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the fact that it is China that may press the detonator, and that now we are arming Japan to fight China instead of arming China to fight Japan – which we were doing some time ago – brought China once more into my mind – the Chin of the philosopher Chuang-tzu and the poet Po Chu-I, peculiar names and peculiar people, to whom I owe very much. And, as usual, my mind was eased, and I was able to write that first paragraph.
I wonder what you think of when China is mentioned. Possibly a Chinese is something horrific, a sinister figure who appears out of the wall with an ingratiating smile and a complex instrument of torture; possibly, if you read those able and misleading books and articles written to explain to civilised European children what kind of a world you live in, China – like India – suggest a backward country, that is one in which people plough with wooden shares instead of tractor-driven machines, sit at home and write poetry instead of going to the cinema, and don’t enjoy the advantages of modern sanitation. Now in some ways these pictures are right. Nothing in Chinese poetry and art wd reconcile me to being slowly heated in oil; and I would rather have a good drainage system. It is just a plain fact that thousands in China & India live and have always lived in misery and at times appalling cruelty – and this must never be forgotten: it accounts for the spread of Communism, which offers something we in the western world did not thoroughly offer to the east - a real equality in material good living. But I want to say one or two things about another side, which we in our pride are apt to forget.
Some time ago some member of staff found a progressive time-chart, in which lines went all over the place in nearly every known colour, s that the total effect looked like the result of an intelligent child of five having been given a large piece of paper, a ruler, and a shopful of crayons. This time-chart summarised the history of the world. We – that is England or for that matter Europe – appeared somewhere near the end, a final squiggle done when the child was rather tired; China began –a broad yellow line x- at the beginning; and that line was still there at the end.
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The history of China –apart from legends, some of which can’t be true – the real history,with facts and data and all that, begins about 2-300 B.C. It goes on steadily from then till now, and is still going on. There is a tradition of Chinese art that began about 1700 B.C.; it’s still with us. Poems written about 1000 B.C. – like one of those I read earlier on – are Chinese in the same way and with the same technique as those written now. Civilizatn, which began there so long ago, is still there – and this isn’t because it hasn’t been threatened. In the years between 2000 BC and now, China has been desolated, conquered, ruled savagely by ruthless and terrible men, so that the things which have threatened our very young civilization must seem to some Chinese mere fleabites. Foreign domination has lasted at times about a thousand years – but China has simply gone on being China, and eventually the conquerors themselves have simply become Chinese. Because wherever a humble potter made pots, wherever a wise man mused about life in a dirty hut, lonely and far from friends, wherever a poet, possibly condemned to live in a filthy village a thousand miles from the centre of life and civilization, wrote his charming words – real China lived on. Real thinking, real living, real art, do not depend on there being museums and lectures, copies of the Listener and the New Statesman, schools and universities. If what we call our civilization were blown up tomorrow, our real civilization cd live on – with men who had to wake up every morning and go out and catch a rabbit for their breakfast. It doesn’t depend on drainage, modern organisation, and the intricate workings of material life; xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx It doesn’t depend on democracy and having parliamentary govt; it doesn’t depend on there being justice and fairness; all these things – which of course I wd much rather have than not – can be swept away, and real civilization still go on. That is the lesson of China; that it is now communist doesn’t deter me at all: in four thousand years it will still be there, and will still be China. The more it changes,
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the more characteristic it is; for those who know French, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Possibly you don’t think so. Yet, a few months ago the Communist leader Mao tse-tung, expected to make a pronouncement on politics and philosophy, did so in poetry that might have been written in classical China 1500 AD. Some time ago a Chinese delegation in England asked a committee of English treasury officials – high-grade civil servants – for a loan of money; the reply was that no money cd be lent yet; later, in about three of four months’ time, the matter might be given sympathetic consideration. The leader of the Chinese party spoke then as he might have spoken at any time since 300 BC: the philosopher Chuang-tzu, finding himself out of rice (he lived by the way in a small hut on rice and water) asked the emperor for a gift. The emperor replied that he had no rice at the moment, but if Chuang-tzu would wait a few months he wd be given the position of court poet with a very largg salary. ‘Your majesty’ said Chuang ‘ as I was on my way here through the forest, I heard avoice crying water, water. I turned and saw no one, but as I heard the voice again, I went back, and there in the path I saw a small gudgeon, that had been dropped by a fisherman and needed water to live. Water, it cried. Wait, Isaid, Iam on my way to the emperor, and I will arrange xx for him to divert the great river, so that it flows your way, and it will take you in its course and you will live. I pray you, said the gudgeon, give me some water. The emperor may divert the great river to flow my way, but I may be dead by then. Give me water now, even a basinful, that I may live.” It is recorded that the leader of the English committee said that he failed to see the point of this story. Possibly, now that the Communists govern China, he has seen it. They have found water, even a basinful, that they may live.
Now I could probably go on talking about China, showing you Chinese things and reading Chinese poems, from now till next Sunday; but though I might enjoy it, you wouldn’t. xx I haven’t time to describe to you, even in the briefest précis possible, the nature of Chinese civilization. There are four thousand years of it. I want to say one or two things that you probably won’t find in books.
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Chinese religion is a peculiar thing. A good many Chinese are Buddhists, some followers of Confucius, and some of Lao-tse who founded the religion known as Tao, or the Way. Now some are Xtns and a good many Communists, and how far this will affect things remains to be seen: the Xtns and the communists get on quite well together, by the way. The variety of these religions doesn’t really matter: the Chinese outlook was a combnation of all three. Buddhism, which came from India, brought something mystical and spiritual to an otherwise very realistic and practical people; Confucius, who was not by the way what we shd call religious at all, taught the Chinese to be tolerant, friendly, and courteous - produced that balanced wise and understanding outlook that is so characteristic. Lao-tse, who probably founded a religion against his will, taught men to be happy, even at the expense of being xwhat school authorities would call quite irresponsible. There thus grew up that attitude which survived oppression after oppression torture after torture, disaster after disaster – the belief that life was living musing about the things that happened in it, making beautiful things, and enjoying an evening with one’s friends. Friendship counts for possibly more in China than anywhere else.
Now we are given to thinking that unless we have a hand in government, and can tell the authorities what regulations we like and xxxx how we want the taxes spent, we aren’t free to be happy. The Chinese have not until recently thought any such thing, but for four thousand years they have insisted on a right, and had one ability, that not poverty or disgrace, not tyranny or physical discomfort havebeen able to take away from them – the right and the ability xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx of a man to be happy in his own way, no matter what governments may do or think. And this has coloured their attitude to most things in life, and given them, in spite of their superb art and poetry, a practical and realist attitude to life. It has accounted for their lack of scientific knowledge.
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Their interest in animals is not biological; their first question is whether they are good to eat or not. They have not bothered about physical science, being more interested in how to enjoy the world than to know how it works. When they discovered gunpowder, which they did a long time before the western world, the only use they found for it was the very sane one, and the best one – that of making fireworks. ‘Here is the world,’ they say. ‘It has these advantages, these beautiful things, these delightful sensations. It has also many drawbacks|: people are roasted alive, and the government may decide to kill us all tomorrow. But though we must be mournful about the inevitable sorrows – death, pain, and the fact that my wife has gone off with somebody else – let us be friends, be kind, and see how we can best enjoy it. ‘This is the attitude that has survived the calamities; there have been nobler attitudes, and higher aspirations; the achievements of the western world have come to us for our great advantage out of ideas much greater and more unselfish. But there is wisdom in it, and there is a generosity and an unselfishness springing out of its very selfishness.
When you look for these things in Chinese art and literature, and especially now in Chinese life, you may not find them. The writings of Confucius are very long-winded, and the wisdom occurs about every hundredth page, hidden in detailed descriptions of the obvious. The ancient Chinese had so much time that they took four hours to get to the point. Chinese poetry seems at first just dull – but it xxxxx seems so because it calls attention to the beauty and charm of things and emotions we in our hurry scorn; later it xxxxxxx shows us what a lot of things there are to enjoy in life that we never noticed before. The whole thing is so cultured, so involved & yet so simple. But that makes it all the more necessary to approach it with that desire to understand and that politness which is a characteristic of it. It is so well-mannered; and the Chinese realised a long time ago what we have yet to realise, that good manners, even among poor philosophers living on rice and water in huts, are a very important part of civilisation.
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And now I must stop, just having given a brief introduction to what I was supposed to be talking about. But though I’m glad to be English rather than Chinese, and though I know that Communism means some awful things in China at the moment, I wanted to say this - because it may lead some of one day to find Chuang-tzu and the poet Po Chu-i; because it gives some comfort to those who feel that all of value in the world may suddenly pass away – it won’t; and because we may soon hear a lot about China, and it’s advisable to know that Chinese xxxxxxx thought xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx about life and how it should be lived was a very old man when our great-grandfathers were sucking dummies, and we cannot treat it as though it were an uneducated baby. By doing this for about 200 years we have created the attitude we now face in a people naturally understanding and accommodating, if treated politely.