r was ruled by a spirit who practically owned it; each
kind of flower had a fairy in heaven attending to its seasons and its welfare, and
there was a Queen of All Flowers whose birthday came on the twelfth day of the second
moon; every willow tree, pine tree, cypress, fox or turtle that reached a grand old
age, say over a few hundred years, acquired by that very fact immortality and became
a "genius".
With this animistic background, it is natural that man is also considered a
manifestation of the spirit. This spirit, like all life in the entire universe, is
produced by the union of the male, active, positive or yang principle, and the female,
passive, negative or yin principle which is really no more than a lucky, shrewd guess
at positive and negative electricity. When this spirit becomes incarnated in a human
body, it is called p'o ; when unattached to a body and floating about as spirit it
is called hwen . (A man of forceful personality or "spirits" is spoken of as having
a lot of p'oli, or p'oenergy.) After death, this hwen continues to wander about.
Normally it does not bother people, but if no one buries and offers sacrifices to
the deceased, the spirit becomes a "wandering ghost, " for which reason an All Souls'
Day is set apart on the fifteenth day of the seventh moon for a general sacrifice
to those drowned in water or dead and unburied in a strange land. Also, if the deceased
was murdered or died suffering a wrong, the sense of injustice in the ghost compels
it to hang about and cause trouble until the wrong is avenged and the spirit is
satisfied. Then all trouble is stopped.
While living, man, who is spirit taking shape in a body, necessarily has certain
passions, desires, and a flow of "vital energy, " or in more easily understood English,
just "nervous energy." In and for themselves, these are neither good nor bad, but
just something given and inseparable from the characteristically human life. All men
and women have passions, natural desires and noble ambitions, and also a conscience;
they have sex, hunger, fear, anger, and are subject to sickness, pain, suffering and
death. Culture consists in bringing about the expression of these passions and desires
in harmony. That is the Confucianist view, which believes that by living in harmony
with this human nature given us, we can become the equals of heaven and earth, as
quoted at the end of Chapter VI. The Buddhists, however, regard the mortal desires
of the flesh essentially as the medieval Christians did they are a nuisance to be
done away with. Men and women who are too intelligent, or inclined to think too much,
sometimes accept this view and become monks and nuns; but on the whole, Confucian
good sense forbids it. Then also, with a Taoistic touch, beautiful and talented girls
suffering a harsh fate are regarded as "fallen fairies, " punished for having mortal↓↓
thoughts or some neglect of duty in heaven and sent down to this earth to live through
a predestined fate of mortal sufferings.
Man's intellect is considered as a flow of energy. Literally this intellect is "spirit
of a genius" (chi ngshen ), the word "genius" being essentially taken in the sense
in which we speak of fox genii, rock genii and pine genii. The nearest English
equivalent is, as I have suggested, "vitality" or "nervous energy" which ebbs and
flows at different times of the day and of the person's life. Every man born into
this world starts out with certain passions and desires and this vital energy, which
run their course in different cycles through childhood, youth, maturity, old age and
death. Confucius said, "When young, beware of fighting; when strong, beware of sex;
and when old, beware of possession, " which simply means that a boy loves fighting,
a young man loves women, and an old man loves money.
Faced with this compound of physical, mental and moral assets, the Chinese takes an
attitude toward man himself, as toward all other problems, w