hich may be summed up
in the phrase: " Let us be reasonable. " This is an attitude of expecting neither
too much nor too little. Man is, as it were, sandwiched between heaven and earth,
between idealism and realism, between lofty thoughts and the baser passions. Being
so sandwiched is the very essence of humanity; it is human to have thirst for knowledge
and thirst for water, to love a good idea and a good dish of pork with bamboo shoots,
and to admire a beautiful saying and a beautiful woman. This being the case, our world
is necessarily an imperfect world. Of course there is a chance of taking human society
in hand and making it better, but the Chinese do not expect either perfect peace or
perfect happiness. There is a story illustrating this point of view. There was a man
who was in Hell and about to be re-incarnated, and he said to the King of Re-incarnation,
"If you want me to return to the earth as a human being,
I will go only on my own conditions." "And what are they ?" asked the King. The man
replied, "I must be born the son of a cabinet minister and father of a future 'Literary
Wrangler' (the scholar who comes out first at the national examinations). I must have
ten thousand acres of land surrounding my home and fish ponds and fruits of every
kind and a beautiful wife and pretty concubines, all good and loving to me, and rooms
stocked to the ceiling with gold and pearls and cellars stocked full of grain and
trunks chockful of money, and I myself must be a Grand Councilor or a Duke of the
First Rank and enjoy honor and prosperity and live until I am a hundred years old."
And the King of Re-incarnation replied, " If there was such a lot on earth, I would
go and be re-incarnated myself, and not give it to you! "
The reasonable attitude is, since we've got this human nature, let's start with it.
Besides, there is no escaping from it anyway. Passions and instincts are originally
good or originally bad, but there is not much use talking about them, is there? On
the other hand, there is the danger of our being enslaved by them. Just stay in the
middle of the road. This reasonable attitude creates such a forgiving kind of
philosophy that, at least to a cultured, broadminded scholar who lives according to
the spirit of reasonableness, any human error or misbehavior whatsoever, legal or
moral or political, which can be labeled as "common human nature" (more literally,
"man's normal passions"), is excusable. The Chinese go so far as to assume that Heaven
or God Himself is quite a reasonable being, that if you live reasonably, according
to your best lights, you have nothing to fear, that peace of conscience is the greatest
of all gifts, and that a man with a clear conscience need not be afraid even of ghosts.
With a reasonable God supervising the affairs of reasonable and some unreasonable
beings, everything is quite all right in this world. Tyrants die; traitors commit░░網░
suicide; the grasping fellow is seen selling his property; the sons of a powerful
and rich collector of curios (about whom tales are told of grasping greed or extortion
by power) are seen selling out the collection on which their father spent so much
thought and trouble, and these same curios are now being dispersed among other
families;
murderers are found out and dead and wronged women are avenged. Sometimes, but quite
seldom, an oppressed person cries out, "Heaven has no eyes! " (Justice is blind. )
Eventually, both in Taoism and in Confucianism, the conclusion and highest goal of
this philosophy is complete understanding of and harmony with nature, resulting in
what I may call "reasonable naturalism, " if we must have a term for classification.
A reasonable naturalist then settles down to this life with a sort of animal
satisfaction. As Chinese illiterate women put it, "Others gave birth to us and we
give birth to others. What else are we to do?"
There is a terrible philosophy in this saying, "Others gave birth