Asian Current

Let us begin with an examination of the Chinese mental make-up which produced this philosophy of living: great realism, inadequate idealism, a high sense of humor, and a high poetic sensitivity to life and nature.

Mankind seems to be divided into idealists and realists, and idealism and realism are the two great forces molding human progress. The clay of humanity is made soft and pliable by the water of idealism, but the stuff that holds it together is after all the clay itself, or we might all evaporate into Ariels. The forces of idealism and realism tug at each other in all human activities, personal, social and national, and real progress is made possible by the proper mixture of these two ingredients, so that the clay is kept in the ideal pliable, plastic condition, half moist and half dry, not hardened and unmanageable, nor dissolving into mud. The soundest nations, like the English, have realism and idealism mixed in proper proportions, like the clay which neither hardens and so gets past the stage for the artist’s molding, nor is so wishy-washy that it cannot retain its form. Some countries are thrown into perpetual revolutions because into their clay has been injected some liquid of foreign ideals which is not yet properly assimilated, and the clay is therefore not able to keep its shape.

A vague, uncritical idealism always lends itself to ridicule and too much of it might be a danger to mankind, leading it round in a futile wild-goose chase for imaginary ideals. If there were too many of these visionary idealists in any society or people, revolutions would be the order of the day. Human society would be like an idealistic couple forever getting tired of one place and changing their residence regularly once every three months, for the simple reason that no one place is ideal and the place where one is not seems always better because one is not there. Very fortunately, man is also gifted with a sense of humor, whose function, as I conceive it, is to exercise criticism of man’s dreams, and bring them in touch with the world of reality. It is important that man dreams, but it is perhaps equally important that he can laugh at his own dreams. That is a great gift, and the Chinese have plenty of it.

The sense of humor, which I shall discuss at more length in a later chapter, seems to be very closely related to the sense of reality, or realism. If the joker is often cruel in disillusioning the idealist, he nevertheless performs a very important function right there by not letting the idealist bump his head against the stone wall of reality and receive a ruder shock. He also gently eases the tension of the hot-headed enthusiast and makes him live longer. By preparing him for disillusion, there is probably less pain in the final impact, for a humorist is always like a man charged with the duty of breaking a sad news gently to a dying patient. Sometimes the gentle warning from a humorist saves the dying patient’s life. If idealism and disillusion must necessarily go together in this world, we must say that life is cruel, rather than the joker who reminds us of life’s cruelty.

I have often thought of formulas by which the mechanism of human progress and historical change can be expressed. They seem to be as follows:

Reality - Dreams = Animal Being

Reality + Dreams = A Heart-Ache (usually called Idealism) Reality + Humor = Realism (also called Conservatism) Dreams - Humor = Fanaticism

Dreams + Humor = Fantasy

Reality + Dreams + Humor = Wisdom

So then, wisdom, or the highest type of thinking, consists in toning down our dreams or idealism with a good sense of humor, supported by reality itself.

As pure ventures in pseudo-scientific formulations, we may proceed to analyze national characters in the following manner. I say “pseudo-scientific” because I distrust all dead and mechanical formulas for expressing anything connected with human affairs or human personalities. Putting human affairs in exact formulas shows in itself a lack of the sense of humor and therefore a lack of wisdom. I do not mean that these things are not being done: they are.

That is why we get so much pseudo-science today. When a psychologist can measure a man’s I.Q. or P.Q.,~ it is a pretty poor world, and specialists have risen to usurp humanized scholarship. But if we recognize that these formulas are no more than handy, graphic ways of expressing certain opinions, and so long as we don’t drag in the sacred name of science to help advertise our goods, no harm is done. The following are my formulas for the characters of certain nations, entirely personal and completely incapable of proof or verification. Anyone is free to dispute them and change them or add his own, if he does not claim that he can prove his private opinions by a mass of statistical facts and figures. Let “R” stand for a sense of reality (or realism), “D” for dreams (or idealism), “H” for a sense of humor, and-adding one important ingredient-”S” for sensitivity.” And further let “4″ stand for “abnormally high,” “3″ stand for “high,” “2″ for “fair,” and “I” for “low,” and we have the following pseudo-chemical formulas for the following national characters. Human beings and communities behave then differently according to their different compositions, as sulphates and sulphides or carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide behave differently from one another. For me, the interesting thing always is to watch how human communities or nations behave differently under identical conditions. As we cannot invent words like “humoride” and “humorate” after the fashion of chemistry, we may put it thus: “3 grains of Realism, 2 grains of Dreams, 2 grains of Humor and I grain of Sensitivity make an Englishman.” a R3D2H2S = The English R2D3H3Sa = The French R3D3H2S2 = The Americans R3D4H1S2 = The Germans

1. 1. I am not objecting to the limited utility of intelligence tests, but to their claims to mathematical accuracy or constant dependability as measures of human personality.
2. In the sense of the French word sensibilite.

Some might with good reason suggest the including of an “L” standing for logic or the rational faculty, as an important element in shaping human progress. This “L” will then often function or weigh against sensitivity, a direct perception of things. Such a formula might be attempted. For me personally, the role of the rational faculty it a human affairs is rather low.

A Pseudo-Scientific Formula

R2D4H1S1 = The Russians

R2DgH1S1 = The Japanese

R4D1HgS3 = The Chinese

I do not know the Italians, the Spanish, the Hindus and others well enough even to essay a formula on the subject, realizing that the above are shaky enough as they are, and in any case are enough to bring down a storm of criticism upon my head. Probably these formulas are more provocative than authoritative. I promise to modify them gradually for my own use as new facts are brought to my knowledge, or new impressions are formed. That is all they are worth today-a record of the progress of my knowledge and the gaps of my ignorance.

Some observations may be necessary. It is easy to see that I regard the Chinese as most closely allied to the French in their sense of humor and sensitivity, as is quite evident from the way the French write their books and eat their food, while the more volatile character of the French comes from their greater idealism, which takes the form of love of abstract ideas (recall the manifestoes of their literary, artistic and political movements). “R4″ for Chinese realism makes the Chinese the most realistic people; “D1″ accounts for something of a drag in the changes in their pattern or ideal of life. The high figures for Chinese humor and sensitivity, as well as for their realism, are perhaps due to my too close association and the vividness of my impressions. For Chinese sensitivity, little justification is needed; the whole story of Chinese prose, poetry and painting proclaims it… The Japanese and Germans are very much alike in their comparative lack of humor (such is the general impression of people), yet it is really impossible to give a “zero” for anyone characteristic in anyone nation, not even for idealism in the Chinese people. It is all a question of degree; such statements as a complete lack of this or that quality are not based on an intimate knowledge of the peoples. For this reason, I give the Japanese and the Germans “H,,” instead of “H;,” and I intuitively feel that I am right. But I do believe that the Japanese and the Germans suffer politically at present, and have suffered in the past, for lacking a better sense of humor. How a Prussian Geheimrat loves to be called a Geheimrat, and how he loves his buttons and metal pins! A certain belief in “logical necessity” (often “holy” or “sacred”), a tendency to fly too straight at a goal instead of circling around it, often carries one too far. It is not so much what you believe in that matters, as the way in which you believe it and proceed to translate that belief into action. By “D3″ for the Japanese I am referring to their fanatic loyalty to their emperor and to the state, made possible by a low mixture of humor. For idealism must stand for different things in different countries, as the so-called sense of humor really comprises a very wide variety of things…

There is an interesting tug between idealism and realism in America, both given high figures, and that produces the energy characteristic of the Americans. What American idealism is, I had better leave it to the Americans to find out; but they are always enthusiastic about something or other. A great deal of this idealism is noble, in the sense that the Americans are easily appealed to by noble ideals or noble words; but some of it is mere gullibility. The American sense of humor again means a different thing from the Continental sense of humor, but really I think that, such as it is (the love of fun and an innate, broad common sense), it is the greatest asset of the American nation. In the coming years of critical change, they will have great need of that broad common sense referred to by James Bryce, which I hope will tide them over these critical times. I give American sensitivity a low figure because of my impression that they can stand so many things. There is no use quarreling about this, because we will be quarreling about words …. The English seem to be on the whole the soundest race: contrast their “R3D2″ with the French “R2D3.” I am all for “R3D2.” It bespeaks stability. The ideal formula for me would seem to be R3D2H3S2, for too much idealism or too much sensitivity is not a good thing, either. And if I give “S1″ for English sensitivity, and if that is too low, who is to blame for it except the English themselves? How can I tell whether the English ever feel anything-joy, happiness, anger, satisfaction-when they are determined to look so glum on all occasions?

We might apply the same formula to writers and poets. To take a few well-known types:

Shakespeare’<> R4D4HaS4

Heine = RaDaH4Sa

Shelley = R1D4H1S4

Poe = RaD4H1S4

Li Po = R1DaH2S4

Tu Fu = R3DaH2S4

Su Tungp’o = RaD2H4Sa

These are no more than a few impromptu suggestions. But it is clear that all poets have a high sensitivity, or they wouldn’t be poets at all. Poe, I feel, is a very sound genius, in spite of his weird, imaginative gift. Doesn’t he love “ratiocination”?

So my formula for the Chinese national mind is:

R4D1HsSs

There we start with an “Sa,” standing for high sensitivity, which guarantees a proper artistic approach to life and answers for the Chinese affirmation that this earthly life is beautiful and the consequent intense love of this life. But it signifies more than that; actually it stands for the artistic approach even to philosophy. It accounts for the fact that the Chinese philosopher’s view of life is essentially the poet’s view of life, and that, in China, philosophy is married to poetry rather than to science as it is in the West. It will become amply clear from what follows that this high sensitivity to the pleasures and pains and flux and change of the colors of life is the very basis that makes a light philosophy possible. Man’s sense of the tragedy of life comes from his sensitive perception of the tragedy of a departing spring, and a delicate tenderness toward life comes from a tenderness toward the withered blossoms that bloomed yesterday. First the sadness and sense of defeat, then the awakening and the laughter of the old rogue-philosopher.

I have hesitated a long time between giving Shakespeare “S.• and “S3″. Finally his “Sonnets” decided it. No school teacher has experienced greater fear and trembling in grading a pupil than I in trying to grade Shakespeare.

On the other hand, we have “R4″ standing for intense realism, which means an attitude of accepting life as it is and of regarding a bird in the hand as better than two in the bush. This realism, therefore, both reinforces and supplements the artist’s affirmation that this life is transiently beautiful, and it all but saves the artist and poet from escaping from life altogether. The Dreamer says “Life is but a dream,” and the Realist replies, “Quite correct. A..”1d let us live this dream as beautifully as we can.” But the realism of one awakened is the poet’s realism and not that of the business man, and the laughter of the old rogue is no longer the laughter of the young go-getter singing his way to success with his head up and his chin out, but that of an old man running his finger through his flowing beard, and speaking in a soothingly low voice. Such a dreamer loves peace, for no one can fight hard for a dream. He will be more intent to live reasonably and well with his fellow dreamers. Thus is the high tension of life lowered.

But the chief function of this sense of realism is the elimination of all non-essentials in the philosophy of life, holding life down by the neck, as it were, for fear that the wings of imagination may carry it away to an imaginary and possibly beautiful, but unreal, world. And after all, the wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials, in reducing the problems of philosophy to just a few-the enjoyment of the home (the relationship between man and woman and child), of living, of Nature and of culture-and in showing all the other irrelevant scientific disciplines and futile chases after knowledge to the door. The problems of life for the Chinese philosopher then become amazingly few and simple. It means also an impatience with metaphysics and with the pursuit of knowledge that does not lead to any practical bearing on life itself. And it also means that every human activity, whether the acquiring of knowledge or the acquiring of things, has to be submitted immediately to the test of life itself and of its subserviency to the end of living. Again, and here is a significant result, the end of living is not some metaphysical entity-but just living itself.

Gifted with this realism, and with a profound distrust of logic and of the intellect itself, philosophy for the Chinese becomes a matter of direct and intimate feeling of life itself, and refuses to be encased in any system. For there is a robust sense of reality, a sheer animal sense, a spirit of reasonableness which crushes reason itself and makes the rise of any hard and fast philosophic system impossible. There are the three religions of China, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism, all magnificent systems in themselves, and yet robust common sense dilutes them all and reduces them all into the common problem of the pursuit of a happy human life. The mature Chinese is always a person who refuses to think too hard or to believe in any single idea or faith or school of philosophy whole-heartedly. When a friend of Confucius told him that he always thought three times before he acted, Confucius wittily replied, “To think twice is quite enough.” A follower of a school of philosophy is but a student of philosophy, but a man is a student, or perhaps a master, of life.

The final product of this culture and philosophy is this: in China, as compared with the West, man lives a life closer to nature and closer to childhood, a life in which the instincts and the emotions are given free play and emphasized against the life of the intellect, with a strange combination of devotion to the flesh and arrogance of the spirit, of profound wisdom and foolish gaiety, of high sophistication and childish naivete. I would say, therefore, that this philosophy is characterized by: first, a gift for seeing life whole in art; secondly, a conscious return to simplicity in philosophy; and thirdly, an ideal of reasonableness in living. The end product is, strange to say, a worship of the poet, the peasant and the vagabond.

There are several views of mankind, the traditional Christian theological view, the Greek pagan view, and the Chinese TaoistConfucianist view. (I do not include the Buddhist view because it is too sad.) Deeper down in their allegorical sense, these views after all do not differ so much from one another, especially when the modern man with better biological and anthropological knowledge gives them a broader interpretation. But these differences in their original forms exist.

The traditional, orthodox Christian view was that man was created perfect, innocent, foolish and happy, living naked in the Garden of Eden. Then came knowledge and wisdom and the Fall of Man, to which the sufferings of man are due, notably (I) work by the sweat of one’s brow for man, and (2) the pangs of labor for women. In contrast with man’s original innocence and perfection, a new element was introduced to explain his present imperfection, and that is of course the Devil, working chiefly through the body, while his higher nature works through the soul. When the “soul” was invented in the history of Christian theology I am not aware, but this “soul” became a something rather than a function, an entity rather than a condition, and it sharply separated man from the animals, which have no souls worth saving. Here the logic halts, for the origin of the Devil had to be explained, and when the medieval theologians proceeded with their usual scholastic logic to deal with the problem, they got into a quandary. They could not have very well admitted that the Devil, who was NotGod, came from God himself, nor could they quite agree that in the original universe, the Devil, a Not-God, was co-eternal with God. So in desperation they agreed that the Devil must have been a fallen angel, which rather begs the question of the origin of evil (for there still must have been another Devil to tempt this fallen angel), and which is therefore unsatisfactory, but they had to leave it at that. Nevertheless from all this followed the curious dichotomy of the spirit and the flesh, a mythical conception which is still quite prevalent and powerful today in affecting our philosophy of life and happiness.’

Then came the Redemption, still borrowing from the current conception of the sacrificial lamb, which went still farther back to the idea of a God Who desired the smell of roast meat and could not forgive for nothing. From this Redemption, at one stroke a means was found by which all sins could be forgiven, and a way was found for perfection again. The most curious aspect of Christian thought is the idea of perfection. As this happened during the decay of the ancient worlds, a tendency grew up to emphasize the afterlife, and the question of salvation supplanted the question of happiness or simple living itself. The notion was how to get away from this world alive, a world which was apparently sinking into corruption and chaos and doomed. Hence the overwhelming importance attached to immortality. This represents a contradiction of the original Genesis story that God did not want man to live forever. The Genesis story of the reason why Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden was not that they had tasted of the Tree of Knowledge, as is popularly conceived, but the fear lest they should disobey a second time and eat of the Tree of Life and live forever:

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.

It is a happy fact that with the progress of modern thought, the Devil is the first to be thrown overboard. I believe that of a hundred liberal Christians today who still believe in God in some form or other, not more than five believe in a real Devil, except in a figurative sense. Also the belief in a real Hell is disappearing before the belief in a real Heaven.

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

The Tree of Knowledge seemed to be somewhere in the center of the garden, but the Tree of Life was near the eastern entrance, where for all we know, cherubims are still stationed to guard the approach by men.

All in all, there is still a belief in total depravity, that enjoyment of this life is sin and wickedness, that to be uncomfortable is to be virtuous, and that on the whole man cannot save himself except by a greater power outside. The doctrine of sin is still the basic assumption of Christianity as generally practiced today, and Christian missionaries trying to make converts generally start out by impressing upon the party to be converted a consciousness of sin and of the wickedness of human nature (which is, of course, the sine qua non for the need of the ready-made remedy which the missionary has up his sleeve). All in all, you can’t make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner. Some one has said rather cruelly, “Religion in our country has so narrowed down to the contemplation of sin that a respectable man does not any longer dare to show his face in the church.”

The Greek pagan world was a different world by itself and therefore their conception of man was also quite different. What strikes me most is that the Greeks made their gods like men, while the Christians desired to make men like the gods. That Olympian company is certainly a jovial, amorous, loving, lying, quarreling and vow-breaking, petulant lot; hunt-loving, chariot-riding and javelin-throwing like the Greeks themselves-a marrying lot, too, and having unbelievably many illegitimate children. So far as the difference between gods and men is concerned, the gods merely had divine powers of hurling thunderbolts in heaven and raising vegetation on earth, were immortal, and drank nectar instead of wine-the fruits were pretty much the same. One feels one can be intimate with this crowd, can go hunting with a knapsack on one’s back with Apollo or Athene, or stop Mercury on the way and chat with him as with a Western Union messenger boy, and if the conversation gets too interesting, we can imagine Mercury saying, “Yeah. Okay. Sorry, but I’ll have to run along and deliver this message at 72nd Street.” The Greek men were not divine, but the Greek gods were human. How different from the perfect Christian God! And so the gods were merely another race of men, a race of giants, gifted with immortality, while men on earth were not. Out of this background came some of the most inexpressibly beautiful stories of Demeter and Proserpina and Orpheus. The belief in the gods was taken for granted, for even Socrates, when he was about to drink hemlock, proposed a libation to the gods to speed him on his journey from this world to the next. This was very much like the attitude of Confucius. It was necessarily so in that period; what attitude toward man and God the Greek spirit would take in the modern world there is unfortunately no chance of knowing. The Greek pagan world was not modern, and the modern Christian world is not Greek. That’s the pity of it.

On the whole, it was accepted by the Greeks that man’s was a mortal lot, subject sometimes to a cruel Fate. That once accepted, man was quite happy as he was, for the Greeks loved this life and this universe, and were interested in understanding the good, the true and the beautiful in life, besides being fully occupied in scientifically understanding the physical world. There was no mythical “Golden Period” in the sense of the Garden of Eden, and no allegory of the Fall of Man; the Hellenes themselves were but human creatures transformed from pebbles picked up and thrown over their shoulders by Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha, as they were coming down to the plain after the Great Flood. Diseases and cares were explained comically; they came through the uncontrollable desire of a young woman to open and see a box of jewels-Pandora’s Box. The Greek fancy was beautiful. They took human nature largely as it was: the Christians might say they were “resigned” to the mortal lot. But it was so beautiful to be mortal: there was free room for the exercise of understanding and the free, speculative spirit. Some of the Sophists thought man’s nature good, and some thought man’s nature bad, but there wasn’t the sharp contradiction of Hobbes and Rousseau. Finally, in Plato, man was seen to be a compound of desires, emotions, and thought, and ideal human life was the living together in harmony of these three parts of his being under the guidance of wisdom or true understanding. Plato thought “ideas” were immortal, but individual souls were either base or noble, according as they loved justice, learning, temperance and beauty or not. The soul also acquired an independent and immortal existence in Socrates; as we are told in “Phaedo,” “When the soul exists in herself, and is released from the body, and the body is released from the soul, what is this but death?” Evidently the belief in immortality of the human soul is something which the Christian, Greek, Taoist and Confucianist views have in common. Of course this is nothing to be jumped at by modern believers in the immortality of the soul. Socrates’ belief in immortality would probably mean nothing to a modern man, because many of his premises in support of it, like re-incarnation, cannot be accepted by the modern man.

The Chinese view of man also arrived at the idea that man is the Lord of the Creation (”Spirit of the Ten Thousand Things”), and in the Confucianist view, man ranks as the equal of heaven and earth in the “Trio of Geniuses.” The background was animistic: everything was alive or inhabited by a spirit-mountains, rivers, and everything that reached a grand old age. The winds and thunder were spirits themselves; each of the great mountains and each river 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” (chingshen), 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, which 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 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 to us and we give birth to others.” Life becomes a biological procession and the very question of immortality is sidetracked. For that is the exact feeling of a Chinese grandfather holding his grandchild by the hand and going to the shops to buy some candy, with the thought that in five or ten years he will be returning to his grave or to his ancestors. The best that we can hope for in this life is that we shall not have sons and grandsons of whom we need be ashamed. The whole pattern of Chinese life is organized according to this one idea.

In my early twenties I left the Southwest for New York City. Here I spent nearly four years, working during the day and attending lectures at night at New York University. Among the friends I made was an old exiled professor from India, Lala Laipat Rai, who began tutoring me in Indian history, preparatory to sending me to India as a teacher. Some of his younger countrymen convinced me that India could not advance until it was freed from British rule - as America had been freed - by revolution. All my experiences predisposed me to believe this, and I became a kind of communication center for these men. I kept their correspondence, their codes, and foreign addresses. It was as a result of this work that I was arrested in 1918, held in solitary confinement in the Tombs in New York City, and charged with a violation of our Neutrality Law. Although I had never met a German and believed that I was only helping a subjugated people, I found myself accused of aiding in German espionage.

Years later I learned that Indian exiles in Europe had indeed formed a government-in-exile and taken a loan from the German Government to finance their work. They had shipped arms and ammunition from America to India, but had no more use for the Germans than-the Germans had for them.

Soon after the Armistice I was released from jail and the charges against me were dismissed. I had spent the months of imprisonment studying and writing. Friends had sent me books, paper, and pencils, and for the first time in my life I had been able to study without being burdened with the necessity of earning my own living. My first short stories, Cell Mates, were written during that time.

Coming out of prison, I learned that, months before, my younger brother had passed through New York City en route to France as a soldier. He had tried to see me repeatedly but the prosecuting attorney had turned him away, telling him that I was a traitor. This, combined with news that my other brother had been killed while working as a day laborer, sickened me. The employer in whose service my older brother had been killed paid my father fifty dollars for his life. My younger brother, unable to earn a living, had offered himself to death before he was seventeen. Both had lived like animals without protection or education.

The problems of my own life had developed neurotic tendencies within me, and the fate of my brothers, combined with my imprisonment, deepened them. I came out of prison morose and miserable. I was in my early twenties, at an age when serious-minded middle-class men and women were completing their schooling and embarking on careers. They had homes, protection, and guidance. It was not that I begrudged them these good things; it was merely that I thought the advantages they had should be made universally available.

I was a woman, and women were expected to marry and, if possible, “marry money.” If you were not interested in marriage or money, you were doomed. As I saw it, I could hope to continue only as I was - slaving by day and striving desperately at night for some kind of meager education. And what after that? A shabby hall bedroom for the rest of my days?

I rejected such a life, yet I could envision no other. A World War had just ended and there was a sort of peace. The German Republic had come to life, but was held in pawn by the victors. The Russian Revolution had taken place, but the Russian people were still fighting on more than a dozen fronts against invading armies of World War victors, including one from my own country. The Russian people were learning the most brutal lesson in human history - that only by their own armed might could they have a civilization of their own choosing.

A Communist Party was being formed in New York, but I did not join it. I knew many of its leaders and had read books or articles written by some of them. For years I listened to Communists with sympathy and in later years in China I gave them my active support, but I could never place my mind and life unquestioningly at the disposal of their leaders. I never believed that I myself was especially wise, but I could not become a mere instrument in the hands of men who believed that they held the one and only key to truth.

Because of this I was often attacked from two sides: believers in capitalism called me a Communist, a Red, or an Anarchist; Communists called me an individualist, an idealist, or a bourgeois democrat… One American woman Communist long delighted in dubbing me a “Smedleyite.’

One day as the year 1919 drew to a close, I took my place in a line at the office of a shipping company on the New York waterfront and made application for a job as a stewardess on an old Polish-American freighter bound for Europe. It carried deck and third-class passengers, and another girl and I were hired to care for them. I had no definite destination, no clear aims, no connections with any organization save a weak link with Indian exiles who lived in Europe and published a small newspaper from Berlin. I merely entertained the hope that I could find them, live a short time in Europe, visit the Soviet Union, and, if possible, find work on some ship sailing for India. Whatever might result from this venture, I would at least see something of the earth on which I had been born. But live the life of a cabbage I would not.

The situation then is, this: man wants to live, but he still must live upon this earth. All questions of living in heaven must be brushed aside. Let not the spirit take wings and soar to the abode of the gods and forget the earth. Are we not mortals, condemned to die? The span of life vouchsafed us, threescore and ten, is short enough, if the spirit gets too haughty and wants to live forever, but on the other hand, it is also long enough, if the spirit is a little humble. One can learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise from his seat and go away saying, “It was a good show,” when the curtain falls.

For we are of the earth, earth-born and earth-bound. There is nothing to be unhappy about the fact that we are, as it were, delivered upon this beautiful earth as its transient guests. Even if it were a dark dungeon, we still would have to make the best of it; it would be ungrateful of us not to do so when we have, instead of a dungeon, such a beautiful earth to live on for a good part of a century. Sometimes we get too ambitious and disdain the humble and yet generous earth. Yet a sentiment for this Mother Earth, a feeling of true affection and attachment, one must have for this temporary abode of our body and spirit, if we are to have a sense of spiritual harmony.

We have to have, therefore, a kind of animal skepticism as well as animal faith, taking this earthly life largely as it is. And we have to retain the wholeness of nature that we see in Thoreau who felt himself kin to the sod and partook largely of its dull patience, in winter expecting the sun of spring, who in his cheapest moments was apt to think that it was not his business to be “seeking the spirit,” but as much the spirit’s business to seek him, and whose happiness, as he described it, was a good deal like that of the woodchucks. The earth, after all is real, as the heaven is unreal: how fortunate is man that he is born between the real earth and the unreal heaven!

Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body. It is high time that some among us made the straight admission that we are animals, an admission which is inevitable since the establishment of the basic truth of the Darwinian Theory and the great progress of biology, especially bio-chemistry. It was very unfortunate that our teachers and philosophers belonged to the so-called intellectual class, with a characteristic professional pride of intellect. The men of the spirit were as proud of the spirit as the shoemaker is proud of leather. Sometimes even the spirit was not sufficiently remote and abstract and they had to use the words, “essence” or “soul” or “idea,” writing them with capital letters to frighten us. The human body was distilled in this scholastic machine into a spirit, and the spirit was further concentrated into a kind of essence, forgetting that even alcoholic drinks must have a “body”-mixed with plain water-if they are to be palatable at all. And we poor laymen were supposed to drink that concentrated quintessence of spirit. This over-emphasis on the spirit was fatal. It made us war with our natural instincts, and my chief criticism is that it made a whole and rounded view of human nature impossible. It proceeded also from an inadequate knowledge of biology and psychology, and of the place of the senses, emotions and, above all, instincts in our life. Man is made of flesh and spirit both, and it should be philosophy’s business to see that the mind and body live harmoniously together, that there be reconciliation between the two.

Although I had looked on Europe as but a halting-place, eight years had passed. Sometimes I thought half of these years were thrown to the wind, and they the best years of my life, but at other times I knew I had gained as well as lost. I had learned to know myself and I had won back my health. - had broadened my knowledge, learned something of the German people and a great deal about India and Indians.

My alliance with Virendranath terminated early in 1928.

To me he was not just an individual, but a political principle. For me he embodied the tragedy of a whole race. Had he been born English or American, I thought, his ability would have placed him among the great leaders of his age. Despite all this, I could not take up life with him again.

I was not to see Viren again until 1933′. Much time and what seemed centuries of events had flowed past. Hitler was threatening and Viren had left Germany for the Soviet Union, where he was connected with the Academy of Sciencesin Leningrad. Upon my arrival in Moscow he came to see me. He was at last growing old, his body thin and frail, and his hair rapidly turning white. The desire to return to India obsessed him, but the British would trust him only if he were dust on a funeral pyre. What happened to him after that I do not know?

In an effort to free myself from him totally, I had spent a number of months of 1927 in Denmark and Czechoslovakia, where I wrote my first book, Daughter of Earth. This book was a desperate attempt to reorient my life. I returned to Berlin in 1928 to teach at the university, but as soon as vacation time came I left for France, where I completed plans to go first to China and then to India.

For two years previous to this, I had been studying Chinese history. The Chinese “Great Revolution” of 1922-27 had broken on the rocks of class warfare when the Kuomintang had split the national front and begun war on the Communists. Many middle-class Chinese revolutionaries had fled to Europe and the Soviet Union. I had made friends with a few of them and had edited a book by one. Virendranath had tried to unite all subjected Asiatic people behind the Chinese Revolution, and I had become involved. To the turmoil of German life was now added a new element, the Chinese Revolution; and at this time I attended Berlin meetings in which Chinese and Germans of different factions actually fought one another physically.

The League against Imperialism had been organized by the Communists, with Virendranath as one of its founders. The Indian delegation to its first Congress included [awaharlal Nehru, and after the Congress in Brussels, Nehru came to Berlin, where I met him. He was a quiet, unspectacular man, totally unlike most Indian leaders. He was so modest and reserved that it was difficult to think of him as a political leader at all; yet he wielded tremendous influence over Indian youth. The Chinese Revolution had made a deep impression on him. Unlike China, India was unarmed. This major difference was a subject of constant conflict between the followers of Gandhi and the advocates of armed revolutionary struggle. Virendranath was an unrelenting advocate of armed struggle.

Returning to Germany from France in 1928, I halted in Frankfurt am Main, where I met the editors of the Frankfurter Zeitung and signed a contract to act as their special correspondent in China. I was to hold this position until shortly before Hitler came to power, after which that old liberal daily was taken over by the Nazis.

In leaving Germany I was venturing into the unknown, entering a responsible profession in which I had but little experience. Sometimes the thought of this new task frightened me. With conflicting emotions of relief and desolation I waved farewell to friends as my train pulled out of Berlin en route to China through the Soviet Union.

As I saw it in late 1928, Moscow was very different from the city I had visited for six months in 1921 as a member of the Indian delegation. In 1928 I stayed less than two months. On both occasions, however, I visited schools, hospitals, factories, the opera, theaters, and the homes of the bezptizomi, or homeless waifs. In 1928 I also visited some of the collective farms in the neighborhood of Moscow.

On my first visit in 1921, the “azure city” period of the Russian Revolution was coming to a close and the cold gray dawn of undramatic hard labor was beginning. At that time grim Red soldiers, clad in captured British clothing and carrying captured British and French guns, were pouring into Moscow from the southern front, where they had driven out the White armies financed by England and France.

The Volga famine was beginning, and I saw thousands of refugees sleeping in railway stations and empty churches. Typhus was decimating the Volga region. Herbert Hoover’s relief organization was being organized and the Russians were suspicious. American intervention in the Soviet Union and Hoover’s black record in Hungary led Russians to believe that, as in Hungary, Hoover would try to do with food what interventionist armies had failed to do by armed force.

In 1921 everyone was ragged, but filled with hope and enthusiasm. Men with holes in the seats of their pants would say: “Anyway, we’re free.” Once some friends of mine left Moscow for Germany, but the engine steamed away toward the east and it was hours before anyone realized that the passenger cars were still standing in the railway station. Almost no telephone worked, no lock locked, and no train ran on time.

In all, I visited the Soviet Union during three different periods. Through all these years I maintained an interest in the fate of the bezprizomi. In 1921 the Government had issued a manifesto concerning the rescue of these homeless children, and committees were formed to round them up, examine and sort them, and place them in homes. The fate of these children affected me deeply because of my own childhood.

The Soviet Government regarded all children as its wards.

Years have now passed and I remember but faintly the individual dramas that were played out before the bezprizomi committees. A plainly-clad motherly woman of middle age, with ample hips and bosom, would often hold out her hands to a ragged, filthy little boy. The child would shrink back in fear. Carefully, deviously, the woman would talk and laugh with him, caress him, and slowly win him to her.

I went to a number of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries which had been fitted out as dormitories and schoolrooms for the children. Some buildings were being equipped with machinery and tools in order that the boys might be drawn into constructive and disciplined work. Any form of manhandling was forbidden, and the boys had their own self-government and tried any offending comrade.

In 1933-4, when I visited the Soviet Union for the third time, I was too ill to do much more than inquire about the fate of the bezptizomi. I learned that there were no longer any homeless children; and those who had once been waifs were men and women. Some were skilled workers or technicians, some university students, some officers or soldiers in the Red Army. Once, in a sanatorium in the Caucasus, I met a young agrarian economist, a graduate of Moscow University, who had been one of the 1921 waifs. In one of the Red Army rest homes I met two former bezprizomi who had become commanders. In the truest sense of the phrase, these men could say: The Soviet Union is my motherland.

Many of the foreign travelers were filled with a vitriolic hatred of the Soviet Union and would stare through the windows, calling attention to the poorly dressed people on the railway platforms. Though these foreigners had merely changed trains in Moscow, they felt that they had become authorities on Russian atrocities and tyranny. Certainly there had been many sad and tragic events during and after the Russian Revolution. But I never heard well-placed foreigners object to atrocities perpetrated by the White Guard armies against the Russian people, nor did they see anything wrong with the invasion of the Soviet Union by foreign armies during the Revolution.

For years there has remained deeply etched in my memory the scene that confronted me as I entered the Soviet Union in 1928. My train had passed through Poland and at railway stations I had watched fashionably dressed Polish ladies, painted and elegant, bid farewell to Polish officers in smart uniforms gaudy with gold braid. On a late wintry October day our train drew up at the Soviet-Polish frontier and I approached the customs station of the first socialist country. This building was rough-hewn out of great logs, and in the waning light it seemed to tower far into the sky and lose itself in the gloom. Before the entrance stood a tall Red Army soldier, his gray greatcoat reaching to the earth, his tall peaked cap with its red star shadowing his face. One end of his rifle rested on the earth and the fixed bayonet reached above his shoulder.

He stood as immovable as the powerful, rough-hewn building behind him. Beyond the scene stretched the gray, impenetrable darkness. Somewhere in that darkness I knew that people were struggling with the rudest forces of nature to build a new world of their own choosing, struggling alone and unaided. But always before the frontier station stood a guard, silent and watchful, facing the Western world. In such a position, I thought, had once stood the men who had founded my own country.

In Danzig Harbor I deserted the freighter and journeyed to Bel lin to look for the small office maintained by Indian exiles. The first person I met there was the Indian revolutionary leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. In New York I had often heard of him as one who had helped form an Indian government-in-exile and build up a world-wide network of Indian revolutionary activity. In fact, it was because of him and his colleagues that I had been imprisoned.

I found the personality and past life of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya compelling. In a very short time I had entered into a union with him; it was not a legal marriage, but I bore his name and was known as his wife. It was to last for nearly eight years, but became so complex that it tended only to aggravate my sick state of mind.

Whether or not I loved him I do not really know. Many years after I had left Viren I remember writing to an American friend that “to my astonishment and resentment Viren remains the center of my emotional life, and if he were in danger I suppose I would walk barefoot around the world to help him. Yet I would not live with him for a day.” That was long ago, and time again proved the great healer. That he loved me there is no doubt. Neither I nor others understood why, for he had little interest in women.

Thirteen years before he met me, Viren had married an Irish Catholic girl. Because he was a pagan who rejected all her efforts to convert him, she bought a special dispensation from the Pope to marry him. After the ceremony she informed him that a condition of the marriage was that any issue was to be Catholic. They quarreled and parted, she becoming a nun in some hidden English convent and he trying for years to have the marriage annulled. He failed and we were never legally married. As a result my American citizenship was twice challenged in later years by the British Secret Service, which claimed, with no good intentions, that I was a British subject. To a shocked American consular official in China I once explained the situation thus:

“My husband was married to a Catholic nun and for this reason could not marry me. You may call me a concubine if you will, but not a British subject.”

The official threw up his hands in despair.

Virendranath was the epitome of the secret Indian revolutionary movement, and perhaps its most brilliant protagonist abroad. He was nearly twenty years my senior, with a mind as sharp and ruthless as a saber. He was thin and dark, with a mass of black hair turning gray at the temples, and a face that had something fierce about it. He might easily have been taken for a southern European, a Turk, or a Persian. To me he seemed something like thunder, lightning, and rain; and wherever he had sojourned in Europe or England, he had been just about that to the British. His hatred for the islanders who had subjugated his country knew no bounds. ,

The foundation of his emotional life had been laid in the feudal Mohammedan state of Hyderabad. To this he had added a quarter of a century of intellectual training in England, Europe, and the Near East. His was a famous Brahmin family abounding in poets, singers, educators, and scientists. One of his sisters was the poetess and national leader Sarojini Naidu, and his younger brother was married to Kamala Devi, who later became a great leader. By race the family was Hindu, by culture a mixture of Hinduism, Mohammedanism, and the best of English liberalism. Viren’s father had been one of the first Brahmins to defy caste laws by going to England and later to Germany to study science. An outcast, he was forced to emigrate to the Moslem state of Hyderabad, where he became a pioneer in modern university education.

Viren had been educated by his father, by Moslem scholars and English tutors. He grew up speaking Hindustani, English, a smattering of German, and the court language of the Moslem world, Persian. Throughout his childhood he had heard his mother - a poetess and an advocate of the emancipation of women - referred to with contempt by Moslems, and this had generated in him emotions which he had never been able to reconcile. This was only one of the many conflicts that went on within him and made his mind and emotional life remind me of one of those Hindu temples in south India - repository of all the cultural movements of the ages.

In Heidelberg and Jena Viren had pursued the study of comparative philology. He spoke English like a ruling-class Englishman and had learned French, German, Swedish, and some Italian and Spanish. He had lived in Sweden for a few years and had not only mastered the language but gone on to study Icelandic. When he and I went with an Indian delegation to the Soviet Union in 1921, shortly after my arrival in Germany, he soon assimilated Russian and in his leisure time sought out men from Lithuania or Iceland, or haunted the encampments of gypsies, in order to compare their languages with ancient Sanskrit.

Like Nehru and many other men of the upper classes of India, Viren had absorbed British traditions of liberty. These he had come to apply to his own country - a practice that enraged most Englishmen. He and his colleagues, some of them caste-ridden, orthodox Brahmins, were among the early nationalist terrorists of India - as they were also among India’s early educators, scientists, artists, labor organizers, and, later, Communists. They hunted British rulers of India and Egypt with pistol, bomb, and knife. Some had been shot, some hanged, others imprisoned for life. In whatever sections of the world Indians gathered they were to be found.

Each summer, when groups of Indian students left England to spend their vacations on the Continent, one goal of pilgrimage was always Virendranath’s home. Of this they never dared speak, and some even preferred not to recall their conversations with him, for he made violent attacks on Hindu caste prejudices and Moslem superstitions. He would eat pork in the presence of Moslems and beef in front of Hindus. To Hindus he spoke of Hinduism as a “cowdung religion,” and he made the adherents of both religions writhe under the sting of his tongue. He taunted them by asserting that even in poetry they learned not from India, but from England, and that they believed England was the paradise to which their souls would go after death. His contempt for Indians aspiring to official posts under the British Government was boundless. He warned his students that only clerks watched time-clocks or lived an orderly, respectable life. When told that one must live, he would answer in the words of Voltaire: “I don’t see the necessity.”

He practiced what he preached. He never possessed more than one suit of clothing, which I was constantly darning, patching, and pressing. Nor did he care what he ate. When he had money, he gave it to anyone in need, so that we were forever in debt. Money was merely a means of working for the independence of his country. His attitude toward it had been formed by the great joint families of India and in particular by that caste of Brahmin teachers and scholars who gave their knowledge freely. Years later I found the same attitude among those intellectuals of China who also came from families in which the clan cared for the individual.

Virendranath turned more and more to the study of Marxism as a means of gaining independence for India; and he eventually became a Communist Party member. I always wondered just what new design was added to the Hindu temple of his mind by this act.’ I could never imagine him being regimented by any political party or following “lines” of thought and action. His mind. took the whole world as its province and drew nourishment from every age.

When Viren and I began life together, two eras and two cultures met. I was an American working woman, the product of a distorted commercial civilization, he a high-caste Indian with a cultivated, labyrinthine Brahmin mind and a British classical education. Though he hated everything British, he had an even deeper contempt for an American capitalism which judged all things by their money value. His mind was modern, but his emotional roots were in Hinduism and Islam.

Like a storm, he existed according to his nature, absorbing, influencing everything he touched. Our way of life was of his choosing, not mine; our home a small edition of that of a great joint family of India. Any Indian who became ill was brought to our home and nursed by me, and on one occasion I had two of them at once. Moslems and Hindus of every caste streamed through it as through a railway station or a hotel. Students came directly from their boats, carting all their bedding and cooking utensils. Some wore weird clothing. One student bought himself a woman’s straw hat with a bunch of grapes hanging down the side; it looked somewhat like a turban, and only with difficulty could we induce him to cease wearing it.

We were desperately poor, and because Viren had no possessions, I sold everything I owned in order to get money. Just as the year 1923 began, protests from the British caused the German Government to order Viren to leave the country. We met the problem by moving repeatedly and changing our name. But our debts and difficulties seemed to increase by geometric progression.

Whenever things seemed about to improve, new problems would turn up. Sometimes Moslems with their wives still half in purdah came to live with us. At other times we visited some who were very much out of purdah, including, for example, the Moslem leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his wife. Cold, sleek, cruel-faced, Jinnah was a great landlord who had married a Parsi woman, daughter of a millionaire Bombay factory-owner. Certainly Mrs. Jinnah could never be accused of living in purdah. She was a beautiful but superficial society woman, whom Jinnah displayed as he would a jeweled shirt-stud. She often wore nothing above the waist except a brassiere carelessly covered by the sheerest of lace saris.

Viren had hopes of inducing the two of them to establish a scholarship fund for poor Indian students in Europe, and when they once wired him to visit them in a German spa where they were recuperating from night life on the Continent, he went in high anticipation. But they were not interested in scholarship funds. Bored, they had thought of Viren merely as a diversion. He was a brilliant conversationalist and Mrs. Jinnah was perplexed by a great problem: she could not find the rouge and lipstick she desired and wanted Viren to look for them in the shops of Berlin.

Such incidents engendered a cold disgust within me. I was, moreover, harassed by domestic difficulties. Hindu and Moslem religious festivals were sometimes celebrated in our home, with dozens of men sitting in a circle on the floor. In the manner of India, no man could be turned away hungry. The cooking and preparation for dinners were therefore endless and the very walls of our home seemed to be permeated with the odor of curry.

Viren thrived on company, but I began to wilt and sink under the complexity and poverty of our life. Everyone understood and loved Viren; few understood me. To them I was a queer creature who grew ever more strange - as indeed I did.

I was with Virendranath and witnessed the power of his personality when his youngest sister, Suhasini, came from Oxford to see him for the first time. She had been born after he left India, and her mother had sung her to sleep with lullabies about her exiled brother. The British Government had forced her father to leave Hyderabad and live in Calcutta under perpetual house-arrest and her childhood had been overshadowed by tragedy. British police were forever raiding their home, tearing up pillows, and disemboweIing Suhasini’s dolls to see if her father had hidden messages or codes from his exiled son. The old man had died a prisoner.

Suhasini was a musician and singer, a woman of striking beauty and noble bearing. When she stood before her brother for the first time, neither spoke, and I saw Suhasini trembling. Viren’s face was tense with inner struggle; it was the first time in a quarter of a century that one of his family had come to share his life, and Suhasini must have reminded him of the tragedy of his father, his country, and his own long years of exile. In later years Suhasini returned to India as a Communist and labor organizer, earning her living as a singer. Her Communism had sprung from Viren’s influence. But it was years before she would bow her handsome aristocratic head and meet on a plane of equality with men of lesser station. Thus it was that member after member of Viren’s family, people of the highest caste and culture, broke the Brahmin bonds of privilege and placed their trained minds at the service of their country or of the dispossessed.

Perhaps my respect and admiration for such men and women robbed me of objectivity. As I saw Viren, his white-hot passion for liberty seemed never to wane; it communicated itself to every one of his countrymen who knew him. It was, in fact, the majesty of his life and intellect that bound me to him even in our most unhappy moments and long after our marriage had become a formality

It is not truth that makes man great, but man that makes truth great. — CONFUCIUS

Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely. — CHANG CH’AO

This is a personal testimony, a testimony of my own experience of thought and life. It is not intended to be objective and makes no claim to establish eternal truths. In fact I rather despise claims to objectivity in philosophy; the point of view is the thing. I should have liked to call it “A Lyrical Philosophy,” using the word “lyrical” in the sense of being a highly personal and individual outlook. But that would be too beautiful a name and I must forego it, for fear of aiming too high and leading the reader to expect too much, and because the main ingredient of my thought is matter-of-fact prose, a level easier to maintain because more natural. Very much contented am I to lie low, to cling to the soil, to be of kin to the sod. My soul squirms comfortably in the soil and sand and is happy. Sometimes when one is drunk with this earth, one’s spirit seems so light that he thinks he is in heaven. But actually he seldom rises six feet above the ground.

I should have liked also to write the entire book in the form of a dialogue like Plato’s. It is such a convenient form for personal, inadvertent disclosures, for bringing in the significant trivialities of our daily life, above all for idle rambling about the pastures of sweet, silent thought. But somehow I have not done so. I do not know why. A fear, perhaps that these form of literature being so little in vogue today no one probably would read it and a writer after all wants to be read. And when I say dialogue, I do not mean answers and questions like newspaper interviews, or those leaders chopped up into short paragraphs; I mean really good, long, leisurely dis-courses extending several pages at a stretch, with many detours, and coming back to the original point of discussion by a short cut at the most unexpected spot, like a man returning home by climbing over a hedge, to the surprise of his walking companion. Oh, how I love to reach home by climbing over the back fence, and to travel on bypaths! At least my companion will grant that I am familiar with the way home and with the surrounding countryside … But I dare not.

I am not original. The ideas expressed here have been thought and expressed by many thinkers of the east and west over and over again; those I borrow from the East are hackneyed truths there. They are, nevertheless, my ideas; they have become a part of my being. If they have taken root in my being, it is because they express something original in me, and when I first encountered them; my heart gave an instinctive assent. I like them as ideas and not because the person who expressed them is of any account. In fact, I have traveled the bypaths in my reading as well as in my writing. Many of the authors quoted are names obscure and may baffle a Chinese professor of literature. If some happen to be well known, I accept their ideas only as they compel my intuitive approval and not because the authors are well-known. It is my habit to buy cheap editions of old, obscure books and see what I can discover there. If the professors of literature knew the sources of my ideas, they would be astounded at the Philistine. But there is a greater pleasure in picking up a small pearl in an ash-can than in looking at a large one in a jeweler’s window.

I am not deep and not well-read. If one is too well-read, then one does not know right is right and wrong is wrong. I have not read Locke or Hume or Berkeley, and have not taken a college course in philosophy. Technically speaking, my method and my training are all wrong, because I do not read philosophy, but only read life at first hand. That is an unconventional way of studying philosophy -the incorrect way. Some of my sources are: Mrs. Huang, an amah in my family who has all the ideas that go into the breeding of a good woman in China; a Soochow boat-woman with her profuse use of expletives; a Shanghai street car conductor; my cook’s wife; a lion cub in the zoo; a squirrel in Central Park in New York; a deck steward who made one good remark; that writer of a column on astronomy (dead for some ten years now); all news in boxes; and any writer who does not kill our sense of curiosity in life or who has not killed it in himself … how can I enumerate them all?

Thus deprived of academic training in philosophy, I am less scared to write a book about it. Everything seems clearer and simpler for it, if that is any compensation in the eyes of orthodox philosophy. I doubt it. I know there will be complaints that my words are not long enough, that I make things too easy to understand, and finally that I lack cautiousness, that I do not whisper low and trip with mincing steps in the sacred mansions of philosophy, looking properly scared as I ought to do. Courage seems to be the rarest of all virtues in a modern philosopher. But I have always wandered outside the precincts of philosophy and that gives me courage. There is a method of appealing to one’s own intuitive judgment, of thinking out one’s own ideas and forming one’s own independent judgments, and confessing them in public with a childish impudence, and sure enough, some kindred souls in another corner of the world will agree with you. A person forming his ideas in this manner will often be astounded to discover how another writer said exactly the same things and felt exactly the same way, but perhaps expressed the ideas more easily and more gracefully. It is then that he discovers the ancient author and the ancient author bears him witness, and they become forever friends in spirit.

There is therefore the matter of my obligations to these authors, especially my Chinese friends in spirit. I have for my collaborators in writing this book a company of genial souls, who I hope like me as much as I like them. For in a very real sense, these spirits have been with me, in the only form of spiritual communion that I recognize as real-when two men separated by the ages think the same thoughts and sense the same feelings and each perfectly understands the other. In the preparation of this book, a few of my friends have been especially helpful with their contributions and advice:

Po Chiiyi of the eighth century, Su Tungp’o of the eleventh, and that great company of original spirits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-the romantic and voluble T’u Ch’ihshui, the playful, original Yuan Chunglang, the deep, magnificent Li Chowu, the sensitive and sophisticated Chang Ch’ao, the epicure Li Liweng, the happy and gay old hedonist Yuan Tsets’ai, and the bubbling, joking, effervescent Chin Shengt’an-unconventional souls all, men with too much independent judgment and too much feeling for things to be liked by the orthodox critics, men too good to be “moral” and too moral to be “good” for the Confucianists. The smallness of the select company has made the enjoyment of their presence all the more valued and sincere. Some of these may happen not to be quoted, but they are here with me in this book all the same. Their coming back to their own in China is only a matter of time. There have been others, names less well-known, but no less welcome for their apt remarks, because they express my sentiments so well. I call them my Chinese Amiels-people who don’t talk much, but always talk sensibly, and I respect their good sense. There are others again who belong to the illustrious company of “Anons” of all countries and ages, who in an inspired moment said something wiser then they knew, like the unknown fathers of great men. Finally there are greater ones still, whom I look up to more as masters than as companions of the spirit, whose serenity of understanding is so human and yet so divine, and whose wisdom seems to have come entirely without effort because it has become completely natural. Such a one is Chuangtse, and such a one is T’ao Yiianrning, whose simplicity of spirit is the despair of smaller men. I have sometimes let these souls speak directly to the reader, making proper acknowledgment, and at other times, I have spoken for them while I seem to be speaking for myself. The older my friendship with them, the more likely is my indebtedness to their ideas to be of the familiar, elusive and invisible type, like parental influence in a good family breeding. It is impossible to put one’s finger on a definite point of resemblance. I have also chosen to speak as a modern, sharing the modern life, and not only as a Chinese; to give only what I have personally absorbed into my modern being, and not merely to act as a respectful translator of the ancients. Such a procedure has its drawbacks, but on the whole, one can do a more sincere job of it. The selections are therefore as highly personal as the rejections. No complete presentation of anyone poet or philosopher is attempted here and it is impossible to judge of them through the evidences on these pages. I must therefore conclude by saying as usual that the merits of this book, if any, are largely due to the helpful suggestions of my collaborators, while for the inaccuracies, deficiencies and immaturities of judgment, I alone am responsible.

Again I owe my thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Richard J. Walsh, first, for suggesting the idea of the book, and secondly, for their useful and frank criticism. I must also thank Mr. Hugh Wade for cooperating on preparing the manuscript for the press and on the proofs, and Miss Lillian Peffer for making the Index.

LIN YUTANG

New York City July 30, 1937

Taking cue from the ancient Silk Road or Silk Route that traversed an amazing distance of more than 8000 kms or 5000 miles through high altitude passes, dry inhabitable deserts, picturesque snowbound lakes and mountain caves connecting China with Asia Minor and Southern Asia, the Karakoram Highway (KKH) is an amazing feat of human endurance and achievement. It today links China’s Xinjang region with northern Pakistan’s Abbotabad district.

It is the highest paved international road in the world across the Karakoram range of mountains. It goes through the Khunjerab Pass at an altitude of 4,693 meters or 15,397 feets, and is also the highest paved International Border Crossing. Yet another amazing feature of this fantastic highway is that, it cuts through the collision zone between Asian and the Indian Sub continent where China, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India come within 250 kms of each other. In terms of strategic and military importance, the Karakoram Highway (KKH) is indeed of high importance.

The Karakoram Highway (KKH) also known as the Friendship Highway in China. It was built by the governments of Pakistan and China, and was completed after 20 years of toil and strives in the year 1986. 810 Pakistani and more than 50 Chinese road-building workmen had reportedly lost their lives while constructing this amazing Highway, mostly due to landslides and high altitude sickness.

The Highway, connecting the Northern areas of Pakistan runs around 1300 kms from Kashgar in the Xinjiang region of China to Havelian, which is located in the Abbotabad district of Pakistan. An extension meets the legendary Grand Trunk Road at Hasan Abdal, west of the Pakistani capital Islamabad. However, not all parts of this super highway is quite motorcar worthy. According to Lee Freeman of Australia who cycled through the KKH as a tourist, “It cannot be called a highway at all since a large section of it, specially the one that runs through Afghanistan, is merely a cattle-track”. Vivid photographs taken by him of the road condition affirms his statement. Abdul Ghani of Pakistan who made a thrilling trip to China through the KKH soon after its completion remarks, “The Karakoram Highway follows the Indus river here for 340 kms, and it’s all like this, narrow and winding, with a steep drop to the river, isolated and awe inspiring.”

On June 30, 2006, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the Pakistan Highway Administration and China’s state-owned Assets Supervision (SASAC) to rebuild and upgrade the KKH. “The width of the highway,” according to SASAC, “will be expanded from 10 meters to 30 meters, and its transport capacity will be increased three times. Also, the upgraded road will be constructed to particularly accommodate heavy-laden vehicles and extreme weather conditions.”

“The Karakoram Highway, following the ancient Silk Route that once connected famous landmarks that are now lost to time,” said a tourist recently traveling through the KKH, “today offers an opportunity to visit these sites and capture some of the magic of old times as historical figures like Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Genghis Khan and Taimur Lang or Tamerlane had all once marched through this Avenue de la Fame.

The Karakoram Highway, in recent years, has become a destination for adventure tourism. The road has also given mountaineers and cyclists easier access to many high mountains, glaciers and snowbound lakes, providing routes to Gilgit and Skardu from the Pakistan end of this amazing highway.

The Karakoram Highway is truly amazing - it is important historically, communicates East and West Asia and the scenic beauty is simply fabulous.

The Forbidden City (referred to in Chinese, as the "Purple Forbidden City") is actually the Chinese imperial palace that was used by the mid-Ming dynasties. This palace is in the center of Beijing, and no visitor to this Chinese city misses it. The City is currently popularly referred as the Palace Museum. The Forbidden City occupies 720,000 square meters or 7,747,200 sq ft or roughly 180 immense acres. This amazing palace is thus bigger than the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, the Vatican and also the Kremlin.

There are 9,999 rooms inside the palace. All the rooms have beautifully painted wood. Strangely, the inner sanctum rooms were forbidden to women, barring the Empress only on her wedding day. Although no longer occupied by the royalty (nevertheless, there is no royalty in modern Peoples republic of China), the Forbidden City remains a symbol of the country’s imperial past.

The UNESCO lists the Forbidden City for its huge collection of preserved ancient wooden structures - it became a World Heritage Site in 1987 as the ‘Imperial Palace of the Ming and Quing Dynasites.’

There are two major parts in the Forbidden City. The Outer Court and the Inner Court.

Outer Court - It has three halls that were used for Coronations, Investitures, Weddings and other ceremonial events. The incredible Hall of Supreme Harmony belongs to the Outer Court. The imperial library, archives, and the lantern storage area were also a part of the Outer Court.

Inner Court - northern, eastern and western parts of the palace form the Inner Court. It includes three other halls that were used more often, on a daily basis actually for administration and other purposes. The Palace of Heavenly Purity was a part of these courts. This is where the Emperor lived, accompanied by the immediate family, maidservants and eunuchs.

There are royal gardens all around the Forbidden City. Zhongnanhai is a building complex that has two lakes around it. Incidentally, it is now the Headquarters for the Communist Party of China. There is also the Beihai Park that is also at the center of a lake - it has now become a park. The Ming Emperor hanged himself when a rebel army attacked, and the place where it happened is Jingshan Park, which is also referred to as Jing Shan or Coal Hill.

When Yuan Dynasty ruled China, Forbidden City was a part of the bigger Imperial City. Yuan Dynasty was succeeded by the Ming Dynasty, and the first Hongwu Emperor went to Nanjing and made it the capital. By royal order, Mongol Palace was razed.

The Forbidden City has gates on each side. It is surrounded by walls that were made thick so that it could bear cannon attacks.

Most international tourists to China come to Beijing. If you are planning a trip to Beijing, do not miss out on the Forbidden City. There is much more to China than just the Chinese wall.

The Yuan Xiao Lantern festival takes place under a full moon, marking the end of the Chinese New Year season. This 2000-year-old Chinese tradition closes out the Lunar New Year and is observed on the 15th day of the first month in the Chinese Lunar calendar although it may change each year. Surprisingly enough, it has roots in both Hinduism and Buddhism, and is celebrated in countries like China, Taiwan and Thailand as also among Asian immigrant communities all over the world. Apart from its festive outlook, Yuan Xiao also marks business and other closings, depending on the region where it is practiced.

Yuan Xiao (Teng Chieh in proper Chinese) feature fireworks and folk dancing when hundreds of people go out in the streets with festive lanterns of every size and shape, hanging them in homes as well as carrying them to parks and temples. Lanterns usually appear in the shape of dragons, birds or exotic animals. Also, people write propitious phrases and axioms on the lanterns to ward off evil spirits and welcome the good ones. Some go to the extent of decorating their lanterns with riddles and even award prizes to those who can solve them. So it becomes a contest as well.

A sense of gayety and exhilaration overwhelms the festivities and everyone seems to enjoy the event. The light given off by the lanterns are believed to usher celestial figures down to the earth for the people to see them. Though it is more prevalent in the oriental countries, but it is also observed in India. Somewhat similar methods are adapted to attract heavenly bodies. Believers put lighted candles or tiny electric bulbs on rooftops (Akash Pradeep) at night during certain times of the year.

Another significant part of the Yuan Xiao festival features a special kind of food called Yuanxiao. Sticky rice flour is made into stuffed dumplings to be taken by all, and it symbolizes family unity, prosperity and happiness. It is believed that the custom of eating Yuanxiao originated during the Eastern Jin Dynasty in the 4th century that ultimately became popular during the Tang and Song periods. The fillings inside the dumplings or Yuanxiao are either sweet or salty. While sweet fillings are made of sugar, walnuts, sesame, osmanthus flowers, rose petals, sweetened tangerine peels or jujube paste, the salty variety is filled with meat or vegetables or both. Whatever the filling, it is a ceremonious eating where everyone must have a bite.

It may be relevant to mention here that the Lantern festival has origins in the belief of Brahmanism, a branch of the Hindu religion, and is thought to have evolved during the 1st century as a ceremonial observance of the edicts of Lord Buddha. However, the Chinese have celebrated the Lantern Festival since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E - 221 A.D.).

The magic of Disney is to be found in virtually every corner of the globe. Disney today has become synonymous with the finest in entertainment. Naturally, when it comes to theme parks, Disneyland is not far behind. What happens to be every child’s dream, viz. visiting Disneyland at least once in a lifetime, is also what many adults secretly desire. Truly enough, the magic of Disney knows no age. From 8 to 80, everybody’s game for a visit to Disneyland.

When in Hong Kong, it’s a shame to miss out on a trip to the Hong Kong Disneyland. Hong Kong Disneyland is the first theme park inside the Hong Kong Disneyland Resort, which is owned and managed by the Hong Kong International Theme Parks, an incorporated company jointly owned by The Walt Disney Company and the Government of Hong Kong.

The formal dedication that accompanies this dreamland goes like:

“To all who come to this happy place, welcome. Many years ago, Walt Disney introduced the world to enchanted realms of fantasy and adventure, yesterday and tomorrow, in a magical placed called Disneyland.”

Today that spirit of imagination and discovery comes to life in Hong Kong. Hong Kong Disneyland is dedicated to the young and the young at heart - with the hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration, and an enduring symbol of the cooperation, friendship and understanding between the people of Hong Kong and the United States of America.

Hong Kong Disneyland offers you the same degree of fun, frolic and comfort that you have come to expect from all things Disney. Discover a magical kingdom of thrilling adventures, storybook journeys and beloved Disney characters. Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Scrooge, Pluto, Goofy - they’re all here. Stay amidst the magic in two enchanting hotels offering unique shopping, imaginative dining and family recreation - all delivered with the style and service for which Disney is renowned.

The park has four themed lands similar to those at other Disneyland parks. Take your pick from Fantasyland, Adventureland, Tomorrowland and Main Street U.S.A. Frontierland is a notable exclusion, but don’t worry, you’ll hardly miss it.

Hong Kong Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A. is an almost exact replica of the Disneyland in California, and includes the train station, the buildings, and the Sleeping Beauty Castle. Adventureland features a large island area, home to Tarzan’s Treehouse, which is circled by the Jungle Cruise. It is also home to the Festival of the Lion King show.

Walt Disney was known for his futurist views. “Tomorrowland” is the realistic culmination of these views. In his own words… “Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future.”

The “Fantasyland” at the Hong Kong Disneyland features the Sleeping Beauty Castle, as well as the Fantasy Gardens where costumed Disney characters can be met. Other attractions include the Cinderella Carousel, Dumbo the Flying Elephant, Mad hatter tea Cups and much more.

Hong Kong Disneyland is a dream come true for every Asian, young or old.

As one of the earliest civilization with a 5,000 year recorded history, China is the third largest country in the world with a land area of approximately 5,965,160 square miles. China also amasses 1/5th of world’s population at 1.3 billion fueling a $1.65 trillion economy. China has become one single fastest growing economy in the world and offers a wealth of opportunities to foreign trade.

Asian Current Incorporated provides good and services for the growing demand in western cultures for Asian products. Importing direct from Southeast Asia using innovative trade wind and routes and to Canada and the United States, Asian Current Incorporated provide exclusive original product unavailable in North America.

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