Some Chinese Ghosts Read online

  “All forms are only temporary.” When this great truth is fully comprehended by any one, then is he delivered from all pain. This is the Way of Purification.

  “All forms are subject unto pain.” When this great truth is fully comprehended by any one, then is he delivered from all pain. This is the Way of Purification.

  “All forms are without substantial reality.” When this great truth is fully comprehended by any one, then is he delivered from all pain. This is the way of . . .

  Her form, too, unsubstantial, unreal, an illusion only, though comeliest of illusions? She had given him alms! Was the merit of the giver illusive also,—illusive like the grace of the supple fingers that gave? Assuredly there were mysteries in the Abhidharma impenetrable, incomprehensible! . . . It was a golden coin, stamped with the symbol of an elephant,—not more of an illusion, indeed, than the gifts of Kings to the Buddha! Gold upon her bosom also, less fine than the gold of her skin. Naked ­between the silken sash and the narrow breast-corslet, her young waist curved glossy and pliant as a bow. Richer the silver in her voice than in the hollow pagals that made a moonlight about her ankles! But her smile!—the ­little teeth like ­flower-stamens in the perfumed blossom of her mouth!

  O weakness! O shame! How had the strong Charioteer of Resolve thus lost his control over the wild team of fancy! Was this languor of the Will a signal of coming peril, the peril of slumber? So strangely vivid those fancies were, so brightly definite, as about to take visible form, to move with factitious life, to play some unholy drama upon the stage of dreams! “O Thou Fully Awakened!” he cried aloud, “help now thy humble disciple to obtain the blessed wakefulness of perfect contemplation! let him find force to fulfil his vow! suffer not Mara to prevail against him!” And he recited the eternal verses of the Chapter of Wakefulness:—

  “Completely and eternally awake are the disciples of Gotama! Unceasingly, by day and night, their thoughts are fixed upon the Law.

  “Completely and eternally awake are the disciples of Gotama! Unceasingly, by day and night, their thoughts are fixed upon the Community.

  “Completely and eternally awake are the disciples of Gotama! Unceasingly, by day and night, their thoughts are fixed upon the Body.

  “Completely and eternally awake are the disciples of Gotama! Unceasingly, by day and night, their minds know the sweetness of perfect peace.

  “Completely and eternally awake are the disciples of Gotama! Unceasingly, by day and night, their minds enjoy the deep peace of meditation.”

  There came a murmur to his ears; a murmuring of many voices, s­m­othering the utterances of his own, like a tumult of ­waters. The stars went out ­before his sight; the heavens darkened their infinities: all things became viewless, became blackness; and the great murmur deepened, like the murmur of a rising tide; and the earth seemed to sink from beneath him. His feet no longer touched the ground; a sense of supernatural buoyancy pervaded every fibre of his body: he felt himself floating in obscurity; then sinking softly, slowly, like a feather dropped from the pinnacle of a temple. Was this death? Nay, for all suddenly, as transported by the Sixth Supernatural Power, he stood again in light,—a perfumed, sleepy light, vapory, beautiful,—that bathed the marvellous streets of some Indian city. Now the nature of the murmur became manifest to him; for he moved with a mighty throng, a ­people of pilgrims, a nation of worshippers. But these were not of his faith; they bore upon their foreheads the smeared symbols of obscene gods! Still, he could not escape from their midst; the mile-broad ­human torrent bore him irresistibly with it, as a leaf is swept by the ­waters of the Ganges. Rajahs were there with their trains, and princes riding upon elephants, and Brahmins robed in their vestments, and swarms of voluptuous dancing-girls, ­moving to chant of kabit and damâri. But whither, whither? Out of the city into the sun they passed, ­between avenues of banyan, down colonnades of palm. But whither, whither?

  Blue-distant, a mountain of carven stone appeared ­before them,—the Temple, lifting to heaven its wilderness of chiselled pinnacles, flinging to the sky the golden spray of its decoration. Higher it grew with approach, the blue tones changed to gray, the outlines sharpened in the light. Then each detail became visible: the elephants of the pedestals standing upon tortoises of rock; the great grim faces of the capitals; the serpents and monsters writhing among the friezes; the many-headed gods of basalt in their galleries of fretted niches, tier above tier; the pictured foulnesses, the painted lusts, the divinities of abomination. And, yawning in the sloping precipice of sculpture, beneath a frenzied swarming of gods and Gopia,—a beetling pyramid of limbs and bodies interlocked,—the Gate, cavernous and shadowy as the mouth of Siva, devoured the living multitude.

  The eddy of the throng whirled him with it to the vastness of the interior. None seemed to note his yellow robe, none even to observe his presence. Giant aisles intercrossed their heights above him; myriads of mighty pillars, fantastically carven, filed away to invisibility ­behind the yellow illumination of torch-fires. Strange images, weirdly sensuous, loomed up through haze of incense. Colossal figures, that at a distance assumed the form of elephants or garuda-birds, changed aspect when approached, and revealed as the secret of their design an interplaiting of the bodies of women; while one divinity rode all the monstrous allegories,—one divinity or demon, eternally the same in the repetition of the sculptor, universally visible as though self-multiplied. The huge pillars themselves were symbols, figures, carnalities; the orgiastic spirit of that worship lived and writhed in the contorted bronze of the lamps, the twisted gold of the cups, the chiselled marble of the tanks. . . .

  How far had he proceeded? He knew not; the journey among those countless columns, past those armies of petrified gods, down lanes of flickering lights, seemed longer than the voyage of a caravan, longer than his pilgrimage to China! But suddenly, inexplicably, there came a silence as of cemeteries; the living ocean seemed to have ebbed away from about him, to have been engulfed within abysses of subterranean architecture! He found himself alone in some strange crypt ­before a basin, shell-shaped and shallow, bearing in its centre a rounded column of less than ­human height, whose smooth and spherical summit was wreathed with ­flowers. Lamps similarly formed, and fed with oil of palm, hung above it. There was no ­other graven image, no visible divinity. Flowers of countless varieties lay heaped upon the pavement; they covered its surface like a carpet, thick, soft; they exhaled their ghosts beneath his feet. The perfume seemed to penetrate his brain,—a perfume sensuous, intoxicating, unholy; an unconquerable languor ­mastered his will, and he sank to rest upon the floral ­offerings.

  The sound of a tread, light as a whisper, approached through the heavy stillness, with a drowsy tinkling of pagals, a tintinnabulation of anklets. All suddenly he felt glide about his neck the tepid smoothness of a woman’s arm. She, she! his Illusion, his Temptation; but how transformed, transfigured!—preternatural in her loveliness, incomprehensible in her charm! Delicate as a jasmine-petal the cheek that touched his own; deep as night, sweet as summer, the eyes that watched him. “Heart’s-thief,” her ­flower-lips whispered,—“heart’s-thief, how have I sought for thee! How have I found thee! Sweets I bring thee, my beloved; lips and bosom; fruit and blossom. Hast thirst? Drink from the well of mine eyes! Wouldst sacrifice? I am thine altar! Wouldst pray? I am thy God!”

  Their lips touched; her kiss seemed to change the cells of his blood to flame. For a moment Illusion triumphed; Mara prevailed! . . . With a shock of resolve the dreamer awoke in the night,—­under the stars of the Chinese sky.

  Only a mockery of sleep! But the vow had been violated, the sacred purpose unfulfilled! Humiliated, penitent, but resolved, the as­cet­ic drew from his girdle a keen knife, and with unfaltering hands severed his eyelids from his eyes, and flung them from him. “O Thou Perfectly Awakened!” he prayed, “thy disciple hath not been overcome save through the feebleness of the body; and his vow hath been renewed. Here shall he
linger, without food or drink, ­until the moment of its fulfilment.” And ­having assumed the hieratic posture,—seated himself with his lower limbs folded beneath him, and the palms of his hands upward, the right upon the left, the left resting upon the sole of his upturned foot,—he resumed his meditation.

  Dawn blushed; day brightened. The sun shortened all the shadows of the land, and lengthened them again, and sank at last upon his funeral pyre of crimson-burning cloud. Night came and glittered and passed. But Mara had tempted in vain. This time the vow had been fulfilled, the holy purpose accomplished.

  And again the sun arose to fill the world with laughter of light; ­flowers opened their hearts to him; birds sang their ­morning hymn of fire worship; the deep forest trembled with delight; and far upon the plain, the eaves of many-storied temples and the peaked caps of the city-towers caught aureate glory. Strong in the holiness of his accomplished vow, the Indian pilgrim arose in the ­morning glow. He started for amazement as he lifted his hands to his eyes. What! was everything a dream? Impossible! Yet now his eyes felt no pain; n­either were they lidless; not even so much as one of their lashes was lacking. What marvel had been wrought? In vain he looked for the severed lids that he had flung upon the ground; they had mysteriously vanished. But lo! there where he had cast them two wondrous shrubs were growing, with dainty leaflets eyelid-shaped, and snowy buds just opening to the east.

  Then, by virtue of the supernatural power acquired in that mighty meditation, it was given the holy missionary to know the secret of that newly created plant,—the subtle virtue of its leaves. And he named it, in the language of the nation to whom he brought the Lotos of the Good Law, “TE;” and he spake to it, saying:—

  “Blessed be thou, sweet plant, beneficent, life-giving, formed by the spirit of virtuous resolve! Lo! the fame of thee shall yet spread unto the ends of the earth; and the perfume of thy life be borne unto the uttermost parts by all the winds of heaven! Verily, for all time to come men who drink of thy sap shall find such refreshment that weariness may not overcome them nor languor seize upon them;—n­either shall they know the confusion of drowsiness, nor any desire for slumber in the hour of duty or of prayer. Blessed be thou!”

  And still, as a mist of incense, as a smoke of universal sacrifice, perpetually ascends to heaven from all the lands of earth the pleasant vapor of TE, created for the refreshment of mankind by the power of a holy vow, the virtue of a pious atonement.

  It is written in the FONG-HO-CHIN-TCH’OUEN, that whenever the artist Thsang-kong was in doubt, he would look into the fire of the great oven in which his vases were baking, and question the Guardian-Spirit dwelling in the flame. And the Spirit of the Oven-fires so aided him with his counsels, that the porcelains made by Thsang-Kong were indeed finer and lovelier to look upon than all ­other porcelains. And they were baked in the years of Khang-hí,—sacredly called Jin Houang-tí.

  The Tale of the Porcelain-God

  * * *

  WHO first of men discovered the secret of the Kao-ling, of the Pe-tun-tse,—the bones and the flesh, the skeleton and the skin, of the beauteous Vase? Who first discovered the virtue of the curd-white clay? Who first prepared the ice-pure bricks of tun: the gathered-hoariness of mountains that have died for age; blanched dust of the rocky bones and the stony flesh of sun-seeking Giants that have ceased to be? Unto whom was it first given to discover the divine art of porcelain?

  Unto Pu, once a man, now a god, ­before whose snowy statues bow the myriad populations enrolled in the guilds of the potteries. But the place of his birth we know not; perhaps the tradition of it may have been effaced from remembrance by that awful war which in our own day consumed the lives of twenty millions of the Black-haired Race, and obliterated from the face of the world even the wonderful City of Porcelain itself,—the City of King-te-chin, that of old shone like a jewel of fire in the blue mountain-girdle of Feou-liang.

  ­Before his time indeed the Spirit of the Furnace had ­being; had issued from the Infinite Vitality; had ­become manifest as an emanation of the Supreme Tao. For Hoang-ti, nearly five thousand years ago, taught men to make good vessels of baked clay; and in his time all potters had learned to know the God of Oven-fires, and turned their wheels to the murmuring of prayer. But Hoang-ti had been gathered unto his ­fathers for thrice ten hundred years ­before that man was born destined by the ­Master of Heaven to ­become the Porcelain-God.

  And his divine ghost, ever hovering above the smoking and the toiling of the potteries, still gives power to the thought of the shaper, grace to the genius of the designer, luminosity to the touch of the enamellist. For by his heaven-taught wisdom was the art of porcelain created; by his inspiration were accomplished all the miracles of Thao-yu, maker of the Kia-yu-ki, and all the marvels made by those who followed ­after him;—

  All the azure porcelains called You-kouo-thien-tsing; brilliant as a mirror, thin as ­paper of rice, sonorous as the melodious stone Khing, and ­colored, in obedience to the mandate of the Emperor Chi-tsong, “blue as the sky is ­after rain, when viewed through the rifts of the clouds.” These were, indeed, the first of all porcelains, likewise called Tchai-yao, which no man, howsoever wicked, could find courage to break, for they charmed the eye like jewels of price;—

  And the Jou-yao, second in rank among all porcelains, sometimes mocking the aspect and the sonority of bronze, sometimes blue as summer ­waters, and deluding the sight with mucid appearance of thickly floating spawn of fish;—

  And the Kouan-yao, which are the Porcelains of Magistrates, and third in rank of merit among all wondrous porcelains, ­colored with ­­colors of the ­morning,—skyey blueness, with the rose of a great dawn blushing and bursting through it, and long-limbed marshbirds flying against the glow;

  Also the Ko-yao,—fourth in rank among perfect porcelains,—of fair, faint, changing ­­colors, like the body of a living fish, or made in the likeness of opal substance, milk mixed with fire; the work of Sing-I, elder of the immortal ­­br­­others Tchang;

  Also the Ting-yao,—fifth in rank among all perfect porcelains,—white as the mourning garments of a spouse bereaved, and beautiful with a trickling as of tears,—the porcelains sung of by the ­poet Son-tong-po;

  Also the porcelains called Pi-se-yao, whose ­­colors are called “hidden,” ­being alternately invisible and visible, like the tints of ice beneath the sun,—the porcelains celebrated by the far-famed singer Sin-in;

  Also the wondrous Chu-yao,—the pallid porcelains that utter a mournful cry when smitten,—the porcelains chanted of by the mighty chanter, Thou-chao-ling;

  Also the porcelains called Thsin-yao, white or blue, surface-wrinkled as the face of ­water by the fluttering of many fins. . . . And ye can see the fish!

  Also the vases called Tsi-hong-khi, red as sunset ­after a rain; and the T’o-t’ai-khi, fragile as the wings of the silkworm moth, lighter than the shell of an egg;

  Also the Kia-tsing,—fair cups pearl-white when empty, yet, by some incomprehensible witchcraft of construction, seeming to swarm with purple fish the moment they are filled with ­water;

  Also the porcelains called Yao-pien, whose tints are transmuted by the alchemy of fire; for they enter blood-crimson into the heat, and change there to lizard-green, and at last come forth azure as the cheek of the sky;

  Also the Ki-tcheou-yao, which are all violet as a summer’s night; and the Hing-yao that sparkle with the sparklings of mingled silver and snow;

  Also the Sieouen-yao,—some ruddy as iron in the furnace, some diaphanous and ruby-red, some granulated and yellow as the rind of an orange, some softly flushed as the skin of a peach;

  Also the Tsoui khi-yao, crackled and green as ancient ice is; and the Tchou-fou-yao, which are the Porcelains of Emperors, with dragons wriggling and snarling in gold; and those yao that are pink-ribbed and have their angles serrated as the claws of crabs are;

  Also the Ou-ni-yao, black as the pupil o
f the eye and as lustrous; and the Hou-tien-yao, darkly yellow as the faces of men of India and the Ou-kong-yao, whose ­color is the dead-gold of autumn-leaves;

  Also the Long-kang-yao, green as the seedling of a pea, but bearing also paintings of sun-silvered cloud, and of the Dragons of Heaven;

  Also the Tching-hoa-yao,—pictured with the amber bloom of grapes and the verdure of vine-leaves and the blossoming of poppies, or decorated in relief with figures of fighting crickets;

  Also the Khang-hi-nien-ts’ang-yao, celestial azure sown with star-dust of gold; and the Khien-long-nien-thang-yao, splendid in sable and silver as a fervid night that is flashed with lightnings.

  Not indeed the Long-Ouang-yao,—painted with the lascivious Pi-hi, with the obscene Nan-niu-ssé-sie, with the shameful Tchun-hoa, or “Pictures of Spring:” abominations created by command of the wicked Emperor Mou-tsong, though the Spirit of the Furnace hid his face and fled away;

  But all ­other vases of startling form and substance, magically articulated, and ornamented with figures in relief, in cameo, in transparency,—the vases with orifices belled like the cups of ­flowers, or cleft like the bills of birds, or fanged like the jaws of serpents, or pink-lipped as the mouth of a girl; the vases flesh-­colored and purple-veined and dimpled, with ears and with earrings; the vases in likeness of mushrooms, of lotos-­flowers, of lizards, of horse-footed dragons woman-faced; the vases strangely translucid, that simulate the white glimmering of grains of prepared rice, that counterfeit the vapory lace-work of frost, that imitate the efflorescences of coral;—