KongFuShi, Lao Tse & Links to Emperors: Far Out!


The gist
of the teaching of Confucius
was the way of the noble
or aristocratic man.

He was
concerned with personal conduct
as much as Gautama was concerned with the peace
of self-forgetfulness
and the Greek with
external knowledge and the Jew
with righteousness
...

He was
the most public-minded of all great teachers.
He was supremely concerned by the confusion and miseries of the world,
and he wanted to maken men noble in order to bring about
a noble
world!

He sought
to regulate conduct
to an extraordinary extent;
to provide sound rules for every occasion of life.
A polite, public-spirited gentleman,
rather sternly self-disciplined,
was the ideal he found already developing
in the northern Chinese world
and one to which he gave
a permanent
form.

~*~

The teaching of LAO TSE,
who was for a long time in charge of the imperial library
of the Chow dynasty,
was much more mystical and vague and elusive than that of Confucius.
HE seems to have preached a stoical indiffernece to the pleasures
and powers of the world
and a return to an imaginary
simple life of the
past.
HE left writings
very contracted in style and very obscure.
HE wrote in
riddles ...

After
his death his teachings,
like the teachings of Gautama Buddha,
were corrupted and overlaid by legends and had the most complex
and extraordinary observances and superstitious ideas
grafted upon
them.

In China
just as in India
primordial ideas of magic and monstrous legends out of the childish past
of our race struggled against the new thinking in the world
and succeeding in plastering it over with grotesque,
irrational and antiquated
observances.





BOTH
Buddhism and Taoism
{which ascribes itself largely to Lao Tse}
as one still can find them in China even now,
are religions of monk, temple, priest and offering
of a type as ancient in form, if not in thought,
as the sacrificial religions of ancient Sumeria and Egypt.
But the teaching of Confucius was not so overlaid
because it was limited and plain and straightforward
and lent itself to no such
distortions ...

~*~

North China,
the China of the Hwang-Ho River,
became Confucian in thought and spirit;
south China,
Yangtse-Kiang China,
became
Taoist.

SINCE
THOSE DAYS
a conflict has always been traceable in Chinese affairs
between those two spirits, the spirit of the north and the spirit of the south,
between {in latter times} Peking and Nanking,
between the officialminded,
upright and conservative north,
and the sceptical, artistic, lax, and experimental
south .............

~*~

The divisions of China
in the Age of Confusion reached their worst stage in the sixth century B.C.
The Chow dynasty was so enfeebled and so discredited
that Lao Tse left the unhappy court and
retired into private life ...

~*~

THREE
nominally subordinate power
dominated the situation in those days.
TS'I and TS'IN, both northern powers, and CH'U,
which was an aggressive military power in the Yangtse valley.
At last Ts'i and Ts'in formed an alliance, subdued Ch'u and
imposed a general reaty of disarmament and peace
in China .............

The power of Ts'in became predominant.
FINALLY about the time of Ashoka in India
the Ts'in monarch seized upon the sacrificial vessels of the Chow emperor
and took over his sacrificial duties ........
HIS son, Shi-Hwang-ti {king in 246 B.C., emperor in 220 B.C.},
is called in the Chinese Chronicles:
"The First Universal Emperor!"

~*~

More fortunate than Alexander, Shi-Hwang-ti reigned for thirty-six years
as king and emperor ................
HIS energetic reign marks the beginning of a new era of unity and
properity for the Chinese people ........
He fought vigorously against the Hunnish invaders from the northern deserts, and he began that immense work {visible from space},
the Great Wall of China, to set a limit
to their incursions .....

~*~

{For more
KUNG FU &
TAO THE KING/I'ching
and so on, see for yourself among other myDi-stories
or read: 25 &
26-02-'04}
engel
06 jul 2004 - bewerkt op 11 jan 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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