CONTENTS OF VOLUME XI ANCIENT CHINA II. THE SHIH KING, or Ancient Poetry (1700-600 B.C.) 119 Part I.-Songs of the Various States. Part II.-Songs for the Lesser Festivals . 269 V ILLUSTRATIONS IN VOLUME XI FACING PAGE The Chinese Buddha (a sculptured Buddha of the year Frontispiece 96 256 The God of Fire (an ancient Chinese sculpture) Chinese Civil Service Examinations (the twelve thousand cells for the candidates in Canton) The Ancient Pagoda of Soo-Chow (a temple sixteen hundred years old, or older, devoted to Confucianism). 352 SACRED BOOKS AND EARLY LITERATURE OF CHINA INTRODUCTION HOW CONFUCIUS SAVED AN ANCIENT CIVILIZATION CHINA has been aptly called "the treasure-house of old religions." This is because Chinese thought is so calmly meditative that there is no record of any religious sect having been driven from the land by persecution. Sects have occasionally been persecuted, but only when they became politically dangerous. The general tolerance, and even welcoming, of new religious ideas has been such that, when China was opened to the world less than a century ago, we found that Christian sects had persisted there through all the Dark Ages of Europe, and that Jewish communities were still existing, the date of whose coming into the land was lost in a remote antiquity. Mohammedanism is also established in China, as is many another less-known creed. Chiefly, however, the land and its people are given over to three faiths, often called the THREE GREAT RELIGIONS of China. These are Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. These three faiths are not mutually exclusive. Indeed it is characteristic of the national attitude of easy tolerance that many a Chinaman professes himself a believer in all three. He gathers his ideas of a future life from Buddhism, takes his moral precepts for the present world from Confucianism, and soothes his superstitious fears, his yearnings for the mystic, with Taoism. How Buddhism came to China |