China and the West

Pound, Ezra. Immediate need of Confucius [ID D29172]. [Ta Hio = Da xue].
In considering a value already age-old, and never to end while men are, I prefer not to write 'to the modern world'. The Ta Hio stands, and the commentator were better advised to sweep a few leaves from the temple steps. This is no shrine for the hurried tourist or for the conductor with: 'One moment, and now for the alligator tanks so that we can catch the Bombay Express at 8.47'.
Dante for a reason wrote De Vulgari Eloquio—On the Common Tongue—and in each age there is need to write De Vulgari Eloquio, that is, to insist on seeing the words daily in use and to know the why of their usage.
No man has ever known enough about words. The greatest teachers have been content to use a few of them justly.
If my version of the Ta Hio is the most valuable work I have done in three decades I can only wait for the reader to see it. And for each to discover its 'value' to the 'modem world' for himself.
Mr. S.V.V. ([The Aryan Path, December 1936) has indicated the parallels in Indian teaching, but the Western reader will first see the antithesis to the general impression of Indian thought now clouding Occidental attention. This cloud exists, and until some light or lightning disrupts it, many of the better minds in the West will be suspicious of all Eastern teaching.
It is 'our' impression that an Indian begins all talk with an allusion to the Infinite and that the Ultimate Unity appears four times on every Indian page.
I am not saying what ought to be. I am not expounding Indian thought, but indicating a misapprehension. It is in the opinion of the hard-headed, as distinct from the bone-headed, West that Westerners who are drawn to Indian thought are Westerners in search of an escape mechanism, Westerners who dare face neither the rigours of mediaeval dialectic nor the concrete and often exhausting detail of the twentieth-century material sciences.
Writing, which is communications service, should be held distinct from the production of merchandise for the book trade. And the
measure of communication was defined by Leo Frobenius when he said:
'It is not what a man says but the part of it which his auditor considers important that determines the amount of the communication'.
In considering the Occident the Oriental should allow for a fact that I have not yet seen printed. Western contact with the Far East was made in an era of Western degradation. American contact with Japan was forced in the very middle of 'the century of usury'. Western ethics were a consummate filth in the middle of the last century.
You can probably date any Western work of art by reference to the ethical estimate of usury prevalent at the time of that work’s composi¬tion; the greater the component of tolerance for usury the more blobby and messy the work of art. The kind of thought which distin-guishes good from evil, down into the details of commerce, rises into the quality of line in paintings and into the clear definition of the word written.
If the editors complain that I am not confining my essay to Confucius, I reply that I am writing on the 'need for Confucius'. I am trying to diagnose Western disease. Western disease has raged for over two centuries. Western disease shows in sixty per cent racket on ink money. That is a symptom of moral obtuseness.
The Oriental looking at the West should try more often to look at the total West over a longer period than is usually drawn to his attention.
For over a thousand years the acute intellectual labour of Europe was done inside the Catholic Church. The readers of The Aryan Path (December 1936) were reminded a few months ago that Scotus Erigena was a layman. A 'movement' or an institution lives while it searches for truth. It dies with its own curiosity. Vide the death of Moslem civilisation. Vide the very rapid withering of Marxist determinism. Yeats burbles when he talks of 'withering into the truth'. You wither into non-curiosity.
Catholicism led Europe as long as Erigena, Grosseteste and their fellows struggled for definitions of words.
Today the whole Occident is bathed daily in mental sewage, that is, the 'morning paper' in ten millions of copies rouses the Western brain daily. Bunkus is called a philosopher, Puley an economist, and a hundred lesser vermin swarm daily over acres of print.
Ex diffinientium cognitione diffiniti resultat cognito - 'KnowIedge of a definite thing comes from a knowledge of things defined', wrote Dante, rubbing it in. You can't know a canzone, which is a structure of strophes, until you know strophes.
'Man triplex, seeks the useful, this in common with vegetables; the delectable, in common with animals; the hmestum; and here he is
alone; vel angelicae naturae sociatur'.
This kind of dissociation and tidiness is 'mediaeval'.
When the experimental method came into material science giving a defined knowledge in realms whereto verbal distinctions had not then penetrated, and where they probably never will penetrate, the Occident lost the habit of verbal definition.
The Church had lost its faith anyhow, and mess, unholy and slithering mess, supervened. Curiosity deserted almost all realms save those of physiology, chemistry and kindred material sciences.
A tolerance of the most ungodly indistinctness supervened. The life of Occidental mind fell apart into progressively stupider and still more stupid segregations. The Church of England for example remained a bulwark of usury and/or a concatenation of sinecures, for the holding whereof neither courage, character nor intelligence was required or even wanted.
Hence (leaping over a certain amount of barbed wire, and intermediary gradations), hence the Western need of Confucius, and specifically of the Ta Hio, and more specifically of the first chapter of the Ta Hio; which you may treat as a mantram, or as a mantram reinforced, a mantram elaborated so that the meditation may gradually be con-centrated into contemplation. (Keeping those two grades of life separate as they are defined in the Benjamin Minor of R. St. Victor.)
There is respectable Western thought. There is Western thought that conforms to Confucius just as S.V.V. in December reminded you that there is in Indian Scripture a stress on Confucian 'self-examination etc., with emphasis on action'. Yet I fail to understand S.V.V. when he adds 'without concern for its fruits'. This phrase of his seems to me capable of grave misinterpretation. Does he mean 'profits'? Does he mean 'material profits'?
In any case the need is a matter of emphasis. We in the West need to begin with the first chapter of the Ta Hio, not merely to grant a casual admission of it in some out-house of our ethics or of our speculations.
There is nothing in this chapter that destroys the best that has been thought in the Occident. The Occident has already done its apparent utmost to destroy the best Western perceptions. Official Christianity is a sink. Catholicism reached nadir, let us say, with Antonelli in the eighteen hundred and fifties. It has started a new ascension with the encyclicals, Rerum Novarum and Quadrigesimo Anno. But the whole of Western idealism is a jungle. Christian theology is a jungle. To think through it, to reduce it to some semblance of order, there is no better axe than the Ta Hio.
I, personally, want a revision of the trial of Scotus Erigena. If 'authority comes from right reason' the shindy between Leibniz and Bossuet was unnecessary.
Ernest Fenollosa emphasised a difference between the approach of logic and that of science. Confucius left his record in ideogram. I do not wish to confuse the ideogramic method with the specific and basic teaching of the Ta Hio, first chapter.
There are here two related matters. The good scholastic (mediaeval) or good canonist recognised the limits of knowledge transmissible by verbal definitions:
Scientes quia rationale animal homo est, et quia sensibilis anima et corpus est animal, et igiwrantes de hac anima quid ea sit, vel de ipso corpore, perfectam hominis cognitionem habere non possumus; quia cognitionis perfectio uniuscuiusque terminatur ad ultima elementa.
[Knowing because man is a rational animal, and because a sensible soul and body is animal, and ignorant what this soul is, or what this body is, we cannot have complete (perfect) cognition of man, because the completeness of cognition of anything in particular ends with the ultimate element.]
Fenollosa accented the Western need of ideogramic thinking. Get your 'red' down to rose, rust, cherry, if you want to know what you are talking about. We have too much of this talk about vibrations and infinites.
There is here a common element with the Confucian method of getting in to one's own 'intentions'.
Naturally there is nothing in this which is hostile to Dante's concept of the 'directio voluntatis'. There exists passage after passage in our serious mediaeval thinkers which contains the terms 'virtu', virtus, with vivid and dynamic meaning. But it is precisely the land of thought that is now atrophied in the Occident. This is precisely how we do nut now think.
It is for these values that we have need of Ta Hio, and as S.V.V., approaching the work from so different a background, agrees, 'here is a very treasury of wisdom'.
S.V.V. did not, I take it, awaken to consciousness in McKinley's America, his early boyhood was not adorned with the bustuous noises of Kipling and the first Mr. Roosevelt. Apparently the Ta Hio offers us a meeting-place, a field of agreement.
In so far as ‘at the centre of every movement for order or recon¬struction in China you will find a Confucian’ (this referring to the procession of centuries) in so far as my own knowledge of Kung has come via Tokio, there appears to be here a common field not only for men of Bombay and London, but for pilgrims from an even wider circumference. To my mind there is need, very great need of such common locus of mutual comprehension.
The late A.R. Orage claimed to have read the Mahabharata. Very few Occidentals can read it. It is manifestly not the possible meeting ground for Eastern and Western man in our era.
Suma Gengi has just been televisioned from London. The news reaches me between one page and another of this essay. There are common denominators. There are points and lines wherein the East can make contact with us Occidentals.
But the 'need of Confucius'. Let me try to get this as clear as possible. A 'need' implies a lack, a sick man has 'need'. Something he has not. Kung as medicine?
In every cranny of the West there is mildew of books that start from nowhere. There is a marasmus of books that start 'treating of this, that and the other' without defining their terminology, let alone their terms, or circle, of reference. A thousand infernal self-styled economists start off without even defining 'money' (which is a measured claim, transferable from any one to any one else, and which does not bear interest as does a bond or a share-certificate).
I take that as example. These filthy writers then go on to muddle their readers with discussion of 'systems' of inflation, of cancellation, of credit problems. And naturally their work is useless and merely spreads ignorance. Think, gentle reader, if the greasy fog in so concrete a science as economics is thus dense, what density is it likely to attain in metaphysics. Where is ethical discrimination to end or begin among us?
If only for the sake of understanding and valuating our own European past, we have need of the Master Kung.
And that is by no means our whole need. The fact that we have such a past, is but an encouragement. It is perhaps but a tentative reassurance that we have a chance of understanding part of die Orient.
The 'value' of Confucius to the Modern World is not, I think we agree, limited to medicinal value for the Occident. There is visible and raging need of the To Hio in barbarous countries like Spain and Russia, but above all questions of emergency, of hypodermic injection or strait-jacket for fever patients and lunatics, there is also a question of milder and continuous hygiene.
No one has ever yet exhausted the wisdom of the forty-six ideograms of the first chapter. No one has ever yet attained so complete a wisdom that he can find no further nutriment in this mantram. And no one, least of all a twentieth-century American with only a superficial acquaintance with Oriental intuition and language, should aspire to emit the 'last word' on this subject. I certainly cannot condense the Ta Hio. I have tried to present as much of it as I understand, free from needless clutteration of dead verbiage.
I am ready to wrestle in friendly manner over the words used even by S.V.V., but such contest would at this point obscure my main meaning. I hope some day to see a proper bilingual text, each ideogram with full explanation so that the American reader may have not merely the one side of the meaning which seems to one translator most imperative in a given passage, but one full meaning held in such restraint that a hierarchy of imperatives be not lost.
In the Dantescan symbol for the universe truth is not lost with velocity. An age-old intelligence is not lost in an era of speed. We are bedevilled with false diagnoses. We are obfuscated with the noise of those who attribute all troubles to irrelevant symptoms of evil. We are oppressed by powerful persons who lie, who have no curiosity, who smear the world and their high offices with Ersatz sincerity. His grace the Wubbok of the Wok dare not investigate this, that and the other,
and so forth Neither does so-and-so nor his colleague (protected by libel laws) dare read the Ta Hio.
Name, nomen, cognomen etc., dare not be left alone in a lighted room with this document. They cannot face the forty-six characters in the solitude of their library. All this testifies to the strength of the chapter and to their need of it. Men suffer malnutrition by millions because their overlords dare not read the Ta Hio.