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Now how am I to know whether I was then, Chwangtse dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am Chwang?" * Which, like nearly all the other passages from him in this lecture, is quoted from Dr. H. A. Giles's Chinese Literature, in the Literatures of the World series; New York, Appleton. For which reason he is, says Dr.
"Oh hang your Confucius!" thinks Chwang the Mystic; "let us have a little of the silence and splendor of the Within!" "It was the time of the autumn floods. Every stream poured into the river, which swelled in its turbid course. The banks were so far apart that from one to the other you could not tell a cow from a horse.
'I too will wag my tail in the mud!" Well; so much for Butterfly; now for Chwang and to introduce you to some of his real thought and teaching. You will not have shot so wide of the mark as to see in his story of the skull traces of pessimism: Chwantse had none of it; he was a very happy fellow; like the policeman in the poem, ".....a merry genial wag Who loved a mad conceit."
Giles, known to this day as "Butterfly Chwang"; and the name is not all inappropriate. He flits from fun to philosophy, and from philosoply to fun, as if they were dark rose and laughing pansy; when he has you in the gravest depths of wisdom and metaphysic, he will not be content till with a flirt of his wings and an aspect gravely solemn he has you in fits of laughter again.
All these ideas are a natural growth from the teachings of Laotse; but Butterfly Chwang, in working them out and stating them so brilliantly, did an inestimable service to the ages that were to come. Laotse's Blue Pearl was already shining into poetry. The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain.
Watters, Yüan Chwang, I. pp. 204 ff. J.R.A.S. 1909, p. 1056, 1912, p. 114. I. p. 203. The period 1-100 is "the one hundred years," 101-200 "the two hundred years" and so on. See B.E.F.E.O. 1911, 356. But it must be remembered that the date of the Buddha's death is not yet certain. It is worth noting that Hsüan Chuang says Asoka lived one hundred years after the Buddha's death.
We do not know what happened when Laotse and Confucius met; but I suspect it was very like what happened when Mr. Judge met Madame Blavatsky. But Butterfly Chwang, the rascal, undertook to let us know; and wrote it out in full. He knew well enough what would happen if he met Mencius; and took that as his model. He wanted Mencius to know it too.
See for the traditions Watters on Yüan Chwang, II. 102-4 and Takakusu in J.R.A.S. 1905, p. 53 who quotes the Chinese Samyukta-ratna-piṭaka-sûtra and the Record of Indian Patriarchs. The Chinese list of Patriarchs is compatible with the view that Aśvaghosha was alive about 125 A.D. for he was the twelfth Patriarch and Bodhidharma the twenty-eighth visited China in 520.
The Andhra kings who reigned from about 240 B.C. to 225 A.D. all claimed to belong to the Śâtavâhana dynasty. See Grünwedel, Mythologie, p. 34 and notes. Polemics against various Hinayanist sects are ascribed to him. Vincent Smith in Early History of India, third edition, pp. 328-334. Winternitz, Ges. Ind. Lit. II. i. p. 256. Watters, Yüan Chwang, I. pp. 210, 355-359. Taranâtha, chap.
The great lack in him is his failure to appreciate Confucius; and to explain that, before I go further with Butterfly Chwang, I shall take a glance at the times he lived in. They were out of joint when Confucius came; they were a couple of centuries more so now.
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