The Crest-Wave Of Evolution Part 33

--"All this," said the Master, "is but the insignificant effect of an imperfect cause not complete in itself; it is but the shadow that follows the substance, and without real existence."

--"Then what," asked Wuti, "is real merit?"

--"It consists in purity and enlightenment, depth and completeness; in being wrapped in thought while surrounded by vacancy and stillness. Merit such as this cannot be won by worldly means."

Wuti, I suppose, found this kind of conversation difficult, and changed the subject,--with an exotericist's question. Said he:

--"Which is the most important of the holy doctrines?"

--"Where all is emptiness," said Bodhidharma, "nothing can be called holy."

A neat compliment, thinks good externalist Wuti, may improve things.--"If nothing can be called holy," says he, "who is it then that replies to me?"--holiness being a well-known characteristic of Bodhidharma himself. Who answered merely:

--"I do not know"; and went his ways. The final comment on the interview is given by a j.a.panese writer thus: "Can an elephant a.s.sociate with rabbits?"

For the rest, he spent the remaining years of his life in a cave-temple near Honanfu; and died after appointing a Chinaman his successor. Besides this small stock of facts there is a sort of legend; as for example:

After leaving the court of Lian, he crossed the Yangtse on a reed,--a theme in sacred art for thousands ever since,--and because of this miraculous crossing, is worshiped still by Yangtse boatman as their patron saint,--on the 28th of February in each year.--Once, as he sat in meditation, sleep overcame him; and on waking, that it might never happen again, he cut off his eyelids. But they fell on the earth, took root and sprouted; and the plant that grew from them was the first of all tea plants,--the symbol (and cause!) of eternal wakefulness. He is represented in the pictures as being footless; in his missionary travels, it is said, he wore away his feet. Thus where there is no known life-story, but all hidden away beneath a veil of esotericism and a Master's seclusion, myths have grown, and a story has been made.--He sat there in his cave silent through the years, they say; his face to the wall. Chih Kuang came to him, asking to be taught the doctrine; and for seven days stood in the snow at the cave-mouth, pleading and unnoticed. Then, to show that he was in earnest, he drew his sword and sliced off his left arm; and the Master called him in, and taught him.--Legend again, no doubt.

I imagine we can only judge of the man and of his astounding greatness by the greatness of the ages he illumined. It was as if he gave, in East Asia, the signal for nation after nation to leap into brilliant being. As for China, she became something new. The Age of Han had been golden, strong, manly, splendid.

But Han was like other empires here and there about the world.

Henceforth during her cycle China was to be as a light-giving body, a luminary wondrous in the firmament with a shining array of satellite kingdoms circling about her. Her own Teachers of a thousand years before had prepared the way for it: Confucius when he gave her stability; Laotse when he dropped the Blue Pearl into her fields. That Pearl had shone, heaven knows. Now Ta-mo, this Bodhidharma, breathed on it; and it glowed, and flame shot up from it, and grew, and foamed up beautiful, till it was a steady fountain of wonder-fire spraying the far stars.

Heretofore we have had a background of Taoist wizardry: in its highest aspects, Natural Magic,--the Keatsism of the waters and the wild, the wood, the field, and the mountain; henceforth there was to be a sacred something shining through and inmingled with this: the urge of the Divine Soul, the holy purposes of evolution. We may say this in Art, to take that one field alone, the most perfect, the fullest, the divinest, expression of Natural Magic

"whereof this world holds record"

was to come in the school of the Successors of Bodhidharma, directly the result of his 'Doctrine of the Heart.'

His school remained esoteric; but it was established, not among the secret mountains, nor in far unvisited regions; but there in the midst of imperial China: an extension of the Lodge, you may say, visible among men. Bodhidharma--are you to call him a _Messenger_ at all? He hardly came out into the world. It was known he was there; near by was the northern capital;--he taught disciples, when they had the strength to insist on it. Yet he dwelt aloof too, and wrapped about in the seclusion Masters must have, to carry on their spiritual work. One must suppose that Messengers of the Lodge had been very busy in China between 375 and 400, in the days of Tao Yuang-ming and Ku Kai-chih; that they had been very busy again in the last quarter of the fifth century; for it seems as if somehow or other there was such an atmosphere in China in the first half of the sixth century,--when ordinarily speaking the Doors of the Spiritual World would be shut,--that the Lodge was enabled partly to throw off its seclusion, and it was possible for at least one of its Members to take up his abode there, and to be known to the world as doing so.

A Messenger was sent out into the Chinese world from the School of Bodhidarma in 575: Chih-i, the founder of the Tientai School which was the spiritual force underlying the glory of the T'ang age; but he was a Messenger from the Dzyan School of Bodhidharma, not its Head. As far as I have been able to gather the threads of it, the line of those Heads, the Eastern Patriarchs, Bodhidharma's successors, was as follows: He died in or about 536, having appointed Chi Kuang to succeed him. Chi Kuang appointed Hui Ssu, called the "Chief of the Chunglung School of the followers of Bodhidharma." Hui Ssu died in 576, having sent out Chih-i into the world the year before, and having appointed Seng T'san to succeed him as head of Dzyan. Seng T'san died in 606; Tao Hsin, his successor, in 651; Hung Jen, his, in 675. Hung Jen, it appears, left two successors: Lu Hui-neng in the south, and Shen Hsiu in the north. It was the last quarter of the century: I imagine Lu Hui-neng was the Messenger sent out into the world; he spent the rest of his life teaching in the neighborhood of Canton; I imagine Shen Hsiu remained the Head of the Esoteric School. After that the line disappears; but the school attained its greatest influence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in China, and later still in j.a.pan.--All these were men living not quite in the world: it was known that they were there, and where they might be found. After Shen Hsiu, the last Northern Chinese Patriarch, the line probably withdrew to Tibet, which had lately come into relations with China, and where civilization had been established through the efforts of T'ang Taitsong. And now I will close this lecture with a saying of Shen Hsiu's which, in this modified form, is very familiar to all of you:

"Mind is like a mirror: it gathers dust while it reflects. It needs the gentle breezes of soul wisdom to brush away the dust of our illusions."

XXV. TOWARDS THE ISLANDS OF THE SUNSET

I had not thought to speak to you further about Celtic things.

But there is something in them here which concerns the spiritual history of the race; something to note, that may help us to understand the Great Plan. So, having beckoned you last week to the edge of the world and the fountain of dawn, and to see Bodhidharma standing there and evoking out of the deep a new order of ages, I find myself now lured by a westward trail, and must jump the width of two continents with you, and follow this track whither it leads: into the heart and flame of mysterious sunset. I hope, and the Gwerddonau Llion, the Green Spots of the Flood,--Makarn Nesoi, Tirnanogue, the Islands of the Blest.

We saw that while the great flow of the cycles from dying Rome ran in wave after wave eastward, there was a little backwash also, by reason of which almost the last glow we saw in the west was in fourth century Gaul, in the literary renaissance there which centers round the name of Ausonius. Now in later history we find every important French cycle tending to be followed by one in England: as Chaucer followed Jean de Meung; Shakespeare, Ronsard and the Pleyade; Dryden and Pope, Moliere and Racine; Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley, the Revolution. And we have seen China wake in 420; and we have noted, in the first of these lectures, the strange fact that whenever China 'gets busy,' we see a sort of reflexion of it among the Celts of the west. And we shall come presently to one of the most curious episodes in history,-- the Irish Renaissance in the sixth century: when all Europe else was dead and buried under night and confusion, and Ireland only, standing like a white pillar to the west, a blazing beacon of culture and creative genius. Now if you see a wave rising in fourth-century Gaul, and a wave breaking into glorious foam in sixth- and seventh-century Ireland,--what would you suspect?-- Why, naturally, that it was the same wave, and had flowed through the country that lies between: common sense would tell you to expect something of a Great Age in fifth- and early sixth-century Britain. And then comes tradition,--which is nine times out of ten the truest vehicle of history,--and shouts that your expectations are correct. For within this time came Arthur.

You know that in the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth published what he claimed to be a History of the Kings of Britain from the time of the coming there of the Trojans; and that it was he mainly who was responsible for floating the Arthurian Legend on to the wide waters of European literature. What percentage of history there may be in his book; how much of it he did not "make out of whole cloth," but founded on genuine Welsh or Breton traditions, is at present unknowable;--the presumption being that it is not much. But here is a curious fact that I only came on this week. The Romans were expelled from Britain in 410, remember. Arthur pa.s.sed from the world of mortals on the night after Camlan, that

"last weird battle in the west,"

when

"All day long the noise of battle rolled Among the mountains by the wintry sea, Till all King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord King Arthur."

Now the reign of Arthur may be supposed to represent the culmination of a national revival among the British Celts; and, --this is the detail I was pleased to come upon,--according to Geoffrey, Camlan was fought in 542;--a matter of thirteen decades (and two years) after the expulsion of the Romans. So that, I say, it looks as if there were some cyclic reality behind it.

Geoffrey of Monmouth did not know that such periods of national revival do last as a general rule for thirteen decades. He had some other guide to help him to that 542 for Camlan.

History knows practically nothing about fifth-century Britain.

It has been looking at it, since scientific methods came in, through Teutonic (including Anglo-Saxon) or Latin eyes; and seen very little indeed but confusion. Britain like the rest of the western empire, suffered the incursions of northern barbarism; but unlike most of the rest, it fought, and not as a piece of Rome, but as Celtic Britain;--fought, and would not compromise nor understand that it was defeated. It took eight centuries of war, and the loss of all England, and the loss of all Wales, to teach, it that lesson; and even then it was by no means sure.

In the twelve-eighties, when last Llewelyn went to war, he was still hoping, not to save Wales from the English, but to re-establish the Celtic Kingdom of Britain, Arthur's Empire, and to wear the high crown of London. The men that marched to Bosworth Field under Harri Tudor, two centuries later, went with the same curious hope and a.s.surance. It was a racial mold of mind, and one of extraordinary strength and persistence,--and one totally unjustified by facts in what were then the present and future.

But I do not believe such molds can ever be fudged up out of nothing: _ex nihilo nihil_ is as true here as elsewhere. So we must look for the cause and formation of this mold in the past.

Something, I think, within that first cycle of Welsh history must have impressed it on the Welsh mind: some national flowering; some great figure, one would say.--Arthur? He is like Vikramaditya of Ujjain; no one know whether he existed at all. There is no historic evidence; but rather the reverse. But then there are all those mountains and things named after him, "from the top of Pengwaed in Cornwall to the bottom of Dinsol in the North"; and, there is the Arthurian Legend, with such great vitality that it drove out the national Saxon legends from England, and quenched the Charlemagne legend in France, and made itself master of the mind of western Europe in the Middle Ages;-- I imagine there would have been an Arthur. Some chieftain who won battles; held up the Saxon advance for a long time, probably; and reminded his people of some ancient hero, or perhaps of a G.o.d Artaios, thought to be reincarnate in him.

Not that I believe that the mold of mind of which we have been speaking could have been created in the fifth and sixth centuries. Whoever Arthur was--the Arthur of that time,--however great and successful, he could but have reigned over some part of Britain, precariously resisting and checking the barbarians; but tradition tells of a very Chakravartin, swaying the western world. No; that mold certainly was a relic of the lost Celtic empire. It had grown dim during the Roman domination; but it had survived, and the coming in of the Crest-Wave had put new life into it. Nothing could have put new life into it, it seems to me, but such a coming in of the Crest-Wave,--to make it endure and inspire men as it did. I think it is certain the Crest-Wave, --a backwash of it, a little portion of it, but enough to make life hum and the age important,--was among the Welsh between 410 and 542. The wave was receding towards the Western Laya-Center; and gathered force as it rolled from Ausonius' Gaul to Taliesin's Wales, and from Tallesin's Wales to Ireland.

Let us look at the probabilities in Britain in 410, seeing what we can. Three hundred years of Roman rule had left that province, I cannot doubt, rich and populous, with agriculture in a better condition than it has been since:--remember the corn Julian brought thence to feed Gaul. We must think of a large population, Roman and Romanized, mixed of every race in the Roman world, in the cities; and of another population, still Celtic, in the mountains of northern England, in the western Scottish Lowlands, and especially in Wales. It was the former element, the cities, that appealed to Aetius for help against the Picts and Scots; the latter, dwelling in less accessible places, fought as soon as they felt the invaders' pressure. Wales itself had never been all held by the Romans. The legions had covered the south from Caerleon in Monmouthshire to Saint Davids in Penfro, a region held by Silures and Gaelic Celts. They had marched along the northern coast to the island of Mona, establishing, just as Edward the Conqueror did in his day, strongholds from which to dominate the dangerous mountains: these regions also were held by Gaels. But just south of those mountains, in what are now the counties of Meirionydd and Montgomery, there was a great piece of Wales which they seem never to have penetrated; and it was held by the Cymric Ordovices, Welsh, not Irish, by language.

About this time there was a great upheaval of the Irish; who conquered western Scotland, and established there sooner or later the Scottish kingdom of history. They also invaded Wales and England, and sent their fleets far and wide: they were the 'Picts and Scots' of the history-books. There seems also to have been an invasion and conquest of Wales, from the north, by the Welsh; who, joining forces with the Welsh Ordovices whom they found already in the unconquered un-Roman part, established in the course of time the kingdom and House of Cunedda, which reigned till the Edwardian Conquest. It is pretty safe to say that the Romanized cities and the Romanized population generally offered no great resistance to the Saxons; mixed with them fairly readily, and went to form perhaps the basis of the English race; that they lost their language and culture is due to the fact that they were cut off from the sources of these on the continent, and, being of an effete civilization, were far less in vigor than the Saxon incomers. And as we saw in the first of these lectures, there was probably a large Teutonic or Saxon element in Britain since before the days of Julius Caesar.

But there seems to have been a time during those thirteen decades that followed the eviction of the Romans, when the Celtic element, wakened to life and receiving an impulse from the Crest-Wave, caught up the sovereignty that the Romans had dropped, remembered its Ancient greatness, and nourished vigorous hopes.

To the Welsh mind, the age has appeared one of old unhappy far-off things,--unhappy, because of their tragic ending at Camlan;-- but grandiose. t.i.tanic vague figures loom up: Arthur, the type of all hero-kings; Taliesin, type of all prophet-bards; Merlin, type of magicians. Tennyson caught the spirit of it in the grand moments of the _Morte D'Arthur;_ and missed it by a thousand miles elsewhere in the _Idylls._ The spirit, the atmosphere, is that of a glory receding into the unknown and the West of Wonder; into Lyonnesse, into Avallon, into the Sunset Isles. There is a sense of being on the brink of the world; with the 'arm clothed in white samite' reaching in from a world beyond,--that Otherworld to which the wounded Arthur, barge-borne over the nightly waters by the Queens of Faerie, went to heal him of his wounds, and to await the cyclic hour for his retum. He is the symbol of--what shall we say?--civilization, culture, or the spiritual sources of these, the light that alone can keep them sweet and wholesome; that light has died from the broken Roman world, and pa.s.ses now west-ward through the Gates of the Sunset: through Wales, through Ireland, the Laya-Center; into the Hidden, the Place of the Spirit; into Avallon, which is Ynys Afallen, the 'Isle of Apple-trees';--whence to return in its time:--_Rex quondam, rexque futurus._

There is a poem by Myrddin Gwyllt, traditionally of the sixth century, about that Garth of Apple-trees; which he will have a secret place in the Woods of Celyddon, the Occult Land, and not an island in the sea at all; and in this poem it has always seemed to me that one gets a clue to the real and interesting things of history. He claims in it to be the last of the white-robed Guardians of the Sacred Tree, the fruit of which none of the black-robed,--no 'son of a monk,'--shall ever enjoy. There has been a battle, in which the true order of the world has gone down; but there Myrddin stays to guard the 'Tree' against the 'Woodmen,'--whom also he seems to identify with the 'black-robed' and the priests Myrddin Gwyllt, by the by, is one of the two figures in Welsh tradition who have combined to become the Merlin of European tradition; the other was Myrddin Emrys the magician. I take great risks, gentlemen but wish to give you a taste, as I think the sound of some lines from the original may, and doubt any translation can, of the old and haughty sense of mystery and grandeur embodied in the poem; because it is this feeling, perhaps the last echo of the Western Mysteries, that is so characteristic of the literature that claims to come down to us from this age:

Afallen beren, bren ailwyddfa, Cwn coed cylch ei gwraidd dywasG.o.dfa; A mi ddysgoganaf dyddiau etwa Medrawd ac Arthus modur tyrfa; Camlan darwerthin difiau yna; Namyn saith ni ddyraith o'r cymanfa.

Afallen bere, beraf ei haeron, A dyf yn argel yn argoed Celyddon; Cyt ceiser ofer fydd herwydd ei hafon, Yn y ddel Cadwaladr at gynadl Rhyd Theon, A Chynan yn erbyn cychwyn y Saeson.

Cymru a orfydd; cain fydd ei Dragon; Caffant pawb ei deithi; llawen fi Brython!

Caintor cyrn elwch cathl heddwch a hinon.

What it means appears to be something of this sort:

Sweet and beautiful Tree of the trees!

The Wood-dogs guard the circle of its roots; But I will foretell, a day shall be When Modred and Authur shall rush to the conflict; Again shall they come to the Battle at Camlan, And but seven men shall escape from that meeting.

Sweet Apple-tree, sweetest its fruitage!

It grows in secret in the Woods of Celyddon; In vain shall they seek it on the banks of its stream there, Till Cadwaladr shall come to Rhyd Theon, And Cynan, opposing the tumult of Saxons, Wales shall arise then; bright shall be her Dragon; All shall have their just reward; joy is me for the Brython!

The horns of joy shall sound then the song of peace and calmness....

The sweet fruits of the Tree, he says, are the "prisoners of words," (_carcharorion geirau_)--which is just what one would say, under a stress of inspiration, about the truths of the Secret Wisdom;--and they shall not be found, he says,--they shall be sought in vain,--until the _Maban Huan,_ the 'Child of the Sun,' shall come. The whole poem is exceedingly obscure; a hundred years ago, the wise men of Wales took it as meaning much what I think it means: the pa.s.sing of the real wisdom of the Mysteries,--of Neo-druidism,--away from the world and the knowledge of men, to a secret place where the Woodmen, the Black-robed, could not find to destroy it;--until, after ages, a Leader of the Hosts of Light should come--you see it is here Cadwaladr, but Cadwaladr simply means 'Battle-Leader,'

--and the age-old battle between light and darkness, Arthur and Modred, should be fought again, and this time won, and the Mysteries re-established.--If I have succeeded in conveying to you anything of the atmosphere of this poem, I have given you more or less that of most of the poetry attributed to this period; there is a large ma.s.s of it: some of the poems, like the long _G.o.dodin_ of Aneurin, merely telling of battles; others, like the splendid elegies of Llywarch Hen, being laments,--but with a marvelous haughty uplift to them; and others again, those attributed to Taliesin, strewn here and there with pa.s.sages that . . . move me strangely . . . and remind me (to borrow a leaf from the Imagists) of a shower of diamonds struck from some great rock of it; and of a sunset over purple mountains; and of the Mysteries of Antiquity; and of the Divine Human Soul. Much of this poetry is unintelligible; much of it undoubtedly of far later origin; and the names of Taliesin and Myrddin, all through the centuries spells for Celts to conjure with, are now the laughing-stock of a brand-new scholarship that has tidied them up into limbo in the usual way. It is what happens when you treat poetry with the brain-mind, instead of with the creative imagination G.o.d gave you to treat it with: when you dissect it, instead of feeding your soul with it. But this much is true, I think: out of this poetry, the occasional intelligible flashes of it, rings out a much greater note than any I know of in our Welsh literature since: a sense of much profounder, much less provincial things: the Grand Manner,--of which we have had echoes since, in the long centuries of our provincialism; but only I think echoes; --but you shall find something more than echoes of it, say in Llywarch Hen, in a sense of heroic uplift, of the t.i.tanic unconquerableness that is in the Soul;--and in Taliesin, in a sense of the wizardly all-pervadingness of that Soul in s.p.a.ce and time:

"I know the imagination of the oak-trees."

"Not of father and mother, When I became, My creator created me; But of nine-formed faculties, Of the Fruit of fruits, Of the fruit of primordial G.o.d; Of primroses and mountain flowers, Of the blooms of trees and shrubs, Of Earth, of an earthly course, When I became,-- Of the blooms of the nettle, Of the foam of the Ninth Wave.

I was enchanted by Math Before I became immortal.

I was enchanted by Gwydion, The purifier of Brython, Of Eurwys, of Euron, Of Euron, of Modron,-- Of Five Battalions of Initiates, High Teachers, the children of Math."

--Now Math--he was a famous wizard of old--means 'sort,' 'kind'; and so implies such ideas as 'differentiation,' 'heterogeneity.'

To say that you were enchanted by Math before you became immortal, is as much as to say that before the great illumination, the initiation, one is under the sway of this illusionary world of separatenesses;--as for being 'enchanted by Gwydion,' that name is, I suppose, etymologically the same as the Sanskrit _Vidya,_ or _Budha;_ he is the 'Purifier' of those 'Five Battalions of--_'Celfyddon,'_ the word is 'artists,' 'skillful ones'; but again I imagine, it is connected with the word _Celi,_ 'occult' or 'secret'; so that being 'enchanted by' him would mean simply, being initiated into the Occult Wisdom. It is difficult for a student of symbolism not to believe that there were Theosophical activities in fifth- and sixth-century Britain.