wandering with Truong Ngoc Hanh/The Masters

jean - jacques rousseau (1712-1778)...

Jean Jacque Rousseau was a multitalented author. He wrote many fiends during his lifetime. For example: Philosophical: Discours sur l'origine et les fondaments de l'integrite parmi les hommes, 1754; Le Contrat social,1762; Emile,1762; Novel: Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise, 1761; Autobiography : Les Confessions, written between 1764 and 1770.

Rousseau was the first... to believe - half unconsciously, perhaps, and yet with a profound conviction - that the individual thing in the world.

This belief, no doubt, would have arisen in Europe, in some way or other, if Rousseau had never lived; but it was he who clothed it with the splendour of genius; and by the passion of his utterance, sowed it far and wide in the hearts of men. In two directions his influence was enormous. His glowing conception of individual dignity and individual rights as adhering, not to a privileged few, but to the whole mass of humanity, seized upon the imagination of France, supplied a new and potent stimulus to the movement toward political change, and produced a deep effect upon the develo-ment of the Revolution. But it is in literature, and those emotions of real life which find their natural outlet in literature, that the influence of Rousseau's spirit may be most clearly seen.. A man's feelings are his very self, and it is around them that all that is noblest and profoundest in our literature seems naturally to centre. A great novelist is one who can penetrate and describe the feelings of others; a great poet is one who can invest his own with beauty and proclaim them to the world. We have come to set a value upon introspection which was quite unknown in the eighteenth century - unknown, that is, until Rousseau, in the most valuable and characteristic of his works, his Confessions, started the vast current in literature and in sentiment which is still flowing to-day..

anonymous

souvenirs de jeunesse

Extrait des "Confessions"

Je sentis avant de penser: c'est le sort commun de l'humanite. Je l'eprouvai plus qu'un autre. J'ignore ce que je fis jauqu'a cinq ou six ans; je ne sais comment j'appris a lire; je ne me souviens que mes premieres lectures et de leur effet sur moi: c'est le temps d'ou je date sans interruption la conscience de moi-meme. Ma mere avait laisse des romans. Nous nous mimes a les lire apres souper, mon pere et moi. Il n'etait question d'abord que de m'exercer a la lecture par les livres amusants; mais bientot l'interet devint si vif, que nous lisions tout a tout sans relache, et passions les nuits a cette occupation. Nous ne pouvions jamais quitter qu'a la fin du volume. Quelquefois mon pere, entendant le matin les hirondelles, disait tout honteux: Allons nous coucher; je suis plus enfant que toi.

En peu de temps j'acquis, par cette dangereuse methode, non seulement une extreme facilite a lire et a m'entendre, mais une intelligence unique a mon age sur les passions. Je n'avais aucune idee des choses, que tous les sentiments m'etaient deja connus. Je n'avais rien concu, j'avais tout senti. Ces emotions confuses, que j'eprouvais coup sur coup.'alteraient point la raison que je n'avais pas encore; mais elles m'en formerent une d'une autre trempe, et me donnerent de la vie humaine des notions bizarres et romantiques, dont l'experience et la reflexion n'ont jamais bien pu me guerir.

Les romans finirent avec l'ete 1719. L'hiver suivant, ce fut autre chose. La bibliotheque de ma mere epuisee, on eut recours a la portion de celle de son pere qui nous etait echue. Heureusement, il s'y trouva de bons livres, et cela ne prouvait guere etre autrement;cette bibliotheque ayant ete formee par un ministre, a la verite, etsavant meme, car c'etait la mode alors, mais homme de gout et d'esprit. L'Histoire de l'Eglise et de l'Empire, par Le Sueur, Le Discours de Bossuet, sur l'Histoire universelle, les Hommes illustres, de Plutarque; L'Historie de Venise,par Nani, les Metamorphses d'Ovide, La Bruyere, Les Mondes de Fontenelle, ses Dialogue des morts, et quelques tomes de Moliere, furent transportes dans le cabinet de mon pere, et je les lui lisais tous les jours, durant son travail. J'y pris un gout rare et peut-etre unique a cet age. Plutarque surtout devint ma lecture favorite. Le plaisir que je prenais a le relire sans cesse me guerit un peu des romans. De ces interessantes lectures, des entretiens qu'elles occasionnaient entre mon pere et moi, se forma cet esprit libre et republicain, ce caractere indomptable et fier, impatient et joug et de servitude, qui m'a tourmente qout le temps de ma vie dans les situations les moins propres a lui donner l

essor. Sans cesse occupe de Rome et d'Athenes, vivant pour ainsi dire avec leurs grands hommes, ne moi-meme citoyen d'une republique, et fils d'un pere dont l'amour de la patrie etait la pluys forte passion, je m'en enflammais a son exemple, je me croyais Grec ou Romain; je devenais le personnage dont je lisais la vie: le recit des traits de constance et d'intrepidite qui m'avaient frappe me rendait les yeux etincelants et la voix forte. Un jour que je racontais a table l'aventure de Scaevola, on fut effraye de me voir avancer et tenir la main sur un rechaud pour representer son action.

J'avais les defauts de mon age; j'etais babillard, gourmand, quelquefois menteur. J'aurais vole des fruits, des bonbons, de la mangeaille; mais jamais je n'ai pris plaisir a faire du mal, du degat, a charger les autres, a tourmenter de pauvres animaux.

Comment serais-je devenu mechant, quand je n'avais sous les yeux que des exemples de douceur, et autour de moi que les meilleures gens du monde? Mon pere, ma tante, ma mie, mes parents, nos amis, nos voisins, tout ce quim'environnait ne m'obeissait pas de la verite, mais m'aimait, et moi je les aimais de meme. Mes volontes etaient si peu excitees et si peu contrariees, qu'il ne me venait pas dans l'esprit d'en avoir. Je puis juger que jusqu'a mon asservissement sous un maitre, je n'ai pas su ce que c'etait qu'une is fantaisie. Hors le temps que je passais a lire ou ecrire aupres de mon pere, et celui ou ma vie me menait promener, j'etais toujours avec ma tante, a la voir border, a l'entendre chanter, assis ou debout a cote d'elle, et j'etais content. Son enjouement, sa douceur, sa figure agreable, m'ont laisse de si fortes impressions, que je voisencore son air, son regard, son attitude: je me souviens de ses petits propos caressants; je dirais comment elle etait vetue et coiffee, sans oublier les deux crochets que ses cheveux noirs faisaient sur ses tempes, selon la mode de ce temps-la.

Je suis persuade que je lui dois le gout ou plutot la passion pour la musique, qui ne s'est bien developpee en moi que longtemps apres. Elle savait une quantite prodigieuse d'airs et de chansons qu'ell chantait avec un filet de voix fort douce. La senerite d'ame de cette excellente fille eloignait d'elle et de tout ce qui l'environnait, la reverie de tristesse. L'attrait que son chant avait pour moi fut tel que non seulement plusieurs de ses chansons me sonttoujours restees dans la memoire, mais qu'il m'en revient meme, aujourd'hui que je l'ai perdue, qui, totalement oubliees depuis mon enfance, se retracent a mesure que je vieillis, avec un charme que je ne puis exprimer. Dirait-on que moi, vieux radoteur, ronge de soucis et de peines, je me surprends quelquefois a pleurer comme un enfant en marmottant ces petits airs d'une voix deja cassee et tremblante? Il y en un surtout qui m'est bien revenu tout entier quant a l'air; mais la seconde moiti des paroles s'est constamment refusee a tous mes efforts pour me rappeler, quoiqu'il m'en revienne confusement the rimes. Voice le commencement et ce que j'ai pu me rappeler du rest:

Tircis, je n'ose

Ecouter ton chalumeau

Sous l'ormeau.

Car on en cause

Deja dans notre hameau.

.........................................

....................... un berger

..................... s'engager,

.......................sans danger,

Et toujours l'epine est sous la rose.

Je cherche ou est le charme attendrissant que mon coeur trouve a cette chanson: c'est un caprice auquel je ne comprends rien; mais il m'est de toute impossibilite de la chanter jusqu'a la fin sans etre arrete par mes larmes. J'ai cent fois projete d'ecrire a Paris pour faire chercher le reste des paroles, si tant est que quelqu'un le connaisse encore. Mais je suis presque sur que le plaisir que je prends a me rappeler cet air s'evanouirait en partie, si j'avais la preuve que d'autres que ma pauvre tant Suson l'ont chante.

Telles furent les premieres affections de mon a la vie; ainsi commencait a se former ou a se montrer en moi ce coeur a la fois si fier et si tendre, ce caractere effemine, mais pourtantindomptable, qui, flottant toujours entre la faiblesse et le courage, entre la mollesse et la virtu, m'a jusqu'a bout mis en contradiction avec moi-meme, et a fait que l'abstinence et la jouissance, le plaisir et la sagesse, m'ont egalement echappe.

Ce train d'education fut interrompu par un accident dont les suites ont influe sur le reste de ma vie. Mon pere eut un demeleavec un M.Gautier, capitaine de France et apparente dans le Conseil. Ce Gautier, homme insolent et lache, saigna du nez, et pour se venger, accusa mon pere d'avoir mis l'epee a la main dans la ville. Mon pere, qu'on voulut envoyer en prison, s'obstinait a vouloir que, selon la loi, l'accusateur y entrat aussi bien que lui: n'ayant pu l'obtenir, il aima mieux sortir de Geneve, et s'expatrier pour le rest de sa vie, que de ceder sur un point ou l'honneur et la liberte lui paraissaient compromis.

Je restai sous la tutelle de mon oncle Bernard, alors employe aux fortifications de Geneve. Sa fille ainee etait morte, mais il avaitun fils de meme age que moi. Nous fumes mis ensemble a Bossey, en pension chez le ministre Lambercier, pour y apprendre avec le latin tout le menu fatras dont on l'accompagne sous le nom d'education.

Deux ans passes au village adoucirent un peu mon aprete romaine et me ramenerent a l'etat d'enfant. A geneve, ou l'on ne m'imposait amusement; a Bossey, le travail me fit aimet les jeux qui lui servaient de relache. La campagne etait pour moi si nouvelle, que je ne pouvais me lasser d'em jouir. Je pris pour elle un gout si vif, qu'il n'a jamais pu s'eteindre.

M.Lambercier etait un homme fort raisonnable, qui, sans negliger notre instruction, ne nous chargeait point de devoirs extremes. La preuve qu'il s'y prenait bien est que, malgre mon averion pour la gene, je ne me suis jamais rappele avec degout mes heures d'etude. et que, si je n'appris pas de lui beaucoup de choses, ce que j'appris je l'appris sans peine et n'en ai rien oublie.

La simplicite de cette vie champetre me fitun bien d'un prix inestimable en ouvrant mon coeur a l'amitie. Jusqu' alors je n'avais connu que des sentiments eleves, mais imaginaires. L' habitude de vivre ensemble dans un etat apisible m'unit tendrement a mon cousin Bernard. En peu de temps j'eus pour lui des sentiments plus affectueux que ceux que j'avais eus pour mon frere, et qui ne se sont jamais effaces. C'etait un grand garcon frot efflanque, fort fluet, aussi doux d'esprit que faible de corps, et qui n'abusait pas trop de la predilection qu'on avait pour lui dans la maison comme fils de mon tuteur. Nos travaux, nos amusements, nos gouts, etaient les memes; nous etions seuls, nous etions de meme age, chacun des deux avait besoin d'un camarade; nous separer etait, en quelque sorte, nous aneantir. Quoique nous eussions peu d'occasions de faire preuve de notre attachement l'un pour l'autre, il etait extreme, et non seulement nous ne pouvions vivre un instant separes, mais nous n'imaginions que nous puissions jamais l'etre. Dans nos etudes, je lui souffrais sa lecon quand il hesitait; quand mon theme etait fait, je l'aidais a faire le sien, et dans nos amusements, mon gout plus actif lui servait toujours de guide. Enfin nos deux caracteres s'accordaient si bien, et l'amitie qui nous unissait etait si vraie, que, dans plus de cinq ans que nous fumes presque inseparables, tant a Bossey qu'a geneve, nous nous battimes souvent, je l'avoue, mais jamais on n'eut besoin de nous separer, jamais une seule fois nous ne portames l'un contre l'autre aucune accusation. Ces remarques sont, si l'on veut, pueriles, mais il en resulte pourtant un exemple peut etre unique depuis qu'il existe des enfants.

La maniere dont je vivais a Bossey me convenait si bien, qu'il ne lui a manque que de durer plus longtemps pour fixer absolument mon caractere. Les sentiments tendres, affectuex, paisible, en faisant le fond. Je crois que jamais individu de notre espece n'eut naturellement moins de vanite que moi. J'etais doux;mon cousin l'etait; ceux qui nous gouvernaient l'etaient eux-memes. Pendantdeux ans entiers je ne fus ni temoin ni victime d'un sentiment violent. Tout nourissait dans mon coeur les dispositions qu'il recut de la nature. Je ne connaissais rien d'aussi charmant que de voir tout le monde content de moi et de toute chose. Je me souviendrai toujours qu'au temple, repondant au catechisme, rien ne me troublait plus, quand il m'arrivait d'hesiter, que de voir sur le visage de Mlle Lambercier des masques d'inquietude et de la peine. Cela seul m'affligeait plus que la honte de manquer en public, qui m'affectait pourtant extremement; car quoique peu sensible aux louanges, je le fus toujours beaucoup a la honte, et je puis dire ici que l'atente des reprimandes de Mlle Lambercier me donnait moins d'alarmes que la crainte de la chagriner.

shakespeare...

It is sometimes forgotten that William Shakespeare, whose work inpires millions of scolarly words each year, was the most popular dramatist of his time, not least with the undereducated classes. His vision is immense.. His heroes are men of action like Henry V, introspective philosophers like Hamlet, romantic and passionate lower like Romeo, over ambitious noblemen like Macbeth. This fact is important for explaining much of nature in his art and also about his continuing writing position of the most famous writers in the world. His plots ... magical, romantic, realistic, or tragic, are the combinaison of these elements:... His characters exist in the whole real world, at once, then in the shadowy world with the imagination of the creator! Shakespeare's people, though indisputably of their time and place, wether Venetian clown or Danish prince, are recognizably in the literature of the XVI th and XVII th centuaries. But most importantly they embody a spirit of humanity which has remained essentially unchanged to the present day. Nowaday, no one can write as Shakespeare wrote, but everyone may recognize the quality of his world without difficulty.

The most advantages as a writer did have Shakespeare. He is the most sensitive playwright who ever lived, but his sensitivity was tempered by the comparative poverty of his childhood, and his struggle to find the place in the theatre. Althought we know very little for his early life, but we know sur, he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, that his father, once a man of substance and position in town, lost his money and went into debt. And that as result, Shakespeare was taken away from school and put to work. He married Anne Hathaway, a woman eight years older than himself, in 1582, when he was 18. They had a child in 1583, and twins in 1585, ...in the same year, it is probable that they moved to London, where Shakespeare first started working in the theatre with the job- so tradition has it- of holding horses for twopence a day.

There are no records about this period of his life, but an established playwright, George Peele, by 1592, sounded a note of alarm about a young-actor-playwright who could beat the recognized playwrights at their own game. He called him a "Johannes Fac Totum", or ..a jack-of-all-trades, which suggested that Shakespeare's main task in his company was to rewrite old plays for more up-to-date presentation.

But truly, he did not rework old dramas; it is from this early period that his first plays probably date.. Love's Labour's Lost, The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, the three parts of Henry VI, Andronicus and Richard III. The plays above are simply those which most agree were written first. Not surprisingly, none of these plays constitutes his best work, or even approaches it, with the exception of Richard III Even when he died leaving only these plays, he would have been a major Elizabethan dramatist. The most impressive about the early plays is that they are full of ideas , thematic and stylistic., which were to be developed later. Love's Labour'sLost and The Comedy of Errors are pure comedies, but they are full of wit, surprise and delightful invention...

Richard II , which tells of the Duke of Gloucester's usurpation of power by murder, marks a transitionary period in Shakespeare's works : here we see the first emergence of the Heros of Shakespeare. In this case, a villain, sly, clever and unscrupulous, yet not entirely unsympathetic. He points the way to more complex characters like... Macbeth, ...Iago of Othello, and... Edmund of King Lear. These later villains reveal their vices and their virtues naturally as the play unfolds. Gloucester, more crudely, is made to reveal himself in an introductory speech:

'... Why I, in this weak, piping time of peace,

Have no delight to pass away the time,

Unless to spy my shadow in the sun,

And descant on mine own deformity:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,

To entertain these fair, well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous.....'

It is generally thought that Shakespeare wrote his two long poems " Venus and Adonis " and " The Rape of Lucrece ". round about 1592, as well as the sonnets and other smaller poems. We must understand that , different with others artists with expression love for the lower by painting or writing letter, Shakespeare exprimed by Sonnet in this case. This break from being a popular and reasonably sucessful young playwright to becomng a private poet is surprising when the circumstances of his life are taken into account. The plague hit London in this year. To escape it, Shakespeare probably joined a band of travelling players, presenting old tragedies and farces to audiences in the provinces. From being rewriter of plays for a cultured audience ,

Shakespeare became merely another actor ( and not, it is thought, a very good one ), playing in stock favorite pieces which the country audiences wanted to see in their unchanged state. So, he found a patron - a young Earl of Southhampton - and wrote the two long poems, and probably the sonnets for him.. His sonnets, "the master of all trades" are among the most beautiful poems in English. Some are advised to the young man, some other to the famous " Dark Lady". Their identity remains a mystery. Some are reproachful, some full of gratitude, some melancholy, some gay. Like the other good sonnets, they are delicate but not flimsy, and are never simply fanciful. Shakespeare was too much of a realist for that. At time, he is deliberately anti-romantic. satirizing the high flown sonnets of his contemporaries :

My mistress'eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than the lip'red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; *

If hairs be wires, blackwires grow on her head.

I have seen rosesdamsk'd, red and white,

But no much roses see I in her cheeks...**

( Sonnet 130)

( Note: * Oh!... genial playwright!...

It is assumed that Shakespeare returned to London and to the theatre about 1594. The period from that year to 1602, when Hamlet was completed, is knowns as his " middle period" and refers both to his life and to his work. It is to this period, that the bulk of his plays have been ascribed.

These are in tentative chronological order: Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, A Midsummer Night's dream, King John, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, Henry IV, part I and II , Henry V, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, Julius Cesar, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Alls' Well That Ends Well, Trilus and Cessida, Mesure for Mesure and Hamlet..

Though bracketed between Romeo and Juliet , his first tragedy, and Hamlet , his first great tragedy, the period is best remembered and best loved for its comedies. Most popular of all the Shakespeare's time, though less so now, were the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V. The reason was the character of Prince Hal ( King Henry V of the last play ) and his dronking companion, Sir John Falstaff. The combination of the passionate, wilful, libertine prince and the gross, good-humoured, drunken old knight captured the imagination of Elizabethan audiences. Here is Falstaff, looking forward to the time when his" Hal" shall be King....

" Mary, then, sweet wag, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night' body be called thieves of the day's beauty; let us be Diana' foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon; and let men say, we be men of good goverment , being governed as the sea is, by our noble mistress th moon, under whose countenance we steal..."

But this riotous companionship was doomed to end when the prince became king, and Falstaff does not appear in Henry V ( though Shakespeare was later force to resurrect him, by popular and royal acclaim, in The Merry Wives of Windsor ) except in the speeches of his friends, who report him dying of a broken heart. For Henry could no longer afford to waste his nights in drinking - he became the proud king ( Henry V) who led his country to victory in France.

Most popular now are the romantic comedies, plays like A midsummer Night's Dream, As you like It, and Twelfth Night. The first of these displays Shakespeare in his most magical mood; the wood in which the action takes place is as full of surprises and as magical as a poet's mind itself - it is the kind of light hearted prototype of Prospero's enchanted island in The Tempest, Twelfth Night, ...On the other hand, thought romantic in form, approaches nearer to harsh reality. Sir Toby and his companions are roistering tavern-knights; Feste, the clown, is cynical, detached and even melancholy....We are not to see a more " bitter fool" until the fool of King Lear...Though the play'stone is in general light-hearted, and ends happily, it touches on issues, like the faithlessness of woman, which were to become important themes for Shakespeare in his " tragic" period....

Two of the late plays of this period were Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure. These have come to be known as ' problem plays", for though the first has a " sad" ending and the second a " happy ending", they are not tragedy or comedy. Rather than " problem", it may be better to say they are " realist" plays : in them, good or evil, happiness and melancholy, true and false are mixed, as they are in life. In both, too, there is the feeling that the society is fundamentally corrupt, and all men's actions are equivocal. In Troilus, Prince Troilus is faced with this unpalatable fact when he sees himself betrayed by Cressida :

"This she? no, this is Diomed's Cressid.

If beauty have a soul, this is not she;

If souls guide vows, if vows be sanctimony,

If sanctimony be the god's delight,

If there be rule in unity itself,

This is not she. O madness of discourse,

That cause sets up with and against itself!"

Hamlet marks at once the end of this period and the begining of the last, in which four great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear were written....Also to this period belong the bitter-sweet last Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tales and the culminating glory, The Tempest.

Prince Hamlet is the finest and last example of the Shakespearean man, a charater whom, we may assume, was modelled on his creator 's conception of himself; he was the only Shakespearean character as one crtic has said, who could have written Shakespeare's plays. He acts decisively only twice, both times in rage when he killed first Polonius ( in mistake for king) and then the king himself. The rest of the time he is brooding, introspective, unsure. The famous soliloquy :

" To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or by opposing, end them "

is indicative of his nature

He is philosopher, a man of peace who find himself in a tragedic situation and is forced to act against his nature. Above all, he is entirely aware of his situation...

The other tragic figures- Macbeth, Othello and Lear - are not in this kind. Their tragedy is brought upon them partly by the tragic flaw in their own natures and partly by cruel chance. To a greater or lesser degree they are unaware of their true character until too late. Macbeth and Othello commit murder before they realize quite what they are doing, and Lear undergoes terrible humiliation before he can recognize true love from false. Here is Othello 's "moment of truth ", after he realizes he has killed his beloved Desdemona through mistaken suspicion :

".... then, must you speak,

Of one that lov'd not wisely, but too well ;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex ' d in the extreme ; of one whose hand

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe. "

These tragedies were written when Shakespeare was at the height of his powers, a full mature and tremendously popular artist. He had become wealthy through; his art and redeemed the family fortunes ; he had purchased one of the best house in Stratford and had received a coat of arms of which he was very proud. Shakespeare's last play nevertheless reflect the sadness of a man who is declining into old age. They are never sentimental, but rather seem to contain a half-wistful delight in the beauty of an art he knew he would soon be unable to practise. This finds a fitting summation in the speech of Prospero:

" Our reveals now are ended. These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits and

Are melted into air, into thin air ;

And, like the baseless fabric of the vision,

The cloud- capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall disolve

And , like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."

Shakespeare's death was in 1616.

He propably wrote nothing later than 1613. It is tempting to adduce from this that he himself knew that his creative life was over, and considered The Tempest to be its culmination, before his own life was " rounded with sleep". It was a little life - his writtings all took place within the space of 20 yeras - but it proved to be the richest life of any writer who has ever lived.....

anonymous

... according to " the Arts "

les impressionistes francais ...

In the expression of the Art in XIX century, the painters were formed a group, otherwise, a phenomenon , which changed the world of expressing Art ... for good.!... It wasn ' t a work of ...a person , but ...a group. I would like to present ...this fantastic group of artists, who have had influence for-ever in the Art.

In 1894, the painter Gustave Cailebotte besqueathed 67 impressionist paintings to the Louvre in Paris. Official embarrassment and public reaction was characterized by the words of an Academician ...:" Only great moral depravity could bring the State to accept such rubbish. These artists are all anarchists and mad men." Such hostile opposition had faced the Impressionist painters since their first collective exhibition in 1874.

They were not the first French painters to challenge bourgeois public taste and the traditional values of Academic art. Gustave Courbet, with his agressive opposition to long-standing artistic conventions in the 1850 and Edouard Manet in the 1860's had set the precedent. Manet had been the key figure in the famous Salon des Refuges of 1863, where works rejected by the offical. Salon were hung. His intention was to create an art free of conventional artifice. He wanted to paint directly from the subject, guided only by his visual sensations and his aesthetic sensibility. In this lay his great originality and in these respects he anticipated the Impressionists ...

Without the decorum of Classical Idealism, Manet ' s nude appeared vulgar and indecent; without any strong narrative or allegorical basis, his figure compositions seemed pointless. Technically, his paintings lacked most of the solid attributes of draughtsmanship, perspective and refined tonal modelling of contemporary Academic Art.

When the Impressionists came to the critic ' s attention, they were immediately linked with Manet, as much for their break with convention as for any specific common ground. He was widely thought to be their leader. At the first group exhibition in 1874, all the important Impressionist Painters - Monet , Renoir, Pissarro and Sisley - were among the 31 artists who took part. Manet refused to exhibit with them. He retained an extraordinary sense of obligation to the Salon as " the real field of Battle ", but he supported them morally and financially when he could. His notoriety naturelly endowed him with an elevated status in the eyes of young radicals. He was an art of sensation; he painted what he saw , true to his responses. This was central to their own concept of painting.

The Impressionists painted on the spot, in the open air. Their concern was with the light, color and atmosphere in nature. With this principal interest, Manet has little in common. The real ancestors of the Impressionists were the XiX century landscape painters : Constable and Turner in England, Corot, Courbet , and the Barbizon painters in France ( the name of Barbizon comes from the village of Barbizon near the Forest de Fontainebleay , where Theodore Rousseau, Millet, Corot, Daubigny, Diaz and others worked in the mid XIX century.)

The young impressionists met in Pris in the 1860s. Claude Monet (1840-1926), Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), fellow students at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, made several painting excursions to Fontainebleau during these years and came into personal contact with the Barbizon painters. Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), older and at this stage a more isolated figure, was more influenced by Courbet and Corot. The sort of advice these young men received from the older generation of painters predisposed them to break completely with the concepts of their Academic tutors in Paris. Courbet advised them to " sit down anywhere and paint what you like..."; Corot insisted that the first impression of the subject was all-important and that this alone should determine the painting's values. Monet received similar advice from Boudin, painter of seascapes from his home-town Le Havre.

The young impressionists have had more agressive manner from technique thru colors in the painting. . We know also, Impressionism began by the paint of still- life and Nature. I must present right away, if not, I will forget. All of them are the masters of Impressionism. In the book Della Pittura ( About Picture), published in 1436 , Leon Alberti mentioned about... the first scientific treatise on perspective. Widely used by Italian Painters such as Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccelo , the theories were of limited value to the problem of landscape.

More helpful was his " magic box" device, the camera obscura , which was much used by the XVII th century and XVIII th century Venetian and Duch landscape masters. The analysis of landscape structures, specially geological and botanical, was among the many scientific interests of Leonardo de Vinci ( 1452-1519) He made many intricate drawings of rock formation and panoramic landscapes. Most of these remained in his personal sketch books, and as a result, his influence on landscape painting was not specially strong, except perhaps through the backgrownds to his Mona Lisa and The Virgin if the Rocks. In general, however, the field of landscape painting is one in which the High Renaissance had comparative little to contribute.

It was in northern Europe, relatively unaffected by Italian humanist culture, that landscape painting really began to develop as a mode of painting in its own right. Conrad Witz's Miraculous Draught of Fishes , painted in 1444, shows the view of Geneva and the distant Alps. It is one of the first pictures in which the landscape predominates and represents a specific place.

Flemish landscape realism and the landscape construction of Italian artists like Piero della Franscesca fuse in the work of Giuvanni Bellini ( 1431-1516) . It's time to mention Italian artists TO CONTRIBUTE MY RESPECT TO THE POPE, JOHN PAUL II , EVEN HE IS OF POLAND, when HE PASSED AWAY ON APRIL 2, 2005 AT AGE OF 84. The emotional response of Bellini to light effects creates strong poetic overtoness to his keen observation of places. Many of his landscape backgrounds can be identified among the towns of Veneto. More than any other early painter, Bellini foreshadowed in his work the achievements of seventeen-and-eighteen-century landscapemasters.

In the North, the wild, hell-fire backgrounds of Hiemymus Bosch ( 1450-1516) and Mattthias Gunewald (1475-1528) exemplify a quite different approach to landscape; his little St George in Munich is one of the first romantic landscape pictures.

The Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel ' s ( c.1525-1569) contribution to landscape is specially important. While most of his work is similar to the fantasy world of Bosch, it is clear that he felt compelled to record details of the countryside, the saisons and all the human activities associated with them. The result was a series of landscapes showing the cycle of the months of the year and included in these are sections of marine painting to which Brueghel made a significant contribution ( e.g Storm at Sea , now in Vienna).

Peter Paul Rubens ( 1577-1640) brought to landscape the same splendid energy that invests all his paintings. He handled the forms of landscape with high sensitivity, characteristically using spirals and arcs as the basic geometry. The theatrical effects of nature - rainbows in stormy skies, meteors, bursts of sunshine and cataracts of water - delighted him.

By the early seventeenth century, Rome had become the principal center of art. Distinguished painters from the North formed colonies there. Two of France's greatest painters, Claude Lorrain ( 1600-1682) and Nicolas Poussin ( 1593-1665) spent almost the whole of their working lives in Rome.

For Poussin, landscape was frequently just a setting for the drama enacted by the figures in the foreground , but towards the end of his life the landscape itself began to play the dominant role, contributing to the mood and sentiment of the subject matter. His aim was to impose classical order on the direct experience of nature.

Claude Lorrain by comparison, was a dreamer, musing on themes from antiquity yet depending on a strong emotional response to the ever-changing aspects of nature. This is especially well demonstrated in his water-color drawings, which are some of the most beautiful of all landscapes. The magical qualities of light to be seen in his work later affected the development of English artist J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851)

Seventeenth-century academics thought that painting should be judged by its moral, historical and philosophical content Such theories were not helpful to the development of landscape. Not surprisingly, during this century the main centre for this art was the Low Countries, where there was little or no classical tradition. Protestantism here discouraged religious painting, and respectable, midde - class patrons were far more interested in straightforward pictorial records than idealized compositions.

These painters from the Low Countries seem to have been magnetically drawn to the image of their countrysides : it was a flat landscape of vast skies and waterways, calculated to arouse an interest in atmospheric effet. The generalizations typical of so much earlier painting were useless in solving the problems of place, time and weather which had to be faced by the Dutch painters of sea and sky and flat, receding plains. Van Goyen ( 1596-1656), Jacob Ruidael (1629-1682), Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709) and Aelbert Cuyp (1620-1691) are the great figures, with Jan van der Cappelle ( 1624-1679), Adriaen and Willem van de Velde (1633-1707) representing the best of the marine painters.

Rembrandt van Ryn (1606-1669) also painted a dozen or so impressive landscapes, but they are so charged with "inwardness" that they are landscapes of the spirit rather than r epresentative examples of the Dutch style.

England in the late eighteenth century was much affected by the example of Dutch landscape and marine art. East Anglia, with its long- standing commercial ties with the Low Countries and a countryside similar in parts to that of Holland, became the source of much English landscape painting. Thomas Gainsborough ( 1727-1788), John Crome ( 1768-1821) , and John Constable ( 1776-1837) were all influenced by the Dutch masters.

Constable and Turner were themselves amongst the great formative influences in the development of landscape and marine painting. The whole field of nineteenth century landscape painting is fore shadowed in their work. Constable speaks of the art painting as being " scientific" as well as " poetic", and in his vaste output of sketches ha made many scrupulous notes about cloud formations and condition of frost and dew. Scientific observation led to a freshness and naturalization in his work. Nature moved him deeply and, in his later years his landscape paintings came to express his own inner life.

These pictures were incidentally to have a deep influence, some 30 or 40 years later, upon the French Romantics. The methods adopted by Constable and Turner greatly extended the technical range of painting. Such techniques as glazing( applying a transparent layer of oil paint over a solid one, so modifying the color of the first ), and impasto ( when the paint is so thiskly applied, by brush or palette knife, that is stands up from the canvas in lumps) were used with a new freedom.

French artists throughout the nineteenth century responded with enthousiasm to the work of Constable and Turner. Their example and genius inspired a new flowering of romantic painting in France, influencing Eugine Delacroix ( 1798-1863), Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) and later, the Impressionists .

Heralding the astonishing landscape achievements of mid-ninettenth century France was the work of Jean-Baptiste Corot (1796-1875), Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) and Eugine Boudin ( 1824-1898). The Impressionist painters who followed them learnt much from their direct way of responding to landscape. Corot was able to approach landscape without the prejudgements of earlier landscape conventions. Boudin exerted a similar influence through his pupil Monet Courbet used paint richly ans sensuously, and spread his impasto so as to give his landscapes and seascapes a superb massive effet. Monumental cliffs, curling waves, dense foliage--- all become vividly real.

From the systematic study of color and visual perception evolved Impresionism, a new theory and practice of painting, increasingly removed from the simple description of a scene. One group of artists, among them George Seurat ( 1859-1891) and Paul Signac ( 1863-1935) constructed pictures from pointilles, myriads of tiny points of pure color. To the eye of the viewer, the points seem to fuse to create subtler colors.

Paul Gaugin (1848-1903) used landscape symbols as ways of expresssing thoughts, dreams, and recollections rather than as a report of direct experience. Similarly, the art of Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) became increasingly a reflection of inner turbulence and final chaotic despair, rather than of the external world. These three different viewpoints - the technical innovations of Seurat, the decorative symbolism of Gaugin, and the passionate immediacy of Van Gogh, were all influential in the work of a group known as the Nabis ( prophets) which included Bonnard and Vuilard , andof the Fauves (wild beasts) such as Matisse , Derain, Marquet and others...

Paul Cezanne ( 1839-1906), though he too had an early Impressionist phase, turned his attention to controlling color so that it came to indicate spatial relationships. He also constructed forms on the canvas in an organized manner recalling the disciplined classism of Poussin . His landscapes were massive and solid. He sais of them " Our art should enable us to feel Nature as eternal " .

The first half of twentieth century unleashed violence that shook Man' s confidence in the image of Nature as eternal. Perhaps it is as a result of this uncertainty that landscape painting has declined. No national schools have emerged since 1900, but a number of individual artists continued to repond to landscape.

Among the first exploratory works of Cubism are several based on the landscapes around the hill towns of Spain, the French Pyrenees and Provence. The landscapes of Kokosschka fuse the color qualities of late Impresionism and the resltless of Northern Impressionism.- Soutine ' s landscapes carry these intensities to their furthest extreme- and many of the Surrealist painters used landscapes as a setting for their fantasies.

In France, Jacques Villon, Dunoyer de Segonzac Jacques Villon, and Nicolas de Stael continued the landscape tradition in their various ways, while in America an artist like Milton Avery has made highly personal extensions of the shapes and emblems of Gaugin' s landscape.

In England, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland have developed a lanscape of symbols ( introduced over a century earlier in the visionary works of Samuel Palmer), and Ivon Hitchens has caught the mood of the Sussex countryside in subtletics of color. They are swept on to the canvas withh all the freshness of his deep knowledge and love of the area where he has lived nearly all his life. All these artists use landscape as a sounding-board for their own emotinal or intellectual concerns. rarher than as a means of expressing a faith in the stability of the natural order.

The graduation from these precedents and theoretical standpoints to the first Impressionist painting of the early 1870. was the conbined achievement of Monet and Renoir . Both were gifted with a rare facility of touch. Renoir, trained as porcelain painter, painted from the start with a almost abandoned enjoyment of his medium and with a very original and delicate sense of color. Monet, the dominant figure of Impressionism throughout the movement' s history, also possesseded a prodigious ability to achieve a likeness. Through his inspired judgement of tone values in the simplified main areas and the judicious placing of a few points of emphatic light and color, he effortlessly reapized Cora' s concept of nature contained in an "atmospheric envelope" .

For a while in 1865-1866, he attempted to reconcile this sort of spontaneous perception with large scale figure compositions, emulating the pastorale idea of Manet' s Dejeuner sur l' Herbe and conforming more to the Salon tradition of paintings with some sort of agreable narrative theme. This whole idea conflicted with his basic principle of an immediate visual rapport between the artist and his subject, and after several attemps, he abandonned the idea. By 1869, he and Renoir were revolved to paint only in front of the subject, to paint small, portable pictures and above all, to concentrate all their resources on one single objective: to capture the unique moment of experience.

As Impressionism matured, the actual identity of the subject became less important. Monet wrote that you should " try to forget what objects you have before you " and record only the colored shaped your eye could see. In effect, the elusive nature of perception itself became their subject.

In this extreme sense, Impressionist landscape painting of the 1870' stood for the most limited objective of all European art. Their painting had no intellectual or conceptual framework, no symbolic or narrative subject-matter. What is more, they abandonned all traditional concepts of technique that they evolved, part conscious, part intuitive, was revolutionary in two respects : in its colors and in the freedom of its brush-marks.

To take color first: because of the unprejuduced honesty of their vision, they actually saw color in the new way. It is genrally true to say that before the Impressionists, color in painting was tied to the concept " known " local colors. If an object was seen and known to be red, then it was painted red in all circumstances. Apart from variations of color in the interest of expression this tonal system had not been seriously questioned since its perfection in the fifteenth century.

In the course of their intensive investigations of natural appearances, it became increasingly apparent to Monet and Renoir that color was in reality not constant : that a shadow cast on any object did not just darken, but actually changed its visible color. They recogn ized that all colors in nature were conditioned by light and atmospheric conditions, and were constant subject to change. When they introduced these ideas into their painting, a perspetive crtic ealized that their color was "so true and so natural that one might well find it false".

What applies to the impermanence of color under atmospheric conditions also applies to the impermanence form. The realization of three dimentional solidity and stability is another " know" rationalization of perception. The destruction of this second constant of traditional art. - form was the essence of the other technical revolution, achieved by the Impressionists. This was the loose, separate and " unfinished" quality of their brushwork, with no contours, no stable boundaries....

By comparison with any painting exhibited previously, the 1870 paintings of Monet and Renoir were " extraordinarily incomplete and indefinite. " disant of an conservative spectator...." They did not present the viewer with comprehensive reconstruction of a visual experience, but with the simutaneous impact of many fragmentary sensations. The pleasurable shock of recongnition that we experience when our eyes and minds collate these sensations to some extent reproduces our purelyvisual experience when suddenly confronted with an unfamiliar view." critizied the author..., then ..."In the same way a familiar Impressionist painting can never quite recapture that first stimulation moment of confrontation. In this sense, Impressionism is an extreme form of Illusion.

For this view, I'm not agreed with the critics. Under the vision of great painters, we must eliminate the uncessary details.... For them, we must close our eyes and imagine which remaining in the dark....

Cezanne later criticized Monet as "only one eye...", and "certainly his paintings were not the synthetic products of eye and mind..." We are not led into the picture from one object to another; there is no sequence, no focal climax. The whole surface is equally articulate, or rather equally inarticulate, alive with incomplete raw material....

The separate brush-strokes contribute to the sense of immediate spontaneity; they carry s sense of breathless gesture.. To some extent they were a matter of expediency; the short life of a particular atmospheric condition demanded rapid execution.... But...they also allowed the painter to separate component colors and to preserve the shimmering vibration of the complementaries by inviting the colors to blend in the viewer's eye rather than on the painter's palette. Monet's seascape are full of iridescent greys made from small interwoven marks of yellow, pink, violet and blue. But their use of complementatires was never scientific or systematic. Their whole way of working called for rapid selection and instant decisions.

Knowing this, it is obvious that we can talk od " an Impressionist technique" only in a very loose sens, Although their ambitionwas objectively, the very nature of a first visual impression is intimately personal. The subdued sensitivity of Sisley and the more considered formality of Pissarro set themslightly apart from the extreme attitudes of Monet and Renoir Their technique is less audacious, their color less spectacular. The choice of subject too,varied with temperament. Pissarro's domestic peasants, Renoir's gay Parisian life and Monet's railways and boulevards are personal and original aspects of the late nineteenth-century painters' repertoire.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917), who shared in their exhibitions and is always linked with the movement, " was scarcely an Impressionist at all ".... He despised spontaneous open-air painting and was " a draughtsman with the true Academic's instinct for experimentresearch and completeness"... " His affinity with the Impressionists lay in his brilliant perception of light and arrested movement. " This is a idea objectively for Degas . With me, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro and Monet are the very talented painters, who created a great impression for the painting modern. For me also, the great inspiration is more important than the reseach, or academic background .. For example . .. the painting " la danseuse" one of the excellent inspiration of painting of Degas , ...Affinity de Degas with Impressionists lay in his brilliant perception of light and arrested movement. Exclusively a figure painter, his paintings, pastels and drawing of contemporary life married his accuracy of vision to the Classical sense of design, closer to Manet than Monet .

Pissarro alone contributed to all eight Impressionists exhibitions; to him it was almost a matter of moral and political principle. By 1886, the year of the last exhibition, the homogeneity of the original group had dissolved and the mood of progressive painting in Paris had been transformed.

The 1880 were the heroic decade what is called Post-Impressionism. The art of its great figures, Cesanne, Seurat, Van Gogh, and Gaugin, all bears some relationship to Impressionism....For all of them, the latter was inadequate..." only a way of seeing " to Cezanne, too scientific for the " Neo-Impressionist" Seurat , too scientific for Gaugin, too" sloppily painted" and objective for Van Gogh . All reacted to some extent against the " Impressionists" concern with appearances. Within the Impressionist group itself, Renoir 's later Classicism and Pissarro 's flirtation with Neo-Impressionism were symptomatic of the dissatisfied 1880s, leaning towards a more monumental form of sonstructive painting. But it is also true that the technical revolutions of Impressionism already anticipated this new concern in surface organization.

The heightened color and gestural brushmarks drew unprecedented attention to the picture surface. The Impressionist surface was an intricate tapestry of colored stitches. As outraged critics complained, you were aware of the colored marks before you recognized the subject.

The more systematic organization of paintings by Seurat, Cezanne and Van Gogh derives directly from the fabrics of marks that Monet and Renoir created. The idealistic vision behind these works was also an expression and an enrichment of the Impressionist act of looking. Only Gaugin , who exhibited at four of their exhibitions, completely abandonned both the objective vision and their small-unit technique.

While others were withdrawing from the exclusive Impressionist disciplines, Monet in the 1880s concentrated more and more tightly on exclusive momentary appearances. To overcome the problems of atmospheric change, he evolved the technique of painting a series of pictures of each subject, changing canvases in time with nature. In the 1890s, during the Poplars series, he worked for only seven minutes at the time on each canvasbefore changing, and became terrified of reworking the Rouen Cathedral pictures for fear of damging the accuracy of the original impression. For a serie of Thames pictures around 1900, he had at one point over 90 canvases stacked against the wall by his side.

The discipline of his ambition created intolerable strain and anguished frustration (' The sunset so fast I can't follow it'..). Right up to his death in 1926, he considered himself an Impressionist, but in his late paintings of his water garden at Giverny, he heightenned perception achieved the intensity of the nature mystic. Painted on mural scale, his images drift informally across the surface. vast expressive decorations. The rarefied atmosphere of these last canvases is comparable to the ecstatic vision of nature in VanGogh's Arles landscapes and Cezanne's paintings of Mont-Saint Victoire .

The heritage of Impressionism is many sided. Man's way of looking at things was irrevocably conditioned by the acute Impressionist vision. In the artist's social context, the group's collective gesture of independence created a lasting precedent. Historically their art was a conclusion and a beginning: both a consummation of the European tradition of illusory naturalism and a daring advance in the fields of coolor and sensation....

anonymous

homer ...

Homer has had a special situation in the literature of the world, even in the past.!...The poems , as mentioned by many great authors, were wrtten by imagination!...But laterly, the events of Troy or others were found. For this reason, the idea of real story that Homer 's wrtting were eventually true! But the problem is still in searched for more evidence!...However, Homer had a great talent for wrtting theses masterpieces!...

Before of calling "epic "poet, the literary people used to call " heroic" poet in the ancient time...for the poets of having a lot of talent ...like Homer!...Listen to Aristotle for his definition for epic poet..." They differ ( the historian and the poet ) in this, that ...the one speaks of things which have happened, and the other,... of things that might have happened!..For poetry speaks more of universals, but historian of particulars!..."."

No doubt, Homer had a special talent for telling about history in the past through his two well known pieces of all times! ...Iliad and ...Odyssey, which inspired a lot of talent artists to perform many masterpieces of Arts later!

We invite you to sêe Homer !...and how ...created he the influence in the World of Art!....

anonymous

When Vergil wrote in the Aeneid about the fall of the great city of Troy ( which, it seems certain, was an actual event ) it was not meant to be a document of the procêdings of the war but rather a glorification of heroic dêeds,both those of men and of the gods.

The authors of the early poems are usually unknown; it is possible, for instance, that Homer is a convenient and reverential name for a collection of poets. It is only in comparatively later centuries, in a literate culture, that poetry is ascribed to a particular author. The early heroic epics were composed by bard-poets and sung or recited for the enjoyment of everyone- they were an early form of popular entertainment !..

The works of anonymous poets inspired authors of the later centuries to follow their example and copy the form they gave their works. The last epics, like Milton's Paradise Lost, were conceived as piece of literature, more often than not aimed at litarate, educated readers who would buy a copy and read it privately, or in the company of friends. These " literay" epics were written in an ornamental style, whereas the earlier heroic poems tended to be more direct...

Heroic poetry has bêen composed pratically everywhere; hundreds of examples still exist, although many more hundreds has bêen lost for ever. They were either transcribed because of their popularity, as with Homer's works, or are still remembered and repeated to this day. Heroic poems were handed down the generations from father to son, from master to pupil. The bard's function was to entertain; often his audience was composed of aristocrats and in primitive society ...these aristocrats would wish to hear of the dêeds of heroes, of skill in war and of honour betwêen... friend and enemy. Homer's Ìliad is full of detailed descriptions of skill in the use of weapons, and so are the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the medieval Spanish Poema de mio Cid...Men accustomed to war would take great pleasure in this description from the Iliad : " Deiphobus... came up close to Idomeneus and let fly a shining lance. But Idomeneus was lơoking out and avoided the bronze spear by sheltering behind the rounded shield he alway carried. It was built of concentric rings of oxhide and of glittering bronze, and was fitted with a couple of crossbars. He crouched under cover of this, and the bronze spear flew over him, drawing a dêep note from the shield as it grazed the edge...."

Heroic poems are of course concerned with the dêeds of heroes : Achilles, Hector, Patroclus in the Iliad,... Odysseus in the Odyssey,... Beowulf in Beowulf, ...Roland in The Song of Roland..and so on....These heroes are all primarily fighting men, though there are more ways of winning glory than in battle!...Odysseus, for example, shows his heroism by his endurance, his patience and his intelligence as well as by his courage. One of the hero's main concerns is to preserve and extend his honour; much of the heroic poem is concerned with descriptions of how the hero proved his honour in different dangerous situations.

The dêeds of the hero in pursuit of honour often appear to us to be exceptionally brutal; but this brutality is often the reaction of the grievous personal loss which the hero can only exorcize by violence towards his ennemies. When the Norse hero, Volund, escapes from his tormentor Nithuth , he savagely kills the latter's children and sends their mutilated bodies back to their parents:

Their skull, once hid by their hair, he lơok,

Set them in silver, and sent them to Nithuth;

Gems full fair from their eyes he fashioned

To Nithuth's wife so wise he gave them.

Volund finds his way from Germanic legend into Anglo-Saxon mythology as Wayland the Smith. Again, Achilles, stricken with grief by the death of his friend Patroclus, slaughters scores of Trojan chielftains with no thought of mercy!...

The other side of the epic hero's honour is one more readily calculated to win sympathy from modern readers; it was contained in the unwritten code of battle which forbad extremes of brutality, even to deadliest ennemies; Achilles the Grêek treats Priam, king of Troy, with great honour, when the latter comes to him to beg for the return of the body of his son Hector. Roland, the Christian knight, while hating his heathen foe, doesn't deprive them of their rights as human beings once he has captured them.

One of the most warlike of all peoples were the Norsemen, whose raids into Britain in the early Miđdle Ages caused the priests to create a special prayer : " From the fury of the Norsemen, gơod Lord deliver us!..." Many of their legends are recorded in the Sagas, which belong to the twelfth and thirtênth centuries. The Eđdas of Iceland deal with the same material - these legends find an echo in the first British heroic poetry which is based on tales brought in by Saxon invaders in the fifth and sixth centuries....

Epic heroes, whether Grêek, Norse or Anglo-Saxon, pagan or Christian, share many qualities : one of the most notable traditions in epic poetry is that... the hero has a close companion, a hero second in courage only to himself. Achilles has Patroclus in the Iliad; Roland, Oliver in The song of Roland; Gilgamesh, Enkidu in the Sumerian poem Gilgamesh, and so on... The friend is often killed in the course of the story, causing grief to the hero and often stirring him to his finest action!...

The virtue that epic poetry must maintain above all others is that of a strong narrative. With a few exceptions, such as Beowulf , which contains many elements of lament, the heroic epics contain no moralizing. This is achieved in large part by giving spêches to the main characters of the poem, allowing the audiences to draw their own conclusions. In some poetry, notably in the Norse poems of the Elder Eđda , these spêeches constitute poems in their own right; in other examples, the form of the poetry is almost entirely dramatic, rather like a primitive verse play with a few narrative interpolations to help the story along...

Heroic, epic poetry is still practised in some part of the world. Examples can be found... in Russia, where the Ryabinin family kêeps the tradition alive,... in Yugoslavia, Grêce, and in many part of Asia ănd some part of Africa. It continues in the form it has always taken, depending for its existence on the passing down of the bardic skills from father to son. It functions best in societies which have remained for the most part illiterate and tribal. It can hardly be written in the modern society, since it assumes a code of honour in action which has ceased for many centuries. The only heroic poems composed in Britain were Beowulf, The Battle of Maldon, and Brunanburh in the Anglo-Saxon period .

The literary of artificial epic lasted longer in the West. Though based upon the form of the heroic epic, it is not so much concerned with the dêeds of heroes as with endowing its events with the grandeur of epic status. The gơd example is also one of the earliest - the Aeneid, written by Vergil in the first century before Christ. The Aeneid is highly conscious imitation of Homer's work : its hero, Aeneas, was a Trojan prince who plays a minor part in the Iliad . Vergil, an intensely patriotic Roman, wanted to give his countrymen a mythology as respectable as that of anciet Grêece. And so Aeneas makes a voyage from Troy to Italy lasting seven years, a voyage very similar to Odysseus' journey home in the Odyssey. Finally he lands on the banks of the Tiber and defeats the Italians. Aeneas was the son of Anchise, a mortal, but his mother was Aphrodite, a gođdess. Consequently the father of Rome could claim devine parentage, and was a fitting progenitor of a race of heroes!...

Though containing much heroic material, the Aeneid is written in a cultivated, literary style; its appeal was primarily to an educated class and it lacks the simplicity as well as the strength of Homer's narration... Yet for the very raison that he was literary poet, Vergil set a style of literary epic; it is significant that the Italian poet Dante, in his greatest work, the Divine Comedy, chose Vergil as his guide through the Underworld...

The Divine Comedy is epic in length. Its intention, too, is epic. It comprises three books, one each on Heaven, Hell and Purgatory . In allegorical terms it affirms Dante's ethical and political conception of the world and the duties of Man. It is also an exciting adventure story, for the poet, in his descent into. Hell, meets terrible monsters and ghosts of men punished eternally for their earthly crimes...

There are some grounds for comparing the Divine Comedy with Milton's Paradise Lost . Both poets set out to write a poem of epic dimensions- Milton's poem was to achieve " Things unattempted yet in prose or rime!", and both poems have a sense of adventure about them. The battle betwên the forces of God and the force of Satan. ending in Satan's fall to Hell is forcefully described in the following lines:

And now thir mightiest quell'd, the battel swerved,

With many an inrode gor'd; deformed rout

Enter'd and foul disorder: all th ground

With shivered armour strew'n, and on a heap

Chariot and Chariotêr lay overturned

And fierce foaming Steeds.

Milton replaced the old warrior heroes by heroes whose functions were more carefully defined. Despite he makes a show of maintening a well-balanced struggle betwên God and Satan, the issue is predeterminated. Again, Satan is not entirely unsympathetic portrait, there is none of the old objectivity in Milton's treatment of his protagonists. This in not the human conflict, undertaken for the glory of it, but a deeply serious struggle over the soulof the mortal Man.

Dante and Milton did not aim primarily to tell the history, as the ancient bards did. Dante felt that only through poetry could he express his vision of a spiritual renewal of the whole humanity. Milton , more sternly, wished to " justifie the wayes of God to the Men!" ; both were preoccupied with a vision of Man's spiritual nêds and their poems are calculated, by use of character and style, to achieve an allegory of the human condition.

Of course, allegory had no place in the heroic epic and spiritual example set by the bards was confined to advice on the wisdom of propitiating the capricious gods. Again, the litarary epic differs from the heroic model by chơsing idealized heroes : though Homer's heroes perform almost supernatural feats of courage and strength, they are very human: they boast, sulk, cheat and run away when occasion demands it. Spencer , the only other English poet whose work The Faerie Queene, can be called epic, set out to create an idealized representation of Queen Elizabeth and " to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline...". To achieve his end, he used tales of medieval chivalry for complex symbolic purposes.

the mock - heroic poem...

Spencer had a vision of the good society, and his poem is a model to all who would learn how to live in such a society. Its narrative, far from being taut and fast-moving, flows along at the very leisurely pace. The language is modelled on the gentle cadences of Italian poetry of the time, and is pleasant to read even now.

Later examples of epic are hard to find. The " Augustan Age ", the eighteenth century, produced no more than mock-heroic poems like Pope's The Rape of the Lock , which applied the elevated language of Greek heroic poetry to the trivial subject. The poem depends for its considerable wit on the description of the capture of a lock of a beauty's hair by an amorous beau in grandiose language. Pope, the most brilliant poet of his generation, knew that the epic form could exist only in this way for his time.

While Byron and Browning both wrote long poems in teh nineteenth century, none of their work was " epic " in the original sense of the word. Longfelơw 's Hiawatha has more of the epic mood than any other.; it deales with a warrior-hero and with the original race of the American contiment , and it was, at least in part, epic in intention . But its treatment is more lyrical tha heroic.

Despite epic, whether heroic or literary, is no longer written outside a few societies, the epics of the past have never been so popular. New translations of Homer appear every few years in Britain alone, and much reseach is being done on the legends of tribes and races now almost forgotten. This popularity is more than a cult: a society in which great deeds are becoming increasingly rare is likely to gain more and more pleasure from reading of the prowess of the heroes of antiquity...

anonymous

taoism and buddhism in china...

The occidental culture is based on the logic. The logic began many centuries before Chirst.

The most well known logical system was of Pythagore!... He would like to apply the mathematics in the demonstration of the presence of universe. His logic also well known by his great knownledge of mathematics.!... Even out of date by the development of sciences in our times, this famous logic had great influence on Plato, an another great thinker, and his disciple Aristotle.! The difference between Plato and Aristotle was... Plato believed faitfully the rational mathematics!,... instead of experimental sciences as Aristotle did!... We can not ingnore the questions and responses of Socrate for his disciples. , it was the key of logic system of Plato. It was also great logic of great thinker. After discussion "sur la table ronde" avec... Truong Ngoc Diep , ...Truong thi Sen,... Truong thi Hue,... Truong thi Hong Nhung, ..Truong thi Tuyet Mai, ... Truong thi Quynh Huong,.. Truong Ngoc Minh, ...Truong thi Thien Huong, ..Truong Quang Minh,..and... Truong Ngoc Tung, ... We all agreed that .., the good philosophic system demands a great knownledge of mathematics!... For example... one well known logic system: " All man must die, Socrate is man, he must die.!.".. This logic is not in our generation, but from Plato, of many centuries before our era.. The occidental logic system is the foundation of the occidental culture!...or we can say, ...for the culture of the world!

Otherwise, the oriental cuture is different.! For most literary people of the West, the oriental culture, considered the oriental culture, specially... the culture of china ...is mystery!... As we say in the begining of this site, " the oriental culture is magnificent, if we have the common sense! " Their fact was presented in the " raw material", the readers have to have good knownledge for appreciating this beauty! For example, the famous story of the oriental culture...A mother would like her son well educated, by selling her house and moved to the place close to the school! Finally, her son was ..a great philosophe in the past of china culture!.... Applying this story with the logical system of occidental culture, we might say: " Influence of the ambiance in the development of the culture!".. For this reason, the oriental culture is difficult to catch up, if we are not in the mood to accept the facts!...

Buddhism is coming from India for many centuries , but the religion had been changed, and becoming of the China itself. Taoism is come from China. I would like to present in this topic because of the similarity of both religions., also their different aspects!.. The comprehension of this topic, demands us a great knownledge also!. I would like to present the "raw material" for your thinking! They are great doctrines of religions in China in many centuries, even in our times! ..but also well known for long, by the " depth of the spirit of the creators!..".

anonymous

taoism...

The age of confusion which follwed the fall of the Han Empire eriod of great importance in the history of religion in China. The 3rd and the 4th centuries AD,an era of turmoil and war, saw the rise and development of the two religions systems which henceforward offered the only alternatives to Confucian orthodoxy. The introduction and spread of Buddhism is described in the last section of this topic; here a brief survey of the progress made by its chief rival, Taoism, will be made.

The transformation of Taoism into a religion was one result of the triumph of the Confucian school, now established as the state protected orthodox philosophy. The nesw Confusianism, as it emerged at the hands of the Han scholars, was entirely divorced from the ancient magical rite of the wu magicians. The sholars who exalted the moral virtues and placed them under the patronage of the supreme deity, T'ien,(Heaven), grudgedany favours shown to the hetereodox deities worshipped by the wu priests... Taoism, with its doctrine of non-action, its mysticism, and its disregard of the rites and ceremonies esteemed by the Confucians, was equally frowned upon by the orthodox scholars. Both Taoism and the cults of the wu priesthood were deeply rooted in the cultural life of the Chinese. The rather arid doctrines of the Confucian scholars had little appeal for the mass of the people. It was not unatural, therefore , that the principal heterodox philosophy. Taoism should join force with the popular religion which Confucianism had rejected.

This alliance, from which later Taoism, a religion more than a philosophic school, was born, was stimulated by the appearance of the new rival, Buddhism. Both Buddhism and Taoist philosophy denied the value of the world of appearances, and directed their appeal to the mystical side of human nature. Since this religious instinct was neglected by Confucian orthodoxy, it was inevitable that the new creeds should awaken a widespread response. Buddhism offered the hope of Nirvana, or eternal happiness in the Western Paradise. Taoism , which had hitherto known no doctrine after life. promised the achievement of immortality by alcheministic practices. Thus the cults which the magicians had populirised at the Court of the Emperor Wu where now systematised by Taoist interpretations and systhesised into a comprehensive pantheon rivalling, and often borrowing from, Buddhist legend and lore.

Traditionally the new movement is ascribed to Chang Tao-ling, a native of Chekiang province- the stronghold of the wu cults- who lived in the reign of Kuang Wu Ti , first Emperor of the Later Han dynasty. Chang Tao-ling is said to have been born in A.D. 34 and to have lived till A.D.156, a space of one hundred and twenty two years, which, to say the least, appeares improbable. Most of his life was spent in retirement upona mountain, where he studied alchemy and sought the drug of immortality. Taoist tradition regards him as the first Tien's Shih or Heavenly Teacher (a title sometimes translated as "pope" ) and he is said to have achieved immortality and ascended to Heaven on the dragon. There are indeed, few historical facts about Chang Tao-ling was a descendant of Chang Liang ,a general of Liu P' ang, founder of the Han dynasty, and this Chang Liu-P'ang, was himself a scion of an ancient family in the Han state. ( Han state is not the same as the han dynasty. The former was one of the Three Tsin , the state among which the old Tsin kingdom had been divided. The supposed pedogree of the Chang Taoist popes is a fiction designed to rival the real antiquity of the K'ung family, descended from Confucius.)

Although the stories about Chang Tao-ling are manifestly legend, it is robable that about this time the Taoist philosophy began to assimilate the practices of the wu cults. and the wu themselves became known as Tao Shih, or Taoist Teachers. Side by side with the growing infusion of magical practices, there persisted a pure school of Taoist teaching which continued to attract scholars and poets who found Confucian doctrine unsatisfying. Early in the Tsin dynasty ( A.D 265-316 ) , there was a famous coterie of Taoist scholars who called themselves the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grave. Their lives and outlook area chacateristic of the Taoism of this period, expressing the revolt against the formalism of Confucianism and the turmoil of contemporary politics. The historians, who are, of course, Confucians, thus describe the activities of the Seven Sages :

" They all revered and esalted the Void and Non-Action and disregarded the rites and law. They drunk wine to excess and disdained the affairs of this world...".

The leader of the club, Hsi K'ang ( A.D. 223-262 ), was put to death by Ssu-ma Chao, father of the first Court of Wei, the northern state of the Three Kingdoms period. Hsi K'ang was in the habit of expounding his doctrines to his disciples and had achieved a very great reputation. Ssu-ma Chao, came to listen to him, but Hsi K'ang made no attempt to treat a minister with ceremony; indeed, he did not appear to notice his presence. Ssu-ma Chao was offended, and later hearing that Hsi K'ang in the letter to his friend Shan T'ao had spoken slighingly of T'ang and Wu, the hero founders of the ancient Shang and Chou dynasties, the minister made this a pretext to execute Hsi K'ang as one of who..."disturbed the times and confused right doctrine.". The real cause of his enmity was thatas he himself was contemplating usurping the throne of his nominal sovereign, the Emperor of the Wei dynasty, he considered that Hsi K'ang slighting reference to T'ang and Wu was a covet criticism of himself, these ancient heroes being, in the opinion of the Taoist, usurpers, not legitimate heirs to the throne.

Shan T'ao, Hsi K'ang friend, was alsoone of the Seven Sages, and a native of the southern kingdom of Wu. Under the Tsindynasty he held high office as president of the Board of Civil Service. He seems to have been less excentric than his friends. Liu Ling, another of the Seven, was a great drinker. He used to declare that to a drunken man the " affairs of the world appear as much duckweed in the river..". He rode about the capital in a small cart drawn by deer, with a servant following with a large pot of wine. Another servant carried a spade, and had orders to dig a grave and bury his master forthwith without ceremony, wherever he chanced to die. Yuan Chi and Yuan Hsien wereuncle and nephew, and like Liu Ling were heavy drinkers. They were both famous musicians although soldiers by profession. Yuan Hsien had a shameless passion for a lady's serving maid. On one occasion, when he was entertaining guests, he saw the lady send the maid away. Rising without apology, he hastily borrowed one of the guest's horse and pursued the young woman, bringing her back on his crupper.

Yuan Chi, his uncle, though sincerely attached to his mother, and sick with grief at her death, scandalised the scholars by drinking heavily throughout the period of mourning. Wang Jung and Hsiang Hsiu , the other members of the Bamboo Grove, were both scholars of distinction. Wang Yung's brother as magistrate of the town in the northern provinces, put into practice the Taoist theory of government by Non-Action, with results which were a conspicuous success. Hsiang Hsiu wrote the best known commentary of the work of Chuang Tzu, although, as he died before it was complete, it has generally been wrongly attributed to Kuo Hsiang, who only completed the unfinished portion.

All the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove cultivated these eccentricities as a deliberate protest against Confucian formality and the elaborate rites with the scolars wished to surround every human activity. Behind the facade of drunken eccentricity they pursued the true Taoist ideals of simplicity and harmony with the rhythm of life. In their writings which took the form of commentaries on the Taoist classic, they developed the philosophic side of the doctrines which Chuang Tzu had propounded. Wang Pi ( A.D.2was26-249 ), a writer who lived in the periof of the Three Kingdoms, after the fall of the Han Empire, devoted himself to the branch of Taoism. His commentary on the Tao Te Ching shows that the higher interpretation of the old Taoist writers was still understood in the III rd century. Indeed the philosophic charactere of Taoism never entirely disappeared even when the new religious and magic type of Taoism had gained the ascendant. In the tenets of more than one of the Buddhist Schools, and particularly in the Ch'an School, Taoist influence is very evident.

Only a few years after the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove there flourished a Taoist writer who emphasised the new magical element which was transforming the old philosophy. Ko Hung, who wrote under the pseudo name of Pao P'u Tzu, was a native of Kiangsu, a contemporary of Tsin Yuan Ti , the first Emperor to re-establish the capital at Nanking after the fall of Lo-Yang to the invading Hsiung Nu. Ko Hung wrote a book in two sections, an " inner " treatise which deals at length with the alchemistic processes by which the drug of immortality may be made, and the transmutation of cinnabar and mercury into gold. His "outer " treatise deals with matters of philosophy and government on Taoist lines.

The inner treatise is of considerable interest as early evidence of the extent to which the theory of alchemy had been developed asnd associated with Taoism. After arguing at some length that the long-lived animals demonstrated the possibility of man attaining immortality, since if animals could live so long, man with the aid of knowledge and power could certainly surpass mere brutes, Ko Hung gives several instances of men and women wha had attained immortality in the past. One chapter of his book is devoted to methods of attaining immortality, for whichhe gives recipes. These drugs were not only believed to be capable of postponing death of centuries, but also rejuvenated the body. The results to be expected were that:

" White hair will become black, lost teeth will grow again, the strength of the body will be renewed. He who takes it will never grow old, an old man will become a youth once more, he will live for ever and not die." ( Pao P'u Tzu, Nei Pien 4. )

These drugs, and others of a similar nature, enabled to immortal to walk through fire without being burned, to walk on the surface of water without sinking, to rise into the air, to command the spirits and demons, and to revive the dead.

In conjunction with the study to procure immortality Ko Hung devotes much space to the method of making gold, which it was hoped could be produced by chemical action. He gives most definite and precise instructions about this process, though he does not actually say whether he had succeeded in making gold himself. As an example of the chemical knowledge and methodes of his time his process is instructive: " Process for make Gold "...

Ko Hung also wrote about spell magic, and gives specimens to charms which were of use to those who dwelt in out-of-the-way places, mountains or forests. These he recommended should be pasted upon the door, beams and pillars of the house.

The new school of alchemistic Taoism also prospered in the northern empire under the Wei dynasty ( AD 386-557), where it received imperial patronage. In AD 415 a certain K'ou Ch'ien-chih, a man of good family and younger brother of a provincial governor, who had dwelt for some years as a hermit on Mt.Sung in Honan, had a vision in which Lao Tzu appeared to him. From the divine founder of Taoism K'ou received a new book of doctrine in twenty rolls, and also was appointed T'ien Shih, or Celestial Teacher , chief of the Taoists among mortal men. This incedent sifficiently refutes the claim of the Chang family to have held the rank of T'ien Shih from father to son since the time of their supposed ancestor Chang Tao-ling. In A.D. 423 K'ou had a further vision in which the great grand son of Lao Tzu, himself an immortal, appeared to give further instructions and confirm K'ou's position as T'ien Shih.

In A.D. 428, K'ou Ch'ien-chih left his retreat on Mt.Sung and came to the Court of the Wei Emperor T'ai Wu ( A.D. 424-452), which was then established near Ta T'ung Fu T in north Shansi. The Emperor welcomed K'ou and accepted him as the chief of the Taoists. He and his disciples were lodged at the public expense, and a temple built for them ouside of the capital. The new cult was highly honored, the Emperor himself paid a visit to the temple in the year A.D.442, and received a book of charms. After this every Emperor of the Wei Dynasty used to proceed to the Taoist temple at his accession and obtain a charm book.

A few years later, in A.D. 448, K'ou Ch'ien-chih died, but the death of their leader did not destroy the faith of the disciples. Indeed, it was the cause of renewed honors.

" After his death his corpse stretched and when the disciples measured it, it was found to be 8 ft 3 in. in length, but after three days it began to shrink and when coffined was no more than 6 in long. Then the disciples believed him to be one who had attained immortality on death, and had become transformed and disappeared as an immortal."

Taoism prospered under the Wei dynasty, and when the capital was moved to Lo Yang in Honan, the Taoist temple was established there. Numerous other adepts appeared, though none attained the fame of Kou Choien-shih. It was to be expected that the Taoists should resent the competition of Buddhism, which, being an alien creed, offended the conservative sense of the nationally minded Chinese,nevertheless the Taoists found it wise to compromise with the intruder to some extent. K'ou Ch'ien-chih, it would appear, described Buddha as one who had found the Tao among the " western barbarians " ( Indians ) and become an immortal. As such he might be honored, though not of course in a manner equal to Lao Tzu or other Taoist immortals of superior rank.

The rivalry of Buddhism and Taoism was the cause of persecutions which fell equally upon both relogions. Taoism had escaped the persecution directed against Buddhism by the Emperor of the Wei dynasty in A.D. 444. In fact, the Taoists inspired this movement on the grounds that Buddhism was an alien creed, which had no tradition connection with the golden age so beloved by all Chinese scholars. In A.D. 555 the ruler of the northern Ch'i State, which occupied the north-eastern provinces, called a congress of Buddhists and Taoists with the idea of the unifying the two rival religions. The priests of Buddha having proved victorious in the argument, the Emperor ordered all Taoist proests to shave their heads and become Buddhist monks. There was at first some opposition, but when four recalcitrant Taoists had been put to death, the others " obeyed the decree" and therefor there " were no Taoists in the Ch'i domain".

The persecution, hoever, was not of long duration, for not many years, when the north had passed under the rule of another dynasty, the Northern Chou , the two religions seem to have been as flourishing as ever. In A.D. 574 the Emperor of that dynasty issued a decree procribing both Taoism and Buddhism. The priests and monks were made to return to secular life, their scriptures were burnt and the images of Buddha and the Taoist divinities smashed. A fey years later in A.D. 579 his successor reversed this policy and restored the temples of both cults, and it is improbable that these short lived persecutions had much effet except in the vicinity of the capital. Throughout the period of division the new Taoist cult gained steadily in influence both with the mass of the people, and also in Court circles. Taoism does not seem to have suffered any persecution in the southern empire, while the influences of Taoist priests and magicians at the Court of Nanking was a factor of importance.

By the end of the VIth century, Taoism was firmly established in its new form as a popular cult, the rival of Buddhism . It had also adopted the pseudo-sciences of alchemy and astrology as an integral part of the system. The object of the Taoist devotee was to achieve immortality by means of magical practices and carefully compounded drugs. If this high aim was beyond his powers, he might at least hope to gain weath by making goldor failing that, to prolonghis life by the study of drugs less potent than that of immortality. The consequences of this new turn to Taoist speculations were far more important than has usually been admitted.

Alchemy and medicine became identified with Taoism. and Taoism was an unorthodox cult, opposed by the scholars of the Confucian school. When Taoism was favored by the Court , the Confucian hostility could be ignored, but when Taoism lost this support, the weight of the Confucian influence was against it. Taoism therefore gradually became a despised popular religion, regarded as gross superstition by the schoolars and educated classes. As alchemy and medicine were the stock-in-trade of the Taoist rpiest, there sciences shared the contempt lavished upon Taoist teaching. Alchemy, though its hopes were too high and its methods unsound, was none the less the parent of true scientific chemistry. In China all such sciences incurred the derision which was meted out to Taoism as the superstitious cult of the " stupid people ". Medicine, which was inspired by Taoist ideas about the elixir vitae, shared this neglect. Educated persons left such practices to Taoists, who were more and more frequently men of low origin and little learning.

This was the cause of the divorce between learning ans science which prevented the Chinese from discovering the principles of the exact sciences.

Dicoveries were made, but they were left to the Taoism Priests. The magnetic compass was used to determine the favorable location of graves. Gunpowder had been discovered by Taoist investigators in their search for the philosopher's stone, yet until the Mongol invaders put it to the uses of war, the Chinese had only employed explosives in fire crackers, used to scare away evil influences. Science, anything which smacked of alchemy or the drug of immortality, was treated as a charlatanism only fit for the ignorant and lowly. The Scholar should concern himself with book learning, litarature, history, poetry- but not with science.

Prior to the contact with European civilisation in the XIX century, Buddhism was by far the most important cultural influence of foreign origin introduced into China in the historical period.

The effect of Buddhism upon Chinese thought, art, and the customs of daily life is comparable to the influence of christianity upon the nations of the west. Buddhism is the only foreign element in the Chinese culture which has penetrated every class of society, maintained its hold over long centuries, and become accepted as an essential part of the national civilisation. Politically the history of China can be broadly divided the feudal and i perial periods, and in religious history there is a Buddhist and pre-Buddhist age.

The new creed not only altered the religious system of China; it familiarised the Chinese with the pre-Buddhist Indian philosophies and religions, and in the realm of art it served as the conduit by which Hellenistic influence flowed eastward across Central Asia. So many sided and powerful a force as Indian Buddhism could not fail to modify the Chinese civilisation profoundly, but in the end it was Buddhism, rather than Chinese culture, which underwent the greatest transformation. The merits of Indian philosophy have been much discussed in the west where the have found vigourous defenders, but to the Chinese, a people with an intensely practical side to their character, the illimitable vagueness of Indian speculation proved unpalatable. As time passed they began to interpret Buddhism doctrine in terms of moral virtues already familiar from the Chou School of philosophy. Chinese Buddhism reshaped under these strong native influences took a form which bears only a faint and superficial resemblance to the Indian system from which it sprang.

The Chinese artists who were called upon to illustrate episodes in the life of Buddha naturally portrayed the Indian sage in surroundings with which they familiar, just as the Italian primitives painted the Christian saints in the costumes of renaissance Italy. One famous picture shows Buddha attending the dead-bed of his father, King Sudhodana, in the typical Chinese Palace hall.

The exact nature of the original Indian doctrine is itself very uncertain. Buddhism, when it reached China in the Irst century A>D>, was already an old religion, with some four or five centuries of history behind it. The dates of Gautama Buddha's life are not precisely known. It has indeed been argued that no such person ever existed, or if he did, he was not the founder of Buddhism, but a reformer who reshaped an ancient creed. This controversy must be left to Indian historians ans Sanskrit scholars. Conservative opinion regards Gautama as a historical personage, who probably lived and preached in Northern India in the first half of the Vth century B.C., the date of his death being either 479 or 477 B.C. No contemporary evidence eother of his life or teaching exists in any language. The monuments of King Asoka, circa 272 - 231 B.C , attest the existence and flourishing state of Buddhism in India at that time, but the evidence of these inscriptions does not always confirm the theology of the most conservative Buddhist School, the Hinayana.

At an unknown date, usually believed to be in the early part of the Irst century A.D.. Buddhism split into two opposing camps, Hinayana and Mahayana, the Lesser and Greater Vehicle, respectively. The Hinayana do not themselves accept this opprobrious epithet, applied to them by their advesaries. The Hinayan, who today are the Buddhists of Ceylon, Burma et Thailand, hold to what they believe to be the true and simple doctrine of Gautama, and regard the Mahayana common with the primitive doctrine. Modern scholars have been inclined to dispute the traditionally accepted view. It is now contended that Mahayana Buddhism, though perhaps not holding closely to the teaching of Gautama, is none the less founded upon a religious system as ancient as the Buddha, if not earlier, incorporating beliefs long current in India, but which were ignored, or perhaps opposed, by the primitive Buddhists.

In the Hinayana system, Gautama is the Buddha, the sole Buddha, who now reposes for ever Nirvana - the absence of desire and striving - having left to mankind a simple rule by which they may attain a like bliss, either at the end of their present incarnation, or at most at the end of seven incarnations. The creed knows no prayers,invacations or offerings, for Buddha is not God, but man who has attained perfection and thrown off the Karma of sin, which dooms mankind to successive reincarnations in the world of pain and sorrow.

Whether Mahayana Buddhism was reshaped under Hellenistic influences which took a less melancholy view of human existence, or whether it represented the Indian taste fir cosmic speculation ( which Gautama condemned as profitless ) the Great Vehicule framed what is in effect an entirely new religion. Gautama now becomes merely one reincarnation in the vast series of Buddhas stretchingfrom an illimitable past into an equally infinite future. Not only on ths worldbut inother worlds numerous as the sands of the Ganges. Buddhas have live and preached at intervals separated by myriads of years, from the time past human calculation. This world is but a speck in space and an instant in time; it will past away and Maitreya will be the Buddha of the next period.

In the later developments of Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhas past and to come gradually become gods of transcendent power, hearkening to the prayers of mankind, responding to invocations, delighting in offerings and incense. Ultimately Amida or Amidabha Buddha, a personage unknown to the early Buddhist scrptures and conjectured to be a revival of the Indian Brahma or the Zoroastrian Ahura- Mazda, beame the object of almost exclusive devotion, and his pure paradise, the Western Heaven, the goal to which the pious may aspire. Nirvana and Gautama Buddha are almost forgotten.

It was Mahayana Buddhism which was introduced into China in the year A.D. 65 in the reign of Han Ming Ti, of the later Han Dynasty. The Hinayana system, though known to the Chinese, never gained any wide currency in the Far East, and died out there altogether in the Xth century. Both forms of Buddhism are extinct in their native India, where they succumbed under the brutal impact of Islamic invasion and the subtle opposition of the ancient Hindu religion. According to the Chinese history, the Emperor Han Ming Ti dreamed that there was a powerful divinity in the west, and sent an embassy to bring his cult to China. The ambassador travelled to India and returned with Buddhist images and Sankrit books, which were translated into Chinese at Lo Yang by two Indian monks who had accompanied the envoy. These two Indians were Kasyapa - Matanga and Dharma - aranya, listed in the index of the authors of the Chinese Tripitaka, orcollection of Buddhist Scriptures, as the first to translate Buddhist works into Chinese. They worked at the White Horse Manastery ouside Lo Yang, so called from the white horse which carried the sacred books from India to China. This monastery, Pai Ma Ssu, or rather one upon the same site, still exists.

It is probable that some knowledge of Buddhism had arlreadybeen acquired by the Chinese envoys to Central Asia and Bactria. for that region, now purely Mohammedan, was an early and active centre of Buddhism. It is even probable that the first Buddhist mission came from ane of these countries, and not from India proper. The Han Emperors, as has been mentioned in an earlier chapter, were keen religious innovators, and were always prepared to welcome a new deity. But the welcome given by the Court to Buddhism remained without any influence on the nation as a whole in the Han period. Buddhism was a curiosity of the capial, its teaching was in the hands of foreigners, and it doesn't appear to have exercised any notable influence either on the masses or upon the educated class, which was strongly Confucian. This early imperial patronage of foreign monks is exactly comparable to the welcome accorded to the first Catholic missionaries by the Ming Emperors and theirfirsr successors of the Manchu dynasty. In both cases the first contact led to no visible results.

The translation of Buddhist works and the propagation of the faith in the Han period were almost entirely the work of foreigners. Only one China author or translator appears in the list. The others were drawn from a variety of nations in Central Asia, Indians, Turanians, Parthians, Kushans , like the equally international recruitment of the ranks of the Christian Missionaries in modern China. The vogue of Buddhism was in fact confined to the Court, and its teaching firmly opposed by the Confucian scholar class, who formed the dominant party among the educated and had the administration of the empire in their hands. Had the centralised empire endured, relying as it did on this scholar class, it is probable that Buddhism would never have taken form root in China, and would have withered away as Nestorian Christianity, introduced and flourishing in the T'ang dynasty ( VII th to X th centuries) disappeared, leaving as its only record the famous Ch'ang An tablet.

The fall of the Han Empire, and the partitions and barlarian invasions which followed, opened the roed to Buddhism, and effected a religious revolution which was the most significant development in what the historians of Confucian tradition described as an "Age of Confusion". While Indian translators, assisted byan increasing number of Chinese colleguescontinued to wrokd upon the vast task of rendering the Sankirit originals into Chinesethe northern Tartar dynasts extended their favor to Buddhist monks in the conquered provinces. The Confucian scholars had for the most part fled south when Lo Yang fell. Those who remained in the north were not favored by the invaders, who rightly suspected this class of secret loyalty to the Chinese Emperor and hostility to the conquerors. The new sovereigns, needing the assistance of the literate class, found in the Buddhists and Taoists, who had been the opponents of the orthodox Confucians, a body of scholarly men who were trustworthy and loyal.

In the IVth and Vth centuries A.D., there was an immense expansion of Buddhism in northern China. This area being in contact with the Central Asdiatic trade route, bu which communication with India was made, it was naturally the region to which the Indian missionaries of Buddhism paid the greatest attention. The petty kingdoms of northern China under their short lived Tungus and Hun dynasties were distinguished in the richness and productivity of their Buddhist schools, by which alone they are remembered. At Ch'ang An in A.D. 401-412, then the capital of the small state of later Chin,the celebrated Kumarajiva, a monk of Indian descent born in Central Asia, worked and taught, spreading the doctrines of new schools of Buddhism, hitherto unknown in China.

Nevertheless the Buddhists did not enjoy uninterrupted favour. Inspired usually by Taoist opposition, persecutions were directed against them in all the states of China, but, fortunately for Buddhism, the persecutions were not simutaneous, and did not endure for long. In A.D. 446 the ruler Wei ,the northern empire, issued an edict against the Buddhists, but as his rival in the Chinese Empire was prepared to receive them, the monks were able to escape its effects. A few years later, Buddhism was at the height of its favour in Wei, andwas enjoying the fruitful patronage of the great Buddhist Emperor Liang Wu Ti of the southern Chinese Empire. These persecutions never resembled those so familiar from western religious history. There were no burnings, no torture or massacre of the faithful. At most the authorities ordered the destruction of some or all of the monasties, and forced monks and nuns to return to family life, sometimes by the expedient, repugnant to all good Buddhists, of mating the monks and nuns themselves.

These ineffective amd intermittent persecutions failed to arrest the progress of the new religion. In A.D.405 the historians cofess that nine out of every ten families in the northern empire had embraced the Buddhist faith. The proportion is significant, for the non-Buddhist tenth fairly represents the educated class of Confucian scholars and Taoist sectaries who alone remained detached from the new religion. The mass of the people, finding in Buddhist a religion which offered them in the next world all that they lacked in their present existence, had adopted the practice of the foreign faith, even if the dogma and theory were but little understood.

A hundred years later, in A.D.500, it is admitted that the whole of China, north and south alike, was Buddhist. That is to say, Buddhist rites and ceremonies were everywhere pactised; temples and monasteries had arisen en every district; priests and nuns were numerous and hightly respected. A few Confucian scholars refused for themselves the salvation which their own families and particularly the women, eagerly embraced. The Taoists, borrowing shamelessly from the rival religion, maintained a more effective opposition.

It wpuld be a mistake to represent this national conversion as a complete break with the religious past, such as marked the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. Strange as it may seem to westerners, the Chinese have a capacity for believing, or at least honouring, several apparently imcompatible doctrines at the same time. It is the most remarkable manifestation of the national gift for compromise. At the present time the vast majority of Chinese honour Confucius, worhip Amida Buddha, and use Paoist rites without any sense of incompatibility. " Three ways to one goal " they say. It would, however, be correct to treat this attitude as a mere materialist desire to be on the safe side, a kind of triple insurance against calamity.