CHINESE ARCHITECTURE—BOERSCHMANN. 567 
This has an important bearing on the religious conception that 
death produces life. The mountain is called the White Cloud for 
the souls of the departed, thus emphasizing, “ From life to death, out 
of death life.” Higher up the mountain there are imposing grave 
inclosures amidst luxurious trees and plants. And when the Chinese 
look down and contemplate the busy city of millions in Canton they 
realize the vanity of this world and the preciousness of the rest that 
follows death. All is vanity in the physical world. He is at once 
a Chinese and a Buddhist. These ideas are further embodied in the 
image of Shou-hsing, the wise ancient hoary god who displays the 
symbol of the world, the sacred eight trigrams which explain the 
cirele of existence as the meaning of life (pl. 9, fig. 2). 
The Chinese thus feels himself to be closely connected with nature. 
He knows that he originated from it (nature) and shall return to it, 
and shall return to the earth, but then reappears in the persons of his 
children and grandchildren. He feels himself to be but a guest on 
earth, an insignificant part of the whole that he conceives as oneness. 
This is the purest partheism, and a wellspring for the outspoken 
social instinct of the race. 
There is, however, an essential difference between the Chinese and 
the Hindu. The ideal of the Chinese is the greatness and wholeness 
of creation, and he embodies this thought in his art and religion. 
But. as a practical man he realizes that as long as he is sojourning 
upon this earth he should arrange this life as comfortably as pos- 
sible. Hence his sober, businesslike sense, his perseverance in work 
which should afford him the means for life and enjoyment. This 
harmonizing of high idealism with practical sense gives the Chinese — 
people vitality and the right to have their ideas considered and 
esteemed as on an equality with our purely individualistic culture. 
And it may be due to the considerable admixture of individualism 
in the Chinese pantheism that the Chinese in his disposition is nearer 
to us than the racially more closely related, but dreamy and other- 
worldly Hindu. 
We have observed how both the country and its history have 
equally demonstrated to the Chinese the grandeur of their con- 
ception of unity. His system of the universe is thus divided into 
the forces in the circle of the two principles, the male and female; 
in the eight trigrams symbolizing the development of the variety of 
the rhythmic and harmonic physical world. Finally, the unity of 
man and nature. It is not very different from our division of 
natural philosophy in physics, mechanical energy, multiplicity, and 
logic and biology. It is always apparently the same with mankind, 
But the peculiar conception and combination of these elements with 
its trend to pantheism gives Chinese culture a reality that is the best 
conceivable preparation for artistic accomplishment. 
