CHINESE PUZZLEDOM 147 



of this sort, where, to borrow from his own language, 

 "progression both forward and backward are equally im- 

 practicable," he invariably puts it down to Fate, and says 

 with philosophic resignation that if the God of Longevity 

 rides on a donkey it is because he has no deer ( ^% J| £$ gg & 

 % A).* 



Those who have plodded wearily through the Four 

 Books and Five Canons unaccompanied by Dr. Legge, 

 will agree that what makes them on the whole so depressing 

 to the student, especially if he be at all fond of understand- 

 ing what he reads, is their contracted phraseology and ultra- 

 conciseness of construction, which Du Halde calls their 

 "Majestic and Sublime Brevity." 



But of all the works in Chinese literature the palm for 

 downright unfathomable abstruseness must unreservedly be 

 given to the I Ching (U H ), or "Canon of Changes."! 

 This book is the groundwork of the whole fabric of Chinese 

 Philosophy founded on the sixty-four permutations of the 

 Pa Kua (A^h), or "Eight Diagrams," which we are told 

 were copied from the markings on the back of a tortoise 

 at some remote period between the years 2953-2838 B.C., 

 by that semi-legendary monarch Fu Hsi. The Pa Kua, 

 which has been elaborated into an entire system of ontology 

 interwoven with the mumbo-jumbo of divination and the 

 science of numbers, represents the Universe divided into 

 eight parts, viz. : 



*The three bright stars in the centre of the Constellation of 

 Orion, known as the "belt," are called by the Chinese Fu, Lu and Shou 

 (|!h S^ii! H H. ) ; they are the three Divinities of Happiness, Emolu- 

 ments and Longevity. In pictures the God of Longevity ( ^ISii.) 

 is always represented as a jovial old man with a flowing white beard 

 and an abnormally high forehead. He holds in one hand the Peach 

 of Immortality, the emblem of long life, culled from the fairy gardens 

 of the "Fairy Mother," Hsi Wang Mu (^J|), and in the other a 

 staff which is the adjunct of old age. He is always accompanied by a 

 deer and a bat. Now, the explanation of the deer and the bat is this : 

 the bat is called fu (fief) and the deer lu ( ^), and by reason of 

 homophony they allude to (}jg) Happiness and ( jjjfS ) Emoluments, 

 the other two members of the trinity not in the picture, albeit the 

 characters denoting them are not the same. In the saying just quoted 

 the character lu is yet another ; it is ££ , a "road," or "way" ; the real 

 sense, therefore, is not he rides on a donkey "because he has no deer," 

 but "because there is no way out of a fix" ; in other words, "he has 

 no option." The play on the words is perfect in the mandarin 

 language. 



+First translated into Latin by the Jesuit Father. P. Regis, 

 a.d. 1834. 



