mountains and forests and lakes and
wild waters: Tsu the land of Laotse and Ch'u Yuan, and I think
Chwangtse too. It is here are the Hills of T'ang, the metropolis
of Natural Magic perhaps for all the world; and the mind and
imagination of China, centered here, were receiving a new
polarization; something richer and more luminous was being born.
Contemporary with Tao Yuan-ming was Ku Kaichih, the first supreme
name in painting. Fenollosa speaks of a "White Lotus Club,"
organized by Hui Yuan, A Buddhist priest, and consisteing of
"mountain-climbers and thinkers,"--Tao Yuan-ming being a member.

One would like to get at the heart of what happened in that last
quarter of the fourth century. This is what we see on our side:
Canton and Yangtse ports were being visited more and more by
Hindu, Arab, and Sassanian traders, bringing in new things and
ideas: the Hindus, especially, an impetus towards culture from
the splendor of the gupta period, then at its topmost height.
Also ther were new inventions, such as that of paper, which was
an incentive to literary output. The Chinese mind, in the south
especially, was quickened on the one hand by the magical wind
from the mountains, and on the other by a wind from the great
world over-seas: the necessary nationalistic and international
quickenings. But deeper quickenings also were taking place.
India was fast becoming, under the Gupta reaction towards
Brahmanism, no place for the Buddhists; and the Hindu ships that
put in at Canton and the Yangtse were bringing much to China
besides merchandise. A great propaganda of Buddhism was in
process; by Indian monks, and now too for the first time by
native Chinese. We read of a missionary who went about preaching
to an indifferent world; then in sorrow took to the mountains,
and proclaimed the Good Law to the mountain boulders; and they
"nodded as it were their heads in assent." * But there is
evidence that China was fast becoming the spiritual metropolis of
the world: Buddhism was drifting in, and mingling among the
mountains with mountain Taoism, that dear and hoary magic of the
Eastern World; and the result was an atmosphere in which
astounding events were to happen.

------
* Giles _Dictionary of Chinese Biography;_ from which work,
and from the same author's _Chinese Literature,_ the facts,
quotations, and enecdotes given in this lecture are taken.
------

In 401, Kumarajiva, the seventeenth Buddhist Patriarch, came