I was much impressed by the ambition and perseverance of one farm boy I met. The majority of the Han country folk were illiterate and content to remain so, but this one lad had somehow learned to read, and was determined to rise above his poverty, and had borrowed books to study. Since he could not neglect his farm work—being the only stay of aged parents—he would tie a book to the horns of his ox and read while he led the beast about in tilling the field. And at night, because the household could not afford even a grease wick-lamp, he would read by the light of glowworms which he plucked from the farm furrows during the day.

I do not mean to assert that every Han in Manzi was the embodiment of virtues and talents and no less worthy attributes. I saw also some egregious evidences of fatuity and even lunacy. One night we came to a village where a religious festa of some sort was going on. There was music and song and dance and merry fires burning all about, and every so often the night was rent by the thunder and flash of the fiery trees and sparkling flowers. The center of all the celebration was a table set up in the village square. It was piled with offerings to the gods: samples of the finest local farm produce, flasks of pu-tao and mao-tai, slaughtered piglet and lamb carcasses, fine cooked viands, beautifully arranged vases of flowers. There was a gap among all that bounty, where a hole was cut in the middle of the table, and one villager after another would crawl under the table, put his head up through the hole, pose that way for a time, then remove himself to make way for another. When I inquired in amazement what that was meant to signify, my scribe asked about and then reported:

“The gods look down and see the sacrifices heaped up for them. Among the offerings, the heads. So each villager goes away confident that the gods, having seen him already dead, will take his name off their list of local mortals to be afflicted with ills and sorrows and death.”

I might have laughed. But it occurred to me that, however simple-mindedly those people were behaving, at least they were being ingeniously simpleminded. After some time in Manzi, and after admiring innumerable instances of the Han’s intelligence, and after deploring as many instances of witlessness, I eventually came to a conclusion. The Han possessed prodigious intellect and industry and imagination. They were mainly flawed in this respect: they too often wasted their gifts in fanatic observance of their religious beliefs, which were flagrantly fatuous. If the Han had not been so preoccupied with their notions of godliness, and so bent on seeking “wisdom instead of knowledge” (as one of them had once expressed it to me), I think those people, as a people, could have done great things. If they had not forever lain worshipfully prostrate—a position which invited their being trodden on by one oppressive dynasty after another—they might themselves by now be rulers of the whole world.

That farm boy I earlier spoke of, whose initiative and assiduity I found admirable, forfeited some of my regard as we talked further and he told me, by way of my scribe:

“My passion for reading and my yearning for learning might distress my aged parents. They might decry my ambition as an overweening arrogance, but—”

“Why on earth should they?”

“We follow the Precepts of Kong Fu-tze, and one of his teachings was that a low-born person should not presume above his ordained station in life. But I was about to say that my parents do not object, for my reading affords me opportunity also to manifest my filial piety, and another of the Precepts is that parents be honored above all else. So, since each night I am so eager to get to my books and my glowworms, I am the first of us to retire. I can lie on my pallet and force myself to lie perfectly still while I read, so that all the mosquitoes in the house can freely suck my blood.”

I blinked and said, “I do not understand.”

“By the time my aged parents stretch their old bodies on their pallets, you see, the mosquitoes are gorged and sated, and do not molest them. Yes, my parents often boast of me to our neighbors, and I am held an example to all sons.”

I said unbelievingly, “This is something marvelous. The old fools boast of you letting yourself be eaten alive, but not of your striving to better yourself?”

“Well, doing the one is being obedient to the Precepts, while the other … .”

I said, “Vakh!” and turned and went away from him. A parent too apathetic to swat his own mosquitoes seemed not much worth honoring, or humoring with attention—or preserving, for that matter. As a Christian, I believe in devotion to one’s father and mother, but I think that not even the Commandment enjoins abject filiality to the exclusion of everything else. If that were so, no son would ever have time or opportunity to produce a son to honor him.

That Kong Fu-tze, or Kong-the-Master, of whom the boy had spoken, was a long-ago Han philosopher, the originator of one of the three chief religions of those people. The three faiths all were fragmented into numerous contradictory and antagonistic sects, and all three were much intermingled in popular observance, and they were interlarded with traces of ever so many lesser cults—worship of gods and goddesses, demons and demonesses, nature spirits, ancient superstitions —but in the main there were three: Buddhism, the Tao and the Precepts of Kong Fu-tze.

I have already mentioned Buddhism, holding out to man a salvation from the rigors of this world by means of continual rebirths ascending to the nothingness of Nirvana. I have also mentioned the Tao, the Way by which a man could hope to harmonize and live happily with all the good things of the world around him. The Precepts dealt less with the here or the hereafter than with all-that-has-gone-before. To put it simplistically, a practitioner of Buddhism looked to the empty void of the future. A follower of the Tao did his best to enjoy the teeming and eventful present. But a devotee of the Precepts was concerned mostly with the past, the old, the dead.

Kong Fu-tze preached respect for tradition, and tradition is what his Precepts became. He ordained that younger brothers must revere the older, and a wife revere her husband, and all revere the parents, and they the community elders, and so on. The result was that the greatest honor accrued not to the best, but to the oldest. A man who had heroically prevailed against fierce odds—to win some notable victory or attain to some notable eminence—was accounted less worthy than some human turnip who had merely sat inert and existed and survived to a venerable age. All the respect rightly owed to excellence was bestowed upon vegetable antiquity. I did not think that reasonable. I had known enough old fools—and not just in Manzi—to know that age does not, as a matter of inevitability, confer wisdom, dignity, authority or worth. Years do not do that by themselves; the years must have contained experience and learning and achievement and travail overcome; and most people’s years do not.

Worse yet. If a living grandfather was to be venerated, well, his father and grandfather, though dead and gone, were even older—no xe vero?—and even more highly to be venerated. Or so the Precepts were interpreted by their devotees, and those Precepts had permeated the consciousness of all the Han, including those who professed faith in Buddhism or the Tao or the Mongols’ Tengri or the Nestorian version of Christianity or some one of the lesser religions. There was a general attitude of “Who knows? It may not help, but it does no harm, to burn a bit of incense to the next fellow’s deity, however absurd.” Even the most nearly rational persons, those Han who had converted to Nestorian Christianity—who would never have made ko-tou to the next fellow’s absurd fat idol, or a shaman’s divining bones, or a Taoist’s advice-giving sticks, or whatever—saw no harm, and possible benefit, in making ko-tou to his own ancestors. A man may be poor in all material assets, but even the most impoverished wretch has whole nations of ancestors. Paying the requisite reverence to all of them kept every living person of the Han perpetually prone—if not in physical fact, certainly in his outlook on life.