É. Apor (ed.): Jubilee Volume of the Oriental Collection, 1951–1976. Papers Presented on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Oriental Collection of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
I. ECSEDY: Historical Time and Mythical History in Ancient China
64 state are preserved in the holy books containing the central philosophy which served for maintaining the state: Confucianism. The classical books contain and thus canonize historical stories, which include direct or indirect references providing support and justification to later causes, and mention heros of more and more shining names; they expound their current and actualized morality as the evident and final truth, and they connect the didactically simplified memory of the past with one or other respectable person or rather with their name in order to perpetuate their memory. This mythical inheritance collected in concise parables and similes — if only because of the authority and wide-spread social influence of Confucianism — supplants all other traditional literary elements of consciousness. Local tradition, tales and magic are first banished as worthless and superfluous, then attacked and finally driven back to the persecuted periphery of a declining social consciousness of culture. Confucius (and Confucianism) "spoke neither of irregular things, nor of spirits" ('Lun-yii', Chapter VII), and he did not even reject existence after death for instance, he simply never dealt with it, saying: whoever does not even know life, how could he understand death? ('Lun-yii', XI). It is probably not accidental that all these ancient or later uncanonized beliefs, of which only parts have been preserved at random, have proved to be inadequate to form the basis of a lost mythology; they refuse to be integrated into a body of concepts and doctrines. The primitive world-concept ofa historically obsolete phase of social history preserved for thousands of years by a prehistorical mode of existence, never completely discredited and overcome, and thus long haunting in its fragments — on the whole repressed, isolated and decaying, but occasionally flourishing — found its natural place in oppositional ideologies. Traditional pious stories fitted easily into the illustrations of Taoism with local and folk roots that escaped into "non-action" — as a form of revolt — as well as into the legends of foreign-based Buddhism which was spreading in a Chinese form and shared the fate of Taoism in its persecution, too. They harmonically merge within the popular "strange stories" of despised belles-letteres proper, created with the help of the proselytizing propaganda of Buddhism. The multitudinous empires of spirits, ghosts, demons and fairies, which öfter mirror imperial order, too, reveal the influence of Taoist-Buddhist mediation; but their miraculous stories have their counterpoints in the whole of Chinese literature, even in quasi-scientific or wholly scientific works. This is due rather to the rudimentary character of the contemporary scientific world concept than to the existence of a coherent "other world" with valid system of social symbols. In its efforts to form a coherent system, Confucianism also refrained from meddling with magic forces, partly because of state interests, and because it considered the ceremonial complex of magic elements to be the only form of magic worthy of survival in a civilised society, i.e. a society like its own, proud of its existence as a state. As it organised the state, it declared itself the sole and direct heir to the ancient and continuously evolving civilisation of China, wherever possible it sought for ancient examples in mythical tradition
