Chinese Sketches by Herbert A. Giles — Read

Theoretically, the Chinese are fatalists in the fullest sense of the word. Love of life and a desire to enjoy the precious boon as long as possible, prevent them from any such extended application of the principle as would be prejudicial to the welfare of the nation; yet each man believes that his destiny is pre-ordained, and that the whole course of his life is mapped out for him with unerring exactitude. Happily, when the occasion presents itself, his thoughts are generally too much occupied with the crisis before him, to be able to indulge in any dangerous speculations on predestination and free-will; his practice, therefore, is not invariably in harmony with his theory.

On the first page of a Chinese almanack for the current year, we have a curious woodcut representing a fly, a spider, a bird, a sportsman, a tiger, and a well. Underneath this strange medley is a legend couched in the following terms: -- "Predestination in all things! " The letterpress accompanying the picture explains that the spider had just secured a fat fly, and was on the point of making a meal of him, when he was espied by a hungry bird which swooped down on both. As the bird was making off to its nest with this delicious mouthful, a sportsman who happened to be casting round for a supper, brought it down with his gun, and was stooping to pick it up, when a tiger, also with an empty stomach, sprang from behind upon the man, and would there and then have put an end to the drama, but for an ugly well, on the brink of which the bird had dropped, and into which the tiger, carried on by the impetus of his spring, tumbled headlong, taking with him man, bird, spider, and fly in one fell career to the bottom. This fable embodies popular ideas in China with regard to predestination, by virtue of which calamity from time to time overtakes doomed victims, as a punishment for sins committed in their present or a past state of existence.