Page 74 - Chiense TExtiles, MET MUSEUM Pub 1934

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
good omen, as does the hou, a horned blue lion. The
tiger is sometimes given as the symbol of physical
strength, as opposed to the dragon, the symbol of spirit-
ual strength and of the fluidity of water. The lion has
been favored from very early times, but since the animal
was not native to China, the Chinese began representing
it as they imagined it from the stories which came from
India, and besides picturing it with strange physical
characteristics, they originated the legend that the lion
cub, often depicted, especially in ceramics, under its
mother's paw, obtained sustenance not from the breasts
of the lioness but from her paw. The male lion is usually
shown with his foot on a ball of brocade.
The religious symbols employed in the Buddhist and
Taoist cults in China have become in our day inter-
-changeable, and many of them are also put to secular
use. The origin of these symbols seems to me to be defi-
nitely Buddhistic. We classify the most familiar of them
under the following headings:

I. SYMBOLS oF ANCIENT CHINESE LoRE
The Pa-kua and the Yin-yang. The Pa-kua ("Eight
Trigrams") are the mystic symbols (fig. 24) supposed
to have been found on the back of the dragon horse,
and from them have developed the philosophy of divi-
nation and geomancy and the I Ching, the much ven-
erated classic, which is quite as unintelligible to most
Chinese as it is to foreigners. In the Yin-yang (fig. 24),
symbol of the duality of Nature, yin is the female and
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