13

The Confucian and the Unicorn

Mongol nomads rarely returned along the same route by which they came. Because Genghis Khan had entered Afghanistan from the northeast, he planned to return to Mongolia via another route, going south, crossing the Indus River, turning east, and making his way through the Himalayas or around them and across Bengal and Assam, and then turning north through China. If he took this route, he could continue to expand his empire along a course that would bring him back to the Tangut kingdom, where he could exact revenge on their ruler who had surrendered to him but then reneged on his promise and refused to send warriors for his campaign against the Khwarizm shah.

Instead of taking this adventuresome route, however, he turned back and returned to Mongolia the way he came. Practical reasons may have led to this decision. India was too hot for his men and horses. The humidity weakened their bows, and his warriors were exhausted after five years of fighting and wanted to return home. The routes through or around the Himalayas were long and extremely difficult—no known army had ever accomplished such a feat. So simple geography may have got the better of him.

Persian accounts offer an altogether different reason for the reversal of his plan, crediting something unusual that happened in Afghanistan. As the Mongolian army prepared to depart, Genghis Khan’s elite bodyguards reportedly saw a mysterious figure emerging from the mist. According to their account, the apparition appeared to be a greenish animal with the body of a deer, a horse’s tail, and one prominent horn protruding from its forehead.

The Secret History frequently refers to the power of heaven and Earth, but it relates no stories of unicorns or similar signs from heaven. One-horned mythical beasts appear frequently in mythology from China to Europe.¹ Some stories credit Alexander the Great with having encountered a unicorn in the same area, and one legend held that Alexander had died at a young age because of the curse from his having killed a sacred unicorn while hunting in Asia.² Marco Polo later reported that Alexander’s stallion, Bucephalus, had bred with local mares to produce a unique type of horse with a special mark on its forehead.³

According to the story about the Mongol sighting of the unicorn, Genghis Khan’s soldiers did not make the same mistake as Alexander. They had no desire to hunt or harm the mythical beast. For the Mongols, the appearance of any animal to a person, especially a wolf, is always understood as an honor and a blessing, not a threat. Whatever the animal may have been, the Mongols let it pass unharmed, and then they prayed and later made offerings to it in appreciation for its having appeared before them.

Although Muslim chroniclers repeated the story, Yelu Chucai may have been responsible for originating it, as the encounter parallels Chinese accounts of the life of Confucius. Any classically educated Chinese person would have known that a unicorn, described as a deer with one horn, appeared immediately prior to the birth of Confucius in 551 BC, carrying a message on a jade tablet proclaiming that his “doctrine will be a law to the world.”⁴ The appearance of the unicorn signaled the fall of an old dynasty and presaged that good government was about to be restored.⁵ Another unicorn appeared shortly before Confucius’s death in 479 BC. Whether or not Yelu Chucai created the unicorn story, he was the one credited with explaining the encounter and claiming that it demonstrated Genghis Khan’s unique blessings from heaven. The incident, near the end of his long campaign in Central Asia, symbolized heaven’s final approval of the life and achievements of the aging Mongol emperor. He had fulfilled his mission on Earth and had fully exhausted the great destiny conferred upon him. In the seventeenth century, an anonymous Buddhist monk in Mongolia offered a different explanation; that the unicorn had appeared as a warning to Genghis Khan, not as a blessing. He rewrote the incident in his Yellow History and claimed that the unicorn was sent from heaven to protect the holy lands of Tibet and India, the home of Buddha, from Genghis Khan’s invading army.⁶

Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great both swept through Central Asia near the end of their lives and reached the height of their conquests in Afghanistan. Although separated by 1,500 years, their stories frequently intertwined. The Romance of Alexander, an allegory based on Arabic and Greek sources, was one of the first Western literary works translated into Mongolian. It related the myth of Alexander’s search for the water of immortality. During the course of his epic journey, Alexander traverses the long bridge of life, climbs the mountain of effort, crosses the earth, and searches the floor of the sea in the quest for long life. Alexander narrates his own journey and tells us, “I followed the darkness in the direction of the setting sun.”⁷ Even though by then he was already “reaching the age of a thousand years,” he wanted to live for three thousand. Now at the end of his life, Alexander said, “there are no people who have not yet been seen by me.”⁸ He finally obtained the sacred water of immortality, but then he reflected on what his life would become if he kept living forever, and he realized that perhaps he did not love life so much as he loved the people who shared life with him. Without them, there would be no pleasure in living. After having searched so diligently for this elusive elixir, he poured it onto a cypress tree that then remained eternally green. Giving life to the tree gave him the immortality he had sought. He said that no king had ever been happier than he was at that moment.⁹ In the Mongolian version of the epic, he says, “I have become khan. On this very earth there has not been born a khan who has enjoyed life as I.”¹⁰ The story ended with a simple idea. “It is over, is ended, ended!” the text states. “Old men, be happy, all is vanity when one dies and comes to an end! It is ended. Be happy. When one dies and comes to an end, all is vanity! Let us be happy! Let us be prosperous.”¹¹

In part due to his ability to favorably interpret unusual events such as summer snow and the reported sighting of a unicorn, Yelu Chucai’s role as Mongol imperial adviser and propagandist steadily grew. Those who knew him described him as dedicated to his work, constantly striving to learn, to improve himself, and to use what he had learned to improve the administration of the Mongol nation. “It was not his habit to talk and laugh heedlessly,” wrote a colleague. “Thus, he may have appeared to be sharp and overbearing, but as soon as one was received by him, he became warm and affable, so that one could not forget him.”¹²

Yelu Chucai was the vehicle through which classical Chinese thought and practice entered the Mongol court. Although he maintained respect for Buddhism and appreciated the utility of Taoism, he particularly valued Confucian philosophy and traditional Chinese ways. For all his travels and transformation, he remained an aristocrat at heart. When he first met Genghis Khan, he was an enthusiastic young man in his twenties with a special flair for divination and a desire for adventure and advancement. Yelu Chucai’s transformation began almost as soon as he left China and entered Mongolia for the first time in 1219. He reflected on his greater appreciation for Chinese culture in the description of his initial arrival at the Kherlen River in Mongolia. “Iced is the river, although the spring has ended, soundless the water. Suddenly the far-away Southern Region seems like the butterfly’s dream.” The butterfly’s dream alludes to a famous quote in Chinese philosophy, when the Taoist scholar Zhuangzi wrote that after dreaming he was a butterfly, he awakened only to wonder if he was then a man dreaming he was a butterfly or was now a butterfly dreaming he was a man. Was Yelu Chucai now a Chinese Khitan pretending to be a Mongol, or possibly something else? He ends the poem with a statement of his difficulty going forward. “Let me hold the whip for a while, and look towards the Northwest. My lean horse is facing the wind unable to proceed.”¹³

The poet came as a somewhat naïve young man, but he left Khwarizm in his thirties as a fully mature minister to the Great Khan and a genius of court intrigue. Yet he still exhibited a nostalgic longing that had been a part of his classical Chinese education. Shortly after setting off on the long ride home from Samarkand, he composed a poem about the city, reflecting how much he had changed in four short years since he wrote the first poem about the ice and the butterfly by the Kherlen River:

Yellow oranges are mixed with honey to fry,

Plain cakes are sprinkled with powdered sugar.

From the time I came here to the west,

I no longer remember my own home place.¹⁴

The classical scholar within him had grown homesick, but he was not just yearning for the comforts of home. He longed for the spiritual simplicity of his youth. A few years later he wrote more somberly that no matter how “strong and determined” he was, he “could not help but feel sad and discouraged” being so far from home.¹⁵ He was a changed man, and yet beneath the surface one could still find that young scholar eager to reclaim the core lessons of history’s great spiritual teachers: Confucius, Buddha, and Lao Tzu. He believed that these original teachings had been corrupted by the arrival of the Manichaeans and the crass popularity of the Taoist sages. “To allow the practice of strange doctrines and heterodox principles will pervert the correct music and take away the luster of vermillion so that the people will no longer be able to distinguish right from wrong,”¹⁶ he wrote. Among these degenerate sects, he specifically rejected Manichaeism, but he did not do so openly while Genghis Khan still lived. He elliptically referred to the Manichaeans and to related sects as “Incense Societies” or “Society of White Robes.”¹⁷

Yelu Chucai recommended that one study only the primary sources in any given religion rather than the commentaries, but he recognized how challenging this could be even for the best educated of scholars. “It is simply that the more profound the writings of the ancients are, the more difficult it is to understand them.”¹⁸ He thought that all religions were compatible. While Genghis Khan sought to unite all the nations under Mongol rule, Yelu Chucai sought to unite the various religions of the empire into a single integrated voice. While Genghis Khan sought to preserve the diversity of religious beliefs within his empire, Yelu Chucai believed that only by unifying diverse faiths could humanity find a common cause and live peacefully within one harmonious empire.

While he supported all three of the established Chinese faiths—Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism—he did not treat them equally. He felt that Buddhism was the strongest and most meaningful, offering a highly personal form of moral guidance, a path toward enlightenment and peace of mind. To guide society and manage the state, however, Yelu Chucai believed that Confucius offered the best advice. The value of Taoism seemed a little less clear in his mind, but he seemed to view it as appropriate guidance for the common people.

Classically educated Confucian scholars were disorientated by and uncomfortable with Genghis Khan’s Mongol rule. Confucian thought did not permit any foreign leader—let alone a barbarian from the steppe—to be considered equal to the Chinese emperor. During Genghis Khan’s lifetime, China still had two royal houses, the Jin in the north and the Sung in the south, each with its own emperor. Confucian scholars taught that it was the constant duty of the Chinese royal court to conquer the barbarians. China had been ruled by foreigners before, but prior to the arrival of the Mongols all foreigner rulers had acknowledged the superiority of the Chinese language and culture. They had sought to become Chinese, offering Confucian officials a special role as cultural and spiritual guides. The Confucians had never been part of an empire that was larger than China, and certainly not one that considered the Chinese as vassals. For Genghis Khan, China was merely one country in his vast empire, which included lands about which Confucians had no knowledge. The scholars did not know what to make of such a previously unimaginable circumstance, so mostly they ignored the new reality and continued to think of themselves as the center of the world. They had no place for Genghis Khan and the Mongols in their worldview, and so it is not altogether surprising that he had no place for them in the administration of his growing empire.¹⁹ Yelu Chucai had a doubly difficult task: to render Confucian thought and Chinese culture palatable to Genghis Khan, while making him, as their new sovereign, appear at least tolerable to the Confucians themselves.

If any man could accomplish such a difficult task, it was Yelu Chucai. His ancestors had been steppe nomads, and although they had adapted to Chinese language and culture, he retained a strong spiritual connection to his origins and was probably the last person to read and write in the Khitai language of his ancestors. He firmly believed that Genghis Khan had the mandate to rule all of China and the world. In a meeting with an envoy from the Sung emperor, he made this clear. “Our horses’ hooves can reach anywhere,” he told him, “be it heaven or sea!”²⁰ To his mind, the unification of China could not come quickly enough. This quest became a guiding principle for him and has made him a popular figure with Chinese scholars ever since.

Just as Genghis Khan had his Keshig to guard him, he gathered around him a cadre of intellectual guardians, some twenty highly intelligent men who served as his own Illuminati.²¹ Most came from the steppe, or their ancestors did. All could read and write in Uighur script and Mongolian as well as other languages. One of these advisers was Chinqai, a Christian from one of the Turkic ethnic groups, who spoke Chinese as well as other tribal languages. Unlike the Muslims, who worked primarily in finance and taxation, or the Chinese, who excelled in technical services, medicine, and in some cases served as prized military commanders, these men were more difficult to identify ethnically or religiously. Their cultural orientation was tilted toward China, but they maintained a sophisticated cosmopolitan spirit, combining ideas from many cultures in a highly eclectic manner according to their personal styles.

Genghis Khan approved of some of the Confucian precepts propounded by Yelu Chucai, such as devotion to duty and consistency in life. He considered betrayal of duty, cowardice, lying, and laziness the vilest of all sins, and he praised those who put personal honor above their well-being, or even their life. He knew he could never depend on those who valued riches over honor. “Such people are base, craven, and they are slaves by nature,” wrote Juvaini. “Genghis Khan despised and destroyed them without mercy.”²² He taught his sons to ignore the kings of history who stored gold and silver. “They were devoid of their share of intellect and strong understanding,” he explained, “for no distinction could be made between that treasure and the dust.” Such treasure was no “source of advantage” nor could it “ward off harm.” “As for us, for the sake of our good name,” he said, “we shall store up our treasures in the corners of men’s hearts and shall leave nothing over the morrow.”²³

And yet, despite his affinity for these essential Confucian virtues, he did not share his adviser’s deeper interest in Confucianism, and shunned some of its most basic teachings. This rejection was probably more emotional than intellectual. Confucian scholars objected vehemently to some Mongol customs, such as the expectation that a dead man’s closest male relative should marry his widow. To refuse to do so seemed cruel and selfish in the eyes of a Mongol, but Confucians condemned such marriages as incestuous, particularly when a son married his stepmother. Genghis Khan considered this narrow-minded and felt it was a violation of the most basic law of compassion and responsibility, as a widow might otherwise have no source of support. The painful experiences of his abandoned mother certainly influenced his thinking on this issue.

Confucian philosophy had no real gods, and its priests had no ability to control weather, forecast the future, or cure illness. How could they speak to heaven if heaven did not speak to them? Their rituals were formal and inaccessible, alienating the Mongols, who were used to participating in ceremonies while seated on their horses, moving around as they pleased so that they could draw up close to friends and socialize while worshipping. Mongol rituals always concluded with food and alcohol, and even the most serious ceremonial gatherings offered men and women an opportunity to chat, eat, flirt, and above all, get drunk. A religious occasion was a celebration, not a solemn state ritual. It had to be interesting and entertaining and to fulfill some personal need. If the shaman or priest could not capture one’s attention with his show, it was doubtful he would attract the attention of the spirits. By contrast, Confucian rituals were simply boring.

Genghis Khan respected Confucius as one of history’s holy men, but he avoided scholars who claimed to be his disciples. Their teachings made little sense to him and they had little to say about imperial conquest and change. Confucius’s writings stressed the importance of preserving the order of the past, while Genghis Khan wanted to destroy the order of the past and create a completely new society. They taught obedience to rulers at virtually any cost, whereas he had rebelled against his overlords and removed them. Confucianism stressed principles of patriarchy and obligations to relatives and ancestors, but these were precisely the people who had caused him the most trouble in his life. His clan had banished him and prevented him from participating in their ancestral worship, but he had overcome this cruel mistreatment to become the strongest leader in the tribe and indeed the world.

At some time in his life, he had violated most of the basic precepts of Confucianism. He had killed his half brother, defied his mother, and risen up and overthrown his sovereign, Ong Khan. Even Yelu Chucai, with his quick mind and skilled oratory, had difficulty reconciling his new master’s actions with Confucian teachings. Confucius emphasized the priority of the male lineage in almost every aspect of society, but Genghis Khan, having been so poorly treated by his male relatives, depended on and empowered women. Mongol women owned property, including the ger, and a share of the animals. They inherited property from their families, but they also accrued it based on their service in peace or war, and they were often assigned control over men. Genghis Khan’s mother, daughters, and wives each had her own royal court and administered her lands, waters, and men. With only a million or so Mongols to maintain control over an empire of more than a hundred million people, Genghis Khan had to maximize the talents of every person to the fullest extent possible. The men were primarily his warriors, so he relied on women to administer the homeland, to control trade and finance, and to rule over many of the conquered nations, particularly along the Silk Route.

Practices such as these contributed to the Confucian view that the steppe barbarians were the antithesis of civilized. In their view, the Mongols were a tribe who claimed descent from a wolf and a deer; they were scarcely human. The Mongols had no sense of the proper separation of generations, classes, or sexes, and no understanding of etiquette or tradition. The Mongol system of government completely violated the Confucian notion that men of formal education should rule and that warriors and merchants ranked low in the hierarchy. Genghis Khan ruled with the aid of his Keshig guardians, who exercised power over the military as well as over law, administration, and religion. To his mind, education and spiritual training were crafts, comparable to weaving rugs, making pottery, or farming. Each craft had its place in society, but these were not appropriate occupations for Mongols, who were born to hunt, make war, and rule over everyone else.

Fanatical followers of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam evidenced a desire to reach a universal audience, but Confucian scripture remained stubbornly rooted within Chinese tradition. A person did not have to be an Arab to convert to Islam or an Indian to practice Buddhism, but it seemed necessary to be Chinese before one could practice Confucianism. Confucian teachings concentrated on social relations between people and adherence to a prescribed set of strict rules that a leader needed to learn and to obey. Genghis Khan felt that heaven endowed powerful leaders with the inherent right to rule over their subjects, especially over their conquered subjects. He had a genuine interest in hearing the advice of religious men, but he would decide on the validity and practicality of their teachings. He considered them to be recommendations, not commands. Genghis Khan was ultimately the one who would issue the orders, laws, and commands. He was not much interested in following another man’s precepts.

Genghis Khan’s attitude toward Confucianism appears to have been set well before he met Yelu Chucai, and he was not inclined to change his mind once it had been made. Yelu Chucai’s position at court rose steadily, and over the course of his three decades of service to the Mongols, he persistently brought up Confucian ideas, references, insights, and practices as seemed appropriate to the problems of the moment. Over time, his influence was considerable.

“I wished to make Our Sovereign tread loftily in the footsteps of the ancient worthies,” he wrote in his memoir of time in Afghanistan, written soon after the death of Genghis Khan. His aim was “to assist the Court in promoting culture and education and in realizing the way of goodness so that fine customs and benevolent rule may excel those of former ages.”²⁴ To this end, he offered a long list of specifics: “to fix the laws, deliberate upon rituals and music, to erect ancestral temples, to build houses, to found schools, to hold examinations, to seek out retired scholars, to search for the ministers of the previous dynasty, to promote the worthy and good, to seek upright men, to encourage agriculture and sericulture, to suppress indolence, to moderate punishments, to reduce taxes, to honor moral integrity, to castigate profligacy, to dismiss superfluous officials, to expel oppressive officers, to exalt filial and brotherly devotion, and to relieve poverty and distress.” Thus will he be able to create a “Great Peace.”²⁵

Because he was interested in Buddhist and Taoist teachings as well as Confucianism, Yelu Chucai sought to please Genghis Khan by combining the various religions. He referred to his training in different scriptures as bathing in “the immense ocean of the Law.” Different religions are referred to as “laws,” each one based on separate but similar scriptures.²⁶ “The Way of our Confucius is for governing the world, the Way of Lao Tzu is for nourishing the nature, and the Way of Buddha is for cultivating the mind. This is a universal opinion, in the past as well as in the present. Apart from these doctrines, the rest is all heresy.”²⁷ Together, in his mind, these three faiths formed the three legs of philosophy and religion. “All that is needed is that the teachings of the Three Sages stand firmly in the world like a tripod without oppressing and robbing one another, each of them living peacefully.”²⁸

Despite his differences with the Immortal Sage, Yelu Chucai consistently preferred the three religions he thought of as Chinese—Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. He dismissed Christianity and Islam as foreign and possibly dangerous. The Christians in the Mongol hierarchy were mostly women or the less powerful sons-in-law of the Great Khan, and Yelu Chucai initially perceived them as a lesser threat. By contrast, the rising influence of the Muslims in court greatly alarmed him. He seemed to enjoy finding small ways to diminish their supposed expertise in mathematics and science, the fields that Genghis Khan most admired. He reportedly once delighted in showing a Muslim prediction of an eclipse to have been wrong; the following year, his forecast was proved correct.

Genghis Khan had exempted all monks from taxation and military duties, but he did not share Yelu Chucai’s faith in them. He said that too many monks lived like parasites off the hard work of others without performing a useful function in return. It seemed gratuitous to exempt them from military service and taxes unless they could prove their mastery of the faith they claimed to follow. Having been through the classical Chinese education system with its emphasis on written exams, Yelu Chucai proposed that the Mongol government test the monks to make sure they qualified for the tax exemption by being, at the very least, able to read. The clergy resisted and angrily objected to even these simple standards, saying that reading was irrelevant to their work. They recited the scriptures that they needed from memory, and looked upon reading as a devious ploy for those not smart enough to memorize.

“How can the clergy be examined like young school boys?” objected one Buddhist leader. “I am a rustic monk,” an illiterate lama complained. “I never look at scriptures and do not know a single word,” he confessed. He pointed out that Mongol officials did not know how to read or write, and yet they performed their jobs without difficulties. So why should a monk have to read and write to perform his duties?²⁹ The law was never enforced.

Yelu Chucai encountered much criticism from his fellow Chinese scholars for helping the barbarians and, in particular, for bringing the Taoist sage to the Mongol court and granting him excessive privileges. To counter their criticism and assuage his conscience, he chastised the Taoists and confessed his error. “I was wrong. I was wrong!” he declared in his book. The experience increased his commitment to classical Chinese philosophy and to Confucianism in particular. He urged his master to adopt the Chinese system, which placed the administration of the empire in the hands of the best educated as selected through a rigorous system of national examinations. But Genghis Khan showed no interest in reinstating the Chinese system of state exams. He chose men based on their achievements in life and on the battlefield, not in the classroom. He valued men of courage and action over those of thoughtful deliberation.

Yelu Chucai failed in some of his more scholarly endeavors, but he managed to introduce many important Chinese administrative practices into the growing Mongol system of government. The Mongols viewed China as a collection of failed states, none of which had been able to protect itself from their arrival, and their leader had little interest in adopting their failed traditions and customs. Yelu Chucai often had to use delicate subtlety to hide the Chinese origins of some of the recommendations, which he presented as simple common sense. Rather than putting them forward as time-tested and proven Chinese or Confucian ideas, he described them in vague but spiritually uplifting terms, explaining that “the way of goodness” was “the essence of government and that however strong its army, no nation could survive without support of its people.”³⁰

Yelu Chucai advocated reforming and systematizing taxes so that state income would be consistent and predictable, but he faced opposition from members of Genghis Khan’s royal family, who simply wanted more income from tax revenues. He remained at the center of a pro-Chinese faction at the Mongol court and was strongly challenged by a coterie of Muslim officials brought in after the annexation of Khwarizm. These Muslim administrators remained popular with the Great Khan’s offspring because of their ruthless, and often cruel, efficiency in extorting every last cent they could from the Chinese peasantry. He described their method of tax administration as “a way used by villains, which is seriously harmful. I hope to stop it.”³¹

Despite his efforts to bring a moderating influence to the Mongol court and to make it conform with Chinese traditional government, Yelu Chucai also changed during his lifetime at Genghis Khan’s court. Once during a celebration at the royal court, according to the Yuan Shi, the official Chinese history of the Mongol reign, Yelu Chucai became drunk, wandered away from the festivities, and passed out in a cart. Genghis Khan’s son Ogodei, also drunk, as he often was, saw Yelu Chucai in the cart, climbed in with him, and tried to rouse him. Without opening his eyes, Yelu Chucai became angry and demanded to be left alone. Ogodei chided him for being drunk alone instead of with the rest of them, and then dragged him back to the celebration. Disheveled, disoriented, and missing his hat, belt, and a few other items, the restrained Confucian scholar was just one more drunken bureaucrat.³² Yelu Chucai came to Genghis Khan as a Chinese scholar, but over the years, he too became a bit of a Mongol.

By the time Genghis Khan departed from Afghanistan, he recognized that men of religion would have only a limited role to play in the administration of his vast empire. They had some useful skills, but they were stymied by an abundance of words with too little ability to act. Genghis Khan was looking for common sense; they were looking for enlightenment. The priests, monks, mullahs, and shamans brought into the Mongol court often frustrated Genghis Khan. They recommended preaching and teaching as the answer to every problem. Every problem required more thought, more study, more analysis, but Genghis Khan had to administer an empire of millions of people with pressing problems that needed immediate, even if not perfect, solutions. The religious men and scholars always wanted to wait, as one of Genghis Khan’s advisers pointed out, for “favorable conditions” or a time of “tranquility before promoting culture and education.” His problems were pressing, and he did not have the luxury of time to wait for enlightenment. “I say that this is very wrong indeed!” complained one Chinese minister. One had to do more than “delay and wait for the favorable conditions.”³³ “Calm and self-satisfied, you put your hands in your sleeves and waited for tranquility,” he complained of the Taoist monks, but such hypocritical inaction resembled the one who “wishes to relieve hunger and cold and yet throws away grains and silk.”

Early in the twentieth century, a curator of Asian manuscripts at the National Library of France in Paris, while examining one of the oldest copies of Juvaini’s book on Genghis Khan, found four brief inscriptions at the back of the manuscript. Each was a short poem written in the four languages used by the Mongol rulers in Central Asia—Mongolian, Arabic, Persian, and Uighur. The Mongolian inscription is one of the oldest Mongolian poems recorded—an elegant endorsement of the value of knowledge and law over wealth and jewels:

Knowledge is an ocean, the jewel retreats before it,

the law of knowledge, the wise man knows.³⁴

Added as a postscript to the first book on the life of Genghis Khan, it seems a fitting summary of his quest in the final years of his life. By the time he left Afghanistan, he knew virtually everything there was to know about war and conquest, and he had accumulated more wealth than any other person in the world. But he was still restless; he was still searching for wisdom.