processes do not disappear” (chap. ii.). It only needs the same quality in the arrangements and measures of government to make society beautiful and happy. “A government conducted by sages would free the hearts of the people from inordinate desires, fill their bellies, keep their ambitions feeble and strengthen their bones. They would constantly keep the people without knowledge and free from desires; and, where there were those who had knowledge, they would have them so that they would not dare to put it in practice” (chap. iii.). A corresponding course observed by individual man in his government of himself becoming again “as a little child” (chaps. x. and xxviii.) will have corresponding results. “His constant virtue will be complete, and he will return to the primitive simplicity” (chap. xxviii.).
Such is the subject matter of the Tâo Teh King—the operation of this method or Tâo, “without striving or crying,” in nature, in society and in the individual. Much that is very beautiful and practical is inculcated in connexion with its working in the individual character. The writer seems to feel that he cannot say enough on the virtue of humility (chap. viii., &c.). There were three things which he prized and held fast—gentle compassion, economy and the not presuming to take precedence in the world (chap. lxvii.). His teaching rises to its highest point in chap. lxiii.:—“It is the way of Tâo not to act from any personal motive, to conduct affairs without feeling the trouble of them, to taste without being aware of the flavour, to account the great as small and the small as great, to recompense injury with kindness.” This last and noblest characteristic of the Tâo, the requiting “good for evil,” is not touched on again in the treatise; but we know that it excited general attention at the time, and was the subject of conversation between Confucius and his disciples (Confucian Analects, xiv. 36).
What is said in the Tâo on government is not, all of it, so satisfactory. The writer shows, indeed, the benevolence of his heart. He seems to condemn the infliction of capital punishment (chaps. lxxiii. and lxxiv.), and he deplores the practice of war (chap. lxix.); but he had no sympathy with the progress of society or with the culture and arts of life. He says (chap. lxv.):—“Those who anciently were skilful in practising the Tâo did not use it to enlighten the people; their object rather was to keep them simple. The difficulty in governing the people arises from their having too much knowledge, and therefore he who tries to govern a state by wisdom is a scourge to it, while he who does not try to govern thereby is a blessing.” The last chapter but one is the following:—“In a small state with a few inhabitants, I would so order it that the people, though supplied with all kinds of implements, would not (care to) use them; I would give them cause to look on death as a most grievous thing, while yet they would not go away to a distance to escape from it. Though they had boats and carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them. Though they had buff-coats and sharp weapons, they should not don or use them. I would make them return to the use of knotted cords (instead of written characters). They should think their coarse food sweet, their plain clothing beautiful, their poor houses places of rest and their common simple ways sources of enjoyment. There should be a neighbouring state within sight, and the sound of the fowls and dogs should be heard from it to us without interruption, but I would make the people to old age, even to death, have no intercourse with it.”
On reading these sentiments, we must judge of Lâo-tsze that, with all his power of thought, he was only a dreamer. But thus far there is no difficulty arising from his language in regard to the Tâo. It is simply a quality, descriptive of the style of character and action, which the individual should seek to attain in himself, and the ruler to impress on his administration. The language about the Tâo in nature is by no means so clear. While Sir Robert Douglas says that “the way” would be the best translation of Tâo, he immediately adds:—“But Tâo is more than the way. It is the way and the way-goer. It is an eternal road; along it all beings and things walk; but no being made it, for it is being itself; it is everything, and nothing and the cause and effect of all. All things originate from Tâo, conform to Tâo and to Tâo at last they return.”
Some of these representations require modification; but no
thoughtful reader of the treatise can fail to be often puzzled
by what is said on the point in hand. Julien, indeed,
says with truth (p. xiii.) that “it is impossible to take
Tâo for the primordial Reason, for the sublime Intelligence,
The Tâo
and the
Deity.
which has created and governs the world”;
but many of Lâo-tsze’s statements are unthinkable if there
be not behind the Tâo the unexpressed recognition of a personal
creator and ruler. Granted that he does not affirm positively
the existence of such a Being, yet certainly he does not deny
it, and his language even implies it. It has been said, indeed,
that he denies it, and we are referred in proof to the fourth
chapter:—“Tâo is like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use
of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency. How
deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things!
We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications
of things; we should attemper our brightness, and
assimilate ourselves to the obscurity caused by dust. How still
and clear is Tâo, a phantasm with the semblance of permanence!
I do not know whose son it is. It might appear to have been
before God (Ti).”
The reader will not overlook the cautious and dubious manner in which the predicates of Tâo are stated in this remarkable passage. The author does not say that it was before God, but that “it might appear” to have been so. Nowhere else in his treatise does the nature of Tâo as a method or style of action come out more clearly. It has no positive existence of itself; it is but like the emptiness of a vessel, and the manifestation of it by men requires that they endeavour to free themselves from all self-sufficiency. Whence came it? It does not shock Lâo-tsze to suppose that it had a father, but he cannot tell whose son it is. And, as the feeling of its mysteriousness grows on him, he ventures to say that “it might appear to have been before God.”
There is here no denial but express recognition of the existence of God, so far as it is implied in the name Tî, which is the personal name for the concept of heaven as the ruling power, by means of which the fathers of the Chinese people rose in prehistoric time to the idea of God. Again and again Lâo-tsze speaks of heaven just as “we do when we mean thereby the Deity who presides over heaven and earth.” These last words are taken from Watters (p. 81); and, though he adds, “We must not forget that this heaven is inferior and subsequent to the mysterious Tâo, and was in fact produced by it,” it has been shown how rash and unwarranted is the ascription of such a sentiment to “the Venerable Philosopher.” He makes the Tâo prior to heaven and earth, which is a phrase denoting what we often call “nature,” but he does not make it prior to heaven in the higher and immaterial usage of that name. The last sentence of his treatise is:—“It is the Tâo—the way—of Heaven to benefit and not injure; it is the Tâo—the way—of the sage to do and not strive.”
Since Julien laid the Tâo Teh King fairly open to Western readers in 1842, there has been a tendency to overestimate rather than to underestimate its value as a scheme of thought and a discipline for the individual and society. There are in it lessons of unsurpassed value, such as the inculcation of simplicity, humility and self-abnegation, and especially the brief enunciation of the divine duty of returning good for ill; but there are also the regretful representations of a primitive society when men were ignorant of the rudiments of culture, and the longings for its return.
When it was thought that the treatise made known the doctrine of the Trinity, and even gave a phonetic representation of the Hebrew name for God, it was natural, even necessary, to believe that its author had had communication with more western parts of Asia, and there was much speculation about visits to India and Judaea, and even to Greece. The necessity for assuming such travels has passed away. If we can receive Sze-mâ Ch’ien’s histories as trustworthy, Lâo-tsze might have heard, in the states of Chow and among the wild tribes adjacent to them, views about society and government very like his own. Ch’ien relates how an envoy came in 624 B.C.—twenty years before the date assigned to the birth of Lâo-tsze—to the court of Duke Mû of Ch’in, sent by the king of some rude hordes on the west. The duke told him of the histories,
