LAO-TSZE 297
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 Professor Douglas says that "the way" would be the best translation of Tao, 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, which has created and governs the world"; but the fact is that 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 Ti, 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."
It is impossible to go, in the present article, into an exposition of the Tâo Teh King at greater length. Since Julien laid it fairly open to Western readers in 1842, there has been, it appears to the writer, 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, indeed, 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 on the other hand 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 Jehovah, it was natural, even necessary, to believe that its author had had communication with more western parts of Asia, and there was no end of speculation about visits to India and Judæa, and even to Greece. The necessity for assuming such travels has passed away, and they have ceased to be thought, of. If we can receive Sze-mâ Ch'ien's histories as reliable, Lâo-tsze might have heard, in the states of Châu 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, that is, 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, poems, codes of rites, music, and laws which they had in the middle states, while yet rebellion and disorder were of frequent occurrence, and asked how good order was secured at all among the wild people, who had none of those appliances. The envoy smiled, and replied that the troubles of China were occasioned by those very things of which the duke vaunted, and that there had been a gradual degeneration in the condition of its states, as their professed civilization had increased, ever since the days of the ancients age, Hwang Ti, whereas in the land he came from, where there was nothing but the primitive simplicity, their princes showed a pure virtue in their treatment of the people, who responded to them with loyalty and good faith. "The government of a state," said he in conclusion, "is like a man's ruling his own single person. He rules it, and does not know how he does so; and this was indeed the method of the sages." Lâo-tsze did not need to go further afield to find all that he has said about government.
We have confined ourselves to the Tâoism of the Tâo Teh King without touching on the religion Tâoism now existing in China, but which did not take shape until more than five hundred years after the death of Lâo-tsze, though he now occupies the second place in its trinity of "The three Pure or Holy Ones." There is hardly a word in his treatise that savours either of superstition or religion. In the works of Lich-tsze and Chwang-tsze, his earliest followers of note, we find abundance of grotesque superstitions; but their beliefs (if indeed we can say that they had beliefs) had not become embodied in any religious institutions. When we come to the Ch'in dynasty (221-206 B.C.), we meet with a Tâoism in the shape of a search for the fairy islands of the eastern sea, where the herb of immortality might be gathered. In our first century a magician, called Chang Tâo-ling, comes before us as the chief professor and controller of this Tâoism, preparing in retirement "the pill" which renewed his youth, supreme over all spirits, and destroying millions of demons by a stroke of his pencil. He left his books, talismans, and charms, with his sword and seal, to his descendants, and one of them, professing to be animated by his soul, dwells at this day on the Lung-hu mountain in Keang-se, the acknowledged head or pope of Tâoism. But even then the system was not yet a religion, with temples or monasteries, liturgies, and forms of public worship. It borrowed all these from Buddhism, which first obtained public
