[ p. 183 ]
CONFUCIUS, the practical man, the organizer, the high-priest of the meticulous, is frequently pointed to as the personification of the entire Chinese character. But that is not just. In the maze which is the Chinese mind — as in the maze which is every other mind — there are many paths shadowed by wild hedges of^_ mysticism. If China has made a god of the practice, [ p. 184 ] Confucius, she has done no less by the mystical LaoTze. …
Unhappily we have almost no reliable data concerning the life of Lao-Tze. His case is not like that of most of the other great men of the past — like the case, for instance, of Moses, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, or Mohammed. Concerning each of these men we have legends and traditions that offer at least a few nails not too loose to sustain the threadbare tapestries of “critical” biography. But concerning Lao-Tze we have not even a half-dependable fact Our main source of information is a short sketch of two hundred and fortyeight Chinese words which were set down at, least five centuries after the philosopher’s death.
Lao-Tze, whose name may be translated the “Old Scholar,” or perhaps the “Old Boy,” is said to have been born in the year 604 B. C., and is supposed to have been the librarian at the court of the province of Chou. There is an anecdote told of how Confucius, while staying once at this court, tried to learn from the then very aged librarian some obscure details concerning the outworn customs of the province. But all he got for his pains was a severe drubbing, and he left the court saying LaoTze was as inexplicable and terrible as a dragon. Confucius was completely bewildered by the old man, for in him he was confronted with a mind more unlike his own than seemed possible. Lao-Tze was possessed of one of those tremendously inquisitive, speculative, adventurous intellects. He was forever asking why? Unlike Confucius, Lao-Tze could not blandly take the, world for granted, but had to know first who was granting it, and how, and why. And he was old, and [ p. 185 ] very tired, and very wise. The lust after earthly conquest had long seeped out of his brittle bones, and only die vanity of all life and striving filled his bleared little almond eyes. No wonder, then, if he had slight patience with the eager, hopeful, bustling young world-saver who came to consult him on the forgotten ways of the past.
The story is told of how in his very last days, LaoTze tried to flee from the province of Chou because of the anarchy into which the state had fallen. Like Confucius, the older man sorely lamented the “poverty of the people” and the “great disorder” and chicanery in the land; but, unlike Confucius, he did not feel himself called upon to try to remedy these evils. He told himself that “to withdraw into obscurity is the way of Heaven,” and forthwith tried to clear out. But at the frontier the captain of the garrison halted the old man, and asked him to write out his philosophy of life before going into exile. And so there, in a little frontier garrison in ancient China, Lao-Tze wrote the book which is the Bible of the whole Taoist religion. The “Tao-Teh-king” the book is called, and although many scholars claim it was never written by Lao-Tze himself, it is reasonably certain that it contains many of the ideas which the old sage himself thought out. It is a very brief book, barely five thousand words in length, and could be set down here verbatim in less than twenty pages. No doubt its very conciseness, its severely ungenerous brevity, was responsible for the little understanding it received in later generations.
The book consists of two sections: the first, the Tao, ■ sets out to tell the why of the universe, and the second, [ p. 186 ] the Teh, endeavors to tell the how of life. The word Tao is almost untranslatable. A remote approximation to it is the word “Nature” or perhaps “Way.” Tao is that which is behind all other things, the fundamental reality, the “Way of the Universe.” As Lao-Tze himself said: “There is a Something undifferentiated and yet perfect, which existed before heaven and earth ever came into being. I know not its name, and if I must designate it, I can call it only Tao.” The outstanding characteristic of this Tao is that it does everything without giving any sign of doing anything. It is a great, inchoate, incorporeal, intangible Something that never exerts itself, and never gets excited. It simply is . . .
And in that very passivity, said Lao-Tze, the Tao sets the standard for the proper life of man. There is but one Teh, one “Virtue,” for man, and that is to emulate the poise and inaction of Tao. It is vain beyond words for any individual to try to accomplish anything in a fever. Fussy meddling with the world, breathless striving to reform or debauch it, are so much sheer folly. There are but “Three Jewels” of character, and choicest of them is wu wei, “inactivity.” The true disciple is everlastingly silent, even about Tao. He rejects all learning and scoffs at all hunger for learning. He is a thoroughgoing nihilist, refusing to trouble himself sufficiently to believe anything or do anything. Even to defend himself from injury is too much of a bother. Confucius taught that reciprocity is one of the main laws of ethics. The good should be requited with good and the evil with evil. But Lao-Tze taught far differently. He declared: “To them that are good I am [ p. 187 ] good, and to them that* are not good I am also good; thus all get to be good. To them that are sincere I am sincere, and to them that are not sincere I am also sincere; thus all get to be sincere.” . . . Weakness seemed to him the greatest strength. “There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water,” he said; “yet for attacking things that are firm -and strong nothing surpasses it.” An extraordinary spectacle, this: a decrepit old yellow-skinned sage sitting there in a wild frontier camp in China five hundred years before Jesus ever walked on earth, and calmly telling the world to return good for evil! …
Next to inactivity, the most precious “Jewel” of character is humility. “When merit hath been achieved, take it not unto thyself,” said Lao-Tze. “If thou dost not take it unto thyself, behold, it can never be taken from thee!” Or again: “Keep behind, and thou shalt inevitably be kept in front.” “The wise man is he alone who rests satisfied with what he has.” “There is no greater guilt than to sanction ambition; neither is there any greater calamity than to he discontented with one’s lot. . . And next to humility the most precious “jewel” is frugality. Just as out of weakness comes strength and out of humility comes prominence, so out of frugality comes liberality. As Lao-Tze put it: “The wise man doth not accumulate. The more he expends for others, the more doth he possess of his own; the more he giveth to others, the more hath he for himself.”
Of religion in the narrow sense of the word, LaoTze said nothing. He did not believe in the gods, and he was unalterably opposed to all forms of worship. [ p. 188 ] He thought sacrifice and prayer both vain and impertinent, for they endeavored to bring nature into harmony with man, when properly it was man’s duty to let himself passively sink into harmony with nature. Only once in the “Tao-Teh-king” is the Supreme god, Shang-ti, mentioned, and then only to make known that he is inferior to the ineffable Tao. In the narrower sense of the word, therefore, Lao-Tze was distinctly not a religious man.
But in the broader sense of the word, Lao-Tze was superlatively a man of faith. For all the eerie morbidness of his nihilistic doctrine, Lao-Tze was profoundly a spiritual being. He saw with blinding clarity what Confucius never even remotely suspected — that all life is but an ark of bulrushes drowning in a swamp of vanity. Desperately was he conscious of the need for security, of the need for something infinite in time and space to which finite little man might cling. And that was why he was so attached to the idea of Tao, and taught that the one road to salvation for every man was utter union with that Tao. In all the mystic literature of the world, it would be hard to find a warmer or richer glow than that in the “Tao-Teh-king.”
¶ 2
OF course a teaching so aloof and unpractical could not remain undefiled and stand any chance of entering the hearts of ordinary men. Tradition declares that when Lao-Tze had made an end to his writing, and was free to take up his journey once more, he went off into the world beyond, and was never again seen by man. He died, and perhaps he was buried — though [ p. 189 ] no man knows how or where. Bat his book lived, and soon man y philosophers were to be found in the hills or far in the forests of China, striving there to live according to the teachings of that book. In caves and the hollowed trunks of trees they sat and labored to practice kenosis — the seeing, doing, and thinking of nothing.
And the plain people were, of course, tremendously impressed when rumors of the strange doctrines of the “Tao-Teh-king” reached them. And they were even more impressed by the extraordinary men who actually tried to live up to those doctrines. They imagined such men must be not merely saints, but also magicians. Whereupon not a few of those men, either out of knavery or self-delusion, did set up as magicians. The “Tao-Teh-king” degenerated in their hands from a source of spiritual wisdom into a textbook of magic formulae. They harried and fretted it to shreds in a mad hunt for the secrets it might contain. Emperors were fooled into spending fortunes on the hare-brained researches of so-called “professors of Taoism.” In the third century A. D. one emperor actually sent out two huge expeditions to discover certain magic islands wherein, according to the “professors,” the elixir of life might be found that would make all men immortal, and the philosopher’s stone that could turn all metals to gold. In the middle ages another emperor actually died of drinking too much of an elixir of life! . ., Men of all classes spent their substance in a frantic hunt for those vain things, life and wealth, which the little old mystic, Lao-Tze, had scorned most bitterly.
A whole religion of Taoism arose. Under the influence [ p. 190 ] of Buddhism, the Taoist hermits began to organize themselves into orders. All their lives they did everything imaginable just to acquire great monasteries in which to do nothing! . . . Temples arose, and in them priests — Wu they were called — offered sacrifices to idols! Even a high-priesthood arose, and to this day there lives on top of a mountain in the province of Kiang-si a pope of the Taoist Church who calls himself T’ien-shi, the “Heaven Master!”
And thus has time played scurvily with the work of Lao-Tze. He who declared that the wise man never accumulates has been made the prophet of a cult that seeks naught save accumulation. He who declared that life is the sorriest of vanities has been hailed the discoverer [ p. 191 ] of magic potions to make life everlasting. Above all, he who laughed at the gods and scoffed at their worship has himself been made a god. . . . What irony! For two thousand and eighty-one years now, ever since 156 B. C., that little old nihilist, Lao-Tze, has been worshipped with sacrifices throughout the land of China! . . .