In the seventh century B.C., lived a man, now commonly spoken of as Lao Tzŭ. He was the great Prophet of his age. He taught men to return good for evil, and to look forward to a higher life. He professed to have found the clue to all things human and divine.
He seems to have insisted that his system could not be reduced to words. At any rate, he declared that those who spoke did not know, while those who knew did not speak.
But to accommodate himself to conditions of mortality, he called this clue TAO, or The Way, explaining that the word was to be understood metaphorically, and not in a literal sense as the way or road upon which men walk.
The following are sentences selected from the indisputably genuine remains of Lao Tzŭ, to be found scattered here and there in early Chinese literature:—
All the world knows that the goodness of doing good is not real goodness.
When merit has been achieved, do not take it to yourself. On the other hand, if you do not take it to yourself, it shall never be taken from you.
By many words wit is exhausted. It is better to preserve a mean.
Keep behind, and you shall be put in front. Keep out, and you shall be kept in.
What the world reverences may not be treated with irreverence.
Good words shall gain you honour in the market-place. Good deeds shall gain you friends among men.
He who, conscious of being strong, is content to be weak—he shall be a cynosure of men.
The Empire is a divine trust, and may not be ruled. He who rules, ruins. He who holds by force, loses.
Mighty is he who conquers himself.
He who is content, has enough.
To the good I would be good. To the not-good I would also be good, in order to make them good.
If the government is tolerant, the people will be without guile. If the government is meddling, there will be constant infraction of the law.
Recompense injury with kindness.
The wise man's freedom from grievance is because he will not regard grievances as such.
Of such were the pure and simple teachings of Lao Tzŭ. But it is upon the wondrous doctrine of Inaction that his claim to immortality is founded:—
Do nothing, and all things will be done.
I do nothing, and my people become good of their own accord.
Abandon wisdom and discard knowledge, and the people will be benefited an hundredfold.
The weak overcomes the strong, the soft overcomes the hard. All the world knows this; yet none can act up to it.
The softest things in the world override the hardest. That which has no substance enters where there is no fissure. And so I know that there is advantage in Inaction.
Such doctrines as these were, however, not likely to appeal with force to the sympathies of a practical people. In the sixth century B.C., before Lao Tzŭ's death, another Prophet arose. He taught his countrymen that duty to one's neighbour comprises the whole duty of man. Charitableness of heart, justice, sincerity, and fortitude—sum up the ethics of Confucius. He knew nothing of a God, of a soul, of an unseen world. And he declared that the unknowable had better remain untouched.
Against these hard and worldly utterances, Chuang Tzŭ raised a powerful cry. The idealism of Lao Tzŭ had seized upon his poetic soul, and he determined to stem the tide of materialism in which men were being fast rolled to perdition.
He failed, of course. It was, indeed, too great a task to persuade the calculating Chinese nation that by doing nothing, all things would be done. But Chuang Tzŭ bequeathed to posterity a work which, by reason of its marvellous literary beauty, has always held a foremost place. It is also a work of much originality of thought. The writer, it is true, appears chiefly as a disciple insisting upon the principles of a Master. But he has contrived to extend the field, and carry his own speculations into regions never dreamt of by Lao Tzŭ.
It may here be mentioned that the historian Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien, already quoted, states in his notice of Lao Tzŭ that the latter left behind him a small volume in 5,000 and odd characters. Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien does not say, nor does he give the reader to understand, that he himself had ever seen the book in question. Nor does he even hint (see p. v.) that Chuang Tzŭ drew his inspiration from a book, but only from the "sayings" of Lao Tzŭ.
Confucius never mentions this book. Neither does Mencius, China's "Second Sage," who was born about one hundred years after the death of the First.
But all this is a trifle compared with the fact that Chuang Tzŭ himself never once alludes to such a book; although now, in this nineteenth century, there are some, happily few in number, who believe that we possess the actual work of Lao Tzŭ's pen. It is, perhaps, happier still that this small number cannot be said to include within it the name of a single native scholar of eminence. In fact, as far as I know, the whole range of Chinese literature yields but the name of one such individual who has ever believed in the genuineness of the so-called Tao-Tê-Ching.[11] Even he would probably have remained unknown to fame, had he not been brother to Su Tung-p'o.[12]
Chuang Tzŭ, indeed, puts into the mouth of Lao Tzŭ sayings which are now found in the Tao-Tê-Ching, mixed up with a great many other similar sayings which are not to be found there. But he also puts sayings, which now appear in the Tao-Tê-Ching, into the mouth of Confucius (p. 275)! And even into the mouth of the Yellow Emperor (pp. 277–278), whose date is some twenty centuries earlier than that of Lao Tzŭ himself!!
Two centuries before the Christian era, an attempt was made to destroy, with some exceptions, the whole of Chinese literature, in order that history might begin anew from the reign of the First Emperor of united China. The extent of the actual mischief done by this "Burning of the Books" has been greatly exaggerated. Still, the mere attempt at such a holocaust gave a fine chance to the scholars of the later Han dynasty (A.D. 25–221), who seem to have enjoyed nothing so much as forging, if not the whole, at any rate portions, of the works of ancient authors. Some one even produced a treatise under the name of Lieh Tzŭ, a philosopher mentioned by Chuang Tzŭ, not seeing that the individual in question was a creation of Chuang Tzŭ's brain!
And the Tao-Tê-Ching was undoubtedly pieced together somewhere about this period, from recorded sayings and conversations of Lao Tzŭ.[13]
Chuang Tzŭ's work has suffered in like manner. Several chapters are clearly spurious, and many episodes have been interpolated by feeble imitators of an inimitable style.
The text, as it now stands, consists of thirty-three chapters. These are a reduction from fifty-three, which appear to have been in existence in the fourth century A.D.[14] The following is the account given in the Imperial Catalogue of the first known edition:—
Chuang Tzŭ, with Commentary, in 10 books. By Kuo Hsiang of the Chin dynasty (A.D. 265–420).
The Shih-shuo-hsin-yü[15] states that Kuo Hsiang stole his work from Hsiang Hsiu.[16] Subsequently, Hsiang Hsiu's edition was issued, and the two were in circulation together. Hsiang Hsiu's edition is now lost, while Kuo Hsiang's remains.
Comparison with quotations from Hsiang Hsiu's work, as given in Chuang Tzŭ Explained, by Lu Tê-ming, shows conclusive evidence of plagiarism. Nevertheless, Kuo Hsiang contributed a certain amount of independent revision, making it impossible for us to regard the whole as from the hand of Hsiang Hsiu. Consequently, it now passes under the name of Kuo Hsiang.
Since Kuo Hsiang's time, numberless editions with ever-varying interpretations have been produced to delight and to confuse the student. Of these, I have chosen six, representative as nearly as possible of different schools of thought. Their editors are:—
1.—Kuo Hsiang of the Chin dynasty. (a) As given in the Shih Tzŭ Ch'üan