This protest of Chuang Tzŭ against externality, and judging only by the outward appearance, might easily be translated into Christian language. For Christianity also teaches inwardness, and, in common with all idealism, resents the delimitation of human life and knowledge to "the things which are seen." In its opposition to a mere practical system like Confucianism, Taoism must have appealed to those deeper instincts of humanity to which Buddhism appealed some centuries later. In practice, Confucianism was limited to the finite. Action, effort, benevolence, unselfishness—all these have a place in it, and their theatre is the world as we know it. Its last word is worldly wisdom; not selfishness, but an enlarged prudentialism. To the Taoist such a system savours of "the rudiments of the world." Its "charity and duty," its "ceremonies and music," are the "Touch not, taste not, handle not," of an ephemeral state of being, and perish in the using. And the sage seeks for the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal. He seeks to attain to Tao.
It is here that we reach (in chaps. vi, vii) what properly constitutes the mysticism of Chuang Tzŭ. Heracleitus is not a mystic, though he is the founder of a long line, which through Plato, and Dionysius the Areopagite and John the Scot in the ninth century, and Meister Eckhart in the thirteenth, and Jacob Böhme in the sixteenth, reaches down to Hegel. Heracleitus despises the world and shuns it; but he has not yet made flight from the world a dogma. Even Plato, when in a well-known passage in the Theaetetus,[48] he counsels flight from the present state of things, explains that he means only "flee from evil and become like God." Still less has Heracleitus got so far as to aim at self-absorption in God. In Greek thought the attempt to get rid of consciousness, and to become the unconscious vehicle of a higher illumination, is unknown till the time of Philo. Yet this is the teaching of Chuang Tzŭ. "The true sage takes his refuge in God, and learns that there is no distinction between subject and object. This is the very axis of Tao" (p. 18). Abstraction from self, then, is the road which leads to Tao (chap. vi). The pure of old did not love life and hate death. They were content to be passive vehicles of Tao. They had reached the state of sublime indifference, they had become "oblivious of their own existence." Everything in them was spontaneous; nothing the result of effort. "They made no plans; therefore failing, they had no cause for regret; succeeding, no cause for congratulation" (p. 69). "They cheerfully played their allotted parts, waiting patiently for the end." They were free, for they were in perfect harmony with creation (p. 71). For them One and not One are One; God and Man. For they had attained to Tao, and Tao is greater than God. "Before heaven and earth were, Tao was. It has existed without change from all time. Spiritual beings draw their spirituality therefrom; while the universe became what we see it now. To Tao the zenith is not high, nor the nadir low; no point of time is long ago, nor by lapse of ages has it grown old" (p. 76). The great legislators obtained TAO, and laid down eternal principles. The sun and moon, and the Great Bear are kept in their courses by Tao.
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong."
He who would attain to Tao must get rid of the thought of "charity and duty," of "music and ceremonies," of body and mind. The flowers and the birds do not toil, they simply live. That is Tao. And for man a state of indifference and calm, the ἀταραξία not of the sceptic but of the mystic, a passive reflecting of the Eternal, is the ideal end. "The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep. And thus he can triumph over matter without injury to himself." (See p. 98.)
It would of course be presumption to attempt to assign a meaning to Tao, and still more to discover an equivalent in Western thought. But it may be lawful to say that Heracleitus often speaks of Λόγος as Chuang Tzŭ speaks of Tao. It is Necessity (ἀνάγκη), or Fate (εἱμαρμένη), or Mind (γνώμη), or Justice (Δική). In nature it appears as balance and equipoise; in the State as Law; in man as the universal Reason, which is in him but not of him. Sometimes it is identified with the mysterious name of Zeus, which may not be uttered;[49] sometimes like the Ἀνάγκη of the Greek poets, it is supreme over gods and men. If it is hard to say what is the relation of Tao to God, it is not less hard to define the relation of Λόγος to Zeus. To speak of Chuang Tzŭ and Heracleitus as pantheists is only to say that, so far as we can translate their language into ours, that name seems less inappropriate than Theist or Deist. But it is doubtful whether the distinction between Pantheism and Theism would have been intelligible to either philosopher, and certain that if they could have understood it, they would have denied to it reality. Both held the immanence of the Eternal Principle in all that is. Both taught that the soul is an emanation from the Divine, and both, though in very different degrees, seem to teach that a life is perfect in proportion as it becomes one with that from which it came, and loses what is individual in it.
In Chuang Tzŭ, as in all mystics, there is an element of antinomianism. That "good and evil are the same," may contain a deep truth for the sage, but "take no heed of time, nor of right and wrong" (p. 31) is, to say the least, dangerous teaching for the masses. The mystic's utterances will not bear translation into the language of the world, and to take them au pied de la lettre can hardly fail to produce disastrous results. This is why antinomianism always dogs the heels of mysticism. And this may perhaps help to explain the debased Taoism of to-day. But of this I know nothing.
It would be interesting to know whether in the undisputed utterances of Lao Tzŭ (i.e. putting on one side the Tâo-Tê-Ching), Quietism and the glorification of Inaction are as prominent as they are in Chuang Tzŭ. One would be prepared à priori to find that they are not. Lao Tzŭ was born at the end of the seventh century B.C., and was, therefore, some fifty years older than Confucius, with whom in 517 B.C., he is said to have had an interview.[50] By the time of Chuang Tzŭ, who was possibly contemporary with Mencius, and therefore some two or three centuries after Lao Tzŭ, Confucianism had become to some extent the established religion of China, and Taoism, like Republicanism in the days of the Roman Empire, became a mere opposition de salon. Under such circumstances any elements of mysticism latent in Lao Tzŭ's system would develop rapidly. And the antagonism between the representatives of Lao Tzŭ and Confucius would proportionately increase. But philosophy does not become mystical and take refuge in flight until it abandons all hope of converting the world. When effort is useless, the mind idealises Inaction, and seeks a metaphysical basis for it. For mysticism and scepticism flourish in the same atmosphere though in different soils, both, though in different ways, implying the abandonment of the rational problem. The Sceptic, the Agnostic or Positivist of to-day, declares it insoluble, and settles down content to take things as they are; the mystic retires into himself, and dreams of a state of being which is the obverse of the world of fact.
The triumph of Confucianism in the centuries which intervened between Lao Tzŭ and Chuang Tzŭ would account for the antagonism between Taoism and Confucianism as we find