Lao Tze is said to have held a position in the Royal Library of Kau. When he perceived that the State showed signs of decadence, he resolved to leave the world, like the Indian heroes, Yudhishthira and his brothers. He went westwards, apparently believing, as did Confucius, “that the Most Holy was to be found in the West”. On entering the pass of Hsien-Ku (in modern Ling-pao, Ho-nan province) the Warden, Yin Hsi, a Taoist, welcomed the sage and set before him a dish of tea. Lao Tze sat down to drink tea with his friend. This was the beginning of the tea-drinking custom between host and guest in China.[4]
Said the Warden, “And so you are going into retirement. I pray you to write me a book before you leave.”
Lao Tze consented, and composed the Tao Teh King,[5] which is divided into two parts, and contains over 5000 words.
When he had finished writing, he gave the manuscript to the Warden, bade him farewell, and went on his way. It is not known where he died.
The most prominent of Lao Tze’s disciples was Kwang Tze, who lived in the fourth century B.C. Sze-ma [[302]]Khien, the earliest Chinese historian of note, who died about 85 B.C., says that Kwang Tze wrote “with purpose to calumniate the system of Confucius and exalt the mysteries of Lao Tze”. But although he wrote much, “no one could give practical application to his teaching”. Other famous Taoist writers were Han Fei Tze, who committed suicide in 233 B.C., and Liu An, prince of Hwai-nan, and grandson of the founder of the Han Dynasty, who took his own life in 122 B.C., having become involved in a treasonable plot.
Another form of the legend is that this prince discovered the Water of Life. As soon as he drank of it, his body became so light that he ascended to the Celestial Regions in broad daylight and was seen by many. As he rose he let fall the cup from which he had drunk. His dogs lapped up the water and followed him. Then his poultry drank from the cup and likewise rose in the air and vanished from sight. Apparently it was not only the poor Indians “with untutored minds” who thought their dogs (not to speak of their hens) would be admitted to the “equal sky”, there to bear them company.
It is generally believed by Oriental scholars that both Taoism and Confucianism are of greater antiquity than their reputed founders. Confucius insisted that he was “a transmitter, not a maker”, and Lao Tze is found to refer to “an ancient”, “a sage”, and “a writer on war”, as if he had been acquainted with writings that have not come down to us.
There is internal evidence in the Taoistic texts of Lao Tze and Kwang Tze that the idea of the Tao had an intimate association in early times with the ancient Cult of the West—the cult of the mother-goddess who had her origin in water. The priestly theorists instructed the worshippers of the Great Mother that at the beginning [[303]]she came into existence as an egg, or a lotus bloom from which rose the Creator, the sun-god, or that she was a Pot containing water from which all things have come—the pot being the inexhaustible womb of Nature, and the symbol of the Great Mother-goddess.
But they themselves were not satisfied with this myth. They recognized that there was at work at the beginning a force—a law which “opened the way”, a phrase which may have had a physical significance but ultimately became a mystical one. In Chinese Taoism, this force is the Tao which is manifested in order, stability, and rightness; it is Truth.
The Ancient Egyptian philosophers believed, at as remote a time as the Pyramid Texts period (c. 2500 B.C.), that everything had origin in Mind. The Universe was the idea of Ptah, the “opener”; he conceived it in his “Heart” (Mind); when he expressed the idea, the Universe came into existence.