When the searchers for wealth introduced into India and China the god Ptah’s potter’s wheel they may well have introduced too the doctrine of the Logos, found in the pyramid-age Ptah hymn quoted above, in which the World Soul is the “mind” of the god, and the active principle “the tongue” that utters “the Word”.
If they did so—the hypothesis does not seem to be improbable—it may be that as Buddhism was in India [[310]]mixed with Naga worship, and was imported into Tibet and China as a fusion of metaphysical speculations and crude idolatrous beliefs and practices, the priestly philosophies of Egypt and Babylonia were similarly associated with the debris of primitive ideas and ceremonies when they reached distant lands. As a matter of fact, it is found that in both these culture centres this fusion was maintained all through their histories. Ptah might be the “Word” to the priests, but to the common people he remained the artisan-god for thousands of years—the god who hammered out the heavens and set the world in order—a form of Shu who separated the heavens from the earth, as did Pʼan Ku in China.
In India and China, as in ancient Egypt, the doctrine of the Logos, in its earliest and vaguest form, was associated with the older doctrine that life and the universe emerged at the beginning from the womb of the mother-goddess, who was the active principle in water, or the personification of that principle.
In one of the several Indian creation myths, Prajapati emerges, like the Egyptian Sun-god Horus, from the lotus-bloom floating on the primordial waters. The lotus is the flower form of the Great Mother, who in Egypt is Hathor.
Another myth tells that after the heat caused the rays to arise, and the rays caused a cloud to form, and the cloud became water, the Self-Existent Being (here the Great Father) created a seed. He flung the seed into the waters, and it became a golden egg. From the egg came forth the personal Brahma (Prajapati).[23] Because Brahma came from the waters (Narah), and they were his first home or path (ayana), he is called Narayana.[24] [[311]]
Here we have the “path” or “way”, the Chinese Tao in one of its phases.
When the Tao (neuter) became “active”, it did not manifest itself as a Great Father, however, but as a Great Mother. The passive Tao is nameless; the active Tao has a name. Lao Tze’s great treatise, The Tao Teh King, opens:
“The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.
The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name,
(Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth;