LIFE OF LAO-TSZE
The state of the Celestial Empire when Lao-Tsze first began to inculcate his peculiar doctrines was corrupt in the extreme, greatly resembling that of the Roman Empire in the time of Nero, when the disciples of Christ preached equality and contempt for riches, striving to win souls from the awful depravity and sensuality of the heathen world, and to teach them to aspire to an ideal and divine love and to the immaterial joys of the Christian heaven. Lao-Tsze, who was to inaugurate the great reform completed later by Confucius, began his public career as curator of the library of the King of the Tcheou, in what was then the city of Lob, not far from that of Lob-yang in the present province of Honan. His real name is supposed to have been Erh-Li, but that of Lao-Tsze, signifying the old philosopher, has entirely superseded it. Whilst keeper of the royal books he is said to have read many of the works of Indian philosophers, and from them to have imbibed the principles embodied in his own immortal work, called the Tao-Teh-King, the exact meaning of the title of which has been so much discussed, but is generally translated the "Book of Supreme reason and virtue." If, as may well be, the word Tao is identical with the Greek Θεος and with the Latin Deos, both of which mean God, then the proper rendering of Tao-Teh-King is the "Book of God and of reason." However that may be, it is certain that its author was a true theist, rightly considered the founder of Theism, which is one of the three doctrines held in equal honour by the Celestials, the other two being Confucianism and Buddhism.
Many legends have gathered about the memory of Lao-Tsze, and the young Confucius is said to have met the old philosopher more than once. The former is reported to have said after an interview in Pekin with his forerunner: "To-day I have seen Lao-Tsze, and can only liken him to a dragon who mounts aloft in the clouds, I cannot tell how, and rises to heaven." Another story is that the older Chinese philosopher travelled in India and there met Pythagoras, the great mathematician and believer in the transmigration of souls; but if so, there is no trace of the influence of the Greek in the Tao-Teh-King, which must have been written before its author left China. As a matter of fact, very little is really known of the life of Lao-Tsze, but some idea of his peculiar views can be obtained from the following quotations from his book:
"God," he says, "is spiritual and material, so that He has two kinds of existence. We emanate in the first instance from the former or spiritual nature, to enter later into the second. Our aim upon earth should be to return to the first, or spiritual nature. To succeed in this we must refrain from the pleasures of the world, control our passions, and practise boundless charity."
It is the advocacy of this boundless charity which justifies us in comparing the doctrine of Lao-Tsze with primitive Christianity. Before, however, we give proofs of this affinity it will be interesting to note how the old philosopher proves his assertion, that all the material forms of nature are but emanations from the divine.
THE TAO-TEH-KING
In the twenty-fifth section of the Tao-Teh-King we read:
"Beings of corporeal form were made from matter which was at first in a chaotic condition.
"Before the heaven and the earth came into being, there was nothing but a profound silence, a boundless void, without any perceptible form.