China and the Chinese

by Herbert Allen Giles

One hundred years B.C. comes the historian Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien, whose brilliant work, the first of the Dynastic Histories, I have already had occasion to bring to your notice. In his brief memoir of Lao Tzŭ, he does mention a book in five thousand and more characters; but he mentions it in such a way as to make it clear beyond all doubt that he himself could never have seen it; and moreover, in addition to the fact that no date is given, either of the birth or death of Lao Tzŭ, the account is so tinged with the supernatural as to raise a strong suspicion that some part of it did not really come from the pen of the great historian.

About two hundred years later appeared the first Chinese dictionary, already alluded to in a previous lecture. This work was intended as a collection of all the written characters known at date of publication; and we can well imagine that, with Lao Tzŭ's short treatise before him, there would be no difficulty in including all the words found therein. Such, however, is not the case. There are many characters in the treatise which are not to be found in the dictionary, and in one particular instance the omission is very remarkable.

Much other internal evidence against the genuineness of this work might here be adduced. I will content myself with a single, and a ludicrous, item, which shows how carelessly it was pieced together.

Sentences occur in the Tao-Tê-Ching which positively contain, in addition to some actual words by Lao Tzŭ, words from a commentator's explanation, which have been mistaken by the forger for a part of Lao Tzŭ's own utterance.

Add to this the striking fact that the great mass of Chinese critical scholarship is entirely adverse to the claims put forward on behalf of the treatise,—a man who believes in it as the genuine work of Lao Tzŭ being generally regarded among educated Chinese as an amiable crank, much as many people now regard any one who credits the plays of Shakespeare to Lord Bacon,—and I think we may safely dismiss the question without further ado.

It will be more interesting to turn to any sayings of Lao Tzŭ which we can confidently regard as genuine; and those are such as occur in the writings of some of the philosophers above-mentioned, from which they were evidently collected by a pious impostor, and, with the aid of unmistakable padding, were woven into the treatise, of which we may now take a long leave.

Lao Tzŭ imagined the universe to be informed by an omnipresent, omnipotent Principle, which he called Tao. Now this word Tao means primarily "a road," "a way"; and Lao Tzŭ's Principle may therefore be conveniently translated by "the Way."

Fearing, however, some confusion from the use of this term, the philosopher was careful to explain that "the way which can be walked upon is not the eternal Way." But he never tells us definitely what the Way is. In one place he says it cannot find expression in words; in another he says, "Those who know do not tell; those who tell do not know."

The latter saying was used by a famous poet as a weapon of ridicule against the treatise. "If those who know," he argued, "do not tell, how comes it that Lao Tzŭ put his own knowledge into a book of five thousand and more words?"

We are assured, however, by Lao Tzŭ that "just as without going out of doors we can know the whole world, so without looking out of window we can know the Way."