Let be; let three little centuries pass; let the funeral pyre but be kindled, and quite burn itself out; and let the ashes grow cold—
And behold you now, this Phoenix of the World, bright and dazzling, rising up from them! Behold you now this same Black-haired People, young, strong, vigorous, gleaming with all the rainbow hues of romance and imagination; conquering and creative, and soon to strew the jewels of faerie over all the Eastern World. . . .
But this is to anticipate: to take you on to the second century B. C.; whereas I want you now in the sixth.—I said that you should find better chances for study in the Royal Library at Honanfu, could you get together the means for journeying thither, than anywhere else in Chu Hia. That was particularly true in the latter part of that sixth century: because there was a man by the name of Li Urh, chief librarian there, from whom, if you cared to, you might hear better things than were to be found in the books in his charge. His fame, it appears, has gone abroad through the world; although his chief aim seems to be to keep in the shadows and not be talked about. Scholars resort to him from far and near; one of them, the greatest of all, who came to him in the year 517 and was (if we are to believe accounts) treated without too much mercy, came out awestruck, and said: "Today I have seen the Dragon."—What! that little old man with the bald head and straggly lank Chirese beard?—Like enough, like enough! —they are not all, as you look at them with these physical eyes, to be seen winged and wandering the heavens. . . .
But wandering the heavens, this one, yes! He has the blue ether about him, even there in the Library among the books.—He has a way of putting things in little old quiet paradoxes that seem to solve all the problems,—to take you out of the dust and clatter of this world, into the serenity of the Dragon-world where all problems are solved, or non-existent. Chu Hia is all a fuss and turmoil, and running the headlong Gadarene road; but the Old Philosopher—as he has come to be called—has anchorage right outside of and above it, and speaks from the calmness of the peaks of heaven. A kind of school forms itself around him; his wisdom keeps provincials from returning home, and the young men of the capital from commonplace courses. Though he has been accredited with much authorship, I think he wrote nothing; living among books, he had rather a contempt for them,—as things at the best for patching up and cosseting life, new windings and wrappings for its cocoon;—whereas he would have had the whole cocoon stripped away, and the butterfly beautifully airing its wings. Be that as it may, there are, shall we say, stenographers among his disciples, and his sayings come down to us. They have to do with the Way, the Truth, and the Life; which things, and much else, are included in Chinese in the one word Tao.
"The main purpose of his studies" says Ssema Tsien (the 'Father of Chinese History'), "was to keep himself concealed and unknown." In this he succeeded admirably, so far as all future ages were to concerned; for Ssema himself, writing in the reign of Han Wuti some four centuries later, could be by no means sure of his identity. He tells us all we know, or think we know, about Laotse:—that he was born in a village in southern Honan; kept the Royal Library at Honanfu; met Confucius there in 517; and at last rode away on his ox into the west, leaving the Tao Teh King with the Keeper of the Pass on the frontier;—and then goes on to say that there were two other men "whom many regarded as having been the real Laotse"; one of the Lao Lai, a contemporary of Confucius, who wrote fifteen treatises on the practices of the school of Tao; the other, a "Grand Historiographer of Chow," Tan by name, who lived some century and a quarter later. To me this is chiefly interesting as a suggestion that the 'School of Tao' was a thing existent and well-established at that time, and with more than one man writing about it.
It may we'll have been. Taoists ascribe the foundation of their religion to the Yellow Emperor, twenty-eight centuries B. C.; but there never was time Tao was not; nor, I suppose, when there was quite no knowledge of it, even in China. In the old manvantara, past now these three hundred years, the Black-haired People had wandered far enough from such knowledge;—with the accumulation of complexities, with the piling up of encumberments of thought and deed during fifteen hundred busy years of intensive civilization. As long as that piling up had not entirely covered away Tao, the Supreme Simplicity, the Clear Air;—as long as men could find scope to think and act and accomplish things;—so long the manvantara lasted; when nothing more that was useful could be accomplished, and action could no longer bring about its expectable results (because all that old dead weight was there to interpose itself between new causes set in motion and their natural outcome)—then the pralaya set in. You see, that is why pralayas do set in; why they must;—why no nation can possibly go on at a pitch of greatness and high activity beyond a certain length of time.—And all that activity of the manvantara—all that fuss and bustle to achieve greatness and fortune—it had all been an obscuration of and moving away from Tao.
The Great Teachers come into this world out of the Unknown, bringing the essence of their Truth with them. We know well what they will teach: in some form or another it will be Theosophy; it will be the old self-evident truths about Karma and the two natures of man. But how they will teach it: what kind of sugar-coating or bitter aloes they will prescribe along with it: —that, I think, depends on reactions from the age they come in and the people whom they are to teach. It is almost certain, as I said, that Li Urh the Old Philosopher left no writings. "Who knows, does not tell," said he; and Po Chu-i quotes this, and pertinently adds: "What then of his own five thousand words and more.—the Tao Teh King." That book was proved centuries ago, in China, not to have come, as it stands, even from Laotse's age; because there are characters in it that were invented long afterwards. The wisest thing to believe is that it is made up mostly of his sayings, taken down by his disciples in the Pitman of the time; and surviving, with accretions and losses perhaps, through the disquiet of the next two centuries, and the burning of the books, and everything. Because whatever vicissitudes may have befallen it, one does hear in its maxims the tones of a real voice: one man's voice, with a timbre in it that belongs to the Lords of Wisdom. And to me, despite Lao Lai and Tan the Grand Historiographer, it is the voice of an old man in the seclusion of the Royal Library: a happy little bald-headed straggly-bearded old man anxious to keep himself unknown and unapplauded; it is a voice attuned to quietness, and to mental reactions from the thunder of the armies, the drums and tramplings and fuss and insolence of his day. I thoroughly believe in the old man in the Royal Library, and the riding away on oxback at last into the west,—where was Si Wang Mu's Faery Garden, and the Gobi Desert, with sundry oases therein whereof we have heard. I can hear that voice, with childlike wonder in it, and Adept-like seriousness, and childlike and Adept-like laughter not far behind, in such sayings as these: "Tao is like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency. How deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things! We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications of things. . . . How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with the semblance of permanence! I do not know whose son it is. It might appear to have been before God."
We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal God, and also the inefficacy of mere ethics. Believers make their God in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an imitation of themselves. At the best of times they take their New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of their Deity:—the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds the whole together. It is after all but a swollen personality; and whether you swell your personalitv with virtues or vices, the result is an offense. There is a bridge, razor-edged, between earth and heaven; and you can never carry that load across it. Laotse, supremely ethical in effect, had a cordial detestation— take this gingerly!—of un-re-enforced ethics. "When the great Tao is lost," says he, "men follow after charity and duty to one's neighbor." Again: "When Tao is lost, virtue takes its place. When virtue is lost, benevolence succeeds to it. When benevolence is lost, justice ensues. When justice is lost, then we have expediency." He does not mean, of course, that these things are bad; but simply that they are the successive stages of best, things left when Tao is lost sight of; none of them in itself a high enough aim. They are all included in Tao, as the less in the greater. He describes to you the character of the man of Tao; but your conduct is to be the effect of following Tao; and you do not attain Tao by mere practice of virtue; though you naturally practise virtue, without being aware of it, while following Tao. It all throws wonderful light on the nature of the Adept; about whom you have said nothing at all when you have accredited him with all the virtues. Joan was blemishless; but not thereby did she save France;—she could do that because, as Laotse would have said, being one with Tao, she flowed out into her surroundings, accomplishing absolutely her part in the universal plan. No compilation of virtues would make a Teacher (such as we know): it is a case of the total absence of everything that should prevent the natural Divine Part of man from functioning in this world as freely and naturally as the sun shines or the winds blow. The sun and the stars and the tides and the wind and the rain—there is that perfect glowing simplicity in them all: the Original, the Root of all things, Tao. Be like them, says Laotse, impersonal and simple. "I hold fast to and cherish Three Precious Things," he says: "Gentleness, Economy, Humility." Why? So, you would say, do the ethics of the New Testament; such is the preaching of the Christian Churches. But (in the latter case) for reasons quite unlike Laotse's. For we make of them too often virtues to be attained, that shall render us meek and godly, acceptable in the eyes of the Lord, and I know not what else: riches laid up in heaven; a pamperment of satisfaction; easily to become a cloak for self- righteousness and, if worse can be, worse. But tut! Laotse will not be bothered with riches here or elsewhere. With him these precious things are simply absences that come to be when obstructive presences are thrown off. No sanctimoniousness for the little Old Man in the Royal Library!
He would draw minds away to the silence of the Great Mystery, which is the fountain of laughter, of life, the unmarred; and he would have them abide there in absolute harmony. Understand him, and you understand what he did for China. It is from that Inner Thing, that Tao, that all nourishment comes and all greatness. You must go out with your eyes open to search for it: watch for Dragons in the sky; for the Laugher, the Golden Person, in the Sun: watch for Tao, ineffably sparkling and joyous—and quiet— in the trees; listen for it in the winds and in the sea-roar; and have nothing in your own heart but its presence and omnipresence and wonder-working joy. How can you flow out to the moments, and capture the treasure in them; how can you flow out to Tao, and inherit the stars, and have the sea itself flowing in your veins;—if you are blocked with a desire, or a passion for things mortal, or a grudge against someone, or a dislike? Beauty is Tao: it is Tao that shines in the flowers: the rose, the bluebell, the daffodil—the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, the peony—they are little avatars of Tao; they are little gateways into the Kingdom of God. How can you know them, how can you go in through them, how can you participate in the laughter of the planets and the angelic clans, through their ministration, if you are preoccupied with the interests or the wants of contemptible you, the personality? Laotse went lighting little stars for the Black-haired People: went pricking the opacity of heaven, that the Light of lights might filter through. If you call him a philosopher, you credit him with an intellectualism that really he did not bother to possess. Rather he stood by the Wells of Poetry, and was spiritual progenitor of thousands of poets. There is no way to Poetry but Laotse's Way. You think you must go abroad and see the world; you must not; that is only a hindrance: a giving the eyes too many new externals, to hinder them from looking for that which you may see, as he says, 'through your own window.' If you traverse the whole world seeking, you will never come nearer to the only thing that counts, which is Here, and Now. Seek to feed your imagination on outward things, on doings and events, and you will perhaps excite, but surely soon starve it. But at the other pole, the inner "How deep and mysterious is Tao, as if it were the author of all things!" And then I hear someone ask him whence it originated—someone fishing for a little metaphysics, some dose of philosophy. What! catch Laotse? "I know," said Confucius, "how birds fly, beasts run, fishes swim. But the runner may be snared, the swimmer hooked, the flyer shot with an arrow. But there is the Dragon; I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds and rises into heaven." No; you cannot hook, snare, or shoot the Dragon. "I do not know whose son Tao is," says Laotse. "It might appear to have been before God."
So I adhere to the tale of the old man in the Royal Library, holding wonderful quiet conversations there; that "it might appear to have been before God" is enough to convince me. There was a man once*—I forget his name, but we may call him Cho Kung for our purposes; he was of affable demeanor, and an excellent flautist; and had an enormous disbelief in ghosts, bogies, goblins, and 'supernatural' beings of every kind. It seized him with the force of a narrow creed; and he went forth to missionarize, seeking disputants. He found one in the chief Librarian of some provincial library; who confessed to a credulousness along that line, and seemed willing to talk. Here then were grand opportunities—for a day's real enjoyment, with perchance a creditable convert to be won at the end of it. Behold them sitting down to the fray, in the shadows among the books: the young Cho Kung, affable (I like the word well), voluble and earnest; the old Librarian, mild, with little to say but buts and ifs, and courteous even beyond the wont in that "last refuge of good manners," China. All day long they sat; and affable Cho, like Sir Macklin in the poem,