________________
2
THE TEXTS OF TÂOISM.
CH.I.
of Wân and Wû (B. C. 1 200), taking them as his model,' are well known.
2. Lâo-jze's birth is said, in the most likely account of it, to have taken place in the third year of king Ting of the Kau dynasty, (B.C.) 604. He was thus rather more than fifty years older than Confucius. The two men seem to have met more than once, and I am inclined to think that the name of Lâo-jze, as the designation of the other, arose from Confucius's styling him to his disciples 'The Old Philosopher. They met as Heads of different schools or schemes of thought; but did not touch, so far as we know, on the comparative antiquity of their views. It is a peculiarity of the Tâo Teh King that any historical element in
Peonlinrity of it is of the vaguest nature possible, and in all the Tâo Teh its chapters there is not a single proper name.
King. Yet there are some references to earlier sages whose words the author was copying out, and to 'sentencemakers' whose maxims he was introducing to illustrate his own sentiments. In the most distant antiquity he saw a happy society in which his highest ideas of the Tâo were realised, and in the seventeenth chapter he tells us that in the earliest times the people did not know that there were their rulers, and when those rulers were most successful in dealing with them, simply said, We are what we are of ourselves.' Evidently, men existed to Lâo-zze at first in a condition of happy innocence, --in what we must call a paradisiacal state, according to his idea of what such a state was likely to be.
When we turn from the treatise of Lào-jze to the writings of Kwang-jze, the greatest of his followers, we are
1 The sixth chapter of Lâo's treatise, that about the Spirit of the Valley,' is referred to in Lich-zze (I, 1b), as being from Hwang Ti, from which the commentator Tû Tâo-kien (about A. D. 1300) takes occasion to say: 'From which we know that Lâo-zze was accustomed to quote in his treatise passages from earlier records,--as when he refers to the remarks of "some sage," of "some ancient,” of “the sentence-makers," and of “ some writer on war." In all these cases he is clearly introducing the words of earlier wise men. The case is like that of Confucius when he said, "I am a transmitter and not a maker," &c.' Found in Ziâo Hung, in loc.
Digitized by Google
