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BK. VI. BRIEF NOTICES OF THE DIFFERENT BOOKS. 135
so as to become entirely conformed to the action of the Tâo, and submissive in all the most painful experiences in his lot, which is entirely ordered by it. A seal will be set on the wisdom of this course hereafter, when he has completed the period of his existence on earth, and returns to the state of non-existence, from which the Tâo called him to be born as a man. In the meantime he may attain to be the True man possessing the True knowledge.
Our author then proceeds to give his readers in five paragraphs his idea of the True Man. Mr. Balfour says that this name is to be understood in the esoteric sense, the partaking of the essence of divinity,' and he translates it by 'the Divine Man. But we have no right to introduce here the terms divine' and divinity. Nan-hwâi (VII, 5b) gives a short definition of the name which is more to the point :- What we call "the True Man" is one whose nature is in agreement with the Tâo (
F T 人者性合于道也: and the commentator adds in a note, ‘Such men as Fû-hsî, Hwang-Tî, and Lão Tan.' The Khang-hsî dictionary commences its account of the character i or 'True' by a definition of the True Man taken from the Shwo Wăn as a Tuli l'a recluse of the mountain, whose bodily form has been changed, and who ascends to heaven;' but when that earliest dictionary was made, Tâoism had entered into a new phase, different from what it had in the time of our author. The most prominent characteristic of the True Man is that he is free from all exercise of thought and purpose, a being entirely passive in the hands of the Tâo. In par. 3 seven men are mentioned, good and worthy men, but inferior to the True.
Having said what he had to say of the True Man, Kwang-zze comes in the seventh paragraph to speak directly of the Tâo itself, and describes it with many wonderful predicates which exalt it above our idea of God ;-a concept and not a personality. He concludes by mentioning a number of ancient personages who had got the Tâo, and by it wrought wonders, beginning with a Shih-wei, who preceded Fû-hsî, and ending with Fû Yüeh, the minister of
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