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THE TEXTS OF TÂOISM.
BK. VII.
Wû-ting, in the fourteenth century B.C., and who finally became a star in the eastern portion of the zodiac. Phăng Zû is also mentioned as living, through his possession of the Tâo, from the twenty-third century B.C. to the seventh or later. The sun and moon and the constellation of the Great Bear are also mentioned as its possessors, and the fabulous Being called the Mother of the Western King. The whole passage is perplexing to the reader to the last degree.
The remaining paragraphs are mostly occupied with instances of learning the Tâo, and of its effects in making men superior to the infirmities of age and the most terrible deformities of person and calamities of penury; as
Tranquillity'under all that might seem most calculated to disturb it. Very strange is the attempt at the conclusion of par. 8 apparently to trace the genesis of the knowledge of the Tâo. Confucius is introduced repeatedly as the exfounder of Taoism, and made to praise it as the ne plus ultra of human attainment.
BOOK VII. YING TÎ WANG. The first of the three characters in this title renders the translation of it somewhat perplexing. Ying has different meanings according as it is read in the first tone or in the third. In the first tone it is the symbol of what is right, or should be; in the third tone of answering or responding to. I prefer to take it here in the first tone. As Kwo Hsiang says, 'One who is free from mind or purpose of his own, and loves men to become transformed of themselves, is fit to be a Ruler or a King,' and as Zhui Kwan, another early commentator, says, 'He whose teaching is that which is without words, and makes men in the world act as if they were oxen or horses, is fit to be a Ruler or a King.' This then is the object of the Book-to describe that government which exhibits the Tâo equally in the rulers and the ruled, the world of men all happy and good without purpose or effort.
It consists of seven paragraphs. The first shows us the model ruler in him of the line of Thâi, whom I have not
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