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THE TEXTS OF TÂOISM.
APP. V.
is yours to hold, not only do you not know what the Tâo is, but you do not know yourself. How is this? You are but a thing in the Tâo. If your life came to you without its being produced by the Tâo, you would yourself be a life-producer. But whether one lives to old age or dies prematurely he comes equally to an end. Your life properly was not from yourself, nor is your death your own act. You did not resist (the coming of your life); you do not keep it (against the coming of death); you are about to return to your original source. This simply is what is meant by the Sage's 'Do nothing, and return to your Root.' As to 'the bodily frame coming from incorporeity and its returning to the same (par. 5),' that certainly is a subject beyond the reach of our seeing and hearing; and how can any one say that the Tâo is his to hold?
What Lâo-zze (says to Confucius in par. 5), and what Khăng tells Shun (in par. 4), have not two meanings; but notwithstanding, it should not be said that the Tâo is not to be found anywhere (par. 6). Speaking broadly, we may say that its presence is to be seen in an ant, a stalk of panic grass, an earthenware tile, and in excrement. Seeking for it in what is more delicate and recondite, let us take the ideas of fulness and emptiness, of withering and decay; of beginning and end, of accumulation and dispersion. These are all ideas, and not the names of things; and (the Tâo) which makes things what they are has not the limit which belongs to things. No wonder that Tung-kwo Zze should have been so perplexed as he was !
Those who think that the Tào has no positive existence (par. 7), speak of it as 'The Mysterious and Obscure,' and then it would seem to be equivalent to the name 'Mystery,' which cannot be rightly applied to it. And those who think that it has a positive existence speak of it as being considered now noble and now mean, now bound and compressed, now dispersed and diffused, and what is One is divided into the noble and the mean, the compressed and the dispersed ;-a mode of dealing with it, of which the Tâo will not admit. Better is it to say with No
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