Tao Te Ching by Laozi (reading comprehension books txt) 📕

is, Hasty); and the ruler of the centre was Hun-tun (that is, Chaos). Shu and Hu were continually meeting in the land of Hun-tun, who treated them very well. They consulted together how they might repay his kindness, and said, ‘Men have all seven orifices for the purposes of seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing while this (poor) ruler along has not one. Let us try and make them for him.’ Accordingly they dug one orifice in him every day; and at the end of seven days Chaos died.”

So it was that Chaos passed away before light. So did the nameless simplicity of the Tao disappear before knowledge. But it was better that the Chaos should give place to the cosmos. “Heedless” and “Hasty” did a good deed.

I have thus set forth eight characteristics of the Taoistic system, having respect mostly to what is peculiar and mystical in it. I will not conclude my exhibition of it by bringing together under one head the practical lessons of its author for men individually, and for the administration of government. The praise of whatever excellence these possess belongs to Lao himself: Chuang-tzŭ devotes himself mainly to the illustration of the abstruse and difficult points.

First, it does not surprise us that in his rules for individual man, Lao should place humility in the foremost place. A favourite illustration with him of the Tao is water. In his eighth chapter he says:⁠—“The highest excellence is like that of water. The excellence of water appears in its benefiting all things, and in its occupying, without striving to the contrary, the low ground which all men dislike. Hence (its way) is near to that of the Tao.” To the same effect in the seventy-eighth chapter:⁠—“There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it. Every one in the world knows that the soft overcomes the hard, and the weak the strong; but no one is able to carry it out in practice.”

In his sixty-seventh chapter Lao associates with humility two other virtues, and calls them his three Precious Things, or Jewels. They are gentleness, economy, and shrinking from taking precedence of others. “With that gentleness,” he says, “I can be bold; with that economy I can be liberal; shrinking from taking precedence of others, I can become a vessel of the highest honour.”

And in his sixty-third chapter, he rise to a still loftier height of morality. He says, “(It is the way of the Tao) to act without (thinking of) acting, to conduct affairs without (feeling) the trouble of them; to taste without discerning any flavour, to consider the small as great, and the few as many, and to recompense injury with kindness.”

Here is the grand Christian precept, “Render to no man evil for evil. If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink. Be not overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.” We know that the maxim made some noise in its author’s lifetime; that the disciples of Confucius consulted him about it, and that he was unable to received it.33 It comes in with less important matters by virtue of the Taoistic “rule of contraries.” I have been surprised to find what little reference to it I have met with in the course of my Chinese reading. I do not think that Chuang-tzŭ takes notice of it to illustrate it after his fashion. There, however, it is in the Tao Te Ching. The fruit of it has yet to be developed.

Second, Lao laid down the same rule for the policy of the state as for the life of the individual. He says in his sixty-first chapter, “What makes a state great is its being like a low-lying, down-flowing stream;⁠—it becomes the centre to which tend all (the small states) under heaven.” He then uses an illustration which will produce a smile:⁠—“Take the case of all females. The female always overcomes the male by her stillness. Stillness may be considered (a sort of) abasement.” Resuming his subject, he adds, “Thus it is that a great state, by condescending to small states, gains them for itself; and that small states, by abasing themselves to a great state, win it over to them. In the one case the abasement tends to gaining adherents; in the other case, to procuring favour. The great state only wishes to unite men together and nourish them; a small state only wishes to be received by, and to serves, the other. Each gets what it desires, but the great state must learn to abase itself.”

“All very well in theory,” someone will exclaim, “but, the world has not seen it yet reduced to practice.” So it is. The fact is deplorable. No one saw the misery arising from it, and exposed its unreasonableness more unsparingly, than Chuang-tzŭ. But it was all in vain in his time, as it has been in all the centuries that have since rolled their course. Philosophy, philanthropy, and religion have still to toil on, “faint, yet pursuing,” believing that in the time will yet come when humility and love shall secure the reign of peace and good will among the nations of men.

While enjoining humility, Lao protested against war. In his thirty-first chapter he says, “Arms, however beautiful, are instruments of evil omen; hateful, it may be said, to all creatures. They who have the Tao do not like to employ them.” Perhaps in his sixty-ninth chapter he allows defensive war, but he adds, “There is no calamity greater than that of lightly engaging in war. To do that is near losing the gentleness which is so