6. The Old Master

Lao-tze—The “Tao”—On intellectuals in government—The foolishness of laws—A Rousseauian Utopia and a Christian ethic—Portrait of a wise man—The meeting of Lao-tze and Confucius

Lao-tze, greatest of the pre-Confucian philosophers, was wiser than Teng Shih; he knew the wisdom of silence, and lived, we may be sure, to a ripe old age—though we are not sure that he lived at all. The Chinese historian, Szuma Ch’ien, tells how Lao-tze, disgusted with the knavery of politicians and tired of his work as curator of the Royal Library of Chou, determined to leave China and seek some distant and secluded countryside. “On reaching the frontier the warden, Yin Hsi, said to him: ‘So you are going into retirement. I beg you to write a book for me.’ Thereupon Lao-tze wrote a book, in two parts, on Tao and Te, extending to over five thousand words. He then went away, and no one knows where he died.”³⁷ Tradition, which knows everything, credits him with living eighty-seven years. All that remains of him is his name and his book, neither of which may have belonged to him. Lao-tze is a description, meaning “The Old Master”; his real name, we are told, was Li—that is to say, a plum. The book which is ascribed to him is of such doubtful authenticity that scholars quarrel learnedly about its origin.* But all are agreed that the Tao-Te-Ching—i.e., the “Book of the Way and of Virtue”—is the most important text of that Taoist philosophy which, in the opinion of Chinese students, existed long before Lao-tze, found many firstrate defenders after him, and became the religion of a considerable minority of the Chinese from his time to our own. The authorship of the Tao-Te-Ching is a secondary matter; but its ideas are among the most fascinating in the history of thought.

Tao means the Way: sometimes the Way of Nature, sometimes the Taoist Way of wise living; literally, a road. Basically, it is a way of thinking, or of refusing to think; for in the view of the Taoists thought is a superficial affair, good only for argument, and more harmful than beneficial to life; the Way is to be found by rejecting the intellect and all its wares, and leading a modest life of retirement, rusticity, and quiet contemplation of nature. Knowledge is not virtue; on the contrary, rascals have increased since education spread. Knowledge is not wisdom, for nothing is so far from a sage as an “intellectual.” The worst conceivable government would be by philosophers; they botch every natural process with theory; their ability to make speeches and multiply ideas is precisely the sign of their incapacity for action.

Those who are skilled do not dispute; the disputatious are not skilled. . . . When we renounce learning we have no troubles. . . . The sage constantly keeps men without knowledge and without desire, and where there are those who have knowledge, keeps them from presuming to act. . . . The ancients who showed their skill in practising the Tao did so not to enlighten the people, but to make them simple and ignorant. . . . The difficulty in governing the people arises from their having too much knowledge. He who tries to govern a state by his wisdom is a scourge to it, while he who does not do so is a blessing.⁴⁰

The intellectual man is a danger to the state because he thinks in terms of regulations and laws; he wishes to construct a society like geometry, and does not realize that such regulation destroys the living freedom and vigor of the parts. The simpler man, who knows from his own experience the pleasure and efficacy of work conceived and carried out in liberty, is less of a peril when he is in power, for he does not have to be told that a law is a dangerous thing, and may injure more than it may help.⁴¹ Such a ruler regulates men as little as possible; if he guides the nation it is away from all artifice and complexity towards a normal and artless simplicity, in which life would follow the wisely thoughtless routine of nature, and even writing would be put aside as an unnatural instrument of befuddlement and deviltry. Unhampered by regulations from the government, the spontaneous economic impulses of the people—their own lust for bread and love—would move the wheels of life in a simple and wholesome round. There would be few inventions, for these only add to the wealth of the rich and the power of the strong; there would be no books, no lawyers, no industries, and only village trade.

In the kingdom the multiplication of prohibitions increases the poverty of the people. The more implements to add to their profit the people have, the greater disorder is there in the state and clan; the more acts of crafty dexterity men possess, the more do strange contrivances appear; the more display there is of legislation, the more thieves and robbers there are. Therefore a sage has said: “I will do nothing, and the people will be transformed of themselves; I will be fond of keeping still, and the people will of themselves be correct. I will take no trouble about it, and the people will of themselves become rich; I will manifest no ambition, and the people will of themselves attain to the primitive simplicity. . . .

In a little state with a small population I would so order it that though there would be individuals in it with the abilities of ten or a hundred men, there should be no employment for them; I would make the people, while looking upon death as a grievous thing, yet not remove elsewhere (to avoid it). Though they had boats and carriages, they should have no occasion to ride in them; though they had buff coats and sharp weapons, they should have no occasion to don or use them. I would make the people return to the use of knotted cords.* They should think their (coarse) food sweet, their (plain) clothes beautiful, their (poor) dwellings places of rest, and their common ways sources of enjoyment. There should be a neighboring state within sight, and the voices of the fowls and dogs should be heard all the way from it to us; but I would make the people to old age, even to death, not have any intercourse with it.”⁴²

But what is this nature which Lao-tze wishes to accept as his guide? The Old Master draws as sharp a distinction between nature and civilization as Rousseau was to do in that gallery of echoes called “modern thought.” Nature is natural activity, the silent flow of traditional events, the majestic order of the seasons and the sky; it is the Tao, or Way, exemplified and embodied in every brook and rock and star; it is that impartial, impersonal and yet rational law of things to which the law of conduct must conform if men desire to live in wisdom and peace. This law of things is the Tao or way of the universe, just as the law of conduct is the Tao or way of life; in truth, thinks Lao-tze, both Taos are one, and human life, in its essential and wholesome rhythm, is part of the rhythm of the world. In that cosmic Tao all the laws of nature are united and form together the Spinozistic substance of all reality; in it all natural forms and varieties find a proper place, and all apparent diversities and contradictions meet; it is the Absolute in which all particulars are resolved into one Hegelian unity⁴³

In the ancient days, says Lao, nature made men and life simple and peaceful, and all the world was happy. But then men attained “knowledge,” they complicated life with inventions, they lost all mental and moral innocence, they moved from the fields to the cities, and began to write books; hence all the misery of men, and the tears of the philosophers. The wise man will shun this urban complexity, this corrupting and enervating maze of law and civilization, and will hide himself in the lap of nature, far from any town, or books, or venal officials, or vain reformers. The secret of wisdom and of that quiet content which is the only lasting happiness that man can find, is a Stoic obedience to nature, an abandonment of all artifice and intellect, a trustful acceptance of nature’s imperatives in instinct and feeling, a modest imitation of nature’s silent ways. Perhaps there is no wiser passage in literature than this:

All things in nature work silently. They come into being and possess nothing. They fulfil their function and make no claim. All things alike do their work, and then we see them subside. When they have reached their bloom each returns to its origin. Returning to their origin means rest, or fulfilment of destiny. This reversion is an eternal law. To know that law is wisdom.⁴⁴

Quiescence, a kind of philosophical inaction, a refusal to interfere with the natural courses of things, is the mark of the wise man in every field. If the state is in disorder, the proper thing to do is not to reform it, but to make one’s life an orderly performance of duty; if resistance is encountered, the wiser course is not to quarrel, fight, or make war, but to retire silently, and to win, if at all, through yielding and patience; passivity has its victories more often than action. Here Lao-tze talks almost with the accents of Christ:

If you do not quarrel, no one on earth will be able to quarrel with you. . . . Recompense injury with kindness. . . . To those who are good I am good, and to those who are not good I am also good; thus (all) get to be good. To those who are sincere I am sincere, and to those who are not sincere I am also sincere; and thus (all) get to be sincere. . . . The softest thing in the world dashes against and overcomes the hardest. . . . There is nothing in the world softer or weaker than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it.*⁴⁵

All these doctrines culminate in Lao’s conception of the sage. It is characteristic of Chinese thought that it speaks not of saints but of sages, not so much of goodness as of wisdom; to the Chinese the ideal is not the pious devotee but the mature and quiet mind, the man who, though fit to hold high place in the world, retires to simplicity and silence. Silence is the beginning of wisdom. Even of the Tao and wisdom the wise man does not speak, for wisdom can be transmitted never by words, only by example and experience. “He who knows (the Way) does not speak about it; he who speaks about it does not know it. He (who knows it) will keep his mouth shut and close the portals of his nostrils.”⁴⁷ The wise man is modest, for at fifty† one should have discovered the relativity of knowledge and the frailty of wisdom; if the wise man knows more than other men he tries to conceal it; “he will temper his brightness, and bring himself into agreement with the obscurity (of others);⁴⁹ he agrees with the simple rather than with the learned, and does not suffer from the novice’s instinct of contradiction. He attaches no importance to riches or power, but reduces his desires to an almost Buddhist minimum:

I have nothing that I value; I desire that my heart be completely subdued, emptied to emptiness. . . . The state of emptiness should be brought to the utmost degree, and that of stillness guarded with unwearying vigor. . . . Such a man cannot be treated familiarly or distantly; he is beyond all considerations of profit or injury, of nobility or meanness; he is the noblest man under heaven.⁵⁰

It is unnecessary to point out the detailed correspondence of these ideas with those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the two men were coins of the same mould and mint, however different in date. It is a philosophy that periodically reappears, for in every generation many men weary of the struggle, cruelty, complexity and speed of city life, and write with more idealism than knowledge about the joys of rustic routine: one must have a long urban background in order to write rural poetry. “Nature” is a term that may lend itself to any ethic and any theology; it fits the science of Darwin and the unmorality of Nietzsche more snugly than the sweet reasonableness of Lao-tze and Christ. If one follows nature and acts naturally he is much more likely to murder and eat his enemies than to practise philosophy; there is small chance of his being humble, and less of his being silent. Even the painful tillage of the soil goes against the grain of a species primordially wont to hunt and kill; agriculture is as “unnatural” as industry.—And yet there is something medicinal in this philosophy; we suspect that we, too, when our fires begin to burn low, shall see wisdom in it, and shall want the healing peace of uncrowded mountains and spacious fields. Life oscillates between Voltaire and Rousseau, Confucius and Lao-tze, Socrates and Christ. After every idea has had its day with us and we have fought for it not wisely or too well, we in our turn shall tire of the battle, and pass on to the young our thinning fascicle of ideals. Then we shall take to the woods with Jacques, Jean-Jacques and Lao-tze; we shall make friends of the animals, and discourse more contentedly than Machiavelli with simple peasant minds; we shall leave the world to stew in its own deviltry, and shall take no further thought of its reform. Perhaps we shall burn every book but one behind us, and find a summary of wisdom in the Tao-Te-Ching.

We may imagine how irritating this philosophy must have been to Confucius, who, at the immature age of thirty-four, came up to Lo-yang, capital of Chou, and sought the Old Master’s advice on some minutiae of history.* Lao-tze, we are told, replied with harsh and cryptic brevity:

Those about whom you inquire have moulded with their bones into dust. Nothing but their words remain. When the hour of the great man has struck he rises to leadership; but before his time has come he is hampered in all that he attempts. I have heard that the successful merchant carefully conceals his wealth, and acts as though he had nothing—that the great man, though abounding in achievements, is simple in his manners and appearance. Get rid of your pride and your many ambitions, your affectation and your extravagant aims. Your character gains nothing for all these. This is my advice to you.⁶¹

The Chinese historian relates that Confucius sensed at once the wisdom of these words, and took no offense from them; that on the contrary he said to his pupils, on his return from the dying sage: “I know how birds can fly, fishes swim, and animals run. But the runner may be snared, the swimmer hooked, and the flyer shot by the arrow. But there is the dragon—I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind through the clouds, and rises to heaven. Today I have seen Lao-tze, and can compare him only to the dragon.”⁶² Then the new master went forth to fulfil his own mission, and to become the most influential philosopher in history.