The Texts of Taoism (Complete)

In writing the preface to the third volume of these Sacred Books of the East in 1879, I referred to Lâo-dze as 'the acknowledged founder' of the system of Tâoism. Prolonged study and research, however, have brought me to the conclusion that there was a Tâoism earlier than his; and that before he wrote his Tâo Teh King, the principles taught in it had been promulgated, and the ordering of human conduct and government flowing from them inculcated.

For more than a thousand years 'the Three Religions' has been a stereotyped phrase in China, meaning what we call Confucianism, Tâoism, and Buddhism. The phrase itself simply means 'the Three Teachings,' or systems of instruction, leaving the subject-matter of each 'Teaching' to be learned by inquiry. Of the three, Buddhism is of course the most recent, having been introduced into China only in the first century of our Christian era. Both the others were indigenous to the country, and are traceable to a much greater antiquity, so that it is a question to which the earlier origin should be assigned. The years of Confucius's life lay between B.C. 551 and 478; but his own acknowledgment that he was 'a transmitter and not a maker,' and the testimony of his grandson, that 'he handed down the doctrines of Yâo and Shun (B. C. 2300), and elegantly displayed the regulations of Wân and Wû (B. C. 1200), taking them as his model,' are well known.

Lâo-dze's birth is said, in the most likely account of it, to have taken place in the third year of king Ting of the Kâu dynasty, (B. C.) 604. He was thus rather more than fifty years older than Confucius. The two men seem to have met more than once, and I am inclined to think that the name of Lâo-dze, as the designation of the other, arose from Confucius's styling him to his disciples 'The Old Philosopher.' They met as Heads of different schools or schemes of thought; but did not touch, so far as we know, on the comparative antiquity of their views. It is a peculiarity of the Tâo Teh King that any historical element in it is of the vaguest nature possible, and in all its chapters there is not a single proper name. Yet there are some references to earlier sages whose words the author was copying out, and to 'sentence-makers' whose maxims he was introducing to illustrate his own sentiments1. In the most distant antiquity he saw a happy society in which his highest ideas of the Tâo were realised, and in the seventeenth chapter he tells us that in the earliest times the people did not know that there were their rulers, and when those rulers were most successful in dealing with them, simply said, 'We are what we are of ourselves.' Evidently, men existed to Lâo-dze at first in a condition of happy innocence,--in what we must call a paradisiacal state, according to his idea of what such a state was likely to be.