380 KEPURT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1900. 



cares based upon speculations regarding Too, Reason, and Ti, Virtue. 

 This excited tlie curiosity of Confucius, who is said to have visited 

 him and to liave retired disconcerted at his hold flights of imagina- 

 tion. The veracity of the statement regarding this meeting is, how- 

 ever, open to doubt. After a long i)eriod of service Lao-tze is said 

 to have retired to the West, after confiding to Yin Hsi, the keeper of 

 the frontier i)ass of Han Ku, a written statement of his philosophy, 

 the Tau-tc-cliliKj, or Classic of. Reason and Virtue. Later mystics 

 improved upon this account by assigning a period of mythical 

 antiquity and a miraculous conception through the influence of a 

 star to Lao-tze's birth, alleging him to have been the incarnation of 

 the supreme celestial entity. According to the Lieh-hsien-ch'uan. an 

 account of the Taoist genii, he became incarnate B. C. 1321, in the 

 State of Ts'u. His mother brought him forth from her left side 

 beneath a plum tree, to which he at once pointed, saying: "I take 

 my surname (namely, Li, a plum) from this tree." When born 

 his head was white and his countenance that of an aged man, from 

 which circumstance he derived his name of Lao-tze, the Old Child. 

 The remainder of the account resembles that given above, except 

 that he is made to live for centuries, eventually retiring to the AVest 

 about B. C. 1080. No countenance is given, however, in the writ- 

 ings ascribed to his pen to supernaturalism of any kind, and the 

 legends regarding his life have evidently been largely colored by 

 the accounts given by Buddhistic writers of the life of S'ukyamuni. 

 The ideas contained in the Tao-te-cliiii;/ of Lao-tze, which has been 

 translated into English, French, and German, are thus sunnned up 

 by Mr. INIayers:^ "Creation proceeding from a vast, intangible, 

 impersonal first principal, self-existent, self-developing, the mother 

 of all things. The operation of this creative principle fulfilled in 

 the nature of man, the highest development of which again is to 

 V)e sought for in a return through 'quietism' and 'non-action' to 

 the mother principle. The highest good is accordingly to be 

 enjoyed in a transcendental al)straction from worldly cares, or 

 freedom from mental perturbation. In a doctrine such as this it 

 is not ditticult to trace at least a superficial likeness to the theories 

 of Brahminism, and whether originally derived from Hindu thought 

 or not it is probable that the cultivation of Lao-tze's teachings 

 had a potent influence in preparing the way for an influx of the 

 metaphysical speculations of Indian philosophers to satisfy a mental 

 craving not provided for in the simple materialism which Confucius 

 expounded. At least the latitude allowed by the vagueness of Lao- 

 tze's writings both enabled and encouraged his so-called disciples 

 and adherents to graft upon the leading notions of his text an 

 entirely adventitious code of natural and psycliical philosophy, 

 which, on the one hand, expanded into a system of religious belief, 

 a simple travesty of Buddhism, and, on the other, l)ecame devel- 

 oped into a school of mysticism, founded apparently upon the early 

 secrets of the professions of healing and divination, from whence 

 it rose to occult researches in the art of transmuting metals into 

 gold and insuring longevity or admission into the ranks of the 

 genii. To all these professions and pretensions the title of the 

 religion or teachings of Tao was given, although they were in reality 



' Chinese Reader's Manual, No. 336. 



