Little is known about Lao Tzu. His enigmatic but deeply venerated figure represents the rise of Taoist thought in China. Taoism is one of the three philosophical and ethicoreligious systems that dominated Chinese culture until the early years of the twentieth century. The other two great systems, Confucianism and Buddhism, used the word ‘tao’ (pronounced ‘dow’) to refer to a way to right living or to spiritual development within the universe, but in Taoism the Tao is the Way and also the universal principle that is in all things. It is the unchanging source of the universe and of all that takes place in it.
The Shih-Chi, the Chinese Historical Record compiled by Ssu-ma Ch’ien in the second century BCE, is not clear concerning Lao Tzu’s dates. It tells us that his family name was Li, his given name Erh and his public name Tan. His birthplace was a village then known as Chu Jen in the Chinese province now called Ho-nan. Lao Tzu was an archivist at the court of the Chou rulers and is reported in some sources to have had a part in teaching Confucius the rites that were so vital a part of Chinese education and life. When the Chou dynasty began to weaken, Lao Tzu departed the court but before leaving China he wrote, at the request of Yin Hsi, the guardian of the frontier pass, a treatise on the Tao. The work, known as the Tao-te Ching (The Way and Its Power), has eighty-one short sections or chapters and consists of around five thousand Chinese characters. Because of this it is sometimes called Lao Tzu’s Five Thousand Words.
There is no record of what Lao Tzu did after his departure from China, allegedly riding on a blue water buffalo. Most sinologists believe the Shih-Chi account to be legendary and the Tao-te Ching a compilation, made over many decades, of the words and thoughts of a number of Taoist thinkers. More than forty English translations of the Tao-te Ching have been made and many hundreds of commentaries, in numerous languages, have been written on it. In A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Wing-tsit Chan remarks that ‘No one can hope to understand Chinese philosophy, religion, government, art, medicine – or even cooking – without a real appreciation of the profound philosophy taught in this little book’.1
Many attempts have been made to translate the term ‘tao’ in a way that conveys its full and exact meaning. The Jesuits who made the first translations of the Tao-te Ching equated Tao with the Supreme Reason of the Divine Being, but this understanding of the term was inadequate in two ways. First, it failed to capture that sense in which the word refers to Nature, or the universe, as a whole. Second, it neglects the central meaning of Tao as the Way, and of the Way as being that of Nature as a whole rather than of a specific way within the natural order. Tao is a word for what is ultimate and ineffable and the Tao-te Ching makes this clear in its opening pronouncements:
The Tao (Way) that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the mother of all things.2
And in the twenty-fifth paragraph we read:
There was something undifferentiated and yet complete,
Which existed before heaven and earth.
Soundless and formless it depends on nothing and does not change.
It operates everywhere and is free from danger.
It may be considered the mother of the universe.
I do not know its name; I call it Tao.3
Many of the important tenets of Lao Tzu’s teaching are best understood by comparing or contrasting them with Confucian teachings. Confucius’ doctrine derives from the importance he placed on each individual’s capacity for moral improvement and the development of a comprehensive benevolence towards one’s fellow beings and to society in general. Lao Tzu’s thought has a somewhat different emphasis. For him, the Tao, or Way, is found in the achievement of a harmony or union with Nature. This union is not secured by striving to achieve specified aims but rather by a kind of letting go, by a relinquishing of desire, by a reduction of needs and by a subduing of busy acquisitiveness. The Tao-te Ching rejects the rigorous practising of rites, so vital in the Confucian system of moral education, and proposes instead a submission to and a gentle exploration of all that is natural. It advocates a wandering discovery of the Way, much as a stream of water will find a course between the irregularities of the land through which it flows. What results is a kind of lived understanding; a knowing-how rather than a knowing-that. Living becomes effortless, yet abundant. The requirement is to inhabit rather than use Nature; to immerse oneself in it rather than distinguish oneself from it.
Confucius’ solution to the problem of living justly, righteously and in a state of sociability involved the elucidation of a well-defined system of morality and a carefully circumscribed education for realizing that system. Lao Tzu shared these ideals of social harmony but not Confucius’ method for realizing them. To him it was a mistake to separate out virtues and excellences and to hold up the idea of morality as a condition towards which one should struggle. He maintained that the multiplication of moral rules and conventions of conduct increased strife and competition and produced a highly artificial system of virtue that ignored Nature. We read in the Tao-te Ching that:
When the great Tao declined,
The doctrines of humanity and righteousness arose.
When knowledge and wisdom appeared
There emerged great hypocrisy.4
And:
. . . only when Tao is lost does the doctrine of humanity
arise. Only when humanity is lost does the doctrine of righteousness arise.5
Lao Tzu’s advice for attaining virtue is to find it ‘the easy way’; that is, to reject the highly articulated constructs of formalized knowledge. He says: ‘Abandon sageliness . . . abandon learning, and there will be no sorrow’, and he counsels rulers to ‘administer the empire by engaging in no activity’ because:
The more taboos and prohibitions there are in the world,
The poorer the people will be.The more sharp weapons the people have,
The more troubled the state will be.6
It should not be thought from all this that Lao Tzu advocated a kind of anarchical individualism. He held that there are immutable laws of nature and that it is through understanding the character of the laws that one finds the Way for oneself through life. Finding one’s own path in the Way depends on wu-wei, the practice of nonintervention that is in accordance with the laws of nature in that one never seeks to impede the enaction of the universal laws that constitute the Tao of Heaven. But wu-wei is not a mere negation or opting out. It is presence in the right place and a willingness to go along with the real nature of things. Again it is water that is the ideal symbol of this conception of strength through gentleness:
The great rivers and seas are kings of all mountain streams
Because they skilfully stay below them. . .
There is nothing softer and weaker than water,
And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.7
Rulers and leaders were not exempt from the wuwei principle. Lao Tzu remarks that ‘ruling a large kingdom is like cooking small fish’; that is, the less stirring around the better the result will be. Many of the observations of the Tao-te Ching contain specific advice to rulers to exemplify Taoism in all they do. It is pointed out that:
Tao invariably takes no action, and yet there is nothing left undone.
If kings and barons can keep it, all things will transform spontaneously.
If, after transformation, they should desire to be active,
I would restrain them with simplicity, which has no name.
Simplicity, which has no name, is free of desires.
Being free of desires it is tranquil.
And the world will be at peace of its own accord.8
Lao Tzu advocates a similar attitude even in the soldier who, he says, uses arms only when he cannot do otherwise:
A skilful leader of troops is not aggressive with his military strength.
A skilful fighter does not become angry . . .
This is called the virtue of not-competing.
This is called the strength to use man.
This is called matching Heaven, the highest principle of old.9
The somewhat paradoxical finding of strength in non-violence and supremacy in lowliness illustrates a fundamental law of Tao expressed in the words:
Reversion is the action of the Tao.
Weakness is the function of the Tao.
All things in the world come from being.
And being comes from non-being.10
Another such law, derived from the essential character of the Tao, is the yin-yang principle of the opposites of feminine and masculine, dark and light, activity and passivity, which are united within and, indeed, constitute the wholeness and comprehensiveness of the Tao. Lao Tzu advocated the cultivation of an unaggressive receptivity, traditionally thought to be characteristic of the female, in any person seeking holiness and completion:
He who knows the male (active force) and keeps to the female (the passive force or receptive element)
Becomes the ravine of the world.
Being the ravine of the world,
He will never depart from eternal virtue . . .11
The invocation of the yin-yang principle and the importance accorded to its feminine element are entirely consistent with the attitude of wu-wei and a general search for balance and harmony. Lao Tzu’s commendation of female qualities was probably contrary to the conventional thought of his day, though it would have been consistent with a good deal of ancient myth and folklore current at the time. His concern was with finding a balanced vitality in which the contributory elements were never in conflict but always complemented and were nourished by each other to produce a harmonious unity. So for him, feminine and masculine were of equal importance and indispensable to each other. Moreover, in their reciprocity and mutuality they partook of the nature of the cosmos as a whole, of the universal forces of being and non-being which are elemental in the Tao.
The American philosopher, Arthur C. Danto has observed that Taoistic knowledge is practical rather than conceptual and that Lao Tzu’s teaching is ‘deprecation of one sort of knowledge in favour of another’.12 Danto also remarks that ‘the [Taoist] thought that political felicity consists in permitting things to find their natural course is optimistic and radically naive’,13 and he cites Confucius’ remark that ‘If the Tao prevailed in the world, I should not be trying to alter things’.14 Taoism does not seem fully to confront the problem of how Taoism can begin to yield its proper consequences in a world that largely ignores its teaching. An even more serious problem is that which arises when we reflect on how things must be if or when the Taoist ideal of a mystical union with Nature is achieved, so that the individual self is lost in that it is absorbed into the life of the universe at large. For Taoism this is the supreme condition, the ultimate moral achievement; but the closing of the gap between the self and the world renders all ordinary conceptions of morality and virtue useless for, as Danto points out, ‘exactly that space that Taoism intends to collapse is what makes morality possible at all’.15 The conditions we ordinarily take as necessary for morality seem to disappear once the individuated consciousness is wholly lost.
In spite of these kinds of difficulties Taoism offers a conception of human life and the cosmos that is profoundly appealing. Its concerns are ones that are perennial and ubiquitous in human thought: What is the source of all things? Is there a meaning to life? What is Good? How should human life be lived? Its responses to these questions are not characteristic only of an Oriental cast of mind; they also embody many of the presuppositions, conjectures and conclusions that are familiar in western philosophy and they express thoughts and ideas common to mysticism wherever it is found in human speculation. In Taoism it is always a union with nature that is sought. It teaches that such a union yields freedom, vital equilibrium and longevity. The person who lives the Tao avoids all excesses and never has a need to burn himself out and deplete his energy. Lao Tzu thought that those who have a proper affinity with the natural world, who have a te, or spirit, that is in harmony with the universal Tao, are virtually invulnerable to what are often thought of as natural dangers: ‘A man endowed with plentiful te is comparable to a newborn infant: poisonous insects will not sting him, wild animals will not seize him in their claws, birds of prey will not carry him off in their talons; his bones are weak, his sinews supple, but his grasp is firm.’16 Suppleness of body and breath control are important for the prolongation of life and for the maintenance of a serenity and openness which guarantee a mind so clear that it reflects and illumines the world. This is the condition of inner holiness and of longevity. Lao Tzu has no belief in physical immortality. What he seems to advocate is a gradual purification of the mind so that, in old age, the death of the body is simply the culmination of a prolonged return to a union with all things.
Much of the Tao-te Ching reads like a treatise on the personal and spiritual life but it has to be remembered that a part, at least, of its intention must have been to serve as a political manual for rulers during the Time of the Warring States (403–222 BCE), that unstable period in which the great states preyed on their lesser neighbours before pitting their enhanced strengths against each other, and which culminated in the third century BCE in the triumph of the Ch’in over the Chou dynasty and the founding of an empire that endured for over two thousand years. It has been suggested that in these conflicts Taoism may have been invoked as a kind of magic against crude, physical aggression. Its exponents might have been thought to have an insuperable and unassailable strength, drawn from their union with the strength of Nature as a whole, and a spiritual power of insight and influence derived from the same source.
When a man disappears by riding out of the life where he is known, much may be imagined or conjectured about what he does thereafter. Interest in Lao Tzu developed into a cult and he eventually became revered as a god. A scroll discovered in a walled-up library at Tun-huang relates Lao Tzu’s transition from sage to god, describes his reappearances as the counsellor of successive emperors and quotes him as exhorting his followers to learn and recite the Tao-te Ching. The doctrine ascribed to him has developed in various ways since the Time of the Warring States, but it has unfalteringly retained and promulgated the ideal of a mystical union with Nature as its central concept. It has inspired the beautiful and dreamlike style of much Chinese landscape painting and its ethos of order and tranquillity has informed the architecture and patterns of many Chinese temples. The profound changes of twentieth-century China have not destroyed Taoism. The China Taoist Association was officially established in Peking in 1957. Its aims are to unite all Chinese Taoists, to promote world peace, and to support Chinese socialism and a policy of religious freedom. Taoism is the leading religion in Taiwan where it became firmly established in the seventeenth century and where many of its ancient practices have been retained in their traditional forms. There too, since 1964, at the instigation of a Dutch scholar, K.M. Schipper, careful research into the history of Taoism in all its forms has been conducted. Lao Tzu and his book, the Tao-te Ching, are now known all over the world.
1 Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 136.
2 Tao-te Ching, ch. 1, Chan, op. cit., p. 139.
3 op. cit., ch. 25, p. 152.
4 op. cit., ch. 18, p. 148.
5 op. cit., ch. 38, p. 158.
6 op. cit., ch. 57, p. 166.
7 op. cit., chs 66 and 78, pp. 170 and 174.
8 op. cit., ch. 37, p. 158.
9 op. cit., ch. 68, pp. 171, 172.
10 op. cit., ch. 40, p. 160.
11 op. cit., ch. 28, p. 154.
12 Arthur C. Danto, Mysticism and Morality, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976, p. 107.
13 op. cit., p. 114.
14 ibid.
15 op. cit., p. 120.
16 Tao-te Ching, ch. 55, in Wing-tsit Chan, op. cit., p. 165.
The authorship of the Tao-te Ching (Classic of the Virtue of the Tao) is attributed to Lao Tzu although it is thought by some to be a compilation of the words and sayings of a number of Taoist thinkers. There are numerous translations of the work. See, for instance:
Chang, Chung-yuan, Tao: A New Way of Thinking. A Translation of the Tao-te Ching, with an Introduction and Commentaries, New York, Harper & Row, 1975.
Waley, Arthur, The Way and Its Power, London and Sydney, Unwin Paperbacks, 1977.
Confucius, Mencius, Hui-neng, Chu Hsi, Tai Chen, Mao Tse-tung
Chan, Wing-tsit, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1963
Chang, Chung-yun, Creativity and Taoism, New York, Harper & Row, 1970
Danto, Arthur C., Mysticism and Morality, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976
Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. D. Bodde, 2 vols, Vol. I, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1983
Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilization in China, 2 vols, Vol. 2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969
Watts, A., Tao: The Watercourse Way, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979