Tao Te Ching

on the ground, drumming on the vessel (of ice), and singing. His friend said to him, “When a wife has lived with her husband, brought up children, and then dies in her old age, not to wail for her is enough. When you go on to drum on the vessel and sing, is it not an excessive (and strange) demonstration?” Chuang-tzŭ replied, “It is not so. When she first died, was it possible for me to be singular, and not affected by the event? But I reflected on the commencement of her being, when she had not yet been born to life. Not only had she no life, but she had no bodily form. Not only had she no bodily form, but she had no breath. Suddenly in this chaotic condition there ensued a change, and there was breath; another change, and there was the bodily form; a further change, and she was born to life; a change no again, and she is dead. The relation between those changes is like the procession of the four seasons⁠—spring, autumn, winter, and summer. There she lies with her face up, sleeping in the Great Chamber;26 and if I were to fall sobbing and going on to wail for her, I should think I did not understand what was appointed for all. I therefore restrained myself.”

The next paragraph of the same book contains another story about two ancient men, both deformed, who, when looking at the graves on Kunlun, begin to feel in their own frames the symptoms of approaching dissolution. One says to the other, “Do you dread it?” and gets the reply, “No. Why should I dread it? Life is a borrowed thing. The living frame thus borrowed is but so much dust. Life and death are like day and night.”

In every birth, it would thus appear, there is, somehow, a repetition of what it is said, as we have seen, took place at “the grand beginning of all things,” when out of the primal nothingness, the Tao somehow appeared, and there was developed through its operation the world of things⁠—material things and the material body of man, which enshrines or enshrouds an immaterial spirit. This returns to the Tao that gave it, and may be regarded indeed as that Tao operating in the body during the time of life, and in due time receives a new embodiment.

In these notions of Taoism there was preparation for the appreciation by its followers of the Buddhistic system when it came to be introduced into the country, and which forms a close connection between the two at the present day, Taoism itself constantly becoming less definite and influential on the minds of the Chinese people. The book which tells us of the death of Chuang-tzŭ’s wife concludes with a narrative about Lieh-tzŭ and an old bleached skull,27 and to this is appended a passage about the metamorphoses of things, ending with the statement that “the panther produces the horse, and the horse the man, who then again enters into the great machinery (of evolution), from which all things come forth (at birth) and into which they re-enter (at death).” Such representations need not be characterised.

Chu Hsi, “the prince of literature,” described the main object of Taoism to be “the preservation of the breath of life;” and Liu Mi, probably of our thirteenth century,28 in his Dispassionate Comparison of the Three Religions, declared that “its chief achievement is the prolongation of longevity.” Such is the account of Taoism originality given by Confucian and Buddhist writers, but our authorities, Lao and Chuang, hardly bear out this representation of it as true of their time. There are chapters of the Tao Te Ching which presuppose a peculiar management of the breath, but the treatise is singularly free from anything to justify what Mr. Balfour well calls “the antics of kung-fu, or system of mystic and recondite calisthenics.” Lao insists, however, on the Tao as conducive to long life, and in Chuang-tzŭ we have references to it as discipline of longevity, though even he mentions rather with disapproval “those who kept blowing and breathing with open mouth, inhaling and exhaling the breath, expelling the old and taking in new; passing their time like the (dormant) bear, and stretching and twisting (their necks) like birds” He says that “all this simply shows their desire for longevity, and is what the scholars who manage the breath, and men who nourish the body and wish to live as long as Pʽêng-tsu, are fond of doing.”29 My own opinion is that the methods of the Tao were first cultivated for the sake of the longevity which they were thought to promote, and that Lao, discountenancing such a use of them, endeavoured to give the doctrine a higher character; and this view is favoured by passages in Chuang-tzŭ. In the seventh paragraph, for instance, of his book VI, speaking of parties who had obtained the Tao, he begins with a prehistoric sovereign, who “got and by it adjusted heaven and earth.” Among his other instances in Pʽêng Tsu, who got it in the time of Shun, and lived on to the time of the five leading princes of Chou⁠—a longevity of more than 1,800 years, greater than that ascribed to Methuselah! In the paragraph that follows there appear a Nü Yü, who is addressed by another famous Taoist in the words, “You are old, sir, while your complexion is like that of a child;⁠—how is it so?” and the reply is, “I became acquainted with the Tao.”

I will adduce only one more passage of Chuang.