and
Desiring to rule over the people,
One must, in one’s words, humble oneself before them;
And, desiring to lead the people,
One must, in one’s person, follow behind them, (LXVI, 160)
These passages seem to support the charge only so long as we have the preconceived notion that the Lao tzu advocates the use of ‘scheming methods’. But if we approach them with an open mind, we begin to see that there need not be anything sinister in what is said, which is no more than this. Even if a ruler were to aim at realizing his own ends he can only hope to succeed by pursuing the ends of the people. If he values his own person he can only serve its best interest by treating it as extraneous to himself. What is here said about the realization of the ruler’s private ends is reminiscent of what is sometimes said about the pursuit of happiness. A man can achieve his own happiness only by pursuing the happiness of others, because it is only by forgetting about his own happiness that he can become happy. This has never been looked upon as a sinister theory. No more need be the theory in the Lao tzu. It is not said in the passages quoted that the ruler should pursue his own ends at the expense of the people. This would indeed be a vicious view, but that is precisely what is said here, by implication, not to be possible, even if one were to grant that it is desirable.
In fact true selfishness is a very rare thing and when it is found in a man it makes him eminently suitable to be a ruler. A truly selfish man is one who would not allow excessive indulgence in the good things in life to harm his body. Such a person is unlikely to take advantage of the people for the sake of gratifying his own desires were he made ruler. Hence it is said,
He who values his body more than dominion over the empire can be entrusted with the empire. He who loves his body more than dominion over the empire can be given the custody of the empire, (XIII, 31)
This probably represented the view of the school of Yang Chu. In a conversation between Yang Chu and Ch’in Ku-li recorded in the Yang chu chapter of the Lieh tzu, Yang Chu is said to have remarked, ‘A man of old would not have given a hair even if he could have benefited the empire by doing so, but neither would he have accepted the empire were it offered to him for his exclusive enjoyment.’ The second half of the statement is a fair representation of Yang Chu’s position, but the first half is a distortion similar to the statement by Mencius that ‘Yang Tzu chose egoism and even if he could have benefited the empire by pulling out one hair he would not have done so’ (7A. 26). It has been pointed out by Dr A. C. Graham* that the true position of Yang Chu was that even if he could have gained the empire by losing one hair he would have refused to do so. This is surely right, and Yang Chu’s ideal was the truly selfish man who would neither harm himself to the least degree in order to gain the empire nor use the empire for his own enjoyment lest such indulgence should be detrimental to his body. Such a man, according to the Lao tzu, is eminently suited to rule over the empire.
As passages which seem to support the charge against Lao tzu are capable of a different interpretation, we are left with only section 79 as sole grounds for it, and this happens to be a passage which has close parallels which the Hanfei tzu, the Chan kuo ts’e, and the Lii shih ch’un ch’iu all attribute to works other than the Lao tzu. It seems reasonable to assume that it is a saying of considerable antiquity which belonged to a tradition somewhat different from that to which the greater part of the Lao tzu belongs.
From what we have said about the Lao tzu it can be seen that the central idea is quite simple and has a direct bearing on life, hi life, whether in its ethical or political aspect, we should model ourselves on the tao. The supreme goal for the common man as well as for the ruler is survival, and the means to this goal is simply to hold fast to the submissive. No wonder it is said,
My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice, (LXX, 170)
If few can understand them it is because
Straightforward words
Seem paradoxical, (LXXVIII, 189)
and
When the worst student hears about the way
He laughs out loud, (XLI, 90)
That no one can put into practice the advice contained in the words is because it is against the grain of human nature in its degenerate form to act in accordance with it.
There are certain ideas which we have, so far, not touched on in our account and to these we must turn our attention. As the work is known as the Tao te thing, it must seem strange that we have not said anything about the term ‘te’. Te means ‘virtue’, and seems to be related to its homophone meaning ‘to get’. In its Taoist usage, te refers to the virtue of a thing (which is what it ‘gets’ from the tao). In other words, te is the nature of a thing, because it is in virtue of its te that a thing is what it is. But in the Lao tzu the term is not a particularly important one and is often used in its more conventional senses.
There are two passages which seem to go against the general tenor of the work. The first is the passage in chapter XIII in which it is said,
The reason I have great trouble is that I have a body. When I no longer have a body, what trouble have I? (30a)
This is enlightenment indeed, but does not fit well into the Lao tzu where survival is assumed, without question, to be the supreme goal in life.
The second is the passage in chapter 11,
Thus Something and Nothing produce each other;
The difficult and the easy complement each other;
The long and the short off-set each other;
The high and the low incline towards each other;
Note and sound harmonize with each other;
Before and after follow each other. (5)
The point here made is that opposite terms are relative. Take away the high, and there will no longer be the low. This line of thought, pushed to its logical conclusion, is capable of destroying the distinction between opposites. When the distinction between life and death is abolished, death is no longer something to be feared. This again goes against the general tendency in the Lao tzu where not only is survival a supreme value but the distinction between opposites is basic. Take away this basis, and you render superfluous almost everything that is said in the book. Both these passages fit in much better with the kind of Taoist thought to be found in the most important parts of the Chuang tzu where the problem that is the main concern of the Lao tzu is solved by cutting the Gordian knot.
There are certain ways of interpreting the thought of the Lao tzu which are very common but which do not seem to me to be well founded. Both in China and in the West, there have been attempts to put undue emphasis on the mysterious elements in the Lao tzu. So far we have seen only a rather down-to-earth philosophy aimed at the mundane purpose of personal survival and political order. There are a few passages which form the basis of this emphasis on the mysterious. These are of two kinds: the first concerns the origin of the universe; the second concerns certain practices of the individual. In the first, we often find the term ‘the mother of the myriad creatures’, but the term which lends itself most easily to such a purpose is ‘the mysterious female’, which occurs in chapter VI,
The spirit of the valley never dies.
This is called the mysterious female.
The gateway of the mysterious female
Is called the root of heaven and earth.
Dimly visible, it seems as if it were there,
Yet use will never drain it. (17)
It is possible, however, to take this as a piece of cosmogony. Just as living creatures are born from the womb of the mother, so is the universe born from the womb of ‘the mysterious female’. It is a remote possibility that the language used here is an echo of some primitive creation myth. But even if that were the case, the language in the Lao tzu has no longer any mythical significance, as can be seen from the description of ‘the mysterious female’ as ‘dimly visible’ and seemingly there. It is no more than a picturesque way of describing how the universe came to be, an
d an expression of wonder at the inexhaustible nature of this creative process. The comparison of the creative processes of nature with the union of male and female is not limited to this passage. Further examples are,
Heaven and earth will unite and sweet dew will fall, (XXXII, 72)
and
The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang, and arc the blending of the generative forces of the two. (XLII, 94)
It seems hardly justifiable to take such passages and interpret the whole work in the light of them.
The second type of passage deals with practices of the individual and has ‘the new born babe’ as a symbol.
One who possesses virtue in abundance is comparable to a new born babe, (LV, 125)
Again
If you are a ravine to the empire,
Then the constant virtue will not desert you
And you will again return to being a babe, (XXVIII, 63)
What is it, we may ask, in a baby that makes it a suitable symbol for a state so desirable in the eyes of the Taoist? It is its suppleness.
Its bones are weak and its sinews supple yet its hold is firm.
(LV, 125)
We have seen that jou (supple, pliant, submissive) is looked upon as the quality resembling most closely that of the tao, and because of this,
A man is supple and weak when living, but hard and stiff when dead. Grass and trees are pliant and fragile when living, but dried and shrivelled when dead. Thus the hard and the strong are the comrades of death; the supple and the weak are the comrades of life, (LXXVI, 182)
It may be noted, in passing, that the insight thus gained into the nature of things is an intuitive one. The Taoist sees that water is submissive and weak yet it can wear down the hardest of things, that the baby is supple and weak yet no one wishes to harm it, that the female is meek and submissive yet she is able to get the better of the male, that the body is supple when alive and rigid when dead, and from these isolated observations he gains the intuitive insight that in the nature of the universe it is the submissive that survives and triumphs in the end. Once this intuition is gained, further observation is unnecessary and serves only to confuse.
Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows, (XLVII, 106)
About the new born babe there is one passage which seems to show a different point of view.
In concentrating your breath can you become as supple
As a babe? (X, 24)
It is possible that the concentrating of the breath implies some sort of breathing exercise or perhaps even yogic practice. But again this is an isolated passage in the Lao tzu, and what may be even more significant is that this passage has parallels in chapter 37 of the Kuan tzu and chapter 23 of the Chiang tzu, and in the latter work the passage occurs in a story concerning Lao Tzu and is attributed by him to a book on the safeguarding of life (Wei sheng chih ching). It is therefore possible that the passage belongs properly to a school which was given to practices thought to be conducive to the prolonging of life. In the Lao tzu the aim is rather to avoid an untimely death through the adoption of submissiveness as a principle of conduct than the prolonging of life beyond its natural limit by artificial practices popular with the seekers after immortality.
There is another common assumption that needs examination. Ever since Wang Pi (AD 226-49) who wrote a commentary on the Book of Changes as well as on the Lao tzu, there has been no lack of interpreters who found affinity between the two works. But it seems to me that this assumption is mistaken. Elsewhere* I have argued that the interpretation of the theory of change as cyclic is more appropriate to the Book of Changes than to the Lao tzu. Here I wish only to call attention to the yin and the yang, the central concepts in the Book of Changes and the basis for the process of cyclic change. In the Lao tzu, the yin and the yang appear only once, in section 94 which has been quoted above. This is perhaps related to another passage,
When carrying on your head your perplexed bodily soul can
you embrace in your arms the One
And not let go? (X, 24)
If this is so, then section 94 probably belongs to the same group as section 24, which, as we have just seen, represents the school given to practices conducive to the prolonging of life, a tradition quite different from that of the main part of the Lao tzu. This may be speculation, but the fact remains that the yin and the yang appear once and once only in the whole of the Lao tzu and there is no reason to suppose that they occupy an important place in the thought of the whole work.
As in our view the Lao tzu is an anthology, it is a matter of some interest and importance that we should try to identify in it the views of some of the thinkers of the Warring States period whose works are unfortunately no longer extant.
We have seen for instance that views similar to those of Yang Chu can be found in passages where the ideal ruler is represented as the truly selfish man. We have also seen that in replacing the concept of heaven by that of the too, the Lao tzu bears some resemblance to parts of the Kuan tzu which, in the opinion of some modern scholars, are the work of the school of Sung K’eng and Yin Wen who figured among the scholars gathered in Chi Hsia in the state of Ch’i.
Again, according to the Lti shih ch’un ch’iu (chiian 17, pt 7), the key concept in the teachings of the legendary Kuan Yin (Keeper of the Pass) is ‘limpidity’. In the Tien hsia chapter of the Chuang tzu, in an account of the thought of Kuan Yin and Lao Tzu, the former is quoted as saying, presumably in connexion with the sage, ‘There is nothing inflexible in him, and so things show themselves up clearly. In his movement he is like water; in his stillness he is like a mirror; in his response he is like an echo. Indistinct, he seems shadowy; silent, he seems limpid… He never leads but always follows behind others.’ Here, besides ‘limpidity’, there are other concepts, many of which, like ‘water’, ‘stillness’, ‘indistinct’, ‘shadowy’, ‘to follow and not to lead’, are to be found in the Lao tzu. As Kuan Yin is so closely associated with the story of the westward journey of Lao Tzu, it is not surprising that so many of the ideas attributed to Kuan Yin are to be found in the Lao tzu.
Lieh Tzu, who is as nebulous a figure as Lao Tzu, was said to have advocated ‘emptiness (hsü)’ (Lii shih ch’un ch’iu, loc. cit.), and ‘emptiness’ figures very prominently in the Lao tzu, although the term used, except in sections 15 and 37, is ch’ung and not hsü.
The most fascinating case is Shen Tao (and T’ien P’ien who is invariably mentioned with him) who not only figured at Chi Hsia but, one suspects, was at least as prominent in the Warring States period as Chuang Tzu or Lao Tzu as representative of what was later called Taoist thought. He is said in the T’ien hsia chapter of the Chuang tzu to ‘discard wisdom’, ‘to laugh at the empire for honouring men of worth’, ‘to consider wrong the great sages of the empire’. He is quoted as saying, ‘The highest thing we can hope to emulate is the insensate. Men of worth and sages serve no useful purpose, as the clod never strays from the way.’ According to the Hsün tzu (chapter 17), he was able to see the value of following behind but not the value of taking the lead. It is somewhat surprising that all his views that we have mentioned are to be found somewhere in the Lao tzu. His attack on wisdom, men of worth, and sages is identical with the opening lines of chapter XIX,
Exterminate the sage, discard the wise,
And the people will benefit a hundredfold, (43)
and the opening words of chapter III,
Not to honour men of worth will keep the people from contention. (8)
The value of not taking the lead is also to be found in a number of passages some of which we have already quoted in connexion with the refutation of the charge of the use of scheming methods. It is also found in chapter LXVII,
I have three treasures
Wh
ich I hold and cherish.
The third is known as not daring to take the lead in the
empire.
Not daring to take the lead in the empire one could afford to
be lord over the vessels.
Now… to forsake the rear for the lead is sure to end in
death. (164, 164a)
Finally, Shen Tao’s insensate clod is singularly like the uncarved block in the Lao tzu, the symbol for freedom from desire.
We have said enough to show that passages are to be found in the Lao tzu which contain key concepts of the various schools of the Warring States period, but unfortunately we cannot take our investigations any further in this direction, for two reasons. Firstly, we know far too little about most of these early schools whose representative works are no longer extant. Secondly, from the key concepts associated with these schools one gets the impression that very often there is more difference between them in terminology than in substance. Does not ‘valuing the submissive’, or ‘valuing the empty’, or ‘avoiding the lead’ amount to the same thing? May it not be die case that some of these schools were very much alike but each had to put up a different ‘slogan’ in order to justify die claim to be an independent school, since in the Warring States period so much was to be gained by such a claim? If this is so, mere is perhaps much to say for looking upon all the schools represented in the Lao tzu as coming under the general description of Taoism, as die historians of die Han certainly did. Whatever the truth of die matter, this the scanty material at our disposal we cannot hope to sort out what pertains to the different schools; though die little we can do reinforces our conviction that the Lao tzu is an anthology in which are to be found passages representing the views of various schools, including some which flourished at Chi Hsia in the second half of the fourth and the first half of the third century BC and which shared die general tendency in thought that came to be known as Taoism.
In die translation, die division into chapters in the traditional text has been adhered to, but section numbers have been introduced. These serve to separate existing chapters into parts which, in my view, need not originally have belonged together. This does not mean that in every case these could not, in fact, have formed a continuous whole. If the reader can see a connexion between parts that I have separated, he can simply ignore my section markings. I have used this method in preference to rearrangement of the text which has been attempted by Eastern as well as Western scholars, because I am unable to share their assumptions that the present text is not in the proper order and that there is a proper order which can be restored by rearrangement. Where two passages are possibly independent, I have given them different section numbers, but when a passage is followed by another which serves as further exposition and was probably added by some editor, I have used the same section number but with an added letter after it.