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One of the proverbs handed down from the hoary past is: "Kumpu no ada to tomo ni ten we itadakazu." "With the enemy of country, or father, one cannot live under the same heaven." The tales of heroic Japan abound in stories of revenge. Once when Confucius was asked about the doctrine of Lao-Tse that one should return good for evil, he replied, "With what then should one reward good?
"The story," said the one in the easy-chair, "is by the refined Tong-king, and it treats of the high-minded and conscientious doubts of one who would become a priest of Fo. When preparing for this distinguished office he discovers within himself leanings towards the religion of Lao-Tse. His illustrious scruples are enhanced by his affection for Wu Ping, who now appears in the story."
He went out of his way to visit Lao-Tse, the other great Chinese leader and the founder of a philosophic system called "Taoism," which was merely an early Chinese version of the Golden Rule. Confucius bore no hatred to any one. He taught the virtue of supreme self-possession.
It was an institution both for spiritual fighting and spiritual healing. The Chinese sage, Confucius, preached a wonderful ethical pragmatism, and the profound thinker, Lao-Tse, preached an all-embracing spiritualism. Christian wisdom included both of them, opening Heaven for the first and showing the dramatic importance of the physical world for the second.
And if somebody thinks still that a few thousands of Christian saints are not a sufficient argument to show that saintliness is practicable, then the Church has still not to give her ideal up and to take as her ideal thousands of great and small Napoleons and Bismarcks, and Goethes and Spencers, or Medics and Cromwells or Kaisers and Kings no, in the latter case it would be much nicer for the Church to point out the saintly men outside of Christian walls, like St Hermes and St Pythagoras, or St Krishna and St Buddha, or St Lao-Tse and St Confucius, or St Zoroaster and St Abu-Bekr.
This essay on the religion of the Chinese would be incomplete without some allusion to one of the contemporaries of Confucius, who spiritually and intellectually was probably his superior, and to whom even Confucius paid extraordinary deference. This man was called Lao-tse, a recluse and philosopher, who was already an old man when Confucius began his travels.
In the sixth century B.C., the corruption of the ancient religion having reached its height, a reaction took place which gave birth to the second, or philosophical period, which produced three systems. Lao-tse, born 604 B.C., was the founder of the religion of the Tao, or of the external and supreme reason.
The true doctrine is to return good for good, and evil with justice." This saying of Confucius has nullified for twenty-four hundred years that pearl of truth enunciated by Lao-Tse, and has caused it to remain an undiscovered diamond amid the rubbish of Taoism. By this judgment Confucius sanctified the rough methods of justice adopted in a primitive order of society.
The two great principles of Jesus: love of God in a word absolute perfection and love of one's neighbour, that is to say, love of all men without distinction, have been preached by all the sages of the world Krishna, Buddha, Lao-tse, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and among the moderns, Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others.
"The wise man," said the Chinese Lao-tse, "avenges his injuries with benefits." "Hatred," says a Buddhist sacred book, the Dhammapada, "does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love; this is the eternal rule." "To overcome evil with good is good, and to resist evil by evil is evil," says a Mohammedan manual of ethics.
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