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He died a broken- hearted failure; than whom perhaps no man except the Lord Buddha ever succeeded more highly. Laotse is his complement. Laotse's aim is not the activity, but the quiescence of mind, self, intellect: "in the NO THING seeking the lonely Way."
All these ideas are a natural growth from the teachings of Laotse; but Butterfly Chwang, in working them out and stating them so brilliantly, did an inestimable service to the ages that were to come. Laotse's Blue Pearl was already shining into poetry. The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain.
"Who knows, does not tell," said he; and Po Chu-i quotes this, and pertinently adds: "What then of his own five thousand words and more. the Tao Teh King." That book was proved centuries ago, in China, not to have come, as it stands, even from Laotse's age; because there are characters in it that were invented long afterwards.
The answer is astonishing, when one thinks of the crude ruthless human dynamo he was. It was simply Taoism: it was Laotse's Blue Pearl; but shining, of course, as through the heart of a very London Particular of Hunnish-barbarian fogs. No subtleties of mysticism; no Chwangtsean spiritual and poetry-breeding ideas, for him!
They are both called more daring thinkers than their predecessors; which is merely to say that in them the Spirit figured more on the intellectual, less on its own plane. They were lesser men, of course. Mencius had lost Confucius' spirituality; Chwangtse, I think, something of the sweet sanifying influence of Laotse's universal compassion.
Well; it was these principles made China supremely great; and kept her alive and strong when all her contemporaries had long passed into death; and, I hope, have ingrained something into her soul and hidden being, which will make her rise to wonderful heights again. You can hear Laotse in them; it is the practical application of Laotse's doctrine.
Now here is something still further from Confucianism; something prophetic of later Taoist developments, though it still contains Laotse's thought, and be it said deep wisdom. Fan Tsu Hua was a bully and a charlatan, who by his trickery had won such hold over the king of Tsin that anyone he might recommend was surely advanced to office, and anyone he cried down would lose his all.
Chu Hsi, the greatest of the Sung philosophers of the brilliant twelfth century A.D., says that "Buddhism stole the best features of Taoism; Taoism stole the worst features of Buddhism: as if the one took a jewel from the other, and the other recouped the loss with a stone." * This is exact: the jewel stolen by Buddhism was Laotse's Blue Pearl, Wonder and Natural Magic; the stone that Taoism took instead was the priestly hierarchy and church organization, imitated from the Buddhists, that grew up under the successors of Chang Taoling.
Laotse went lighting little stars for the Black-haired People: went pricking the opacity of heaven, that the Light of lights might filter through. If you call him a philosopher, you credit him with an intellectualism that really he did not bother to possess. Rather he stood by the Wells of Poetry, and was spiritual progenitor of thousands of poets. There is no way to Poetry but Laotse's Way.
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