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Updated: June 15, 2025
If Chwangtse had lived before Mencius, or Mencius after Chwangtse, Chwangtse could have afforded to see Confucius in his true light, as Liehtse did; but the power and influence of the mind of Mencius were such that in his time there was no looking at the Master except through his glasses.
Alas! they were at loggerheads: a wide breach between the two schools of thought had come to be by their time; or perhaps it was they who created it. We shall arrive at them next week; tonight, to introduce you to Liehtse, a Taoist teacher who came sometime between Laotse and Chwangtse; perhaps in the last quarter of the fifth century, when Socrates was active in Greece.
It is an instinct for this truth that makes Chinese poetry the marvel that it is. So the man of Tao is enriching the natural world: filling the hills with gold, putting pearls in the sea. "Can one get Tao to possess it for one's own?" asks Chwangtse; and answers himself thus: "Your very body is not your own; how then should Tao be? If my body is not my own, whose is it, pray?
Liehtse's tale of the Dream and the Deer leads me naturally to this characteristic bit from Chwangtse:* "Once upon a time, I, Chwangtse, dreamed I was a butterfly fluttering hither and thither; to all intents and purposes a veritable butterfly. I followed my butterfly fancies, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and there I lay, a man again.
Now how am I to know whether I was then, Chwangtse dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am Chwang?" * Which, like nearly all the other passages from him in this lecture, is quoted from Dr. H. A. Giles's Chinese Literature, in the Literatures of the World series; New York, Appleton. For which reason he is, says Dr.
When one quotes Chwangtse as speaking of "the delegated adaptability of God," one must remember that one has to use some English word for his totally impersonal Tao or Tien, or even Shangti, or whatever it may be.
And that the prince keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of his ancestral temple. Now if this tortoise had its choice, which would it prefer: to be dead, and have its remains venerated; or to be alive, and wagging its tail in the mud? "'Sir, replied the two officials, 'it would rather be alive, and wagging its tail in the mud. "'Begone! cried Chwangtse.
Laotse probably had been a Ts'u man; and also Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan; and in after ages it was nearly always from the forests of Ts'u that the great winds of poetry were blown. Still he had immense territories and resources, and the world looked mainly to her for defense against the northern Tiger Ts'in.
These were Chwangtse for Taoism, and Mangtse or Mencius for Confucius: the one, the channel through which spiritual thought flowed to the quickening of the Chinese imagination; the other, the man who converted the spiritual thought of Confucius into the Chinese Constitution.
"Chwantse was fishing in the river P'u when the Prince of Ch'u sent two high officials to ask him to take charge of the administration. "Chwangtse went on fishing, and without turning his head said: 'I have heard that in Ch'u there is a sacred tortoise which has been dead now some three thousand years.
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