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Updated: June 15, 2025
Confucius appears to have taken none of his disciples into the Library; and Confucianist writers have had nothing to say about the incident, except that it occurred, I believe. Chwangtse, and all Taoist writers after him, show Confucius taking his rating very quietly; as indeed, he would have done, had Laotse been in a mood for quizzing.
When China should be ready, Chwangtse and the Pearl would be found waiting for her. The manvantara had not yet dawned; but we may hurry on now to its dawning. The Crest-Wave was still in India when China plunged into the abyss from which her old order of ages never emerged.
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.
Not for such an age as that Chwangtse and Ch'u Yuan wrote, but indeed you may say for all time. What light from the Blue Pearl could then shine forth and be seen, would, in the thick fog and smoke-gloom, take on wild fantastic guise; which, as we shall see, it did: but what Chwangtse had written remained, pure immortality, to kindle up better ages to come.
Chwangtse will not help you through the examinations; but he is mighty good to read when your days of competing are over; as I think it is Dr. Giles who says. Like his contemporary Diogenes, he would have his dead body cast out to the vultures; but the spirit of his wish was by no means cynical.
"He takes his refuge in Tao, and places himself in subjective relations with all things"; he keeps the mountain within him; the scent of the daffodil, and her yellow candle-flame of beauty, are within the sphere and circle of himself; "...the little wave of Breffny goes stumbling through his soul." "Hence it is said" this is Chwangtse again "that there is nothing like the light of Nature.
And perhaps, behind this naive Chinesity, lie grand enunciations of occult law. . . . I will end with what is probably Liehtse's most famous story and, from a purely literary standpoint, his best. It is worthy of Chwangtse himself; and I tell it less for its philosophy than for its fun.
So that whoever wrote this book, whether it was the man referred to by Chwangtse when he says: "There was Liehtse again; he could ride upon the wind and go wheresoever he wished, staying away as long as thirteen days," or someone else of the same name, he did not take his non de plume from that passage in Chwangtse, because he was probably dead when Chwangtse wrote it.
Such a man, of course, might have lived later than Chwangtse, and taken his nom de plume of Liehtse from the latter's book; but against this there is the fact that Liehtse's teaching forms a natural link between Chtangtse's and that of their common Master Laotse; and above all and herein lies the real importance of him the real Liehtse treats Confucius as a Teacher and Man of Tao.
The Dragon was yet a long way off; though indeed it must be allowed that flight, when Chwangtse wrote and Ch'u Yuan sung, was surprised with the far churr of startling wings under the stars.
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