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Updated: September 15, 2025
As an unprejudiced follower, in his own land, of the systems of Confucius, Lao-tse, and Buddha, this person already recognises the claims of seventeen thousand nine hundred and thirty-three deities of various grades, so that the addition of one more to that number can be a heresy of very trivial expiation."
Later writers have debased the system of Lao-tse, and cast aside his profound speculations for superstitious rituals and the multiplication of gods and goddesses. Confucius was the founder of the second school, which has exerted a far more extensive and beneficial influence on the political and social institutions of China.
In this work, which is but an outline criticism of pure reason, the philosopher Lao-tse continually identifies, under the name of TAO, universal reason and the infinite being; and all the obscurity of the book of Lao tse consists, in my opinion, of this constant identification of principles which our religious and metaphysical habits have so widely separated.
In its varied scientific and artistic development it forms the most perfect family of languages on the globe, and modern civilization, by a chain reaching through thousands of years, ascends to this primitive source. Chinese literature. 2. The Language. 3. The Writing. 4. Chinese Religion and Philosophy, Lao-tse, Confucius, Meng-tse or Mencius. 6. Buddhism. 7. Social Constitution of China. 8.
Though Lao-tse taught to recompense injury with kindness, the voice of Confucius was very much louder, which counselled that injury must be recompensed with justice; and yet revenge was justified only when it was undertaken in behalf of our superiors and benefactors. One's own wrongs, including injuries done to wife and children, were to be borne and forgiven.
Lao-Tse taught the Golden Rule, and in less than three centuries the ignorant masses had made him into a real and very cruel God and had buried his wise commandments under a rubbish-heap of superstition which made the lives of the average Chinese one long series of frights and fears and horrors. Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honouring their Father and their Mother.
So that, according to this doctrine, all the founders of religions, such as Moses and the prophets, Confucius, Lao-Tse, Buddha, Christ, and others, preached their doctrines and their followers accepted them, not because they loved the truth, but because the political, social, and above all economic conditions of the peoples among whom these religions arose were favorable for their origination and development.
The doctrine of Lao-tse, the younger contemporary of Kong-tse, which lays down as the basis of the world, that is of the unreal or non-existent, a supreme principle, Tao, or Being, corresponds with the Brahma doctrine of the Indians, among whom he lived for a long time; but this doctrine never became popular in China.
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