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* Chinese Literature: H.A. Giles If Laotse founded any school or order at all, it remained quite secret. I imagine his mission was like Plato's, not Buddha's: to start ideas, not a brotherhood.
Even the imperial blood becomes diluted, degraded, and absorbed into the body politic after the seventh generation; but the descendants of Confucius remain separate, through all the mutations of time and of government." Laotse, the founder of the smallest of the three sects in China, namely, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, was an old man when Confucius was in his prime.
Looking backward thirteen decades from that, we come to 608 B.C.; four years after which date, according to the usually accepted tradition, Laotse was born. Thus we find the cycle preceding that of Greece mainly occupied, in China, by the lives of the two great Teachers.
The Sung allegory of the Three Vinegar Tasters explains admirably the trend of the three doctrines. Sakyamuni, Confucius, and Laotse once stood before a jar of vinegar the emblem of life and each dipped in his finger to taste the brew. The matter-of-fact Confucius found it sour, the Buddha called it bitter, and Laotse pronounced it sweet.
She had no Blue Pearl of Laotse to render her immortal; no Confucian Doctrine of the Mean to keep her sober and straight; and hence it came that, though later a new start was made, and great men arose, once, twice, three times, to do their best for her, she fell to pieces at last, a Humpty-Dumpty that all the king's horses and all the king's men could never reweld into one; and the place she should have filled in history as Unifier of Europe was only filled perfunctorily and for a time; and her great duty was never rightly done.
It is after all but a swollen personality; and whether you swell your personalitv with virtues or vices, the result is an offense. There is a bridge, razor-edged, between earth and heaven; and you can never carry that load across it. Laotse, supremely ethical in effect, had a cordial detestation take this gingerly! of un-re-enforced ethics.
Whatever sectarian pride may assert to the contrary one cannot help being impressed by the similarity of Southern Zen to the teachings of Laotse and the Taoist Conversationalists. In the Tao-teking we already find allusions to the importance of self-concentration and the need of properly regulating the breath essential points in the practice of Zen meditation.
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."
Contrasting the efforts of that age and this, we may say that then, organization, such as we have now, was lacking. Confucius did not come as the official successor of Laotse; Laotse, probably, had had no organized school that he could hand over to Confucius.
It is written in the Chinese school manual concerning the origin of habits and customs that the ceremony of offering tea to a guest began with Kwanyin, a well-known disciple of Laotse, who first at the gate of the Han Pass presented to the "Old Philosopher" a cup of the golden elixir.
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