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Laotse had taught that of old time, before Tao was lost, the Yellow Emperor sat on his throne and all the world was governed without knowing it. Confucius worked out the doctrine thus: True government is by example; given the true ruler, and he will have the means of ruling at his disposal, and they will be altogether different from physical force.
Now, Laotse had long since ridden away into the West; the Doors were shut; the tides were no longer flowing; and the God's great Confucius remained in a world that knew him not. As for holding office and governing states, he had done all that was necessary. He had done enough in the way of holding office and governing states.
A Great Soul from the God World, he kept his eyes resolutely on the world of men; as if he remembered, nothing of the splendor, and nothing foresaw. . . . Indeed, I cannot tell; one would give much to know what really passed between him and Laotse.
This Persian devil, which had become identified with winter or with the absence of the sun's rays, was now Aryhman, or the "powers of darkness," and was doubtless the source whence sprang the personal devil elaborated at a later age by Laotse in China.
There is a Blue Pearl, Immortality; and the Dragon, wandering the heavens, is forever in pursuit or quest of it. You will see that on the old flag of China, that a foolish republicanism cast away as savoring too much of the Manchu. You perhaps know the picture of Laotse riding away on his ox. I do not wonder that the beast is smiling.
There had been poets all along. During the last thirty years of the Hans, 190 to 220, there had been the Seven Scholars of the Chien An Period: among them that jolly K'ung Jung who, because he was a descendant of Confucius, claimed blood-relationship with the descendants of Laotse.
Laotse had somehow flashed down into human consciousness a vision of Infinity: had confronted the Chinese mind with a conviction of the Great Mystery, the Divine Silence. It is simply a fact that that is the fountain whose waters feed the imagination and make it grow and bloom.
We do not know what happened when Laotse and Confucius met; but I suspect it was very like what happened when Mr. Judge met Madame Blavatsky. But Butterfly Chwang, the rascal, undertook to let us know; and wrote it out in full. He knew well enough what would happen if he met Mencius; and took that as his model. He wanted Mencius to know it too.
Asked by the great man wherein it lay, says he very sweetly: "Your ancestor Laotse and my ancestor Confucius were friends engaged in the search for truth; may we not then be said to be of the same family?" "Cleverness in youth," sneered a bystander, "does not mean brilliancy in later life." "You, Sir," says Ten-years-old, turning to him, "must have been a very remarkable boy." *
He had moved out of Rome itself, where the psychic atmosphere was too thickly encumbered; had gone eastward, where the air, after long pralaya, was clearer; had propped up imperial authority, now for the first time, with the definite insignia of imperial state: wore a tiara, was to be kneeled to, addressed as Dominus, and so forth: all outward expedients, and Brummagem substitutes for that inner adjustment which Laotse called Tao: the Way that you are to seek by retreating within, and by advancing boldly without; and not by any one road, because it is not found by devotion alone, nor by religous contemplation alone, or by ardent progress, self-sacrificing labor, or studious observation of life, alone; but the whole nature of man must be used wisely by the one who desire to enter it.
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