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Updated: June 26, 2025
This Laotse illustrates by his favourite metaphor of the Vacuum. He claimed that only in vacuum lay the truly essential. The reality of a room, for instance, was to be found in the vacant space enclosed by the roof and the walls, not in the roof and walls themselves.
Why not consecrate ourselves to the queen of the Camelias, and revel in the warm stream of sympathy that flows from her altar? In the liquid amber within the ivory-porcelain, the initiated may touch the sweet reticence of Confucius, the piquancy of Laotse, and the ethereal aroma of Sakyamuni himself.
All these ideas are a natural growth from the teachings of Laotse; but Butterfly Chwang, in working them out and stating them so brilliantly, did an inestimable service to the ages that were to come. Laotse's Blue Pearl was already shining into poetry. The theme of it is this: From earliest childhood Ch'u Yuan had sought the Tao, but in vain.
In the sixth century B.C. it was in a fair way to becoming as obsolete as Neoplatonism or Gnosticism in the nineteenth A.D.; and Laotse and Confucius simply restated some aspects of it with a new force and sanction; just as H.P. Blavatsky, in the Key to Theosophy, begins, you will remember, with an appeal to and restatement of the Theosophy of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists of Alexandria.
Professor De Groot, of Holland, speaks boldly of Confucius as a Taoist; and though I dislike many of this learned Dutchman's ideas, this one is excellent. His thesis is that Laotse was no more an innovator than Confucius; that both but gave a new impulse to teachings as old as the race.
Well; it was these principles made China supremely great; and kept her alive and strong when all her contemporaries had long passed into death; and, I hope, have ingrained something into her soul and hidden being, which will make her rise to wonderful heights again. You can hear Laotse in them; it is the practical application of Laotse's doctrine.
Laotse said: Sing with the singing spheres, and behold, your duty is doing itself uder your hands. The password into the Tao of Confucius is Duty: he said merely Do that, and, the rest is silence. He may have played that rest on his lute; we are not to hear it in his words.
About the same time Buddha and the founder of Jainism in India, Laotse and Confucius in China, and as we have seen, probably also Zoroaster in Persia, all broke away from the Official Mysteries, more or less, to found Theosophical Movements of their own; which would indicate that, at least from the Tyrrhenian to the Yellow Sea, the Mysteries had, in that sixth century, ceased to be the efficient instrument of the White Lodge.
Aristotle would have had no government ruling more than ten thousand people; Laotse would have had his State of such a size that the inhabitants could all hear the cocks crowing in foreign lands; and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad. What he taught was a total bouleversement of the methods of his age.
The germ of Taoist speculation may be found long before the advent of Laotse, surnamed the Long-Eared.
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