Introduction

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Introduction of the Sayings of Lautsu. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recording
by Nemo. The Sayings of Lautsu by Lautsu, translated by

(00:23):
Lionel Giles introduction with rare modesty and intelligent self appreciation,
Confucius described himself as a transmitter, not a maker, one
who loved and believed in the ancients. This judicious estimate
fairly sums up the position of China's most prominent teacher,

(00:47):
incalculable those influence has been over millions of the human race.
It is due rather to his sterling common sense, backed
by the moral strength of his character, than to any
striking intellectual power or or novelty in his ideas. But
some fifty years before the time of Confucius, there lived
another great Chinese who, besides being a lover of antiquity,

(01:11):
takes high rank as a profound and original thinker. Apart
from the thick crop of legend a myth which soon
gathered around his name, very little is known about the
life and personality of l'autsu. And even the meager count
preserved for us in the history of Sutzmachien must be
looked upon with suspicion. All the alleged meetings and conversations

(01:35):
with Confucius may safely be rejected, not only on account
of chronological difficulties, but because they are exactly the sort
of invention which would be likely to pass current in
an early and uncritical age. We need not, however, go
so far as those who impgene the very existence of
Lautsu as an individual, and regard the book which passes

(01:58):
under his name as a mere collect section of scraps
of ancient proverbial philosophy. Some color, indeed, is lent to
this theory by the uncertainty that attaches to the proper
interpretation of the name Lao Tzu, which is variously explained
as one old boy, because he is said to have
been born with a white beard. But we may rather

(02:20):
suspect that the story was invented to explain the name
two son of Lao, this being the surname of the
virgin mother who conceived him at the sight of a
falling star. Or three Old Philosopher, because of the great
age in which he wrote his immortal book, the Tao

(02:40):
di Ching. The mention of this classic or treatise of
the Way and of Virtue, as it may be translated
for want of better English equivalents, brings us naturally to
the vexed question as to whether the text which has
come down to us can really be attributed to the
hand of Lausu, or whether it is not rather garbled,

(03:02):
an unauthorized compilation of the sayings, or even the mere
forgery of a later age. The Chinese themselves, it may
be remarked, are almost unanimous in denying its authenticity. It
has been urged that we must make allowance here for
Confucian bias, but the internal evidence alone should suffice to

(03:24):
dispel the notion to which many eminent synologues have clung
that the daubt Di Ching in its present form can
possibly represent the actual work of Laou Tsu. On the
other hand, it is highly probable that much of it
is substantially what he said or wrote, though carelessly collected
in piece together at random. Tuma Chien, who published his

(03:47):
history in ninety one b c. And was consequently removed
from Lao Tsu by a much longer period than we
are from Shakespeare tells us that this age wrote a
book of five thousand in odd words, and indeed, by
that time that Dao di Ching may possibly have existed
in something like its present shape. But anyone who reflects

(04:08):
on the turbulent condition of China during the intervening centuries,
and the chaotic state of primitive literature before the labours
of Confucius, to say nothing of the burning of the
books in two thirteen BC, will find it hard to
convince himself that Sue Ma Chien ever had before him
the actual writings of the philosopher arbitrary and confused. Though

(04:32):
the arrangement of the Dao di Ching appears, it is
possible to trace a coherent line of thought throughout the whole.
And although no coiner of paradox on such an extensive
scales l'atsu could hope to achieve absolute and invariable consistency,
it is easy to see that the daod Ching is
something more than a mere jumble of stray aphorisms, that

(04:56):
it is in fact the well defined, though rudimentary outline
of a great system of transcendental and ethical philosophy. That
this magnificant scheme of thought never reached its full expression
in Lautsu's treatment is largely due to the fact that
he is perpetually struggling to convey his ideas through the
medium of language still imperfectly developed, in forming an inadequate

(05:21):
vehicle for obtrusive philosophical conceptions. This, too, combined with an
extraordinary conciseness of diction, is the cause of the obscurity
which hangs over several portions of the texts, and which
the labors of innumerable commentators have done very little to
clear away. To the wide scope thus afforded for the imagination,

(05:45):
we owe the startling discoveries in the body of the work,
of the doctrine of the Trinity, and of the Hebrew
word for Jehovah thinly disguised in its Chinese dress. Sad
to say, both of these once famous theories are now
totally discredited. The real value of the doubt du Ching

(06:05):
lies not in such puerilities, but in its wealth of
suggestive hints and pregnant phrases, each containing a world of
thought in itself, incapable of expansion into volumes. Whether Laosu
ever developed the germs of thought thrown out with such prodigality,
we do not know at any rate, no record of

(06:28):
the development remains, and if Lao Tzu failed to work
out his own system, the task was never satisfactorily accomplished
by those who came after. It is true that an
enormous superstructure of Daois literature has been raised upon this
slender foundation of the Doubt Tu Ching. But these Taoist
writers soon forsook the austerity of Laotsu's way for the

(06:51):
more attractive fields of ritual and magic. Lao Zu was
a Socrates who never found a Plato or an Aristotle
to reap the goodly harvest he had sown. Even Chuang Tsu,
the greatest of his followers, whose exquisite literary style contrasts
strangely with the rugged sentences of the Doubt du Ching,

(07:12):
scarcely seems to have caught the true spirit of his master,
and is apt to lose himself in the vague speculations
of a dreamy mysticism. Lao TSU's work, however, was able
to command attention on its own merits. It was first
officially recognized as a canon or classic under the Emperor
Ching Ti b. C. One Fifty six to one of

(07:36):
the Han dynasty, after which the study of Dao survived
many vicissitudes, being now under a cloud and now again
in high favor of court. One emperor was in the
habit of holding forth on the doctrines of Laosu before
his assembled ministers, and would forthwith degrade anyone who stretched, yawned,
or spat during his discourse. Other published edition of the

(08:01):
daud Ching, which described in the preface as the root
of all things, the teacher of kings, and the most
precious jewel of the public. The first emperor of the
latter Qin dynasty asked if Tao was of any use
in government. Chang chiang Ming told him that with Dao,

(08:22):
a corpse could govern the empire by success of edicts.
The Dao tu Ching was made obligatory at the examination
for graduates of the second degree. Everyone was required to
possess a copy of the work, and it was cut
on stone at both capitals. Later on, printed copies were
distributed to all directors of education, and it was translated

(08:45):
into the language of Nu Chen Tatars. Finally, Kublai Khan
ordered all Taois books to be burnt, with the exception
of the Dao tu Ching. Thus showing a just appreciation
of the gulf separating Laosu from the later writers An Dao.
In view of the disjointed and inartistic character of the

(09:07):
work and its antagonism to many of the principles of
orthodox Confucianism, it is a small wonder that native scholars
with true Chinese subordination of matter to form seldom professed
to hold it in great esteem, and indeed its qualities
are not such as would strongly appeal to an essentially

(09:28):
hard headed and materialistic race. Yet on reflection it will
certainly appear that the teaching of Lao Tsu has not
been barren of practical results. The great political lesson of
lase ez fair is one that the Chinese people has
well assimilated, and perhaps carried to excess, may even be

(09:48):
said to impregnate their national life more thoroughly than any
doctrine of Confucius. From two great evils of modern civilization,
the bane of over legislation in the past, of meddlesome
and overbearing officialdom, China is remarkably free, and in few
other countries does the individual enjoy such absolute liberty of action. Thus,

(10:13):
on the whole, the Chinese may be said to have
adopted L'autsu's main principles of government with no small success.
It is hard to believe that a rigidly despotic empire
encumbered with an irksome array of laws and statutes could
have remained homogeneous and intact throughout so lengthy a period.
Who can doubt that the enormous bulk of China has

(10:35):
managed to defy the disintegrating action of time by reason
of its very inertness and placidity. It has been suggested
that L'aotsu may have reached this doctrine of non interference
by observing that the supreme power Tao governs the universe
by fixed laws, and yet leaves to man an apparently

(10:56):
unrestricted freedom of will. Be this as it may, he
was undoubtedly the first man to preach the gospel of
peace and intelligent inaction, being in this as in many
other respects, far in advance of his age. In those
troublesome times when the land was torn by Internestine feuds

(11:17):
and the spirit of materialism was rife, it is not
a little remarkable to find him expressing unqualified abhorrence of war,
though to be sure, this was but the logical outcome
of his system of quietism. Few can help being struck
by the similarity of tone between the sayings of Lausu
and the Gospel enunciated six centuries later by the Prince

(11:41):
of Peace. There are two famous utterances, in particular, which
secure to Laotsu the glory of having anticipated the lofty
morality of the Sermon on the Mount. The cavaliers, who
had ranked the golden rule of Confucius below that of
Christ will find it hard to get over the fact
that laot Zu said, requite injury with kindness, and to

(12:06):
the not good, I would be good in order to
make them good. It was one hundred and fifty years
later that Plato reached the same conclusion in the first
Book of the Republic. It is interesting to observe certain
points of contact between Lautsu and the early Greek philosophers.

(12:26):
He may be compared both with Parmenides, who disparge sense
knowledge and taught the existence of the one as opposed
to the many, and with Herklitis, whose theory of the
identity of contraries recalls some of our sage's paradoxes. But
it is when we come to Plato that the most
striking parallels occur, it has not escaped notice that something

(12:50):
like the Platonic doctrine of ideas is discoverable in the
forms which Laotzu conceives as residing in Tao. So far
as I know, no one has yet pointed out what
a close likeness Tao itself bears to that curious abstraction
which Plato calls the idea of the good. The function

(13:13):
and attributes of this grandiose conception are not set forth
quite so fully or clearly as those of Tao, but
it certainly covers a great deal more than the ordinary
moral connotation of our word good. It is at once
the creative and sustaining cause of the universe, the condition
of all knowledge, and the summum bonum or supreme object

(13:37):
of man's desire. Being a metaphysical entity, it cannot be
perceived by the eye or ear of sense, and is
therefore ridiculed by the inferior man of little intelligence, while
only the few can enter into close communion with it. Now,
all of this might stand equally well as a description

(13:58):
of Tao. On the other hand, the inactivity and repose
which are so insisted on by the Chinese thinker, as
the primary characteristics of Tao would have been less intelligible
to the Greek and seem to bring us nearer to Buddhism.
The lack of reliable information about L'aotsu is very disappointing.

(14:19):
One cannot help wishing that some of the less important
details touching the life of Confucius could be exchanged for
an authentic personal account. However, brief of his older contemporary,
all that we know for certain is that, after having
spent most of his life in the state of Chaoo,
he set out at an advanced age towards the west,

(14:40):
past the frontier, and was never heard of again. Thus
Laotsu's gigantic figure looms but indistinctly through the mist of ages,
and to gather some idea of his personality, who must
be content to fall back on his own rough hewn sentences,
There is one striking pas in which he describes himself

(15:02):
half sarcastically and half in earnest, as a dullard and
a clown compared with ordinary men. In this he seems
to indicate is the result of his adherents to Tao.
These words, evidently written in great bitterness of spirit, may
have been wrung from him by sense of his failure
to convert the careless generation, which would have none of

(15:25):
the Tao he venerated as the most precious thing under heaven.
In showing himself the man of Tao in such a
disadvantageous light, his meaning was probably much the same as
that of Plato in the Allegory of the Cave, where
he depicts the blindness and bewilderment of those who descend
once more into the darkness of their prison after having

(15:48):
contemplated the dazzling brilliance of the sun. Laotsu's despondency would
have been greater still, could he have foreseen how his
pure and idealistic teaching was destined to be dragged in
the mire of degrading superstition, which for centuries has made
Taoism a byword of reproach. Though frequently described as one

(16:11):
of the three religions of China, this cult is really
little more than an extricable mass of jugglery and fraud,
absorbed from various popular beliefs in other sources, including even
the rival creed of Buddhism, and conducted by a body
of priests recruited from the very dregs of the empire.

(16:33):
Such a fate, however, is less to be wondered at
than deplored, Seeing that the great Founder himself took no
pains to establish a practicable system. He propounded lofty sentiments
and neglected the homely details without which his ideas could
not bear fruit. Moreover, when all is said and done,

(16:55):
idealism can never hope to hold its own in human affairs. Indeed,
the new eradons of which Plato dreamed long ago, in
this world of ours becomes ripe for the dominion of
philosopher Kings Wilcott Road acton June twenty one, nineteen o four,

(17:18):
end of introduction of the Sayings of Laotsu