TAOISM. BY FREDERIC H. BALFOUR. It is, as you are no doubt aware, a commonplace of our school geographies that in China there are Three Religions; or, to speak more accurately, Three Doctrines. In fact, I do not think it can be said that China has ever produced a genuine Religion, in the strictest sense of the term; unless, indeed, we admit as an historical fact that primitive Monotheism associated with the prehistoric and semi-mythical Emperors who are said to have flourished between one and two thousand years before the birth of Confucius. Of that eminent man, and the system of which he was the founder, you heard last Sunday from the mouth of the greatest living exponent, among Europeans, of Confucianism. It is not, of course, either my intention or my province to trench upon another man's domain; but it is necessary for my present contention to record the opinion which, erroneous or well-founded, I very strongly hold, that Confucianism is less a religion than a code of social and political morality. Buddhism, on the other hand, is a religion, in a very important sense; but then it is a foreign importation, like Mohammedanism or Christianity, and has become imbued with no more than a local colouring from its prolonged establishment in China. Taoism, with which we have to deal to-day, bears, it is true, many of the outward and visible signs of a religious system; but this is a mark of degradation, and is due in a very large measure to the contaminating influences of its contact with those grosser developments of popular Buddhism which flourish so rankly among the lower classes of Chinese. At present Taoism is a base and abject superstition, a religion in the worst and lowest sense, a foolish idolatry supported by an ignorant and venal priesthood commanding the respect of no single class in the community; a system of unreasoning credulity on the one hand, and of hocus-pocus and imposture on the other. This is not the Taoism of which I am going to speak to you to-day. It has its students among European scholars, but I confess that the subject has little or no interest for me. What I am going to tell you of is not Taoism the degenerate and idolatrous mythology which exists at present, but Taoism the pure and lofty philosophy which arose two thousand years ago, when a wave of inspiration seems to have swept over the entire civilized world, bringing with it that restlessness and vague though earnest expectation of something better yet to come, some epochmaking discovery or revelation of which the previous agitation was a har binger, that is ever present in periods marked by great intellectual upheavals, and when schools of learning were in process of establishment under Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, destined to exert an influence upon the world, not for that age merely, but for all time. The great movement which took place in Europe five hundred years before Christ was accompanied by a corresponding movement, almost as great, almost as farreaching, in a country whose very existence was a dream to the scholars of Greece and Rome; and foremost in time, if not in speculative and metaphysical power, among the leaders of thought in China, was the old Philosopher who, wearying of official cares, devoted the best portion of his life to the study of abstract ideas, and became the acknowledged founder of Taoism, or the doctrine of the Tao. Now, in order to find out what Taoism really is, we must devote our attention to the word, or character, "Tao" itself. This is composed of two parts, meaning respectively "head" and "to go." I do not think that this analysis will help us very far. As regards its meaning, we find that it is susceptible of several translations, according to the context and the sense in which the word is used. Primarily it means a Road or Way. It is also employed in composition as the verb "to speak." Thirdly, it signifies Principle or Doctrine. The trifling fact that it is susceptible of at least half-a-dozen other meanings, none of which are cognate to the present inquiry, need not delay us here. It is used in the Classics in the sense of the Right Path in which one ought to go, while many European scholars have boldly translated it Reason, thereby identifying it with the Platonic Logos. What is the truth about the matter, and how shall we be best able to find it out? Well, the position we take up is a very simple one. To put it algebraically, Tao is the x, or unknown quantity, that we have to find. And the first thing to be done is to see what is predicated of this mysterious Thing; how it is described; with what attributes it is credited; where it is to be found; whence it sprang, how it exists, and what its functions are. Then we may find ourselves in a position to discover what it is that answers to these particulars, and profanely to give a name to that which its preachers themselves declared must be for ever nameless. We are told that it has existed from all eternity. Chuang-tzů, the ablest writer of the Taoist school, says that there never was a time when it was not. Lao-tzů, the reputed founder of Taoism, affirms that the image of it existed before God Himself. It is all pervasive; there is no place where it is not found. It fills the Universe with its grandeur and sublimity; yet it is so subtle that it exists in all its plenitude in the tip of a thread of gossamer. It causes the sun and moon to revolve in their appointed orbits, and gives life to the most microscopic insect. Formless, it is the source of every form we see; inaudible, it is the source of every sound we hear; invisible, it is that which lies behind every external object in the world; inactive, it yet produces, sustains, and vivifies every phenomenon. which exists in all the spheres of being. It is impartial, impersonal, and passionless; working but its ends with the remorselessness of Fate, yet abounding in beneficence to all. "What is Tao?" asks Huai-nan-tzů, another eminent writer on the Taoist philosophy. "It is that which supports heaven and covers the earth; it has no boundaries, no limits; its heights cannot be measured, nor its depths fathomed; it enfolds the entire universe in its embrace, and confers visibility upon that which of itself is formless. It is so tenuous and subtle that it pervades everything just as water pervades mire. It is by Tao that mountains are high and abysses deep; that beasts walk and birds fly; that the sun and moon are bright, and the stars revolve in their courses. When the spring winds blow, the sweet rain falls, and all things live and grow. The feathered ones brood and hatch, the furry ones breed and bear; plants and trees put forth all their glorious exuberance of foliage, birds lay eggs, and animals produce their young; no action is visible outwardly, and yet the work is completed. Shadowy and indistinct, it has no form. Indistinct and shadowy, its resources have no end. Hidden and obscure, it reinforces all things out of formlessness. Penetrating and permeating everything, it never acts in vain.” ... Such are a few of the attributes ascribed to the nameless Principle we are considering. What ideas do they suggest to our mind? Such, I believe, as can scarcely be expressed in any single word. Lao-tzŭ and his followers recognised the fact that for this mysterious entity there can be no name, and so, as Lao-tzů himself says, they were forced to speak of it simply as Tao. We in the West have practically arrived at the same conclusion. What is it that makes flowers grow up and water flow down, which causes the showers to fall and the sun to shine, which guides the stars in their flaming courses, regulates the seasons, endows the butterfly with its radiant hues, makes heat expand and cold contract, gives one man black hair and another red, and, in a word, is the cause of every phenomenon around us, the mainspring of the huge machine of which we form a part? We, too, have failed to find a name for it, and so we call it Nature. Translate Tao, as used in this sense, by our common word Nature or, if you prefer it, Principle, Course, or Way of Nature-and I think we shall have discovered the key to Taoism; using the word, of course, not as applied poetically to the visible Universe, the natura naturata, but in the sense of natura naturans, the abstract Cause, the initial Principle of life and order, the hypostatic quiddity which underlies all phenomena, and of which they are a manifestation only. Tao, then, is Nature; Taoism is the philosophy of Nature; and Taoists are in the fullest sense of the word Naturalistic philosophers. Let us proceed now to consider the developments and adaptations of the great Naturalistic theory, in its relation to speculative cosmogony, in the first place, and afterwards to the more practical details of social and political life. The Taoists have a good deal to tell us about the Evolution of the visible Universe. "There was a time," says Chuang-tzů, "when all things had a beginning. The time when there was yet no beginning had a beginning itself. There was a beginning to the time when the time that had no beginning had not begun. There is existence, and there is also non-existence. In the time which had no beginning there existed Nothing —or a Vacuum. When the time which had no beginning had not yet begun, then there also existed Nothing. Suddenly, there was Nothing; but it cannot be known, respecting existence and non-existence, what was certainly existing and what was not." Now I dare say that that sounds to you so much empty nonsense. But I will ask you to compare it with the following utterance of no less a writer than the late lamented Mr. Proctor, who traverses the same ground as this old Chinese philosopher of two thousand years ago, though he speaks in rather clearer language :— "Those," he says, "who can, may find relief in believing in absolutely void space and absolutely unoccupied time before some very remote, but not infinitely remote epoch, which may in such belief be called the beginning of all things; but the void time before that beginning can have had no beginning, unless it were preceded by time not unoccupied by events, which is inconsistent with the supposition. We find no absolute beginning if we look backwards." In the first chapter of the works of Lieh-tzu, another very prominent writer of this school, we find a more definite speculation about the origin of life and motion, conveyed in very striking terms : "There is a Life that is uncreated; There is a Transformer who is changeless. That Transformer cannot but transform. Wherefore creations and transformations are perpetual, And these perpetual creations and transformations continue through all time. They are displayed in the Four Seasons. The Uncreated stands, as it were, alone; The Changeless comes and goes; His duration can have no end, Peerless and One-His ways are past finding out." In the same book we have a very interesting discussion, between an Emperor and his Minister, about the extent and eternity of matter. The Emperor begins by asking whether matter existed from the beginning of all things; and the Minister replies by asking how, if it did not, it came to exist at present, and whether their descendants would be justified in denying that matter existed in his Majesty's own day. The Emperor naturally enough rejoins that, by this argument, matter must have existed from all eternity—a remark that his Minister parries by saying that no records remain of the time before matter existed, and that all such knowledge is beyond the scope of humanity. To the question of the Emperor whether there is any limit to the expanse of the Universe, the Minister replies by avowing his entire ignorance; and when the Emperor presses the matter home by urging that "where nothing exists, that is the Infinite, but where there is existence there must be finality," the Minister says plainly that nobody knows anything about the Infinite. But we know this much: Heaven and Earth are simply contained in the great whole of the infinite Universe; and how can we tell whether there may not be an Unseen Universe, above and beyond that smaller Cosmos that is within the range of our perception? At this point it may be useful to deal very briefly with a question which has, no doubt, occurred to many of you already, namely, Does the Taoist system include a Personal Creator and Moral Governor of the Universe ? Well, the question is one more easily asked than answered. It is true that there are frequent references in the Taoist Classics to some Being, Influence, or Power, who is spoken of as the Creator. There are also passages, here and there, in which the word "Ti," or God, occurs. But such allusions are very obscure, very vague, very indefinite; while the term which is generally used for the verb "to create" implies less creation, as we understand it, than transformation or metamorphosis. Nor is there, as far as my own researches teach me, any definite statement as to the relations existing between this very shadowy Creator and the Tao. Some persons have hazarded the theory that Tao and the Taoist Creator are identical; that the Tao, in point of fact, is God. But this will not hold water. Tao is impersonal and passionless, and, in one sentence of what we may call the Taoist Bible, is spoken of in direct antithesis to God. Then, again, the workings of Tao explain everything, so that there is neither the room nor the necessity for a Personal Creator. In fact, the Taoist theory of Creation appears to me to foreshadow in a very remarkable manner the latest conclusions arrived at by scientific men in the present day. The nebulous haze which Professor Tyndall regards as the source of all material things, had a place in the philosophy of the ancient Taoists, who spoke of the primordial aura that eventually underwent condensation and concretion, and finally emerged in the form of solid matter, with definite and various shapes. Evolution lay at the root of Taoist cosmical science, and we find passages in Haeckel's History of Creation which might have been written, word for word, by any of the Taoist authors, passages which I would read to you did the time at my disposal permit. The Taoist theory, however, cannot be more ably or concisely summed up than in the words of Lucretius: "Nature is seen to do everything of herself spontaneously, without the meddling of the gods." Now, according to the Taoist theory, man is to be regarded as simply a part of the Universe, an offshoot of creation, a manifestation, like everything else, of the universal and inherent Tao. And this, be it remarked, is not a scientific or speculative opinion merely. It is a powerful moral factor, inducing a resignation to destiny and a submission to the laws of Nature which deserve our respectful attention. Listen, for instance, to the following utterances on the subject of Death. To the Taoist, |