eadily advanced in repute, so
that his book was translated almost a hundred times into various
European languages. According to the general view among the Chinese, Lao
Tzu was an older contemporary of Confucius; recent Chinese and Western
research (A. Waley; H. H. Dubs) has contested this view and places Lao
Tzu in the latter part of the fourth century B.C., or even later.
Virtually nothing at all is known about his life; the oldest biography
of Lao Tzu, written about 100 B.C., says that he lived as an official at
the ruler's court and, one day, became tired of the life of an official
and withdrew from the capital to his estate, where he died in old age.
This, too, may be legendary, but it fits well into the picture given to
us by Lao Tzu's teaching and by the life of his later followers. From
the second century A.D., that is to say at least four hundred years
after his death, there are legends of his migrating to the far west.
Still later narratives tell of his going to Turkestan (where a temple
was actually built in his honour in the Medieval period); according to
other sources he travelled as far as India or Sogdiana (Samarkand and
Bokhara), where according to some accounts he was the teacher or
forerunner of Buddha, and according to others of Mani, the founder of
Manichaeism. For all this there is not a vestige of documentary
evidence.

Lao Tzu's teaching is contained in a small book, the _Tao Te Ching_, the
"Book of the World Law and its Power". The book is written in quite
simple language, at times in rhyme, but the sense is so vague that
countless versions, differing radically from each other, can be based on
it, and just as many translations are possible, all philologically
defensible. This vagueness is deliberate.

Lao Tzu's teaching is essentially an effort to bring man's life on earth
into harmony with the life and law of the universe (Tao). This was also
Confucius's purpose. But while Confucius set out to attain that purpose
in a sort of primitive scientific way, by laying down a number of rules
of human conduct, Lao Tzu tries to attain his ideal by an intuitive,
emotional method. Lao Tzu is always described as a mystic, but perhaps
this is not entirely appropriate; it must be borne in mind that in his
time the Chinese language, spoken and written, still had great
difficulties in the expression of ideas. In reading Lao Tzu's book we
feel that he is trying to express something for which the language of
his