found China, as it is now, nominally under the sway of the Three
Doctrines.

So much has been written on Confucianism, and so much more on Buddhism,
that I propose to confine myself entirely to Taoism, which seems to have
attracted too little the attention of the general public. In fact, a
quite recent work, which professes to deal among other things with the
history of China, omits all discussion of this particular religion.

Taoism is the religion of Tao; as to what Tao is, or what it means, we
are told upon the highest authority that it is quite impossible to say.
This does not seem a very hopeful beginning; but

"even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea,"

and I shall therefore make an effort to set before you a clue, which, I
trust, will lead toward at any rate a partial elucidation of the
mystery.

At some unknown period in remote antiquity, there appears to have lived
a philosopher, known to posterity as Lao Tzu, who taught men, among
other things, to return good for evil. His parentage, birth, and life
have been overloaded in the course of centuries with legend. Finally, he
is said to have foreseen a national cataclysm, and to have disappeared
into the West, leaving behind him a book, now called the _Tao-Te-Ching_,
which, for many reasons, he could not possibly have written.

The little we really know of Lao Tzu is gathered from traditional
utterances of his, scattered here and there in the works of later
disciples of his school. Many of these sayings, though by no means all
of them, with much other matter of a totally different character, have
been brought together in the form of a treatise, and the heterogeneous
whole has been ascribed to Lao Tzu himself.

Before proceeding with our examination of Tao, it is desirable to show
why this work may safely be regarded as a forgery of a later age.

Attempts have been made, by the simple process of interpolation in
classical texts, to prove that Lao Tzu lived in the same century as that
in which Confucius was born; and also that, when the former was a very
old man, the two sages met; and further that the interviews ended very
much to the astonishment of Confucius. All this, however, has been set
aside by the best native scholarship ever produced in China, as the work
of later hands.

Further, there was another philosopher of the same name, who really was
contemporary with Confucius, and it is held by many Chinese critics that
the two have be