“The main purpose of his studies” says Ssema Tsien (the ’Father of Chinese History’), “was to keep himself concealed and unknown.”  In this he succeeded admirably, so far as all future ages were to concerned; for Ssema himself, writing in the reign of Han Wuti some four centuries later, could be by no means sure of his identity.  He tells us all we know, or think we know, about Laotse:—­that he was born in a village in southern Honan; kept the Royal Library at Honanfu; met Confucius there in 517; and at last rode away on his ox into the west, leaving the Tao Teh King with the Keeper of the Pass on the frontier;—­and then goes on to say that there were two other men “whom many regarded as having been the real Laotse”; one of the Lao Lai, a contemporary of Confucius, who wrote fifteen treatises on the practices of the school of Tao; the other, a “Grand Historiographer of Chow,” Tan by name, who lived some century and a quarter later.  To me this is chiefly interesting as a suggestion that the ‘School of Tao’ was a thing existent and well-established at that time, and with more than one man writing about it.

It may we’ll have been.  Taoists ascribe the foundation of their religion to the Yellow Emperor, twenty-eight centuries B. C.; but there never was time Tao was not; nor, I suppose, when there was quite no knowledge of it, even in China.  In the old manvantara, past now these three hundred years, the Black-haired People had wandered far enough from such knowledge;—­with the accumulation of complexities, with the piling up of encumberments of thought and deed during fifteen hundred busy years of intensive civilization.  As long as that piling up had not entirely covered away Tao, the Supreme Simplicity, the Clear Air;—­as long as men could find scope to think and act and accomplish things;—­so long the manvantara lasted; when nothing more that was useful could be accomplished, and action could no longer bring about its expectable results (because all that old dead weight was there to interpose itself between new causes set in motion and their natural outcome)—­then the pralaya set in.  You see, that is why pralayas do set in; why they must;—­why no nation can possibly go on at a pitch of greatness and high activity beyond a certain length of time.—­And all that activity of the manvantara—­all that fuss and bustle to achieve greatness and fortune—­it had all been an obscuration of and moving away from Tao.

The Great Teachers come into this world out of the Unknown, bringing the essence of their Truth with them.  We know well what they will teach:  in some form or another it will be Theosophy; it will be the old self-evident truths about Karma and the two natures of man.  But how they will teach it:  what kind of sugar-coating or bitter aloes they will prescribe along with it:  —­that, I think, depends on reactions from the age they come in and the people whom they are to teach.  It is almost certain, as I said, that Li Urh the Old