The result, thus far, is to an active passivity.  Lao teaches that not to act involves the highest energy of being, and leads to the greatest results.  By not acting one identifies himself with the Tao, and receives all its power.  And here we cannot doubt that the Chinese philosopher was pursuing the same course with Sakya-Muni.  The Tao of the one is the Nirvana of the other.  The different motive in each mind constitutes the difference of their career.  Sakya-Muni sought Nirvana, or the absolute, the pure knowledge, in order to escape from evil and to conquer it.  Lao sought it, as his book shows, to attain power.  At this point the two systems diverge.  Buddhism is generous, benevolent, humane; it seeks to help others.  Tao-ism seeks its own.  Hence the selfish morality which pervades the Book of Rewards and Punishments.  Every good action has its reward attached to it.  Hence also the degradation of the system into pure magic and spiritism.  Buddhism, though its course runs so nearly parallel, always retains in its scheme of merits a touch of generosity.

We find thus, in the Tao-te-king, the element afterwards expanded into the system of utilitarian and eudaemonic ethics in the Book of Rewards and Punishments.  We also can trace in it the source of the magical tendency in Tao-ism.  The principle, that by putting one’s self into an entirely passive condition one can enter into communion with the unnamed Tao, and so acquire power over nature, naturally tends to magic.  Precisely the same course of thought led to similar results in the case of Neo-Platonism.  The ecstatic union with the divine element in all nature, which Plotinus attained four times in his life, resulted from an immediate sight of God.  In this sight is all truth given to the soul.  The unity, says Plotinus, which produces all things, is an essence behind both substance and form.  Through this essential being all souls commune and interact, and magic is this interaction of soul upon soul through the soul of souls, with which one becomes identified in the ecstatic union.  A man therefore can act on demons and control spirits by theurgic rites.  Julian, that ardent Neo-Platonician, was surrounded by diviners, hierophants, and aruspices.[20]

In the Tao-te-king (Sec.Sec. 50, 55, 56, etc.) it is said that he who knows the Tao need not fear the bite of serpents nor the jaws of wild beasts, nor the claws of birds of prey.  He is inaccessible to good and to evil.  He need fear neither rhinoceros nor tiger.  In battle he needs neither cuirass nor sword.  The tiger cannot tear him, the soldier cannot wound him.  He is invulnerable and safe from death.[21]

If Neo-Platonism had not had for its antagonist the vital force of Christianity, it might have established itself as a permanent form of religion in the Roman Empire, as Tao-ism has in China.  I have tried to show how the later form of this Chinese system has come naturally from its principles, and how a philosophy of the absolute may have degenerated into a system of necromancy.