Still the mystical, quietist philosophy of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu has an undoubted resemblance to Indian thought.  No one who is familiar with the Upanishads can read the Tao-Te-Ching without feeling that if Brahman is substituted for Tao the whole would be intelligible to a Hindu.  Its doctrine is not specifically Buddhist, yet it contains passages which sound like echoes of the Pitakas.  Compare Tao-Te-Ching, 33. 1, “He who overcomes others is strong:  he who overcomes himself is mighty,” with Dhammapada, 103, “If one man overcome a thousand thousand in battle and another overcome himself, this last is the greatest of conquerors”; and 46. 2, “There is no greater sin that to look on what moves desire:  there is no greater evil than discontent:  there is no greater disaster than covetousness,” with Dhammapada, 251, “There is no fire like desire, there is no monster like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like covetousness.”  And if it be objected that these are the coincidences of obvious ethics, I would call attention to 39. 1, “Hence if we enumerate separately each part that goes to form a cart, we have no cart at all.”  Here the thought and its illustration cannot be called obvious and the resemblance to well-known passages in the Samyutta Nikaya and Questions of Milinda[603] is striking.

Any discussion of the indebtedness of the Tao-Te-Ching to India is too complicated for insertion here since it involves the question of its date or the date of particular passages, if we reject the hypothesis that the work as we have it was composed by Lao-tzu in the sixth century B.C.[604] But there is less reason to doubt the genuineness of the essays of Chuang-tzu who lived in the fourth century B.C.  In them we find mention of trances which give superhuman wisdom and lead to union with the all-pervading spirit, and of magical powers enjoyed by sages, similar to the Indian iddhi.  He approves the practice of abandoning the world and enunciates the doctrines of evolution and reincarnation.  He knows, as does also the Tao-Te-Ching, methods of regulating the breathing which are conducive to mental culture and long life.  He speaks of the six faculties of perception, which recall the Shadayatana, and of name and real existence (namarupam) as being the conditions of a thing.[605] He has also a remarkable comparison of death to the extinction of a fire:  “what we can point to are the faggots that have been consumed:  but the fire is transmitted and we know not that it is over and ended.”  Several Buddhist parallels to this might be cited.[606]

The list of such resemblances might be made longer and the explanation that Indian ideas reached China sporadically, at least as early as the fourth century B.C., seems natural.  I should accept it, if there were any historical evidence besides these literary parallels.  But there seems to be none and it may be justly urged that the roots of this quietism lie so deep in the Chinese character, that the plant