While the West has set up the ideal of individualism and is suffering now because it no longer has any ethical system to which individuals voluntarily submit; while for the Indians the social problem consisted in the solving of the question how every man could be enabled to live his life with as little disturbance as possible from his fellow-men, Confucianism solved the problem of how families with groups of hundreds of members could live together in peace and co-operation in a densely populated country.  Everyone knew his position in the family and so, in a broader sense, in the state; and this prescribed his rights and duties.  We may feel that the rules to which he was subjected were pedantic; but there was no limit to their effectiveness:  they reduced to a minimum the friction that always occurs when great masses of people live close together; they gave Chinese society the strength through which it has endured; they gave security to its individuals.  China’s first real social crisis after the collapse of feudalism, that is to say, after the fourth or third century B.C., began only in the present century with the collapse of the social order of the gentry and the breakdown of the family system.

7 Lao Tzu

In eighteenth-century Europe Confucius was the only Chinese philosopher held in regard; in the last hundred years, the years of Europe’s internal crisis, the philosopher Lao Tzu steadily 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.