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 Tz[)u] 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 Tz[)u] was an older contemporary of Confucius; recent Chinese and Western research (A.  Waley; H.H.  Dubs) has contested this view and places Lao Tz[)u] 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 Tz[)u], 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 Tz[)u]’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 Tz[)u]’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.

Lao Tz[)u]’s teaching is essentially an effort to bring man’s life on earth into harmony with the life and law of the universe (Tao).  This was also Confucius’s purpose.  But while Confucius set out to attain that purpose in a sort of primitive scientific way, by laying down a number of rules of human conduct, Lao Tz[)u] tries to attain his ideal by an intuitive, emotional method.  Lao Tz[)u] is always described as a mystic, but perhaps this is not entirely appropriate; it must be borne in mind that in his time the Chinese language, spoken and written, still had great difficulties in the expression of ideas.  In reading Lao Tz[)u]’s book we feel that he is trying to express something for which the language of his day was inadequate; and what he wanted to express belonged to the emotional, not the intellectual, side of the human character, so that any perfectly clear expression of it in words was entirely impossible.  It must be borne in mind that the Chinese language lacks definite word categories