and bewilderment spread through the land.  The more craft and cunning men have, the more useless and pernicious contraptions will they invent.  The more laws and edicts are imposed, the more thieves and bandits there will be.  ’If I work through Non-action,’ says the Sage, ’the people will transform themselves.’"[1] Thus according to Lao Tzu, who takes the existence of a monarchy for granted, the ruler must treat his subjects as follows:  “By emptying their hearts of desire and their minds of envy, and by filling their stomachs with what they need; by reducing their ambitions and by strengthening their bones and sinews; by striving to keep them without the knowledge of what is evil and without cravings.  Thus are the crafty ones given no scope for tempting interference.  For it is by Non-action that the Sage governs, and nothing is really left uncontrolled."[2]

    [1] The Way of Acceptance:  a new version of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te
    Ching, by Hermon Ould (Dakers, 1946), Ch. 57.

    [2] The Way of Acceptance, Ch. 3.

Lao Tzu did not live to learn that such rule of good government would be followed by only one sort of rulers—­dictators; and as a matter of fact the “Legalist theory” which provided the philosophic basis for dictatorship in the third century B.C. was attributable to Lao Tzu.  He was not thinking, however, of dictatorship; he was an individualistic anarchist, believing that if there were no active government all men would be happy.  Then everyone could attain unity with Nature for himself.  Thus we find in Lao Tzu, and later in all other Taoists, a scornful repudiation of all social and official obligations.  An answer that became famous was given by the Taoist Chuang Tzu (see below) when it was proposed to confer high office in the state on him (the story may or may not be true, but it is typical of Taoist thought):  “I have heard,” he replied, “that in Ch’u there is a tortoise sacred to the gods.  It has now been dead for 3,000 years, and the king keeps it in a shrine with silken cloths, and gives it shelter in the halls of a temple.  Which do you think that tortoise would prefer—­to be dead and have its vestigial bones so honoured, or to be still alive and dragging its tail after it in the mud?” the officials replied:  “No doubt it would prefer to be alive and dragging its tail after it in the mud.”  Then spoke Chuang Tzu:  “Begone!  I, too, would rather drag my tail after me in the mud!” (Chuang Tzu 17, 10.)

The true Taoist withdraws also from his family.  Typical of this is another story, surely apocryphal, from Chuang Tzu (Ch. 3, 3).  At the death of Lao Tzu a disciple went to the family and expressed his sympathy quite briefly and formally.  The other disciples were astonished, and asked his reason.  He said:  “Yes, at first I thought that he was our man, but he is not.  When I went to grieve, the old men were bewailing him as though they were bewailing a son, and the young wept as though they were mourning a mother.  To bind them so closely to himself, he must have spoken words which he should not have spoken, and wept tears which he should not have wept.  That, however, is a falling away from the heavenly nature.”