Page:The Dial (Volume 75).djvu/507

Rh of a deep void. All day long he looked to it but could hear nothing; he clutched at it but got hold of nothing. Starlight then said, 'Perfect! Who can attain to this? Non-existing non-existence; and non-existing existence! How is it possible to reach to this? Perfect!

It is a very nice and a very delicate question though one obviously beyond the scope of this sketch, whether the great doctrine of the Tao was actually modified by Kwang; whether in fact, Kwang's Tao departs from the original and orthodox Tao. One suspects that it does depart from this not a little; but Kwang has so plausible a manner of presenting his own temperamental vision that it is very hard to catch him in the act of "glossing" the older oracles.

For our part we are unable to see why the Taoism of Kwang should not be a finer and a deeper philosophy than the Taoism of Lao-tze. It is certainly more daring and more amusing. The Tao probably had interpreters long before Lao-tze appropriated it; and it may well be that what are called the "Classical Texts of Taoism" represent a philosophical articulation of a much more primitive and mythological cult, towards which the poetic imagination of Kwang fumbles its own way.

His doctrine of the Tao remains in any case, as it is disclosed to us in these extraordinary pages, a piece of human speculation that may be enjoyed on its own merits. What it seems to reveal is nothing less than what may well have been the religion of the human race in some incredibly early period of its history; the worship in plain words, of Chaos and Chance, combined with an awful recognition of Something Unutterable—neither to be named as Existence nor as Nothingness, neither as the One nor as the Many—out of the womb of which Chaos and Chance emerged and into which they will sink.

It is the underlying presence of this Unutterable—a different thing altogether from the Hindu Brahma—which makes it possible for Kwang to speak as if Life and Death themselves were only temporary aspects of something that was beyond them both, and as if neither Benevolence nor Righteousness could ever reach that depth of clairvoyance which the mere "lying back" upon one's own essential nature, such as it may be, in unmitigated simplicity and sincerity, can enable us to attain.