Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 8 (Chinese and Japanese).djvu/37



HE School of Doctrine, Tao, has gathered around it almost all the mythological characters of Chinese history j and it is necessary to understand the gradual development of this school into one of the national Three Religions—Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The emphasis placed upon mythological subjects having taken place after the establishment of Taoism as a religion, and the object of this book being to discuss these subjects and not ethical ones, it will not be necessary in the following pages to make any further use of the term School of Doctrine, Tao. In its stead the term Taoism will be used in a generic sense as including all that went before as well as all that followed after its recognition as a religion.

There are three distinct stages of Taoism. The first of these, which may be called the ethical, can be dated conveniently as having begun with Lao Tzǔ and his writings which are included in the Tao Teh King. This was the stage of philosophic discussion, beginning about the close of the sixth century The second stage or the magical, as it may be called, began in the first century of the Christian era and is centred around the personality of Chang Tao-ling. He retired to seclusion in the mountains of western China and devoted himself to the study of alchemy and to the cultivation of purity by means of mental abstraction. Here he was sought out by large numbers of disciples, who paid him five pecks of rice a day for their keep, from