Page:The Sayings of Lao Tzŭ (Giles, 1904).djvu/14

 ordinary conciseness of diction, is the cause of the obscurity which hangs over several portions of the text, and which the labours of innumerable commentators have done very little to clear away. To the wide scope thus afforded for the imagination we owe the startling discoveries, in the body of the work, of the Doctrine of the Trinity, and of the Hebrew word for Jehovah, thinly disguised in its Chinese dress. Sad to say, both of these once famous theories are now totally discredited.

The real value of the Tao Tê Ching lies not in such puerilities, but in its wealth of suggestive hints and pregnant phrases, each containing a world of thought in itself and capable of expansion into volumes. Whether Lao Tzŭ ever developed the germs of thought thrown out with such prodigality, we do not know. At any rate, no record of the development remains. And if Lao Tzŭ failed to work out his own system, the task was never satisfactorily accomplished by those who came after him. It is true that an enormous superstructure of Taoist literature has been raised upon the slender foundation of the Tao Tê Ching, but these Taoist writers soon forsook the austerity of Lao Tzŭ's way for the more attractive fields of ritual and magic. Lao Tzŭ was a Socrates who never found a Plato or an Aristotle to reap the goodly harvest he had sown; even Chuang Tzŭ, the greatest of his followers, whose exquisite literary style contrasts strangely with the rugged sentences of the Tao Tê Ching, scarcely seems to have caught the true spirit of his Master, and is apt to lose