#18 LAO TZU – PHILOSOPHER 570BC
The Old Master … or the Old Sage … are two of the translations of Lao Tzu a respectful title given to a man who lived around the sixth century BC.
Born Li Erh, some scholars believe he was a little older than his fellow philosopher Confucius (Kung-Fu Tzu). He is said to have been born in K7 Prefecture of the State of Chu, which is today’s Henan province and to have held an office at court.
One legend places Lao Tzu as the senior archivist at the Emperor’s court where as an old man he was about to retire and leave the palace to find a peaceful retreat when a gatekeeper stops him and encourages him to record his wisdom. Another legend says his major work, the Tao was simply a collection of sayings written by several Taoists using the pen-name Lao Tzu.
According to the mainstream tradition, Lao Tzu himself recorded the Tao-Di-Jhing (pron. Dow-Tee-Ching) which means the way of life and its power. It is a collection of eighty-one sayings of which the most important fifty-nine are rhymed for emphasis and ease of remembering. Hundreds of years after his death his treatise was divided into two parts, verses 1-37 were called the Tao (pron. Dow) because they begin with the word Tao. And verses 38-81 were called Di because they begin with the word Di. Jing or Ching means Classic or Ancient text. The five thousand two hundred and fifty words of the Tao Di are some of the most important words ever written. It is the most translated classic in the world after the Bible with about seven hundred translations extant and it is the oldest scripture of the religion: Taoism. Its gentle advocacy of non-violence over violence is the forerunner of Christ’s and Gandhi’s philosophy. Lao Tzu’s principal mode of thinking is through paradox and through poetry.
“What is the Tao?” Lao Tzu asks..
The Tao is the mysterious unity underlying and sparking in all things.
There is a thing, formless yet complete
Before Heaven and Earth, it existed.
We do not know its name, but we call it Tao
It is the mystery of mysteries … incomprehensible.
Look, it cannot be seen – it is beyond form.
Listen, it cannot be heard – it is beyond sound.
Grasp, it cannot be held – it is intangible.
These three are indefinable, they are one.
From above, it is not bright;
From below, it is not dark:
Unbroken thread beyond description.
It returns to nothingness.
Form of the formless,
Image of the imageless,
It is called indefinable and beyond imagination.
Stand before it – there is no beginning.
Follow it and there is no end.
Stay with the Tao, Move with the present.
Knowing the ancient beginning is the essence of Tao.”
In this translation of the opening verses, the Tao is a path which allows us to live in harmony with the universe because there is a mysterious unseen unity which underlies everything even that which is apparently in conflict. While Lao Tzu never calls the Tao… God and he does not see it as personal or relating to humans; its presence, like God, that sustains everything and like God, deserves awe and respect.
Taoism is a mystical philosophy influenced by nature with a slight scepticism permeating it. Lao Tzu believed that a person’s life should be governed by instinct and conscience, and unconditional acceptance of the laws of the universe; he emphasized spontaneity and harmony with nature together with complete relaxation and sitting with a blank mind. There was but one virtue in life and that was to be in harmony with the Tao. Living six hundred years before Jesus Christ, he advised to repay evil with good. He saw all opposites not as polarities of one another, but as existing in one another and dissolving into the Tao.
One legend has the two great philosophers, the Buddha and Lao Tzu meeting; another legend has him meeting with Confucius. The story of his life raised the perennial questions of legendary beings. Did he really exist? Where did he come from and what did he have to learn in this life? Where did he work? f he met Confucius and the Buddha what were their meetings about and what did Lao Tzu take away from them? And why is some of the Tao so similar to the preachings of Jesus Christ?
Conversation with the Gatekeeper
“Gatekeeper, it is time to discuss with you, as my Tibetan sage, the greatest Sage who may have ever lived: Lao Tzu. I need to find out if he actually existed and, if he did, whether he influenced other great philosophers like Kung-Fu-Tzu, Buddha and Jeshua ben Joseph. And if he did exist, what was he called?”
“Yes, he did exist. His family dynastic name was Li which means plum and he did not have a first name or in the Chinese sense, a last name, until he was twelve or thirteen and by then he was called … what do you think? How about Lao Tzu?”
“Why would you call a twelve-year-old… an old Master?”
“Because his parents heard his wisdom and knew he had been born many times before. He had one life in Siberia and another in Egypt as Imhotep’s tutor, Dhrahippi, but all his other lives were in China and although he couldn’t remember any of his lives, he was born wise!”
“Where was he born?”
“He was born where the border of the northern province of China joins Manchuria. His father was Manchurian and was an educated man. He was a notary and let me stress, he was very educated for a Manchurian. His mother came from a noble Chinese family which disapproved of her love match marriage.”
“I presume that his mother was an aspect of Mary?”
“Lao Tzu’s mother is shrouded in mystery … it is possible he was not born but adopted by his family at an early age as a foundling.”
“I’ll let that go for the moment. How was Lao Tzu educated?”
“The mother’s family took charge and paid for him to go to the school of the Imperial Court, a local Kingdom court to train him as a Mandarin.”
“Tradition says he was an archivist in the Royal Library of Chou. Is that correct?”
“Lao Tzu journeyed once through the land of Chou which you now call Canton. He would leave it quickly because he said it was the worst place to live where they spoke the most barbarous dialect but where he ate the most heavenly food. He was, however, an archivist – if by that you mean a historian and a librarian who kept the scrolls in good condition and order, catalogued them and hewrote treatises on philosophy and history. He did all this, and as well, he was a gifted teacher. He taught privileged young boys of the nobility and some of them who were not of the nobility but who would later be castrated as eunuchs to enable them to become valuable servants of the court.”
“Was that Lao Tzu’s fate?”
“Certainly not. Lao Tzu was not having any contact with a wife.”
“That is a relief, but it does mean that no women or girls were educated by him. How large were his classes?”
“There were from ten or twelve to thirty boys in a class, but usually ten to twelve like at an academy.”
“And of the many treatises that he wrote, do they still exist? Did they survive two and a half thousand years and China’s Cultural Revolution?”
“Usually I would have to say no but many of his treatises do still exist. They remain in the archives of the Emperors and in the temple libraries where over one hundred thousand scrolls are preserved. One result of the increased affluence and education in China will be this remarkable resurgence in classical scholarship. Sometimes it will be sponsored by the Overseas Chinese; some, if not most, of his four hundred treatises, will be rediscovered … he was quite prolific.”
“There is a tradition about him which involves the story of another gatekeeper. It says at eighty-seven years Lao Tzu was stopped when he was about to leave China by Yin His, a warden or gatekeeper who asked him to write his wisdom down. Whereupon he writes this book in two parts on Tao and Te and used only five thousand characters. My question, Gatekeeper, is … in this case, is tradition (which after all knows everything) right?”
“This allows me to tell a wonderful story because in this case, tradition is approximately right. The gate guardian or warden of the Northern Imperial court was under orders from the King [I know that you will ask me his name and I can only find his personal name Xiaddiang] not to allow Lao Tzu out of his court until his wisdom was recorded. He was really, although not a declared one, a national treasure… Lao Tzu’s response to the gate guardian’s demand to record his wisdom was thoughtful, he said he would seek the answer within himself. “What is correct?” he asked himself. He was informed by his own gatekeeper who said to him“… to do this is correct.” Then, because both his physical and his spiritual gatekeepers agreed, he could only accede. Now the gate guardian was a female… the king kept a whole regiment of female warriors called Yin His which means Iron Blossom… Well, metal blossom is more accurate because iron was not invented yet but I discarded it for the more poetic and potent impact of the word iron. Yin His is a sort of female name but the Chinese love puns and it depends on how you write it. If you write it as one character it means ‘guardian of the gate’ and if you write it as two it means ‘a she who is a he’ –or a lesbian, as all the Emperor’s iron blossoms were.”
“You have described Lao Tzu using his intelligence in a critical inquiry to establish the truth as in the Greek logos reason but his dialogue with his internal gatekeeper creates a new dimension of logos. It is a blend of the rational with the spiritual, is it not?”
“It is a blend. Not that Lao Tzu realised that it was a new technique because progenitors often don’t!”
“What was there in Lao Tzu’s life experiences that led him to his philosophical position which is essentially that there exists a way of thinking or refusing to think and seeking a modest life of quiet contemplation?”
“Lao Tzu was different … a genius … who was privileged to bring in some knowledge from his previous incarnations. We all bring abilities from our different master lineages with our spiritual DNA but no memory of our lives or of the time between them. He brought special abilities and knowledge but no memory. As a philosopher he was able to take what he knew and justify what he knew without knowing where it came from. Any insight he had would, for example, be tried or tested to see if the knot of knowledge held fast under scrutiny; if it did not, he took the knot and painstakingly picked it apart and then he rebuilt the whole hypothesis until it could hold fast. The difference between him and other philosophers is that he had a flying start. He was given the prior knowledge and he had only to put in place a structure to justify it.”
“Why was Lao Tzu given this knowledge?”
“There was an exception made. Humankind, in that particular place in China, needed to take a larger leap forward than would be possible with normal births. Leonardo da Vinci is another example of a genius who came in with prior knowledge. Lao Tzu, as a philosopher sitting and teaching in a library, had little opportunity to learn from the experience of interesting challenges. Previously, he had several incarnations as a leader of soldiers, several as a man with a genius intellect in the body of a peasant condemned to do back breaking work; and he had two incarnations as a local ruler where he experienced wielding power. He brought all his learning and knowledge of those, and the others I’ve already mentioned, forward into his life as Lao Tzu.”
“Who made the decision to allow him that access?”
“I know you want me to say it was the Karmic Board or God but in this case the decision made itself. The energetic need of the Earth in China demanded, like a vacuum, to be filled. The need unfolds like a flower unfolding…it only unfolds when it's ready…a decision was made by the developing nature of the world.”
“No doubt we’ll return to this topic later but I’m interested in whether Lao Tzu met Kung Fu [Confucius]. Legend says the young sage sought his advice?”
“Lao Tzu met Kung Fu just once in today’s Shanghai and they didn’t like one another, not one little bit. Picture this: Kung Fu comes in, very tall, with piercing black eyes, large nose, black hair, a thin and rangy build, a typical Northerner. Kung Fu is wearing silk and a Mandarin hat and he is covered in gold and silver embroidery with red frogging on his jacket- a bit flash is our Kung Fu. Lao Tzu receives him. He is, by contrast, small, bird-like with transparent parchment skin, eyes heavily lidded, bald-headed except for a fringe of long white wispy hair, a goatee beard and long moustache. He is frail, tiny, delicate and on this day he is dressed carelessly… like a Franciscan because for him his robes were not important… they merely a distraction.
Lao Tzu thought Kung Fu precocious; a young man who took too large intellectual leaps without being able to justify them. Observing his finery, he thought Kung-Fu was too concerned with material matters. On the other hand, Kung Fu thought that Lao Tzu was in his dotage, completely over-estimated and too concerned with things which were ‘old fashioned’.
Kung Fu had arranged for the meeting to be on neutral ground and he brought scribes and an assistant to record their discussion. Lao Tzu’s record of this meeting won’t be discovered because he never ordered for it to be made. This was one of his mistakes; he thought the meeting was not of great consequence or importance. Speaking of Kung Fu after he met him he said ‘No one will know who he is in a hundred years.’ He was, after all, human and more than a little piqued by this presumptuous young man.”
