anced in repute,
so that his book was translated almost a hundred times into various
European languages. According to the general view among the Chinese, Lao
Tz[)u] was an older contemporary of Confucius; recent Chinese and
Western research (A. Waley; H.H. Dubs) has contested this view and
places Lao Tz[)u] in the latter part of the fourth century B.C., or even
later. Virtually nothing at all is known about his life; the oldest
biography of Lao Tz[)u], written about 100 B.C., says that he lived as
an official at the ruler's court and, one day, became tired of the life
of an official and withdrew from the capital to his estate, where he
died in old age. This, too, may be legendary, but it fits well into the
picture given to us by Lao Tz[)u]'s teaching and by the life of his
later followers. From the second century A.D., that is to say at least
four hundred years after his death, there are legends of his migrating
to the far west. Still later narratives tell of his going to Turkestan
(where a temple was actually built in his honour in the Medieval
period); according to other sources he travelled as far as India or
Sogdiana (Samarkand and Bokhara), where according to some accounts he
was the teacher or forerunner of Buddha, and according to others of
Mani, the founder of Manichaeism. For all this there is not a vestige of
documentary evidence.

Lao Tz[)u]'s teaching is contained in a small book, the _Tao Te Ching_,
the "Book of the World Law and its Power". The book is written in quite
simple language, at times in rhyme, but the sense is so vague that
countless versions, differing radically from each other, can be based on
it, and just as many translations are possible, all philologically
defensible. This vagueness is deliberate.

Lao Tz[)u]'s teaching is essentially an effort to bring man's life on
earth into harmony with the life and law of the universe (Tao). This was
also Confucius's purpose. But while Confucius set out to attain that
purpose in a sort of primitive scientific way, by laying down a number
of rules of human conduct, Lao Tz[)u] tries to attain his ideal by an
intuitive, emotional method. Lao Tz[)u] is always described as a mystic,
but perhaps this is not entirely appropriate; it must be borne in mind
that in his time the Chinese language, spoken and written, still had
great difficulties in the expression of ideas. In reading Lao Tz[)u]'s
book we feel that he is trying to express something for which the