." And if it be objected that these are the
coincidences of obvious ethics, I would call attention to 39. 1,
"Hence if we enumerate separately each part that goes to form a cart,
we have no cart at all." Here the thought and its illustration cannot
be called obvious and the resemblance to well-known passages in the
Samyutta Nikaya and Questions of Milinda[603] is striking.

Any discussion of the indebtedness of the Tao-Te-Ching to India is too
complicated for insertion here since it involves the question of
its date or the date of particular passages, if we reject the
hypothesis that the work as we have it was composed by Lao-tzu in
the sixth century B.C.[604] But there is less reason to doubt the
genuineness of the essays of Chuang-tzu who lived in the fourth
century B.C. In them we find mention of trances which give superhuman
wisdom and lead to union with the all-pervading spirit, and of magical
powers enjoyed by sages, similar to the Indian _iddhi_. He approves
the practice of abandoning the world and enunciates the doctrines of
evolution and reincarnation. He knows, as does also the Tao-Te-Ching,
methods of regulating the breathing which are conducive to mental
culture and long life. He speaks of the six faculties of perception,
which recall the Shadayatana, and of name and real existence
(namarupam) as being the conditions of a thing.[605] He has also a
remarkable comparison of death to the extinction of a fire: "what we
can point to are the faggots that have been consumed: but the fire is
transmitted and we know not that it is over and ended." Several
Buddhist parallels to this might be cited.[606]

The list of such resemblances might be made longer and the explanation
that Indian ideas reached China sporadically, at least as early as the
fourth century B.C., seems natural. I should accept it, if there were
any historical evidence besides these literary parallels. But there
seems to be none and it may be justly urged that the roots of this
quietism lie so deep in the Chinese character, that the plant cannot
have sprung from some chance wind-wafted seed. That character has two
sides, one seen in the Chinese Empire and the classical philosophy,
excellent as ethics but somewhat stiff and formal: the other in
revolutions and rebellions, in the free life of hermits and wanderers,
in poetry and painting. This second side is very like the temper of
Indian Buddhism and easily amalgamated with it,[607] but it has a
spec