me Tao was not; nor, I suppose, when there
was quite no knowledge of it, even in China. In the old
manvantara, past now these three hundred years, the Black-haired
People had wandered far enough from such knowledge;--with the
accumulation of complexities, with the piling up of encumberments
of thought and deed during fifteen hundred busy years of
intensive civilization. As long as that piling up had not
entirely covered away Tao, the Supreme Simplicity, the Clear
Air;--as long as men could find scope to think and act and
accomplish things;--so long the manvantara lasted; when nothing
more that was useful could be accomplished, and action could no
longer bring about its expectable results (because all that old
dead weight was there to interpose itself between new causes set
in motion and their natural outcome)--then the pralaya set in.
You see, that is why pralayas do set in; why they must;--why no
nation can possibly go on at a pitch of greatness and high
activity beyond a certain length of time.--And all that activity
of the manvantara--all that fuss and bustle to achieve greatness
and fortune--it had all been an obscuration of and moving away
from Tao.

The Great Teachers come into this world out of the Unknown,
bringing the essence of their Truth with them. We know well what
they will teach: in some form or another it will be Theosophy;
it will be the old self-evident truths about Karma and the two
natures of man. But how they will teach it: what kind of
sugar-coating or bitter aloes they will prescribe along with it:
--that, I think, depends on reactions from the age they come in
and the people whom they are to teach. It is almost certain, as
I said, that Li Urh the Old Philosopher left no writings. "Who
knows, does not tell," said he; and Po Chu-i quotes this, and
pertinently adds: "What then of his own five thousand words and
more.--the _Tao Teh King._" That book was proved centuries ago, in
China, not to have come, as it stands, even from Laotse's age;
because there are characters in it that were invented long
afterwards. The wisest thing to believe is that it is made up
mostly of his sayings, taken down by his disciples in the Pitman
of the time; and surviving, with accretions and losses perhaps,
through the disquiet of the next two centuries, and the burning
of the books, and everything. Because whatever vicissitudes may
have befallen it, one does hear in its maxims the tones of
a real voice: one man