Lao-tsze inquired of Confucius if he had discovered the _Taou_, the "path" or "reason" by which Heaven acts, and was informed that the philosopher had searched for it unsuccessfully. Lao-tsze replied that the wealthy dismissed their friends with presents, and sages theirs with good counsel; and that for himself, he humbly claimed to be thought a sage--an indirect way of advising Confucius to continue his quest of the _Taou_. Retiring to Han-kwan, he wrote there his _Taou-tih-king_, or Book of Reason and Virtue. He died, or as his followers say, ascended to Heaven on a black buffalo, in the twenty-first year of the reign of King-wang of the Chow or Cheu dynasty, or B.C. 523, having attained the age of 119 years.[32]
The contrast between the system of Lao-tsze and that of Confucius may be indicated in a word: the former was _speculative_, the latter _practical_, and it is no wonder, therefore that the latter, addressing itself to man's actual necessities and daily duties, prevailed over the former. But, in an abstract sense, Lao's, as originally defined by himself, was the purer and more elevated; for it aimed at securing the immortality of man through the contemplation of GOD, the subjugation of the passions, and the absolute tranquillity of the soul. He taught that Silence and the Void generated the Taou, the "Logos" or reason by which movement was produced; and that all beings containing in themselves the duality of male and female sprang from them.
Man, he said, was composed of two principles, the material and the spiritual: from the latter he emanated, and to it he ought to return, by throwing off the fetters and snares of the world, crushing out the material passions, the desires of the soul, and the pleasures of the body, and abandoning riches, honours, and the ties of life.
Before Lao-tsze's time, the Chinese seem to have worshipped the _Shang-te_, or Supreme Ruler, and the _Tien_, or Heaven: but Lao-tsze preached in their place the _Taou_, or "reason" of the Kosmos. Of a Supreme Creative and Eternal Power he had no conception. There was as little theology in his system as in that of Confucius; but its morality was not less admirable; it insisted on the practice of those virtues which form the moral code of all the higher religions,--charity, benevolence, chastity, and the free-will, moral agency, and responsibility of man. But there was an obscurity about Lao-tsze's teaching, which enabled his followers successfully to pervert it, and it gradually assumed a form which the Teacher himself would undoubtedly have been the first to repudiate. The Taossi, as they were called, professed to have discovered the drink of immortality, and practised divination, alchemy, the invocation of spirits, and other superstitious rites. These follies were gravely ridiculed by the Joo-Keaou, or sect of Confucius, and gradually were abandoned by all but the most illiterate.