But, after all, what great doctrine is
there which is easy to expound? The ancient sages never
put their teachings in systematic form. They spoke in
paradoxes, for they were afraid of uttering half-truths.
They began by talking like fools and ended by making
their hearers wise. Laotse himself, with his quaint humour,
says, "If people of inferior intelligence hear of the Tao, they
laugh immensely. It would not be the Tao unless they laughed
at it."
The Tao literally means a Path. It has been severally translated
as the Way, the Absolute, the Law, Nature, Supreme Reason,
the Mode. These renderings are not incorrect, for the use of
the term by the Taoists differs according to the subject-matter
of the inquiry. Laotse himself spoke of it thus: "There is a thing
which is all-containing, which was born before the existence
of Heaven and Earth. How silent! How solitary! It stands alone
and changes not. It revolves without danger to itself and is the
mother of the universe. I do not know its name and so call it
the Path. With reluctance I call it the Infinite. Infinity is the
Fleeting, the Fleeting is the Vanishing, the Vanishing is the
Reverting." The Tao is in the Passage rather than the Path.
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