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 Tê 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
language of his day was inadequate; and what he wanted to express
belonged to the emotional, not the intellectual, side of the human
character, so that any perfectly clear expression of it in words was
entirely impossible. It must be borne in mind that the Chinese language