THE PHILOSOPHER KWANG
THE older texts of Taoism, as we get them translated by James Legge in Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East, make up but a small fraction of the two volumes in the Oxford Edition devoted to this cult. The larger portion of both these fascinating books is filled with the writings of Kwang-tze, the "laughing philosopher" of the kingdom of Liang.
The earlier texts are arresting enough to any mystical-minded person; but one cannot help feeling, as one turns these pages, that the real genius of the Taoist tradition is not the legendary Lao-tze, its portentous prophet, but the much more whimsical and irresponsible Kwang, its Voltairian high-priest.
This extraordinary and imaginative man of letters lived, it appears, about three and a half centuries before Christ and about two centuries after Lao-tze and Confucius.
For some mysterious reason, however, Kwang, compared with his great forerunners, still lacks the homage, still lacks the intellectual recognition, that seems his due. And yet the quality of his thought strikes us as more original, as more imaginative, than that of either Lao-tze or Confucius. Perhaps it is that his chaos-loving thought besieges our purer reason and—it may well be—corrupts it, in the very manner against which the whole elaborate ritual of the Confucian ethics was especially directed!
Very little is known of Kwang's life. He appears to have guarded his freedom from official responsibility with a Montaignesque sagacity; for when a certain monarch sent messengers with large gifts to bring him to Court his response is characteristic of his habits of mind, both in its rudeness and in its quaint gaiety:
"Have you seen the victim-ox for the sacrifice? It is fed and robed to enter the temple. When the time comes for it to do so, it would prefer to be a little pig; but it cannot get to be so. Go away! Do not soil me with your presence! I would rather enjoy myself in a filthy ditch than be subject to court regulations."
