The Texts of the Tao Te Ching and Chuang-Tzŭ Shu , as Regards Their Authenticity and Genuineness, and the Arrangement of Them

Fei, a voluminous author, who died by his own hand in BC 230; and Liu An, a scion of the Imperial House of Han , king of Huai-nan , and better known to us as Huan-nan Tzŭ, who also died by his own hand in BC 122. In the books of all these men we find quotations of many passages that are in our treatise. They are expressly said to be, many of them, quotations from Laozi; Han Fei several times all but shows the book beneath his eyes. To show how numerous the quotations by Han Fei and Liu An are, let it be borne in mind that the Tao Te Ching has come down to us as divided into eighty-one short chapters; and that the whole of it is shorter than the shortest of our Gospels . Of the eighty-one chapters, either the whole or portions of seventy-one are found in those two writers. There are other authors not so decidedly Taoistic, in whom we find quotations from the little book. These quotations are in general wonderfully correct. Various readings indeed there are; but if we were sure that the writers did trust to memory, their differences would only prove that copies of the text had been multiplied from the very first.