existences cannot be regarded as nonexistent. The name Tao is a metaphor used for the purpose of description. To say that it exercises some causation, or that it does nothing, is speaking of it from the phase of a thing;—how can such language serve as a designation of it in its greatness? If words were sufficient for the purpose, we might in a day’s time exhaust the subject of the Tao . Words not being sufficient, we may talk about it the whole day, and the subject of discourse will only have been a thing. Tao is the extreme to which things conduct us. Neither speech nor silence is sufficient to convey the notion of it. When we neither speak nor refrain from speech, our speculations about it reach their highest point.”
The Tao therefore is a phenomenon; not a positive being, but a mode of being. Lao’s idea of it may become plainer as we proceed to other points of his system. In the meaning time, the best way of dealing with it in translating is to transfer it to the version, instead of trying to introduce an English equivalent of it.
Next in importance to Tao is the name Tʽien , meaning at first the vaulted sky or the open firmament of heaven. In the Confucian Classics, and in the speech of the Chinese people, this name is used metaphorically as it is by ourselves for the Supreme Being, with reference especially to His will and rule. So it was that the idea of God arose among the Chinese fathers; so it was that they proceeded to fashion a name for God, calling Him Ti , and Shang Ti , “the Ruler,” and “the Supreme Ruler.” The Taoist fathers found this among their people; but in their idea of the Tao they had already a supreme concept which superseded the necessity of any other. The name Ti for God only occurs once in the Tao Te Ching ; in the well-known passage of the fourth chapter , where, speaking of the Tao , Laozi says, “I do not know whose son it is; it might seem to be before God.”
Nor is the name Tʽien very common. We have the phrase, “heaven and earth,” used for the two great constituents of the cosmos, owing their