without having avoid buff coat or sharp weapon. The rhinoceros finds no place in him into which to thrust its horn, nor the tiger a place in which to fix its claws, nor the weapon a place to admit its point. And for what reason? Because there is in him no place of death.” To the same effect he says in his fifty-fifth chapter , “He who has in himself abundantly the attributes (of the Tao ) is like an infant. Poisonous insects will not sting him; fierce beasts will not seize him; birds of prey will not strike him.”
Such assertions startle us by their contrariety to our observation and experience, but so does most of the teaching of Taoism. What can seem more absurd than the declaration that “the Tao does nothing, and so there is nothing that it does not do?” And yet this is one of the fundamental axioms of the system. The thirty-seventh chapter , which enunciates it, goes on to say, “If princes and kings were able to maintain (the Tao ), all things would of themselves be transformed by them.” This principle, if we can call it so, is generalised in the fortieth , one of the shortest chapters, and partly in rhyme:—