It seems desirable, before passing from Lao and Chuang in this “ Introduction ,” to give a place in it to what is said about them by Ssŭ-ma Chʽien. I have said that not a single proper name occurs in the Tao Te Ching . There is hardly an historical allusion in it. Only one chapter, the twentieth , has somewhat of an autobiographical character. It tells us, however, of no incidents of his life. He appears alone in the world through his cultivation of the Tao , melancholy and misunderstood, yet binding that Tao more closely to his bosom.
The books of Chunag-tzŭ are of a different nature, abounding in pictures of Taoist life, in anecdotes and narratives, graphic, argumentative, often satirical. But they are not historical. Confucius and many of his disciples, Lao and members of his school, heroes and sages of antiquity, and men of his own day, move across his pages; but the incidents in connection with which they are introduced are probably fictitious, and devised by him “to point his moral or adorn his tale.” His names of individuals and places are often like those of Bunyan in his Pilgrim’s Progress or his Holy War , emblematic of their characters and the doctrines which he employs them to illustrate. He often comes on the stage himself, and there is an air of verisimilitude in his descriptions, possibly also a certain amount of fact about them; but we cannot appeal to them as historical testimony. It is only to Ssŭ-ma Chʽien that we can go for this; he always writes in the spirit of a historian; but what he has to tell us of the two men is not much.
And first, as to his account of Laozi. When he wrote, about the beginning of the first century BC , the Taoist master was already known