The Chinese Discoveries

“The Tao is infinite, eternal.”
—Lao Tze
“Suppose everybody in the world loves universally, loving others as one’s self.”
—Mo Ti
With this problem in mind: “how can life be made happy?” it is possible to examine what the great civilizations discovered in response to it. The discoveries that the Chinese made were defeated after several centuries, but they are so profound that we should not ignore them. Their thoughts will also serve as a good backdrop for the Western and Near Eastern attempts.

In the first millennium before Christ, there was a Chinese philosopher named Lao Tze who wrote a significant work called the Tao Te Ching. Anyone interested in having a happy life at the beginning of the 21^st century cannot afford to do without this book. It is the highest expression of the theology made publicly available in the Eastern world. In this work Lao Tze develops his idea that all of human life takes place within a spiritual environment called the Tao (“Way”). According to him, human happiness on the individual and corporate level comes from living in harmony with the Tao, and having the Tao fill and rule over human affairs. An unhappy person is one who lives in conflict with the Tao, and an unhappy nation is one in which the rulers do not understand or practice the Tao. The descriptions he gives of the Way are very similar to the descriptions of the LORD and His kingdom in the Hebrew Scriptures. This text and a few others became the basis of Taoism, a sizable philosophical and ascetic sect.

There is some hinting about an afterlife in the Tao Te Ching, but only so much as one would expect in, say, the Old Testament. Like most of the ancient writers, Lao Tze was not primarily concerned with individual immortality. In the end it was the metaphysics of Buddhism which defeated the Taoist movement on the public level in the East.

In the fifth century of this era there was a philosopher in China named Mo Ti (also written Mo-Tze or Mo Di) who taught universal love. His idea was that the happiness of human life depended on living in limitless love for all people. This idea works well with Lao Tze’s teaching about the Way, and could have served to make the Eastern world a beacon of human civilization in the highest sense. Unfortunately the teachings of Mo Ti were defeated by Confucianism several centuries later. But even today, one could make a happy life using the writings of these men and an appropriate asceticism. They also prepare one to read the Western texts with new eyes, and this is especially true regarding the Old and New Testaments.