the ruler's court and, one day, became tired of the life of an official
and withdrew from the capital to his estate, where he died in old age.
This, too, may be legendary, but it fits well into the picture given to
us by Lao TzÅ­'s teaching and by the life of his later followers. From
the second century A.D., that is to say at least four hundred years
after his death, there are legends of his migrating to the far west.
Still later narratives tell of his going to Turkestan (where a temple
was actually built in his honour in the Medieval period); according to
other sources he travelled as far as India or Sogdiana (Samarkand and
Bokhara), where according to some accounts he was the teacher or
forerunner of Buddha, and according to others of Mani, the founder of
Manichaeism. For all this there is not a vestige of documentary
evidence.

Lao Tzŭ's teaching is contained in a small book, the _Tao Tê Ching_, the
"Book of the World Law and its Power". The book is written in quite
simple language, at times in rhyme, but the sense is so vague that
countless versions, differing radically from each other, can be based on
it, and just as many translations are possible, all philologically
defensible. This vagueness is deliberate.

Lao TzÅ­'s teaching is essentially an effort to bring man's life on earth
into harmony with the life and law of the universe (Tao). This was also
Confucius's purpose. But while Confucius set out to attain that purpose
in a sort of primitive scientific way, by laying down a number of rules
of human conduct, Lao TzÅ­ tries to attain his ideal by an intuitive,
emotional method. Lao TzÅ­ is always described as a mystic, but perhaps
this is not entirely appropriate; it must be borne in mind that in his
time the Chinese language, spoken and written, still had great
difficulties in the expression of ideas. In reading Lao TzÅ­'s book we