Chapter 74 of Ssu-ma Ch'ien's Shih Chi tells of the philosopher Tsou Yan (350–270 B.C.), who was noted for his profound speeches and unusual ideas that were highly esteemed by his contemporaries, especially rulers, who treated him with much greater respect than Confucius or Meng-tzu. Tsou Yan wrote many works that amounted to 100,000 characters and that have not survived. According to Ssu-ma Ch'ien, Tsou Yan "reached the very wellspring of life, when Heaven and Earth have not yet emerged and utter darkness reigned." Tsou Yan knew of "the overseas lands that men could not behold." He maintained that, "since the time when Heaven and Earth opened up and became divided, the five te virtues are in constant circulation…" and that Chungkuo, i.e., China, represented "only one eighty-first part of the Under-Heaven." But what mattered most was that Tsou Yan "thought deeply about the waxing and waning of the yang and у in forces, penetrated into the vicissitudes of all changes."
Here we have an extremely important text. For the first time, China produced a thinker who, contrary to the accepted norm and having no predecessors to lean upon, delved deeply into mysticism and created impressive metaphysi-cal-cosmogonic constructs. He has been to places that none of the Chinese has been to; he has seen that which none of them has seen. He spoke assuredly of the time when Heaven and Earth have not yet emerged and darkness prevailed; he stated that China was merely one eighty-first part of the Under-Heaven. Where Tsou Yan could have borrowed these ideas from? They were well known to Indian thinkers who wrote about the nine dvipa continents, each of which in turn consisted of nine parts. Tsou Yan discussed problems of cosmogony in earnest, though all earlier Chinese thinkers were completely indifferent to them. Besides, he spoke of the incessant circulation of certain "five te [substances]", which were obviously somehow related to the wu-hsing proto-elements. He also pondered over the rise and fall of the yang and yin forces, which corresponds so fully to the Iranian idea of the eternal struggle between the forces of Good and Evil, of Light and Darkness. The Tsou Yan phenomenon remains an enigma[304], just like many things associated with Taoist philosophy, starting with Chuang-tzu (369–286 B.C.).
We mean here the mysterious origin of those ideas, including mythology, which appears for the first time in Chinese writings (we refrain from discussing oral tradition, as it is hard to say something definite regarding it) and is widely represented in the Chuang-tzu. The book in question is one of the most interesting in the Ancient China. In addition to profound metaphysical constructs that are entirely foreign to any earlier Chinese text, it contains a huge number of parables, anecdotes, myths and short essays on abstract topics.
Chuang-tzu's metaphysics and cosmogony proceed from the assumption that the Universe was created out of the original Chaos and that its creation is related to the Great Tao (the Tao of Taoism, which differs from the Tao of Confucius) — a certain Supreme Absolute, extrinsic to the phenomenal world and undetectable by the senses. Те is an emanation of Tao[305]. Tao is everywhere and nowhere, it pervades everything and it lies at the bottom of the cosmogonic process. The ideas of Chuang-tzu — like those of Tsou Yan — are very unorthodox for Ancient Chinese thought. It is very hard to believe that they could have popped up out of the blue, in a country where no one took interest in such things before. Well, there is no need to believe that. One has but to pick up, for instance, an unassuming chrestomathy titled Ancient Indian Philosophy (Drev-neindiyskaya filosofiya, Moscow, 1972; in Russian) to find very similar in nature — though much more refined and elaborated — constructs of the Rigveda and Upanishads. They contain the same ideas: the Great Brahman-Absolute and its emanation Atman, the existent and non-existent, Chaos and the emergence of the One, the latter's association with thought (the Word, Logos), the original emptiness so favored by Chuang-tzu.
Here is another important detail to be added to what was said above: the Chinese term ch 7 (lit. "air") was given by Taoists a new meaning: "vital force", "energy" and the like. According to them, the universe turned out to be permeated with the vigorously circulating ch 7 proto-substance. It is this ch 7 complex that Taoists equate with life. If such a complex disintegrates, then life ends. If a new complex of this kind forms, then a new life is created. The idea of reincarnation — which was so thoroughly developed in Ancient India and totally unknown in China until the time of Chuang-tzu's publication — was first clearly set forth in the just mentioned work. In addition to ch 7 "at large", Taoist text begin to mention "the finest/subtlest cA7" (pi.; ching-ch'i), whose presence enables spiritual life in man and in all animate beings. The Chandogya Upani-shad (VI, 7–8) states that food consists of three parts. The coarsest part eventually forms excreta, the intermediate part is digested by the body and feeds it, and the finest part becomes — in humans — their breath, thoughts and words. Another version of the text present the same idea in a somewhat different context: the fine substance is that which makes salt salt, a mosquito a mosquito, and a tiger a tiger; i.e., the finest is the base of the essence (the quality of being itself) in all things and of spirituality in man.
So, Taoist philosophy, as regards its basic innovative ideas — let us put it as gently as we can — is not entirely free (to say the least) from extraneous influences. The twofold source of that influence is the Indo-Iranian metaphysical thought. The content of the most widely known work of Taoist philosophy, the Tao-te ching ascribed to Lao-tzu, attests to the same. The pithy dicta of that extremely profound and structurally complex text are really impressive. Most likely, it was written later than the Chuang-tzu, though there are several versions that allow of different opinions. However, what really deserves attention is the problem of its authorship.
The work is attributed to Lao-tzu, there are no other "claimants" to its authorship. In this connection, it is extremely interesting that Lao-tzu — allegedly a senior contemporary of Confucius — seems to be, most likely, a figment of Chuang-tzu's imagination. No text mentions Lao-tzu's name prior to the work of Chuang-tzu. But there is more to it than just that. It is more important to realize why Chuang-tzu needed that old man, who subsequently became wrapped in legend. This is not difficult to realize. Chuang-tzu (like Tsou Yan, for that matter) put forward some ideas that were completely unheard-of in China. However, unlike Tsou Yan's ideas — that were, for all their cardinal importance, easy to understand, — Chuang-tzu's suggestions seemed rather vague. It appears that, initially, even the wisest ones were unable to grasp his ideas. So Chuang-tzu experienced an urgent need for a valid basis that would have very ancient roots, for the Chinese highly valued nothing but old tradition. So he invented a certain "Old Man" who was nearly Confucius' precursor (this temporal tie-in is most important), who had the nerve to lecture the Master haughtily, while the latter allegedly accepted with meekness wisdom thus imparted.
On the other hand, the above-mentioned does not mean that the new ideas were solely the result of extraneous influence. Two important additions must be made. Firstly, the Chinese, including Taoists, tended to mix foreign innovations with old, well-known stories and examples from Chou and even pre-Chou history, which greatly reduced the general bewilderment of those who read the Chuang-tzu for the first time. Secondly, they were expert in grasping and subtly perceiving extraneous ideas in their own individual way, making them Chinese "on the fly". Both the specifics of the hieroglyphic writing and Ле difficulty of rendering foreign words, let alone special terms, greatly contributed to this. Thus the Taoist philosophy, which was alien to the Ancient Chinese pragmatism, was establishing itself.
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1 The second volume of J. Needham's famous work (J. Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 1956, pp. 236–268) adduces, referring the reader to Ma Kuo-han, a still longer list of Tsou Yan's ideas that were innovative in the Chou China. Needham (ibid., p. 274) attributes to Tsou Yan the authorship of the Hsichi-chuan (early 3rd century B.C.), the main commentary on the Yiching, in which all the lines of trigrams and hexagrams receive, for the first time, a philosophic interpretation. They are explained as combinations of the yin and yang symbols, which were by that time viewed as the female and the masculine principles.
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2 Here again, as in the case of Tao, Taoists borrow a well-established Confucian term (which was applied to the sacred virtue by the early-Chou Chou-kung, and to the desacralized virtue by Confucius) and give it a new meaning saturated with non-Chinese, as regards its origins, mysticism.