Lao Tzu admired the simple life of the past, but left behind mysterious and obscure works, as difficult to understand as riddles

Just as many philosophers appeared after the breakup of Greece, and many prophets appeared among the captured Jews of the fallen country, so there were also many philosophers and sages in China during the chaotic division of the Spring and Autumn Warring States. It is precisely this unstable and turbulent situation that has contributed to great ideas.

Like philosophers, saints, and prophets in other regions, Lao Tzu, like Confucius, lived in the 6th century B.C., when mankind was in his youth, when he had astonishingly brilliant achievements.

Lao Tzu, who had long been in charge of the royal library of the Zhou Dynasty, was far more subtle, vague, and elusive than the teachings of Confucius. He seems to want people to maintain a certain Stoic indifference to worldly pleasures and power, to return people to the imaginary simple life of the past.

Lao Tzu like

The concise and obscure works left by Lao Tzu to future generations are as difficult to understand as riddles. After Lao Tzu's death, his teachings, like the teachings of Shakyamuni, were obscured by various legends, so that many complex and bizarre precepts and superstitions were also mixed in.

In China and India, new ideas have had to contend with the mysterious primitive ideas and bizarre legends that humanity produced in infancy, and the result is often that the latter succeeds in smearing strange, irrational, and ancient rituals on the former.

In today's China, one would find that both Buddhism and Taoism (a religious sect developed on the basis of Lao Tzu's teachings) were a religion of monks, temples, priests, and sacrifices. They retain, if not ideologically, at least formally, the same ancient style as the old religions of Sumeria and Egypt. But Confucius's teachings are different, because Confucius's teachings are limited, clear and direct, so they can be kept true without being misunderstood by future generations.

In the Yellow River Basin in northern China, Confucianism is generally practiced in ideology and spirit; In the southern Yangtze River Basin, most of them believe in Taoism. Thus, from then on, the conflict between these two spirits, namely the spirit of the South and the spirit of the North, the spirit of Beijing and Nanjing, the bureaucratic temperament of the North, the conflict between Fangzheng, the old-fashioned and the doubtfulness of the South, romantic, lax, and adventurous, can often be traced in China's major events.

（H· G. Wells's "History of the World You Should Know" Reading Notes)