Notes

  1. . The Book of Historical Documents was edited by Confucius and contains documents from the time of Emperor Yao (third millennium B.C.) down to 624 B.C. The authoritative translation, completed in 1865, was made by James Legge.
  2. . The ancient Greeks also seemed to believe in a moral equation of sorts between man and the gods; but their gods, though immortal and physically more able and attractive, are morally no better than man. In the Judeo‐Christian tradition, man, exiled from the Garden of Eden, needs God's intervention for his guidance.
  3. . The first authoritative history of China, the Historical Records, which was composed in the first century B.C. by Ssu‐ma Chien, indicates that Lao Tzu was an older contemporary of Confucius and keeper of the imperial archives in the state of Chou. It also tells us that, seeing the decline of Chou, Lao Tzu resigned his office and was going elsewhere when detained by an officer at one of the passes who insisted that he first record his thoughts. Thus under some duress he was supposed to have written his only work, consisting of about 5,600 characters and later called the Tao Teh Ching. This account is regarded as accurate by tradition but has been challenged and hotly disputed by some, claiming that there was no such man as Lao Tzu, or that the book was of a much later date, or that it was composed by more than one man. As those who disagree with or dispute the traditional account have not been able to agree on an alternative, the weight of scholarly opinion is returning to the traditional account as the most reasonable. A very good case can be made for it, but this is not the place here.
  4. . This is Lao Tzu's only work, a small book consisting of eighty one short chapters. References are to the chapters in Wang Pi's edition in which the lines quoted occur. These were translated with the help of Kuo‐Cheng Wu.
  5. . David Hawkins, The Language of Nature (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co., 1964), p. 291.
  6. . Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan Co., 1933), p. 144.
  7. . Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail (New York: Viking Press, 1979), p. 2.
  8. . For the concept of value‐driven decision systems see George Edgin Pugh, The Biological Origin of Human Values (New York: Basic Books, 1977), and for that of inherited models of reality see Charles D. Laughlin, Jr., and Eugene G. d'Aquili, Biogenetic Structuralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974).
  9. . Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking Press, 1974), pp. 104, 29.
  10. . Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modem World (New York: Macmillan Co., 1925), p. 164.
  11. . For a contemporary view that is quite similar see José Ferrater Mora, Being and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 6–13.
  12. . Laughlin and d'Aquili, pp. 105–6.
  13. . Heraclitus Fragment 69.
  14. . Pugh, pp. 66–71.
  15. . Frank Lloyd Wright, The Natural House (New York: Horizon Press, 1954), pp. 220–21.
  16. . Hawkins (n. 5 above), p. 275.
  17. . Pugh, p. 174.
  18. . Biruté M. F.Galdikas, “Living with the Great Orange Apes,” National Geographic  157 (June 1980): 832.
  19. . Thomas, Medusa and the Snail, p. 16.
  20. . K. B. Madsen, Modem Theories of Motivation (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1974), p. 289; Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), p. 340.
  21. . Thomas, Medusa and the Snail, p. 111.
  22. . Thomas, Lives of a Cell, pp. 9–10.
  23. . Laughlin and d'Aquili (n. 8 above), p. 183.
  24. . Ibid., p. 184.