The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient

94:5.1As the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies passed through Asia, spread­ing the doc­trine of the Most High God and sal­va­tion through faith, they ab­sorbed much of the phi­los­o­phy and re­li­gious thought of the var­i­ous coun­tries tra­versed. But the teach­ers com­mis­sioned by Mel­chiz­e­dek and his suc­ces­sors did not de­fault in their trust; they did pen­e­trate to all peo­ples of the Eurasian con­ti­nent, and it was in the mid­dle of the sec­ond mil­len­nium be­fore Christ that they ar­rived in China. At See Fuch, for more than one hun­dred years, the Salemites main­tained their head­quar­ters, there train­ing Chi­nese teach­ers who taught through­out all the do­mains of the yel­low race.

94:5.2It was in di­rect con­se­quence of this teach­ing that the ear­li­est form of Tao­ism arose in China, a vastly dif­fer­ent re­li­gion than the one which bears that name to­day. Early or proto-Tao­ism was a com­pound of the fol­low­ing fac­tors:

94:5.31. The lin­ger­ing teach­ings of Singlang­ton, which per­sisted in the con­cept of Shang-ti, the God of Heaven. In the times of Singlang­ton the Chi­nese peo­ple be­came vir­tu­ally mono­the­is­tic; they con­cen­trated their wor­ship on the One Truth, later known as the Spirit of Heaven, the uni­verse ruler. And the yel­low race never fully lost this early con­cept of De­ity, al­though in sub­se­quent cen­turies many sub­or­di­nate gods and spir­its in­sid­i­ously crept into their re­li­gion.

94:5.42. The Salem re­li­gion of a Most High Cre­ator De­ity who would be­stow his fa­vor upon man­kind in re­sponse to man’s faith. But it is all too true that, by the time the Mel­chiz­e­dek mis­sion­ar­ies had pen­e­trated to the lands of the yel­low race, their orig­i­nal mes­sage had be­come con­sid­er­ably changed from the sim­ple doc­trines of Salem in the days of Ma­chi­venta.

94:5.53. The Brah­man-Ab­so­lute con­cept of the In­dian philoso­phers, cou­pled with the de­sire to es­cape all evil. Per­haps the great­est ex­tra­ne­ous in­flu­ence in the east­ward spread of the Salem re­li­gion was ex­erted by the In­dian teach­ers of the Vedic faith, who in­jected their con­cep­tion of the Brah­man—the Ab­so­lute—into the sal­va­tion­is­tic thought of the Salemites.

94:5.6This com­pos­ite be­lief spread through the lands of the yel­low and brown races as an un­der­ly­ing in­flu­ence in re­li­gio-philo­sophic thought. In Japan this proto-Tao­ism was known as Shinto, and in this coun­try, far-dis­tant from Salem of Pales­tine, the peo­ples learned of the in­car­na­tion of Ma­chi­venta Mel­chiz­e­dek, who dwelt upon earth that the name of God might not be for­got­ten by man­kind.

94:5.7In China all of these be­liefs were later con­fused and com­pounded with the ever-grow­ing cult of an­ces­tor wor­ship. But never since the time of Singlang­ton have the Chi­nese fallen into help­less slav­ery to priestcraft. The yel­low race was the first to emerge from bar­baric bond­age into or­derly civ­i­liza­tion be­cause it was the first to achieve some mea­sure of free­dom from the ab­ject fear of the gods, not even fear­ing the ghosts of the dead as other races feared them. China met her de­feat be­cause she failed to pro­gress be­yond her early eman­ci­pa­tion from priests; she fell into an al­most equally calami­tous er­ror, the wor­ship of an­ces­tors.

94:5.8But the Salemites did not la­bor in vain. It was upon the foun­da­tions of their gospel that the great philoso­phers of sixth-cen­tury China built their teach­ings. The moral at­mo­sphere and the spir­i­tual sen­ti­ments of the times of Lao-tse and Con­fu­cius grew up out of the teach­ings of the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies of an ear­lier age.