The Melchizedek Teachings in the Orient

94:6.1About six hun­dred years be­fore the ar­rival of Mi­chael, it seemed to Mel­chiz­e­dek, long since de­parted from the flesh, that the pu­rity of his teach­ing on earth was be­ing un­duly jeop­ar­dized by gen­eral ab­sorp­tion into the older Uran­tia be­liefs. It ap­peared for a time that his mis­sion as a fore­run­ner of Mi­chael might be in dan­ger of fail­ing. And in the sixth cen­tury be­fore Christ, through an un­usual co-or­di­na­tion of spir­i­tual agen­cies, not all of which are un­der­stood even by the plan­e­tary super­vi­sors, Uran­tia wit­nessed a most un­usual pre­sen­ta­tion of man­i­fold re­li­gious truth. Through the agency of sev­eral hu­man teach­ers the Salem gospel was re­stated and re­vi­tal­ized, and as it was then pre­sented, much has per­sisted to the times of this writ­ing.

94:6.2This unique cen­tury of spir­i­tual prog­ress was char­ac­ter­ized by great re­li­gious, moral, and philo­sophic teach­ers all over the civ­i­lized world. In China, the two out­stand­ing teach­ers were Lao-tse and Con­fu­cius.

94:6.3Lao-tse built di­rectly upon the con­cepts of the Salem tra­di­tions when he de­clared Tao to be the One First Cause of all cre­ation. Lao was a man of great spir­i­tual vi­sion. He taught that man’s eter­nal des­tiny was “ev­er­last­ing union with Tao, Su­preme God and Uni­ver­sal King.” His com­pre­hen­sion of ul­ti­mate cau­sa­tion was most dis­cern­ing, for he wrote: “Unity arises out of the Ab­so­lute Tao, and from Unity there ap­pears cos­mic Du­al­ity, and from such Du­al­ity, Trin­ity springs forth into ex­is­tence, and Trin­ity is the pri­mal source of all re­al­ity.” “All re­al­ity is ever in bal­ance be­tween the po­ten­tials and the ac­tu­als of the cos­mos, and these are eter­nally har­mo­nized by the spirit of di­vin­ity.”

94:6.4Lao-tse also made one of the ear­li­est pre­sen­ta­tions of the doc­trine of re­turn­ing good for evil: “Good­ness begets good­ness, but to the one who is truly good, evil also begets good­ness.”

94:6.5He taught the re­turn of the crea­ture to the Cre­ator and pic­tured life as the emer­gence of a per­son­al­ity from the cos­mic po­ten­tials, while death was like the re­turn­ing home of this crea­ture per­son­al­ity. His con­cept of true faith was un­usual, and he too likened it to the “at­ti­tude of a lit­tle child.”

94:6.6His un­der­stand­ing of the eter­nal pur­pose of God was clear, for he said: “The Ab­so­lute De­ity does not strive but is al­ways vic­to­ri­ous; he does not co­erce man­kind but al­ways stands ready to re­spond to their true de­sires; the will of God is eter­nal in pa­tience and eter­nal in the in­evitabil­ity of its ex­pres­sion.” And of the true re­li­gion­ist he said, in ex­press­ing the truth that it is more blessed to give than to re­ceive: “The good man seeks not to re­tain truth for him­self but rather at­tempts to be­stow these riches upon his fel­lows, for that is the re­al­iza­tion of truth. The will of the Ab­so­lute God al­ways ben­e­fits, never de­stroys; the pur­pose of the true be­liever is al­ways to act but never to co­erce.”

94:6.7Lao’s teach­ing of non­re­sis­tance and the dis­tinc­tion which he made be­tween ac­tion and co­er­cion be­came later per­verted into the be­liefs of “see­ing, do­ing, and think­ing noth­ing.” But Lao never taught such er­ror, al­beit his pre­sen­ta­tion of non­re­sis­tance has been a fac­tor in the fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of the pa­cific predilec­tions of the Chi­nese peo­ples.

94:6.8But the pop­u­lar Tao­ism of twen­ti­eth-cen­tury Uran­tia has very lit­tle in com­mon with the lofty sen­ti­ments and the cos­mic con­cepts of the old philoso­pher who taught the truth as he per­ceived it, which was: That faith in the Ab­so­lute God is the source of that di­vine en­ergy which will re­make the world, and by which man as­cends to spir­i­tual union with Tao, the Eter­nal De­ity and Cre­ator Ab­so­lute of the uni­verses.

94:6.9Con­fu­cius (Kung Fu-tze) was a younger con­tem­po­rary of Lao in sixth-cen­tury China. Con­fu­cius based his doc­trines upon the bet­ter moral tra­di­tions of the long his­tory of the yel­low race, and he was also some­what in­flu­enced by the lin­ger­ing tra­di­tions of the Salem mis­sion­ar­ies. His chief work con­sisted in the com­pi­la­tion of the wise say­ings of an­cient philoso­phers. He was a re­jected teacher dur­ing his life­time, but his writ­ings and teach­ings have ever since ex­erted a great in­flu­ence in China and Japan. Con­fu­cius set a new pace for the shamans in that he put moral­ity in the place of magic. But he built too well; he made a new fe­tish out of or­der and es­tab­lished a re­spect for an­ces­tral con­duct that is still ven­er­ated by the Chi­nese at the time of this writ­ing.

94:6.10The Con­fu­cian preach­ment of moral­ity was pred­i­cated on the the­ory that the earthly way is the dis­torted shadow of the heav­enly way; that the true pat­tern of tem­po­ral civ­i­liza­tion is the mir­ror re­flec­tion of the eter­nal or­der of heaven. The po­ten­tial God con­cept in Con­fu­cian­ism was al­most com­pletely sub­or­di­nated to the em­pha­sis placed upon the Way of Heaven, the pat­tern of the cos­mos.

94:6.11The teach­ings of Lao have been lost to all but a few in the Ori­ent, but the writ­ings of Con­fu­cius have ever since con­sti­tuted the ba­sis of the moral fab­ric of the cul­ture of al­most a third of Uran­tians. These Con­fu­cian pre­cepts, while per­pet­u­at­ing the best of the past, were some­what in­im­i­cal to the very Chi­nese spirit of in­ves­ti­ga­tion that had pro­duced those achieve­ments which were so ven­er­ated. The in­flu­ence of these doc­trines was un­suc­cess­fully com­bated both by the im­pe­rial ef­forts of Ch’in Shih Huang Ti and by the teach­ings of Mo Ti, who pro­claimed a broth­er­hood founded not on eth­i­cal duty but on the love of God. He sought to rekin­dle the an­cient quest for new truth, but his teach­ings failed be­fore the vig­or­ous op­po­si­tion of the dis­ci­ples of Con­fu­cius.

94:6.12Like many other spir­i­tual and moral teach­ers, both Con­fu­cius and Lao-tse were even­tu­ally de­i­fied by their fol­low­ers in those spir­i­tu­ally dark ages of China which in­ter­vened be­tween the de­cline and per­ver­sion of the Taoist faith and the com­ing of the Bud­dhist mis­sion­ar­ies from In­dia. Dur­ing these spir­i­tu­ally deca­dent cen­turies the re­li­gion of the yel­low race de­gen­er­ated into a piti­ful the­ol­ogy wherein swarmed dev­ils, drag­ons, and evil spir­its, all be­to­ken­ing the re­turn­ing fears of the un­en­light­ened mor­tal mind. And China, once at the head of hu­man so­ci­ety be­cause of an ad­vanced re­li­gion, then fell be­hind be­cause of tem­po­rary fail­ure to pro­gress in the true path of the de­vel­op­ment of that God-con­scious­ness which is in­dis­pens­able to the true prog­ress, not only of the in­di­vid­ual mor­tal, but also of the in­tri­cate and com­plex civ­i­liza­tions which char­ac­ter­ize the ad­vance of cul­ture and so­ci­ety on an evo­lu­tion­ary planet of time and space.