It is not only Confucianism, with its grand ethical system, its acquiescence in Nature-worship and its cult of ancestors, that has built up the curiously unsymmetrical edifice of Chinese religion. Taoism and Buddhism must also be taken into account; and if one can find for them but few words of praise it is only fair to remember that the Taoism of to-day has very little in common with the lofty if sometimes rather misty speculations enshrined in that remarkable old classic the _Tao Tê Ching_, and that Buddhism--as now practised in north-eastern Shantung and indeed in the greater part of China (excluding certain famous monastic centres)--is perhaps irrevocably degenerate and corrupt. The _Tao Tê Ching_, the sacred book of Taoism, is generally supposed, probably on insufficient grounds,[334] to have been written by a philosopher known as Lao Tzŭ, said to have been an elder contemporary of Confucius, in the sixth century B.C. The Taoist philosophy, as set forth in that book, may or may not have been indigenous to China; some writers insist that it was wholly a product of Chinese speculation,[335] while others trace it to early Indian philosophy[336] and even connect it with Buddhism.[337] Though its doctrines are metaphysical as well as ethical, Taoism is to some extent comparable with Confucianism, in which the ethical element is predominant. Indeed most writers have admitted that in enunciating the noble doctrine "Return good for evil," Lao Tzŭ rose to a height never quite attained by Confucius, though the latter also anticipated Christianity by formulating a version of the Golden Rule. One of the best outline comparisons ever attempted between the two systems of Taoism and Confucianism is that recently made by a sympathetic American writer,[338] who concludes with the carefully-weighed and highly important utterance that the two codes combined "furnished at once the foundation and superstructure of as pure, high, and at the same time practical system of ethics as the world has ever seen. It need fear comparison with none. Even that laid down in the Bible, if carefully separated from the religious element here and there intermingled with it, can do no more for man than this ancient system of the Far East can do. And why should it be otherwise, since the two are similar almost to identity, and are, as has been claimed, the necessary outgrowth of the same human spirit."