SAGE OF THE SACRED MOUNTAIN.

ByStanwood Cobb '03. Washington: AvalonPress, 1953. 92 pp. $2.50.

A reverence for Eastern life and ideology has inspired many of Mr. Cobb's seventeen volumes. He offers the present little book, with its sequence of early Taoist dialogues, as a kind of spiritual sedative. How far these are translations he nowhere states and only in a dedication does he hint that his Sage is Laotze, the propounder of the Tao in the 6th century B.C. Wisely avoiding all show of pedantry, he has made these "dramatizations," as he thinks his sources may originally have been, both lucid and highly significant.

The Sage, supremely beatific in his mountain retreat and in his selfless surrender to the Tao ("the way of Nature"), frames thoughts of universal scope that come to him, he says, as perfection comes effortlessly from nature to bird or flower. Men of all walks - peasant, poet, sage, and emperor - seek his counsel. He approves all forms of service, but would purge the spirit of the server of pride, avarice, and all pretense.

Mr. Cobb finds these discourses "fresh as the day on which they were uttered" and values them as a "Gospel of Tranquility." Some of them also seem uncannily to clarify thought on present issues, like the one on the spread of empire by defensive war entitled "War and Peace"; or the one on rival doctrines called "The Superior Man and the Perfect Man." A few are made appealing in story settings like "War and Peace" and "Poetry and Love."

Surely we must all admire the Master who, when offered a gorgeous temple to replace his mountain garden as a school, could say, "Just where I am is the spot Destiny has selected for me. I would change it for no other." The world, we know, "beat a pathway to his door."