CHAPTER I.
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Zhuangzi and Giles, Herbert Allen
Chien Wu said to Lien Shu,
Both fictitious personages.
"I heard Chieh Yü utter something unjustifiably extravagant and without either rhyme or reason.
This was an individual, named Lu T'ung, who feigned madness in order to escape an official career. For his interview with Confucius, see ch. iv, ad fin.
I was greatly startled at what he said, for it seemed to me boundless as the Milky Way, though very improbable and removed from the experiences of mortals."
"What was it?" asked Lien Shu.
"He declared," replied Chien Wu, "that on the Miao-ku-shê mountain
Which is as fabulous as the story.
there lives a divine man whose flesh is like ice or snow, whose demeanour is that of a virgin, who eats no fruit of the earth, but lives on air and dew, and who, riding on clouds with flying dragons for his team, roams beyond the limits of mortality. This being is absolutely inert. Yet he wards off corruption from all things, and causes the crops to thrive. Now I call that nonsense, and do not believe it."
"Well," answered Lien Shu, "you don't ask a blind man's opinion of a picture, nor do you invite a deaf man to a concert. And blindness and deafness are not physical only. There is blindness and deafness of the mind, diseases from which I fear you yourself are suffering. The good influence of that man fills all creation. Yet because a paltry generation cries for reform, you would have him condescend to the details of an empire!
Not seeing that the greater contains the less.
"Objective existences cannot harm him. In a flood which reached to the sky, he would not be drowned. In a drought, though metals ran liquid and mountains were scorched up, he would not be hot. Out of his very dust and siftings you might fashion two such men as Yao and Shun. And you would have him occupy himself with objectives!"
Illustrating the inaction of the divine man.
A man of the Sung State carried some sacrificial caps into the Yüeh State, for sale. But the men of Yüeh used to cut off their hair and paint their bodies, so that they had no use for such things. And so, when the Emperor Yao, the ruler of all under heaven and pacificator of all within the shores of ocean, paid a visit to the four sages of the Miao-ku-shê mountain, on returning to his capital at Fên-yang, the empire existed for him no more.
This illustrates the rejection of self by the perfect man. Yao had his eyes opened to the hollowness and uselessness of all mortal possessions. He ceased, therefore, to think any more of himself, and per consequens of the empire.
Hui Tzŭ
A celebrated schoolman, contemporary with and antagonistic to Chuang Tzŭ. For an account of his theories, see ch. xxxiii.
said to Chuang Tzŭ, "The Prince of Wei gave me a seed of a large-sized kind of gourd. I planted it, and it bore a fruit as big as a five-bushel measure. Now had I used this for holding liquids, it would have been too heavy to lift; and had I cut it in half for ladles, the ladles would have been ill adapted for such purpose. It was uselessly large, so I broke it up."
"Sir," replied Chuang Tzŭ, "it was rather you who did not know how to use large things. There was a man of Sung who had a recipe for salve for chapped hands, his family having been silk-washers for generations. Well, a stranger who had heard of it, came and offered him 100 oz. of silver for this recipe; whereupon he called together his clansmen and said, 'We have never made much money by silk-washing. Now, we can make 100 oz. in a single day. Let the stranger have the recipe.'
"So the stranger got it, and went and informed the Prince of Wu who was just then at war with the Yüeh State. Accordingly, the Prince used it in a naval battle fought at the beginning of winter with the Yüeh State, the result being that the latter was totally defeated.
They suffered from chapped hands, while their rivals of the Wu State were protected by their patent salve.
The stranger was rewarded with territory and a title. Thus, while the efficacy of the salve to cure chapped hands was in both cases the same, its application was different. Here, it secured a title; there, a capacity for washing silk.
"Now as to your five-bushel gourd, why did you not make a boat of it, and float about over river and lake? You could not then have complained of its not holding anything! But I fear you are rather woolly inside."
Like it. This, of course, is a sneer. Hui Tzŭ could not see that the greatness of a thing depends upon the greatness of its application.
Hui Tzŭ said to Chuang Tzŭ, "Sir, I have a large tree, of a worthless kind. Its trunk is so irregular and knotty that it cannot be measured out for planks; while its branches are so twisted as to admit of no geometrical subdivision whatever. It stands by the roadside, but no carpenter will look at it. And your words, sir, are like that tree;—big and useless, not wanted by anybody."
"Sir," rejoined Chuang Tzŭ, "have you never seen a wild cat, crouching down in wait for its prey? Right and left it springs from bough to bough, high and low alike,—until perchance it gets caught in a trap or dies in a snare. On the other hand, there is the yak with its great huge body. It is big enough in all conscience, but it cannot catch mice.
The adaptability of a thing is oft-times its bane. The inability of the yak to catch mice saves it from the snare which is fatal to the wild cat.
"Now if you have a big tree and are at a loss what to do with it, why not plant it in the domain of non-existence,
Beyond the limits of our external world. Referring to the conditions of mental abstraction in which alone true happiness is to be found.
whither you might betake yourself to inaction by its side, to blissful repose beneath its shade?
"Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy and grief in this centre?"—Emerson.
There it would be safe from the axe and from all other injury; for being of no use to others, itself would be free from harm."
Illustrating the advantage of being useless. That which is small and useful is thus shown to be inferior to that which is large and useless.