NOURISHMENT OF THE SOUL.
_Argument_:--Life too short--Wisdom unattainable--Accommodation to
circumstances--Liberty paramount--Death a release--The soul immortal.
My life has a limit, but my knowledge is without limit. To drive the
limited in search of the limitless, is fatal; and the knowledge of
those who do this is fatally lost.
In striving for others, avoid fame. In striving for self, avoid
disgrace. Pursue a middle course. Thus you will keep a sound body, and
a sound mind, fulfil your duties, and work out your allotted span.
Prince Hui's cook was cutting up a bullock. Every blow of his hand,
every heave of his shoulders, every tread of his foot, every thrust of
his knee, every _whshh_ of rent flesh, every _chhk_ of the chopper, was
in perfect harmony,--rhythmical like the dance of the Mulberry Grove,
simultaneous like the chords of the Ching Shou.
Commentators are divided in their identifications of these ancient
_morceaux_.
"Well done!" cried the Prince. "Yours is skill indeed."
"Sire," replied the cook; "I have always devoted myself to TAO. It is
better than skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before
me simply _whole_ bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more
whole animals.
Meaning that he saw them, so to speak, in sections.
And now I work with my mind and not with my eye. When my senses bid me
stop, but my mind urges me on, I fall back upon eternal principles.
I follow such openings or cavities as there may be, according to the
natural constitution of the animal. I do not attempt to cut through
joints: still less through large bones.
For a curious parallelism, see Plato's _Phædrus_, 265.
"A good cook changes his chopper once a year,--because he cuts. An
ordinary cook, once a month,--because he hacks. But I have had this
chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand
bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone. For at the joints
there are always interstices, and the edge of a chopper being without
thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness
into such an interstice.
These words help to elucidate a much-vexed passage in ch. xliii of the
_Tao-Tê-Ching_. See _The Remains of Lao Tzŭ_, p. 30.
By these means the interstice will be enlarged, and the blade will find
plenty of room. It is thus that I have kept my chopper for nineteen
years as though fresh from the whetstone.
"Nevertheless, when I come upon a hard part where the blade meets with
a difficulty, I am all caution. I fix my eye on it. I stay my hand, and
gently apply my blade, until with a _hwah_ the part yields like earth
crumbling to the ground. Then I take out my chopper, and stand up, and
look around, and pause, until with an air of triumph I wipe my chopper
and put it carefully away."
"Bravo!" cried the Prince. "From the words of this cook I have learnt
how to take care of my life."
Meaning that which informs life, _sc._ the soul.
When Hsien, of the Kung-wên family, beheld a certain official, he was
horrified, and said, "Who is that man? How came he to lose a foot? Is
this the work of God, or of man?
"Why, of course," continued Hsien, "it is the work of God, and not of
man. When God brought this man into the world, he wanted him to be
unlike other men. Men always have two feet. From this it is clear that
God and not man made him as he is.
It was by God's will that he took office with a view to personal
aggrandisement. That he got into trouble and suffered the common
punishment of loss of feet, cannot therefore be charged to man.
"Now, wild fowl get a peck once in ten steps, a drink once in a
hundred. Yet they do not want to be fed in a cage. For although they
would thus be able to command food, they would not be free."
And had our friend above kept out of the official cage he would still
have been independent as the fowls of the air.
When Lao Tzŭ died, Ch'in Shih went to mourn. He uttered three yells and
departed.
A disciple asked him saying, "Were you not our Master's friend?"
"I was," replied Ch'in Shih.
"And if so, do you consider that a sufficient expression of grief at
his loss?" added the disciple.
"I do," said Ch'in Shih. "I had believed him to be the man of all men,
but now I know that he was not. When I went in to mourn, I found old
persons weeping as if for their children, young ones wailing as if
for their mothers. And for him to have gained the attachment of those
people in this way, he too must have uttered words which should not
have been spoken, and dropped tears which should not have been shed,
thus violating eternal principles, increasing the sum of human emotion,
and forgetting the source from which his own life was received. The
ancients called such emotions the trammels of mortality. The Master
came, because it was his time to be born; he went, because it was his
time to die. For those who accept the phenomenon of birth and death in
this sense, lamentation and sorrow have no place. The ancients spoke
of death as of God cutting down a man suspended in the air. The fuel
is consumed, but the fire may be transmitted, and we know not that it
comes to an end."
The soul, according to Chuang Tzŭ, if duly nourished and not allowed
to wear itself out with the body in the pursuits of mortality, may
become immortal and return beatified to the Great Unknown whence it
came.