When the Master was in Wei, he was once pounding on the musical stone, when a man with a basket of straw crossed his threshold, and exclaimed, "Ah, there is a heart that feels! Aye, drub the stone!" After which he added, "How vulgar! how he hammers away on one note!—and no one knows him, and he gives up, and all is over!
Be it deep, our skirts we'll raise to the waist,
—Or shallow, then up to the knee,'"
"What determination!" said the Master. "Yet it was not hard to do."
Tsz-chang once said to him, "In the 'Book of the Annals' it is stated that while KŠu-tsung was in the Mourning Shed he spent the three years without speaking. What is meant by that?"
"Why must you name KŠu-tsung?" said the Master. "It was so with all other ancient sovereigns: when one of them died, the heads of every department agreed between themselves that they should give ear for three years to the Prime Minister."
"When their betters love the Rules, then the folk are easy tools," was a saying of the Master.
Tsz-lu having asked what made a "superior man," he answered,
"Self-culture, with a view to becoming seriously-minded."
"Nothing more than that?" said he.
"Self-culture with a view to the greater satisfaction of others," added the Master.
"That, and yet no more?"