"It is nothing else than the teachings of Confucius and Mo Ti," said Hui Yang.
A main idea of Taoism—one with which the Confucius of orthodox Confucianism did not concern himself—is the possibility of creating within one's outer and mortal an inner and immortal self; by subduing desire, by sublimating away all impurities, by concentration. The seed of that Immortality is hidden in us; the seed of mastery of the inner and outer worlds. Faith is the key. Shang Ch'iu K'ai, whose "faith had made him whole," walked through fire. "Whoso hath faith as a grain of mustard-seed," said Jesus, can move mountains. It sounds as if he had been reading the Book of Liehtse; which is at pains to show how the thing is done. T'ai-hsing and Wang-wu, the mountains, stood not where they stand now, but in the south of the Chi district and north of Ho-yang. I like the tale well, and shall tell it for its naive Chinesity. The Simpleton of the North Mountain, an old man of ninety, dwelt opposite to them, and was vexed in spirit because their northern flanks blocked the way for travelers, who had to go round. So he called his family together and broached a plan.—"Let us put forth our utmost strength and clear away this obstacle," said he; "let us cut right through the mountains till we come to Han-yin." All agreed except his wife. "My goodman," said she, "has not the strength to sweep away a dung-hill, let alone such mountains as T'ai-hsing and Wang-wu. Besides, where will you put the earth and stones?" They answered that they would throw them on the promontory of P'o-hai. So the old man, followed by his son and grandson, sallied forth with their pickaxes, and began hewing away at the rocks and cutting up the soil, and carting it away in baskets to the promontory. A widow who lived near by had a little boy who, though he was only just shedding his milk-teeth, came skipping along to give them what help he could. Engrossed in their toil they never went home except once at the turn of the season.
The Wise Old Man of the River-bend burst out laughing and urged them to stop. "Great indeed is your witlessness!" said he. "With the poor remaining strength of your declining years you will not succeed in removing a hair's-breadth of the mountains, much less the whole vast mass of rock and soil." With a sigh the Simpleton of the North Mountain answered:—"Surely it is you who are narrow-minded and unreasonable. You are not to be compared with the widow's son, despite his puny strength. Though I myself must die, I shall leave my son behind me, and he his son. My grandson will beget sons in his turn, and those sons also will have sons and grandsons. With all this posterity my line will not die out; while on the other hand the mountains will receive no increment or addition. Why then should I despair of leveling them to the ground at last?"—The Wise Old Man of the River-bend had nothing to say in reply.
Chinese! Chinese!—From whatever angle you look at it, it smacks of the nation that saw Babylon fall, and Rome, and may yet—
But look now, at what happened. There was something about the project and character of the Simpleton of the North Mountain, that attracted the attention of the Serpent-Brandishing deities. They reported the matter to Almighty God; who was interested; and perhaps was less patient than the simpleton.—I do not quite know who this person translated 'Almighty God' may be; I think he figures in the Taoist hierarchy somewhere below Laotse and the other Adepts. At any rate he was in a position to order the two sons of K'ua O—and I do not know who K'ua O and his sons were— to expedite matters. So the one of them took up T'ai-hsing, and the other Wu-wang, and transported them to the positions where they remain to this day to prove the truth of Liehtse's story. Further proof:—the region between Ts'i in the north and Han in the south—that is to say, northern Homan—is still and has been ever since, an unbroken plain.
And perhaps, behind this naive Chinesity, lie grand enunciations of occult law. . . .
I will end with what is probably Liehtse's most famous story— and, from a purely literary standpoint, his best. It is worthy of Chwangtse himself; and I tell it less for its philosophy than for its fun.
One morning a fuel-gatherer—we may call him Li for convenience, though Liehtse leaves him nameless—killed a deer in the forest; and to keep the carcass safe till he went home in the evening, hid it under a pile of brushwood. His work during the day took him far and when he looked for the deer again, he could not find it. "I must have dreamed the whole thing," he said;—and satisfied himself with that explanation. He made a verse about it as he trudged home through the woods, and went crooning:
At dawn in the hollow, beside the stream,
I hid the deer I killed in the dream;
At eve I sought for it far and near;
And found 'twas a dream that I killed the deer.
He passed the cottage of Yen the woodman—Yen we may call him, though Liehtse calls him nothing.—who heard the song, and pondered. "One might as well take a look at the place," thought he; it seemed to him it might be such and such a hollow, by such and such a stream. Thither he went, and found the pile of brushwood; It looked to him a likely place enough to hide a deer under. He made search, and there the carcass was.