"These three States," replied Shun, "are paltry out-of-the-way places. Why can you not shake off this desire? Once upon a time, ten suns came out together, and all things were illuminated thereby. How much more then should virtue excel suns?"
Illustrating the use of "light." Instead of active force, substitute the passive but irresistible influence of virtue complete. The sun caused the traveller to lay aside his cloak when the north wind succeeded only in making him draw it tighter around him.
Yeh Ch'üeh asked Wang I,
A disciple and tutor of remote antiquity. Said to have been two of the four Sages on the Miao-ku-shê mountain mentioned in [ch. i].
saying, "Do you know for certain that all things are subjectively the same?"
"How can I know?" answered Wang I. "Do you know what you do not know?"
"How can I know?" replied Yeh Ch'üeh. "But can then nothing be known?"
"How can I know?" said Wang I. "Nevertheless, I will try to tell you. How can it be known that what I call knowing is not really not knowing, and that what I call not knowing is not really knowing? Now I would ask you this. If a man sleeps in a damp place, he gets lumbago and dies. But how about an eel? And living up in a tree is precarious and trying to the nerves;—but how about monkeys? Of the man, the eel, and the monkey, whose habitat is the right one, absolutely? Human beings feed on flesh, deer on grass, centipedes on snakes, owls and crows on mice. Of these four, whose is the right taste, absolutely? Monkey mates with monkey, the buck with the doe; eels consort with fishes, while men admire Mao Ch'iang and Li Chi,
Beauties of the fifth and seventh centuries B.C., respectively. The commentators do not seem to have noted the very obvious anachronism here involved.
at the sight of whom fishes plunge deep down in the water, birds soar high in the air, and deer hurry away.