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THE TEXTS OF TÂOISM.
CH, III.
It is, however, in connexion with the death of his own wife, as related in the eighteenth Book, that his views most fully—I do not say 'clearly'-appear. We are told that when that event took place, his friend Huî-zze went to condole with him, and found him squatted on the ground, drumming on the vessel (of ice), and singing. His friend said to him, When a wife has lived with her husband, brought up children, and then dies in her old age, not to wail for her is enough. When you go on to drum on the vessel and sing, is it not an excessive (and strange) demonstration?' Kwang-zze replied, 'It is not so. When she first died, was it possible for me to be singular, and not affected by the event? But I reflected on the commencement of her being, when she had not yet been born to life. Not only had she no life, but she had no bodily form. Not only had she no bodily form, but she had no breath. Suddenly in this chaotic condition there ensued a change, and there was breath; another change, and there was the bodily form; a further change, and she was born to life; a change now again, and she is dead. The relation between those changes is like the procession of the four seasons,-spring, autumn, winter, and summer. There she lies with her face up, sleeping in the Great Chamber?; and if I were to fall sobbing and going on to wail for her, I should think I did not understand what was appointed for all. I therefore restrained myself.
The next paragraph of the same Book contains another story about two ancient men, both deformed, who, when looking at the graves on Kwăn-lun, begin to feel in their own frames the symptoms of approaching dissolution. One says to the other, 'Do you dread it?' and gets the reply, ‘No. Why should I dread it? Life is a borrowed thing. The living frame thus borrowed is but so much dust. Life and death are like day and night.'
In every birth, it would thus appear, there is, somehow, a repetition of what it is said, as we have seen, took place at 'the Grand Beginning of all things,' when out of the
1 That is, between heaven and earth.
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| SR No. | 007682 |
| Book Title | Questions of King Milinda Part 02 |
| Original Sutra Author | N/A |
| Author | T W Rhys Davids |
| Publisher | Oxford |
| Publication Year | 1894 |
| Total Pages | 2240 |
| Language | English |
| Classification | Book_English |
| File Size | 38 MB |