Questions of King Milinda Part 02

SR No.: 007682
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

Page 1647

167
whose spring was 8000 years, and its autumn the same. And Phăng 3û1 is the one man renowned to the present day for his length of life :-if all men were (to wish) to match him, would they not be miserable?
PT. I. SECT. I. THE WRITINGS OF KWANG-3ZE.
3. In the questions put by Thang2 to Ki we have similar statements :- In the bare and barren north there is the dark and vast ocean,-the Pool of Heaven. In it there is a fish, several thousand li in breadth, while no one knows its length. Its name is the khwăn. There is (also) a bird named the phăng; its back is like the Thâi mountain, while its wings are like clouds all round the sky. On a whirlwind it mounts upwards as on the whorls of a goat's horn for 90,000 lî, till, far removed from the cloudy vapours, it bears on its back the blue sky, and then it shapes its course for the South, and proceeds to the ocean there.' A quail by the side of a marsh laughed at it, and said, 'Where is it going to? I spring up with a bound, and come down again when I have reached but a few fathoms, and then fly about among the brushwood and bushes; and
1 Or the patriarch Phăng.' Confucius compared himself to him (Analects, VII, 1);-'our old Phăng;' and Kû Hsî thinks he was a worthy officer of the Shang dynasty. Whoever he was, the legends about him are a mass of Tâoistic fables. At the end of the Shang dynasty (B. C. 1123) he was more than 767 years old,
and still in unabated vigour. We read of his losing 49 wives and 54 sons; and that he still left two sons, Wu and I, who died in Fu-kien, and gave their names to the Wû-î, or Bû-î hills, from which we get our Bohea tea! See Mayers' Chinese Reader's Manual,' p. 175.
2 The founder of the Shang dynasty (B. c. 1766-1754). In Lieh-zze his interlocutor is called Hsiâ Ko, and 3ze-kî.
Digized by Google