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 1959

68
THE TEXTS OF TÂOISM.
BK, XXII,
under Llo-lung K. Shăn Năng was leaning for: ward on his stool, having shut the door and gone to sleep in the day time. At midday A-ho Kan pushed open the door and entered, saying, 'Lâolung is dead.' Shăn Năng leant forward on his stool, laid hold of his staff and rose. Then he laid the staff aside with a clash, laughed and said, That Heaven knew how cramped and mean, how arrogant and assuming I was, and therefore he has cast me off, and is dead. Now that there is no Master to correct my heedless words, it is simply for me to die!' Yen Kang, (who had come in) to condole, heard these words, and said, 'It is to him who embodies the Tâo that the superior men everywhere cling. Now you who do not understand so much as the tip of an autumn hair of it, not even the tenthousandth part of the Tâo, still know how to keep hidden your heedless words about it and die ;-how much more might he who embodied the Tâo do so! We look for it, and there is no form; we hearken for it, and there is no sound. When men try to discuss it, we call them dark indeed. When they discuss the Tâo, they misrepresent it.'
Hereupon Grand Purity? asked Infinitude , saying, 'Do you know the Tâo?' 'I do not know it,' was the reply. He then asked Do-nothing ?, who replied, 'I know it.' 'Is your knowledge of it de
1 Shăn Năng is well known, as coming in the chronological list between F0-hsî and Hwang-T1; and we are surprised that a higher place is not given to him among the Taoist patriarchs than our author assigns to him here.
These names, like those in the first paragraph of the Book, are metaphorical, intended, no doubt, to set forth attributes of the Tao, and to suggest to the reader what it is or what it is not.
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