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 2000

PT. III. SECT. II. THE WRITINGS OF KWANG-BZE.
109
also know how they injure it. It is only those who stand outside such men that know this ?.'
There are the pliable and weak; the easy and hasty; the grasping and crooked. Those who are called the pliable and weak learn the words of some one master, to which they freely yield their assent, being secretly pleased with themselves, and thinking that their knowledge is sufficient, while they do not know that they have not yet begun (to understand) a single thing. It is this which makes them so pliable and weak. The easy and hasty are like lice on a pig. The lice select a place where the bristles are more wide apart, and look on it as a great palace or a large park. The slits between the toes, the overlappings of its skin, about its nipples and its thighs,—all these seem to them safe apartments and advantageous places ;—they do not know that the butcher one morning, swinging about his arms, will spread the grass, and kindle the fire, so that they and the pig will be roasted together. So do they appear and disappear with the place where they harboured :this is why they are called the easy and hasty.
Of the grasping and crooked we have an example in Shun. Mutton has no craving for ants, but ants have a craving for mutton, for it is rank. There was a rankness about the conduct of Shun, and the people were pleased with him. Hence when he thrice changed his residence, every one of them became a capital city 2. When he came to the wild
1 I suppose that the words of Hsü Ya stop with this sentence, and that from this to the end of the paragraph we have the sentiments of Kwang-jze himself. The style is his, -graphic but sometimes coarse.
? See note on Mencius V, i, 2, 3.
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