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PT. I. SECT. VI.
THE WRITINGS OF KWANG-BZE.
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Heaven (the inevitable) is a long-acknowledged fact ;—why should I hate my condition ?
10. Before long 3ze-lâi fell ill, and lay gasping at the point of death, while his wife and children stood around him wailing? Zze-li went to ask for him, and said to them, 'Hush! Get out of the way! Do not disturb him as he is passing through his change.' Then, leaning against the door, he said (to the dying man), “Great indeed is the Creator! What will He now make you to become ? Where will He take you to? Will He make you the liver of a rat, or the arm of an insect??' Zze-lâi replied, 'Wherever a parent tells a son to go, east, west, south, or north, he simply follows the command. The Yin and Yang are more to a man than his parents are. If they are hastening my death, and I do not quietly submit to them, I shall be obstinate and rebellious. There is the great Mass (of nature) ;—I find the support of my body in it; my life is spent in toil on it; my old age seeks ease on it; at death I find rest on it :what has made my life a good will make my death also a good.
Here now is a great founder, casting his metal. If the metal were to leap up (in the pot), and say, “I must be made into a (sword like the) Mo-yeh 3,"
is passive, having the that precedes as its subject (observe the force of the the after in the best editions), and not active, or governing the that follows.
i Compare the account of the scene at Lâo-zze's death, in III, par. 4.
2 Here comes in the belief in transformation. 3 The name of a famous sword, made for Ho-lü, the king of
