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THE TEXTS OF TÂOISM.
BK. XXXII.
chariots must have been owing to your finding him asleep. Let him awake, and you will be ground to powder?.'
13. Some (ruler) having sent a message of invitation to him, Kwang-zze replied to the messenger,
Have you seen, Sir, a sacrificial ox? It is robed with ornamental embroidery, and feasted on fresh grass and beans. But when it is led into the grand ancestral temple, though it wished to be (again) a solitary calf, would that be possible for it??'
14. When Kwang-zze was about to die, his disciples signified their wish to give him a grand burial. 'I shall have heaven and earth,' said he, 'for my coffin and its shell; the sun and moon for my two round symbols of jade; the stars and constellations for my pearls and jewels; and all things assisting as the mourners. Will not the provisions for my burial be complete? What could you add to them?' The disciples replied, 'We are afraid that the crows and kites will eat our master. Kwang-gze rejoined, *Above, the crows and kites will eat me; below, the mole-crickets and ants will eat me :—to take from those and give to these would only show your partiality3.'
The attempt, with what is not even, to produce what is even will only produce an uneven result; the attempt, with what is uncertain, to make the uncertain certain will leave the uncertainty as it
Compare paragraph 8. But Lin again denies the genuineness of this.
% Compare XVII, par. II.
8 We do not know whether Kwang-jze was buried according to his own ideal or not. In the concluding sentences we have a strange descent from the grandiloquence of what precedes.
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