The mouse burrows down below the hill to avoid being smoked or cut out of its nest. Is your wit below that of these two creatures?"
- That you should be unable to devise means of avoiding the artificial restraints of princes. Better than coercing into goodness is letting men be good of their own accord.
T’ien Kên
- Of whom nothing is known.
was travelling on the south of the Yin mountain. He had reached the river Liao when he met a certain Sage to whom he said, "I beg to ask about the government of the empire."
"Begone!" cried the Sage. "You are a low fellow, and your question is ill timed. God has just turned me out a man. That is enough for me. Borne on light pinions I can soar beyond the cardinal points, to the land of nowhere, in the domain of nothingness. And you come to worry me with government of the empire!"
But T’ien Kên enquired a second time, and the Sage replied, "Resolve your mental energy into abstraction, your physical energy into inaction. Allow yourself to fall in with the natural order of phenomena, without admitting the element of self,—and the empire will be governed."
- By virtue of natural laws which lead, without man's interference, to the end desired.
Yang Tzŭ Chü went to see Lao Tzŭ, and said, "Suppose a man were ardent and courageous,
