The Grand Augur, in his ceremonial robes, approached the shambles and thus addressed the pigs:—
"How can you object to die? I shall fatten you for three months. I shall discipline myself for ten days and fast for three. I shall strew fine grass, and place you bodily upon a carved sacrificial dish. Does not this satisfy you?"
Then speaking from the pigs' point of view, he continued, "It is better perhaps after all to live on bran and escape the shambles......."
"But then," added he, speaking from his own point of view, "to enjoy honour when alive one would readily die on a war-shield or in the headsman's basket."
So he rejected the pigs' point of view and adopted his own point of view. In what sense then was he different from the pigs?
- Even as a pig thinks of nothing but eating, so was the Grand Augur ready to sacrifice everything, life itself, for paltry fame.
When Duke Huan was out hunting, with Kuan Chung as his charioteer, he saw a bogy. Catching hold of Kuan Chung's hand, he asked him, saying, "What do you see?"
"I see nothing," replied Kuan Chung. But when the Duke got home he became delirious, and for many days was unable to go out.
There came a certain Huang Tzŭ Kao Ngao of the Ch'i State
- "A sage of the Ch'i State,"—as the commentators
