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FOUR AND TWENTY MINDS
both dreaming. I who say that you are dreaming am dreaming myself.[1]
Nay more, death is preferable to life: long before the time of Hamlet, Kwang-tze questioned the skulls of the dead and learned from mouths of bone such truths as mouths of flesh do not reveal:
When Kwang-tze went to Khû, he saw an empty skull, bleached indeed, but still retaining its shape. Tapping it with his horse-switch, he asked it, saying, “Did you, Sir, in your greed of life, fail in the lessons of reason, and come to this? Or did you do so, in the service of a perishing state, by the punishment of the axe? Or was it through your evil conduct, reflecting disgrace on your parents and on your wife and children? Or was it through your hard endurances of cold and hunger? Or was it that you had completed your term of life?”
Having given expression to these questions, he took up the skull and made a pillow of it when he went to sleep. At midnight the skull appeared to him in a dream, and said, “What you said to me was after the fashion of an orator. All your words were about the entanglements of men in their lifetime. There are none of those things after death. Would you like to hear me, Sir, tell you about death?” “I should,” said Kwang-tze, and the skull resumed: “In death there are not (the distinctions of) ruler above and minister below. There are none of the phenomena of the four seasons. Tranquil and at ease, our years are those of heaven and earth. No king in his court has greater enjoyment
- ↑ Vol. XXXIX, pp. 194–95. On this passage see Farinelli, La vita è un sogno, Turin, 1916, Vol. I, pp. 21 and 256. Farinelli, however, does not refer to a Chinese comedy which is built entirely on this idea. It is by Chi-yuen, and is called Hoang-liang-mong (The Dream of the Yellow Millet) and has a Tâoist thesis.
