When Lâo Tan died, Khin Shih went to condole with his son, but after crying out three times, he came out.
The disciples said to him, "Were you not a friend of the Master?"
"I was," he replied, and they said, "Is it proper then to offer your condolences merely as you have done?"
He said, "It is. At first I thought he was the man of men, and now I do not think so. When I entered a little ago and expressed my condolences, there were the old men wailing as if they had lost a son, and the young men wailing as if they had lost their mother.
"In his attracting and uniting them to himself in such a way, there must have been that which made them involuntarily express their words of condolence, and involuntarily wail, as they were doing.
"And this was a hiding from himself of his Heaven-nature, and an excessive indulgence of his human feelings—a forgetting of what he had received in being born; what the ancients called the punishment due to neglecting the Heaven-nature.
"When the Master came, it was at the proper time; when he went away, it was the simple sequence of his coming. Quiet acquiescence in what happens at its proper time, and quietly submitting to its ceasing afford no occasion for grief or for joy.
"The ancients described death as the loosening of the cord on which God suspended the life. What we can point to is the wood that has been consumed; but the fire is transmitted elsewhere, and we know not that it is over and ended."
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