Chuang Tzu 6.9

Tsze-sze, Tsze-yü, Tsze-lì, and Tsze-lâi, these four men, were talking together, when someone said, "Who can suppose the head to be made from nothing, the spine from life, and the rump-bone from death? Who knows how death and birth, living on and disappearing, compose the one body? I would be friends with him." 

The four men looked at one another and laughed, but no one seized with his mind the drift of the questions. All, however, were friends together. 

Not long after Tsze-yü fell ill, and Tsze-sze went to inquire for him. "How great," said the sufferer, "is the Creator! That He should have made me the deformed object that I am!" 

He was a crooked hunchback; his five viscera were squeezed into the upper part of his body; his chin bent over his navel; his shoulder was higher than his crown; on his crown was an ulcer pointing to the sky; his breath came and went in gasps—yet he was easy in his mind, and made no trouble of his condition. 

He limped to a well, looked at himself in it, and said, "Alas that the Creator should have made me the deformed object that I am!" 

Tsze said, "Do you dislike your condition?" 

He replied, "No, why should I dislike it? If He were to transform my left arm into a cock, I should be watching with it the time of the night; if He were to transform my right arm into a crossbow, I should then be looking for a hsiâo to bring down and roast; if He were to transform my rump-bone into a wheel, and my spirit into a horse, I should then be mounting it, and would not change it for another steed. 

"Moreover, when we have got what we are to do, there is the time of life in which to do it; when we lose that at death, submission is what is required. When we rest in what the time requires, and manifest that submission, neither joy nor sorrow can find entrance to the mind. 

"This would be what the ancients called loosing the cord by which the life is suspended. But one hung up cannot loose himself—he is held fast by his bonds. And that creatures cannot overcome Heaven, the inevitable, is a long-acknowledged fact—why should I hate my condition?" 

IMAGE: Jacques Callot, The Flageolet Player (c. 1622)