Chuang Tzu 6.10

Before long, Tsze-lâi fell ill, and lay gasping at the point of death, while his wife and children stood around him wailing. 

Tsze-lì went to ask for him, and said to them, "Hush! Get out of the way! Do not disturb him as he is passing through his change." 

Then, leaning against the door, he said to the dying man, "Great indeed is the Creator! What will He now make you to become? Where will He take you to? Will He make you the liver of a rat, or the arm of an insect?" 

Tsze-lâi replied, "Wherever a parent tells a son to go, east, west, south, or north, he simply follows the command. The Yin and Yang are more to a man than his parents are. If they are hastening my death, and I do not quietly submit to them, I shall be obstinate and rebellious. 

"There is the great Mass of nature—I find the support of my body in it; my life is spent in toil on it; my old age seeks ease on it; at death I find rest on it—what has made my life a good will make my death also a good.

"Here now is a great founder, casting his metal. If the metal were to leap up in the pot, and say, 'I must be made into a sword like the Mo-yeh,' the great founder would be sure to regard it as uncanny. 

"So, again, when a form is being fashioned in the mold of the womb, if it were to say, 'I must become a man; I must become a man,' the Creator would be sure to regard it as uncanny. 

"When we once understand that heaven and earth are a great melting pot, and the Creator a great founder, where can we have to go to that shall not be right for us? We are born as from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awaking." 

IMAGE: Isidoro Grünhut, The Dying Man (1887)