r and the Pigs:--

"The Grand Augur, in his ceremonial robes, approached the
shambles and thus addressed the Pigs:--

"'Why,' said he, 'should you object to die? I shall fattan 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?

"'Yet perhaps after all,' he continued, speaking from the pigs'
point of view, 'it is better to live on bran and escape the
shambles...

"'No,' said he; speaking from his own point of view again. 'To
enjoy honor when alive one would readily die on a war-shield or
in the haeadsman's basket.'

"So he rejected the pigs' point of view and clung to his own. In
what sense, then, was he different from the pigs?"

And here, the still more famous tale of the Sacred Tortoise:--

"Chwantse was fishing in the river P'u when the Prince of Ch'u
sent two high officials to ask him to take charge of the
administration.

"Chwangtse went on fishing, and without turning his head said:
'I have heard that in Ch'u there is a sacred tortoise which has
been dead now some three thousand years. And that the prince
keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of
his ancestral temple. Now if this tortoise had its choice, which
would it prefer: to be dead, and have its remains venerated; or
to be alive, and wagging its tail in the mud?'

"'Sir,' replied the two officials, 'it would rather be alive, and
wagging its tail in the mud.'

"'Begone!' cried Chwangtse. 'I too will wag my tail in the mud!'"

Well; so much for _Butterfly;_ now for _Chwang_--and to
introduce you to some of his real thought and teaching. You will
not have shot so wide of the mark as to see in his story of the
skull traces of pessimism: Chwantse had none of it; he was a
very happy fellow; like the policeman in the poem,

".....a merry genial wag
Who loved a mad conceit."

But he was by all means and anyhow for preaching the Inner as
against the outer. Yet he did not dismiss this world, either, as
a vain delusion and sorrowful mockery;--the gist of his teaching
is this: that men bear a false relation to the world; and he
desired to teach the true relation. He loved the Universe, and
had a sublime confidence in it as the embodiment and expression
of Tao; and would apply this thought as a solvent to the one
false thing in it: the human personality, with its here