ed; it goes, and cannot
be stopped. But alas, the world thinks that to nourish the physical
frame is enough to preserve life. Although not enough, it must still be
done; this cannot be neglected. For if one is to neglect the physical
frame, better far to retire at once from the world, since by renouncing
the world one gets rid of the cares of the world. There is, however,
the vitality which informs the physical frame; that must be equally an
object of incessant care. Then he whose physical frame is perfect and
whose vitality remains in its original purity--he is one with God. Man
passes through this sublunary life as a sunbeam passes through a crack;
here one moment, and gone the next. Neither are there any not equally
subject to the ingress and egress of mortality. One modification brings
life; then comes another, and there is death. Living creatures cry out;
human beings feel sorrow. The bow-case is slipped off; the clothes'-bag
is dropped; and in the confusion the soul wings its flight, and the body
follows, on the great journey home.

Attention has already been drawn to this necessary cultivation of the
physical frame, and Chuan Tzu gives an instance of the extent to which
it was carried. There was a certain man whose nose was covered with a
very hard scab, which was at the same time no thicker than a fly's wing.
He sent for a stonemason to chip it off; and the latter plied his adze
with great dexterity while the patient sat absolutely rigid, without
moving a muscle, and let him chip. When the scab was all off, the nose
was found to be quite uninjured. Such skill was of course soon noised
abroad, and a feudal prince, who also had a scab on his nose, sent for
the mason to take it off. The mason, however, declined to try, alleging
that the success did not depend so much upon the skill of the operator
as upon the mental control of the patient by which the physical frame
became as it were a perfectly inanimate object.

Contemporary with Chuang Tzu, but of a very different school of thought,
was the philosopher Hui Tzu (_Hooeydza_). He was particularly fond of
the quibbles which so delighted the sophists or unsound reasoners of
ancient Greece. Chuang Tzu admits that he was a man of many ideas,
and that his works would fill five carts--this, it must be remembered,
because they were written on slips of wood tied together by a string run
through eyelets. But he adds that Hui Tzu's doctrines are paradoxical,
and his terms u