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One morning a fuel-gatherer we may call him Li for convenience, though Liehtse leaves him nameless killed a deer in the forest; and to keep the carcass safe till he went home in the evening, hid it under a pile of brushwood. His work during the day took him far and when he looked for the deer again, he could not find it.
The men of the second stage effectually tidied Liehtse up: Dr. H. A. Giles says he was an invention of the fertile brain of Chwangtse, and his book a forgery of Han times. Well; people did forge ancient literature in those days, and were well paid for doing so; and you cannot be quite certain of the complete authenticity of any book purporting to have been written before Ts'in Shi Hwangti's time.
After this, Liehtse for the most wanders from story to story; he taught in parables; and sometimes we have to listen hard to catch the meaning of them, he rarely insists on it, or drives it well home, or brings it down to levels of plain-spokenness at which it should declare itself to a westem mind.
So that whoever wrote this book, whether it was the man referred to by Chwangtse when he says: "There was Liehtse again; he could ride upon the wind and go wheresoever he wished, staying away as long as thirteen days," or someone else of the same name, he did not take his non de plume from that passage in Chwangtse, because he was probably dead when Chwangtse wrote it.
Yet there is joy and beauty in the roll of billows as they sweep outward toward eternity. Why not enter into their spirit, or, like Liehtse, ride upon the hurricane itself? He only who has lived with the beautiful can die beautifully. The last moments of the great tea-masters were as full of exquisite refinement as had been their lives.
I think Liehtse has much to show us as to the difference between the methods of the Chinese and Western minds: the latter that must bring most truths down through the brain-mind, and set them forth decked in the apparel of reason; the former that is, as it seems to me, often rather childlike as to the things of the brain-mind; but has a way of bringing the great truths down and past the brain-mind by some circuitous route; or it may be only by a route much more direct than ours.
He passed the cottage of Yen the woodman Yen we may call him, though Liehtse calls him nothing. who heard the song, and pondered. "One might as well take a look at the place," thought he; it seemed to him it might be such and such a hollow, by such and such a stream. Thither he went, and found the pile of brushwood; It looked to him a likely place enough to hide a deer under.
They agreed at once: Kung-hu, with the weaker will, was to get the smaller mental powers to match it; Chi-ying was to get a mentality equal to his firm will. We should think Kung-hu got very much the worst of the bargain; but he, and Dr. Pien-chiao, and Liehtse, and perhaps Chinamen generally, thought and would think nothing of the kind.
We may ride the wind with Liehtse and find it absolutely quiet because we ourselves are the wind, or dwell in mid-air with the Aged one of the Hoang-Ho, who lived betwixt Heaven and Earth because he was subject to neither the one nor the other.
It could not save their personalities from suffering; but it gave the Soul in each of them a basis on which to build the grand steadfast creations. All of which Chinese Liehtse tells you without comment, and with an air of being too childish-foolish for this world, in the following story: Kung-hu and Chi-ying fell ill, and sought the services of the renowned doctor, Pien-chiao.
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