Then he advanced again, also respectfully, and said, "May I ask you about personal cultivation?"
Lao Tzŭ said, "Your countenance is a strange one. Your eyes protrude. Your jaws are heavy. Your lips are parted. Your demeanour is self-satisfied. You look like a man on a tethered horse.
- His body there, his mind elsewhere.
You are too confident. You are too hasty. You think too much of your own powers. Such men are not trusted. Those who are found on the wrong side of a boundary line are called thieves."
Lao Tzŭ said, "Tao is not too small for the greatest, nor too great for the smallest. Thus all things are embosomed therein; wide indeed its boundless capacity, unfathomable its depth.
"Form, and virtue, and charity, and duty to one's neighbour, these are the accidentals of the spiritual. Except he be a perfect man, who shall determine their place? The world of the perfect man, is not that vast? And yet it is not able to involve him in trouble. All struggle for power, but he does not join. Though discovering nothing false, he is not tempted astray. In spite of the utmost genuineness, he still confines himself to essentials.
- To the root, not to the branch.
"He thus places himself outside the universe, beyond all creation, where his soul is free from
