On his return to Sung, he visited Chuang Tzŭ and said, "As for living in poverty in a dirty hovel, earning a scanty subsistence by making sandals, with shrivelled face and yellow ears,—this I could not do. Interviewing a powerful ruler, with a retinue of a hundred carriages,—that is my forte."
"When the prince of Ch'in is sick," replied Chuang Tzŭ, "and he summons his physician to open a boil or cleanse an ulcer, the latter gets one carriage. The man who licks his piles gets five. The more degrading the work, the greater the number of carriages given. You, Sir, must have been attending to his piles to get so many carriages. Begone with you!"
- "Not," says Lin Hsi Chung, "from the pen of Chuang Tzŭ."
Duke Ai of Lu asked Yen Ho, saying, "Were I to make Confucius a pillar of my realm, would the State be profited thereby?"
"It would be most perilous!" replied Yen Ho. "Confucius is a man of outward show and of specious words. He mistakes the branch for the root.
- Accessories for fundamentals.
He seeks to impress the people by an overbearing demeanour, the hollowness of which he does not perceive. If he suits you, and you entrust him
