人间世英文版 - 林语堂

The Preservation of Life

Human life is limited, but knowledge is limitless. To drive the limited in pursuit of the limitless is fatal; and to presume that one really knows is fatal indeed!

In doing good, avoid fame. In doing bad, avoid disgrace. Pursue a middle course as your principle. Thus you will guard your body from harm, preserve your life, fulfill your duties by your parents, and live your allotted span of life.

Prince Huei's cook was cutting up a bullock. Every blow of his hand,

every heave of his shoulders, every tread of his foot, every thrust of his knee, every whshh of rent flesh, every chhk of the chopper, was in perfect rhythm, --like the dance of the Mulberry Grove, like the harmonious chords of ChingShou.

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\myself to Tao, which is higher than mere skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before me whole bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more whole animals. And now I work with my mind and not with my eye. My mind works along without the control of the senses. Falling back upon eternal principles, I glide through such great joints or cavities as there may be, according to the natural constitution of the animal. I do not even touch the convolutions of muscle and tendon, still less attempt to cut through large bones.

\ordinary cook, one a month, -- because he hacks. But I have had this chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand

bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone. For at the joints there are always interstices, and the edge of a chopper being without thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness into such an

interstice. Indeed there is plenty of room for the blade to move about. It is thus that I have kept my chopper for nineteen years as though fresh from the whetstone.

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tackle, I am all caution. Fixing my eye on it, I stay my hand, and gently apply my blade, until with a hwah the part yields like earth crumbling to the ground. Then I take out my chopper and stand up, and look around, and pause with an air of triumph. Then wiping my chopper, I put it carefully away.\

\how to take care of my life.\

When Hsien, of the Kungwen family, beheld a certain official, he was

horrified, and said, \the work of God, or of man?\

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balanced. From this it is clear that God and not man made him what he is.\

A pheasant of the marshes may have to go ten steps to get a peck, a hundred to get a drink. Yet pheasants do not want to be fed in a cage. For although they might have less worries, they would not like it. When Laotse died, Ch'in Yi went to the funeral. He uttered three yells and departed. A disciple asked him saying, \friend?\

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\death?\

\know that he was not. When I went in to mourn, I found old persons weeping as if for their children, young ones wailing as if for their

mothers. When these people meet, they must have said words on the occasion and shed tears without any intention. (To cry thus at one's

death) is to evade the natural principles (of life and death) and increase human attachments, forgetting the source from which we receive this life. The ancients called this 'evading the retribution of Heaven.' The Master came, because it was his time to be born; He went, because it was his time to go away. Those who accept the natural course and sequence of things and live in obedience to it are beyond joy and sorrow. The

ancients spoke of this as the emancipation from bondage. The fingers may not be able to supply all the fuel, but the fire is transmitted, and we know not when it will come to an end.\

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