Lung Shu came to the great doctor Wen Chih, and said to him:  “You are the master of cunning arts.  I have a disease; can you cure it, Sir?” “So far,” said Wen Chih, “you have only made known your desire.  Please let me know the symptoms of your disease.”  They were, utter indifference to the things and events of the world.  “I hold it no honor to be praised in my own village, nor disgrace to be decried in my native State.  Gain brings me no joy, loss no sorrow.  I dwell in my home as if it were a mere caravanserai, and regard my native district as though it were one of the barbarian kingdoms.  Honors and rewards fail to rouse me, pains and penalties to overawe me, good or bad fortune to influence me; joy or grief to move me.  What disease is this?  What remedy will cure it?” *

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* I may say here that though I am quoting the speeches more or
less directly from Dr. Lionel Giles’ translation, too many
liberties are being taken, verbally, with the narative parts of
these stories, to allow quotation marks and small type.   One
contracts and expands (sparingly, the latter); but gives
the story.
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Wen Chih examined his heart under X-rays;—­really and truly that is in effect what Liehtse says.—­“Ah,” said he, “I see that a good square inch of your heart is hollow; you are within a little of being a true Sage.  Six of the orifices are open and clear, and only the seventh is blocked up.  This last is doubtless due to the fact that you are mistaking for a disease what is in reality an approach to divine enlightenment.  It is a case in which my shallow art is of no avail.”

I tell this tale, as also that other about the exchange of hearts, partly to suggest that Liehtse’s China may have had the actuality, or at least a reminiscence, of scientific knowledge since lost there, and only discovered in Europe recently.  In the same way one finds references to automatic oxen, self-moving chariots, traveling by air, and a number of other things which, as we read of them, sound just like superstitious nonsense.  There are old Chinese drawings of pterodactyls, and suchlike unchancey antediluvian wild fowl. Argal, (you would say) the Chinese knew of these once; although Ptero and his friends have been extinct quite a few million years, one supposes.  Or was it superstition again?  Then why was it not superstition in Professor So-and-so, who found the bones and reconstructed the beastie for holiday crowds to gaze upon at the Crystal Palace or the Metropolitan Museum?  Knowledge does die away into reminiscence, and then into oblivion; and the chances are that Liehtse’s time retained reminiscences which have since become oblivion-hidden;—­then rediscovered in the West.—­But I tell the tale also for a certain divergence marked in it, between Taoist and Confucian thought.  Laotse would have chuckled over it, who brooded much on ‘self-emptiness’ as the first step towards illumination.  Confucius would have allowed it; but it would not have occurred to him, unsuggested.