Like his contemporary Diogenes, he would have his dead body cast out to the vultures; but the spirit of his wish was by no means cynical.  “When Chwangtse was about to die,” he writes (anticipating things pleasantly), “his disciples expressed a wish to give him a splendid funeral.  But he said:  ’With heaven and earth for my coffin and shell, and the sun, moon, and stars for my burial regalia; with all creation to escort me to the grave—­ is not my funeral already prepared?’”

He speaks of the dangers of externalism, even in the pursuit of virtue; then says:  “The man who has harmony within, though he sit motionless like the image of a dead man at a sacrifice, yet his Dragon Self will appear; though he be absorbed in silence, his thunder will be heard; the divine power in him will be at work, and heaven will follow it; while he abides in tranquillity and inaction, the myriads of things and beings will gather under his influence.”—­“Not to run counter to the natural bias of things,” he says, “is to be perfect.”  It is by this running counter—­going aginst the Law, following our personal desires and so forth,—­that we create karma,—­give the Universe something to readjust,—­and set in motion all our troubles.  “He who fully understands this, by storing it within enlarges the heart, and with this enlargement brings all creation to himself.  Such a man will bury gold on the hillside, and cast pearls into the sea.”—­ sink a plummet into that, I beseech you; it is one of the grand utterances of wonder and wisdom.—­“He will not struggle for wealth or strive for fame; rejoice over longevity, or grieve at an early death.  He will get no elation from success, nor chagrin from failure; he will not account the throne his private gain, no look on the empire of the world as glory personal.  His glory is to know that all thigns are one, and life and death but phases of the same existence.”

Why call that about burying gold and casting pearls into the sea one of the supreme utterances?—­Well; Chwangtse has a way of putting a whole essay into a sentence; this is a case in point.  We have discussed Natural Magic together many times; we know how the ultimate beauty occurs when something human has flowed out into Nature, and left its mysterious trace there, upon the mountains, or by the river-brink,

     “By paved fountain, or by rushy brook. 
     Or on the beached margent of the sea.”

Tu Fu saw in the blues and purples of the morning-glory the colors of the silken garments of the lost poet Ssema Hsiangju, of a thousand years before—­that is, of the silken garments of his rich emotion and adventures.  China somehow has understood this deep connexion between man and Nature; and that it is human thought molds the beauty and richness, or hideousness and sterility of the world.  Are the mountains noble?  They store the grandeur and aspirations of eighteen millions of years of mankind.  Are the deserts desolate and terrible?  It was man made the deserts:  not with his hands, but with his thought.  Man is the fine workshop and careful laboratory wherein Nature prepares the most wonderful of her wonders.  It is an instinct for this truth that makes Chinese poetry the marvel that it is.—­So the man of Tao is enriching the natural world:  filling the hills with gold, putting pearls in the sea.