Attention has already been drawn to this necessary cultivation of the physical frame, and Chuan Tzu gives an instance of the extent to which it was carried.  There was a certain man whose nose was covered with a very hard scab, which was at the same time no thicker than a fly’s wing.  He sent for a stonemason to chip it off; and the latter plied his adze with great dexterity while the patient sat absolutely rigid, without moving a muscle, and let him chip.  When the scab was all off, the nose was found to be quite uninjured.  Such skill was of course soon noised abroad, and a feudal prince, who also had a scab on his nose, sent for the mason to take it off.  The mason, however, declined to try, alleging that the success did not depend so much upon the skill of the operator as upon the mental control of the patient by which the physical frame became as it were a perfectly inanimate object.

Contemporary with Chuang Tzu, but of a very different school of thought, was the philosopher Hui Tzu (Hooeydza).  He was particularly fond of the quibbles which so delighted the sophists or unsound reasoners of ancient Greece.  Chuang Tzu admits that he was a man of many ideas, and that his works would fill five carts—­this, it must be remembered, because they were written on slips of wood tied together by a string run through eyelets.  But he adds that Hui Tzu’s doctrines are paradoxical, and his terms used ambiguously.  Hui Tzu argued, for instance, that such abstractions as hardness and whiteness were separate existences, of which the mind could only be conscious separately, one at a time.  He declared that there are feathers in a new-laid egg, because they ultimately appear on the chick.  He maintained that fire is not hot; it is the man who feels hot.  That the eye does not see; it is the man who sees.  That compasses will not make a circle; it is the man.  That a bay horse and a dun cow are three; because taken separately they are two, and taken together they are one:  two and one make three.  That a motherless colt never had a mother; when it had a mother, it was not motherless.  That if you take a stick a foot long and every day cut it in half, you will never come to the end of it.

Of what use, asked his great rival, is Hui Tzu to the world?  His efforts can only be compared with those of a gadfly or a mosquito.  He makes a noise to drown an echo.  He is like a man running a race with his own shadow.

When Chuang Tzu was about to die, his disciples expressed a wish to give him a splendid funeral.  But Chuang Tzu said:  “With heaven and earth for my coffin and my shell; with the sun, moon and stars as my burial regalia; and with all creation to escort me to my grave,—­are not my funeral paraphernalia ready to hand?” “We fear,” argued the disciples, “lest the carrion kite should eat the body of our Master;” to which Chuang Tzu replied:  “Above ground I shall be food for kites; below ground for mole-crickets and ants.  Why rob one to feed the other?”