Bigmouse, the Rat
Today we
have another wise tale or two from China. In Chinese
a rat is called a "big mouse."
Mister Tu
lived in China and was a great scholar. Night and day
he studied his books. People called him clever, and
a man of superior intelligence. Tu thought himself
to be very clever too. But he was outdone in cleverness
by a rat.This is how it happened:
He was sitting up late
at night when all of a sudden he heard somewhere the
gnawing of a rat. Disturbed, Tu gave a loud rap on
his chair. The gnawing stopped. Soon it
began again. After calling to his servant to bring
a light, he and the servant looked all around the room.
They heard a grating sound coming from a
gunny sack on the floor. "Aha!" cried Tu, "the
rat has got into this sack and is trying
to gnaw his way out." When they opened the sack,
there didn't seem to be anything in it, but at the
bottom they found a dead rat lying there.
The servant (who was
a bit superstitious) said, "Oh my! Is it possible
that the rat who was just now gnawing died so suddenly?
Or was it perhaps the ghost of this rat
who was making that noise?" Turning the sack inside
out he dumped the body of the dead rat onto the floor,
whereupon it ran full speed away, before they had time
to do anything.
"This is a very
strange thing," said Tu, sighing, "the cleverness
of that rat. The sack was too tough for it to gnaw
through, so it attracted attention with its noise
and then pretended to be dead, to save its life. Now,
I have always believed that the highest intelligence
is in the human being. We can tame the alligator, break
in the buffalo, train the tortoise and the flea. Yet,
here am I, trapped by a rat! It lay down like a corpse
and then ran like a rabbit."
Then Tu became thoughtful
and his mind filled with ideas: "Your knowledge,"
he thought, "is the knowledge of books; you stare
at the truth but see it not. You do not concentrate
your mind within, but allow it to be distracted outside.
So you are deceived by the gnawing of a rat. One
person may throw away a precious jewel , yet
cry her eyes out over a broken cooking-pot.
Another will snare a wild animal, yet faint
at the sting of a bee. Those are words you wrote,
Tu; have you forgotten them? Master Tu bent his head and
laughed.
How to Carve a Masterpiece
Khing
was a carver, who worked in rare and precious types
of wood. He would make statues and pieces of furniture,
demanded by the rich and high-placed people of
his land. Sometimes he created new designs from his
imagination and put them on display for the highest
bidder. Once he made an exquisite and peculiar
stand for hanging bells. (In fashionable houses people
sometimes hung bells of different sizes, which they
could ring as they went in and out; bells were also
rung in temples.) Khing's new bell-stand became famous,
drawing folk from all around to see it. Superstitious
villagers said, "Heavenly spirits must have come
and done it for him; no human hand could have created
such a masterpiece."
Small and ignorant people
often belittle the power of the great, and suppose
that all greatness comes from somewhere outside.
The land Khing lived
in was called Lu, and one day the Prince of Lu arrived at
the house to see the famed work of art. The Prince, too,
was much impressed. "What is the mystery of your art
and skill?" he asked.
"Your humble subject
(meaning himself) is but an artisan," Khing replied.
"What mystery is there about me? And yet,
there is one thing: when the idea of the bell-stand
came to me, I decided to guard against any waste of
my vital energy. I stopped taking food, in order to
make my mind very quiet. After fasting for three days,
I gave up every thought of what I could earn, in money
or honor, from the work I was about to undertake.
Thinking like this, after five days I had forgotten
all about myself -- even my limbs and my body I became
unconscious of. By this time my skill had become concentrated;
everything outside that could divide my mind had disappeared.
"Then I went into
the forest and looked at the natural forms of the trees.
When I saw one of perfect form, the image of the bell-stand
formed in my mind and I began my carving. If I had
not found this particular tree, I would have had to
give up. I let the TAO (universal principle) in me
cooperate with the TAO in the wood, and thus I was
able to produce what you see here."
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