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MASTER SSU, MASTER YÜ, MASTER LI AND MASTER LAI

All at once Master Yü fell ill, and Master Ssu went to ask how he was. “Amazing!” exclaimed Master Yü. “Look, the Creator is making me all crookedy! My back sticks up like a hunchback’s so that my vital organs art on top of me. My chin is hidden down around my navel, my shoulders are up above my head, and my pigtail points at the sky. It must be due to some dislocation of the forces of the yin and the yang. . . .”

“Do you resent it?” asked Master Ssu.

“Why, no,” replied Master Yü. “What is there to resent . . .?”

Then suddenly Master Lai also fill ill. Gasping for breath, he lay at the point of death. His wife and children gathered round in a circle and wept. Master Li, who had come to find out how he was, said to them, “Shoooooo! Get back! Don’t disturb the process of change.”

And he leaned against the doorway and chatted with Master Lai. “How marvelous the Creator is!” he exclaimed. “What is he going to make out of you next? Where is he going to send you? Will he make you into a rat’s liver? Will he make you into a bug’s arm?”

“A child obeys his father and mother and goes wherever he is told, east or west, south or north,” said Master Lai. “And the yin and the yang—how much more are they to a man than father or mother! Now that they have brought me to the verge of death, how perverse it would be of me to refuse to obey them. . . . So now I think of heaven and earth as a great furnace and the Creator as a skilled smith. What place could he send me that would not be all right? I will go off peacefully to sleep, and then with a start I will wake up.”

—CHUANG-TZU

They so mean around here, they steal your sweat.

—SONNY LISTON