To Clear Vision

Confucius visited Lao-tzu, and spoke of charity and duty to one's neighbor. Lao-tzu said: "The chaff from winnowing will blind a man's eyes so that he cannot tell the points of the compass. Mosquitoes will keep a man awake all night with their biting. And just in the same way this talk of charity and duty to one's neighbor drives me nearly crazy. Sir! Strive to keep the world to its own original simplicity. And as the wind bloweth where it listeth, so let virtue establish itself. Wherefore such undue energy, as though searching for a fugitive with a big drum.
     "The snow-goose is white without a daily bath. The raven is black without daily coloring itself. The original simplicity of black and white is beyond the reach of argument. The vista of fame and reputation is not worthy of enlargement. When the pond dries up and the fishes are left upon dry ground to moisten them with a little spittle is not to be compared with leaving them in the first instance in their native rivers and lakes."
     On returning from the visit to Lao-tzu, Confucius did not speak for three days. A disciple asked him, saying, "Master, when you saw Lao-tzu in what direction did you admonish him?"
     "I saw a dragon," replied Confucius, "a dragon which by convergence showed a body, by radiation became color, and riding upon the clouds of heaven, nourished the two principles of creation. My mouth was agape; I could not shut it. How then do you think I was going to admonish Lao-tzu?
— Chung-tzu, from Musings of a Chinese Mystic, Herbert & Lionel Giles (tr. & ed.), in The Portable Dragon: The Western Man's Guide to the I Ching, R.G.H. Siu, pp. 14-15.

....What I do is simply what lies easiest to my hand. It happens that I was born with an intense and unsatiable interest in ideas, and thus like to play with them. It happens also that I was born with rather more than the average facility for putting them into words. In consequence, I am a writer and editor, which is to say, a dealer in them and a concocter of them. There is very little conscious volition in all this. What I do was ordained by the inscrutable fates, not chosen by me. In my boyhood, yielding to a powerful but still subordinate interest in exact facts, I wanted to be a chemist, and at the same time my poor father tried to make me a business man. At other times, like any other relatively poor man, I have longed to make a lot of money by some easy swindle. But I became a writer all the same, and shall remain one until the end of the chapter, just as a cow goes on giving milk all her life, even though what appears to be her self-interest urges her to give gin.
— H.L. Mencken, from "Letter to Will Durant," quoted in On the Meaning of Life, Will Durant, in Ibid., pp. 18-19.

A man after fourteen years of hard asceticism in a lonely forest obtained at last the power of walking over the waters. Overjoyed at this acquisition, he went to his guru, and told him of his grand feat. At this the master replied, "My poor boy, what thou hast accomplished after fourteen years' arduous labor, ordinary men do the same by paying a penny to the boatman."
— Sri Ramakrishna, Teachings of Sri Ramakrishna, Almora: Advaita Ashrama, p. 154, in Ibid., pp. 32-33.

A foolish man learning that the Buddha observed the principle of great love which commends the return of good for evil, came and abused him. The Buddha was silent, pitying his folly.
     When the man had finished his abuse, the Buddha asked him, saying: "Son, if a man declined to accept a present made to him, to whom would it belong?" And he answered: "In that case it would belong to the man who offered it."
     "My son," said the Buddha, "thou hast railed at me, I decline to accept thy abuse, and request thee to keep it thyself. Will it not be a source of misery to thee? As the echo belongs to the sound, and the shadow to the substance, so misery will overtake the evil-doer without fail."
     The abuser made no reply, and Buddha continued: "A wicked man who reproaches a virtuous one is like one who looks up and spits at heaven; the spittle soils not the heaven but comes back and defiles his own person."
— Gautama Buddha, "Sermon on Abuse," from The Wisdom of China and India, Lin Yutang (ed. & TR.), in Ibid., p. 73.

I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence for which music alone finds the word
And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring begin,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities —
We cannot speak.
A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
"How did you lose your leg?"
And the soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
....
There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of a deep peace of mind,
And the silence of an embittered friendship,
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
....
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
....
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
....
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it.
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
— Edgar lee Masters, "Silence," Songs and Satires, 1916, in Ibid., pp. 74-75.