{"collection":"Taoism","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/tao/mt/mt47.htm","path":"tao/mt/mt47.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/tao/mt/mt47.htm","text":"The Tao Teh King: A Short Study in Comparative Religion, by C. Spurgeon Medhurst, [1905]\nFame or life, which is dearer? Life or wealth, which is more? Gain or loss, which is worse?\nExcessive love implies excessive outlay. Immoderate accumulation implies heavy loss. 1\nWho knows contentment meets no shame. Who knows when to stop incurs no danger. Such long endure.\n\u201cTo enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.\n\u201cTo know all things, learn to know nothing.\n\u201cTo possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.\n\u201cTo be all things, be willing to be nothing.\n\u201cTo get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whatever experiences you have no taste for.\n\u201cTo learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.\n\u201cTo reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.\n\u201cTo be what you are not, experience what you are not.\n\u201cWhen you stop at anything, you cease to open yourself to the All.\n\u201cFor to come to the All, you must give up the All.\n\u201cAnd if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it, desiring Nothing.\u201d *\nWith this compare an hitherto untranslated saying by Lu Hui-neng, the sixth and last Chinese Buddhist Patriarch: \"To be able to separate one's self from all affections is the pith of tranquillity.\"\n76:1 \"Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess.\"\u2014Emerson's Essay on Compensation.\n76:* Quoted in \"The Varieties of Religious Experiences\" (Gifford Lectures 1901-1902) by William James, LL.D., etc., p. 306.","title":"The Tao Teh King: A Short Study in Comparative Religion: Chapter XLIV","type":"page"}