Home
| Meditation | Mystic Musings | Enlightenment | Counseling | Psychic World
Mother Earth | Therapies  | EBooks | Life of Masters | Links |   Quotes | Store | Stories | Zen
Osho | Gurdjieff | Krishnamurti | Rajneesh | Ramana | Ramakrishna | Shankara | Jesus | Buddha | Yoga

    


 

Chuang Tzu Stories

  1. Apologies

  2. The Empty Boat

  3. Means and ends

  4. The Useless

  5. Three in the Morning

  6. The Owl and the Phoenix

  7. The need to win

  8. Three Friends

  9. Chuang Tzu’s funeral

  10. The Man of Tao

  11. When the shoe fits

  12. The Tower of the Spirit

  13. Flight from the Shadow

  14. Fighting Cock

  15. Monkey Mountain

  16. Symphony for a seabird

  17. Autumn floods

  18. The Turtle

  19. Duke Hwan & the Wheelwright

  20. Man is born in Tao

  21. Wholeness


 


 

Chuang Tzu Story - Duke Hwan and the Wheelwright

Duke Hwan of Khi, first in his dynasty,
sat under his canopy reading his philosophy.
And Phien the wheelwright was out in the yard
making a wheel.

Phien laid aside hammer and chisel,
climbed the steps
and said to duke Hwan,
“May I ask you, Lord,
what is this you are reading?”

Said the duke: “The experts, the authorities.”
Phien asked: “Alive or dead?”
The duke said: “Dead, a long time.”
“Then,” said the wheelwright,
“you are only reading the dirt they left behind.”

The duke replied, “What do you know about it?
You are only a wheelwright.
You had better give me a good explanation
or else you must die.”

The wheelwright said,
“Let us look at the affair from my point of view.
When I make wheels, if i go easy they fall apart,
and if I am too rough they don’t fit.
But if I am neither too easy nor too violent
they come out right,
and the work is what I want it to be.

“You cannot put this in words,
you just have to know how it is.
I cannot even tell my own son exactly how it is done,
and my own son cannot learn it from me.
Se here I am, seventy years old, still making wheels!

The men of old took all they really knew
with them to the grave.
And so, Lord, what you are reading there
is only the dirt they left behind them.”