Be Careful

Lingyuan said:

Learners must be careful about what they take up and what they leave aside; they cannot be unthinking in what they say and do.

People of few words are not necessarily fools; glib people are not necessarily wise. Rustic, simple people are not necessarily unreasonable or rebellious; those who are servile and obedient are not necessarily loyal and true.

Therefore a teacher does not understand peoples states on the basis of words, and does not select students on the basis of ideas.

Who among the mendicants in the world does not want to seek enlightenment? Yet those who are enlightened and see reality are hardly one out of a hundred or a thousand. Even those who are cultivating themselves and diligently practicing, storing learning and planting virtue, need thirty years to accomplish it. If there happens to be one thing wrong and the community reject you, then you can never be established in all your life.

Even jewels that light the way for a chariot cannot be flawless, even a gem worth many cities cannot be free from defect. How can there be no faults in ordinary beings with feelings? Even Confucius, who was a sage, still said he studied the Book of Changes for fifty years before he became free from gross errors.

A scripture says, “Do not fear the arising of thoughts just beware of being slow to become aware of it.” How fitting this is—for who since the sages has ever been free from error?

It is a matter of one who really knows developing it completely—then the being is not wasted. So it is said, “skillful carving is a function of following curves and angles; whether crooked or straight, there is  no wasted material. Good riding is in the proper way of meeting situations of danger and ease; neither the slow nor the swift lose their nature.”

Since things and animals are like this, so schooled people be. If you follow sentiments of like and dislike in your actions, leave those who are different form you and join those who are like you, this is due to laying out curves and lines without sting and marker, or assessing weight without a balance. Although you many have a fine touch, you cannot be entirely free from error.

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the Book of Changes is the Tao Te Ching. This is talking of the travels in the desert; Abram was 100 before he became Abraham and fathered nations. Mosses spent 40 years wandering in the desert, even Christ disappeared from society for a decade.