Old Man Avoids Shame

I like this. Teems clarity. I bumped into it in McLuhan's The Extensions of Man (this isn't McLuhan's pen; he suggests he found it in Werner Heisenberg's The Physicist 's Conception of Nature, which McLuhan describes as an example of the new quantum physicist whose over-all awareness of forms suggests to thim that we would do well to stand aside from most of them. He points out that technical change alters not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation. Page sixty-nine of an old paperback:


As Tzu-Gung was traveling through the regions north of the river Han, he saw an old man working in his vegetable garden. He had dug an irrigation ditch. The man would descend into a well, fetch up a vessel of water in his arms and pour it out into the ditch. While his efforts were tremendous the results appeared to be very meager.

Tzu-Gung said, "there is a way whereby  you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can irrigate a hundred ditches in one day, and whereby you can do much with little effort. Would you not like to hear of it?"

Then the gardener stood up, looked at him and said, "And what would that be?" Tzu-Gung replied, "You take a wooden lever, weighted at the back and light in the front. In this way you can bring up water so quickly that it just gushes out. This is called a draw-well."

Then anger rose up in the old man's face, and he said, "I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine. He who does his work like a machine grows a heart of a machine, and he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity. He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul. Uncertainty in the strivings of the soul is something which does not agree with honest sense. It is not that I do not know of such things; I am ashamed to use them."