Chapter 25, Part 10A - Chuang Tzu

Little Understanding said to Great Impartial Accord, "What is meant by the term `community words'?"

Great Impartial Accord said, " `Community words' refers to the combining of ten surnames and a hundred given names into a single social unit. Differences are combined into a sameness; samenesses are broken up into differences. Now we may point to each of the hundred parts of a horse's body and never come up with a `horse' - yet here is the horse, tethered right before our eyes. So we take the hundred parts and set up the term `horse.'

"Thus it is that hills and mountains pile up one little layer on another to reach loftiness; the Yangtze and the Yellow River combine stream after stream to achieve magnitude; and the Great Man combines and brings together things to attain generality.

"Therefore, when things enter his mind from the outside, there is a host to receive them but not to cling to them; and when things come forth from his mind, there is a mark to guide them but not to constrain them.
~ Burton Watson translation via Terebess Asia Online ~

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