Wang opened him with the blade of insight. “You do not get rid of desire by sitting on it. That is what your thoughts of annihilation are—desire gone to mildew. Only they think in terms of annihilation who are extremely conscious of self. Abandon your methods. Desire neither life nor death, and eat red meat.” “I fear I have sadly misinterpreted the wisdom of the Sages,” Blackwood faltered, and actually the moon glowed in a tear on his cheek. “This is the beginning, and only the beginning, of wisdom,” replied Wang. “Retrace your steps, give rein to the passions of a man, and in ten years’ time you may take some gentle exercise in self-forgetfulness.” With this somewhat paradoxical statement he seemed to close himself to all outside influence, and the spray of the moonlit cascade gradually wetted his old bald head. “It seems likely,” remarked Sir Richard, “that Hsiao will presently be altogether forgetful of his body, since the goblet in his hand contains about a pint and a half of your really very powerful and delicious wine, and that is the third I have seen him consume.” “In the days when Hsiao thought in terms of good and evil, of restraint and excess, he used to be very sick,” Yuan replied. “Rid the mind of purely relative distinctions between drunk and sober, and you will not be troubled with the gout.” “Thank you for that recipe,” said Quentin. “Wang Li does not take wine, I notice,” said Lord Sombrewater. “That is because he requires no aids to contemplation.” “Then why does Hsiao take it?” asked Ruby. “He is an artist, which is a weakness of the will, and he needs some attachment to the illusions of sense.” Lord Sombrewater had been deeply pondering. “It seems to me,” he said, “that there is something to be argued for our western habit of life. You here—I do not speak of the mass of your countrymen, who present, if I may say so, the appearance of an immense swarm of toiling insects—you in this valley have abandoned the world to its fate. You have abandoned, so it seems to me, much that makes men specifically men, and you have become the abodes of great impersonal forces. Sometimes when I talk with you I feel I am talking with the nightwind, or the moonlight, or the spraying waterfall. God-intoxicated, you have given up your organisms to be the dwellingplace of the great unknown principle of the universe, and any pleasure, any joy, that is in you, is its.” “Precisely,” said Yuan. “Our bodies, to a more or less extent, according to the measure of our renunciation, become temples of godhead. Using your western phraseology, we have come strangely near to Christian doctrine.”