Once students found Confucius by the river. The teacher was sitting on the shore and was looking closely at the water, observing how it ran.
Students were surprised and asked:
“Teacher, what’s the use to observe how water flows? There’s nothing special in it, that’s how it always was and will be”.
Confucius replied:
“You’re right: this is the most common phenomenon, it always took place and will continue, and everybody understands it.
But not everybody understands that the flow of water is similar to a teaching. I was looking at the water and was thinking about it. Waters flow incessantly, they flow day and night until they merge together in a large ocean. Similarly, the true teaching of our fathers, grand-fathers, and grand-grand-fathers from the beginning of the world was flowing without stop for us.
Let us also ensure that the true teaching flows further, let us work to pass it to those who will live after us so that they, following our example, will pass it to their descendants, and so on, until the end of the world.”
This work is a translation and has a separate copyright status to the applicable copyright protections of the original content.| Original: |
This work was published before January 1, 1927, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. |
|---|---|
| Translation: | The standard Wikisource licenses apply to the original work of the contributor(s). 
This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.  The Terms of use of the Wikimedia Foundation require that GFDL-licensed text imported after November 2008 must also be dual-licensed with another compatible license. "Content available only under GFDL is not permissible" (§7.4). This does not apply to non-text media. 
This work is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, which allows free use, distribution, and creation of derivatives, so long as the license is unchanged and clearly noted, and the original author is attributed. |
This article is issued from Wikisource. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.