a finger a little different from the rest of the world, and so he wants to be cured, and will think nothing of travelling from Shin to So—­a distance of a thousand miles—­for the purpose.  To be sure, men are very susceptible and keenly alive to a sense of shame; and in this they are quite right.  The feeling of shame at what is wrong is the commencement of virtue.  The perception of shame is inborn in men; but there are two ways of perceiving shame.  There are some men who are sensible of shame for what regards their bodies, but who are ignorant of shame for what concerns their hearts; and a terrible mistake they make.  There is nothing which can be compared in importance to the heart.  The heart is said to be the lord of the body, which it rules as a master rules his house.  Shall the lord, who is the heart, be ailing and his sickness be neglected, while his servants, who are the members only, are cared for?  If the knee be lacerated, apply tinder to stop the bleeding; if the moxa should suppurate, spread a plaster; if a cold be caught, prepare medicine and garlic and gruel, and ginger wine!  For a trifle, you will doctor and care for your bodies, and yet for your hearts you will take no care.  Although you are born of mankind, if your hearts resemble those of devils, of foxes, of snakes, or of crows, rather than the hearts of men, you take no heed, caring for your bodies alone.  Whence can you have fallen into such a mistake?  It is a folly of old standing too, for it was to that that Moshi pointed when he said that to be cognizant of a deformed finger and ignore the deformities of the soul was to disregard the true order of things.  This is what it is, not to distinguish between that which is important and that which is unimportant—­to pick up a trifle and pass by something of value.  The instinct of man prompts him to prefer the great to the small, the important to the unimportant.

[Footnote 95:  Wine is almost always drunk hot.]

If a man is invited out to a feast by his relations or acquaintances, when the guests are assembled and the principal part of the feast has disappeared, he looks all round him, with the eyeballs starting out of his head, and glares at his neighbours, and, comparing the little titbits of roast fowl or fish put before them, sees that they are about half an inch bigger than those set before him; then, blowing out his belly with rage, he thinks, “What on earth can the host be about?  Master Tarubei is a guest, but so am I:  what does the fellow mean by helping me so meanly?  There must be some malice or ill-will here.”  And so his mind is prejudiced against the host.  Just be so good as to reflect upon this.  Does a man show his spite by grudging a bit of roast fowl or meat?  And yet even in such trifles as these do men show how they try to obtain what is great, and show their dislike of what is small.  How can men be conscious of shame for a deformed finger, and count it as no misfortune that their hearts are crooked?  That is how they abandon the substance for the shadow.