' Without passions '...

Hui Tzu said to Chuang Tzu: "Are there, then, men who have no passions?"

Chuang Tzu replied: "Certainly."

"But if a man has no passions," argued Hui Tzu, "what is it that makes him a man?"

"Tao," replied Chuang Tzu, "gives him his expression, and God gives him his form. How should he not be a man?"

"If, then, he is a man," said Hui Tzu, "how can he be without passions?"

"What you mean by passions," answered Chuang Tzu, "is not what I mean. By a man without passions I mean one who does not permit good and evil to disturb his internal economy, but rather falls in with whatever happens, as a matter of course, and does not add to the sum of his mortality."



-Chuang Tzu
in Lionel Giles
Musings of a Chinese Mystic, 1909, p. 87-88
http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/mcm/mcm14.htm