The world is a dream, the past and present a play, and life a bubble of morning dew, changing in an instant. Glory and decline, life and death, fortune and misfortune are all fleeting flashes of light. The rain may fall bleakly, only for auspicious clouds to fill the sky in the blink of an eye. The world is ever-changing, and both good times and hard journeys are shaped by fate.
Farmers and shepherd boys may have no power to change the world, yet they can admire flowers and gaze at the moon, sing at the top of their lungs or weep their hearts out, and savor the peace within. Is such detachment not a kind of happiness? And yet some fools try to shake a tree like an ant or reach beyond their station like a sparrow longing to be a swan, only to destroy themselves in the end. Heaven and earth mourn with them as the gloom of the underworld spreads across the human realm, leaving people bewildered by life’s true meaning.
