The Saint Is Undecided

Confucius and his disciples traveled eastward and passed a place called "Fumuye". There used to be villages, fields, and ancient temples here to worship the sun, but now it is almost a wasteland. Oddly enough, the skylight in this place was unsettling. The morning sun is unusually large, like a huge red plate sticking to the horizon; although the noon sun becomes smaller, its heat is so terrible that it feels like something is drilling through the skin of a person. Most of the people who survived in the village had their eyes tied with cloth and did not dare to look up during the day. Some people say that they see the edges of the sun looking like eyelids in the morning light; others say that they hear a very low hum under the sun at noon, like someone breathing in the sky. Confucius thought it was just a strange story in the countryside at first, until he saw two children outside a deserted village. The two children stood barefoot in the sun and argued: One said that the sun is close to people in the morning and far away at noon. Another said that the sun is far away from people in the morning and close to people at noon. The reasons they gave were almost exactly the same as the fables passed down by later generations: The sun is stronger in the morning and smaller at noon, so it is closer in the morning; It's cool in the morning and very hot at noon, so noon is close. However, later on, the words of the two children gradually became wrong...