The next paragraph of the same book contains another story about two ancient men, both deformed, who, when looking at the graves on Kunlun, begin to feel in their own frames the symptoms of approaching dissolution. One says to the other, “Do you dread it?” and gets the reply, “No. Why should I dread it? Life is a borrowed thing. The living frame thus borrowed is but so much dust. Life and death are like day and night.”

In every birth, it would thus appear, there is, somehow, a repetition of what it is said, as we have seen, took place at “the grand beginning of all things,” when out of the primal nothingness, the Tao somehow appeared, and there was developed through its operation the world of things⁠—material things and the material body of man, which enshrines or enshrouds an immaterial spirit. This returns to the Tao that gave it, and may be regarded indeed as that Tao operating in the body during the time of life, and in due time receives a new embodiment.