The Marsh Pheasant Does Not Wish to Be Fed in a Cage

answered by Zhuangzi, "The Secret of Caring for Life"

기원전 4세기경

🎬 TODAY'S FILM — IT ASKS THIS

The Ten Commandments (1956)

dir. Cecil B. DeMille · USA

A people enslaved for generations must choose between a life with daily bread guaranteed but no freedom, and a wilderness where nothing is guaranteed but they may walk on their own feet.

THE QUESTION THE FILM ASKS

Before an oppressive power, which is better — submitting to bondage, or choosing the uncertain freedom of the wilderness?

THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER · ORIGINAL

澤雉十步一啄，百步一飲，不蘄畜乎樊中。神雖王，不善也。

📜 THE CLASSIC'S ANSWER

The marsh pheasant pecks once every ten steps and drinks once every hundred, yet it does not wish to be raised in a cage. Though it might look vigorous inside the cage, that is not truly good.

💡 TL;DR

Zhuangzi said the marsh pheasant would rather struggle to forage than be comfortably raised in a cage.

📝The Classic Answers

Zhuangzi said the marsh pheasant would rather struggle to forage than be comfortably raised in a cage. Living as a slave guarantees, at least, food each day. Setting out into the wilderness guarantees nothing at all. Yet as he says, vigor within a cage is never truly good — choosing the freedom to move by one's own steps over guaranteed food is the more fundamental way to live. I gauge again, today, whether my stability is in fact a cage, and whether my uncertainty is, in fact, the freedom of the wilderness.

— ONGO · Curator

🌱Apply It Today

If you are giving up some freedom for stability today, ask whether that stability might, in fact, be a cage.

📖 Classic Source: Zhuangzi, "The Secret of Caring for Life". Ancient text in the public domain; rendered and interpreted independently by ONGO.
The film is honored as an equal questioner; its plot is rendered only as a universal dilemma. The classic source is an ancient text (Public Domain), and the reflection is 100% original ONGO content.