People who feel a profound need to justify themselves have difficulty in understanding the viewpoints of those who do not, and the Chinese who created Zen were the same kind of people as Lao Tzu, who, centuries before, had said, 'Those who justify themselves do not convince.'  For the urge to make or prove oneself right has always jiggled the Chinese sense of the ludicrous, since as both Confucians and Taoists - however different these philosophies in other ways - they have invariably appreciated the man who can 'come off it.'  To Confucius it seemed much better to be human-hearted than righteous, and to the great Taoists, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, it was obvious that one could not be right without also being wrong, because the two were as inseparable as back and front.  As Chuang Tzu said, 'Those who would have good government without its correlative misrule, and right without its correlative wrong do not understand the principles of the universe.

• ji-ji-mu-ge
• justification
• lao tzu
• taoism
• government
• understanding
• zen
• other