Chapter 45: , Hamlet says

Chapter 12i,

Hamlet says……

Liu Guozong

Among all things in heaven and earth, only humans are the most precious. Shakespeare, in his renowned work *Hamlet*, has Hamlet say: 'What a marvelous masterpiece humanity is! How noble its reason! How great its power! How beautiful its bearing! How graceful its conduct! In conduct, how like an angel! In wisdom, how like a deity! The essence of the universe! The pinnacle of all things!'

This is Shakespeare's summary of humanity's goodness and beauty; he has summed up all human virtues. It is precisely by leveraging these virtues that humanity has created civilization and pushed the world toward a bright future. But Laozi also said: 'Under heaven everyone knows beauty as beauty, and thus there is ugliness; everyone knows goodness as goodness, and thus there is not goodness. Therefore, being and non-being produce each other; difficulty and ease complement each other; length and shortness shape each other;...'

This person has both a good side and a bad side.

One could say: however good humanity is, that's how evil it is!

This person can do good deeds, and can also do bad deeds! They can exhaust all good deeds, and can also carry out wicked deeds to the extreme! Killing, arson, **, **, corruption, deceit, feigning ignorance, deceiving the world and stealing fame, and so on—can any of these bad deeds be unrelated to humanity?

Laozi, over two thousand years ago, clearly told us: when humanity comes to know beauty, it begins to do evil.

The era in which Laozi lived was precisely an era of slaughter.

Feudal lords warred, corpses filled the fields. Where could there be any talk of human goodness?

Lu Xun said: Human history is nothing but a history of killing!; In his *Diary of a Madman* he said: 'Over two thousand years of history!' I stayed up half the night, and every page was filled with the two characters for 'killing'.

History tells us: if there is no killing, it is not history; this is my impression from reading one of the four great condemnatory novels of the Ming-Qing era, *The Travels of Lao Can*.

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