Legge, The Writings of Kwang-Tze, Book XXXIII part 7: Hui Shih’s paradoxes (1891)

Companion source

Source: Internet Archive mlbd.textsoftaoismsac0000unse; local OCR excerpt .txt, lines 10230–10320 of the archive’s _djvu.txt, retrieved 2026-09-08. Metadata: James Legge, The Texts of Tâoism, Part II, Sacred Books of the East vol. 40 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), Book XXXIII “Thien Hsiâ”, paragraph 7. Extraction: archive.org OCR; clean English with footnote markers. Rights: public domain.

Source digest

Legge renders the debaters’ theses, including “The shadow of a flying bird does not (itself) move” and “Swift as the arrowhead is, there is a time when it is neither flying nor at rest”, with his note that these are riddles or paradoxes. For this project, this is the pre-1901 English of the Chinese arrow beside the Chinese text.

Passage anchors

• Archive lines 10298–10299: the bird’s shadow and the arrowhead.
• Archive line 10242: the opening of paragraph 7 on Hui Shih.

Coverage and limits

Reading level passage for paragraph 7.