As you peer in, far down you see a tiny bit of sky, as deep as the blue is high above, across which slowly sail the passing clouds; then nearer stand the trees, arching overhead, as if bending to catch glimpses of themselves in that other world below; and then, nearer yet--yourself.
Emblem of the spirit of man is this little pool to Far Oriental eyes.
Subtile as the soul is the incomprehensible water; so responsive to light that it remains itself invisible; so clear that it seems illusion! Though portrayer so perfect of forms about it, all we know of the thing itself is that it is.

Through none of the five senses do we perceive it.
Neither sight, nor hearing, nor taste, nor smell, nor touch can tell us it exists; we feel it to be by the muscular sense alone, that blind and dumb analogue for the body of what consciousness is for the soul.

Only when disturbed, troubled, does the water itself become visible, and then it is but the surface that we see.

So to the Far Oriental this still little lake typifies the soul, the eventual purification of his own; a something lost in reflection, self-effaced, only the alter ego of the outer world.
For contemplation, not action, is the Far Oriental's ideal of life.

The repose of self-adjustment like that to which our whole solar system is slowly tending as its death,--this to him appears, though from no scientific deduction, the end of all existence.