華 品

I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man's uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious. This is a charity that hides a multitude of sins. The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own castoff griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion. From what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing? Under what latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light? Who is that intemperate and brutal man whom we would redeem? If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even — for that is the seat of sympathy — he forthwith sets about reforming — the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers — and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it — that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.

《法句經》第54偈：

奇草芳花，不逆風熏；近道敷開，德人逼香。

此偈意謂道德的香氣更勝於花香，能遍及於各個方向，不似花香會受風向的影響。梭羅說，他不以慈悲和正直來衡量一個人，他認為那只是人的莖和葉 －－ 他要的是人的花和果！與充滿花果香的「德人」交往應是如沐春風，或似春風化雨；給人勇氣而非悲情，給人健康及輕快(ease)而非病恙(disease)。若是我們的慈善團體多的是這樣的人，吳念真的妹妹也不會覺得無處可逃，寧可一個人忍受痛苦。台灣佛教徒所強調的大悲心，其實只是佛教教義的莖和葉。讓這些在世界各地救苦救難的菩薩們最痛心的不在苦難的世人，而在他們自己的病恙。若是有一天他的病體得癒，春天走向他、晨光重臨他的床榻，他會毫不猶豫地向他的同修道別，連一聲抱歉也沒有。