Chinese Æsop:

WHEN Confucius was born a unicorn appeared and spat out a piece of jade on which was written: 'Son of the water crystal, one day you shall be uncrowned king! ' He grew up and was nine feet tall. He had black hair and an ugly face. His eyes protrude and his nose was turned up. His lips did not cover his teeth and his ears had large holes. He studied with great application and was well versed in all things. Thus he became a saint. One day, with his favourite disciple Yen Hui, he climbed to the highest summit of the Great Mountain (Tai Shan). He could see as far as the Yangtse River in the south. 'Can you see,' he asked Yen Hui, 'What it is that is glistening outside the city gate of Wu?' Yin Hui looked closely, strained his eyes, and said: is a piece of white cloth.' 'No,' said Confucius. 'It is a white horse.' And when they sent someone to find out it really was so. The Great Mountain is a good thousand miles distant from the capital...

In the Chow dynasty lived Chung Yew, named also Tszeloo, who because his family was poor, usually ate herbs and coarse pulse. "Alas!" said Tszeloo, "although I was a scholar, yet my parents were poor; and how was I to nourish them?" Exhausted he travelled more than a hundred le to procure rice for his parents. Pleasantly he endured the toil, and exerted his utmost strength without any commendation. Afterwards, when his parents were dead, he went south to the country of Tsoo, where he was made commander of a hundred companies of chariots; there he became rich, storing up grain in myriads of measures, reclining upon cushions, and eating food served to him in numerous dishes; but sighing, he said, "although I should now desire to eat coarse herbs and bring rice for my parents, it cannot be!"

1.  The ancestry of the sage And have you foreigners surnames as well? This question has often been put to me by Chinese. It marks the ignorance which belongs to the people of all that is external to themselves, and the pride of antiquity which enters largely as an element into their character. If such a pride could in any case be justified, we might allow it to the family of the K'ung, the descendants of Confucius. In the reign K’ang-he, twenty-one centuries and a half after the death of the sage, they amounted to eleven thousand males. But their ancestry is carried back through a period of equal extent, and genealogical tables are common, in which the descent of Confucius is traced down from Hwang-te, the inventor of the cycle, B.C. 2637. The more moderate writers, however, content themselves with exhibiting his ancestry back to the commencement of the Chow dynasty, B.C. 1121. Among the relatives of the tyrant Chow, the last emperor of the Yin dynasty, was an elder brother, by ...

THE BIOGRAPHY OF WANG YANG-MING Ancestry and Birth The Teacher was named Shou-jen ( 守仁 ) and Po-an ( 伯安).1 His –ancestor, at the time of the Western Chin dynasty was Wang Hsi-chih (王羲之), a general of the right division of the army; and the ancestral home was at Shanyin in the province of Chekiang. Twenty-three generations later, Wang Shou, an official of rank, moved the home to Yüyao, also in Chekiang. At the time when the Ming dynasty first came into power, Wang Kang, who lived six generations before Wang Yang-ming, lost his life in the service of his emperor, at the hands of the aborigines in Canton Province. His son, Wang Yen-ta, wrapped his father's remains in sheep's skin and took them back to Yüyao. A censor named Kuo Shun reported this to the emperor, who had a temple erected in honor of the father at Tseng in the province of Canton. In the fourth generation Wang Yu-chun was requested by Emperor Yung Lo to become an official, but refused, styling himself "th...