The lost sheep at the crossroads

One of Yang Zi’s neighbours, who lost a sheep, sent all his men out to find it, and asked Yang Zi’s servant to join in the search.

”What!” exclaimed Yang Zi (Yang Zhu): ”Do you need all those men to find one sheep?”
“There are so many paths it may have taken,” the neighbour explained.

When his servant returned, Yang Zi asked him: ”Well, did you find the sheep?”
He answered that they had not. Then Yang Zi asked how they had failed to find it.
”There are too many paths,” replied the servant. “One path leads to another, and we didn’t know which to take, so we had to come back.”

At that Yang Zi looked very thoughtful. He was silent for a long time, and did not smile all day. His pupils were surprised.
”A sheep is a trifle,” they said, “and this wasn’t even yours. Why should you stop talking and smiling?”
Yang Zi did not answer, and his pupils were puzzled.

One of them, Meng Sunyang, went out to describe what had happened to Xindou Zi.
”When there are too many paths,” said Xindou Zi, “a man cannot find his sheep. When a student has too many interests, he fritters away his time. The source of all knowledge is one, but the branches of learning are many. Only by returning to the primal truth can a man avoid losing his way. You are Yang Zi’s pupil and study from him, yet you seem to have failed completely to understand him.”

Philosophical Notes

This ancient Chinese fable is a timeless critique of intellectual chaos and the obscuring of fundamental truths. It warns that:

• The proliferation of paths (ideas, choices, methods) can lead to the loss of the original goal or truth (the sheep).
• Excessive complexity and fragmentation make the pursuit of unity or a single correct answer futile or incredibly difficult.
• Intellectual disputes and the endless branching of schools of thought can obscure the core Dao or principle they originally sought to understand.
• Navigating a world of infinite choices and interpretations requires wisdom and focus to avoid getting hopelessly lost.

Yang Zhu’s sorrowful reaction underscores the story’s message: the multiplication of divergent paths is not just a practical obstacle to finding a lost sheep, but a profound philosophical tragedy representing the loss of unity, clarity, and access to the fundamental Way in the face of human intellectual complexity and disputation. It’s a lament for a simpler, more unified understanding that seems impossible to recover once the paths have diverged.