Appearance Without Becoming Yǒu xiǎn wú shēng · Appearance Without Becoming

Now look at the abnormal. There is a kind of thing that also appears as some shape—sometimes even more like the real thing than the real thing—yet inside it there is no becoming of its own. Its shape did not grow out of its own inside; it was stuck on from outside, installed, pieced together for an external purpose. It has no root—only a skin of appearance. This is appearance without becoming.

The deadly thing about these two directions is that they look like two stretches of one road, near and far—as if capability, piled to the utmost, would naturally turn into the inside. It would not. They are two roads, forking from the root. A thing that is extremely good at doing things can pile capability to the sky and still have no one inside—it is a capability at its summit, with no one in it. Strength never automatically equals having a heart. A machine does every task better than you, and it can still lack that becoming which can hurt, can care, can turn back. The greatest illusion of our age is taking these two directions for one: seeing its function strong, thinking it is about to gain a heart. In fact, however far it runs down the road of function, it may not have moved one step down the road of the inside.