Yinguo Zhili Ge — A Popular Verse on Karma and Virtue

This is a short anonymous verse song, preserved among the Daoist texts of the Chinese Wikisource transcription of the Daoist Canon and its wider literature. No catalogue heading survives with it — no named author, no assigned scroll — and no Daozang (DZ) number could be confirmed for this piece. Its proverbs and cadence place it within the vast late-imperial Chinese tradition of shanshu 善書, "morality books": short, cheaply printed exhortations meant to be read, copied, and given away. Nothing in the text fixes a date more exactly; it may be Ming, Qing, or later.

The song moves in two meters. Eight couplets of seven-character lines open with a run of images from farm and household — bent wood forced straight, a wolf raised as a watchdog, a white egret dyed black, a crow powdered white, bitter goldthread coated sweet, fruit picked before its season — each showing that a thing's true nature returns no matter how it is forced or disguised. The verse turns next to plainer counsel on kind speech and the merit of circulating morality books, then closes with four couplets of four-character lines, in the terser cadence of the classics, gathering the teaching into a handful of maxims.

A note on the title word. Yinguo 因果, "cause and effect," never recurs in the body of the song — yet the whole opening chain of images enacts it without naming it. Ink will not hold on an egret and force will not ripen a fruit, because in each case the outcome is already set by what came before; the poem argues its title's doctrine before the reader ever needs the word for it.

Translated for the Good Works Library directly from the classical Chinese printed in full below. A search of the standard bibliographies of Daoist texts in Western-language translation found no record of this song; a live web search could not be completed at the time of preparation. We know of no published English translation of the Yinguo Zhili Ge.

Translation

Bent wood, straightened by force, will curve again in the end;
raise a wolf as a watchdog, and it makes a poor guardian of the house.

Dye a white egret with ink, and the black will not last;
wash a crow with powder, and the white will not shine.

Coat bitter goldthread as thick as you like, and it stays bitter;
force the picking of melon or fruit, and it will not turn sweet.

The good do not do what the wicked do;
the wicked find it hard to form bonds with the good.

Morality books, wherever you find them, are worth reading;
honor them, I urge you, and do not take them lightly.

Read one through, then pass it on, and your blessing only grows;
a kindness that costs nothing yields merit without end.

A single kind word warms three winters through;
a single cruel word cuts like cold in the sixth month.

If you truly wish to enjoy blessings beyond measure,
store up hidden virtue, and store up less silver.

While a person lives in this world,
doing good is the greatest joy.

In all things, seek fairness;
virtue is the root, wealth only the branch.

Practice every good deed;
do no evil at all.

Delight in holding a good heart,
and the Nine Blessings, the Threefold Abundance, will be yours.

Colophon

This Good Works Translation was prepared for the Ethics and Response shelf of the Good Works Library. The English was translated independently from the classical Chinese text printed below; no existing English rendering was consulted at any point, since none could be found. The song's two verse forms — eight couplets of seven-character lines, then four couplets of four-character lines — are kept as twelve two-line stanzas, one stanza for each couplet of the source, with each Chinese clause becoming one English line.

Before the claim above was written, a genuine translation-status check was performed. The standard bibliographies of Daoist texts in Western-language translation — Komjathy's Daoist Texts in Translation and the 2023 Purple Cloud survey of Daoist texts in Western languages — were searched under the Chinese title, its pinyin romanization, and related phrases, and returned no record of this song. A live web search could not be completed at the time of preparation, so no wider check of the internet could be added to this one. We therefore make no claim to be first: we simply know of no published English translation of the Yinguo Zhili Ge, and state this as the limit of what could be confirmed, not as a certainty.

Three notes on the source. In the second couplet, 鷺鶿 is read as 鷺鷥, "white egret" — the couplet's own logic pairs a bird dyed black against a crow (烏鴉) powdered white, and 鷺鶿 as written does not by itself name a colour, so the reading follows the parallelism and the sense. In the third couplet, 黃蓮 is read as 黃連, huanglian, the proverbially bitter root Coptis chinensis; 蓮 and 連 share the reading lian and the substitution is common in popular printing. 密濺, literally "thickly splashed," is rendered by its general sense of coating or steeping, since the source does not specify what is applied or how. In the closing line, 九如三多 names two traditional blessing-formulas rather than a single image: the "Nine Ru" (九如), nine wishes for long life and abundance drawn from the "Tianbao" ode of the Book of Odes, and the "Three Abundances" (三多), the wish for many blessings, long life, and many sons associated with the border-guard of Hua's benediction in the Zhuangzi. Both are kept as capitalized terms of art in the translation rather than expanded into paraphrase.

Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted translation and editorial work.

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Source Text: 因果至理歌

Classical Chinese text of this song, in the Chinese Wikisource transcription. Presented complete for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above.

因果至理歌

曲木危直終必彎，養狼當犬看家難。

墨染鷺鶿黑不久，粉洗烏鴉白不鮮。

密濺黃蓮終須苦，強摘瓜果不能甜。

善人不作惡人事，惡人難結善人緣。

善書到處都須閱，望君敬重莫等閒。

閱過送人更獲福，惠而不費功無邊。

良言一句三冬暖，惡語傷人六月寒。

果真欲享無量福，多積陰德少積錢。

人生在世，為善最樂。

盡要公平，德本財末。

眾善奉行，諸惡莫作。

喜存善心，九如三多。

Source Colophon

The Chinese text follows the Chinese Wikisource transcription of this text (article 因果至理歌, revision of 12 July 2009), inspected from a witness copy captured on 8 August 2026. It is catalogued among Daoist texts on Chinese Wikisource; no Daozang (DZ) catalogue number could be confirmed for this piece. Chinese Wikisource transcriptions are published under CC BY-SA 4.0 and the GFDL; the text itself is traditional and in the public domain. The wiki header and license templates have been removed; the text is otherwise complete and unaltered.

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