Quan Shi Shi — An Anonymous Poem of Moral Exhortation
This is a short, anonymous verse from the vast and largely undated Chinese literature of moral exhortation (勸世文, "words to exhort the world") — poems and tracts, composed across many centuries and circulated at every level of Chinese religious life, that press the ordinary reader toward honesty, charity, and inward cultivation rather than fortune-telling or the search for outside help. It survives here in the Chinese Wikisource transcription under the general heading of "Daoist Classics" (道教典籍), without a Daozang canon number, a named author, or a fixed date; nothing in its transmission tells us more about its origin than the poem's own text.
The verse shifts meter as it goes: it opens in the terse four-character clauses of old scripture-verse, loosens into five-character couplets at its center, and closes in the freer seven-character line of popular ballad and exhortation literature. The movement in sense follows the movement in form — from a cosmic warning (Heaven's watching eye, swift retribution) through plain instruction (drink little, covet nothing, wrong no one) to a closing riddle: a speaker sought at the world's end and found nowhere there, because what the poem asks for in the end is not a person to find but a heart to tend.
One word is worth watching. Fangbian 方便, "ease" or "convenience," opens the poem's first stanza ("the smallest good... brings others ease") and returns in its last ("give ease to others"), framing the whole exhortation. In Buddhist usage the same compound names upaya, skillful or expedient means — a resonance this popular verse likely carries without naming it, in the same loose Buddhist-Daoist idiom that gives it, a few lines in, the sutra-recitation phrase "listen closely" (諦聽).
Translated for the Good Works Library directly from the classical Chinese, printed in full below the translation. A live web search could not be completed at the time of preparation; the standard bibliographies of Daoist texts in Western translation record no entry for this poem. We know of no published English translation of it.
Translation
A hair's breadth of good
brings others ease.
A hair's breadth of wrong—
I urge you, do it not.
Let food and clothing come as circumstance brings them,
and happiness comes of itself.
Why reckon your fate?
Why consult the diviner?
To cheat others is calamity;
to forgive others is good fortune.
Heaven's eye is bright and watchful;
its retribution comes swift.
Listen closely to my words—
spirits honor them, and ghosts submit.
Drink little of wine that cheats the heart-mind;
covet not wealth got by wrong.
Good fortune comes of compassion and goodness;
calamity comes of cunning and treachery.
Betray not the Three Luminaries, betray not your fellow man;
cheat not the spirits, cheat not the poor.
If someone asks me the way of cultivation—
only tend the field of the heart-mind, and nourish this body.
To the world's end and the sea's furthest corner, people seek me out;
travel to the world's end, and you find no one there.
Practice loyalty, filial duty, righteousness, and compassion — give ease to others;
you need not seek me: the real comes of itself.
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. The source is verse throughout, in three meters that shift as the poem proceeds — four-character clauses for its first three and a half stanzas, five-character couplets at its center, seven-character couplets to its close. This translation keeps the source's own paragraph breaks as stanza breaks and gives each Chinese clause its own English line.
Before the claim below was written, a genuine translation-status check was performed. Both local bibliographies of Daoist texts in Western-language translation — Komjathy's Daoist Texts in Translation and the 2023 Purple Cloud survey — were searched for the Chinese title 勸世詩, its pinyin Quan Shi Shi, and near variants; neither records an entry for this poem, and neither lists any translated title in the alphabetical range around it. A live web search could not be completed at the time of preparation, so this check rests on the local bibliographies alone. We know of no published English translation of this poem, and make no claim to be first; a poem this short, and of a genre so widely copied in Chinese popular-morality anthologies, may well exist in English somewhere we have not been able to check.
A note on one term. Fangbian 方便, "ease" or "convenience," bookends the poem as described above. No character in the source was illegible or unencoded.
Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted translation and editorial work.
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Source Text: 勸世詩
Classical Chinese text as transcribed on Chinese Wikisource, where the poem is catalogued under Daoist Classics (道教典籍). Presented complete for reference, study, and verification alongside the English translation above.
勸世詩
一毫之善，與人方便。一毫之惡，勸君莫作。
衣食隨緣，自然快樂。算什麼命？問什麼卜？
欺人是禍，饒人是福。天眼昭昭，報應甚速。
諦聽吾言，神欽鬼伏。
少飲欺心酒，休貪不義財。
福因慈善得，禍向巧姦來。
不負三光不負人，不欺神道不欺貧。
有人問我修行法，只種心田養此身。
天涯海角人求我，行到天涯不見人。
忠孝義慈行方便，不須求我自然真。
Source Colophon
The Chinese text follows the Chinese Wikisource transcription of this poem (article 勸世詩, revision of 12 July 2009), inspected from a witness copy captured on 8 August 2026. Chinese Wikisource transcriptions are published under CC BY-SA 4.0 and the GFDL; the poem itself, anonymous and undated, is in the public domain. The wiki header, category tag, and license template have been removed; the text is otherwise complete and unaltered.
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