The human heart is insufficient and the snake swallows the elephant is a Chinese phrase, whose pinyin is rén xīn bù zú shé tūn xiàng. It is a metaphor that if people's desires are not satisfied, they will do something like a snake swallowing an elephant; it means that if a person is greedy, he will be harmed by his own desires.

It is a metaphor for being too greedy and the result is counterproductive.

From "The Classic of Mountains and Seas: Hai Nei Nan Jing": "The Ba snake eats an elephant, and its bones are born when it is three years old."

Original text:

The Ba snake eats an elephant. An elephant comes out of its bones at the age of three. A gentleman obeys it and has no heart problems. It is snake green, red and black. One said: black snake with green head, west of rhinoceros.

Translation:

There is a kind of snake named Ba Snake, which can eat elephants. Every time an elephant is eaten, it takes three years to spit out the bones. If a virtuous person is lucky enough to eat snake meat, he will be free from heart and abdominal diseases for the rest of his life. The skin of the Ba snake is a mixture of green, yellow, red and black, making it colorful. It is also said that the Ba snake has a black body and a cyan head, and generally lives in the west of where rhinos live.

Grammar complex sentence pattern; used as object, attributive, clause; has derogatory meaning.

Extended information:

As a famous saying to persuade the world, the versions circulated in different places are different, but it persuades people to be content and happy and to a certain extent keep their roots. The purpose of each is the same, and the philosophical education contained in it has enlightened generations of people in history, and is still of great significance in correctly guiding people's consciousness in the current materialistic society.

People can be self-disciplined and self-abstinent, and not do things that harm others, benefit themselves, harm the world, or push themselves too far, bring themselves to blame, and suffer bad deeds. This is more effective than praying to God and worshiping Buddha to protect themselves from corruption, murder, and extravagance. Unparalleled.

The rich cultural connotation condensed by "the human heart is not enough, the snake swallows the elephant" has long become a bright flower among the hundreds of flowers of our Chinese nation's cultural heritage, and has become one of the magic weapons for us to persuade each other and self-motivate, and to conduct ourselves and do things in the world. .

Baidu Encyclopedia-The snake swallows the elephant if the human heart is insufficient