1. There is a fool who is afraid of his own shadow and his own footprints. He walked faster and faster in order to get rid of footprints and shadows. But he didn't know that no matter how fast he walked, the shadow never left his heel; He doesn't know that the more he walks, the more footprints he has. He doesn't understand, as long as you go to the shade, the shadow is gone; As long as you sit still, your footprints will disappear. He felt that he didn't walk fast enough, so he ran as hard as he could, and finally he was exhausted.

Zhuangzi believes that people often do things against their will because of ignorance and stupidity; If you don't do it, you will be closer to the goal. Zhuangzi was the first thinker in China who compared the relationship between man and shadow. Since then, there have been successors, such as Xunzi, who are good at reasoning and not good at metaphor. Although there are few fables in his works, he was infected by the vividness and cleverness of Zhuangzi's fables, so he reformed this fable: there was a fool named Juan Shuliang who walked on a moonlit night and looked down at his own shadow and thought it was a ghost; He looked up and saw his hair again. He thought it was a charm. He ran in fear and came home, scared to death.

Zhuangzi explained the outlook on life of "natural inaction" by "staying in the shadows and resting in the shadows". Unlike Zhuangzi, Xunzi used this fable to show that all ghosts and gods are self-deception. Xunzi was the most thorough atheist in the pre-Qin period. In the present words, he is the most practical and rational person. Regarding ghosts and gods, his famous saying is that "gentlemen think of literature and people think of God".

Contrary to Xunzi's transformation of Zhuangzi's fable to illustrate atheism, Gambao in Jin Dynasty transformed Zhuangzi's fable into a myth in Searching for the Gods: there is a monster called stork in the water, which contains the shadow of shooting people's sand, making people sick and die.