4 ideas
A craftsman presents King Mu with a man of leather, wood, glue and lacquer that walks, sings and dances; when it winks at the royal concubines, the enraged king orders the craftsman executed until the figure is taken apart and shown to be only materials. The oldest artificial-man tale turns not on awe at the machine but on jealousy, because the king treats convincing behavior as real intent and reacts to it as a rival.
When the king has the automaton's heart removed it can no longer speak, when the liver goes it cannot see, and when the kidneys go it cannot walk. Capacities are pinned to specific internal parts, so a being is understood as an assembly whose functions can be switched off one component at a time, and a made thing can therefore match a born one.
Once reassured, King Mu marvels that human skill can equal the work of the maker of all things. The story holds that the line between the natural and the artificial is a matter of skill, not kind, since assembled materials can reproduce the outward signs of life closely enough to be mistaken for a person.
A man of Qi is so afraid that heaven will collapse and the earth give way that he cannot eat or sleep, until a friend reassures him that the sky is only piled-up air and the earth only packed soil. The parable names needless anxiety about unlikely catastrophes beyond one's control. The later debate in the text adds that since no one can know whether heaven and earth will perish, it is better not to trouble the mind with the question at all.