Rhetorical Persuasions and Allegories
Intrigues of the Warring States
Compiled by Liu Hsiang (77–6 B.C.E.)
Pien-ch’iao and the King’ s Carbuncle
The great physician Pien-ch’iao 1 visited King Wu of Ch’in and the king showed him the carbuncle on his face. Pien-ch’iao offered to remove it.
“Your majesty’s carbuncle is forward of the ear and below the eye,” cried the king’s attendants. “If the physician should not cease soon enough while removing it he might cause your majesty to lose his hearing or the sight of an eye.”
As a result the king excused Pien-ch’iao. Pien-ch’iao was furious and threw down his flint lancet.
“Your majesty planned this by consulting with one who had knowledge, but now he revokes it on the advice of those who know nothing! If the government of Ch’in were run in the same fashion, the country would perish with your first action.”
A Dialect1 Word
Marquis Ying 2 said, “In Cheng they call jade which has not been worked ‘pure’; in Chou they call fresh-dressed rats which have not yet been preserved ‘pure.’
“A man of Chou carrying fresh-dressed rats passed a Cheng merchant and asked him if he wanted to buy some ‘pures.’ The merchant replied that he did. But when he was shown dressed rats he declined them.
“Now Lord P’ing-yüan 3 is busy getting himself a name for virtue throughout the empire. It was he who banished his own ruler, the former king of Chao, to Sha-ch’iu in order to become minister, yet rulers everywhere still respect him. This merely proves that rulers are less intelligent than the Cheng merchant. They are so dazzled by the word ‘pure’ that they do not trouble to discover what reality lies behind it.”
The Handsome Man
Tsou Chi was tall and fair of face and figure. He put on his court robes and cap and looked in the mirror.
“Am I more handsome than Mr. Tardy of Northwall?” he asked his wife.
“You are much more so,” replied his wife. “How can Mr. Tardy even be compared with you?”
Now, Mr. Tardy was a man known in Ch’i for his beauty, and Tsou Chi was not content, so he asked his concubine:
“Am I more handsome than Mr. Tardy?”
“How can there be any comparison?” she replied.
Next morning when guests, not members of his family, came and he sat with them and talked, he asked them:
“Who is the more handsome, Mr. Tardy or I?”
“Mr. Tardy is not as handsome as you are, sir,” they replied.
The day after that Mr. Tardy himself came. Tsou Chi examined him closely and decided he was not as handsome as Mr. Tardy. Then he looked in the mirror at himself and decided he was much less well favored than was Mr. Tardy. When he went to bed that night he thought about it:
“My wife thinks me handsome because she is close to me, my concubine because she fears me, and my guests because they want something of me.”
He then went to the court, had an audience with King Wei, and said:
“Your servant knows he is really not as handsome as Mr. Tardy. My wife is close to me, my concubine fears me, and my guests want something of me, so they all say I am more handsome than he. Now in the thousand square tricents of our country and in its one hundred and twenty cities there is no woman of the king or attendant who is not close to him. In the court there is no minister who does not fear him, and within the borders of the land there is no one who does not seek something of the king. If one looks at it this way, the king has been monstrously hoodwinked!”
“It is so,” said the king, and he sent down an order:
“To all ministers, officers, and citizens who will criticize the king’s faults to his face will go the highest reward; those who will remonstrate with the king in writing will be given the next highest reward; and to those who overhear criticism of the king and convey it to his ears will go the least reward.”
As soon as the order had been given, ministers came in with remonstrations; the doorway to the chamber looked like a marketplace. In a few months there were occasional petitioners, and after a year none who spoke to the king had petitions to present.
When Yen, Chao, Han, and Wei heard of this, they all came to court at Ch’i. This is what is meant by “winning a battle from the throne room.”
The Tiger and the Fox
“I hear that the North fears Chao Hsi-hsü,” said King Hsüan to his ministers. “What say you to this?”
None of them replied, except Chiang Yi, who said, “The tiger hunts all the animals of the forest and devours them, but once when he caught a fox, the fox said, ‘You dare not eat me. The Lord of Heaven ordained me chief among beasts; if you now kill me you will be disobeying the will of Heaven. If you doubt it, follow behind me through the forest and watch the animals flee when they see me.’ The tiger did indeed doubt the fox and therefore followed him. Animals saw them and fled, but the tiger did not know that the animals ran because they feared him. He thought they were afraid of the fox.
“Now your majesty’s country is five thousand tricents square and in it are a million first-class troops, all of whom are under Chao Hsi-hsü. Therefore when the North fears Hsi-hsü, in reality it fears your majesty’s arms, just as the animals of the forest feared the tiger.”
Translated by James I. Crump
The Intrigues of the Warring States (Chan-kuo ts’e) consists of material from the Warring States period that was compiled by Liu Hsiang (77-6 B.C.E.) and reorganized by Kao Yu (fl. 200 C.E.). While it is generally agreed that the Intrigues is the largest pre-Han collection of historical anecdotes, fables, snippets of romances, and tales of famous persons, the uses to which it has been put by the Chinese are as varied as the ages through which it has passed. Their persistent view has been that the book is a piece of bad history, and from time to time it has joined that group of alluring, if slightly sinister, “secret books of the ancients” which, if studied diligently enough, would never make one a “True King” but might lead one to great secular power and wealth. An equally persistent, but very sound, conviction is that the Intrigues contains many of the finest examples of “ancient prose” extant. Hence avid readers ever since Han times have condemned its morality while praising its style. On a less subjective level, it appears in fact to be a heterogeneous collection of rhetorical pieces, which may have been used as grist by the wandering political persuaders of the times and may actually record some of their happier inspirations.
The fictionality of much of the Intrigues was long ago demonstrated by Henri Maspero. Thus, while the Intrigues itself may not be classified as fiction per se, with it begins the impulse toward fictionalization which achieves full bloom during the T’ang period, partly under the influence of Buddhism. The dividing line between fiction and nonfiction is, of course, notoriously difficult to draw. In general, however, the fictional component of those texts earlier in the prose section of this anthology is smaller than that of those which follow below.
For a note on the compiler, see selection 203.
1. A famous physician of antiquity (see selection 192, note 3). His name is also spelled Pien-ch’üeh.
1. “Dialect,” as used loosely in reference to Sinitic tongues, often signifies separate and mutually unintelligible languages according to usual linguistic standards. Also see selection 190, note 9 and selection 161, unnumbered note (last sentence).
2. Minister of Ch’in.
3. Kung-tzu Sheng.