Four Characters That Contain a Whole Story — Epoche B1
Chinese has a four-character phrase, hua she tian zu, 'to draw a snake and add feet', and those four syllables carry an entire story. In the old text where it appears, several men compete to draw a snake for a pot of wine. The fastest finishes first, and then, with time to spare, adds legs to his snake. A second man finishes plainly, takes the wine, and points out that snakes have no feet. To say the phrase today is to say: you ruined it by not stopping. The pattern repeats. Shou zhu dai tu, 'guard the stump, wait for the rabbit', comes from a farmer who saw a hare run into a tree stump and die, and who then abandoned his fields to watch the stump. It means waiting for luck to repeat itself. Ke zhou qiu jian, 'notch the boat to seek the sword', is the man who drops his sword overboard and cuts a mark on the moving hull to remember the spot. It means using yesterday's method on today's river. Sai weng shi ma, the frontier old man who lost his horse, teaches that good and bad fortune keep changing places. Look at what these examples have in common. Each is a case, not a decoration, and speakers use them the way a lawyer uses a precedent. That is also why the grammar inside them feels strange: it is classical Chinese, where a single character does the work of a modern two-syllable word, so the phrases cannot be parsed by today's rules. A student who learns hundreds of these is not collecting ornaments. They are acquiring a shared library, where four syllables let a listener supply the rest of the story themselves. References Liu Xiang (comp., 1st century BCE). Zhanguo ce (Strategies of the Warring States). In Crump, J. I. (trans., 1970), Chan-kuo Ts'e. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Han Fei (3rd century BCE). Han Feizi. In Watson, B. (trans., 2003), Han Feizi: Basic Writings. Columbia University Press, New York. Rohsenow, J. S. (2002). ABC Dictionary of Chinese Proverbs. University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu.