The classical forms have always been very popular and have been anthologized in various collections through the centuries. Today virtually all Chinese share some of the motifs from these fables as part of their common cultural package, just as, say, most Europeans have a number of Aesopic fables in theirs.

The fables of China, too, are from an altogether separate tradition. The form and the function in part, however, is remarkably similar to the Greco-Latin fable. They are very short, with a single motif, and demonstrate some sort of application through their paranaeic (didactic) or sententious content. Like the Greek fable in the Western tradition, few are animal tales. (The modern “Western” fable has retained very few fables from the many hundreds of fables of the classical tradition, and the fact that most of these are animal and plant fables is an artifact of survival.) Like the Greek form, there is generally no specific moral spelled out for the reader. The application of the fable ought to be understood whenever it is used as a rhetorical device; otherwise, it is simply not a very well-constructed fable. Many classical fables are connected with famous schools of Chinese philosophy, but it is clear that many originated in the people’s oral tradition and are recirculated. That might well explain why some of these have exact counterparts among the Greek and earlier fables. One of the Chinese fable complexes is “The Goat in the Tiger’s Skin,” in which the goat could not forget that he was, after all, only a goat:

A goat found a tiger’s skin and hid it away. As winter came, the goat was so cold he could not stand it another minute and got out the tiger’s skin and put it on. He was as warm as could be and happily ran back and forth over the mountains where he lived, behaving as fearless as a tiger. He saw another skin dropped by a hunter and wanted to take it home as well, but then he saw a wolf. Trembling with fear, he turned and ran back to his cave.

The motif in the fable that follows is very common—the earliest known version is Greek, from the fifth century B.C. In China, the earliest known version dates from the fifth century A.D. and is attributed to Wei Shou. The fable is as well known all through Asia as it is in the West.

When he was old and ill, an old ruler of a kingdom summoned his sons and his brother. The aged king handed his brother a quiver of arrows and told him to pull one out. “Try to break it,” he said. And the brother did so with ease.

“Now break all the other arrows together,” he ordered. His brother dutifully attempted to do so but was unable to break the bundle.