They argued and argued and finally they went to the patriarch of their family, who suggested that they roast half and stew half. But when they returned and looked for the goose it was nowhere to be seen.

Another of Han Fei Tse’s fables begins with a farmer working his fields. This fable has many analogues in the Greco-Latin fable tradition and an even larger class of similar stories in modern jokes.

The farmer sees a rabbit run into a tree and break its neck. The farmer dropped his plow and picked up the rabbit, congratulating himself on the easy meal. After that, he did not plow, but just waited by the tree for it to happen again. But no rabbit ran into the tree after that, and the farmer was derided throughout the entire province.

Human virtues are stressed; and negative qualities are highlighted. Impatience is another fault of man derided time and time again:

A certain man was about to take up a post in the government. A close friend cautioned him. “One thing you must remember when you become an official. You must always be patient.”

The man replied that he would, whereupon the friend told him the same thing three more times, and the man answered three times that he would be patient. When the friend began to tell him for the fourth time, the man became angry and said: “Do you think I am an idiot? Why do you tell me the same thing over and over again?”

His friend sighed: “It’s not easy to be patient, I have only said that a few times, and you are already impatient. ”

The use of animals and plants as well as human figures strengthens these points. The animals are often chosen for their natural characteristics and for those characteristics attributed to them by long association. Continued use of these characteristics tends to develop stereotypical specific features for the characters. Thus we see the type casting of donkeys for stupidity, the fox for cunning, the lion or tiger as king of the beasts, and so on.

This allows a sort of “instant characterization,” allowing the short fable to convey considerably more than the simple narrative. An example of two of these characteristics is found in the fable about the Fox and the Tiger attributed to Chan Kuo-Ts’e: