The man answered, “No, I don’t want the gold, I want your finger!”

The Chou dynasty from the fourth to the third centuries B.C. saw the beginning of the “hundred schools” of philosophy, which turned out to be one of the golden ages of fables in China. Among the scholars who dealt with fables from this era was Han Fei Tsu, who gave us the fable of the painter. The “moral,” or paranaeic content, is implicit, as it ought to be in any good fable, not requiring a moral tag line, or epimythium. The fable may very well have been of folk origin and might have been in oral tradition for a very long time, although this literary version shows none of the characteristics of such a long oral tradition. The story is very much alive in oral tradition today.

A famous painter was painting the portrait of a great king. One day the king asked the painter: “What is the hardest thing to paint?”

The painter answered: “Dogs and horses.”

“And what then is the easiest thing to paint?” asked the king.

“Gods and ghosts,” answered the painter.

“Why those objects?” asked the king.

“Everyone sees dogs and horses every day. Everyone can judge how well a painter paints them. But no one has ever seen a ghost or a god, and therefore they are easy to paint.”

This is, at the same time, also very reflective of the society in which Han Fei Tsu lived, not only because of the timeless point to be made, but for other considerations, such as the pessimistic attitude toward “gods and ghosts,” found there as well as here.

The explanatory tag line of the following fable, clearly political, brings this fable into a form indistinguishable from the Greco-Roman type. It is from the Lu shih ch’un ch’iu, probably from the third century B.C.

A man from Sung was constantly giving his horse the taste of his spurs because his horse did not run as fast as the man wanted. But to no avail.