An impatient farmer, whose impatience grew with every year’s harvest, finally could not wait for his rice crop to grow and mature, and hit upon a marvelous scheme to help the crop along. He went out into his fields and began to pull the seedlings higher out of the ground. He went home exhausted, but elated, and described his activities to his family, ending with: “I may be tired, but all the seedlings are quite a bit taller this evening than this morning.”

At that, his son rushed off to see the rice crop that had grown taller in a single day, but by the time he reached the fields, the rice seedlings had already begun to die.

The “deep structure” meaning or resolution of the metaphor is very similar to that of the European “Goose that Laid a Golden Egg,” which was known as a fable in Latin at least 1,800 years before it was collected as a favorite “fairy tale.”

Man’s follies are often the point of fables everywhere, and the Chinese fables are rich in such narratives.

On flattery and its position in the world of men, Tu Pen-chun of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) reframes a well-known folk fable:

A rich man was talking to a poor man and asked: “I have a hundred gold pieces. If I gave you twenty, will you flatter me?”

“If you gave me twenty, then the money would not be fairly shared, so how could I flatter you?”

“If I gave you half, would you flatter me?”

“We would be equal then, and thus I would not flatter you.”

“And if I gave all the gold pieces, would you then?”

“If you gave me all the gold pieces, I would have no need to flatter you.”

It has long been considered probable that the use of the fable form owes something to the necessity of concealing one’s direct statements about those in power.