South of the Yangtze there are many who love a lawsuit, and in the Wu country most of all. There was a certain father and son, greedy and sharp by nature, expert at drafting plaints.
One day they dreamed that ghost-officers hauled them to the hall of Yama. The king, leaning on his bench, tried the father first.
“Scholar, farmer, artisan, merchant — each has his fixed calling. Why do you write plaints?”
“Do I love litigation? People come at me with gold and silk. I make as if to refuse, and their eyes blaze at me with fire. I have no choice but to agree.”
Then he tried the son.
“This is your fault! If you had let me be born without hands, how should I write plaints?”
“What art do you carry, that you can turn black into white like this?”
“It is not hard. Liu Xiahui holding the woman in his lap — argue it as rape. Guan Yiwu receiving the fief of Pian — charge him under the statute for seizing fields and property.”
“That is making straight into crooked. What of forcing crooked into straight?”
“That is easier still. Proud Xiang killing his elder brother — it was obeying his father’s command. Chen Ping and his sister-in-law — call it reaching out to a drowning woman.”
“So be it. But what of the man who hears the case?”
“Deceive him along the grain of his own mind, and Yan Hui picking grain out of the dust was doubted by his master; Zengzi’s mother at the loom doubted her own son. And of those who sit facing south to judge, how many hold a bright mirror hung on high? Open them and close them; push them and watch for the gap. Multiply branches to dazzle them; bring in witnesses to entangle them. Meet an honest and kindly officer and work upon him; meet a greedy and cruel one and join with him. My art never fails.”
The king flew into a rage. He ordered the ox-headed warder to gouge out the father’s two eyes and to cut away the son’s two arms, and had the officers take them back.
When they woke, father and son were each as in the dream. It reached the ears of those in authority, who said that since the pair had suffered the retribution of the dead, plaints might at last grow fewer.
Some days later they sent a clerk to look. He found men come to file suits standing in a ring below the hall, holding gold and silk. The father sat cross-legged on a couch facing south, his eyes closed, muttering the words aloud for others to take down; and beside him his son had a desk laid across, and with a five-inch brush gripped between his toes wrote as though the wind drove it.
The clerk went back and reported it.
“Even if every district and county magistrate in the land were made a living Yama,” the man in authority sighed, “this breed still could not be rooted out. How fearful.”
The Duo comment: In the Changes, qian above and kan below makes 讼. The Image says: heaven and water move contrary. Alas — is the azure heaven itself then engaged in a lawsuit? I do not know whether those who make it their profession follow heaven or oppose it. And the line says: there is sincerity that is choked. Therefore he who wishes not to be choked must seek a master.
