Tasting Gall
Beaten and spared, King Goujian of Yue hangs a gall bladder by his seat and tastes it before every meal, sleeps on brushwood, and for ten years makes his own body remember Kuaiji — until Wu is his to take.
Keep the wound open on purpose, and it keeps the debt awake.
The wine-seller could afford meat now, and ate his millet plain and cold, and made certain his customers saw him do it.
He had been rich once and ruined in a season he would name to anyone who sat long enough. Now the trade had come back, and still a cracked measure sat on his counter — the one from the year he was wiped out — and before he counted the day's coin he bit a sliver of something bitter and let his face show it.
"He keeps the bad year on purpose," the Wu said. "Tastes it before every profit, so the profit can't make him stupid."
Dog watched him bite the bitter root. "It's not only the money," he said. "He's keeping somebody. Somebody went, the year he was ruined."
"There was a king beaten and spared," she said, after a moment, "who hung a gall by his seat and tasted it before he ate, and slept on brushwood, and asked himself each night whether he had forgotten the day they let him live. Ten years. Then he took the kingdom that spared him."
She did not say that she kept a gall of her own, and tasted it oftener than she let on — the one reading she had pushed a line too far, long ago, for someone she had loved, and what it had cost. She had never let it close. She let the bitter rise first, now, whenever a client's eyes begged her for one line more, and it stopped her hand. The boy was the reason she could not afford to forget how that went.
The history. From the Shiji (chapter 41). King Goujian of Yue, crushed by Wu and besieged on Mount Kuaiji, begged to live as a vassal and was spared — against the counsel of Wu Zixu, who warned that a worthy ruler let go would come back to ruin you. Home in his broken state, Goujian punished his body and burned with thought: he set a gall bladder by his seat and tasted its bitterness whenever he sat, lay down, or ate, asking himself, "Have you forgotten the shame of Kuaiji?" He plowed his own fields, ate no meat, wore no fine colors, shared the people's toil, and after some ten years of kept pain fell on a distracted Wu and destroyed it — its king covering his face in death, saying he had no face to meet the loyal counselor he had killed. 臥薪嘗膽, "sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall," is still the phrase for a hardship nursed on purpose to keep a resolve awake.
The figure. ䷨ Decrease (Sun) · line 5 — Someone indeed increases you. Ten pairs of tortoise shells cannot oppose it. Supreme good fortune. When you are marked by fate for good fortune, it comes without fail. All oracles concur. Fear nothing.
The reading. Keep the wound open on purpose, and it keeps the debt awake. In the scene a wine-seller rich again eats cold millet and bites a bitter root so he never forgets the year he was ruined — and the Wu, who reads the strategy of it, recognizes her own kept gall. She drew legs on a snake once for someone she loved and never let the wound close, because the boy beside her is the reason she cannot afford to forget how it goes when she lets love do her arithmetic.
Source: Shiji 41 · State of Yue (越) · Hexagram ䷨ Decrease · line 5
Illustrated & divined by Digital Rain Studios.