The Six Hundred Li
Zhang Yi promises Chu six hundred li of Qin land to break with Qi; once Chu has burned the alliance and insulted Qi to prove the break, the promise shrinks to six — a slip of the tongue, he smiles.
When the offer is six hundred and costs you nothing, you've already misheard it. Greed is a kind of deafness.
A stranger had stopped at the salt-factor's stall — well-dressed, unhurried, the kind who makes you feel he is doing you a favour by standing there.
Six hundred baskets of Qin white, he offered, at a price that was barely a price, on one condition: the factor must end his standing with the Wei house he had run his salt through for years, and let the street see the break, so the stranger could be sure of him. The Wu watched the factor's face do the sum and then stop doing anything at all.
He sent his own boy across the market to tell the Wei agent, loud, that his salt was grey and his measures false and they were finished. The agent went white, then very still.
"He didn't even haggle," Dog said. "The price was too good and he stopped listening. He can't hear anything now but the six hundred."
"Then he won't hear the six." The Wu had watched the shape work a king once. A man of Qin promised Chu six hundred li to break with its one ally, and Chu broke it gladly. When the envoy came to collect, the Qin man smiled: he had pledged six li, his own small fief — surely they had misheard.
By midday the stranger's six hundred had become six, a clerk's slip, so sorry, and the factor stood in the wreck with no Qin salt and no Wei house while the agent he had shamed talked terms with the smooth man who had unmade them both.
"When a stranger's first gift is the thing you most want," the Wu told the boy on the road, "weigh the wrapping, not the gift." Dog kept it. He could not read a hexagram, but he had just watched a man go deaf with his eyes wide open.
The history. From the Shiji (chapter 70). Qin wanted to attack Qi, but Qi and Chu were bound in alliance, so Zhang Yi went to Chu and promised King Huai six hundred li of Qin's Shangyu region if he would close his borders and sever ties with Qi. The king was delighted and broke with Qi over the lone warning of his minister Chen Zhen, even sending men through Song to insult the King of Qi and prove the rupture. When the Chu envoy came to collect, Zhang Yi said he had pledged only six li of his own fief — surely they had misheard — and the enraged king attacked Qin alone, his ally gone; Qin and Qi struck Chu together, beheading eighty thousand at Danyang and routing it again at Lantian. No fixed chengyu marks it, only the swindle remembered as 商於之地, "the land of Shangyu" — the six hundred li that were always six.
The figure. ䷉ Treading (Lu) · line 3 — The one-eyed thinks he can see. The lame thinks he can walk. He treads on the tiger's tail and gets bitten. Misfortune. This is the warrior who oversteps toward the great ruler—overconfidence destroys him.
The reading. When the gift is free and enormous, you've already misheard the price. The scene puts a salt-factor in Chu's place: a smooth stranger dangles six hundred baskets if he'll break with the house that backed him, and his greed makes him burn the one tie that protected him before the number quietly shrinks to six. The Wu hands the boy the law of it — weigh the wrapping, not the gift — and the boy, who reads faces, watches a man go deaf with his eyes wide open.
Source: Shiji 70 · State of Chu (楚) · Hexagram ䷉ Treading · line 3
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