The Awl in the Bag
Lord Pingyuan needs one last man for a doomed embassy to Chu; the unknown Mao Sui names himself — put me in the sack at last, and the whole awl comes through, not just the tip.
An awl kept in the sack proves nothing — and the one kept folded away pays for the keeping.
The dyke below the town had been leaking since first light, and the headman was a man short of the twenty he wanted to hold the breach.
Nineteen he trusted; the rest of the crowd he did not. A reed of a youth stepped out of it — a water-carrier, somebody's nephew, who had fetched along that bank three seasons and never once been named. Put me in, he said. The headman laughed, not unkindly: a man worth having is an awl in a sack, the point shows the first day, and in three years I have not felt yours. You never gave me the sack, the boy said.
They were out of men and out of morning, so he was waved in. While the trusted nineteen heaped sand where the water ran darkest, the thin boy walked the foot of the dyke with his eyes half shut, then went flat in the mud and dug where no one had bothered — at a slow clear blister of water welling up quiet. The bank was hollowing from under. He stuffed it with his own coat and both arms and bawled for sand, and the breach that would have had the town by dusk was shut by noon.
"A lord of Zhao went short like that once," the Wu said as they walked on. "Needed twenty good men for an embassy and could find nineteen. A nobody put himself forward and said: sack me at last and the whole awl comes through, not the tip. He took him for want of a twentieth — and the nobody won the alliance with his hand on his sword."
Dog was quiet a stretch. "He just wanted somebody to open the bag," he said.
She heard the rest of it under the words and did not answer it. She kept him nameless on purpose, folded town to town, no point of him let to catch the light — because the awl she carried was the kind a gate-clerk's slip could snap the instant it glinted. She watched his face the rest of the road and did not once reach for the cord of the bag, though her hand knew where it was.
The history. From the Shiji (chapter 76). When Qin besieged Handan, the Zhao capital, Lord Pingyuan was sent to Chu to force a rescue alliance and could take twenty retainers of proven worth. He found nineteen and no twentieth. An obscure man named Mao Sui put himself forward; Lord Pingyuan objected that a true talent is like an awl in a sack — its point shows through at once — and that in three years he had never once heard Mao Sui's name. Mao Sui answered that he was only now asking to be put in the sack, and that placed there sooner the entire awl-head would have burst through, not merely the tip. Taken along for lack of a better man, he proved it: when the lord's negotiations stalled from sunrise to noon, Mao Sui gripped his sword and strode up the hall steps, told the King of Chu that within ten paces his life hung from Mao Sui's hand, shamed him with the memory of Bai Qi burning Chu's own capital, and pressed him into the blood oath on the spot. 毛遂自薦, "Mao Sui recommends himself," and 錐處囊中, "the awl in the sack," are still the proverbs for the untried man who volunteers his own worth.
The figure. ䷙ The Taming Power of the Great (Da Chu) · line 6 — The way of heaven is attained. The obstruction ends. Energy stored through discipline now flows freely. Your principles shape the world because you earned that authority through restraint.
The reading. An awl kept in the sack proves nothing — and the one kept folded away pays for the keeping. A thin water-carrier, unnamed for three seasons, finds the hidden boil in the dyke that the trusted men missed, the moment the headman finally lets him in — and the Wu, who keeps the boy nameless and sheathed for his life's sake, watches him watch it. The keeping protects him; it is also a cost she had stopped counting.
Source: Shiji 76 · State of Zhao (趙) · Hexagram ䷙ The Taming Power of the Great · line 6
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