The Empty Seat
Lord Xinling leaves the seat of honor empty and drives himself to fetch a seventy-year-old gatekeeper, who makes him wait in the market just to watch whether the prince's face stays kind.
Read a man by where he seats the one who can never repay him.
The wine went down the officer's sleeve in a long red rope, and the old man who had spilled it was already folding toward the floor.
Three days in the salt post, the lacquer still wet on him, a clerk and two guards to watch him wear it. The man with the jar was the innkeeper's father — deaf, kept on at the pouring because his son could not bring himself to take even that off him.
The officer looked at his ruined cuff. Then he had the old man under the elbow before the knees could land, and said, loud enough for the deaf ears and the staring room, that a house this old was a blessing on a new post and he would not wash the sleeve a week. He poured the next cup himself and put it in the old man's hands.
"He's done that before," Dog said, low. "Not the kindness — the being seen at it. His eyes are on the guards, not the old man."
"And the guards will follow him into a bad year for it." The Wu turned her cup. "A man who keeps his face toward the one who can't repay him, where the ones who can are watching — both ends learn to trust him. It needn't be real to work." Which of them had the truer half she did not say, because she did not know.
There had been a prince of Wei, she told the boy, who left the high seat in his own cart empty and drove down to the east gate himself to fetch a doorkeeper of seventy. The old man made him wait in the market to prove he would.
She looked at the boy a while. Then she went back to her millet, and when she pushed the bowl across to share it she gave him the side that was not scorched — the way she did, without deciding to, every time.
The history. From the Shiji (chapter 77). Lord Xinling, Prince Wuji of Wei, heard that a worthy man named Hou Ying — seventy years old and poor — kept the Yimen, the eastern gate of the capital. When Hou Ying refused his gifts, the prince instead held a grand banquet, filled the hall with the generals and nobles of Wei, then took his own carriage, left the place of honor on the left empty, and drove personally to the gate to fetch the old gatekeeper. Hou Ying climbed straight into the honored seat in his shabby clothes to test him, then asked the prince to halt in the market so he could visit his friend the butcher Zhu Hai, and lingered there talking while the prince waited in the street holding the reins — his expression only growing more courteous as his attendants seethed. Hou Ying had staged the delay on purpose, so the whole market would witness a prince humble himself before a doorkeeper and thereby make his name; he became the prince's chief strategist, later devised the plan that saved Zhao, and cut his own throat to seal it. 虛左, "leaving the honored left seat empty," is still the phrase for holding the highest place open for the worthy.
The figure. ䷷ The Wanderer (Lu) · line 5 — He shoots a pheasant. It drops with the first arrow. In the end this brings both praise and office. Traveling statesmen would introduce themselves to local princes with the gift of a pheasant. You shoot one, killing it at the first shot. Thus you find friends who praise and recommend you, and in the end the prince accepts you and confers an office. If you know how to meet the situation and introduce yourself in the right way, you may find a circle of friends and a sphere of activity even in a strange country.
The reading. Read a man by where he seats the one who can never repay him. A new salt-officer keeps his face kind when a deaf old servant drenches his sleeve in front of the very men he means to command — and the Wu reads his whole future off that one courtesy, the way she once read the boy in a town that had seated him nowhere. She seats the lowest-born highest; the whole of her war is that single courtesy held long past the point of sense.
Source: Shiji 77 · State of Wei (魏) · Hexagram ䷷ The Wanderer · line 5
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