The Market Diviner
Two court grandees stroll into the eastern market to sneer at the fortune-teller Sima Jizhu and leave hollowed out — the man who owns nothing holds the one thing they traded away for their salaries.
The high seats sold their read for salary. The cheapest stall kept its.
The two officials had stopped to look down at the scribe in the dust, and the scribe did not look up from his brush.
He worked the edge of the grain-sellers' row, a board across his knees, writing other men's letters for a coin each — a soldier's word home, a widow's plea, a son's lie that he was eating well. Their robes were the colour of money. One asked the other, loud, how a hand that could write so plain came to spend itself in the dirt on peasants' griefs.
"They want him ashamed," Dog said, low. "He won't. He likes them, nearly — the way you'd like a child who hasn't learned the thing yet."
The Wu had heard the shape of it told of a diviner in a market once, when two clever men of the court came on their rest day to be amused at him, and asked how a man of any worth could sit so low. He laughed from the belly and asked them back who they thought was high. He swept his own mat and spoke true for a few coins, he said, while the men they envied drew great salaries to misadvise kings and lose whole states by it.
The scribe blew the ink dry and looked up at last. "You write for the one man who can kill you," he said, mild. "I write for everyone who can't." He put his hand out for the next customer, which was its own way of dismissing them, and they went, smaller than they had come.
The boy was grinning. The Wu was not. She had been offered courts, and a kept oracle is a fed one, and she had chosen the road and the copper and the dirt. She watched the scribe take the next letter and did not envy him the dust, which was the part she could never quite manage.
The history. From the Shiji (chapter 127). Sima Jizhu, a man of Chu, told fortunes in the eastern market of Chang'an. On a rest day two of the court's brightest — Song Zhong, a Central Grand Master, and Jia Yi, the celebrated erudite who wrote the Faults of Qin — came strolling among the divination stalls, having decided that the sages of old, when out of office, were always to be found among diviners and healers. Finding Jizhu discoursing on heaven and earth and the roots of fortune, they bowed, then asked why a man so plainly able dwelt in so low and demeaning a place. He laughed aloud and turned it back on them: whom did they call worthy, whom high? The diviner sweeps his mat, straightens his sash, and for a few coins speaks words that heal the sick and steady the frightened — small fee, great benefit — while the officials they admired drew vast salaries to misadvise their lords and ruin states. The two left drained and speechless; in time Song Zhong was convicted after a failed mission to the Xiongnu, and Jia Yi died of grief in office when his royal charge fell from a horse — the high place, as Jizhu said, being the dangerous one, the cap on the head no nearer heaven than the shoe in the dust.
The figure. ䷎ Modesty (Qian) · line 1 — Modest and still more modest, the person of character. Use this to cross the great water. Good fortune. Humility doubled lets you attempt what arrogance cannot.
The reading. The law: rank inverts under weight — the low seat that owns nothing can hold the one true thing the high seats have already sold for their salaries. The market carries it in a scribe in the dust who will not be shamed by two perfumed officials, because he writes the truth of ordinary hearts while they write lies for the one dangerous man above them. It lands on the Wu, who has turned down the courts that wanted to keep her and chosen the cheap mat — the cheap mat the price she pays to keep the read clean, and herself worth something to the boy.
Source: Shiji 127 · State of Chu (楚) · Hexagram ䷎ Modesty · line 1
Illustrated & divined by Digital Rain Studios.