The Three Burrows
Feng Xuan burns Lord Mengchang's debt-records at Xue. Buys him nothing. Buys him everything. The cunning hare digs three burrows.
He bought a place to land before the lord knew he was falling.
The Wu spent good coin that morning on a woman they would never see again, and Dog could not work out why.
The woman kept a poor house at the edge of the town — a widow with a goat and a dry store-room — and the Wu paid her three months' rent on the store-room they did not need, and a little over, and was warm to her, and mentioned twice, lightly, that she had a nephew, and that the boy sometimes went on ahead. The widow had a key. The Wu took it, and they walked out of a town where nothing was wrong and no one was chasing them.
"We're not even staying," Dog said. "You paid for a room we're walking away from."
"I paid for a door that opens when we come back to it at night with men behind us. That is a different thing, and worth far more than a room."
He turned the coin of it over. "There's nothing behind us."
"There is always something behind us. It is simply not here yet." She set the pace down the south road, unhurried. "There was a clever man once whose lord sent him to call in debts from a poor town. Instead he burned the debt-papers, gave the town its freedom, and came home having collected nothing. The lord was furious — robbed of a year's grain. Then the lord fell, as lords do, and had nowhere on earth to go, and the one town in the world that flung its gates wide and wept to see him was the town whose debts that clever man had burned. The cunning hare keeps three burrows, the man told his lord. We have just dug the first."
Dog looked back at the widow's house, small and poor and already behind them, and understood it was not poor at all — it was a burrow, bought cheap, on a day with sun, against a night that had not come. "You do this everywhere," he said slowly, seeing it now: the chain of paid widows and warm words and side-doors stretching back down all the roads they had walked.
"I do this everywhere." She did not slow. "The cheapest day to dig the exit, boy, is the day you can still tell yourself you'll never need it. By the night you need it, it is no longer for sale."
The history. From the Zhanguoce. Feng Xuan, a retainer of Lord Mengchang of Qi, was sent to collect debts from the lord's fief at Xue. Instead he gathered the debtors, burned their contracts before them, and told them the lord forgave them — returning with no grain and the news that he had bought the one thing the lord's house lacked: the people's loyalty. Mengchang was not pleased. A year later he fell from court and retired to Xue, and the townspeople came a hundred li out to welcome him. “The cunning hare keeps three burrows” (狡兔三窟), Feng Xuan told him; you have one — let me dig the other two — and he secured the lord's recall and his standing besides.
The figure. ䷑ Work on What Has Been Spoiled (Gu) · line 1 — Setting right the father's decay. If there is a son, no blame falls on the departed father. Danger, but good fortune in the end. The child corrects what the parent let slide.
The reading. He bought a place to land before the lord knew he was falling. The Wu pays a poor widow for a store-room the pair are walking away from — a door that opens at night with men behind them — and tells the boy about Feng Xuan and his burned contracts: the cheapest day to dig the exit is the day you can still tell yourself you'll never need it. By the night you need it, it is no longer for sale.
Source: Zhanguoce · State of Qi (齊) · Hexagram ䷑ Work on What Has Been Spoiled · line 1
Illustrated & divined by Digital Rain Studios.