Taoism

Tradition·Founded c. 500 BCE·est. ~12 million formally; far more informally

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Story of Taoism

The old man's horse.

His horse ran away — bad luck, said the neighbours; who knows, said the old man. It came back with a wild horse — good luck; who knows. His son broke his leg riding it — bad luck; who knows. Then the army came for every able-bodied young man in the district, and did not take him.

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Where it is toldHuainanzi, second century BCE — the source of a proverb everyone in China knows
Who appearsAn old man on the frontier, his son, one horse
What it teachesThat the horse ran off, came back with another, threw the son and broke his leg, and the broken leg kept him out of the war that killed everyone else — and that at no point was it possible to say which was the good news
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The story is from the Huainanzi, a second-century BCE compilation, and it has condensed into a four-character proverb — sai weng shi ma, the old man of the frontier loses a horse — that essentially every Chinese speaker knows and uses. An old man's horse runs off into barbarian territory. The neighbours commiserate; he asks how they know it is not good fortune. Months later the horse returns bringing a fine barbarian horse with it. They congratulate him; he asks how they know it is not bad fortune. His son rides the new horse, falls, and breaks his hip. They commiserate; how do you know it is not good fortune. A year later the nomads invade, every able-bodied young man in the district is conscripted, and nine in ten die. The son, lame, stays home. The proverb functions in ordinary Chinese speech as a piece of practical consolation and its philosophical content is exact: judgments about fortune are made from inside an unfinished sequence.

From the sources — the passages this rests on; concise renderings, cited

His neighbours came to console him. The old man said: how do you know this is not good fortune?

Huainanzi, chapter 18 (rendered)

The four characters of the proverb, sai weng shi ma, are still ordinary Chinese speech.

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