Mend the Fold After a Sheep Is Lost and Play the Tune to a Cow
3 min readMend the Fold After a Sheep Is Lost
During the Warring States Period, the State of Chu was not very powerful. The king and the important court officials were dissolute and incompetent. They indulged in luxury and excessive pleasure. Zhuang Xin, one of the ministers, foresaw that the country was in danger.
One day he remonstrated with the king:”Your Majesty, wherever you go, youre always surrounded by people who flatter you with what you like. They try everything to please you and you forget to tend to state affairs. If you go on like this, no doubt, the country will perish sooner or later.”
The King of Chu flew into a rage.”How dare you! You even use such vicious words to curse my country and arouse resentment among the people!”Zhuang Xin explained,”I dare not curse the State of Chu. But I really have a premonition that Chu is facing great danger.”Seeing that the king is especially fond of those corrupt officials and trust them in everything, theminister thought Chu is bound to extinct. So he asked the king to let him leave Chu. He wanted to go to the State of Zhao and stay there for a while.
Five months later, the King of Qin sent his troops to invade Chu and occupied a large tract of its territory. The King of Chu himself went into exile. Now, the king remembered Zhuang Xin’s words. He sent his men to fetch him. When the king saw Zhuang Xin again, he asked him,
“What can Ido now?”
Zhuang Xin replied,”It’s not too late if you mend the sheepfold when you find a sheep is missing.”He then made some good suggestions to rehabilitate the state and recover the lost land. The king was very much pleased.
The idiom “mend the fold after a sheep is lost”has developed from Zhuang Xin’s answer to the king.
Play the Tune to a Cow
In ancient time, there lived a musician named Gongming Yi. He was very good at playing the Zheng,a 21-or 25-stringed plucked instrument. But he also behaved foolishly sometimes.
One day, he saw a cow eating grass in the field near his house. He was inspired by the scene and ran outside to play a tune for the cow. Gongming Yi played beautifully and he himself was intoxicated by the music. But the cow paid no heed to the beautiful tune. It simply focused its attention on eating the grass. Gongming Yi was surprised and couldn’t understand why the cow was so indifferent to his performance. Obviously, it is not because his performance is poor, but the cow could neither understand nor appreciate his elegant music!
From that story comes the idiom “play the tune to a cow”which implies that someone speaks or writes without considering his audience. Generally speaking, the speaker or writer has overestimated his listeners or readers. In these cases, the idiom mocks the audience rather than the speaker.
