"Good for you, my son!" he sighed. "They are the cleaver and we are the meat. They are the cauldron and we are the deer."
"You explained 'they are the cleaver and we are the meat' the other day, papa," said the boy. "It's what they say when people are massacred or beheaded. Like meat or fish being sliced up on the chopping-board. Does 'they are the cauldron and we are the deer' mean the same thing?"
"Yes, more or less," said the man; and since the train of soldiers and prison carts was fast receding, he took the boy by the hand.
"Let's go indoors now," he said. "It's too windy for standing outside. Inside, the man picked up a writing brush and moistened it on the ink-slab; then, on a sheet of paper, he wrote the character for a deer.
"The deer is a wild animal, but although it is comparatively large, it has a very peaceable nature. It eats only grass and leaves and never harms other animals. So when other animals want to hurt it or eat it, all it can do is run away. If it can't escape by running away, it gets eaten."
He wrote the characters for "chasing the deer" on the sheet of paper. "That's why in ancient times they often used the deer as a symbol of the empire. The common people, who are the subjects of empire, are gentle and obedient. Like the deer's, it is their lot to be cruelly treated and oppressed. In the History of the Han Dynasty it says 'Qin lost the deer and the world went chasing after it'. That means that when the Qin emperor lost control of the empire, ambitious men rose up everywhere and fought each other to possess it. In the end it was the first Han emperor, who got this big, fat deer by defeating the Tyrant King
of Chu."
"I know," said the boy. "In my story-books it says 'they chased deer on the Central Plain'. That means they were all fighting each other to become emperor.
The scholar nodded, pleased with his son's astuteness. He drew a picture of a cauldron on the sheet of paper.
"In olden times they didn't use a cooking-pot on the stove to cook their food; they used a three-legged cauldron like this and lit a fire underneath it. When they caught a deer they put it in a cauldron to seethe it. Those ancient rulers and great ministers were very cruel. If they didn't like somebody, they would pretend they had committed some crime or other, and then they would put them in a cauldron and boil them. In the Records of an Historian Lin Xiangru says to the son of Qin, 'Deceiving your majesty was a capital offense. I beg to approach the cauldron.' What he meant was, 'I deserve to die. Put me in the cauldron and boil me.'"
"Often in my story-books I've read the words 'asking about the cauldrons in the Central Plain'," said the boy. "It seems to mean the same thing as 'chasing the deer in the Central Plain'."
"It does," said the man. "King Yu of the Xia Dynasty, the first Dynasty that ever was, collected metal from all the nine provinces of the empire and used it to cast nine great cauldrons with. 'Metal' in those days meant bronze. Each of these bronze cauldrons had the name of one of the provinces on it and a map showing the mountains and rivers of that province. In later times whoever became master of the empire automatically became the guardian of these cauldrons. In The Chronicle of Zuo it says that when the Viscount of Chu was reviewing his troops on Zhou territory and the Zhou king sent Prince Man to him with his royal compliments, the Viscount questioned Prince Man about the size and weight of the cauldrons. Of course, as ruler of the whole empire, only the Zhou king has the right to be guardian of the cauldrons. For a mere Viscount like the ruler of Chu to ask a questions about them showed that he was harbouring thoughts of rebellion and planning to depose the Zhou king and seize the empire for
himself."
"So 'asking about the cauldron' and 'chasing the deer' both mean wanting to be
emperor," said the boy. "And 'not knowing who will kill the deer' means not knowing who will be emperor."
"That's right," said the man. "as time went by, these expressions came to be applied to other situations as well, but originally they were only used in the sense of wanting to be emperor." He sighed. "For the common people, thought, the subjects of empire our role is to be the deer. It may be uncertain who will kill the deer, but the deer gets killed all right. There's no uncertainty about that."