A paradox of the jester’s method is that they could hit home all the better for using the indirect means of jokes, stories and other roundabout ways of getting a point across. Is there something we can learn here?
A Chinese official is described in his biography in the official Liao dynastic history as loving a laugh. At banquets there was no limit to his humour and people thought of him as a jester. He commented on this as he was dying:
`When I was young, I tried to put my ideals forward to my ruler but I couldn’t succeed by direct means, so I started joking, hoping that one in ten thousand times I might say something of some help, so is it any wonder I was called a jester?’
好滑稽，雖君臣燕飲，詼諧無所忌，時人比之俳優。臨終，謂人曰：「吾少有致君志，不能直遂，故以諧進。冀萬有一補，俳優名何避！」
His borrowing the guise of a jester to remonstrate more effectively is echoed in the English writer and entertainer, John Heywood.
Source: ‘Wan Xiao zhuan’, in Liaoshi 遼史, fol. 85, by Tuo Tuo 脫脫 (1314-55) and others, Siku Quanshu 四庫全書 (Shanghai: Guji Chubanshe, 1987), vol. 289, p. 621b.
Note: The Chinese Text Project version gives it as fol. 77, compared to my bibliographic reference’s folio 85, and the name as Xiao Liu 蕭柳 rather than Wan Xiao.
0 Comments