Two men who couldn't stop lying to each other
A question, before any of this
Why is it so hard to stop competing with someone you are supposed to be working with?
Not an enemy. A colleague, a sibling, a friend, a co-parent — someone on your side, nominally, with whom you nonetheless keep a running tally that neither of you has ever mentioned out loud. They do something; you match it. You do something; they match it. Nobody declared this and nobody can find the off switch.
This week's story is about two men in exactly that position, and it is the first of the short ones. Three minutes. It is also, by a distance, the funniest thing in this course — right up to the last sentence, which is not funny at all and arrives with no warning whatsoever.
From here on, the stories come from a single enormous book. In the year 516 a Chinese emperor ordered a monk named Bǎochàng to solve a problem: the Buddhist scriptures had grown to thousands of volumes, and nobody could find anything in them. So Bǎochàng and his team read the whole canon and pulled out every story, sorting them not by which scripture they came from but by subject — heavens, kings, queens, merchants, ordinary men, ordinary women, animals, hells. Fifty volumes. It is the largest book of its kind that survives, and all fifty volumes of it are translated on this site.
Fascicle 44 is called "Ordinary Men." This is story number seven in it.
One note on the content: the trap in this story is sexual, and the text is matter-of-fact about it. It is a sixth-century collection, working from older Indian material, and it treats a man's desire as the obvious lever to pull. Nothing about that is coy, and nothing about it is dwelt on.
The storyThree minutes — read it before anything below
The page holds all the stories of Fascicle 44 in order. You want number 7. Read it whole, including the last sentence, and try not to look ahead at the others — several are coming up later in this course.
7. The Woodcarver and the Painter Deceive Each Other
North India and South India, two men at the top of their crafts, and an invitation to dinner.
Read it →Come back when you have finished. The rest of this page assumes you have.
Three momentsPlaces worth stopping
1 · The first deception is indistinguishable from hospitality
"The craftsman heard of him and prepared fine food and drink and invited the painter, and had the wooden woman serve the wine and carry the dishes from dawn until night. The painter did not know and took her for a real woman, and his lustful mind grew extreme and he could not forget her."
"When it was dusk, the craftsman went in to sleep and left the painter to stay, and set this wooden woman standing at his side, and said to the guest: I leave this woman here on purpose; you may sleep with her."
Look at what the craftsman actually does. He hears there is another man of great skill in the south. He does not challenge him, insult him, or compete with him. He invites him to dinner and is an exceptional host. Fine food. A full day of it. And then, at the end of the evening, an act of what looks like extraordinary generosity.
Every single move in the trap is, on its face, a kindness. If it had gone unsprung, the painter would have gone home describing a wonderful visit.
And then there is the detail that does the real work: from dawn until night. A whole day. The painter has hours of evidence in front of him — a woman who serves wine, carries dishes, comes and goes, and never once says a single word — and he notices none of it, because he does not want to. The text is blunt about the reason. His desire "grew extreme and he could not forget her." Nobody makes a fool of him. He is very well set up, and then he does the rest himself.
2 · The revenge that feels equal and is not
"So the painter contrived an expedient of his own: on the wall he painted an image of himself, wearing clothing no different from his own, with a rope tied round the neck as though he had hanged himself… When it was done he shut the door and got in under the bed."
"At dawn the host came out and saw that the door had not been opened, and looked in; and he saw only the image of the guest hanged on the wall. The host was greatly frightened and thought he had truly died, and broke down the door and went in and cut the rope with a knife — and at that the painter came out from under the bed."
The painter's plan is beautiful, and it is beautiful in the same register as the offence — a made thing so convincing it is mistaken for a person. He answers a wooden woman with a painted corpse. As craftsmanship, the reply is exact.
As an injury, it is nothing like exact. Add up what each man suffered. The painter was embarrassed in an empty room, alone, with nobody watching. The craftsman wakes to find that a guest under his own roof has killed himself, spends however long it takes to break down a door believing it, and cuts down what he thinks is a dead man with a knife in his hand.
That asymmetry is the entire mechanism, and the story does not point at it. It does not need to. Anyone who has escalated something knows the feeling of paying someone back exactly — and the retaliation is always priced by the person delivering it.
3 · The sentence that changes the genre
"…and the painter said: you were able to deceive me and I am able to deceive you. Guest and host, the account is settled and neither owes the other."
"The two of them, knowing in faith that they had been mad and deluded, each gave up their kin and loved ones and went forth and cultivated the path."
Up to the second sentence this is a comedy, and a well-made one — a tit-for-tat with a tidy closing line. "The account is settled and neither owes the other." That is where the joke ends and you would expect the story to.
Then, in one sentence, with no transition and no argument whatsoever, both men walk out of their entire lives.
Notice what they conclude, because it is not what people usually conclude. The words are 狂惑 — "mad and deluded." Neither of them decides the other man was wicked. Each decides he himself had been out of his mind. The craftsman spent months building an automaton to humiliate a stranger he had never met. The painter spent a night engineering a fake suicide over a moment of private embarrassment. Laid side by side at dawn, in daylight, with nothing hidden any more, that is simply what it looks like.
And one more thing, easy to miss: neither of them could have seen it alone. The craftsman's trick on its own is a good joke. The painter's trick on its own is a good joke. It took both, set beside each other, for either man to see what he had been spending his life on.
One thing to tryThis week · costs nothing · nobody needs to know
Neither man in this story ever says "I am competing with you." The craftsman does not even know the painter. The whole contest runs without a single word of declaration.
You do not have to stop. Really — do not try to stop, because trying to stop is usually just a new move in the same game. Simply notice it once, clearly, while it is happening, and name to yourself who the other player is.
Then ask the question the story turns on: if someone laid your move and their move side by side, in daylight, with nothing hidden — what would the pair of them look like?
Five questionsClick an answer for immediate feedback · nothing is recorded
One question, left open
Who are you keeping score with?
There is probably a name. There may be several. Note that the question is not whether you are ahead — the two men in this story both finished level, and that is precisely what let them see it. The question is who the other player is, and how long the game has been running without either of you ever agreeing to play.
Session 4 · The wager
Another very short one, and a related disease. A husband and a wife, three cakes, and a bet about who can stay silent longest. Then a burglar walks in. It is about four sentences long and people have been telling it for two thousand years.