Wednesday, April 06, 2016

About trespassing the assigned duty...

"Once in by-gone days, Marquis Chao of Han was drunk and fell into a nap. The crown-keeper, seeing the ruler exposed to cold, put a coat over him. When the Marquis awoke, he was glad and asked the attendants, "Who put more clothes on my body?" "The crown-keeper did," they replied. Then the Marquis found the coat-keeper guilty and put the crown-keeper to death. He punished the coat-keeper for the neglect of his duty, and the crown-keeper for the overriding of his post. Not that the Marquis was not afraid of catching cold but that he thought their trespassing the assigned duties was worse than his catching cold."

Han Feizi, Chapter VII. The Two Handles (from the W. K. Liao translation available at http://www2.iath.virginia.edu:8080/exist/cocoon/xwomen/texts/hanfei/d2.7/1/0/bilingual )

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