The qin in Chinese idioms: playing to a cow, burning the qin to cook the crane, man and qin both gone

In Chinese, the word qin is found much of the time not on the instrument but inside a chengyu, one of the compact four-character idioms that the language uses the way English uses proverbs. Many are two thousand years old and still in daily use, by people who have mostly never seen a qin. Yet trace each phrase back to its source and it turns out to be a concrete scene: a man playing the qin at the edge of a field; a man sitting beside a coffin playing his dead brother's instrument; a man riding into Sichuan on a single horse with a crane behind him.

Playing the qin to a cow

Dui niu tan qin, "playing the qin to a cow", is the commonest of them. It means explaining something to someone who cannot take it in. Its source is unexpected: the Mouzi Lihuo Lun ("Mouzi's Treatise Settling Doubts"), a work of the late Eastern Han (25–220) written to defend Buddhism against its Chinese critics.

Mouzi had become a Buddhist. Someone asked him: if you are expounding the Buddha's teaching, why do you keep quoting the Book of Songs and the Book of Documents, the Confucian classics? He answered with a story:

Gongming Yi played the air Qingjue for a cow, and it went on grazing with its head down as before. It was not that the cow could not hear; the music did not suit its ears. He changed to the sound of mosquitoes and gnats and the cry of a lone calf, and at once the cow flicked its tail, pricked up its ears, and came pacing over to listen.

Picture it: a qin player on a path between fields plays a lofty piece, Qingjue (清角, "Clear Jue"), and the cow ignores him. He does not scold the cow. He makes the qin imitate a mosquito and a calf, and the cow hears him.

The original meaning is far more generous than the modern usage. Mouzi tells it to explain why he quotes the Confucian classics to Confucian scholars: not because the Buddhist teaching is lacking, but because one must "suit the ears" of the listener and speak in words the other side understands. In the story, the fault lies first with the player: you did not change your tune. Today we use the idiom to mock the listener, which turns Mouzi's point exactly upside down.

Burning the qin to cook the crane

Fen qin zhu he, "burning the qin to cook the crane", describes spoiling something fine. Its source is the Zazuan (杂纂, "Miscellaneous Lists") attributed to Li Shangyin (c. 813–858), one of the great poets of the late Tang.

The Zazuan is a strange little book made entirely of lists, such as "things that do not match" or "things that kill a scene", each with a few items and no explanation. The entry for "things that kill a scene" reads:

Washing your feet in a clear spring; drying your trousers on the flowers; building a tower that blocks the mountain; burning the qin to cook the crane; sipping tea in front of the flowers; shouting to clear the road beneath the pines.

Six things, and every one takes something elegant and uses it vulgarly. (Tea before blossoms is on the list because Tang taste held that in front of flowers one should drink wine.)

Li Shangyin's wording was "setting fire to the qin"; the idiom settled into its present form later. In the eyes of Tang literati the qin and the crane were a pair: both were emblems of a life withdrawn from office, one to listen to and one to watch. A qin and a crane were the entire household of a recluse (see "One qin, one crane" below). To make firewood of one and dinner of the other is the most complete reversal of refinement, and a practical one: wood burns, and birds can be eaten. That is where Li Shangyin's humour lies. The person who kills the scene is not wicked. He is a person who sees only usefulness.

Qin and se in harmony

Qin se he ming, "qin and se sounding in harmony", describes a happy marriage. It is assembled from two passages in the Shijing (诗经, the Book of Songs), China's oldest anthology of poetry, compiled roughly between the 11th and 6th centuries BCE. The first is in "Guan ju", the very first poem in the collection:

The graceful, modest maiden: with qin and se befriend her.

The second is in "Chang di", one of the Lesser Odes:

Wife and children in loving accord, like the playing of se and qin.

The qin and the se are different instruments. The se is a large zither with twenty-five strings and a busy, full sound; the qin has seven strings and a spare one. When the two play together the se must hold back and the qin must come forward, and only by yielding to each other do they make a harmony. The Book of Songs uses them as a figure for marriage in the sense of "different, yet in accord": not two identical things side by side, but two unlike things combined into a single sound.

The phrase itself was condensed by later writers, but qin and se were a metaphor for marriage two and a half thousand years ago. Weddings still use it, though few people have ever seen a se. After the Tang (618–907) it largely dropped out of ordinary performance and survives chiefly inside this idiom.

One more note. In "with qin and se befriend her", "befriend" is a verb: use the qin and se to draw close to her. To court someone, first play for her. That is exactly what Sima Xiangru did for Zhuo Wenjun (see courting with the qin).

Man and qin both gone

Ren qin ju wang, "man and qin both gone", is used in mourning a close friend or relative. It comes from the Shishuo Xinyu ("A New Account of Tales of the World"), a 5th-century collection of anecdotes about the personalities of the Wei and Jin period, in the chapter "Mourning the Dead". Of the six stories here, it is the best.

Wang Ziyou and Wang Zijing were both gravely ill, and Zijing died first. Ziyou asked those around him: "Why have I heard no news at all? He must already be dead." As he spoke there was no grief in him. He called for a carriage to go to the mourning, and did not weep. Zijing had always loved the qin. Ziyou went straight in, sat down on the funeral couch, took Zijing's qin and played it, but the strings were out of tune. He threw it to the ground and cried: "Zijing, Zijing, man and qin are both gone." Then he wept until he fainted, and lay senseless for a long while. A little over a month later, he too died.

Wang Huizhi (Ziyou) and Wang Xianzhi (Zijing) were brothers, sons of Wang Xizhi, the most celebrated calligrapher in Chinese history.

Read the passage for its rhythm. Twice the text tells us he does not cry, to set up the end. It is not that he does not grieve. It is that his grief has not yet found its way out. Only when he picks up the qin and finds the strings out of tune, finds that with its owner gone the qin is no longer the qin it was, does the way out appear. The four words "man and qin both gone" are what he weeps.

The men of the Wei and Jin (220–420) cultivated a studied unconventionality and did not display feeling lightly (see Huan Yi's three variations). Wang Huizhi holds himself in all the way to the funeral couch, all the way to the moment the strings will not tune. Since then "man and qin both gone" has been the heaviest phrase in the language for mourning a kindred spirit.

One qin, one crane

Yi qin yi he, "one qin and one crane", describes an official of clean hands who travels light. The Song Shi (宋史, the official History of the Song), in its biography of Zhao Bian, records that when Zhao Bian was posted to Chengdu, Emperor Shenzong (r. 1067–1085) asked him:

The emperor said: "I hear that you rode into Shu on a single horse, with only a qin and a crane for company, and that your government is just as simple. Is that so?"

Shu is the old name for Sichuan. Zhao Bian (1008–1084) was a famous upright official of the Northern Song, nicknamed the "iron-faced censor". Chengdu was a great metropolis, and other officials arrived at such posts with luggage filling dozens of carts. He came on one horse, with a qin on the saddle and a crane behind. The emperor himself had heard of it.

A qin and a crane were the whole estate of a scholar-official. Here the qin is a statement: what I bring is my cultivation, not my possessions. And the crane? In Chinese culture the crane is the recluse's companion and a symbol of long life, and it has one further quality: you cannot pack anything in it. To take a crane to a new post is to tell everyone that you do not intend to carry anything away.

It is worth setting this idiom beside "burning the qin to cook the crane". The same two objects: in one they are an honest official's luggage; in the other, a vulgar man's firewood and dinner.

Playing the qin any old how

The last item is not a classical idiom but a colloquialism. Luan tan qin, "playing the qin at random", is said of someone who acts wildly and ignores the rules. It has no classical source, but the logic is clear: the qin is the most rule-bound of instruments, with every string, hui (the thirteen position markers along the strings) and finger stroke written plainly in the score.

The slang preserves a judgement: in the Chinese mind the qin stands for rules, and of all things it is not supposed to be played at random.

Why the qin

Chinese has very few idioms built on the zheng, the pipa or the flute, and a great many built on the qin. The reason is not the instrument itself but its social position. The qin was the scholars' instrument, and scholars wrote, so the qin entered the written language. The zheng and the pipa were mostly in the hands of professional musicians and singing girls, and they did not write books.

Each idiom is a small scene: Gongming Yi changing his tune for a cow; Li Shangyin compiling his list of ruined pleasures; Wang Huizhi on a funeral couch playing a qin that will not tune; Zhao Bian riding into Sichuan with a crane. Put side by side, they show that what the Chinese have said through the qin was never only about music. It was about understanding and its absence, refinement and vulgarity, presence and loss, greed and integrity.

The qin in these stories can still be played today. The way jianzipu (减字谱, the tablature that compresses finger instructions into composite characters) writes each stroke, and where each technique came from, are all in the technique index. The crane you can do without.