What Is the Parable of the Chinese Farmer?

Imagine you get a rejection letter from the job you wanted most. Your friends tell you how sorry they are, and you feel that a door has closed. Two years later, you are in a better job that you would never have found otherwise. So was the rejection bad luck or good luck? A very old Chinese story says that the honest answer, on the day the letter arrived, was “I don’t know yet.”

What happens in the story, and what does it mean?

The parable of the Chinese farmer is a short story about a man whose luck keeps turning around. Each time something happens, his neighbors call it good or bad. Each time, he refuses to agree. Its lesson is that you often cannot judge whether an event is good or bad when it happens, because its consequences are not finished yet.

The version most people know today comes from the British writer Alan Watts, who told it in his talks about Chinese philosophy. It goes in four steps.

1. The horse runs away. A farmer’s only horse runs off. The neighbors say, “What bad luck.” The farmer says, “Maybe.”
2. The horse comes back. Later, the horse returns with seven wild horses. The neighbors say, “What good luck.” The farmer says, “Maybe.”
3. The son breaks his leg. The farmer’s son tries to ride one of the wild horses. He is thrown off and breaks his leg. The neighbors say, “What bad luck.” The farmer says, “Maybe.”
4. The army comes. Officers come to the village to take young men into the army. They reject the son because of his broken leg. The neighbors say, “What good luck.” The farmer says, “Maybe.”

Now look at what happens to each judgment. Every time the neighbors give a label, the next event makes the label look wrong. The lost horse was bad until it brought more horses. The extra horses were good until they hurt the son. The injury was bad until it kept him out of the army.

The mechanism has three parts.

• We judge at one moment. The neighbors give a label on the day of each event.
• Each event changes what comes next. The new horses only exist because the old one ran away. The injury only happens because of the new horses.
• The chain does not stop. The value of an event depends on what follows, and at the moment of judging, that is unknown.

So the farmer’s “maybe” is not a lack of interest. It is the most accurate answer he can give.

The oldest version of the story is darker than Watts’s. It is in the Huainanzi, a Chinese book from the 2nd century BCE. There, a man living near the northern frontier loses his horse to the Hu, a people across the border. Months later, the horse returns with a fine Hu horse. His son loves riding, falls and breaks his thigh.

A year later, the Hu invade. The young men of the frontier have to fight, and nine out of ten of them die. The son survives because he is lame. Each time, the father asks a question. After each loss he asks, “How do we know this will not turn out to be good fortune?” After the lucky turn he asks the same about bad fortune.

What the parable of the Chinese farmer teaches you

The parable teaches you to delay your final judgment. When something big happens, you can ask: “What could this lead to that I cannot see yet?”

Here are three situations where that question helps.

• Rejections. A failed exam, a lost job or a rejected application feels like an end. Often it is a turn in a longer chain. The question is not whether to feel disappointed. The question is whether to treat the disappointment as a final verdict.
• Wins. The parable works in both directions. A promotion, a sudden success or a large sum of money can bring new problems. The neighbors in step 2 were as wrong as the neighbors in step 1.
• The news. Many events look like a clear victory or a clear disaster on the day they are reported. A few years later, historians often describe them very differently.

Psychology has studied one part of this. In 1998, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues ran six studies on affective forecasting, which means predicting how you will feel in the future. People expected to feel bad for a long time after events such as the end of a relationship or failing to get a permanent university job. In fact, they recovered faster than they had predicted. The neighbors in the parable make a similar error. They treat today’s feeling as if it were the final result.

The parable fits well with a Stoic idea, explained in What Is the Dichotomy of Control?. That idea separates what is up to you from what is not. You cannot control how a chain of events will end. You can control how you act at each step. The farmer does both. He keeps working, and he does not pretend to know the ending.

Does “maybe” mean that nothing matters?

No. This is the most common misreading. Some people hear the parable and conclude that you should not care about anything, or that you should not feel sad. But the farmer does not say that the lost horse does not matter. He only says that he cannot yet tell whether it is good or bad. Being sad that your horse is gone and being unsure about the long-term effect can go together.

A second misreading is “everything happens for a reason”. That phrase claims to know that every bad event leads to something good. The parable does not claim that. In the Huainanzi, the closing line says that fortune turns into misfortune and misfortune into fortune, and that these changes cannot be fully predicted. The point is uncertainty in both directions.

Where is the parable not good advice?

The parable has two real limits.

The first limit is the strongest objection. The story is built so that each event reverses the one before. Real life is not built like that. A broken leg is usually just a broken leg. If you ask “Is this good or bad?” about many people who break their leg, the answer is “bad” for most of them. The parable picks one lucky chain.

So it is a good reason to be humble about a single case. It is not a reason to ignore what usually happens.

The second limit is that some losses do not become gains, whatever comes later. The death of a child or a serious injustice is not a “maybe”. Telling a grieving person “Who knows if this is bad?” would be cruel. The parable is most useful for ordinary ups and downs, and for your own judgments, not for judging someone else’s pain.

There is also a practical risk. “Maybe” can turn into an excuse not to act. If your roof leaks, you fix it. You do not wait to see whether the leak will turn out well. The farmer’s calm is about the label he gives events, not about doing nothing.

Learn more

The story has no single known author. Its oldest written form is in chapter 18 of the Huainanzi, a large book of philosophy put together at the court of Liu An, king of Huainan. Liu An presented it to his nephew, Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, in 139 BCE. The book combines many schools of thought, with a strong influence from Daoist classics. The same thought appears in chapter 58 of the Dao De Jing, the classic text of Daoism. A plain translation of the line is “good fortune leans on misfortune, and misfortune hides inside good fortune”.

In Chinese, the story became the saying sai weng shi ma (塞翁失馬), “the old man at the frontier loses his horse”. In the 20th century, Alan Watts made a shorter version popular in the West.

If you read Chinese, the original is only a few lines long and is linked in the references. If you prefer English, the Columbia University Press translation of the Huainanzi is the standard edition. For a related way of thinking about change, read The Wiggliness of the World: Alan Watts on Straight Lines and a Curved Reality, which also draws on Watts.