How do our minds reach truth

At roughly the same time as Plato in the West, ancient Daoist thinkers in China also expressed their ideas in imaginative form. On the subject that occupies us here—how do our minds reach truth—there is one tale in Lie Zi that seems illuminating and fundamental.

In the time of the Warring States, horses were very important for military reasons. The feudal lords employed the services of experts to find good ones. Best of all was the super-horse (qian-li ma), an animal which could run a thousand miles a day without leaving tracks and without raising dust. Super-horses were most sought after, but they were also very rare and hard to detect. Hence the need for highly specialised experts; most famous among these was a man called Bole. Eventually Bole became too old to pursue his field trips prospecting for super-horses. Thus his employer, the Duke of Qin, asked him if he could recommend another expert to carry on with this task. “Yes,” said Bole, “I have a friend, a pedlar of firewood in the market, who is quite a connoisseur of horses.” Following Bole’s advice, the duke dispatched this man on a mission to find a super-horse. Three months later, the man returned and reported to the duke: “I have found one; it is in such-and-such a place; it’s a brown mare.” The duke sent his people to fetch the animal, which proved to be a black stallion. The duke was not happy and summoned Bole: “That friend of yours—he does not seem to be much of an expert: he could not even get the animal’s sex and colour right!” On hearing this, Bole was amazed:

Fantastic! He is even better than myself, a hundred, a thousand times better than myself! What he perceives is the innermost nature of the animal. He looks for and sees what he needs to see. He ignores what he does not need to see. Not distracted by external appearances, he goes straight to the inner essence. The way he judges horses shows that he should be judge of more important things than horses.

And, needless to say, this particular animal proved to be a super-horse indeed, a horse that could run a thousand miles a day without leaving tracks and without raising dust.

Simon Leys
The Hall  of Uselessness