Chapter 10 Steal

Mi Youren (named Yuanhui), son of the great calligrapher of the Song Dynasty and the great painter Mi Fu, has a long history of family education. Like his father, he is not only good at writing calligraphy, but also good at painting; he especially loves the works of ancient people.Once, on someone else's boat, he saw Wang Xizhi's real calligraphy, and he was so happy that he immediately wanted to exchange a good copy, but the owner disagreed, so he screamed anxiously, climbed over the side of the boat and jumped into the water. Fortunately, others hugged him quickly so that he would not fall into the water.One of his great talents is to learn to imitate the paintings of the ancients.When he was in Lianshui, he once borrowed a "Pine Cow Picture" from someone to describe it.Later, he kept the original copy and returned it to someone with a facsimile, but the person didn't realize it at the time.Take it and go.It was not until many days later that I came to recover the original.Mi Youren asked him how he could tell, and the man replied: "In the original book, there are shadows of a shepherd boy in the eyes; but the one you returned to me does not." But Mi Youren imitated the paintings of the ancients, Few of his models were found to be false.He often tried his best to borrow ancient paintings from others to describe them; after the copying, he always gave the master both the sample and the real copy, and asked the master to choose by himself.Because of his exquisite skills in imitating ancient paintings, the masters often took the models back as if they were the real ones, and thus Mi Youren obtained many valuable authentic ancient paintings.

Mi Youren is a talented artist, worthy of people's admiration, and also a lover and appreciator of ancient paintings, so that people can better understand the beauty and value of ancient paintings; The real behavior of others is despised and contemptible.Therefore, some people called his behavior of defrauding other people's authentic ancient paintings in clever ways "sleight of hand." Later, people later extended it into the idiom "sleight of hand" to describe people's use of improper and ingenious methods. Take what you don't deserve. "Crafting" means defrauding;And using this method to seize property is often convenient and yields a lot, so there is a saying "Stealing cleverly, so you get a lot" see ("Qingbo Magazine"), for example.The magic stick under the guise of gods and objects often sets up a clever name to defraud ignorant people of their property under the guise of doing Buddhist work.Grabbing private property is "stealing and usurping".