Yu Liang owned a horse. The horse was beautiful — strong, fast, with a coat like polished bronze. It was also, according to the horse physiognomists, a 的卢 — a horse that brings misfortune to its owner.
Everyone told him to sell it. "Get rid of it," his friends said. "Before it kills you." The market for beautiful horses was strong. The market for cursed beautiful horses was even stronger — there were always buyers willing to gamble their luck against superstition.
Yu Liang refused. "If the horse is cursed — brings misfortune to its owner — then selling it would simply transfer the harm to someone else. How can I, knowing what I know, sell a cursed horse to an innocent buyer? I would rather bear the curse myself than profit from someone else's misfortune."
The Ethics of Harm
The Shishuo Xinyu records this story in its chapter on 德行 — moral conduct. It is one of the most quoted passages in the entire work, because it poses a moral question that has no easy answer: When you possess something harmful, what is the right thing to do?
The utilitarian answer is simple: sell the horse, take the money, let the buyer worry about the curse. The market will sort it out. If the horse is truly cursed, the buyer will learn a lesson about buying cursed horses. If the curse is superstition, no harm is done.
Yu Liang's answer was different. He refused to participate in a system that transferred harm from the informed to the ignorant. His ethics were not consequentialist — they were deontological. The act of selling a cursed horse was wrong, regardless of the outcome.
The Horse's Fate
Yu Liang kept the horse. He rode it carefully, with full knowledge of the risk. The horse did not kill him — or rather, it did not kill him any faster than the political intrigues of the Eastern Jin court, which was itself a kind of cursed horse that everyone rode and no one could sell.
The Shishuo Xinyu does not record what happened to the horse after Yu Liang's death. Perhaps it was buried with him. Perhaps it was finally sold. Perhaps it wandered off into the mountains, freed from the curse of being someone's property.
The Lesson
Yu Liang's story is not about horses. It is about the things we carry — the burdens we refuse to put down, not because we are saints, but because putting them down would require us to harm someone else. This is the Wei-Jin definition of virtue: not the absence of temptation, but the refusal to let temptation become someone else's problem.
He could have sold the horse. No one would have blamed him. The market was willing. The buyer was willing. Only Yu Liang was unwilling — and that unwillingness, that stubborn refusal to participate in a system of transferred harm, is what makes the story endure.