一片草叶

English (for the teacher)

More than two thousand years ago, there was a carpenter in the state of Lu whom everyone called Lu Ban. The tables he made never wobbled, and the houses he built stood for decades without falling apart.

The story goes that one year, Lu Ban was given a job: to build a huge palace. That needed a great deal of wood, but he was given very little time.

In those days there were no saws yet; the only way to cut down a tree was with an axe. Lu Ban took a group of apprentices up the mountain, and they chopped from morning to night until everyone's hands were raw, yet at the end of a day they had felled only a few trees. At this rate, when the day came, they wouldn't even have finished half.

That day, Lu Ban climbed a higher mountain on his own to look for better trees. The path was slippery; his foot slid, and he quickly grabbed a handful of grass by the path. Once he had his footing, he felt a sharp pain in his hand, looked, and saw that his finger had been cut and was bleeding.

“How can grass this soft cut my hand?” He found it strange, so he picked a blade of grass and held it up close to look carefully. It turned out that both edges of the leaf had a row of tiny “teeth”, hard to the touch.

Looking at the little leaf, Lu Ban suddenly saw it: if he made a tool with teeth like these along its edge and pulled it back and forth across a tree, couldn't he cut the tree through quickly?

He went straight down the mountain and first made one out of bamboo. He made a row of little teeth along one side of the bamboo, and sure enough, one pull across a tree bit a little way in. But after only a few pulls, the teeth broke. Then he asked a blacksmith to beat out a strip of iron and made a row of teeth along its edge. This time, two apprentices each took one end and pulled it back and forth, and before long a big tree came crashing down.

And so the saw came into the world. They say that in the end Lu Ban finished the palace on time.

Whether the story is true, nobody knows any more. But Chinese carpenters have always honoured Lu Ban as the founder of their craft. Chinese even has an idiom, “班门弄斧”: playing with an axe at Lu Ban's door, meaning showing off your little bit of skill in front of a real master. So if you have a friend who's a great cook and you're cooking in front of them, you can say modestly first: “I'm swinging my axe at Lu Ban's door here.”