Hair and beard fortune telling

There are many criteria for happiness. Chernyshevski thinks that happiness is happiness no matter what, and the way to judge happiness is to see whether you are happy or not, but China's way to judge happiness is far more than that. According to the observation of the older generation, "blessed people have two legs, and unfortunate people have two legs." Some people may find it strange. How do they use the hair on their legs to judge whether this person is happy or not? What does this sentence mean?

The ancients thought that happy and rich people were blessed. In ancient times, they especially liked fortune telling and divination, so they racked their brains to think what a blessed person should look like. That's why this sentence came into being: "The blessed have two legs, and the unlucky have two legs." In fact, this way of judging happiness is inseparable from ancient farming.

In ancient times, when people planted large areas of farmland, they naturally rolled their sleeves and trousers to prevent clothes from getting dirty. They drip mud again and again, sow again and reap again. Because people hold their trouser legs all the year round, human beings have left some hair when they evolved. However, with people's continuous work, the soil comes into close contact with their skin. Over time, the hair on their legs will slowly fall off, so many farmers will lose hair on their legs. Relatively speaking, those who don't have to work in the fields, such as the gentlemen and ladies in Zhuangzi, don't have to work in the fields, as long as they wear beautiful clothes every day, so the leg hair on their legs naturally doesn't fall off automatically because of beautiful clothes, so the hair on their legs still grows well. This is the source of "the hair on the legs of blessed people", and it is easy to do without working.

The second half of the sentence is easier to explain, because proverbs have been circulating for so long that many sounds and glyphs have changed. The correct explanation of "unhappy people have two legs" should be "unhappy people have busy legs", because the ancients liked to pay attention to antithesis and rhyme, so in the process of circulation, Mao became busy. In fact, the meaning of this sentence is easy to understand, that is, if there is no blessing, your legs will be busy, so that you can maintain your life. The leg here actually does not refer to the leg, but refers to the attitude towards life. No matter your hands or legs, you must be busy first to get something. Just like those farmers, or other occupations, such as blacksmith, umbrella seller, etc. , are running for life.

In addition to these two sentences, there is actually a sentence about using "hair" to identify whether this person is blessed or not, but the hair in this sentence is not leg hair, this sentence is "a blessed person has mouth hair", and this hair is a beard. In ancient times, beards actually symbolized how rich and expensive they were, because "one bite of hair" was actually a very neat and beautiful beard, just like officials in previous TV dramas, with two moustaches. Such people are more blessed than those who grow beards but don't take care of them, because they have leisure time to take care of their beards, which proves that their lives are rich and they can spend some money on their clean bodies. The poor are not so happy. If you have a beard, just twist it casually, as long as it doesn't delay your daily work. Who cares if the beard is beautiful?