The father and mother of DĪNG Lán 丁兰 of Hénèi 河内 prefecture during the Hàn 汉 dynasty (period 06) died when Dīng Lán was young and never received support and service from him. As a poor orphan he became a beggar, but eventually he managed to become a farmer and even married.
He thought often of what the scriptures call a parent’s “grievous toil” (qúláo 劬劳). He carved wooden statues and served them as though they were alive, ordering his wife to do the same.
His wife began after a time not to revere them, for they were after all only pieces of wood, not living parents.
One day, when Dīng Lán was working in the fields, she took a needle and pricked the statues’ fingers in mockery. But to her horror, blood flowed from them, and when the wooden statues saw Dīng Lán, real tears fell from their eyes. Dīng Lán inquired closely, and when he learned what had happened; he divorced his wife and cast her out.
Many people say that this is the origin of ancestral tablets, although ancestral tablets are pieces of wood with names written on them, and not usually statues.
[This is one story in the classic corpus of the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars. Some modern editors most often rewrite it in versions for children, apparently in order to avoid the divorce. For example, sometimes the wife, seeing the statues react, is grief-stricken, reforms, and is forgiven rather than divorced by her husband. However in another group of variants, also of great antiquity, a neighbor’s wife, who has come by to borrow something, scoffs at Dīng Lán’s pious wife at her devotions. Dīng Lán’s pious wife, angered, refuses to lend her what she wants. (Or sometimes the statues do not approve the loan.) The neighbor’s wife returns home and sends her husband over, who sneers and beats the statues with his stick sometimes significantly damaging them. Dīng Lán returns, sees the weeping or damaged statues, hears the tale, and stabs the neighbor to death or beheads him. The magistrate, rather than punishing Dīng Lán, commends him as a fine example of filial piety.]