📚 Yuanshen Haikua — a Qing-dynasty endgame manual
Count the pieces and few would believe this position can be drawn: Red has exactly four fighting pieces left — two chariots, one cannon, one pawn — while Black keeps almost the entire board: both advisors, both elephants, two knights, two chariots, two cannons and five pawns. Yet Uyên Thâm Hải Khoát records the verdict: draw. The name borrows the image of Bodhidharma crossing the Yangtze on a single reed — a Zen legend told in the anecdote below, where the patriarch answers Emperor Wu of Liang's proud question about merit with one famous, freezing sentence. Few against many, weak yet unbeaten: that is exactly the problem Red must solve here. Holding Red, how would you secure this draw?
Crossing a river on a reed: Bodhidharma and the answer 'no merit at all'
Emperor Wu of Liang — the ruler who built temples, cast statues and made offerings on a scale unmatched in his age — greeted the foreign monk with a proud question: 'I have done so many Buddhist works; how much merit have I gained?' The answer he received was as cold as the Yangtze's surface: 'No…
Stories around this position — storytelling, not part of the engine-verified content.
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