Little Farmer's Clever Cons

In a village where every farmer owned at least one cow except for a poor but exceptionally clever man known as Little Farmer, he devised a plan when his single wooden cowhide was all he had left to sell: he traveled to a neighboring village and traded it to a butcher claiming it could predict the weather, receiving a handsome price from a buyer eager to test such a marvelous claim, though naturally it never worked as promised.

Rather than admit defeat when neighbors grew suspicious of his sudden new wealth, Little Farmer spun an elaborate story that he had drowned his own cattle deliberately in a lake and retrieved even greater riches from underwater "cattle markets" that only he seemed to know about. Several greedy neighbors, eager to replicate his supposed fortune without ever questioning how implausible it sounded, drowned their own valuable cattle in the same lake hoping for identical riches — and lost everything they owned in the process, blaming Little Farmer bitterly for a scheme they had, in truth, eagerly volunteered themselves into out of pure greed.

Furious villagers dragged him before a judge repeatedly over the following schemes he ran, and each time, through sheer wit and audacious lies delivered with total confidence, Little Farmer talked his way free while his accusers, blinded by their own desire to get rich quickly without earning it, kept falling for increasingly implausible follow-up schemes anyway. The tale left listeners with an uncomfortable but honest lesson: a trickster can only fool you as many times as your own greed is willing to overrule your own common sense.