This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Han Feizi argued a ruler needs no exceptional personal virtue or wisdom to govern well, only two instruments he called the two handles: the power to reward and the power to punish, applied consistently according to fixed, publicly known law rather than the ruler's own shifting judgment. Combined with positional power, the authority that comes from occupying the throne itself rather than from personal merit, and with technique, the concrete methods by which a ruler tests whether officials' actual performance matches what they claimed they would deliver, the two handles let an entirely ordinary ruler, not only an exceptional sage, hold a state together, which Han Feizi considered the only realistic basis for government given how rare genuine sage kings actually are.
He illustrated the argument with parables rather than abstraction alone. One tells of a farmer who, having once seen a rabbit break its neck running into a tree stump, abandoned his plow to wait beside the stump for another rabbit to do the same, a mockery of rulers who tried to govern the present by clinging to the customs of the ancient sage kings rather than adapting law to a changed age. Another describes a merchant selling a spear he claimed could pierce any shield and a shield he claimed no spear could pierce, a story so useful for exposing a self contradicting claim that its two words, spear and shield, mao and dun, became the standard Chinese term for contradiction itself.
Government by fixed law rather than by imitation of old sages, and clarity rather than empty boasting, are what Han Feizi considered the only honest basis for either statecraft or argument.