Something completely irrelevant. From Zuo Zhuan for four years.
In 656 BC, the seven northern countries of the Qi Huangong League prepared to jointly attack Chu, and Chu became king (in 682 BC? -626 BC) learned the news and thought that Qi was an unreasonable aggression. While assembling troops to prepare for the battle, he also decided to send a doctor to meet Qi. The allusion to the idiom "the wind and the horse are irrelevant" comes from angry words before this war.
According to "Zuo Zhuan Xi Gong Four Years", "In the spring of four years, Qi Hou invaded Cai as a vassal, and Cai was defeated, so he cut Chu. The angel of Zi Chu said to his teacher, "You are in the North Sea and I am in the South China Sea." . It's just irrelevant. I'm not worried about your meddling in our land. "Why?" It turned out that in the spring of four years, the vassal state soldiers attacked Cai. After Cai's defeat, he attacked Chu again. King Chu Cheng sent Qu Wan as an ambassador to the Qi army, saying that you live in the far north, and our Chu State is in the far south, far away. Even if cattle and horses try to chase each other, they can't run into each other's territory. I didn't expect you to join us. "Wind" is used as a verb here, which means "let yourself drift and lose your way". When it comes to the attraction of male and female animals, it is called "wind", because horses and cows are different and will not attract each other. Here is to describe that Qi and Chu are far apart, and cattle and horses will not get lost in each other's territory. Similarly, there is another explanation, "China's View on Ancient Literature": cows go with the wind and horses go against the wind, which means that Qi and Chu have nothing to do with it. Later generations used metaphors such as "wind irrelevant, wind irrelevant, wind irrelevant, wind irrelevant, wind irrelevant".
After Dr. Chu questioned the Qi army, Guan Zhong, a famous politician and strategist in Qi State, also recounted the "crimes" that Chu did not pay tribute to Zhou, and threatened to say, "Look, our allied forces are so powerful, how can you resist it?" Unexpectedly, he replied modestly, "How about ... if we use force, we will take Fangcheng (the Great Wall of Chu) as the wall and Hanshui as the moat. Even if you bring more troops in, you may not be able to come in. " After that, Guan Zhong, who is famous for his eloquence, was also refuted. The Qi army did not dare to act rashly, so it withdrew its troops and returned to China.
"The wind and the horse are irrelevant" is a very widely used idiom in later generations. Tang Xianzu's twenty-ninth biography of Conan said: "Your husband is in Jiangbei, and my concubine is in Jiangnan, which is irrelevant." Zou Taofen refuted several arguments that hindered democratic politics: "In fact, democratic politics has nothing to do with' sloppy anarchism', which is very common sense."