对牛弹琴
Duì niú tán qín
Translation: Play a lute to a cow.
Meaning: To offer something valuable to someone who doesn’t understand its value, equivalent to the English proverb “Cast pearls before swine.”
Story
This proverb comes from a story in the Collected Records of Hongming, an account of the three hundred-year spread of Buddhism in China, written by Sengyou (445–518 ce), a Buddhist monk of the Liang State during the Southern dynasty (420–589 ce).
Gongming Yi was a
