Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 6

by Pu Songling

  Only Zhou was unwilling, and when he declined, he took the excuse that he had no money; thus the escort suggested that they could send him back home to collect the sum, but Zhou still resisted. The escort pointed to him and declared, “You’re a truly stingy fellow, and even suffering can’t change your mind!” Then they saluted him respectfully and left.

  While Zhou stumbled out past the city walls, he dampened his sleeve with saliva, trying to wipe his eyes clear as he walked. As he headed towards the river, the ink resisted his efforts to wipe it away; he scooped up water with both hands to wash his eyes, but it had hardened so he couldn’t dissolve it; thus, regretting his actions, he went back.

  Originally, the woman from the Zhao family had gone to her mother’s house, and although it was evening, she hadn’t yet returned home. Her husband hence walked out to look for her, coming to the mouth of the valley, where he saw his wife lying in the street. As he stared at her appearance, he could tell that his wife had run into some ghosts, so he took the mud out of her mouth, picked her up and carried her home on his back. Gradually she regained consciousness so she could speak and realized that something had been inserted into her. Then she finally told him what had been done. She turned away to pull it out, then described everything to her husband. He became furious, and quickly rushed off to see the county magistrate to press suit against Li and Zhou.

  The magistrate sent out an arrest warrant—at that moment, Li was just waking up, while Zhou remained asleep, giving the appearance that he was dead. The magistrate thus concluded that the complaint was a false accusation and quickly had the wife beaten and shackled, without the husband or the wife being allowed to offer their side of the matter.

  A day passed, and Zhou woke up, discovering suddenly that one of his eye sockets had turned red and the other black, then screamed that his finger was excruciatingly painful. Taking a closer look, he realized that the finger’s muscles had already been separated from the bone, that only the skin remained connected to his hand, and after several days it dropped off. There was black and red above each of his eyes, creating a dark skin texture. Everyone who saw this couldn’t help but laugh at him.

  One day, he watched as Wang Da arrived, demanding the money Zhou owed him. In a stern voice, Zhou told him he had no money, so Wang grew angry and left. When Zhou’s servants asked him about this, they came to understand what had transpired. In unison acknowledging that supernatural beings are ruthless, they advised Zhou to pay up.

  Zhou couldn’t dispute the wisdom of this, replying, “Today, the magistrate and the officials all help those who delay repaying their debts, even though there should be no difference between the real world and the underworld—let alone, when they’re gambling debts!”

  The next day, two ghosts arrived, reporting that Master Huang had presented a petition in the village to have him arrested, too, and brought forward to be examined; Li was also petitioned to testify since at that time he was, for all of intents and purposes, dead.

  When they came to the village outskirts, they saw that Wang and Feng were both there. Li told Zhou, “Your eyes are still marked with the red and black, so how can you feel confident when you face the magistrate?” Zhou maintained that he was just going to repeat what he’d said before. Li realized that Zhou was just being stingy, so he remarked, “After you chose to ignore your conscience, I asked to see Huang Ba, to allow me to repay the money for you.” Then together they went to see Huang.

  Li entered and explained to him that he wanted to repay the debt for Zhou; but Huang insisted, “Who’s the one who owes money, and why should I collect from you?” Li went back outside and told Zhou what he’d said, then took out some money to loan Zhou so he could pay off Huang.

  Zhou became even more incensed and succeeded in offending Huang. The ghosts then arrested him. Before long, he was brought into town and taken to the city god. Sternly castigating him, the city god declared, “You unreliable thief! I have your eyes smeared, yet you persist, and then you renege on your debt!”

  “Master Huang loaned me the money,” retorted Zhou, “luring me into gambling, thus he’s the one who should be punished.”

  The city god called a Huang family servant to come forward, angrily demanding of him, “Your master opens a gambling house to seduce gamblers, yet he still demands to be repaid a debt?”

  “He put up money at the time,” replied the servant, “but he couldn’t have known that they were gamblers. The master’s home is in Yanzi valley, and the gamblers were apprehended at a Guan Yin temple about ten li away. The master had nothing to do with this man’s gambling.”

  The city god turned to Zhou and exclaimed, “You boldly take money without repaying it, then you come back and trump up false charges! Some men are unprincipled, but when it comes to you, you’re even more so!” He wanted to have Zhou beaten. But Zhou reiterated his own accusations, claiming that Huang’s interest rates were too high. The city god asked him, “Have you repaid even a bit of the loan?”

  “Honestly,” Zhou answered, “I haven’t repaid any yet.”

  The city god angrily demanded, “You still owe the original amount, yet you just stand here talking about the interest?” He had Zhou given thirty lashes, exacting his pledge to repay Master Huang. The two ghosts accompanied him to his home, where they solicited bribes before allowing him to live, then tied him up and left him in the toilet, ordering him to describe any dreams that he had to his family members.

  The servants meanwhile burnt twenty paper ingots as bribes, and after the fire had consumed them, they changed into taels of gold and two thousand strings of cash. Zhou then took the gold and repaid the loan before using the strings of cash to deliver the pledged bribes, clearing his obligations and then returning home.

  Upon regaining consciousness, he found his buttocks to be sorely swollen, with pus and blood dripping from them, and it took several months before his wounds finally healed. After this, the Zhao family woman never again dared to curse at other people; and Zhou, with four fingers on one hand and a pair of eyes as red and black as before, continued to gamble. This just goes to show that no gamblers are normal human beings!

  _________

  Guan Yin: The Buddhist bodhisattva and goddess of mercy.

  Li: A distance equal to 1/3 mile.

  Burnt paper ingots: Reflecting the practice of burning paper surrogates (of money, houses, etc.) to send them symbolically to the departed—usually for use of deceased family members or friends, but in this case as bribes to underworld functionaries.

  The collector of these strange tales remarks, “When there is injustice among human affairs, it’s all due to officials who overreact in response to wrongs. In former times, rich and powerful people raised the interest rates for borrowers in order to take their women and children from them, which the men didn’t dare complain about; moreover, even if someone did file a challenge, officials would bias the law on behalf of the individuals making the loans. Thus in earlier days, local government officials were basically servants of the powerful families. Finally, virtuous individuals, who’d witnessed this abuse of the law, took the opportunity to rise up and overturn the practice.

  “There was a juren who borrowed money in order to set himself up as a grandly-stocked merchant, wearing brocade clothing, rejecting even choice foods, having pavilions built to expand his family’s home, and also purchasing fertile farmland. Yet in the end, he neglected to remember from whence all that money had come. When he received a request for the loan to be repaid, he turned angry eyes upon the individual who’d given him the loan. The matter was taken up with the local magistrate, who announced, ‘I will be no man’s servant.’

  “What a difference there is between such a man and the lazy pig of a Buddhist monk who wouldn’t even help an ordinary person wipe away his tears! In my experience, I’d say that the officials of the past were flatterers, whereas now the officials are simply wrong-headed; the flatterers should be punished, but the wrong-headed ones deserve our a
nger, too. Borrowing money at low interest—why should this be an opportunity only available to rich men?”

  _________

  Juren: A successful candidate in the imperial civil service examination at the provincial level.

  Lazy pig of a Buddhist monk: An allusion to a character (Zhu 3:1514n23) in Moon-in-the-Water Temple Points to the Moon by Qu Ruji (1548-1610); although he was attracted to Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci in hopes that Ricci was learned in alchemy (Spence 152), Ricci converted Qu to Christianity in 1605 (they first met in 1599), and Qu wrote a preface for Ricci’s

  Zhang Shinian, a magistrate in Zichuan, was extremely harsh in his dealings with gamblers. He’d have their faces smeared with mud and then sent outside to walk around the city’s walls; but he also followed the methods of the underworld, so even though his punishments didn’t usually reach the severity of cutting off fingers, gambling was still extirpated from his jurisdiction. As an official, he was very effective at using the law to get to the bottom of matters.

  He’d be busy looking over his official documents whenever someone was brought into his hall to be examined, at which point the magistrate would proceed, spending some time acquainting himself with the individual’s address, age, number of family members, and occupation, invariably including seemingly irrelevant questions. Once he was finished with his inquiries, he’d advise and encourage the individual, subsequently directing the person to leave.

  There was one man who appeared in reference to taxes he was supposed to pay. Believing that he had nothing to lose, he presented a petition to be exempted. The magistrate stopped what he was doing, launched into a series of detailed questions, and then asked the man, “Why are you a gambler?”

  _________

  1599 text, On Friendship (Wu 365n36).

  Zichuan: Pu Songling’s home county, part of the modern city of Zibo, in Shandong province.

  Now the officials are simply wrong-headed: Alan Barr writes of this story that in Pu’s ideal world, “justice is enforced with evenhanded severity and the unprincipled receive their due punishment” (168).

  The man vehemently disputed the accusation, claiming that he’d never been a gambler in his entire life. Magistrate Zhang laughed and replied, “You still have your gambling supplies in your pocket.” The man was searched, and sure enough, the evidence was there. The man took Zhang to be some kind of immortal, exclaiming that he really didn’t understand what kind of magic the magistrate had employed to arrive at the truth.

  442. Le Zhong

  Le Zhong lived in Xi’an. His father died prematurely, and Le was born soon after his death. His mother was a devout Buddhist, so she didn’t eat meat or drink wine. After Le grew up, he developed a habit of drinking and eating unrestrainedly, becoming privately critical of his mother’s beliefs, thus he constantly advised her to indulge herself in tasty treats. His mother always responded with reproach.

  After she fell quite ill and was close to dying, she made up her mind that she needed to eat some meat. Le quickly discovered that no one had any meat left to sell, so he cut off a chunk of flesh from his left thigh and fed it to her. This caused her to recover somewhat from her illness, but she felt so regretful once she learned of the meat’s source that she stopped eating altogether and died.

  To mourn his mother’s death, Le cut himself even more severely, taking a sharp blade to his right leg and slicing so deeply that one could see the bone. Family members worked to save him, wrapping the wound with silk to which medicines had been applied, until it healed.

  When he thought about his mother’s Buddhist devotion in the midst of her own suffering and the ultimate meaninglessness of it, he felt so moved and humiliated that he felt compelled to burn the Buddha statues in the house before setting up a wooden tablet to memorialize her. Afterwards, whenever he got drunk, he always wept sorrowfully before her tablet.

  _________

  Xi’an: The capital of Shaanxi province.

  Though Le married at the age of twenty, he was still very childlike. When he’d been married three days, he told some people, “When men and women are alone at home together, they do all kinds of filthy things that sure don’t make me very happy!” Thus he sent his wife away. Her father, Gu Wenyuan, prompted Le’s relatives to entreat him to let her return, but after they’d asked him three or four times, Le remained adamant that she couldn’t come back. Six months later, Gu arranged another marriage for his daughter.

  Le lived alone for the next twenty years, during which time his behavior became even more unrestrained: he drank with everyone, from lowly servants to actors; whenever fellow villagers begged from him, he never refused to provide for them; it was said that when one family was marrying off its daughter but didn’t have a cooking cauldron to give her, Le took the pot off his own stove and offered it to them as a gift. Thereafter, he had to go borrow a pot from a neighbor just to cook his own food.

  All the local ne’er-do-wells knew about his generous nature, so they were always trying to deceive and cheat him. One of them was a penniless gambler who came sobbing to Le about so urgently looking for financial assistance that he was on the verge of having to sell his son. Le made arrangements to give him the amount of money that he claimed to need to pay his taxes, which exhausted Le’s financial resources; when a clerk showed up to collect Le’s own taxes, he was forced to pawn his possessions to pay them. Thus it was that his household’s fortunes declined, day after day.

  Originally, Le’s well-established family had been quite affluent, so his younger relatives contended among themselves to take up business with him, and it was common for him to accede to their requests for money without any dispute; when once his prosperity began to wane, they stopped sending anyone to inquire after him. Le was big-hearted, however, and didn’t hold it against them.

  On the anniversary of his mother’s death, Le fell ill and couldn’t visit her tomb, so he wanted to send some of his younger relatives to offer sacrifices for her in his place; but all of them offered excuses why they couldn’t do it. Consequently, all Le could do was pour out libations of wine in his home and perform obeisance before her memorial tablet, crying in anguish; there were no children or relatives there to wrap their arms around him in sympathy. Thereupon his illness worsened considerably.

  As he lapsed into unconsciousness, he felt someone comforting him; when he opened his eyes a little, he saw that it was his mother. Startled, he asked, “How have you come here?”

  “Since there was no one from the family coming to visit my grave,” she explained, “I decided I’d enjoy coming here, to see you since you’re sick.”

  “Where have you been living, mother?” asked Le.

  “In the South China Sea,” she replied. She massaged him, and afterwards his body began to feel cool. When he opened his eyes and looked all around, no one was there, and he’d recovered from his illness.

  When he got up, he thought about making a trip to the South China Sea to perform sacrifices for his mother. Some of his village neighbors had assembled a society that engaged in religious pilgrimages, so he arranged to sell about ten mu of farmland, then took the proceeds and begged to be admitted to their society. The society members disapproved of his unclean habits, so they collectively rejected his application. Consequently, Le just followed along after them, rather than traveling with them.

  Along the way, he violated the Buddhist teachings about eating meat, onions, and garlic, and drinking wine, and the group of pilgrims found this behavior so repugnant that when they discovered him passed out, drunk, they didn’t tell him they were going, but simply left. Thus Le had to travel on alone.

  _________

  Mu: A measure equal to 1/6 acre.

  When he came to Fujian, he met up with a friend who invited him for drinks, where he encountered a prostitute named Qionghua. Le happened to mention that he was traveling to the South China Sea, and Qionghua expressed her desire to join him on his journey. This made Le very happy, so they quickly packed up and went o
n their way; yet though they slept and ate together, they never engaged in sex.

  Once they arrived at the South China Sea and the society members saw that Le had brought a prostitute with him, they sneered at him, scornfully refusing to do obeisance at the same time that he did. Le and Qionghua realized what they meant by this, so they waited until the others had performed their veneration and then they performed theirs.

  The society members were disappointed that there was no manifestation of the Buddha in response to their ceremonial reverence. Then as Le and Qionghua performed their obeisance, abjectly prostrating themselves on the ground, they suddenly saw lotus flowers cover the surface of the sea, forming the shape of a pearl necklace, and Qionghua saw in them the Buddha, while all that Le could see in the many flowers was his mother. Hence he ran towards her, calling to his mother as he sprinted all the way.

  What the society members saw were tens of thousands of lotus flowers that were transformed into rosycolored clouds which blanketed the sea like silk brocade. In a little while, the clouds calmed the waves down, everything vanished, with Le standing alone on the shore. He didn’t know how he’d come to be standing there, or why his clothing and shoes weren’t wet. As he looked out at the sea, he sobbed so loudly that the sound of it shook the surrounding islands. Qionghua gently tried to persuade and to pull him away from the shoreline, and in his mournful state she took him to a Buddhist temple, then arranged for a boat to convey them northward.

  _________

  Qionghua: A most auspicious name, meaning “fine jade” (琼华), but also sounding like the characters (琼花) for a rare flower that was reputed to make anyone who ate it immortal.