by Pu Songling
Strange Tales from Liaozhai
Strange Tales from Liaozhai
Volume Four
Pu Songling
Translated and Annotated by
Sidney L. Sondergard
Illustrations by Leah Farrar, Matt Howarth, Sarah Lawrence, and Christopher Peterson
JAIN PUBLISHING COMPANY
Fremont, California
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pu, Songling, 1640-1715.
聊斋志异 (Liaozhai zhi yi.)
Strange Tales from Liaozhai / Pu Songling ; translated and annotated by Sidney L. Sondergard ; Illustrations by Leah Farrar ... [et al.]
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Summary: “The subjects of Pu Songling’s short story collection include supernatural creatures, natural disasters, magical aspects of Buddhism and Daoism, and Chinese folklore”--Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-0-89581-047-2 (vol. 4 : alk. paper)
I. Sondergard, Sidney L. II. Title.
PL2722.U2L513 2010
398.20951--dc22
2008020137
Cover art by Matt Howarth.
Copyright © 2010 by Sidney L. Sondergard. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher except for brief passages quoted in a review.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. The Strange Business of Confucian Ideology and Advancement: Pu’s Separation of Values and System
II. Purchasing Posterity: Wives and Concubines as Commodities in Pu’s Tales
The Tales
249. Scholar Leng
250. Punishing a Lewd Fox
251. The City on the Mountain
252. Jiangcheng
253. Scholar Sun
254. The Eighth Great King
255. Pretending to Hang
256. Luo Zu
257. Liu Xing
258. Ninth Sister Shao
259. Gong the Immortal
260. Younger Brother Shang
261. The Xiucai from Yishui
262. The Mei Girl
263. Xiucai Guo
264. The Dead Monk
265. A-Ying 1279
266. The Orange Tree
267. The Red Writing
268. Niu Chengzhang
269. Qing’e
270. The Oracle Mirror
271. The Cattle Plague
272. Uncle Jin
273. The Magistrate of Zitong
274. The Ghost’s Saliva
275. Island of the Immortals
276. Dying in the Service of the Hell King
277. The Crazy Daoist
278. Fourth Daughter Hu
279. The Monk’s Magic
280. The Allotted Lifespan
281. Scholar Liu
282. The Miscarriage of Justice
283. The Ghosts’ Recitations
284. Empress Zhen
285. Huanniang
286. A-Xiu
287. Scarred-Eye Yang
288. Xiaocui
289. Jin the Monk
290. The Dragons Trick the Spider
291. The Businessman’s Wife
292. The Hell King’s Banquet
293. Treating the Ghosts
294. Slender Willow
295. The Painted Horse
296. Swindles
297. Releasing the Butterflies
298. A Boy Gives Birth to Sons
299. Scholar Zhong
300. The Ghost Wife
301. General Huang
302. The Statesman Who Served Three Emperors
303. The Healing Art
304. The Louse Stocks Up
305. Dreaming of Wolves
306. Glowing in the Dark
307. Summer Snow
308. Becoming a Boy
309. The Warrior Bird
310. The Geese
311. The Elephant.
312. Carrying a Corpse
313. The Purple Lotus Buddhist.
314. Zhou Kechang
315. Chang’e
316. Ju Leru
317. Scholar Chu
318. The Outlaws’ Lair
319. A Certain Yi
320. The Huo Daughter
321. The Certifier of Literary Trends
322. The Ugly Fox
323. Lü Wubing
324. The Witch’s Money Prophecy
325. Yao An
326. Cai Weiweng
327. Cui Meng
328. Solving a Case with Poetry
329. The Deer with the Grass in Their Mouths
330. The Tiny Coffins
Works Cited
Acknowledgments
For all the many reasons that he wrote these tales, from reflecting his love of the otherworldly to providing a natural extension of his work as a teacher, Pu Songling composed them most importantly to be enjoyed by a broad audience, not just by literary scholars. For over three hundred years this has indeed been their legacy in China, and I have tried while preparing this translation to remain respectful of that popular tradition. Many of these stories are unapologetically earthy, but never crude; they are occasionally quite violent or disturbing, but never gratuitously so; and they are frequently sad, but never morose or maudlin. What makes them so compelling is a barely-contained exuberance of tone that celebrates their excursions into the world of ghosts, demons, foxes, and immortals.
For this first complete translation of Strange Tales from Liaozhai into English, I have attempted to follow Pu Songling’s syntax, punctuation, and phrasings faithfully, providing annotations for the reader when he makes allusions to personages or events unfamiliar to English readers, and I have profited enormously from the unabridged and newly-annotated edition of the liaozhai zhi yi edited by Zhu Qikai, published in Beijing (1995), my source text for the tales. In those cases where a long series of clauses has made it difficult or awkward for the reader to follow the flow of Pu’s images, I have subdivided them into discrete sentences. I have resisted idiomatizing Pu’s writing because I have found that translations which attempt to appeal to the slang and colloquialisms of the translator’s immediate contemporaries tend, like topical humor, not to age well.
I wish to thank the Freeman Foundation for the generous grant support that allowed me to pursue research in 2005 on Pu Songling’s life and work at Zibo and other sites in Shandong province. Every trip to China has been filled with serendipitous discoveries for me; I often share the astonishment there of Pu’s characters, who, walking the mundane world one moment, in an instant find themselves in the presence of wonders.
My laoshi and colleague, Cai Hong/Anne Csete, has been keenly supportive of my efforts to translate Pu Songling’s stories, and I wish to express my profound gratitude for her generosity of spirit and her scholarly devotion. My colleague Zhang Zhenjun has also been a reliable critic and a great scholarly resource.
I a
m particularly indebted to my meticulous Chinese Editor, Li Lin, who has painstakingly reviewed my pinyin transliterations and has offered very helpful suggestions regarding the translations. The blame for any errors in the text, then, must fall solely to me.
If you would like to receive copies of the pinyin transliterations of any of the particular stories in this volume, please feel free to e-mail me at [email protected], and I will gladly send electronic copies to you.
I am pleased once again to present the work of illustrators who have responded to Pu Songling’s stories with their own beautifully strange visions. I admire and treasure the results of their efforts.
For raising the kinds of questions that are always useful for me to ponder, and for listening with genuine interest as I read each new translation aloud, I am indebted to Ran Rongming/Ramona Ralston, 你表现英勇 不屈.
Introduction
I. The Strange Business of Confucian Ideology and Advancement: Pu’s Separation of Values and System
From the Tang family examination study halls in the Ping Shan neighborhood of Hong Kong, to the study centers in the heart of the Confucian tradition, Confucius’s Shandong province hometown of Qufu, ample physical evidence remains today of the pervasive bureaucratic legacy of the imperial civil service examination system. This system was established quite simply as a method of identifying individuals who were qualified for public service as government officials by having them demonstrate intellectual talent, rather than assigning such positions according to preexisting status or wealth. It was conceived to help shape a scholarly meritocracy, but inevitably became as rigidly regulated and standardized (and often corrupted) as any other bureaucracy. Children as young as age five would begin learning simple texts before proceeding under the guidance of a tutor to memorize the Confucian classics, as well as selected commentaries on them. These core texts included the Five Classics, supposedly edited by Confucius himself (The Book of Changes, The Book of Odes, The Book of Rites, The Book of History, and The Spring and Autumn Annals), and the Four Books (the Analects of Confucius, the Mencius, the Doctrine of the Mean, and The Great Learning).
Following such training, the scholar was ready to begin attempting examinations at the district/county, provincial, and national levels, each exponentially more difficult than the exams preceding it. The essay examinations began with the candidate being provided a phrase from one of the Confucian source texts, which the candidate would have to finish by completing from memory the entire passage containing the phrase. From there, the examination posed “questions on philosophy, history, government theory, and the theory of poetry” (Rainey 149). Responding in part perhaps to his own repeated failure to pass the examination at the provincial level,1 Pu Songling (1640-1715) celebrates those scholars who defy examination protocols but inevitably succeed despite doing so, as in the tale of “Scholar Leng” (leng sheng), nicknamed “the laughing scholar,” whose laughter during examinations is found so indecorous by the provincial education commissioner that he removes Leng’s name from the list of successful scholars despite the excellence of his writing. Indeed, two of the ten infractions which could disqualify an examination from qualifying were either talking during the exam, or humming (Miyazaki 28), which a candidate might unconsciously do when composing the poetry portion of an exam, while thinking of its metrics.
Sons who showed any kind of early intellectual aptitude faced great pressure from their families to become scholarly overachievers and to perform well within the civil service qualification structures, since it was one of the few ways in which a family might aspire to material success within a culture otherwise dedicated largely to subsistence farming. Hence the family of scholar Cui, which “repeatedly found itself in financial straits” in “The Painted Horse” (hua ma), typifies the hopes riding on a talented son to escape poverty. This placed incredible pressures on those sons who had no family resources to draw upon during their years of preparing for the examinations. The impoverished title character of “Scholar Chu” (chu sheng) has to restructure his day to increase the efficiency of his learning: “thus if I work up until midnight, I can do in two days what it takes other students three days to do.” Chu is so poor that he’s eventually forced to make and sell torches fashioned from hemp plants and sulfur, just to make enough to pay his elderly tutor. In time, Chen, a fellow scholar and beneficiary of Chu’s assistance and advocacy, learns that Chu is a ghost, having apparently died at some point during his arduous studies, and Pu praises him in one of his frequent narrative postscripts: “Though Scholar Chu didn’t have a mortal body to use to repay his teacher, he employed his spirit to help his friend, with a will so powerful that it crossed from one world to another.”2
Pu Songling often creates correlations like this between the “strange” elements in his tales and the positive exemplars of Confucian values among his scholar characters. That’s clearly because he doesn’t believe there should be any distinction between the theory and practice of the lessons in the Confucian source texts—whether they involve protecting the interests of the common people, or dealing diplomatically with individuals who are no longer mortal. Such equanimity and consistency of response is modeled in “The Great Plan” from The Book of History, for example, which outlines five areas of conduct: “Demeanor entails respectfulness; speech reason; seeing clarity; hearing impartiality; and thinking perceptiveness. In turn, respectfulness leads to earnestness; reason to order, clarity to wisdom, impartiality to sound judgment and perceptiveness to sagacity” (121, 123). When scholars Song and Wang challenge the surly scholar from Yuhang to a literary contest based on themes drawn from Confucius’s Analects in Pu’s “The Certifier of Literary Trends” (si wenlang), he has no hope of beating them because he hasn’t internalized the meaning of the values associated with the lessons in the Confucian source text. Hence when a monk burns compositions by each of the competitors, mystically sniffing their relative merits in the smoke coming off of them, he finds the smell of the Yuhang scholar’s burning writing to be little short of putrid.
The similarity between lessons in the Confucian canon of texts, and lessons in Pu’s tales, is clearly quite unambiguous by design, whether the author’s aim is ultimately to provide evidence of the degree of his own study of the source texts, or to articulate in an explicitly narrative form the philosophy that he finds most compelling in them. Confucius teaches his follower Zilu, in the Analects, “To know what you know and know what you do not know—this then is wisdom” (2.17.79). Scholar Feng, in “The Eighth Great King” (ba dawang), only slightly varies this lesson by expressing it interrogatively to the title character, who indulges too often in drinking: “If you’ve come to such an understanding of yourself, why don’t you change your ways?” Confucian thinkers believe a responsible individual continually reflects upon, and reshapes, his or her life as a whole, and “by virtue of this capacity, one is also capable of assessing and redefining one’s relation to the social order” (Shun 193).
Perhaps to encourage positive change, Pu seems to prefer making the relationship between studious contemplation and right action explicit and immediate in his stories, occasionly even drawing explicitly on characters and teachings from the Confucian canon. Take Zilu, the strong right arm among Confucius’s followers, who is by turns the object of the master’s criticism (for being unreflective) or his praise (for being loyal). The Analects record Confucius as claiming that if he ever had to make his escape on the high seas by raft, the person most likely to accompany him would be the impetuous man-of-action, Zilu: “With Zilu, his boldness certainly exceeds mine, but he brings nothing with him from which to build the raft” (5.7.96). Emphasizing Zilu’s brash actions, Pu’s “The Ghosts’ Recitations” (gui ling), depicts Master Zhan, whose habit it is to get roaring drunk and then ride his horse up the steps into a Confucian temple, until he eventually dashes his head against a tree during one of his inebriated desecrations, and before he dies, cries out, “Zilu’s so angry at my impertinence, he’s beaten
my brains out!” Zhan knew the legacy of Zilu from having studied the Confucian texts, but he had learned nothing from the mistakes made by Confucius’s well-meaning but impetuous follower.
This was unfortunately too often the case among Confucian scholars aspiring to official appointments—even before Pu Songling’s time. By the sixteenth century, the problem of corruption among public officials had become endemic, and the scholar gentry, who should have been “the presumed exemplars of Confucian values,” not only had strayed from Confucian social ethics, but by “illegal as well as immoral means—fraud, deceit, and threats—the gentry sought to acquire buildings, farmland, and other forms of property” (Chow 18). The prestige of being respected as men of superior intellect, conferred upon scholars who became officials through their civil service examination achievements, frequently empowered such illegal acquisitiveness, despite the admonition given to Zilu by Confucius in the Analects, “the flaw in being fond of acting wisely without equal regard for learning is that it leads to self-indulgence” (17.8.205). At the conclusion of “The Xiucai from Yishui” (yishui xiucai), Pu inveighs against scholars who only pretend to be refined, and whose real “concern, however, is that they become rich as nobles.” Hence in “The Crazy Daoist” (dian daoren), a more-than-human scholar named Yin Wenping reproachfully mocks the formerly impoverished scholar Zhou, who begins insisting on riding in the luxury of a sedan chair wherever he goes once his fortunes change thanks to his success in the civil service examinations.
The complement to greed among the unscrupulous officials in Pu’s tales is usually cruelty or callousness, and this, too, is directly addressed in Confucian literature. The Book of Rites describes an encounter between Confucius and a woman crying at a family tomb, who explains that her grief is due to the tragic deaths of her father-in-law, her husband, and finally her son, each of whom was killed by a tiger. When Confucius asks her why they didn’t move from such a place, she explains that they faced no tyranny or oppression there, leading the master to comment to his followers, “remember that harsh government is fiercer than the tiger” (63). A man was considered worthy of the power of an official’s position if he could combine a sense of altruism, a willingness to think of others before himself, while resisting the temptations of wealth and position; such a person could “choose death over life if life is found unworthy of living or if a value worthy of being preserved is in conflict with life and is found larger than life” (Cheng 135).
