by Pu Songling
When Scholar Ma was lodging in the man’s home, and initially saw him arrive with his abacus, he was quite shocked; afterwards, Ma—who forged a secret plan—felt his indignation turn to happiness while he listened to the man make his calculations again, and said nothing to correct any of them. The man was very pleased with Ma’s work, and so they discussed another contract for the next year.
However, Ma refused and recommended a rather irascible scholar to the Changshan man, to take his place. When the new man arrived to take up his tutor duties, he began frequently reviling his pupil, yet his employer felt helpless and simply held his tongue, enduring it.
At the end of the year, he brought in his abacus. The scholar reacted to it with sudden anger, but then tentatively listened to the man’s calculations. The Changshan man then assessed the tutor’s service for the year with his abacus, checking the calculations carefully against his account book, but when he refused to give the tutor his wages for the days when he was traveling to take Ma’s place, the scholar rejected the calculations and began moving the beads representing Ma’s pay to his own side of the abacus.
The two argued without settling the matter, then took up arms and faced each other, with the result that the two men pummeled each other’s heads and finally had to resolve the matter in a court of law.
347. A Shanfu Magistrate
In Qingzhou, there was a certain citizen who was over fifty, but he married a young woman anyway. His two sons were afraid that he might have more children with her, so they secretly took advantage of the opportunity when their father was drunk to castrate him, then sprinkled some medicinal powder over the wounds. Their father felt this, but he just claimed he was sick, and didn’t say anything further about it.
After a long time, the wounds gradually healed. Suddenly as he entered the room one day, his knife wounds split open, and since his blood wouldn’t stop welling out, the man died as a result.
When his wife realized what had caused his death, she filed a suit with the local official. The official had the two sons tortured, and consequently they admitted what they’d done. “I’ll serve as a modern ‘Shanfu Magistrate’!” cried the official. Then he had the sons executed.
In our town there was a scholar named Wang, who’d been married for a month and then divorced his wife. His father-in-law subsequently took him to court. At the time, the magistrate in Zichuan was Master Xin, and he asked Wang, “Why did you divorce your wife?”
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Qingzhou: Formerly Yidu county, in Shandong province.
Shanfu Magistrate: An allusion to Confucius’s pupil Fu Buqi (known to his fellows as Zijian), who earned a reputation for wisdom and virtue by eschewing political meetings in favor of playing his beloved qin, a seven-stringed zither. Confucius’s veneration of filial piety as the central element of social cohesion means that Fu, like the Qingzhou magistrate, would condemn the sons’ egregiously unfilial behavior.
“I can’t talk about it,” he answered. Master Xin remained firm with his questioning until Wang replied, “I married her, but she can’t bear children.
“That’s absurd!” cried the magistrate. “She’s only been your wife for a month, so how can you possibly know that she can’t give birth?”
Looking embarrassed for a long time, Wang shyly replied, “Her yin is very deficient.”
Xin laughed and told him, “It may be that such ‘deficiency’ is troubling, but it’s no reason for splitting up a family.” This can be passed along with “A Shanfu Magistrate.” At least it’s funny.
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Zichuan . . . Master Xin: On this local magistrate for Pu Songling’s home county, see Zhu (3:1192n5).
Yin: Although yin is the essential femine principle in all nature, in this specific context Wang seems to be suggesting that his wife isn’t very responsive sexually.
348. Sun Bizhen
Sun Bizhen was being ferried across a river when a mighty tempest struck, causing the boat he was in to roll and shake, terrifying everyone aboard. Suddenly they saw a gold-armored god standing among the clouds, holding in his hands a tablet with golden characters written on it; everyone looked up to see what they said, and the three characters displayed there spelled the name “Sun Bizhen,” quite clearly.
The other passengers told Sun, “You must have committed some kind of offense to bring the wrath of heaven down on you—please take another boat, so you don’t involve all of us, too.”
Sun respectfully said nothing, but the others wouldn’t wait till he was ready to leave, so when they saw that there was a small boat nearby, they got together and pushed him over the side. As Sun afterwards climbed into the little boat, he turned his head to look back, only to discover that the first boat had capsized.
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Sun Bizhen: Sun, whose courtesy name was Mengqi, a literary luminary from Shandong province’s Zhucheng county, passed the highest level of the imperial civil service examination at the age of sixteen (Zhu 3:1194n1).
349. A Man from My Home Town
In my home town, there was a man who was always a troublemaker. One day, at sunrise, two men came and carried him away. When they arrived at one end of the marketplace, they saw where a butcher had taken half a pig and hung it up, so the two men approached, started poking and squeezing the man till he felt like he’d become part of the hanging flesh, and soon the two hurried off on their way.
Before long, the butcher sold some of the pork, and as he held his knife to cut some off, the man felt the pain as though the knife was penetrating to his very marrow. Afterwards, an elderly neighbor of his came to the marketplace for some meat, and when he complained that the butcher was cheating him with his scales, the butcher trimmed off some additional portions from the hanging pork, and as the butcher continued to cut off slices, piece by piece, the man felt excruciating pain as he did so.
When the actual pig meat was all gone, the man was able to scurry away home; it was already well past dawn by the time he arrived there. His family members teased him that he must be waking up late, so he related the details of the torments he’d suffered. They called on the neighbor to ask him about it, and the old man replied that he’d bought the pork and then returned home, explaining how many slices had been cut for him, and how many jin he’d purchased, matching the amounts that the man had described.
During the hours from daybreak to breakfast time, he’d been dismembered, slice by slice—wasn’t that bizarre!
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Jin: A weight approximately equal to a kilogram.
350. Gold and Silver Ore
In Guangdong, jutting out over a river, there was a craggy cliff where gold and silver ore was often found embedded in the rock face. Below the cliff, however, the waves surged so much that boats couldn’t anchor there. If some fellow paddled a boat close enough to pick off some of the ore, it proved so firmly embedded that he couldn’t get any of it; yet if he finally managed to pry some loose, as soon as he turned back around to the spot, he’d see that it had already been replaced with more.
351. Examining the Stone
Wang Zhongchao reports, “In Dongting’s Mt. Jun, there’s a stone cave with a roof that’s sufficiently high for a boat to fit under it—it’s too dark to measure the dimensions—and lake water flows into and out of it. Whenever someone enters the darkness by torchlight, from inside a boat, they can see two walls of an entirely black stone, the color of lacquer, and if they touch it, the stone feels soft; if they take out a knife and cut some off, the severed piece becomes like dried tofu.
“Then, meaning to make a study of the stone, they take it back outside, and once it’s no longer in the cave, it becomes harder than any other stone. Examining its blackness, they find it quite beautiful. Many people regularly paddle their boats back and forth, but no one seems to know about the beautiful stones waiting there to be collected, so the stones are simply discovered by the curious
, and then passed around to be praised by others.”
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Dongting’s Mt. Jun: Mt. Jun, which is also known as Mt. Xiang, is located at Dongting, in Hunan province. According to tradition, it’s also the home of the goddess of the Xiang River, Xiangjun (Hawkes 124).
352. Mt. Wuyi
On Mt. Wuyi, there was a precipice located about one thousand ren up the mountain, and people were often able to pick up incense wood and pieces of jade from its underside. The prefectural chief heard about this, and started supervising several hundred workers to begin construction of an enormous wooden scaffolding, ordering them to make it reach up so he could observe the strange phenomenon, and finally, three years later, they finished it.
The prefectural chief climbed up it and was almost up to the precipice when he saw a mighty foot begin stretching downward, while a massive toe started poking at him, like a stick used to pound clothes when washing them, and a huge voice cried, “If you don’t get down, you’re in for a fall!” Terrified, he quickly climbed down.
Just as he reached the ground, the wooden framework began falling apart, collapsing due to rotten timbers, till there was nothing left standing.
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Mt. Wuyi: Located in Fujian province.
One thousand ren: A distance equal to about eight thousand feet.
353. The Mighty Rat
When Wanli was emperor, a rat was discovered in the palace that was as big as a cat, and hence capable of doing serious harm. From all over, the people were solicited for exceptional cats that might be able to catch the rat, but every one of them was bitten and devoured by the beast.
It happened then that a foreign country donated a Siamese cat with snow-white fur. It was picked up and tossed into a room with the rat, the door was shut tight, while servants surreptitiously watched from outside. The cat sat crouching for a long time while the rat slowly emerged from its hole, and when it spotted the cat, it furiously rushed at it.
The cat evaded it by jumping onto a table, but as the rat also climbed up onto it, the cat jumped down. Things continued back and forth exactly like this a hundred times. The group of observers commented among themselves that the cat was simply cowardly, and took it to mean that this cat couldn’t succeed, either.
In a while, the rat began to slow down from all its leaping and chasing, its huge belly panting, so it squatted down on the floor for a little rest. The cat hastily sprang at the rat, grasping the behemoth’s furry head with its claws and biting into the creature’s neck as they began thrashing around and around with the cat hanging on, yowling, while the rat squealed in agony.
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Wanli: The Ming dynasty emperor ruled from 1573-1620.
When the servants opened the door and peered in, they discovered the rat’s head had already been chewed to bits. That’s when they realized that the cat had been avoiding the rat intentionally, pretending to be afraid, in order to wear it down.
To retreat when the other advances, and then advance when the other retreats, is simply to act wisely. Amazing! The strange rat might have been more than a match for the cat in terms of power, but not in strategy!
354. Zhang Buliang
There was a certain merchant who happened to have arrived at the border of Zhili, when suddenly a storm of hail began to fall, so he took refuge in a field of grain. From the sky, he heard a voice say, “This is Zhang Buliang’s field, so don’t harm his crops.” The merchant figured that this meant that the Zhang family must be “no good,” so he wondered why heaven had tried to protect him.
When the hail stopped, he entered the village, and began inquiring about this Zhang, but everyone he asked replied that Zhang was a righteous man. It turned out that Zhang had become wealthy without ever holding public office, as the harvests from his grain fields had made him very rich. Every spring the poor people came to borrow from his stores, and when they returned to repay him, he simply took what they offered, without paying attention to how much they owed—and hence he was called Buliang because he “didn’t measure,” not because he was “no good.”
Everyone hurried out to the fields, to see whether any of the grain had been ruined by being flattened, and found that all of the Zhang family fields were safe and sound.
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Zhili: Part of modern Hebei province.
Zhang Buliang . . . “no good”: Zhang’s first name, 不量, means “no measure,” but it sounds just like 不良, meaning “no good,” or “harmful.”
355. The Shepherds
Two shepherds who went into the mountains came across a wolf’s den, where there were two little wolf cubs, so they each decided to grab one of them. Then they both climbed into trees, several dozen steps apart from each other.
In a little while, an adult wolf arrived, entered its den to find the cubs missing, and immediately panicked. The shepherd up in one tree twisted his cub’s paws and ears till it howled; when the adult wolf heard the sound, it looked up at the source and angrily rushed underneath the tree, howling as it tried to climb up and stop the shepherd.
While it was doing this, the shepherd in the other tree caused the other cub to cry out; at the sound of the cry, the wolf looked around, and as soon as it spotted the other cub off in the distance, it abandoned the one tree and dashed over to the other, howling as it ran, just like before. When a cry came from the first tree, the wolf turned around and hurried back there.
The wolf never stopped its howling, its feet never stopped their running, and after several dozen such trips back and forth, its frantic movements began to slow and its voice gradually grew weak; before long, it suddenly collapsed and lay motionless, not moving even after a long time. When the shepherds climbed down to take a look, they discovered that the wolf was dead.
Nowadays, there are bullies who walk around with angry eyes, ready to draw their swords, as if equally ready to fight or bite someone; and when others see how enraged they are, they run away and lock their doors. The bullies finally wear themselves out from shouting at them, and then when no one’s around to oppose them, don’t they imagine themselves to be heroes? They don’t realize that their power is no greater than this wild beast’s, and that other people make a mockery of such men.
356. The Wealthy Old Man
There was a certain wealthy old man from whom many business people came to borrow money. One day, when he went out, a young man started following behind his horse, and when the old man asked why he was following him, he explained that he was also coming to make use of the old man’s wealth. The old man promised to help him out.
After they arrived at the old man’s house, it happened that he had several dozen copper coins sitting out on a table, so the young man proceeded to take the coins and pile them up into tall stacks. The old man then declined to loan him anything, so in the end, he left without any money.
When someone asked him why he’d refused, the old man replied, “This fellow is most certainly a gambler, not a decent person. The stacking is a practice he picked up in gambling houses, which he unconsciously demonstrated with his movements.” Anyone who asks around will find that this is, indeed, the case.
357. Minister of War Wang
While Minister of War Wang Xiangqian, whose courtesy name was Jiyu and who was from Xincheng, was overseeing the garrison posts along the northern border, he employed craftsmen who worked until they forged an enormous long-handled sword, more than a chi in width, that weighed a hundred jun. Whenever he went to review the situation along the border, it always took more than four men to carry the sword. Whenever his troops stopped somewhere and set the sword down on the ground, he’d tell the northern people they met to try to pick it up, but no one was strong enough to move it even a little.
War Minister Wang secretly had a wooden replica made that looked like the great sword, just the same size as the original, and had silver foil glued on, so he could brandish it w
henever he went out riding on his horse. Without exception, everyone who observed this was intimidated by his feat.
Then, just on either side of the border, he planted a line of reeds that formed a hedge-like row for ten li, and he announced to everyone, “This is my Great Wall.” When soldiers from the north came to it, they yanked out all the reeds and burned them. War Minister Wang then had them replaced.
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Xincheng: Located in modern Shandong province.
Chi: A measure equal to 1/3 meter.
Jun: A weight equal to 15 kilograms, so the sword weighs just under 3,307 pounds.
Li: A distance equal to 1/3 mile.
Before long, the soldiers had burned them down three times, so Wang then arranged for explosives to be hidden beneath the reeds, and when the northern soldiers set fire to them again, the results were immediate, resulting in a great many of them being killed or wounded. After the survivors had fled, War Minister Wang planted more reeds, just as he had before. When the northern soldiers off in the distance spied him doing this, they all ran away, and thereafter they turned docile, like Wang was some kind of god.
Afterwards, the War Minister resigned his post and returned home, till he was needed again to help guard the border. He was summoned by the emperor to resume his duties; Wang was eighty-three at the time, so he employed the excuse of illness to resist the emperor’s call.
The emperor reassured him by saying, “You won’t have to do anything more than just lie there on watch.” As a result, Wang went once again to the border.
Wherever he stopped at various points along it, he flew a banner that said he was resting. When the northern soldiers heard that War Minister Wang had come, they couldn’t believe it, hence they pretended to be responding in friendly terms, in order to test whether he was really back. When they opened the flap of his tent, and saw that Wang was lying down calmly, they all approached his bedside to kowtow to him, then, tongue-tied, they quickly retreated.