Adventures of the Mad Monk Ji Gong

by Guo Xiaoting

  “If it were not that his home is the same as mine, I would not ask. Don’t worry about a thing. I will go with you.” As the two left the wine shop, Li Ping asked, “Where did you become a monk, Teacher?”

  “I became a monk at the Monastery of the Soul’s Retreat. The first character of my name is Dao and the second is Ji. They also call me Mad Ji,” the monk told Li Ping. And so they walked on, talking, until they reached Ma Jing’s gate.

  “I will call someone to the gate,” said Li Ping.

  But the monk said, “I will call.” Then he shouted, “Is Cloud Dragon Hua in there?”

  “Teacher, what is that you said just now?” asked Li Ping.

  “Never mind,” said Ji Gong.

  After a little while, Ma Jing opened the gate and said, “Dear brother, did you call someone to open the gate?”

  “It was not I,” replied Li Ping. “It was the honorable monk. We came together. This is the famous Chan teacher Ji from the Monastery of the Soul’s Retreat, who has just cured my younger brother. I came with him to introduce him so that he could cure your mother.”

  “Dear brother,” said Ma Jing, “you came at an unfortunate time. I am just sitting down with some friends. Could you ask the monk to wait until I call and invite him?”

  “I was right, wasn’t I?” said the monk. “I came at the wrong time. Am I to be asked in or not?”

  “Elder Brother,” exclaimed Li Ping, “you’re acting foolishly! What friends could you have that would prevent you from seeing me and getting the old lady cured? Why are you hiding from people? You cannot trifle with your mother’s illness! If it had not been that Ji Gong cured my younger brother, I would not have come!”

  But Ma Jing kept saying, “Come another day.”

  Li Ping became impatient, and taking the monk with him, simply walked inside. The two men had long been the kind of friends who simply entered each other’s door without knocking. Therefore, Ma Jing could not very well prevent Li Ping from doing that now, so he simply followed along behind.

  The monk went straight to the east building and sat down. Ma Jing instantly beckoned to the monk, saying, “Teacher, let us go and sit in the north building.”

  “Why won’t you let me sit here in the east building?” the monk asked.

  “There are guests,” Ma Jing replied.

  “Oh, your three little friends. Well, there is one that won’t be able to run away while we’re in here,” said the monk.

  Li Ping did not understand. He was thinking, “This is the library. Why doesn’t Ma Jing want the monk here?” He could see no one and felt uneasy.

  The three men then went to the north building and Li Ping said, “If you are going to perform the cure now, I will go back to my shop. Later, please come to my place and we will have some refreshments together.”

  “Go ahead,” said the monk.

  After Li Ping had gone, the monk took out a piece of medicine and asked for boiling water in which to dissolve it and also cold water to cool it. He then gave the mixture to the old lady to drink. In a short time, the old lady began to feel energy in her body. She sat up and asked, “Son, how is it that after having been so sick and unable to move for these many months, now I suddenly feel well?”

  “Mother,” Ma Jing explained, “you did not know that here we have Ji Gong from the Monastery of the Soul’s Retreat who has given you a strange and wonderful medicine.”

  As soon as the old lady heard that this was Ji Gong, she recalled that Ji Gong liked meat pastries: “My son, you must kowtow to Ji Gong and then take him into the east room and give him some tea and meat pastries.”

  Ma Jing approached Ji Gong and said, “Teacher, my mother wants me to kowtow to you and also offer you some refreshment. Let us go outside, then.”

  “Good,” said Ji Gong, and the two went to the east room.

  CHAPTER 48

  Ji Gong asks for a scroll; Ma Jing kills a temple guardian

  MA Jing had, indeed, been very happy to see Ji Gong cure his mother. As she had recommended, he immediately kowtowed, falling to his knees and knocking his head against the floor. After what his mother had said, there was nothing he could do except invite the monk into the east room library.

  As the monk followed Ma Jing into the east building, he saw at once that the table was set with four places. “Who was here drinking wine?” he asked.

  “I was,” answered Ma Jing.

  “If you were drinking here alone, why are there four wine cups?” asked the monk.

  “I was drinking from each of them in turn,” said Ma Jing. Then he quickly had the dishes removed and two places set instead in front of the monk and himself.

  “May I ask your honorable name?” queried the monk.

  “I am called Ma Jing,” he replied.

  “May I ask you about someone you might know?” asked the monk.

  “Who is that?” asked Ma Jing.

  “I have a pupil named Ma Yuanzhang. Do you know him?” asked the monk.

  Ma Jing was thinking, “This monk is really hateful, saying my uncle is his pupil. This is an insult.” He looked the monk straight in the eye and said aloud, “I do not know a Ma Yuanzhang.”

  “I cured your mother’s illness and how do you thank me?” asked the monk.

  “How much did that medicine cost?” asked Ma Jing. “How much gold and silver? You tell me. I must give you what you ask.”

  “I really don’t want any money, but I truly love scrolls,” replied the monk.

  “If you like scrolls,” said Ma Jing, “I have many. Please come with me and make your selection.”

  “I really don’t want any other,” said the monk. “I just want this one hanging here on the wall.”

  “You may have it,” said Ma Jing. “A little later, when you are leaving, I will give it to you to take away.”

  “I said I want it because I just want it now,” said the monk, and standing up he moved forward as if to take it.

  Ma Jing quickly stepped in between the monk and the picture. “Teacher, the wall is very dirty. If you disturb the picture, how can we eat? But after we have eaten, we will discuss it.”

  “This, too, is possible, but I will not leave this room, and I will see that not one of them escapes,” the monk insisted. At this time, Lei Ming and Chen Liang, together with Cloud Dragon, were there in the cellar behind the picture on the wall. They heard and very clearly understood what Ji Gong meant. The three of them began to shake with fear.

  “This monk is uncontrollable,” thought Ma Jing. “If I kill him with one slash of my knife, then to satisfy my young brother Li Ping I will have to erect a pagoda in recognition of him curing my mother’s illness, and every year I will have to burn incense and paper money there in his memory.” He moved toward the center of the room, secretly fingering his long knife. He thought he would get the monk drunk on wine. He poured a cup and waited.

  The monk raised his cup and said, “You’re waiting until you get me drunk, aren’t you? It will be easier to manage things then.” Then he sat there for a long while and began to hum with a mournful, moaning sound. By this time the day was drawing to a close.

  “Why are you making that moaning sound, monk?” asked Ma Jing.

  “I am getting bored with this place and would like to leave,” answered the monk. Together they walked out of the room and through the gate. It was getting dark. As they walked, the monk was asking, “Ma Jing, what do you think of that medicine?”

  “Good,” said Ma Jing.

  “Ma Jing, can you guess how much that medicine cost?” asked the monk.

  “How much was it?” countered Ma Jing.

  “Ma Jing, would you have guessed that that medicine cost only one cash each for a pill?” asked the monk.

  “That’s very cheap,” commented Ma Jing.

  “Cheap or not, I don’t think I will come again,” the monk said. “People are not good-hearted any more. I cured your mother and you are thinking of killing me. Then you will build a pagod
a in my memory and offer incense and burn paper money to my spirit.”

  As Ma Jing listened, he thought, “This is a very strange monk.” Then, as they came to the entrance to the east section, the monk sat down on a stone. Ma Jing stepped behind his back and leaned over him with knife in hand, ready to kill him. Suddenly the monk pointed with his finger and Ma Jing was unable to move. He stood still with the knife upraised in his hand.

  “Help! He’s going to kill me! I’m a monk!” Ji Gong shouted.

  Along the street there were many shops, and their doors began to open. People were coming out of them with lights. Ma Jing was frightened as he thought, “If people see me standing here unable to move with the knife in my upraised hand, they will question me—what shall I say to them?”

  At that point the monk used his Buddhist arts so that they both became invisible. People walked by them but saw nothing. “I was in the wrong,” said Ma Jing, “and yet you would not let people see me.”

  “You took your knife to me,” said the monk, “but you paid no attention to your wife’s lover.”

  “I didn’t know where he was,” said Ma Jing.

  “Come with me and I will show you,” said the monk. Ma Jing followed the monk until they came to the Temple of the God of Wealth. “He is in this temple,” the monk told Ma Jing.

  “Let me knock at the gate,” said Ma Jing.

  But the monk said, “You won’t catch people committing adultery by knocking at gates. You go over the wall.”

  “I can go over the wall,” said Ma Jing, “but how will you manage?”

  “I can go over walls, too,” the monk assured him.

  Ma Jing took a great leap to the top of the wall and looked down. There was Ji Gong on the inside. “How did you get in here?” Ma Jing asked.

  “I leapt over the wall,” the monk replied.

  “Show me,” said Ma Jing. “I would like to see how Teacher does it.”

  Ji Gong was up on the wall with one leap. Then he chanted, “I command by the word Om,” and disappeared. Once more he chanted, “I command by the word Om,” and he became visible again.

  “These magic tricks are not bad,” said Ma Jing to himself. “Tomorrow, perhaps I can learn them.”

  Again the monk said, “Come with me.” Around the corner of the building they saw before them a two-story hall. At the corner was a gate leading into another large courtyard filled with pines and bamboo. At the back of this courtyard was a three-story building.

  At the top floor they could see a light. Shadows moved over the paper-covered latticed windows. Stealthily they climbed upstairs to the third-story veranda. Ma Jing made a tiny hole in the paper window-covering to look inside. The building faced south, and on the north side, opposite the windows, he could see a long, raised brick platform that was used as a bed. On the brick platform was a low table, and on the table was a paper lantern with a candle inside. Directly opposite him, seated on the platform, was none other than his wife. She was dressed in brightly colored, richly embroidered silk garments. He looked again. It could be no one else but his He Shi.

  On either side were sitting two monks. One was a large man with dark reddish features wearing a loose saffron-colored robe and white shoes. Ma Jing recognized him as a ruffian known as Tan, “the Striped Wolf.” The other man was smaller and dressed in a brown monk’s robe. It was Zhou Lan, nicknamed “the White Tiger.” They were the two men hired to take care of the little private temple in his uncle’s absence.

  Then he heard Tan speaking. “Why are you concerned, Sister? We both heard that Ma Jing would not return tonight. You don’t have to leave now. We were just thinking of having some tea and something to eat. We were pleasantly surprised to see you tonight.”

  “No, I really can’t stay,” Ma Jing heard his wife say. “The monk Ji Gong called at our house and cured the old lady of her illness. Ma Jing has been entertaining him in the east room. I told the household people that I was going to see my aunt, and so I was able to come here briefly. I knew you’d be missing me. Well, if I don’t go back tonight, I can go in the morning and say that I stayed overnight with my aunt. Let’s have something to eat. I haven’t had anything.”

  Ma Jing grew more and more angry as he looked. “What is a husband to do if his wife is not true to him and his children pay no attention to him? Behaving in this disgraceful way!” Suddenly he gripped his knife and burst into the room. His arm rose and fell. He had killed the man named Tan. The other man threw himself through the latticed window. His wife stood up and quickly ran out through the door. Ma Jing followed after her. In the courtyard she turned and he saw her touch her face with her hand. A huge mouth opened with teeth nearly a foot long. Ma Jing was stunned with terror.

  “You dare to interfere with me!” she screamed. Out of her mouth came a black jet of smoke that struck Ma Jing, making him fall to the ground more dead than alive.

  Now this creature was not He Shi, Ma Jing’s wife, at all. He Shi could never have sent forth that black smoke. It was a fox spirit that had copied her features to appear as a physical being. She was one of a group of fox spirits that haunted the Jade Mountains. She had come looking for human companionship, and she had grown attached to He Shi in the following way.

  Long before He Shi had married Ma Jing, she had been a girl named He Qin, and a family member had given her an old Daoist cap that she liked to put on and play at being a sorceress. On one occasion, she had been at a wedding in a house where the groom’s younger brother had been ill for some time. Another girl said to her, “Why don’t you get your Daoist cap and see if you have any luck at curing him?”

  He Qin laughingly agreed to try. “Perhaps I can get my spirit to come to me and help.”

  “Don’t you need a table, the five grains, and things like that?” her girlfriend asked.

  “No. I will just put the cap on, lie down, and ask my friendly spirit to come to me. Then I will ask her to cure the boy.” At this time there was a great wind that rattled the doors and the windows. Immediately afterward, several things in the room moved mysteriously, as if an unseen person were in the room.

  He Qin was not frightened at all. She described the boy’s illness and asked the spirit to help her. Oddly enough, the boy got well and He Qin was rewarded with a present of money. For a while she left the Daoist cap at her friend’s home, but as objects continued to move about, she was asked to take it back.

  After she married Ma Jing, her husband was angered when mysterious things happened, and the fox spirit in turn came to dislike Ma Jing. While Ma Jing was away from home for two months doing his thievery disguised as a businessman, the fox spirit decided to come down from the Jade Mountains in her fox-like body. From that body she was able to transform herself into other material forms, in this case into a likeness of He Shi, the one person she knew well enough to duplicate. Her purpose in taking the form of He Shi was certainly not to cause trouble for Ma Jing’s wife, to whom she was greatly attached, but to use her mischief as a fox spirit to damage the relationship between Ma Jing and his close friend Li Ping.

  The two monks in the temple were not actually monks, but two unprincipled ruffians who had been dressing in monk’s robes while staying in the empty Temple of the God of Wealth. They had been persuading people to give them undeserved gifts and doing other bad things as well.

  They had picked up a little monkish lore from Ma Yuanzhang, who, of course, pretended to be a monk, but it was all simply a masquerade to cover their devilry. They both admired Ma Jing’s wife and hoped that she might respond in kind, but their compliments had just the opposite effect. The one named Tan had been particularly troublesome, and Ma Jing’s wife had asked her husband to tell them to keep away from her because of their behavior. The fox spirit had thought that it would be amusing to pay the two men a visit. It was at that point that Ma Jing had burst into the room with his knife.

  CHAPTER 49

  The fox spirit hears a story; Ma Jing receives the monk’s instructions


  WHEN Ma Jing ran after the fox spirit thinking that she was his wife, she had suddenly turned and, as she showed her teeth, shouted: “I am going to eat you!”

  And so she would have done, had not Ji Gong confronted her, saying, “You are not going to eat people. Why don’t we talk things over? We might get along well together.”

  “You shameless monk! What do you mean? I will simply eat you also,” she said. With that she sent forth another blast of smoke at Ji Gong.

  The monk only laughed and said, “Fox Spirit, if you like monks, let me tell you a story. There was once a famous monk who went up into the mountains and lived as a hermit. Because of his abstinence from everything worldly, the natural order of things was affected and no rain fell. The villagers who needed the rain for their crops therefore asked a certain woman named Water Lily to go up and persuade the monk to make, rain. They promised her 200 ounces of silver.

  “‘If I am to try to do this,’ she said, ‘you must first give me fine clothing, a sedan chair, and attendants so that he will think I am a great lady and pay attention to me.’

  “All this was done. When she reached the mountaintop, she saw the monk sitting in meditation with his eyes closed. ‘Old monk,’ she cried, ‘have pity on me. My stomach aches terribly, and it will only stop if some skillful gentleman rubs it.’

  “The monk opened his mouth and chanted, ‘O Mi To Fu, Holy Buddha! Don’t talk nonsense, young lady. Men and women should not touch each other carelessly. Moreover, I have left the world and have come up to the mountaintop for undisturbed meditation, abstaining from eating flesh or drinking wine. I can see also that the young lady comes from a family of high pedigree. It would all be most unseemly.’

  “At this point the woman called Water Lily laughed, and going up to the monk, seized his robe at the shoulders, pulling it away from his chest. Again she said, ‘Pity me.’ The monk could not help but smell the fragrance of powder and perfume. He saw that she was indeed beautiful to look upon. Men are, after all, not made of grass and wood. Suddenly he threw his arms around her in an embrace, and immediately rain began to fall. Water Lily returned to the village and collected her reward.”