Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies (Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library)

by Roberts, Moss

  The Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library

  African Folktales by Roger D. Abrahams

  African American Folktales by Roger D. Abrahams

  American Indian Myths and Legends by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz

  Arab Folktales by Inea Bushnaq

  Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies by Moss Roberts

  The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

  Favorite Folktales from Around the World by Jane Yolen

  Folktales from India by A.K. Ramanujan

  French Folktales by Henri Pourrat

  Gods and Heroes by Gustav Schwab

  Irish Folktales by Henry Glassie

  Japanese Tales by Royall Tyler

  Legends and Tales of the American West by Richard Erdoes

  The Norse Myths by Kevin Crossley-Holland

  Northern Tales by Howard Norman

  Norwegian Folk Tales by Peter Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe

  Russian Fairy Tales by Aleksandr Afanas’ev

  Swedish Folktales and Legends by Lone Thygesen Blecher and George Blecher

  The Victorian Fairy Tale Book by Michael Patrick Hearn

  Copyright © 1979 by Moss Roberts

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title:

  Chinese fairy tales and fantasies.

  1. Fantastic fiction, Chinese—Translations into English.

  2. Fantastic fiction, English—Translations from Chinese.

  3. Fairy tales, Chinese—Translations into English.

  4. Fairy tales, English—Translations from Chinese. I. Roberts, Moss, 1937-

  PL2658.E8C48 895.1′3′008 79-1894

  eISBN: 978-0-307-76042-5

  v3.1

  For Sean and Jennifer

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Illustrations

  Introduction

  TALES OF ENCHANTMENT AND MAGIC The Cricket

  The Waiting Maid’s Parrot

  Sea Prince

  A Girl in Green

  Butterfly Dreams

  Suited to Be a Fish

  Li Ching and the Rain God

  Jade Leaves

  The Wizard’s Lesson

  The Priest of Hardwork Mountains

  White Lotus Magic

  The Peach Thief

  TALES OF FOLLY AND GREED The Magic Pear Tree

  The Wine Well

  Gold, Gold

  Stump Watching

  Buying Shoes

  The Missing Axe

  Overdoing It

  The Horsetrader

  The Silver Swindle

  The Family’s Fortune

  The Leaf

  The Tiger Behind the Fox

  Rich Man of Sung

  The Flying Bull

  Social Connections

  A Small Favor

  Pitted Loquats

  Memory Trouble

  Medical Techniques

  The Lost Horse

  The Deer in the Dream

  Loss of Memory

  The Sun

  THE ANIMAL KINGDOM A Faithful Mouse

  The Loyal Dog

  Black and White

  The Dog Goes to Court

  The Tale of the Trusty Tiger

  The Repentant Tiger of Chaoch’eng

  Tiger Boys

  Human Bait

  Educated Frogs and Martial Ants

  The Snakeman

  The North Country Wolf

  Counselor to the Wolves

  Monkey Keeper

  Man and Beast

  Man or Beast

  The Fish Rejoice

  Wagging My Tail in the Mud

  WOMEN AND WIVES Li Chi Slays the Serpent

  The Black General

  The Master and the Serving Maid

  A Cure for Jealousy

  The Fortune Teller

  A Dead Son

  The Golden Toothpick

  The King’s Favorite

  The Divided Daughter

  GHOSTS AND SOULS The Scholar’s Concubine

  Three Former Lives

  The Monk from Everclear

  The Monk’s Sins

  The Truth About Ghosts

  Sung Ting-po Catches a Ghost

  The Man Who Couldn’t Catch a Ghost

  Ai Tzu and the Temple Ghost

  Escaping Ghosts

  Test of Conviction

  Drinking Companions

  The Censor and the Tiger

  Underworld Justice

  Sharp Sword

  The Skull

  JUDGES AND DIPLOMATS The Sheep Butcher and His King

  The Prime Minister’s Coachman

  The Royal Jewel

  Country of Thieves

  Strategy

  Buying Loyalty

  The Groom’s Crimes

  The Chain

  Hearsay

  Dreams

  The Mortal Lord

  One Word Solves a Mystery

  A Wise Judge

  A Clever Judge

  A Fine Phoenix

  Sun Tribute

  AN UNOFFICIAL HISTORY OF THE CONFUCIAN ACADEMY Nature

  Civilization

  A Note on the Translation and Transcription of Chinese

  List of Sources

  About the Translator

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank first of all Professor C. N. Tay of New York University for his sustaining encouragement and for sharing his extraordinary knowledge of language and literature;

  the Pantheon editor, Wendy Wolf, and the copy editor, Mary Barnett, whose excellent judgment in matters of literary taste and English style improved my manuscript in countless ways;

  my wife, Florence, and my children, Sean and Jennifer, who read the manuscript with care and made many valuable suggestions;

  our friend, Shirley Hochhausen, who listened to these tales with a keen and appreciative ear;

  the students in the East Asian Studies Program at New York University, who have stimulated so much of my research into Chinese literature.

  A Note on the Illustrations

  The illustrations were taken from the Ming encyclopedia San Ts’ai T’u Huei, or Compendium of Illustrations for the Three Orders of Heaven, Earth, and Man (1608). I am grateful to Mr. Jack Jacoby of the East Asian Collections of the Columbia University Libraries for permission to use their reprint edition. I also wish to thank Mr. David Tsai, Curator, and Ms. Alice Chi of the Gest Oriental Library of Princeton University for their assistance.

  Introduction

  The tales, fables, and fantasies in this collection blend the everyday life of mortals, the fabulous kingdom of birds and beasts, and the supernatural world of gods and ghosts. Like Western folk and fairy tales, they spring from the deep wells of a civilization’s history and imagination, and their cast of peasants, philosophers, virgins, kings, judges, tigers, and parrots may sometimes remind us of characters in more familiar legends. At the same time, these stories bear the stamp of the society and traditions that originally produced them. They illuminate the Chinese social order through the structured relationships that defined it: emperor and subject, father and so
n, husband and wife (or wives), official and peasant, human and beast.

  The Confucian philosophers who dominated the Chinese state conceived these relationships as a harmonious balance of obligations, and a number of pieces in this collection illustrate their view of order and authority. By and large, the Confucians were the voice of the superior orders—emperor, father, husband. The majority of our tales, however, speak for the other side, for they come from the Taoists, philosophers and social critics who represented the subordinate orders and historically opposed the Confucians. The Taoist view found vivid expression in popular literature—novels, plays, and the tales and legends we read here. Indeed, one of the purposes of this genre, typically scorned and even banned by Confucian authorities, was to publicize the crimes of the mighty and the injustices suffered by the subordinate order, including children, women, and animals. As the conflict between those above and those below gave shape to Chinese history, the rivalry of these two great philosophies gave shape to Chinese culture.

  In Confucian doctrine, the emperor sat at the center of the political, social, and natural realms. He ruled with a mandate from heaven, and his spiritual authority radiated outward in concentric circles; he received in return the allegiance of humans and the submission of creatures and things. The Chinese saw him as both Son of Heaven and father of the people, thus fusing the Western roles of king and pope into a single, semi-divine figure. As the descendant of the founder of his own dynasty, the emperor had charge of the filial worship of his ancestors and the wise governance of his own family—in particular the careful arrangement of marriages and the proper education of the son who would succeed him. In Confucianism, the hereditary principle was foremost, because the imperial family was the heart of the state.

  The emperor transmitted his influence across the land directly through the imperial bureaucracy and indirectly through the great landowning clans, sometimes called the local gentry or nobility. Official positions (the goal for every clan’s sons) were obtained through a series of qualifying examinations based on the sacred books of Confucian doctrine, ritual, ethics, metaphysics, and history. An ambitious young man could rise by passing three successive levels of examinations, the county, the provincial, and the metropolitan. Each of the degrees brought its holder various immunities, exemptions, and privileges, though not always an actual office. The system was designed to delegate the responsibilities of government to upright and learned men, to scholar-officials who would rule with judgment.

  However, these tales deal with practice, not theory, and in reality the bureaucracy was a cumbersome, often corrupt structure in which official appointment was determined by a mixture of factors that included patronage and bribery as well as scholarship. A tale like “The Scholar’s Concubine” is meant as a scathing satire on the sale of office to the unqualified.

  The official that appears most frequently in this collection is the county magistrate, the lowest official of the imperial bureaucracy and the direct governor of the people in his jurisdiction. He usually held a “metropolitan” or “provincial” degree, and was addressed as “parent of the county.” Even so, he was usually a sorry caretaker of the peasants’ fortunes, and rarely loved. “A Wise Judge” and “A Clever Judge” pay tribute to good magistrates; but “Social Connections” tells how a vicious official ruins a prosperous farmer, and “Underworld Justice” goes further to show how little justice there is in this world or the next.

  The closing selection of this book, chapter one of the eighteenth-century novel An Unofficial History of the Confucian Academy, satirizes the entire official realm. In it, the hero, Wang Mien, refuses to take office despite his enormous talents and the wishes of the emperor, taking to heart his mother’s dying wish: “Take a wife and raise a family; care for my grave—and don’t become an official.” Such criticism rarely touched the emperor himself. An exception is the opening tale, “The Cricket,” in which the whole bureaucracy mobilizes to cater to the court’s newest fad.

  The great clans ruled locally, little models of the imperial family. Here too, hereditary right was enforced to assure the smooth transmission of property and status; and to that end the arrangement of marriages was essential. If a young noble and his first wife had little choice in the matter, secondary wives or concubines had none at all. Generally speaking, in a society that makes the family a political as well as a social unit, freedom of love and marriage cannot be tolerated; personal preference and appetite must be overruled by the social virtues. The response to this demand—the struggle for freedom to love and marry—became the spark in much of Chinese literature, as we see in “The Divided Daughter,” which describes with compassion the sorrow of couples who want to marry for love, not duty, and in “The Waiting Maid’s Parrot,” where a young concubine who loves a scholar finds that help can come from an unusual source.

  The control of emotion lies at the heart of the Confucian’s perception of human nature. The Confucians defined human beings solely in terms of a set of obligatory relationships, in which the essence, the fundamental act, was obedience: children obeyed parents, peasants obeyed lords and officials, wives obeyed husbands. This was the primary force in behavior—leaving passion and instinct as attributes not of humans but of animals; we encounter an official who has fallen into this savage state in “The Censor and the Tiger.”

  Master storyteller P’u Sung-ling, who sets the dominant tone in this volume, attacks this entire tradition in a set of tales in which animals and other “subordinate” creatures set the standards for virtuous conduct that their superiors would do well to follow; in “The Loyal Dog,” “The Snakeman,” and “A Faithful Mouse,” he shows eloquently where love and compassion are truly demonstrated. Twenty-one of the tales here come from P’u’s Record of Things Strange in a Makeshift Studio, a collection of over four hundred tales which is the culmination of the Chinese short-story tradition. The manuscript of this work was probably completed toward the end of the seventeenth century and circulated widely, though it was not formally published until the 1760s, some fifty years after P’u’s death.

  The literary countertradition of which P’u may be the principal figure has its roots in Taoism, a philosophy as old as Confucianism and the one most consistently critical of it. Tao (literally “the way” or “the main current”) is the universal ancestor and the universal annihilator. As the ultimate leveler of all living creatures, it creates all things equal, giving no one of them dominion over another by virtue of birth or any other inheritable power. Tao’s authority is absolute; it transfers no authority to what it creates—quite unlike the Confucian heaven, which gives its “son” the emperor a mandate to rule. As destroyer, Tao gathers up again all it has produced; none of its myriad creatures can transfer influence, property, or status beyond its ordained time. Animals and all other creatures exist on the same level as humans, and each exists for one lifetime alone, free of obligations to either ancestors or descendants. According to the Taoists, the artifices of civilization only lead people away from the original and benign state of nature. Thus at one blow the Taoists shattered the fundamental premise of the Confucian order: the social hierarchy founded on hereditary right.

  More than twenty pieces in this collection come from the great Taoist philosophers Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu. Two brief selections, “The Fish Rejoice” and “Butterfly Dreams,” imagine how the human and animal realms are part of the same whole. Chuang Tzu, in particular, sought a state of personal transcendence in which the spirit would be free to rove among the entirety of creation, becoming one first with this, then with that. This interplay between the human and animal worlds connects Taoism to the Buddhists, who believed that the spirits of the dead may reappear in animal form to atone for the sins of previous lifetimes. The transmigration of souls figures dramatically in “Suited to Be a Fish” and “Three Former Lives.” Both tales also teach the importance of compassion toward all living things, the essence of Buddhist ethics.

  The humanization of animals in thes
e tales reflects yet another cultural association: the relations between the Chinese and the non-Chinese. Confucian historians were often outraged by the marriage and burial customs of the innumerable Asian peoples, some non-Chinese, some partly Chinese, who lived around China’s borders. Concerned with preserving the purity of Chinese ethnic and cultural identity, the Confucians often referred to these peoples with unflattering animal names like “hound” and “reptile.” The Taoists and Buddhists, on the other hand, had a far more tolerant view. Lieh Tzu’s “Man or Beast” voices this challenge in a powerful way, recognizing in mythic terms the contributions non-Chinese peoples had made to Chinese civilization.

  But the Taoists did not deal only in imaginative metaphors. The Taoist priests whose magical powers are displayed throughout the tales spurned the teachings of the Confucian classics and the careers of bureaucrats in order to study alchemy, astrology, botany, pharmacology, meteorology, zoology, and so forth. Rebels as often as recluses, they lived in the mountains where tigers reigned and outlaws hid. As critics of the social order, they often joined the peasants in resisting and at times overthrowing the dynasty in power, thus translating their egalitarian view of creation into social and economic reality. Antidynastic movements such as the White Lotus (a society of peasant rebels active from the twelfth century to the nineteenth) often made use of the “heresies” and “black arts” the Taoists taught them. “White Lotus Magic” and “The Peach Thief” afford us a glimpse of their activities.

  The Confucian social order was threatened from yet another source, the supernatural world. In the Confucian view, the dead commanded an authority that could be invoked only in the ancestral temple, and only by their living—and noble—descendants. These rituals had enormous social and psychological influence over the common people, whose untitled and often homeless dead were silent and impotent. A rival and contemporary of Confucius, the philosopher Mo Tzu, devised an ingenious way to reverse this concept. Ghosts, Mo argued, are not the agents of the privileged living; rather, they are agents of heaven. As the collective common dead, they are the enforcers of a universal, objective justice and can compensate for the defects in human justice. The City God who plays an important role in “Underworld Justice” is criticized for neglecting this duty. The City God had a public temple in the city which gave anyone who entered and sought it access to the world of the dead. The local deity in “Drinking Companions” is a variant of the same idea. Many of the other tales in the section Ghosts and Souls poke fun at those who believe in ghosts that are creations of mere superstition, not agents of justice.