Yün Li-shou then said to her, “Sister-in-law, you may not be aware of it, but although I am only in charge of this mountainous stockade here, I command a considerable body of both infantry and cavalry and possess quantities of money and silk, fancy clothing, gold and silver, and other valuables. The only thing I lack is a wife to take charge of my household. For some time I have thought of you:
Like a thirsty person longing for drink;
Like a parched person longing for coolness.
I could hardly have anticipated that you would show up here today in order to formalize the betrothal of your son to my daughter.
Heaven has granted this affinity,
That we may share our mutual joy.
If we end up here as man and wife:
We can enjoy a lifetime of bliss.81
There is nothing unfeasible about such a scheme.”
When Yüeh-niang heard this proposal she was enraged and cursed at Yün Li-shou, saying, “Who could have known that you are nothing but:
The skeleton of a dog wrapped in human skin.
My late husband did not treat you with disrespect. How can you now come out with such:
Language fit only for a dog or a horse?”
Yün Li-shou only laughed at this and then, stepping forward to embrace Yüeh-niang, said to her, “Lady, you were residing in a home of your own. What did you come to my place here for? It has always been true that:
It is easier to do business when the
customer comes to your door.82
I don’t know why it is, but I no sooner set eyes on you than you captivated by soul. There is no alternative. For better or for worse, you must marry me.”
So saying, he brought over some wine to share with Yüeh-niang.
“Go up front and call in my younger brother,” said Yüeh-niang. “There is something I need to say to him.”
Yün Li-shou laughed at this and said, “Your younger brother and your servant Tai-an have already been killed by me.”
He then said to his attendants, “Bring those things here to show to the lady.”
In no time at all, by the light of the lamp, they brought in the two heads of Wu the Second and Tai-an, dripping with blood. This so perturbed Yüeh-niang that:
Her complexion turned the color of dirt,
and she:
Fell to the floor in tears.
Yün Li-shou responded by:
Stepping forward and lifting her up,83
saying as he did so, “Lady:
There is no need for you to be upset.84
Since your brother is already dead, you can become my wife. I am a regional commander, so such a marriage:
Would not dishonor you in any way.”85
Yüeh-niang thought to herself, “Since this lousy character has already slain my brother and my servant, if I don’t go along with him, I am likely to forfeit my life as well.”
Thereupon, she pretended that:
Her anger had changed to joy,
and said, “You will have to agree to my conditions before I will consent to be your wife.”
Yün Li-shou responded, “No matter what your conditions may be, I will agree to them.”
“If you first formalize my son’s marriage,” said Yüeh-niang, “I will then agree to become your wife.”
“That’s no problem,” responded Yün Li-shou.
So saying, he proceeded to call his daughter out and pushed her over to Hsiao-ko so they could:
Share a loving cup,
Tie a nuptial knot,86
and become man and wife. Only after that did he pull Yüeh-niang over to him and propose to engage in the game of clouds and rain together; but Yüeh-niang resisted him and refused to comply.
Yün Li-shou was enraged at this and cursed her, saying, “You worthless woman! You tricked me into consummating the marriage of my daughter to your son, and now presume that I would not dare to kill your son.”
So saying, he went to the head of the bed, where he:
Picked up a sword and brought it down in a sweep,
Scattering blood for a distance of several paces.
Truly:
When the three feet of sharp blade
struck the neck,
The flood of fresh blood inundated
everything around.
When Yüeh-niang saw that he had hacked Hsiao-ko to death, she couldn’t help uttering a loud cry, which caused her to:
Wake up with a jerk,
revealing it all to be but:
A dream of the Southern Branch.
She was so perturbed by this that:
Her whole body was covered with sweat,
And her entire anatomy oozed moisture,
as she cried out, “How strange! How strange!”
“Mistress,” asked Hsiao-yü, who was lying at her side, “what are you crying about?”
“Just now, I had an inauspicious dream,” Yüeh-niang responded and then went on to tell her all about it.
“I was unable to sleep a little while ago,” said Hsiao-yü, “and got up to go and spy surreptitiously on what that monk was doing through a crack in the door. It turns out that he has been communicating with ghosts the whole night long. Just now, my late master, the Fifth Lady, the Sixth Lady, Brother-in-law Ch’en, the commandant Chou Hsiu, Sun Hsüeh-o, Lai-wang’s wife Sung Hui-lien, and Hsi-men Ta-chieh all came to speak to him and then went their separate ways.”
“Many of them are buried in the graveyard behind this temple,” said Yüeh-niang. “It is not surprising that:
The stranded souls of the unjustly dead,
should manifest themselves during the quiet of the night.”
Mistress and servant were unable to go back to sleep, and before they knew it, it was the fifth watch, and the cocks crowed. Wu Yüeh-niang hastily got up, washed her face, and went into the meditation hall in order to pay obeisance to the Buddha and burn incense.
Whom should she encounter there but Master P’u-ching, who was sitting on his meditation platform and addressed her in a loud voice, saying, “Lady Wu, have you achieved enlightenment now?”87
Yüeh-niang then knelt down and made him an obeisance, saying, “Permit me to inform your reverence that your disciple, née Wu, with her:
Fleshly eyes and mortal body,88
did not recognize you to be the incarnation of an ancient Buddha. But thanks to the dream from which I have just awakened, I am now enlightened.”
“Since you have already achieved enlightenment,” the Master responded, “there is no need for you to continue on this journey. Should you do so, things will turn out the way they did in your dream, and all five of you will lose your lives. The fact that you and your son encountered me is something that was:
Both ordained and fated to happen to you,89
because in days past you planted the seeds of your good fortune. Were that not so, it would have been difficult for you to avoid:
The splitting up of your flesh and blood.90
Initially, your deceased husband Hsi-men Ch’ing committed evil deeds and was anything but virtuous. This son of yours was reborn into your family in order to dissipate your wealth and destroy your property and would have ended up with:
His body and his head in different places.91
I will now undertake to lead him to salvation as my disciple. As the saying goes:
Should a single son leave the home to be ordained,
Nine generations of one’s ancestors will be saved.92
This will also have the benefit for your late husband of:
Compensating for his evil karma,
so that he too may achieve salvation. If you don’t believe me, follow me, and I will allow you to see for yourself.”
Thereupon, he strode into the abbot’s quarters, where they could see that Hsiao-ko was still asleep on the bed. The Master raised the staff in his hand and touched him on the head with it, while telling Yüeh-niang and the others to take a look. All of a sudden, he turned over, and
they could see that it was Hsi-men Ch’ing:
With a heavy cangue around his neck,93
And iron chains enclosing his waist.94
The Master then touched him again with his staff, and just as before, he appeared to be Hsiao-ko asleep on the bed. When Yüeh-niang saw this, without knowing it, she began to weep out loud, concluding that Hsiao-ko was a reincarnation of Hsi-men Ch’ing.
Before long, Hsiao-ko woke up, and Yüeh-niang said to him, “You must now follow the Master to leave home, take the tonsure, and be anointed as a priest before the Buddha.”
In a piteous state, Yüeh-niang embraced him and wept bitterly, feeling that she had raised him in vain in the expectation that upon reaching the age of fifteen he would be able to inherit and perpetuate the ancestral line; and never having anticipated that on meeting this Ch’an Master he would be spirited away into a celibate life. Wu the Second, Hsiao-yü, and Tai-an were also overcome with grief.
Thereupon, Master P’u-ching took charge of Hsiao-ko, conferred the religious name of Ming-wu upon him, and bade farewell to Yüeh-niang; saying to her on the way out, “You do not need to proceed any further. Before long, the barbarian army will withdraw; the territory will be split between two separate dynasties; one to the south and one to the north; and the Central Plain will have a ruler of its own. In no more than ten days:
Ch’an Master P’u-ching Spirits Away Hsi-men Hsiao-ko
The armed troops will be withdrawn;
And the territory will be pacified.
You can thus return to your home and:
Spend your days with peace of mind.”95
“Master,” Yüeh-niang responded, “once you have accomplished my son’s salvation:
On what day of what year,
will mother and son ever be able to see each other again?”
So saying, she instinctively took hold of Hsiao-ko and began to weep out loud.
“Lady,” said the Master, “stop your crying. Another Master is arriving over there.”
This fooled them all into swiveling their necks to look in the direction to which he pointed, whereupon, along with Hsiao-ko, he:
Transformed himself into a gust of clear breeze,96
and disappeared from sight. Truly:
Having thrice descended to the mundane world
where he was not recognized;
All of a sudden he flew away over the summit
of Mount T’ai’s Eastern Peak.
We will say no more here about how Master P’u-ching spirited Hsiao-ko away.
To resume our story, after this event Wu Yüeh-niang, Wu the Second, and the others continued to stay at the Temple of Eternal Felicity. In less than ten days time, sure enough, the Great Chin regime set up Chang Pang-ch’ang as a puppet emperor in the Eastern Capital, with a hierarchy of civil and military officials. The two Sung dynasty emperors, Hui-tsung and Ch’in-tsung, were subsequently taken to the north in captivity. The Prince of K’ang:
Escaped across the river on a clay horse,97
and assumed the throne in Chien-k’ang. This was Emperor Kao-tsung of the Southern Sung dynasty, who appointed Tsung Tse as general-in-chief and succeeded in retaking parts of Shantung and Hopei from the Chin invaders. The country was thus split into two regimes, the Chin dynasty in the north and the Southern Sung dynasty in the south. As a result:
The realm under Heaven was once again at peace,98 and
The people were able to resume their vocations.
When Wu Yüeh-niang returned home and opened the gate to her residence, she found that nothing of the family possessions or the household furnishings had been lost. Later on, she changed Tai-an’s name to Hsi-men An and allowed him to inherit what was left of the family property. Henceforth, people addressed him as the Honorable Young Hsi-men, and he supported Yüeh-niang during her old age. She lived on to the age of sixty-nine before dying a natural death, which was the reward she had earned by doing good deeds and reciting the scriptures during her lifetime. There is a poem that testifies to this:
An idle glance at this transmitted text leaves
one with confused feelings;
Who fully understands the extent to which the
Way of Heaven is cyclical?99
Hsi-men Ch’ing’s wealth and corruption made it
hard to continue his line;
Ch’en Ching-chi’s licentious cavorting ensured
his eventual annihilation.
The goodness of Meng Yü-lou and Wu Yüeh-niang
vouchsafed them long lives;
The wantonness of Li P’ing-erh and Ch’un-mei
led to their early deaths.
It is not strange that P’an Chin-lien should
meet with an awful fate;
And her ill repute last for a thousand years,100
perpetuated in fiction.
NOTES
Chapter 81
1. This four-character expression occurs in the ch’uan-ch’i drama San-yüan chi (Feng Ching [1021–94] wins first place in three examinations), by Shen Shou-hsien (15th century), Liu-shih chung ch’ü ed. (Taipei: K’ai-ming shu-tien, 1970), scene 3, p. 4, l. 11; the ch’uan-ch’i drama Pao-chien chi (The story of the precious sword), by Li K’ai-hsien (1502–1568), in Shui-hu hsi-ch’ü chi, ti-erh chi (Corpus of drama dealing with the shui-hu cycle, second series), ed. Fu Hsi-hua (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan she, 1958), scene 10, p. 22, l. 19; and a set of songs by Wang Hsi-chüeh (1534–1610), in Ch’üan Ming san-ch’ü (Complete nondramatic song lyrics of the Ming), comp. Hsieh Po-yang, 5 vols. (Chi-nan: Ch’i-Lu shu-she, 1994), 3:2909, l. 1.
2. A virtually identical line of synonymous meaning occurs in a set of poems by T’ang Yin (1470–1524). See T’ang Po-hu ch’üan-chi (Complete works of T’ang Yin) (Taipei: Tung-fang shu-tien, 1956), chüan 2, p. 13a, l. 13.
3. This four-character expression occurs in the Yüan-Ming ch’uan-ch’i drama Ching-ch’ai chi (The thorn hairpin), Liu-shih chung ch’ü ed., scene 16, p. 49, l. 1; San-yüan chi, scene 15, p. 41, l. 10; a set of songs by Hsü Wen-chao (c. 1464–1553), Ch’üan Ming san-ch’ü, 1:822, l. 10; the sixteenth-century ch’uan-ch’i drama Ming-feng chi (The singing phoenix), Liu-shih chung ch’ü ed., scene 18, p. 78, l. 2; Hsi-yu chi (The journey to the west), 2 vols. (Peking: Tso-chia ch’u-pan she, 1954), vol. 1, ch. 20, p. 223, l. 7; Mu-lien chiu-mu ch’üan-shan hsi-wen (An exhortatory drama on how Maudgalyāyana rescued his mother from the underworld), by Cheng Chih-chen (1518–95), author’s pref. dated 1582, in Ku-pen hsi-ch’ü ts’ung-k’an, ch’u-chi (Collectanea of rare editions of traditional drama, first series) (Shanghai: Shang-wu yin-shu kuan, 1954), item 67, chüan 1, p. 51a, l. 7; and the anonymous sixteenth-century ch’uan-ch’i drama Chü-ting chi (Lifting the tripod), in Ku-pen hsi-ch’ü ts’ung-k’an, ch’u-chi, item 39, scene 6, p. 11a, l. 10.
4. This formulaic four-character expression occurs in the middle-period vernacular story K’ung Shu-fang shuang-yü shan-chui chuan (The story of K’ung Shu-fang and the pair of fish-shaped fan pendants), in Hsiung Lung-feng ssu-chung hsiao-shuo (Four vernacular stories published by Hsiung Lung-feng [fl. c. 1590]), ed. Wang Ku-lu (Shanghai: Ku-tien wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan she, 1958), p. 67, l. 15; T’ang-shu chih-chuan t’ung-su yen-i (The romance of the chronicles of the T’ang dynasty), by Hsiung Ta-mu (mid-16th century), 8 chüan (Chien-yang: Ch’ing-chiang t’ang, 1553), fac. repr. in Ku-pen hsiao-shuo ts’ung-k’an, ti-ssu chi (Collectanea of rare editions of traditional fiction, fourth series) (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1990), vol. 1, chüan 3, p. 25b, l. 10; Ch’üan-Han chih-chuan (Chronicle of the entire Han dynasty), 12 chüan (Chien-yang: K’o-ch’in chai, 1588), fac. repr. in Ku-pen hsiao-shuo ts’ung-k’an, ti-wu chi (Collectanea of rare editions of traditional fiction, fifth series) (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1990), vol. 2, chüan 6, p. 29a, l. 5; Pai-chia kung-an (A hundred court cases), 1594 ed., fac. repr. in Ku-pen hsiao-shuo ts’ung-k’an, ti-erh chi (Collectanea of rare editions of traditional fiction, second series) (Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 199
0), vol. 4, chüan 6, ch. 52, p. 9b, l. 3; the Ming novel Ts’an-T’ang Wu-tai shih yen-i chuan (Romance of the late T’ang and Five Dynasties) (Peking: Pao-wen t’ang shu-tien, 1983), ch. 56, p. 216, ll. 14–15; and Ta-T’ang Ch’in-wang tz’u-hua (Prosimetric story of the Prince of Ch’in of the Great T’ang), 2 vols., fac. repr. of early 17th-century edition (Peking: Wen-hsüeh ku-chi k’an-hsing she, 1956), vol. 2, chüan 7, ch. 53, p. 39b, l. 10.
5. This four-character expression recurs in the Chin P’ing Mei tz’u-hua (Story of the plum in the golden vase), pref. dated 1618, 5 vols., fac. repr. (Tokyo: Daian, 1963), vol. 5, ch. 92, p. 11a, l. 5.
6. A virtually synonymous sequence of five lines, with minor textual variations, recurs in ibid., vol. 5, ch. 84, p. 1b, l. 7.
7. This idiomatic four-character expression occurs twice in Shui-hu ch’üan-chuan (Variorum edition of the Outlaws of the Marsh), ed. Cheng Chen-to et al., 4 vols. (Hong Kong: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1958), vol. 1, ch. 21, p. 309, l. 14; and ch. 24, p. 381, l. 15.
8. This proverbial couplet occurs in the fourteenth-century anthology of moral aphorisms entitled Ming-hsin pao-chien (A precious mirror to illuminate the mind), pref. dated 1393 (Microfilm copy of a Ming edition in the East Asian Library, University of Chicago), chüan 2, p. 6b, ll. 13–14; the Ming ch’uan-ch’i drama Shuang-chu chi (The pair of pearls), by Shen Ch’ing (15th century), Liu-shih chung ch’ü ed., scene 10, p. 27, l. 5; the ch’uan-ch’i drama Hsiu-ju chi (The embroidered jacket), by Hsü Lin (1462–1538), Liu-shih chung ch’ü ed., scene 10, p. 28, l. 2; the ch’uan-ch’i drama Yü-chüeh chi (The jade thumb-ring), by Cheng Jo-yung (16th century), Liu-shih chung ch’ü ed., scene 34, p. 107, ll. 3–4; the ch’uan-ch’i drama Ssu-hsi chi (The four occasions for delight), by Hsieh Tang (1512–69), Liu-shih chung ch’ü ed., scene 6, p. 16, ll. 8–9; the ch’uan-ch’i drama Yen-chih chi (The story of the rouge), by T’ung Yang-chung (16th century), in Ku-pen hsi-ch’ü ts’ung-k’an, ch’u-chi, item 49, chüan 1, scene 16, p. 21a, l. 1; Mu-lien chiu-mu ch’üan-shan hsi-wen, chüan 1, p. 66a, ll. 7–8; and an anonymous song suite in Ch’üan Ming san-ch’ü, 4:5125, l. 8. The first line also occurs independently in Chang Wen-kuei chuan (The Story of Chang Wen-kuei), fac. repr. in Ming Ch’eng-hua shuo-ch’ang tz’u-hua ts’ung-k’an (Corpus of prosimetric tz’u-hua narratives published in the Ch’eng-hua reign period [1465–87] of the Ming dynasty), 12 ts’e (Shanghai: Shanghai Museum, 1973), ts’e 7, p. 16a, l. 7; and Shui-hu ch’üan-chuan, vol. 1, ch. 21, p. 307, l. 16.
The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei Page 61