Chinese Ghost Stories

by Lafcadio Hearn

  For the Spirit of the Furnace made strange answer to him with whispering of fire: “Vast thy faith, weird thy prayer! Has Thought feet, that man may perceive the trace of its passing? Canst thou measure me the blast of the Wind?”

  Nevertheless, with purpose unmoved, nine-and-forty times did Bu seek to fulfill the Emperor’s command; nine-and-forty times he strove to obey the behest of the Son of Heaven. Vainly, alas! did he consume his substance; vainly did he expend his strength; vainly did he exhaust his knowledge: success smiled not upon him; and Evil visited his home, and Poverty sat in his dwelling, and Misery shivered at his hearth.

  Sometimes, when the hour of trial came, it was found that the colors had become strangely transmuted in the firing, or had faded into ashen pallor, or had darkened into the fuliginous hue of forest-mould. And Bu, beholding these misfortunes, made wail to the Spirit of the Furnace, praying: “O thou Spirit of Fire, how shall I render the likeness of lustrous flesh, the warm glow of living color, unless thou aid me?”

  And the Spirit of the Furnace mysteriously answered him with murmuring of fire: “Canst thou learn the art of that Infinite Enameler who hath made beautiful the Arch of Heaven—whose brush is Light; whose paints are the Colors of the Evening?”

  Sometimes, again, even when the tints had not changed, after the pricked and labored surface had seemed about to quicken in the heat, to assume the of living skin—even at the last hour all the labor of the workers proved to have been wasted; for the fickle substance rebelled against their efforts, producing only crinklings grotesque as those upon the rind of a withered fruit, or granulations like those upon the skin of a dead bird from which the feathers have been rudely plucked. And Bu wept, and cried out unto the Spirit of the Furnace: “O thou Spirit of Flame, how shall I be able to imitate the thrill of flesh touched by a Thought, unless thou wilt vouchsafe to lend me thine aid?”

  And the Spirit of the Furnace mysteriously answered him with muttering of fire: “Canst thou give ghost unto a stone? Canst thou thrill with a Thought the entrails of the granite hills?”

  Sometimes it was found that all the work indeed had not failed; for the color seemed good, and all faultless the matter of the vase appeared to be, having neither crack nor wrinkling nor crinkling; but the pliant softness of warm skin did not meet the eye; the flesh-tinted surface offered only the harsh aspect and hard glimmer of metal. All their exquisite toil to mock the pulpiness of sentient substance had left no trace; had been brought to nought by the breath of the furnace. And Bu, in his despair, shrieked to the Spirit of the Furnace: “O thou merciless divinity! O thou most pitiless god!—thou whom I have worshipped with ten thousand sacrifices!—for what fault hast thou abandoned me? for what error hast thou forsaken me? How may I, most wretched of men! ever render the aspect of flesh made to creep with the utterance of a Word, sentient to the titillation of a Thought, if thou wilt not aid me?”

  And the Spirit of the Furnace made answer unto him with roaring of fire: “Canst thou divide a Soul? Nay! . . . Thy life for the life of thy work!—thy soul for the soul of thy Vase!”

  And hearing these words Bu arose with a terrible resolve swelling at his heart, and made ready for the last and fiftieth time to fashion his work for the oven.

  One hundred times did he sift the clay and the quartz, the gaoling and the dun; one hundred times did he purify them in clearest water; one hundred times with tireless hands did he knead the creamy paste, mingling it at last with colors known only to himself. Then was the vase shapen and reshapen, and touched and retouched by the hands of Bu, until its blandness seemed to live, until it appeared to quiver and to palpitate, as with vitality from within, as with the quiver of rounded muscle undulating beneath the integument. For the hues of life were upon it and infiltrated throughout its innermost substance, imitating the carnation of blood-bright tissue, and the reticulated purple of the veins; and over all was laid the envelope of sun-colored baijiahe, the lucid and glossy enamel, half diaphanous, even like the substance that it counterfeited—the polished skin of a woman. Never since the making of the world had any work comparable to this been wrought by the skill of man.

  Then Bu bade those who aided him that they should feed the furnace well with wood of cha; but he told his resolve unto none. Yet after the oven began to glow, and he saw the work of his hands blossoming and blushing in the heat, he bowed himself before the Spirit of Flame, and murmured: “O thou Spirit and Master of Fire, I know the truth of thy words! I know that a Soul may never be divided! Therefore my life for the life of my work!—my soul for the soul of my Vase!”

  And for nine days and for eight nights the furnaces were fed unceasingly with wood of cha; for nine days and for eight nights men watched the wondrous vase crystallizing into being, rose-lighted by the breath of the flame. Now upon the coming of the ninth night, Bu bade all his weary comrades retire to rest, for that the work was well-nigh done, and the success assured. “If you find me not here at sunrise,” he said, “fear not to take forth the vase; for I know that the task will have been accomplished according to the command of the August.” So they departed.

  But in that same ninth night Bu entered the flame, and yielded up his ghost in the embrace of the Spirit of the Furnace, giving his life for the life of his work—his soul for the soul of his Vase.

  And when the workmen came upon the tenth morning to take forth the porcelain marvel, even the bones of Bu had ceased to he; but lo! the Vase lived as they looked upon it: seeming to be flesh moved by the utterance of a Word, creeping to the titillation of a Thought. And whenever tapped by the finger it uttered a voice and a name—the voice of its maker, the name of its creator: BU.

  And the Son of Heaven, hearing of these things, and viewing the miracle of the vase, said unto those about him: “Verily, the Impossible hath been wrought by the strength of faith, by the force of obedience! Yet never was it our desire that so cruel a sacrifice should have been; we sought only to know whether the skill of the matchless artificer came from the Divinities or from the Demons—from heaven or from hell. Now, indeed, we discern that Bu hath taken his place among the gods.” And the Emperor mourned exceedingly for his faithful servant. But he ordained that god-like honors should be paid unto the spirit of the marvelous artist, and that his memory should be revered forevermore, and that fair statues of him should be set up in all the cities of the Celestial Empire, and above all the toiling of the potteries, that the multitude of workers might unceasingly call upon his name and invoke his benediction upon their labors.

  Notes

  “The Soul of the Great Bell”—The story of Ge-ai is one of the collection entitled Baixiaodu shou, or A Hundred Examples of Filial Piety. It is very simply told by the Chinese narrator. The scholarly French consul, P. Dabry de Thiersant, translated and published in 1877 a portion of the book, including the legend of the Bell. His translation is enriched with a number of Chinese drawings; and there is a quaint little picture of Ge-ai leaping into the molten metal.

  “The Story of Ming Yi”—The singular phantom-tale upon which my work is based forms the thirty-fourth story of the famous collection Jinguqiguan, and was first translated under the title, La Bachelière du Pays de Chu, by the learned Gustave Schlegel, as an introduction to his publication (accompanied by a French version) of the curious and obscene Mai-yu-lang-toú-tchen-hoa-koueï (Leyden, 1877), which itself forms the seventh recital of the same work. Schlegel, Julien, Gardner, Birch, D’Entrecolles, Rémusat, Pavie, Olyphant, Grisebach, Hervey-Saint-Denys, and others, have given the Western world translations of eighteen stories from the Jingujiguan; namely, Nos. 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14, 19, 20, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 35, and 39. The Chinese work itself dates back to the thirteenth century; but as it forms only a collection of the most popular tales of that epoch, many of the stories selected by the Chinese editor may have had a much more ancient origin. There are forty tales in the Jingujiguan.

  “The Legend of
Zhi Nü”—My authority for this tale is the following legend from the thirty-fourth chapter of the Ganyingpian, or Book of Rewards and Punishments—a work attributed to Laozi, which contains some four hundred anecdotes and traditions of the most curious kind:

  Dong Yong, who lived under the Han dynasty, was reduced to a state of extreme poverty. Having lost his father, he sold himself in order to obtain … the wherewithal to bury him and to build him a tomb. The Master of Heaven took pity on him, and sent the Goddess Zhi Nü to him to become his wife. She wove a piece of silk for him every day until she was able to buy his freedom, after which she gave him a son, and went back to heaven.—Julien’s French Translation, p. 119.

  Lest the reader should suppose, however, that I have drawn wholly upon my own imagination for the details of the apparition, the cure, the marriage ceremony, etc., I refer him to No. 96 of Giles’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, entitled, “A Supernatural Wife,” in which he will find that my narrative is at least conformable to Chinese ideas. (This story first appeared in “Harper’s Bazaar,” and is republished here by permission.)

  “The Return of Yan Zhenjing”—There may be an involuntary anachronism in my version of this legend, which is very pithily narrated in the Ganyingpian. No emperor’s name is cited by the homilist; and the date of the revolt seems to have been left wholly to conjecture. Baber, in his Memoirs, mentions one of his Mongol archers as able to bend a two-hundred-pound bow until the ears met.

  “The Tradition of the Tea Plant”—My authority for this bit of folklore is the brief statement published by Bretschneider in the “Chinese Recorder” for 1871:

  A Japanese legend says that about a.d. 519, a Buddhist priest came to China, and, in order to dedicate his soul entirely to God, he made a vow to pass the day and night in an uninterrupted and unbroken meditation. After many years of this continual watching, he was at length so tired that he fell asleep. On awaking the following morning, he was so sorry he had broken his vow that he cut off both his eyelids and threw them upon the ground. Returning to the same place the following day he observed that each eyelid had become a shrub. This was the tea-shrub, unknown until that time.

  Bretschneider adds that the legend in question seems not to be known to the Chinese; yet in view of the fact that Buddhism itself, with all its marvelous legends, was received by the Japanese from China, it is certainly probable this legend had a Chinese origin—subsequently disguised by Japanese chronology. My Buddhist texts were drawn from Fernand Hu’s translation of the Dhammapada, and from Leon Feer’s translation from the Tibetan of the Sutra in Forty-two Articles. A scholar of Eastern subjects who should condescend in a rare leisure-moment to glance at my work might also discover that I had borrowed an idea or two from the Sanskrit poet, Bhâminî-Vilâsa.

  “The Tale of the Porcelain God”—The good Père D’Entrecolles, who first gave to Europe the secrets of Chinese porcelain-manufacture, wrote one hundred and sixty years ago:

  The Emperors of China are, during their lifetime, the most redoubted of divinities; and they believe that nothing should ever stand in the way of their desires.…

  It is related that once upon a time a certain Emperor insisted that some porcelains should be made for him according to a model which he gave. It was answered that the thing was simply impossible: but all such remonstrances only served to excite his desire more and more.… The officer charged by the demigod to supervise and hasten the work treated the workmen with great harshness. The poor wretches spent all their money, took exceeding pains, and received only blows in return. One of them, in a fit of despair, leaped into the blazing furnace, and was instantly burnt to ashes. But the porcelain that was being baked there at the time came out, they say, perfectly beautiful and to the satisfaction of the Emperor. . . . From that time, the unfortunate workman was regarded as a hero; and his image was made the idol which presides over the manufacture of porcelain.

  It appears that D’Entrecolles mistook the statue of Putai, God of Comfort, for that of the real porcelain deity, as Jacquemart and others observe. This error does not, however, destroy the beauty of the myth; and there is no good reason to doubt that D’Entrecolles related it as it had been told him by some of his Chinese friends at Jingdezhen. The researches of Stanislas Julien and others have only tended to confirm the trustworthiness of the Catholic missionary’s statements in other respects; and both Julien and Salvétat, in their admirable French rendering of the Jingdezhen taolu, or History of the Porcelains of King-te-chin (a work which has been of the greatest service to me in the preparation of my little story), quote from his letters at considerable length, and award him the highest praise as a conscientious investigator. So far as I have been able to learn, D’Entrecolles remains the sole authority for the myth; but his affirmations in regard to other matters have withstood the severe tests of time astonishingly well; and since the Taiping rebellion destroyed Jingdezhen and paralyzed its noble industry, the value of the French missionary’s documents and testimony has become widely recognized. In lieu of any other name for the hero of the legend, I have been obliged to retain that of Pu, or Bu—only using it without the affix “tai”—so as to distinguish it from the deity of comfort and repose.

  Glossary

  Abhidharma—The metaphysics of Buddhism. Buddhist literature is classed into three great divisions, or “baskets”; the highest of these is the Abhidharma.… According to a passage in Spence Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism,” the full comprehension of the Abhidharma is possible only for a Buddha to acquire.

  Chu-sha-kih—The mandarin-orange.

  Çramana—An ascetic; one who has subdued his senses. For an interesting history of this term, see Burnouf—Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme Indien.

  Da Zhongsi—Literally, “Temple of the Bell.” The building at Beijing so named covers probably the largest suspended bell in the world, cast in the reign of Yongluo, about 1406 ce, and weighing upwards of 120,000 pounds.

  Damâri—A peculiar chant, of somewhat licentious character, most commonly sung during the period of the Indian carnival. For an account, at once brief and entertaining, of popular Hindu songs and hymns, see Garcin de Tassy—Chants populaires de l’Inde.

  Dao—The infinite being, or Universal Life, whence all forms proceed: Literally, “the Way,” in the sense of the First Cause. Laozi uses the term in other ways; but that primal and most important philosophical sense which he gave to it is well explained in the celebrated Chapter XXV. of the Daodejing.… The difference between the great Chinese thinker’s conception of the First Cause—the Unknowable—and the theories of other famous metaphysicians, Eastern and Western, is set forth with some definiteness in Stanislas Julien’s introduction to the Daodejing, pp. x–xv. (Le Livre de la Voie et de la Vertu. Paris, 1842.)

  Dogs of Fo—The Dog of Fo is one of those fabulous monsters in the sculptural representation of which Chinese art has found its most grotesque expression. It is really an exaggerated lion; and the symbolic relation of the lion to Buddhism is well known. Statues of these mythical animals—sometimes of a grandiose and colossal execution—are placed in pairs before the entrances of temples, palaces, and tombs, as tokens of honor, and as emblems of divine protection.

  Fenghuang—This allegorical bird, corresponding to the Arabian phoenix in some respects, is described as being five cubits high, having feathers of five different colors, and singing in five modulations.… The female is said to sing in imperfect tones; the male in perfect tones. The fenghuang figures largely in Chinese musical myths and legends.

  Fo—Buddha is called Fo, Fu, Fudu, Hu, Fat, in various Chinese dialects. The name is thought to be a corruption of the Hindu Bodh, or “Truth,” due to the imperfect articulation of the Chinese. ... It is a curious fact that the Chinese Buddhist liturgy is Sanskrit transliterated into Chinese characters, and that the priests have lost all recollection of the antique tongue—repeating the texts without t
he least comprehension of their meaning.

  Fuyin—A Chinese official holding a position corresponding to that of mayor in the West.

  Gaoling—Literally, “the High Ridge,” and originally the name of a hilly range which furnished the best quality of clay to the porcelain-makers. Subsequently the term applied by long custom to designate the material itself became corrupted into the word now familiar in all countries—kaolin. In the language of the Chinese potters, the gaolin, or clay, was poetically termed the “bones,” and the dun, or quartz, the “flesh” of the porcelain; while the prepared bricks of the combined substances were known as baidun yise. Both substances, the infusible and the fusible, are productions of the same geological formation—decomposed feldspathic rock.

  Gopia (or Gopis)—Daughters and wives of the cowherds of Vrindavana, among whom Krishna was brought up after his incarnation as the eighth avatar of Vishnu. Krishna’s amours with the shepherdesses, or Gopia, form the subject of various celebrated mystical writings, especially the Prem-Ságar, or Ocean of Love (translated by East-wick and by others); and the sensuous Gita-Govinda of the Bengalese lyric poet Jayadeva (translated into French prose by Hippolyte Fauche, and chastely rendered into English verse by Edwin Arnold in the Indian Song of Songs). See also Burnouf’s partial translation of the Bhagavata Purana, and Théodore Pavie’s Kriçhna et sa doctrine.… The same theme has inspired some of the strangest productions of Hindu art: for examples, see plates 65 and 66 of Moor’s Hindi Pantheon (edition of 1861). For accounts of the erotic mysticism connected with the worship of Krishna and the Gopia, the reader may also be referred to authorities cited in Barth’s Religions of India; De Tassy’s Chants populaires de l’Inde; and Lamairesse’s Poésies populaires du Sud de l’lnde.