Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 2 Read online

  Typically, Pu’s tales open with an introduction of their protagonists, identifying their home towns or villages, prefectures, or counties, and identifying their distinctive personal characteristics, particularly in terms of scholarly advancement (or failure) and reputation. Coupled with the implied assertion that these figures are real personages, the stories often feel initially like case studies, grounded in a verisimilitude that helps to set up the plot twists that send the narratives in the direction of the fantastic and the strange. The football skills of the title character in “Wang Shixiu” (wang shixiu) are described as something he shared in common with his father—so Pu ensures that those skills are exercised when Wang is given the opportunity to rescue his father, who had supposedly died almost a decade earlier. Luo Zifu, described in “Pianpian” (pianpian) initially as a brothel addict, is given that foible to rationalize his inability to appreciate the magical splendor of his wife, Pianpian, and to display the material attachments that signal his unworthiness to become, like her, an immortal. Ma Ji proves himself to be a natural performer as a young man, a propensity that comes in handy later when his survival and advancement in the court of the Dragon Lord proves dependent upon it (in “The Rakshas’ Sea Market” [luocha hai shi]). The title character of “Xiao’er” (xiao’er) proves herself adept at learning the Confucian canon—an impressive feat for a Chinese woman, though not without ample historical precedents—so the reader will find it believable that she easily masters the magic of the mysterious White Lotus Society.4

  Except in the case of autoethnography and its acknowledgment of personal biases or prejudices, ethnographers attempt to be objective about the groups they study. In this, Pu Songling’s collection, crafting, and dissemination of the stories in Strange Tales from Liaozhai would seem to diverge from ethnography’s aim of reporting without bias. Ultimately, Pu’s sympathies lie with the scholars among his protagonists: those individuals who make significant sacrifices in order to advance their studies, but who often face a range of setbacks (usually in the form of failing civil service examinations for idiosyncratic reasons), and deprivations ranging from homesickness and loneliness (while studying in isolated settings, like mountaintop monasteries) to romantic longings (which is why so many of the individuals visited by fox seductresses are scholars—they’re especially susceptible to the desire for company). However, it is this subjective sympathy that actually seems to link Pu Songling explicitly to the goals of a particular set of modern ethnographers. Critical ethnographers are individuals who see themselves as advocates of the groups they study, and speak to their audience in an attempt to empower the groups the critical ethnographer sees as marginalized, in order to “challenge the status quo and ask why it is so,” while hoping to empower the groups being discussed “by giving them more authority” (Creswell 487).

  Pu champions scholars whose merits go unrecognized by authorities, particularly when others’ corruption, ignorance, or incompetence interferes with them being accorded the honors they otherwise deserve. He laments the insensitivity of other people to the isolation of the scholar who spends his days immersed in the Confucian canon and in historical sources, writing essay after essay, relentlessly perfecting his calligraphy; thus he emphasizes that Yang Yuwei is “despondent at being cut off from other people” (in “Lian Suo” [lian suo]), while implicitly criticizing landlord Yin Tuan for renting a room to a scholar for six months before he bothers to check in on him (in “Yu De” [yu de]). He bemoans the plight of scholars who demonstrate their talents locally, but prove unable to develop the larger sphere of reputation that would allow them to work for the country’s greater good (like the title character in “Bai Yuyu” [bai yuyu], and Scholar Qiao in “Liancheng” [liancheng]).

  But Pu’s advocacy of the scholars goes well beyond simply drawing attention to the challenges they face;5 the tales he presents actively compensate hard-working scholars who remain committed to the life of the mind and to self-improvement. Talented Xia Pingzi (in “The Administrator of Thunder” [lei cao]), who “always failed the civil service examination and became depressed as a result,” dies, but subsequently becomes an immortal, and finds a unique way of repaying his classmate, Le Yunhe, who cares for Xia’s wife and child following his death. Scholar Mao (in “The Sisters Switch Marriages” [zi mei yi jia]), like a number of his peers in the Strange Tales from Liaozhai, is born poor, but is skilled and hardworking, and the author sees to it that he eventually proves extremely successful.

  Given the sincerity of this advocacy, it’s not surprising that Pu Songling’s tales prove equally uncompromising and harsh when they mete out punishment to unworthy individuals—particularly to the ones who claim to be scholars. A scholar from Binzhou, in “Raining Coins” (yu qian), is disgraced for his greedy behavior by a fox immortal who tells him, “I originally took you to be a friend who shared the love of literature,” thereby shaming the man with the very description that any true scholar would covet. A modest monk in “A Sequel to the Yellow Millet Dream” (xu huangliang) similarly humiliates a smug scholar named Zeng, whose ambitions for high office change radically in response. Scholar Feng allows jealousy and drunkenness to tarnish his reputation when he insults an official named Chu in “Fourteenth Daughter Xin” (xin shi si niang), and as a consequence he almost brings about his own destruction. According to Pu, scholars, like anyone else, should be respected and valued in proportion to their talents, their good deeds and the dependable performance of their duty. This is what he wished for himself, and hence it is what he models as desirable for others. Catherine Russell notes that autobiography “becomes ethnographic” when the ethnographer “understands his or her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes” (276). Whether his motivations for writing the Strange Tales from Liaozhai were ultimately personal or not, Pu Songling provides us with insights into his culture that are both timeless and very much of his time, and in so doing reveals much of the “social formations and historical processes” contextualizing his life in early Qing era China.

  Notes

  1 Pu’s preface appears in volume one of this translation (1:1-4). All subsequent citations of stories and essays from this volume will appear in parentheses, with the volume number preceding page references.

  2 For Pu Songling’s frustrations regarding the imperial civil service examinations and their implications for his ability to advance in public service, see the preceding volume’s “The Mystery of the Disappearing Artist: Pu Songling’s Voice and Persona in the Stories” (1:xi-xxii, esp. xv-xvii). “Liaozhai’s Own Account,” his 1679 preface to the story collection (which wasn’t printed in his lifetime; the first known printing of the stories dates to 1766 [Lanciotti 72]), also reveals the degree to which he considers himself as a kind of caretaker of the supernatural tales (1:4), even if this makes him seem odd or outlandish to others. Judith T. Zeitlin incisively sees a triple objective in this preface that supercedes simple autobiography: “an opening discourse that seeks to establish the author’s credibility and authority to write a ‘history’ of the strange; a sketch of the author’s origins and destiny that seeks to explain his personal affinity with the strange; and a final vignette that paints a self-portrait of the author in the very act of recording the strange” (43).

  3 Every village or town is supposedly assigned a patron god, a local deity to serve as its advocate, by the celestial powers. Chinese folklore is full of examples of worthy individuals who are charged with the task of becoming some specific locale’s earth god; even the first story in Strange Tales from Liaozhai offers an example (see “Taking the Examination to Become Town God” [kao chenghuang], 1:7-9).

  4 Individuals who have received knowledge from diligent study are always lauded in Pu’s tales, particularly when they use their talents upon coming in contact with unscrupulous individuals or daunting opponents. The self-indulgent qualities of scholar Han and his freeloading friend, Xu, are punished by the artifice of a Daoist adept in “The
Daoist Priest” (daoshi), for example, while Xu Yuangong becomes a master of Daoist magic in “Driving Out a Monster” (qu guai), his name “known far and near,” and consequently finds himself in the position of freeing an official from the creature that had been plaguing him.

  Pu also exhibits the ethnographer’s interest in relating the behavior of the members of cultural groups to demographic factors like socioeconomic status (Swanson and Siegel, 1-3): Xing De (in “The Greedy Man” [laotao]), possessed of a strength that gives him a unique talent with the crossbow, should have no problem obtaining a livelihood as a hunter, soldier, or bodyguard. However, due to the fact that “he always managed to squander whatever money he did earn,” he repeatedly finds himself compelled to live “like an outlaw in the forest.” His financial ineptitude makes him covetous and gets him into trouble—until he’s finally taught a lesson by some individuals whose skills make his own seem negligible. The cycle of misfortune and misdeeds is eventually broken once he becomes “a law-abiding person who always performed good deeds.”

  5 Since Pu has such a personal respect for supernatural lore, it often is the case that he “rewards” his scholar characters by allowing them contact with individuals and creatures not from the mundane world. This is why officials and scholars often receive occult visitations, as when government envoy Qu discovers a dragon manifesting itself to him, and subsequently observes that its tracks first appeared in his bookcase (in “The Hibernating Dragon” [zhe long]).

  II. Justice After Death: Pu Songling and the Tradition of the Hell King

  In the universe of Pu Songling’s strange tales, a great deal of traffic passes between the mundane world of mortal human beings, and the underworld with its spirit denizens. In the latter, individuals are judged after death and reparations are exacted in order for them to be returned to the world of the living in another incarnation. The relationship between assessment and enforcement of justice for the dead is constituted by what might be called “a seamless administrative net” of cultural beliefs (Teiser 460), formed by a conjunction of the Buddhist notion of karma, imported to China from India, and the bureaucracy of officials constructed from Confucian principles of governance and social interaction. In order to determine the state of an individual’s karmic debt,1 underworld officials are assigned by the celestial powers to evaluate the deeds and misdeeds of the dead and to pass judgment on them. The Chinese underworld is not simply a place marking a suspension of being, like the realm of Hades in Homer’s Odyssey, or a place strictly of eternal punishment, like the Christian Hell. It serves a purgatorial function; hence in Pu’s story, “Official Lu’s Daughter” (lu gong nu), when scholar Zhang recites the Buddhist scriptures of the Diamond Sutra for five years on behalf of his dead beloved, whose love of hunting had incurred a karmic debt for the sin of killing animals, she is finally released from the underworld and reborn into another family.

  As early as 200 C.E., it was widely believed in China that the souls of the dead returned to Taishan (signifying both Mt. Tai, in Shandong province, and the god of that mountain), where the deity of the mountain maintained a ledger accounting for the deeds of every human being (Bonnefoy 238; Cline and Littlejohn 18). Early Chinese culture described the human soul as participating in the same dichotomy that is reflected in all of nature: the po (魄), or animating spirit, associated with the feminine yin principle, returned to earth and the grave upon death, while the hun (魂), or higher soul, associated with the masculine yang principle, rose toward the heavens. But Buddhist influences in the third through seventh centuries suggested that the hun was “first detoured through an array of underground ‘earth-prisons’ for judgment and purgation” (Campany 346).

  The introduction of Buddhism from northeastern India in the first century C.E. spread along the Silk Road and took hold during the decline of the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.-220 C.E.), which had adopted Confucianism, with its sociopolitical ethics, as the orthodox state belief system (Perkins 47). With it came the figure of Yama Dharmarāja, the Lord of the Dead, who would question the deceased whether he or she had been visited by the three messengers, disease, old age, and death. If the deceased answered in the negative, this would confirm that she or he had committed grave misdeeds, since they would have been avoided if the individual had acted upon the counsel of the messengers. Yama would then assert the karmic principle to the individual “that only he is responsible for the consequences of his actions since these were committed by himself” (Siklós 176), before infernal servants would lead the deceased to various deed-specific tortures.2

  In time, both King Yama and Taishan became just two of ten kings of the underworld (the fifth and seventh, respectively). The earliest surviving paintings of the hell kings appear on the walls of the Dunhuang caves (Shimbo 477-81), in Gansu province, dating from both the Northern Chou period (557-81 C.E.) and the Five Dynasties period (907-60 C.E.). The subdivision represented by the additional kings reflected both the administrative dynamics of bureaucracy (namely, that the ever-increasing caseloads of the dead would justify an expansion of the underworld justice system, just as was the case in the mundane world) and a deterrence strategy, designed to intimidate believers into better behavior. However, King Yama was the “original father of the afterlife in Vedic tradition,” and in China, he became the “ruler in the underworld in both Buddhist and Daoist cosmologies,” hence the very name of “King Yama” or the “Hell King” came popularly to be synonymous with any one of the ten kings (Kucera 88).

  Perception of the Hell King varies in Pu’s stories, as it does in Chinese culture more generally, between the extremes of punitive severity and compassionate rehabilitation. Certainly not a purely pejorative character, Yama in Indian culture was considered “a guardian of the south” as well as a judge of the dead (Teiser 445), and although he was initially the king of the first court in the underworld, he was eventually “demoted” on “account of his lenience” (Siklós 182). When ambitious Jing Xing abandons his wife for the title beauty of “A-Xia” (a-xia), the Hell King sees to it that Jing fails the civil service examination he would otherwise have passed, and the disgraced scholar is informed—having been judged, even though not yet dead—that “your official rank and salary has been cut from the records in the underworld.” Yet the effect of this is not to destroy Jing’s life (and the reason that he’s shown some mercy is because his ancestors “were virtuous and generous, and their [karmic] good fortune is still sufficiently abundant to transfer to their descendants”), but rather to allow him the opportunity to begin living a better life.

  The young scholar addicted to chess-playing in “The Chess Ghost” (qi gui), who vexes his father so much that the old man dies in frustrated anger, is punished for his unfilial behavior by having his lifespan shortened and by being punished in the underworld for seven years. He is then given a mission and the chance to redeem his misspent life, but his unfortunate failure to act prudently on that compassionate gesture dooms him to remain a spirit in the underworld. The redemptive facet of the Hell King’s judgments is often overshadowed in literary accounts by the horrors of the torments and tortures waiting for those guilty of misdeeds, explaining why the Hell King’s judgments may seem reminiscent of “Lucifer or Beelzebub in the Christian world” (Gálik 126) to those unfamiliar with the religious contexts surrounding his function.

  What this means for Strange Tales from Liaozhai, and for other such narratives in the Chinese zhiguai, or supernatural short stories, tradition, is that death isn’t always final. This is something that Pu’s readers come to accept, but that his characters never seem to anticipate: hence an irate sister (in “Shang Sanguan” [shang sanguan]) chastises her brothers for not taking action against the people who have done great harm to their family, posing the rhetorical question, “Do you think heaven’s going to have the Hell King reincarnate a Magistrate Bao for you two?” The Hell King may not reincarnate heroes to rescue the living from their woes, but on occasion the dead are allowed to return to life in ac
knowledgment of some extraordinary devotion or service performed by someone related them. Yang Yuwei offers to help deliver the ghostly title character “Lian Suo” (lian suo) from the male ghost trying to force her to become his concubine; by treating her with tender kindness, making her “part of the human world” after her having been a ghost for twenty years, Yang’s love brings her back to life.

  In “Gengniang” (gengniang), the title character achieves revenge on the murderer of her beloved husband’s parents, then drowns herself to escape from the murderer’s brother, but subsequently is miraculously returned to life. According to Chinese tradition, these tales are not without precedent in the real world: the artist, Zhang Xiaoshi, whose career spanned the late seventh and early eighth centuries, not only created paintings of the underworld, but according to biographies written in the first quarter of the twelfth century, he was uniquely suited for recording such images because he had once died himself, personally observing the underworld and then returning to life (Teiser 440).

  Such returns are sometimes the results of incompetencies and corruptions within the multi-tiered bureaucracy of the underworld. Thus Pu Songling and other canny zhiguai writers were able to employ their fantastic short stories about dishonest or ineffectual practices among the administrators of the dead as allegorical critiques of real officials and their excesses. Distinguished scholar Tang Pin (in “Master Tang” [tang gong]) dies, but then isn’t sent to the underworld for judgment and processing, so his case passes instead through a succession of bureaucratic interviews involving a giant, a monk, Confucius himself, and the god of literature, before finally being addressed by the goddess Guanyin, who restores him to life. Sometimes the dead are returned due to a mistaken summons—one is summoned to underworld judgment before one’s appointed time, or perhaps one shares a surname or resemblance with the party who was actually supposed to be summoned.