Liu Chen in love: Liu Chen, of the first century AD, once wandered away with his friend into the Tiantai Mountains to gather herbs. There they fell in love with two beautiful girls, who gave them hemp-seed to eat (or in some versions wine to drink); and after a stay of what appeared to them about six months, they returned to find that seven generations had passed away.

98.

THE SOUTHERN WUTONG-SPIRIT.

Wutong-spirit: The expression Wutong (literally the Five Penetrating Ones) is said by some to refer to five brothers who descended from the sky in human form in a great blaze of light. By the end of the Tang dynasty there were numerous temples dedicated to them. In later popular belief, the origins of these five deities were eclipsed by their sexual and orgiastic associations. In the early years of the Manchu dynasty, the governor of Jiangsu, Tang Bin (162787), took steps to dismantle the Wutong temples, which were especially common around Suzhou, and to abolish the 'lewd practices' associated with them drunken rituals, ecstatic dancing and singing. He claimed that whenever a woman displayed acute signs of fever or hysteria, the local shamanesses would say that she had been taken as a bride by the Wutong. Women taken with this condition would rave incoherently, and in the end they usually wasted away and died.

Nicholas B. Dennys (The Folk-Lore of China (London, 1876), p. 87) mentions a story in Yuan Mei's eighteenth-century collection What the Master Did Not Say, where it is recounted that in a certain village in Sichuan Province the Wutong-spirit required a young girl each year, and that the girl chosen was duly possessed by this evil spirit. In the seventeenth-century Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton records a similar story from Japan: At Japan in the East Indies, at this present (if we are to believe the relation of travellers), there is an idol called Teuchedy, to whom one of the fairest virgins in the country is monthly brought, and left in a private room, in the fotoqui, or church, where she sits alone to be deflowered. At certain times the Teuchedy (which is thought to be the devil) appears to her, and knoweth her carnally. Every month a fair virgin is taken in; but what becomes of the old, no man can tell.

(Everyman edition, 3 vols. (London, 1932), III, p. 48) Recent scholars have suggested a psychological connection between spirit-possession and prenuptial anxiety, and have emphasized the vulnerability of women in traditional Chinese society in the period shortly before and after the consummation of marriage (often to a man they had never seen before). Vivien Ng comments: 'Young women, particularly those on the verge of marriage, seemed to be especially susceptible to the lecherous attentions of malevolent spirits, and they often became temporarily insane as a result' (quoted by Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers (Stanford, 1994), p. 211); while Richard von Glahn writes: 'Feigning union with Wutong was a culturally accepted strategy employed by women to avoid sleeping with their betrothed husbands or to escape conjugal obligations altogether' (see 'The Enchantment of Wealth: The God Wutong in the Social History of Jiangnan', Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51 (1991), pp. 699701).

It is interesting to compare these modern explanations with accounts of the incubus phenomenon in Europe. In the words of Isidore of Seville (c. 560636), 'Satyrs are they who are called Pans in Greek and Incubi in Latin. And they are called Incubi from their practice of overlaying that is debauching. For they often lust lecherously after women, and copulate with them.' The 1486 witchcraft manual Malleus Maleficarum describes incubi as 'fallen angels now in devilish shape which have appeared to wanton women and have sought and obtained coition with them' (Maureen Duffy, The Erotic World of Faery (New York, 1980), pp. 1314). The historian Keith Thomas provides a succinct explanation: 'Feelings of guilt evoked by sexual dreams and nocturnal emissions could be assuaged by the reflection that an incubus or succubus must have been at work' (Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 568).

99.

SUNSET.

such a fine, cultured young man: See the note on refinement and cultivation in Tale 65, 'Twenty Years a Dream', for the full range of meaning of the expression fengya.

the Golden Dragon King: A deity revered in the provinces of Anhui and Jiangsu. His origins are supposed to date back to a man named Xie Xu, nephew of the Empress Xie (consort of the last Emperor of the Southern Song dynasty (11271278)). Xie Xu was Heir Apparent, and in the last years of the rapidly crumbling dynasty he hid away in the Golden Dragon Mountains near Hangzhou. In order to avoid falling into the hands of the Mongols, he drowned himself in the Tiao River. There was a temple dedicated to him in Suzhou, as a river god.

100.

THE MALE CONCUBINE.

silken softness: The Chinese expression, a cliche in the vocabulary of beauty, literally means 'smooth and lustrous as lard'.

101.

CORAL.

The Chronicler of the Strange comments: Desisting from meat and wine is but the outward appearance of Buddhist faith. True enlightenment consists in utter childlike simplicity. Yue Zhong saw in his beautiful woman-companion a pure fellow-searcher for the Way, not a partner in sensual pleasure. They slept together for thirty years, in a relationship that combined passion and detachment. Such is the true aspect of Buddhist faith, one that the world cannot fathom!

Feng Zhenluan (1818) several times praises Yue Zhong as a true son of the Dharma, a man combining the qualities of Buddhist, Taoist and knight errant. The whole story is, he says, a veritable Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment (Yuanjuejing, a scripture translated into Chinese by the Tibetan monk Buddhatrata in 693). Dan Minglun (1842) remarks: 'Let the drinkers of wine drink wine, and the drinkers of tea drink tea! If one has attained the Tao, Buddha is present in both fasting and drinking. If one has not attained the Tao, then Buddha is absent both from drinker and faster', while in Tales of the Supernatural (Edinburgh, 1984), H. C. Chang writes that: 'This is one of the very few truly religious tales in Liaozhai. On the surface it is about the filial piety of a glutton, but the hero's filial piety leads him to true piety, and his gluttony and drunkenness bring about his eventual enlightenment.'

Devotion to one's parents or filial piety (xiao), was one of the cardinal Confucian virtues. Confucius said: 'The duty of children to their parents is the fountain whence all other virtues spring, and also the starting point from which we ought to begin our education' (The Book of Filial Devotion,? fourththird century BC). Although in this tale Yue Zhong does not necessarily see eye to eye with his mother, in his own way he is extraordinarily devoted to her. The part of the story where he cuts off his own flesh and serves it to her in her delirium echoes some of the more extreme stories of Filial Devotion that were told to Chinese children through the ages, such as the one in the collection Twenty-Four Examples of Filial Piety (itself probably a Ming-dynasty concoction), about the Magistrate Yu Qianlu in the Southern Qi dynasty (479502), who, to oblige the doctor treating his dying father, tasted the old man's excrement.

rid himself of his wife: In traditional Chinese law, a husband could unilaterally repudiate (i.e. divorce) his wife on any one of seven grounds: sterility, lewdness, disobedience to her parents-in-law, loquacity, stealing, jealousy and any repulsive disease. We are not told what the grounds were in this particular instance.

The fact of his own childlessness... on his mind: In the words of Herbert Giles: The importance of male offspring in Chinese social life is hardly to be expressed in words. To the son is confided the task of worshipping at the ancestral tombs, the care of the ancestral tablets, and the due performance of all rites and ceremonies connected with the departed dead. No Chinaman will die, if he can help it, without leaving a son behind him. If his wife is childless he will buy a concubine.

(Strange Stories, p. 39, note 10) Coral: The young lady's name, Qiong Hua, literally 'beautiful reddish-jade, or agate', has a poetic resonance suggestive of the immortal realms from which she has been banished. He who savours the flowers of the mythical Qiong tree, growing to a towering height on the slopes of the fabulous Kunlun Mountains, is supposed to live for ever.

sea at Nanhai: Pu Songling seems to be more than a trifle vague here about his geography. In ordinary speech, Nanhai can simply mean the Southern Sea, what foreigners call the South China Sea, the stretch of ocean between the provinces of Fujian and Guangdong and the island of Taiwan, in which case it would be perfectly plausible for Yue Zhong to travel from his home in Xi'an (in the north-west) through the province of Fujian to the coast. But the place of pilgrimage referred to here must surely be the Holy Island known as Mount Putuo farther north off the coast of Zhejiang Province, which since the ninth century has been a centre for the cult of the Bodhisattva Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, whose 'special work is to receive the spirit as it leaves the body and place it in a lotus-blossom which opens in the Sacred Lake of the Western Heaven' (Plopper, Chinese Religion Seen through the Proverb, p. 156). In this story both Yue Zhong's mother and his companion Coral are linked to the icon of Guan Yin, and to the Bodhisattva's qualities of beauty and compassion. Guan Yin and the lotus-flower are the keynotes of the story. Guan Yin is commonly represented in Buddhist devotional art as a beautiful woman seated or standing on a lotus-blossom.

Her island shrine is spoken of in Buddhist parlance as Nanhai or Mount Putuo, a reference to the Potala Mountains near the southern coast of India, supposed home of the original male Boddhisattva Avalokitesvara, of whom Guan Yin is the Chinese female transformation. H. C. Chang, in a long and very interesting note on Mount Putuo in his Tales of the Supernatural, quotes a 1913 eyewitness account of one of Guan Yin's apparitions by Sir Reginald Johnston (tutor to the last Manchu Emperor): At certain times, when atmospheric and tidal conditions are favourable, a shaft of sunlight streams into the cave through a gap in the roof called the tian-chuang or Heaven's Window, and strikes athwart the flying foam. The cave then seems to be filled with a tremulous haze, in which the unbeliever sees nothing but sunlit spray, but which to the devout worshipper is a luminous veil through which the Bodhisattva of Love and Pity becomes visible to the eyes of her faithful suppliants.

One cannot help but be reminded of Lourdes, and the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at the grotto.

In a sense, Nanhai, or South Sea, is 'wherever Guan Yin is'. Feng Zhenluan (1818) quotes the lines: That home wherein Guan Yin dwells Is a Southern Sea before our very eyes; But where men know her not, Their prayers are all in vain.

Apsaras: See note to Tale 6, 'The Painted Wall'.

102.

MUTTON FAT AND PIG BLOOD.

Ji: A Chinese form of spirit-writing or planchette that still takes place in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Two people, normally the medium and his assistant, hold a carefully selected wand of peach-wood or willow, forked or sometimes T-shaped, over a tray of sand. A spirit is called upon to descend, whereupon the wand traces characters (or marks which can be interpreted as characters) on the sand. 'Suddenly the tip comes down, like a hammer it jumps up and down, two, three, even more times' (de Groot, The Religious System of China, VI, pp. 12951322). The marks are then used to predict the future, or to answer some specific question. Sometimes the exchange between the spirit and the medium takes the form, as in this story, of an incomplete couplet.

couplet: Literally 'opposites'. Writing these perfectly matching couplets is a peculiarly Chinese pastime. Arthur Smith explains that 'Its essence is thesis and antithesis antithesis between different tones and different meanings, resemblances in the relations between the characters in one clause and those in another clause... The construction of antithetical sentences affords a fertile field for Chinese ingenuity, a field to which we have nothing in English even remotely correspondent' (Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese (Shanghai, 1914), pp. 4750).

Mutton-fat-white jade-sky: Mutton-fat-white jade is one of the most valuable sorts of jade, a pure white nephrite, which when well polished resembles congealed mutton fat. It is sometimes known in the West as Imperial White Jade.

104.

STIR-FRY.

put it to soak in a bowl of water: Van Gulik (Erotic Colour Prints, pp. 1467), quoting the erotic novel Wild Tales of the Bamboo Grove, describes another type of dildo, called the 'Cantonese Groin', which had to be soaked in hot water before use. He thinks it was filled with the dried stalks of a plant, which swelled when moistened.

the two of them had a good laugh about it: Feng Zhenluan (1818) jokingly quotes the Taoist sage Laozi, a legendary figure, thought by some to have been a contemporary of Confucius in the sixth century BC: 'If they hadn't laughed, it would not have been worthy of being considered the Tao.'

end.