Censored by Confucius (23 page)

Scholar Zhang

There was a scholar from Hangzhou by the name of Zhang who worked as a tutor in the governor's residence in the capital. His study was situated in the garden a hundred-odd yards from the main residential buildings, and being a cowardly sort of fellow, Zhang always insisted that the houseboy responsible for tidying the study stay overnight with him.

Every night, as soon as it became dark enough to require a candle, Zhang would go straight to bed and sleep. This routine had continued unchanged for over a year Until the night of the Midautumn Festival, when the moon was particularly big and bright.

The houseboy had gone out drinking to celebrate, so the garden gate was not yet locked, and Zhang, planning to admire the fullness of the moon himself, walked out into the garden. While he was strolling among the landscaped mounds and rocks he suddenly caught sight of a woman, completely bereft of clothing, walking towards him.

Her hair was tangled and her white skin was smeared with mud and grime. Zhang was absolutely terrified. He instantly assumed that he v/as looking at a corpse that had just dug its way out from the ground. Her eyes had an unnatural brightness and in the light of the full moon they took on a particularly frightening gleam.

Zhang ran as fast as he could back to his study, blocked the door with a wooden doorstop, and jumped into bed. Peeking fearfully out from under the covers, he could hear a tremendous banging as the woman tried to open the door.

Eventually the doorstop gave way and in walked the woman. She sat down at Zhang's desk and proceeded to tear all his books and papers to shreds. The ripping and tearing made a terrible sound and poor Zhang nearly passed out in terror.

Having destroyed his papers, she then took up his ruler and banged it repeatedly on the desk, sighing long and loudly all the while.

Zhang then really did slip into a semiconscious state and his soul was just about to quit his terrified body when he became aware that the woman was now manipulating his genitals.

"What a typical, barbaric southerner! This thing is absolutely useless! Absolutely useless!" she cursed loudly.

She then walked out and left him alone.

The next day Zhang lay in his bed stiff as a corpse in this semiconscious state. When his students tried to rouse him for lessons they received no response, so they ran back to inform the governor. Some ginger juice was poured straight down Zhang's throat and he gradually regained consciousness.

He then recounted the terrifying events of the previous night.

But the governor just laughed, saying, "That was no ghost you saw, my dear fellow. It was a servant of ours! She went crazy after losing her partner and we've had her locked up over two years now. Last night, however, she managed to escape and obviously made quite a nuisance of herself terrifying you!"

Zhang remained skeptical of this explanation, so the governor personally took him to the woman's room to see for himself. Sure enough, the woman in the room and the woman he had seen the previous night were one and the same. In an instant he felt much better, although the embarrassment of having been described as absolutely useless left him feeling rather ashamed.

The houseboy laughed at him, saying, "Lucky she thought you were useless! If she had thought it worth the effort you might have found yourself in a worse state this morning. She's prone to biting and pinching penises. Other people have had their penises nearly snapped in two after an evening in her clutches! Once she likes a fellow's organ, she keeps going at it nonstop."

The Reincarnation of Cai Jing

During the reign of the Chongzhen emperor at the end of the Ming dynasty, there lived a gentleman who claimed to be the reincarnation of Cai Jing. He said that he was an officer from heaven who had fallen into the deepest of all the levels of hell. He had flashes of extreme clarity whenever anybody recited the Benevolent King Sutra.

He claimed that one of his punishments had been rebirth as a Yangzhou widow. She was forced to live on her own, maintaining a strict code of chastity, for forty years. Consequently, this gentleman had a liking for the strangest sexual activities.

He was, for instance, particularly fond of admiring the buttocks of beautiful women and the penises of handsome men. He maintained that male beauty was better admired from the front, whereas female beauty was better from a rear view. Anyone who thought otherwise he deemed ignorant of good sexual practice.

He would often dress women in men's gowns and singlets and, conversely, dress men in women's skirts and jewelry, taking great delight in groping and fondling the profusion of buttocks and penises.

His several dozen concubines and houseboys were often involved in his strange escapades as well. One game which was particularly good fun involved having everyone remove the clothing from their lower body while completely covering their heads. The trick then was to run around and guess who was who by feeling the exposed bodies.

One of the cabinet's scribes, a man by the name of Shi Jun, was very slim and good-looking, but more importantly, his private parts were quite exquisite. Our gentleman loved to suck on Shi Jun's penis and found endless delight in playing with it. Indeed, whenever this gentleman was asked for an example of his calligraphy, he would insist that Shi Jun grind the ink for him before he proceeded.

Mr. Shi's buttock
s were given the nickname "handfuls o
f jade white brocade" and his penis was called the "immort
al rosy rod" by the adoring gentleman.

Hanging onto the Ears of a Tiger

In Dala County, Yunan Province, there lived a peasant farmer by the name of Li Shigui whose family had worked the land for many generations.

Li owned two water buffalo, and one night when he went out to bring them in he discovered that one was missing. As he wandered among the dark fields searching for his beast, he saw an animal lying in the paddy snoring loudly. Li presumed this to be one of his missing buffalo.

He walked over and scolded the beast: "Why aren't you home yet?! It's late."

In the dim moonlight Li jumped onto the beast's back, intending to grab its horns and ride it back to the house. Only then did he realize his grave mistake.

There were ears in place of the horns he had expected, and when he looked down at the broad back onto which he had leaped, he could see the telltale orange and black stripes of a tiger. Li quickly realized that in such a situation the worst thing he could do would be to try to escape.

The tiger, rudely awakened from its slumber, leaped up with a roar and tried to shake the terrified Li off its back.

"If I jump off now, this tiger will make a meal of me," Li thought. And so he resolved to remain on the tiger's back clutching those ears with all his might. So tight was his grasp that eventually his fingers pierced the tiger's ear lobes. Still he did not release his grip. In fact he hung on even tighter.

Li's persistence drove the tiger to distraction. In anger it began bucking and weaving, leaping rivers and bounding across mountains in an effort to shake this pest from its back. In its rampaging fury the tiger's body became lacerated by thorns and prickles. This furious pace continued throughout the night until the tiger collapsed from exhaustion and died early the next morning.

Li himself was on the verge of collapse. He lay frozen, stiff as a rod, on the tiger's back, breathing only faintly.

His family had been searching for him all night, and it was in this state of near death that they finally found him. They carried the wounded man home and there the full extent of his injuries became apparent. The tiger had mauled and scratched Li's legs, exposing the bone in several places.

It was a full twelve months before he recovered from the ordeal.

Animals and Humans Are Equally Unpredictable

"One should not keep a chicken for longer than three years and dogs should be gotten rid of after a maximum of six"—or so the saying goes in the
Soushenji.
Animals, it appears, should not be kept for too long.

One of my domestic servants, a man by the name of Sun Huizhong, had a big yellow dog that everyone knew to be docile and quite harmless. It had the endearing habit of begging food off the dinner table with a cheerful wag of its tail.

The dog always saw Sun off when he left on an errand and faithfully greeted him on his return home. Sun, of course, was extremely fond of his canine friend—that is, until the day the dog gouged a hole in Sun's hand as he passed down a piece of meat.

The wound was incredibly painful and poor Sun fainted from the shock and fell to the floor. Once he had recovered sufficiently, Sun beat his dog to death.

The unpredictable nature of animal behavior is similarly illustrated by the example of a tiger keeper from Yangzhou by the name of Zhao Jiu. He made his living by parading a caged tiger around the markets.

For ten coppers Zhao would let the tiger out of its cage, then place his head inside the animal's mouth and rub it between the mighty jaws until it was quite dripping with saliva. The watching crowd would roar with laughter as Zhao wandered off unharmed.

He performed this amazing stunt many times over a period of two years without mishap, until one day, while performing at Pingshan Pavilion, the tiger severed his head with one mighty bite.

The shocked crowd hurriedly notified their local officials of the disaster and a hunter was dispatched with instructions to kill the tiger.

So, because animals are regarded as unpredictable, we are often advised that humans should not live in close proximity to birds or
beasts. I think this is a lot of nonsense, because human beings are equally unpredictable.

In 1746, during the reign of the Qianlong emperor, I was serving as magistrate in Jiangning County and one day I went to investigate a multiple murder in my jurisdiction. Three members of the same family had been killed—husband, wife, and child. The murderer was the wife's younger brother, a Mr. Liu.

It seemed from all my inquiries that the husband and wife had an extremely good relationship with Liu, and nobody had heard of any trouble between them.

Apparently this brother was in the habit of visiting the murdered couple's house regularly to play with his five-year-old nephew. So when her brother happened to visit on May thirteenth the young mother thought nothing of handing the boy over to her brother to look after.

However, this time Liu took the child and tossed him into a vat of water, then heaped stones on top to ensure that he would drown. When the child's mother saw what had happened she ran over in a state of shock only to be confronted with her brother wielding a knife. Liu summarily slaughtered his sister, eventually decapitating her.

Hearing his wife's screams, the husband hurried to the scene and made a vain attempt to save her. He too was savagely attacked. Liu stabbed him in the stomach, then pulled his brother-in-law's intestines out about a foot. This did not kill him immediately, and so I was able to question him about the reason for Liu's hatred.

The husband gasped with his dying breath that there had never been any problems between them.

I then asked Liu himself why he had launched such a violent attack on his sister's family. Liu gave no reply. He simply stood laughing at me while looking at the bodies out of the corner of his eye. I really couldn't understand his reasoning at all. Even so, I promptly ordered him beaten to death for his crimes.

Right up to this very day this case remains a mystery to me.

Similarly, there is the case of the widow who had maintained an unblemished record of chastity for over twenty years. Then, out of the blue, when she was well over fifty, she had an affair with a servant. She got pregnant and after a difficult labor died in childbirth.

Both of these cases show that humans are just as unpredictable as animals. They are like the tiger and the dog.

A Ghost Buys Herself a Son

In Dongting there's a young scholar by the name of Ge Wenlin who has made quite a name for himself at the local college. His father's first wife, a Madam Zhou, died unexpectedly and his father remarried a Jingzhou woman, Miss Li. This was Ge Wenlin's mother.

Three days after his mother was married, she was looking through the deceased wife's wardrobe and found a red jacket embroidered with nine delicate lilies. Ge's mother fell in love with the jacket and tried it on for size.

Later that day when she went down for dinner she suddenly became delirious and began slapping herself about the face.

Then she said, "I am the first wife, Madam Zhou. I had some clothing, given to me as wedding presents, put away in a chest. I treasured these clothes too much to wear them, and now you, you who have only just married into the household, are trying to steal them from me! I won't stand for it! I'll drive you to your death. Just wait and see!"

The whole family was shocked at this outburst and immediately got onto their knees to plead for Mistress Li's life.

"Madam Zhou, what possible use do you have for such luxurious clothes now that you are dead?"

"I want to wear them now, so burn them immediately!" she replied. "It may seem sentimental and petty, but I want all the things I brought with me as part of my dowry to be burned for my use in the underworld. If you do this then I'll not harm her. I don't want that Li woman to have even one item."

The Ge family then did exactly as the ghost of the first wife had instructed and burned every single item of her dowry. The ghost then clapped her hands and said, "I'll be off now."

In an instant Li's madness disappeared.

This was a great relief to everyone in the household, but the haunting was not over yet. The next morning, while Li was putting on her
cosmetics, she gave a great yawn, and in those few seconds the ghost possessed her again.