Content created: 2014-05-21
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Procursus
People who die violently are believed in China to be particularly dangerous ghosts because, for reasons nobody seems able to explain, each such victim is doomed to haunt the place death until another person can be lured to a similar fate as a "substitute." As a practical matter, this belief has led to most Chinese through the centuries seeing bodies of water as potentially extremely dangerous. To this day it nearly impossible to sell or rent out a house in which someone has been killed. And religious processions are subject to "unexplained" disruptions at corners where people have died in automobile accidents.
Both Buddhist and Daoist clerics are involved with funerals and memorial services for the dead as well as with occasional possessions or exorcisms. They virtually always claim not to fear ghosts. But they do not deny their existence.
The following curious tale does not explicitly say that it is about a Daoist adept, but that is almost certainly what the author assumes, and I have therefore given it that title. But interestingly, his esoteric arts have reached such a level that he is able to break through the cosmic constraint that binds those who die by violence.
—DKJ
Long ago there lived a man named Ye Laotuo, whose origins were unknown to anybody. Both in winter and in summer he wore the same tattered cloth robe, and we walked about with neither hat nor shoes. Always he carried with him a rolled up bamboo mat.
Once he stayed at an inn in Yangzhou. Since he disliked the noise of other guests, he asked for a quieter room. The innkeeper showed him to a rather dirty little room, and said, “This is our quietest room, but it is haunted, and no one has actually been able to sleep a whole night in it.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Ye replied. He accepted it. They swept out the room, and Ye laid out his mat on the floor.
Later that night, at the sound of the third watch, as he was sleeping on his mat, the door of the room suddenly flew open and he saw the figure of a woman with a scarf around her neck, with both eyes distended so far that they hung from their sockets onto her cheeks, and with her tongue dangling several feet out of her mouth. With her there stood a figure with no head on its shoulders, but two heads in its hands.
Behind this pair stood two more phantoms. One was black from his head to his feet, and his eyes, mouth, nose, and ears were oddly blurred, as though seen through a thin gauze. The other had bright yellow skin and was entirely bloated so that its stomach was like a huge ripe melon, about to burst, and its arms and legs looked like rotting sausages.
The four disgusting newcomers seemed surprised.
“I smell a living person,” said one.
“Let’s capture it,” said another.
They moved about the room, as though searching for something, but they seemed unable to get close to Ye, or even to see him. Finally one of them said, “It’s clear that he is here somewhere. Why can’t we find him?”
“It’s because we can capture a person only when the person’s spirit has fled from the body through pure terror,” said the bloated yellow phantom. “This must be someone who has attained the Way and who therefore has no fear. In such cases the spirit does not flee the body, and we are helpless.”
The ghosts looked at each other in consternation. Ye, whom they still could not see, sat up on his mat and pointed at his own nose. “I am right here, sitting on the mat,” he said calmly.
The startled phantoms all bowed down to him, and Ye asked each of them in turn what had led to its death. The woman with the long tongue and the eyes dangling down onto her cheeks spoke for all of them:
“We all died violently. This guy died by drowning and that guy in a fire. The third person over there was robbed and murdered. As for me, being a proper lady, I hanged myself in my bedroom.”
Ye well knew that people who die violent deaths must hover near their place of death until they can find substitutes to hover for them; only then can they move on and eventually be reincarnated into their next destined life. But Ye also had powers that came with the great spiritual accomplishment of attaining the Way.
“Do you all submit yourselves to me?” he asked commandingly.
“We do, oh we do!” they said in chorus.
“Very well, then. Each of you is free to go and be reborn into the world of living humans. Do not make any more mischief around here,” he said.
The four specters kowtowed to him, pounding their heads on the floor before him, and then vanished.
When morning came, Ye told the innkeeper about the night’s visit and what had happened. Initially suspicious, the innkeeper was eventually delighted, for quiet returned to the room, which could be rented out thereafter with no further worry about ghosts.
Source: What Confucius Never Discussed by YUAN Mei (Qing dynasty)
I am unable to locate the Chinese original of this story. It is here retold from an Esperanto translation on pages 63-64 of the following compilation of ghost-buster stories from various periods. That volume identifies the source of this story only as What Confucius Never Discussed by YUAN Mei (Qing dynasty)
- Anonymous
- 1961 Rakontoj pri fantom-spitantoj. (Kompilita de la Literatura Instituto de la Ĉina Akademio de Sciencoj.) Tr. by Pandiŝo and L. Ko. Chinese title: 不怕鬼的故事. Beijing: Ĉina Esperanto-Ligo.