Ghosts Matter: The Culture of Ghosts in Six Dynasties Zhiguai

Author(s): Robert F. Campany

Source: Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) , Dec., 1991, Vol. 13 (Dec.,
1991), pp. 15-34
Published by: Chinese Literature: essays, articles, reviews (CLEAR)

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/495051

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 Ghosts Matter: The Culture of Ghosts
in Six Dynasties Zhiguai

Robert F. Campany
Indiana University

Introduction

The topic adumbrated in my subtitle- "the culture of ghosts" evident in that

corpus of Six Dynasties narratives known collectively as zhiguai *f, or "account

of the strange" - is hardly as simple as it might seem. To begin with, there is the empir-
ical fact of the overwhelming quantity of zhiguai ghost narratives. Arthur Waley onc
noted wryly that "there seem to be more ghost-stories in China than in any other par
of the world; which is not unnatural, for more people have lived and died in China
during more centuries than anywhere else." And Anthony C. Yu, in a comprehensiv
overview of ghosts in traditional Chinese fiction, similarly begins with a memorabl
account of the "utter unwieldiness" of the material.' Even restricting ourselves t
zhiguai collections likely assembled before the end of the sixth century, an impressio
of the quantity of extant material can be gained from the fact that the section devote
to ghosts by the great Song encyclopaedia, Taiping guangji i (compiled in
978), takes up some forty-four juan 4 and over 130 folio pages in the edition use
for this study. The excerpts here collected are all short narratives of the zhiguai or (Tang-
period) chuanqi '4 genre, and approximately one fourth of them are cited from pre-
Tang texts.2
But beyond the problem of sheer quantity of material there lies the more daunting
set of problems hinted at in the very phrase "the culture of ghosts." If an unusually
spunky Chinese of the Six Dynasties period encountered a specter, he or she wa

1 See Arthur Waley, The Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1963), 56, and Anthony C. Yu, "'Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit!' Ghosts in Traditional Chinese
Fiction," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47, no. 2 (Dec. 1987):397-434, hereafter cited as Yu, "Ghosts."
With the publication of this article, a mere footnote to his masterpiece, I would like to express my thank
to Professor Yu for his encouragement and for his example. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers
of an earlier draft of this article, as well as to my colleague, Professor Eugene Eoyang, for their helpfu
suggestions.
2Questions of the authorship and date of particular zhiguai tales and texts are extremely difficult and
will not be addressed here. Authoritative studies of authorship, textual history, and dating include Fu
Xihua, "Liuchao zhiguai xiaoshuo zhi cunyi," Han-hiue 1 (1944):169-210; Lin Chen, "Lu Xun xiansheng
'Gu xiaoshuo gouchen' di jilu niandai suoshou geshu zuozhe," Wenxue yichan xuanji 3 (1960):385-407;
Yan Maoyuan, "Wei Jin nanbeichao zhiguai xiaoshuo lufu," Wenxue nianbao 6 (1940):45-72; Wang Guoliang,
Wei Jin nanbeichao zhiguai xiaoshuo yanjiu (Taibei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1984), 65-74; and Kenneth
J. DeWoskin, "The Sou-shen-chi and the Chih-kuai Tradition: A Bibliographic and Generic Study," PhD
diss., Columbia University, 1974, chap. 3.

15

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16 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

free to ignore it or to refrain from taking it seriously, as did a certain Ruan Deru
according to a story from that period: while in the latrine, Ruan saw a ghost that st
over ten feet tall, was black, had big eyes, and wore white; but he remained calm, laughin
and saying to the ghost, "People have always told me that ghosts are detestable, bu
now I can see for myself that it's really true," whereupon the visitor blushed with shame
and went away.3 But for us, as late twentieth century students of Chinese texts,
ghost can never be just a ghost; we cannot remain as nonchalant as Mr. Ruan in th
face of such a character. When we encounter a ghost among the pages of a Chines
story, we want to know, first of all, the background of religious beliefs and practi
surrounding death and the afterlife against which this particular ghost's narrated
appearance makes sense (of which I can provide little in this short paper). 4 Then w
want to understand how and why the author or collector of this story uses the gho
In simplest terms, why write a story about a ghost? What point is being made, abou
what topic, to whom, and for what purpose?
Here I want to discuss one of the most important uses of ghost narratives in th
zhiguai corpus. I will show how, in these texts, stories of ghostly appearances serv
as a vehicle for exploring the delicate and complex matter of the relations between
ing and dead people. I assume that, as in the case of any literary work however m
it presents itself as a neutral record of events or of folk beliefs and practices, so he
the zhiguai authors did not simply describe the world of the dead and its relations w
the living. They also helped to shape that world and those relations. They present
in other words, with creative models both of and for proper relations between the
ing and the dead.
I have argued elsewhere that the larger zhiguai genre, of which the ghost storie
I am considering here are a part, represents an attempt by a certain group of earl
medieval literate Chinese to come to terms - systematically and for the first time
with areas of human life and experience that were new and unfamiliar in the sense t
they had never before been deliberately explored in writing.5 The "accounts of th
strange," in other words, are the first attempts to chart in written media certain

3Xiaoshuo /J\J item 101 (LX 115), Youming lu A U1) t item 67 (LX 257), TPGJ 318 (25.416a). He
and throughout, "LX" is used as an abbreviation for Lu Xun's anthology of early medieval stories cu

by him from later' (mostly Song) encyclopediae: Lu Xun, Gu xiaoshuo gouchen, -~*J )i E 2 vo
continuously paginated (n.p.: Lu Xun quanji chubanshe, 1946). I give the item number (by my own coun
in Lu's anthology and the page number in this edition. "TPGJ" denotes the Taiping guangji; I cite t
edition published in Shanghai in 1930 by the Saoye Shanfang Publishing Co., giving the juan num
followed in parentheses by the fascicle and page numbers (separated by a decimal) in this edition.
4For bibliography on the religious background and a study of a related story motif, see my "Return
from-Death Narratives in Early Medieval China," Journal of Chinese Religions 18 (1990):91-125.
5See my Chinese Accounts of the Strange: A Study in Religious Cosmography, forthcoming. Ot
recent, general discussions of the genre include, infra alia, Wang Guoliang, Wei Jin Nanbeichao zhi
xiaoshuo yanjiu (Taibei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1984); Li Jianguo, Tangqian zhiguai xiaoshuo shi (Ti
jin: Nankai Daxue chubanshe, 1984); Takeda Akira, Chagoku no yarei: Kaii o kataru dent6 (Tokyo, 19
Kenneth J. DeWoskin, "The Six Dynasties Chih-kuai and the Birth of Fiction," in Chinese Narrati
Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 21-5
idem, "Chih-kuai," in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H
Nienhauser, Jr. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 280-84; and Karl S. Y. Kao, ed., Class
Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic: Selections from the Third to the Tenth Cent
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 1-51.

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 17

strange, new cultural and religious terrains of which, famously

not speak," and regarding which the Chinese literary tradition ha
with a few exceptions, silent.6 It is in this way, then, that I ap
zhiguai stories involving ghosts: as explorations of new types of
tions regarding the relationship between living and dead human
exceptions - notably Mozi's chapter entitled Minggui A ("Exp
Wang Chong's pioneering consideration of ghosts in his famous
Lunheng * - nothing approaching the quantity of zhiguai mater
cerned with the nature of the afterlife, the existence and natu
human beings "returned"7 from the realm of the dead to that
variety of dealings between living people and ghosts as well
before been written in China. And certainly no one had dealt in
or with such moral sensitivity, with the issue of the relations b
various categories of the dead.
As will become clear shortly, the zhiguai stories involving gho
negotiate two significant boundaries whose crossing constitutes
interest of the narrative. On the one hand, obviously, there is
the two realms of life and death, pithily expressed in formulas
76 ? 9 , "the dead and the living go different ways."' Despite
tain living persons manage to negotiate the difficult crossing and
world of the dead (hence the "return-from-death" story) and certain
to insert themselves among us and interact with us (hence the gh
of such accounts, zhiguai authors expressed new kinds of concer
this boundary and tested the variety of ways in which it could
On the other hand, there is the boundary separating one kinship g
From ancient times it had been stressed that one's proper relatio
restricted to one's own lineage members. Confucius himself is s
"Just as to sacrifice to ancestors other than one's own is presum
is right and not do it is cowardice."'0 In the Zuozhuan we find t
spirits [of the dead] do not accept [offerings] from those not o

6See Analects 7.20: "The Master never talked of prodigies, feats of abnorm
orders, or spirits." On early Confucian historians' reluctance to use ghosts as cha
see esp. Alvin P. Cohen, "Avenging Ghosts and Moral Judgement in Ancien
Three Examples from Shih-chi," in Legend, Lore, and Religion in China: Ess
Eberhard on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Sarah Allan & Alvin P. Cohen
Materials Center, 1979), 97-108.
7The pun on the most common term for ghost, gui, as "revenant" or "[on
is at least as old as the Zuozhuan 1'f : see the passage in the section on the se
(Zuozhuan jujie [Hong Kong: Lianho, n.d.], 2:89).
80n these frequent formulaic expressions, see Yu, "Ghosts," 414.
91 have treated the return-from-death narratives in Six Dynasties zhiguai in
related, distinctively Buddhist story type is the rebirth account, on which see, for e
"Rebirth as an Animal in Medieval Chinese Buddhism," Society for the Study of
8 (1980):56-69.
l0Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Vintage, 1938), 93
Analects (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 66: "The Master said, 'To offer sac
ancestor not one's own is obsequious. Faced with what is right, to leave it undon

The Chinese of the first phrase reads: fei qi gui erh ji zhi chan ye ? _3A

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18 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

the people do not sacrifice to spirits not of their clan."" The Guoyu relates a
story in which the spirit of a dead nobleman named Dan Zhu "descends" to earth
at a certain place. The king of the realm is careful to send a descendant of Dan Zhu
along with several ritual specialists to present offerings to the spirit, since, as an
early commentator writes (repeating the formula just cited), "The spirits do not accept
offerings from those not of their lineage.""2 Now the fact that offerings to non-
ancestral spirits of the dead were thus prohibited in early Confucian texts of course
might indicate that such offerings were indeed being made by certain social groups.
Given the paucity of information on such topics in the historial record, it is difficult
to tell. What is important for our purposes here is that making offerings to the non-
ancestral dead was morally and religiously unacceptable to the shapers of the classical
textual tradition.
But in the zhiguai narratives it is suddenly ghosts - other people's ancestors, and
not their own-with whom living protagonists primarily make contact. The number
of zhiguai ghost stories far surpasses the number of stories involving ancestors, which
goes to show that the possibility of encountering other people's dead constituted an
important part of the "strange" terrain that was being "accounted" for by these authors.
In the early medieval period, then, new kinds of moral, social, ritual, and emotional
ties were being forged across both the boundary separating life from death and that
separating kin from stranger.
This development within the narrative tradition is paralleled by contemporary
developments within the Buddhist and Taoist liturgical traditions. New liturgies for the
dead introduced by Buddhist monastic writers and by certain segments of the Taoist
community in the fourth through the sixth centuries C.E. (and perhaps earlier) departed
from the classical tradition by mandating universal offerings for the dead. From perhaps
the fourth century onward, the Buddhist rite of yulanpen I * I , recently illuminated
by Stephen Teiser, provided an unprecedented ritual means for feeding and appeasing
all the souls of the dead, ghosts -that is, the non-kin dead-as well as ancestors.13
At almost exactly the same time, the Lingbao 1I Taoist tradition seems to have
developed rituals designed to transfer merit to all the souls of the departed, in all direc-
tions of space, as well as to the ancestors of the Taoist faithful; there is much yet to
be learned, however, concerning every aspect of early Taoist practices surrounding
death. '14

11Zuozhuan
12See 1.75. The
Guoyu 1:32-33, andChinese reads:inshen
the discussion buxin
Henri feilei
Maspero, mininbusi
China feizu Ftrans.
Antiquity, ( M Frank
,) . A.
Kierman, Jr. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 418 n.3.
13 See Stephen F. Teiser, "Ghosts and Ancestors in Medieval Chinese Religion: The Yii-lan-p'en Festival
as Mortuary Ritual," History of Religions 26/1 (Aug. 1986):47-67, and idem, The Ghost Festival in Medieval
China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); on the yulanpen as a joint and simultaneous offering
to both ghosts and ancestors, see in particular "Ghosts and Ancestors," 59-65, and The Ghost Festival, 218-21.
140ne important text in this regard is the Lingbao ritual text Wushang huanglu dazhai licheng yi

-L-_k,4,-*
fascicle 281 ofI-X
the (Procedures for the
Zhengtong Daozang Ultimate
(hereafter Great
cited as Zhaifasc.
"DZ" plus of no.),
the no.
Yellow
508 inRegisters),
the Com- juan 16, in
bined Indices to the Authors and Titles of Books in Two Collections of Taoist Literature, Harvard-Yenching
Institute Sinological Series no. 25 (Peking: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1925), hereafter abbreviated as "HY."
This text is summarized and discussed in Catherine M. Bell, "Medieval Taoist Ritual Mastery" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Chicago, 1983), 121-30. Another key text is found in DZ 181 (HY 369), entitled Taishang

dongxuan lingbao miedu wulian shengshi miaojing,t_ c?, g- t _ t ?P _ $Ion which see the

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 19

In the famous story of Mulian 4 and his mother, dating f

have an excellent illustration of the clash between the classical and the new models
for relating to the dead. In fact, the story seems to have been deliberately crafted
Buddhist proponents as an argument in narrative form for the moral and religio
necessity of performing compassionate rites for all the dead and not merely for o
own kin. Briefly, the narrative tells of the monk Mulian and his mother, who, hav
committed the grave sin of failing to donate food to monks, is karmically requited
being reborn in the lowest level of Buddhist hell. Mulian at first journeys to hel
an attempt to rescue her, even offering - as a filial son - to stand in her place an
endure her tortures. He is unsuccessful, however, until the Buddha himself arrives
smashes the gates of hell, releasing all souls from their punishments. At this poi
Mulian's mother escapes hell only to move one rung up the Buddhist ladder of rebi
she becomes a hungry ghost, destined to wander the earth in constant search of fo
and drink. Mulian, ever the filial son, then offers food to her, but when she bri
it to her lips it bursts into flames, as does the water he offers. Once more Mulia
appeals to the Buddha, who then explains that Mulian- and all others who wish to
rescue their ancestors from the torments of rebirth in hell or as a hungry ghost - m
perform the yulanpen rite on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, offe
food to the monks of all directions as well as to all the souls of the departed in t
entire universe. The story's message is clear: only by universalizing the principle
filial piety, ritually performing for all the dead the sort of service hitherto provi
only for one's own kin, can one succeed in helping one's deceased ancestors.1
This vast sea-change in relations with the dead, entailing the revolutionary not
that the living may have new and specific obligations not only to ancestors but a
to ghosts - dead persons outside their own lineage - did not occur without protest f
various elite quarters. In certain early medieval Taoist texts, for instance, we fin
passages in which offerings to souls of the dead with whom one is not connected
lineage are expressly and forcefully forbidden, as are excessive offerings even to o
own ancestors. Such offerings are represented in these texts as symptomatic of t
"excessive" and "impure" cults from which elite Taoists were trying to distance the
selves.16 Such protests are indicative of the profound adjustment required by the n

excellent discussion in Stephen R. Bokenkamp, "Death and Ascent in Ling-pao Taoism," Taoist Reso
1.2 (Winter 1989):1-20; Bokenkamp translates the title as Transmit through Extinction by the Refine
of the Five for the Revivification of the Corpse. Other important discussions of Taoist rites for the
include Judith M. Boltz, "Opening the Gates of Purgatory: A Twelfth-century Taoist Meditation Techn
for the Salvation of Lost Souls," in Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein, vol. 2, ed
Strickmann (Institut Belge des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, 1983), esp. 495 for comments on the early Shan
and Lingbao traditions; and John Lagerwey, Taoist Ritual in Chinese Society and History (New Y
Macmillan, 1987), esp. 171 and chaps. 11-13.
151 have here summarized the version of the story of Mulian and his mother contained in the Dunh
Transformation Text on Mulian Rescuing His Mother from the Underworld; for a complete translatio
see Victor H. Mair, Tun-huang Popular Narratives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 87-
For a translation and discussion of the less complex monastic version of the story-which is geared ev
more explicitly toward the justification of the yulanpen ritual-see Teiser, The Ghost Festival, 48-

16An important text in this regard is Taishang dongyuan shenzhou jing IAJ~ . (DZ 170-173,
HY 335),
(DZ particularly
876, HY 1196). Boththe
arepassages in in
discussed juan 2, A.
Rolf pp.Stein,
3b and 5a; another
"Religious is Santian
Taoism neijiejing
and Popular = F pP
Religion M j-the
from
Second to the Seventh Centuries," in Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, ed. Holmes Welch and

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20 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

range of relationships between living and dead. The zhiguai ghost and afterlife narr
tives, I believe, played an essential role in that process of adjustment by providing
ideologically rather free genre-a genre not bound by the same constraints to whic
older, more historiographic genres were subject-in which new models of and for
relations between the living and the dead could be safely explored.

"Naturalistic" and "Moral" Relations between the Living and the Dead

If we take early medieval stories about near-death experiences, ghosts, and ances-
tors to be fundamentally concerned with probing the boundary between life and death
and charting the dark terrain of relations between people on either side, then we must
begin by making a basic distinction. Some zhiguai stories talk about the nature of
relations between the living and the dead in what might be called "naturalistic" terms;
others talk about those relations in what are clearly moral terms. In "naturalistic"
discourse, ghosts are pictured as one among many kinds of harmful natural forces in
the world. The appropriate response to them is to be on guard in order to protect
oneself. Questions of justice or benevolence -whether the ghost deserves anything from
the person who has encountered it, whether it should be pitied or scorned-do not
arise in this way of imagining people's interactions with the dead. The focus is rather
on more or less successful ways of defending oneself against attack. In moral discourse,
on the other hand, ghosts are pictured as having -at least in principle-a legitimate
claim on living human beings. The appropriate response to them is to acknowledge
their claim, either by accepting it-which entails giving ghosts one's attention, respect,
perhaps even service of one kind or another-or else by refuting it. In this sort of
discourse, social-moral categories such as reciprocity, exchange, and the incurring and
repayment of obligation - in Chinese terms, the fundamental categories of bao * and
en A, -come into play.17 Let me now flesh out these two sorts of discourse with some
examples.
In stories of the "naturalistic" type, "ghosts" (gui) usually attack living people for
no apparent reason; the two parties have no prior relationship, that is, no grounds are
given to explain why this person is attacked and not some other. Further, we know
nothing of the identity or "case history" of the attacker; he is not portrayed in the
narrative, in other words, as a character with a specific biography or personality. For

Anna Seidel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 53-81. Warnings against excessive offerings to
ancestors are found in the second-century Taipingjing -~f-~'l (Scripture of Great Peace); see Wang Ming,
ed., Taiping jing hejiao (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 134, and Max Kaltenmark, "The Ideology of
the T'ai-p'ing Ching," in Welch and Seidel, eds., Facets of Taoism, 35-36. For a brief discussion of
Confucian protests against offerings to ghosts, see Teiser, "Ghosts and Ancestors in Medieval Chinese
Religion," 60.
17The notion of bao involves, fundamentally, a "response" to some previous "influence," a setting-right
of some moral imbalance, ranging from returning a favor to avenging a wrong. The closely related notion
of en involves the incurring of a debt to another party and the associated ambivalent feelings of gratitude
and indebtedness; or, from the opposite point of view, it is the act of creating a debt on another's part.
On these twin concepts, I have particularly benefited from reading Lien-sheng Yang, "The Concept of Pao
as a Basis for Social Relations in China," in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 291-309; Paul Varo Martinson, "Pao Order and Redemption:
Perspectives on Chinese Society and Religion Based on a Study of the Chin Ping Mei," Ph.D. diss.,
University of Chicago, 1973; and Michael Dalby, "Revenge and the Law in Traditional China," American
Journal of Legal History 25 (1982):267-307.

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 21

example, in one story of this type an unidentified ghost apparent

a new bride.'8 In another, a pack of hungry ghosts disturb a
steal the pork offered to his soul, but are subsequently chas
son-in-law.19 Elsewhere ghosts guilty of stealing a certain f
killed by means of a potion.20
Furthermore, ghosts in this type of story are sometimes d
human, monstrous, or foreign form; and they rarely have a
described simply as "a ghost" or "a creature" (usually w
Guangzhou, a Buddhist monk met a ghost on his way to the t
was shaped "like a Kurung" (that is, like one from the In
aborigine),21 had yellow eyes, and was naked. The monk, who
up the creature in order to test its arts, but it escaped after
a man was setting out from Guangling23 by boat when sudd
ride and got on. The ghost was red, maybe ten feet tall, and
a deer horn. Now the man knew a little something of the art
"a southern peasant song" (sujia nandi zhi qu 9ft6 dk ).
out its tongue, opened its eyes wide, and threw its walking
parts and burst into flames. The man was helpless and soo
Now it is crucial to note that these "naturalistic" stories ar
the rule in zhiguai representations of human encounters with
of account remind us of nothing so much as those shadowy
variety of terms in early texts, most of which might be best
I believe that they represent an older stratum in the history

18In Zhiguai by Zu Taizhi, item 12 (LX 210); note that this "ghost," who a
boy carrying a knife, is characterized as a "ghost-child" (guizi ).
19See Youming lu item 94 (LX 265-66), trans. in Kao, Classical Chine

20 As in Soushen houji ,*i * & (Han Wei congshu 1791 ed., fasc. 57, he
2.24a Taiping
on (2.7b), which also appears,
yulan entry. withattributed
(This text, slight textual variations, in
to Zu ChongzhiI*+ andShuyiji i?JA--by
anthologized item 23 (LX
Lu Xun 172), based
from
later encyclopedic sources, is not to be confused with the two-juan text of the same title attributed to

Ren Fang f If '. The latter is distinguished in the notes that follow by being cited first by juan and item
number, then by juan and page number.) The potion is secretly made by boiling down a mass of the vine
called ge A , apparently a source of edible starch, and then making a porridge out of this and covering
it; after eating it the ghosts "vomited" (tou tu !W tr ) and died. I cannot determine why the juice of the
ge was poisonous to the ghosts, however, unless it was because of its laxative qualities.
21 The text has "shaped like kunlun R * "; on the use of kunlun to designate Malays and Khmers, see
Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963),
45-46.

22Shuyi ji item 90 (LX 193), TPGJ 327 (26.30a).

23 At the southern tip of Lake Sheyang, just north of the Yangtze.
24Linggui zhi f item 16 (LX 202), TPGJ 322 (26.14a). Compare Shuyi ji item 45 (LX 178, also
TPGJ 325 [26.24a]), in which a man staves off a pack of marauding gui by brute strength, only to provoke
them into killing his father; these gui are described as having animal form.
25The best overview of such creatures is de Groot, Religious System, esp. vols. 4-6. See also Donald
Harper, "A Chinese Demonography of the Third Century B.C.," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45
(1985):459-98; on some of the visual evidence, Michael Loewe, "Man and Beast: The Hybrid in Early Chinese
Art and Literature," Numen 25 (1978):97-117; and for their much later uses in Chinese fiction, my
"Demons, Gods, and Pilgrims: The Demonology of the Hsi-yu Chi," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles,
Reviews 7 (1985):95-115, and "Cosmogony and Self-Cultivation: The Demonic and the Ethical in Two Chinese
Novels," Journal of Religious Ethics 14 (1986):81-112.

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22 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

living and the dead in China - a stratum in which relations between people and ghos
had not yet taken definite moral and cultic shape. In most early medieval zhig
stories involving beings called gui, on the other hand, we find a moral discourse,
which the focus is not on the ghostly attack per se but rather on the set of obligati
and entitlements that constitute the context and rationale for the attack. In these
stories, the duties and claims of each party are carefully if implicitly weighed.
Consider, for example, the case of Zhang Kai, who befriended a person injured
beside a road only to find out that the object of his compassion was really a ghost
who sought his body as a "replacement." The ghost, mindful of its debt to Zhang,
pitied its benefactor and could not carry out its malicious intent. So a compromise
was reached: the ghost asked if there were someone else nearby with the same given
name, and Zhang, to save himself, obligingly pointed out a surrogate victim, who die
later the same night.26 This would be a neat solution were it not for the apparent
innocence of the third party. But in a similar story, a student "summoned" by a
ghostly visitor suggested his own commander (who "resembled" him) as a substitute
for himself; and the commander was notorious for maintaining that ghosts do not
exist-a theme to which I will return shortly.27 Here it is the commander's haughty
scepticism concerning the existence of ghosts that justifies - or at least explains - his
speedy demise. However we might understand these particular stories, the point is
that most ghost narratives in the zhiguai collections involve this sort of moral com
plexity and adjudication of claims.
This complex sort of moral discourse on the relations between the living an
the dead was novel in Chinese writing. To be sure, tales of vengeful souls (yuanhun
% O ) had already been circulating for several centuries, and they continued to be
collected in the early medieval period, as attested by the most famous example, Yan
Zhitui's sixth-century Tales of Vengeful Souls (Yuanhun zhi , 0 ), as well as b
isolated stories in other collections. But by now a subtle change had occurred even
here: the vengeful soul is shown going through proper bureaucratic channels
(including the presentation of a written appeal) and securing penal authority from
the "(Celestial) Emperor."28 This procedure points to another aspect of the chang

26Zhenyi zhuan 4-4# item 2 (LX 155-56), TPGJ 321 (26.9b-10a).

27 Soushen ji ~I~# (20-juan version), juan 16, item 4 (I have used the edition published in Taipei in
1982 by Shijie shuju, in which the page numbers for this item are 116-17; all subsequent references to th
Soushen ji will be to this edition, by juan- and item-number and also by page number). The story is even
more complicated than I have intimated, in that the student, like his commander, professes scepticis
regarding ghosts' existence. Perhaps the student was excused on grounds of his minority, while his superi
should rightly have known better. This story is discussed in Yu, "Ghosts," 405.
28The reader may consult the complete translation of this text by Alvin P. Cohen, Tales of Vengef
Souls: A Sixth Century Collection of Chinese Avenging Ghost Stories, Varidtis Sinologiques n.s. 6
(Taipei: Institut Ricci, 1982), as well as the study by Albert E. Dien, "The Yiian-hun Chih (Accounts
of Ghosts with Grievances): A Sixth-Century Collection of Stories," in Wen-lin: Studies in the Chine
Humanities, ed. Chow Tse-tsung (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 211-28. Salient examples
of the vengeful souls motif in other pre-Tang zhiguai works include Shuyi ji item 61 (LX 185-86), which
puts an unusual twist on the motif; Youming lu item 121 (LX 273), which also appears in Liu Jun
commentary to the Shishuo xinyu K .* and is translated in Richard B. Mather, A New Account
Tales of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 330; and Xu Qi Xie ji fi a *4
in HWCS fasc. 57, 4a. See also Yu, "Ghosts," 415-22, and Cohen, "Avenging Ghosts and Moral Judge-
ment." I cannot here address in detail the similarities and differences between gui (and stories abou

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 23

in relations between the living and the dead during the early m
increasing bureaucratization, a trend that would continue with
and Taoist-adopted elaboration of hell into ten courts presid
the guise of administrative officials.29 But, in any case, the act
was by now a familiar mechanism of cosmic justice, carried out
of a mere "response" (ying ~) to a prior "influence" (gan A). Mo
ghostly retribution allowed no room for compromise or maneu
the living player in this moral drama.30 It was not the oc
relationship across the great divide separating the dead from the
the culmination of a relationship already formed by an unjust
soul was still a living person.

A Typology of Ghost Narratives

In the following discussion, I seek to give a sense of the tot

obligations and entanglements between the living and the dead
in Six Dynasties zhiguai. My treatment is meant to be wide-ran
haustive. Space permits the full translation of only a few tales.

The ghostly apologue

I will start with the simplest sort of demand or claim a gho
living person: the demand that its sheer existence be acknowled
that the ghost, or indeed any ghost, is a real player in the mor
only exists but also warrants attention and response from the li
deal with what Anthony Yu has aptly called the "ghostly apolog
be further divided into two types: "confrontational," in which t
and argumentative encounter between a ghost and a living p
existence of ghosts, and "evidential," in which telling evidence is
real existence although no explicit argument is mounted.
In the face of known scepticism among the elite, some stories
tional" type - give what amount to explicit apologies for the re
Many of these stories share the following basic plot. A man (us
member of the elite) noted for his skill in arguing against the
receives a guest. The two perhaps speak of other matters, but w
ghosts, the skillful host marshals his arguments and defeats the
the words, "I myself am a ghost," the guest then reveals that h

them) and hun (and stories about them). Suffice it to say, first, that the t
etymologies; secondly, that gui (revenant) refers to a dead person under the as
returned to the world of the living, whereas hun (cloud-soul) refers primarily t
bound of the dual components of human personality, always in implied con
terrestrial component; thirdly, that in the zhiguai corpus the two terms ar
being by far the more common; and fourthly, that the only significant differe
concerning gui and hun is the one I describe in this paragraph.
29See esp. the stories numbered 42, 48, and 52 in Cohen's translation of the Y
of wrongfully killed people being buried with brush, paper, and ink so that the
appeal to the Celestial Emperor.
30Note that in the Yuanhun zhi stories, when the living seek forgiveness for
too late: the cosmic forces of justice have already been set in inexorable mo

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24 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

very class of beings whose existence has been debated. The guest then disappea
but, somewhat later, the previously sceptical host invariably dies.31 In a simi
story, a man named Yuan Zhan who maintained the non-existence of ghosts w
"suddenly told" by another: "The way of ghosts and deities has been transmitted b
sages and worthies of both yesterday and today. How can you alone maintain its n
existence?" The man who uttered these words "suddenly changed form, and after
moment disappeared. A little over a year later, Yuan grew sick and died.""32
In some stories it is not the denial of ghosts' existence, but the false pretense th
one is not afraid of ghosts, that is offensive. In one particularly eerie story, a ma
haunted by a ghost thinks to escape it by changing his name and moving to anoth
village. After a long time he believes the danger is past, and, while relaxing w
friends beside a river, can finally say aloud, "I'm no longer afraid of this ghos
but at that moment he sees the old ghost's reflection in the water, uttering threa
against his life, and he is once again pursued by it.33
The "evidential" ghostly apologues, while they do not include sceptical characte
or philosophical debates, provide more tangible evidence of the real existence of ghos
and the disclosure of this evidence is clearly the point, and provides the narrative
climax, of the stories. Here it is a physical object, acting as a sign of a ghost's prese
or activity, that mounts a mute though irrefutable argument for the ghost's existen
For example, a dead woman-the wife of the former grand administrator of Hejian
-appears to the current grand administrator in a dream and gives him two rare coin
which he puts under his pillow. Later the woman's grave is checked, and the coins
with which she had been buried, are indeed found to be missing.34 These stories a
reminiscent of Taoist-inspired tales of "liberation from the corpse," in which the gr
of a reputed immortal is opened and-contrary to the above stories-precisely
nothing is found (save perhaps for a strange fragrance), which confirms that the
deceased was no ordinary mortal and has ascended to the clouds.35
Another kind of evidence of its existence and power-not a physical object, but
no less tangible in its effects on the living-is a ghost fulfilling a threat made while
alive. In one story of this type, a dying man warns his concubine, who is homely of
appearance but skilled at singing, not to re-attach herself to another after he dies, or
he will kill her. When she is about to transgress his warning, she sees his ghost
approach on horseback and shoot her through the throat with an arrow. The unfor-
tunate woman did not, after all, die; but her wound destroyed her voice, the one

31 As examples, see Youming lu item 68 (LX 257) (also in TPGJ 319 [26.lb-2a]), Soushen ji 16.3 (116),
and ibid., 16.4 (116-17). This last item puts a twist on the plot, as noted above and by Yu, "Ghosts," 405.
32Xiaoshuo item 130 (LX 119). Cf. the similar tale of Song Dai, regional inspector of Qingzhou, in
the same collection, item 131 (LX 119-20).
33 Guishen liezhuan * ? lJI'f~item 1 (LX 325). In this case the ghost (gui) has a specific name, and haunts
his human quarry for over five years.
34 Zhiguai by Zu Taizhi, item 2 (LX 208). Other examples of "evidential apologues" include Lieyi zhuan
SJ 8-4 titem 31 (LX 143) and Shuyi ji item 82 (LX 190-91), both discussed below.
35This motif, common in Taoist hagiography, also finds its way into the zhiguai corpus: see, e.g.,
Shuyi ji 2 (2.15a-b). In some cases an object is found that "replaces" the corpse: thus when the Yellow
Emperor's hoary tomb was opened due to a landslide, no remains of a corpse were found within, only
a sword; an example is Lieyi zhuan item 1 (LX 133).

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 25

faculty that had made her desirable, and also stood as kind o
to anyone who doubted ghosts' efficacy.36

Offerings
Beyond the sheer acknowledgment of their existence, ghosts claim or request many
other things from the living, among the most basic of which is the offering of
sustenance. A common response to a ghost's appearance is to offer it food and drink,
often in the form of rice and wine. In one story, a man being haunted by a spirit is
ordered by a government official to prepare a document to be read to the spirit;
he is also obliged to set out offerings of rice and wine beside a thoroughfare."37
Another story tells of how a whole crowd of ghosts was fed:

During the Jin, when Huan Baonu governed Jiang Province, there was a clerk
named Gan whose home was under the jurisdiction of Linchuan Commandery. His
thirteen year old son contracted an illness and died. He was buried east of the house
among a group of other graves. A week later, the sounds of drums being beaten and
people singing were suddenly heard on the eastern road. Over a hundred people marched
up to the Gan house and asked: "Is the clerk at home? We have come to pay him a
visit. His worthy son is also here with us." With that, the sound of voices was heard
no more, neither were any forms visible. So several jars of wine were set out; for a
moment they disappeared, then they were seen to be empty. Now the Governor of
Linchuan, having heard the sound of drums starting up, had assumed that somebody
was about to give a performance and that they surely were on their way to announce
it to him; so he was surprised by the fact that everything got quiet and the troupe never
arrived. When Gan told him what happened, he was greatly frightened.38

In yet another tale, a manager of agricultural fields, named Xu, offers part of his food
to the ghost of a recent murder victim whose body had been buried nearby by the
murderer. Xu invokes the ghost to "draw near to my food" and "come and rest here
with me." The ghost later appears and, apparently in repayment for his kindness, takes
Xu on a visit to his family home, where a plentiful offering is being made to him.
The ghost conceals Xu's form, enabling him to sit with the ghost on the altar and
consume the offered food with him. When the ghost's murderer, a guest of the family
on this occasion (since they do not know the identity of the killer), comes in, the ghost
leaves out of fear and takes Xu with him, whereupon his form suddenly becomes
visible. The family is naturally shocked; Xu tells them the whole story. They follow
Xu back to his fields, recover the body, and are thus able to perform proper burial
rites, after which the ghost no longer appears to Xu.39
This sort of offering of food and drink to the spirits is often described in
scholarly literature as an act of "appeasement" by which people, fearful of the dead,

36Zhenyi zhuan item 6 (LX 157), TPGJ 321 (26.9b).

37 Yiyuan --A juan 6, item 8 (6.2a). I have used the edition of this text published in the collection
Shuoku j (Taibei: Xinxing shuju, 1963) and cite it by juan and item number followed in parentheses
by the juan and page numbers. The man in this story had had some unmentioned incident with the ghost
some fifty years before, and the ghost communicates its wishes through an intermediary.
38 Youming lu item 98 (LX 267), TPGJ 319 (26.2a-b).
39 Youming lu item 261 (LX 318-19).

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26 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

hope to bribe the recipients into leaving them alone.40 But it is seldom noted that t
very possibility of this "appeasement" rests on a prior, tacit understanding that t
offering represents an exchange and presupposes a contract with obligations on bo
sides. The rice and wine offerings to ghosts-in these cases, offerings made outside
of Buddhist contexts - are not, therefore, to be understood as feeble human attemp
to escape the wrath of all-powerful spiritual beings; instead, they constitute means
which people can exercise some claim over ghosts, as well as fulfulling the ghosts' cla
to food. In other words, the offering creates an obligation on the part of ghosts
who eat.41
As if to illustrate this point, we find stories in which ghosts fail to abide by th
unwritten code governing the making and receiving of offerings, and as a result
blamed or punished by people. In one story, a pack of ghosts attack a man in orde
to steal the drying seaweed he had gathered, but he succeeds in fending them off. La
they return to beg for food, but he refuses to make offerings, reminding them of their
earlier improper behavior.42 I have already mentioned another story in which a m
kills ghosts by mixing a potion into the pot from which they had regularly been
stealing food. In the economy of relations between the living and the dead, therefo
a dual principle of etiquette emerges: on the one hand, the living owe food offerin
to non-kin dead; on the other, the dead may not eat food that is not offered.

Reburial and healing

Aside from offerings of food and drink, one of the services ghosts most ofte
seek from the living is reburial (or other care) of their corpse, which is described
as having been interred improperly or without the appropriate rites.43 Almo
invariably in these cases, the ghost is described as requesting-not demanding -this

40A classic comparative treatment of relations between the living and the dead takes this approach:
J. G. Frazer, The Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religion, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1933-36; rep
[as one volume] New York: Arno Press, 1977). A recent, but excellent and much more sophisticate
analysis of the fear of the dead and its expression in food offerings and deprivation by mourners, m
be found in Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology
Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. Parts I and II.
41 A humorous exception to this moral economy of offerings to ghosts appears in Youming lu item
(LX 316-17), TPGJ 321 (26.8b-9a). Here a "new ghost" (xinguiqjA), famished because he does not kn
how to secure food, asks for instructions from a friend-ghost he had known while alive. The friend-gh
says, "That's easy. All you have to do is to scare some people, and they'll give you something to e
However, the new ghost's initial attempts to scare families of living people- first a devout Buddhist fam
then a Taoist one-backfire when he picks up and waves about first a grindstone and then a pes
and the families, assuming that a ghost is being sent to work for them on account of their relig
devotion, give him raw grain to grind. Each time the ghost works for hours and gets nothing to ea
return. The friend-ghost then explains that, because these families serve the Buddha and the Tao, "the
emotions are not easily stirred"; he suggests going to a peasant family (baixing jia-t f.I ) instead. I
peasant house the new ghost enters a room where some girls are eating and picks up a white dog, walk
about so that the dog appears to the girls to be floating through the air. The girls are frightened and
consult a diviner, who says: "There is a guest seeking food. You should kill the dog and set it out al
with fruits, wine, and rice in the room as an offering. In this way you can alleviate any further troub
After thus learning his way in the ghostly world, the new ghost continues to "cause anomalies" (zuogu
# ) in order to get food.
42Jiyijig,-~item 11 (LX 395).
43 On the importance in Chinese culture of proper burial - including state provisions, where necessa
for the burial of unclaimed corpses - see de Groot, Religious System, 3:855-67.

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 27

service from a stranger; and after the stranger cares for the
ghost performs some gesture of thanks, thus "repaying" (ba
the stranger's generosity.
Here is an example. A man, while traveling in the mountai
who tells him that he will find her corpse nearby, with weeds
skull. If he tidies it up, she will richly reward him. The man
find a skull that has fallen out of the rotten head-end of its co
up through the eye sockets like thorns. He pulls up the weeds,
the skull back inside, and fastens the lid. Where the skull ha
of gold rings as his reward.44 In another story of this type, a
to a man in his dreams and tells him where he can find its i
nearby. The man finally decides to heed the dream: he finds th
said it would be, and reburies it with rich funeral rites. After
in the man's dream to thank him.45
Another service which ghosts sometimes request from the living is therapy; for,
as the ghost in the following story explains, the dead feel pain just as the living do.

Xu Qiufu of Qiantang was skilled at curing illnesses. He lived on the east side of
Hugou Bridge. One night he heard a terrible moaning sound coming from empty space.
He got up and went to the spot from which the sound was issuing, and said: "Are you
a ghost? [If so,] why are you acting like this? Is it that you are cold and hungry, in
need of clothing and food? Or are you sick and in need of treatment?" The ghost said:
"I come from Dongyang. My surname is Si and my given name is Seng; I was formerly
a messenger for [the government office at] Yueyou.46 I died of a kidney ailment. Now
I dwell in Hubei. Although I am a ghost, the pain is just as real as if I were still alive.
On account of your skill in medicine, I have come to confer with you." Qiufu said:
"But you don't have a body. How can you be cured?" The ghost said: "Just tie up some
thatch grass in the form of a human. Pierce it with a needle according to the location
of the foramina (anxue zhen zhi~ JX?).47 Then cast it into the flowing water, and
that should do it." So Qiufu made a mannikin from thatch, and pierced it in two
places with a needle, in the liver area and in the area of the eyes. After setting out a
light offering, he sent someone to take the mannikin out to the middle of the lake
[and cast it into the water]. That same night he dreamed that the ghost said to him:
"Having met with the double good fortune of being cured and being fed a generous
meal, I am deeply grateful to you, sir, for your kindness." In the sixth year of the
Yuanjia reign-period of the Song [429 C.E.], Qiufu received an invitation to court.48

44Shuyi ji item 79 (LX 190), TPGJ 276 (22.31a).

45 Yiyuan juan 6, item 4 (6.1a-b). There are many other examples; see, e.g., those translated from the
Shiyi jiA~ik by Lawrence Chapin Foster, "The Shih-i chi and its Relationship to the Genre known as
Chih-kuai hsiao-shuo," PhD diss., University of Washington, 1974, pp. 245, 247, and 265-66; see also
Shenguai lu jgg item 2 (LX 223).
461n Shanxi, south of Chang'an.
47This is a reference to the Chinese medical theory of sensitive points or xue ("foramina") and to
acupuncture procedures. Formamina, to quote one authoritative discussion, are "openings for the passage
of energy (ch'i) which are situated in palpable concavities at the surface of the body." See the discussion
in Manfred Porkert, The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974),
197ff. (this quotation from 199).
48Xu Qi Xie ji (HWCS ed.) item 16 (8a-b). The text is mispunctuated.

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28 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

Here, although we are not explicitly told so, Qiufu's court appointment seems to
have been acquired under the ghost's influence as a repayment for his services.
Therapy was also sought by the living from the dead. In some stories, people try
to obtain ghostly cures by magical means; in others, ghosts offer their help freely, or
in repayment of a debt already incurred. One man, who had malaria and had tried
various remedies without success, was advised to prepare some cooked rice and stand
by the road, calling out the name of a cavalry officer who had died in battle and
offering to exchange his rice for a cure. The officer suddenly appeared on horseback,
tied him up, and took him away. His family found him several days later still tied up
beside the officer's grave; his illness was cured.49 In another story we are told how a
ghost who "frequently came" to the home of a certain family-perhaps for meals-
searched for and found a rare medicine for their sick son.50
We see here how the exchange of therapy-across the boundaries separating the
living from the dead and the members of one lineage from those of another-
constituted another sort of moral and ritual tie between these two groups. Stories
in which that code of reciprocity and mutual respect is violated serve to illustrate
by negative example. For example, one Zhang Yi, whose wounds from a severe
whipping had been slow to heal, was advised to seek a cure by exhuming a hum
skull and burning it, thereby transferring his sickness to the skeleton's "owner." So
sent a boy into the mountains to find a skeleton and do the deed on his behalf. Th
night a fire was seen burning the hand of this boy; and an object came floati
through the air, glowing as though filled with flames and saying, "Why did you bu
my head? I'll use this fire to burn you in return!" But the terrified boy told of h
Zhang Yi had ordered him to do it. Nevertheless, much of the boy's hair and sk
were burned off before the skull finally relented. Frightened, Zhang Yi quickly returned
the remainder of the skeleton to its resting place and offered wine to its spirit, aft
which there was no more trouble.5' We have to do not with a naturalistic discourse
in which human bones may be used medicinally like any natural substance, but wit
a moral discourse, in which a structure of obligation is central.

Ghosts as servants and friends of the living

Ghosts are sometimes depicted in zhiguai stories as providing various services fo
the living in return for favors such as regular offerings of food or being spar
execution. We have already seen examples in which ghosts cure people. In other cas
they act almost as domestic servants, fetching rare edibles and performing menial
tasks. 52 Occasionally a ghost and a living person form a long-lasting friendship an

49Shuyi ji item 61 (LX 185-86); the text's "in the Taiyuan period" is probably, Lu Xun notes, an er
for "in the Darning period," which would place this event in the late 450s or early 460s.
50 Qi Xie ji J*'o j item 13 (LX 235). The rare medicine is huwan AA , literally "tiger egg (or pelle
perhaps denoting a tiger foetus; note that when the ghost returns with it and deposits it on the flo
it is "still warm." We are not told whether or not the cure was effective.
51Shuyi ji 65 (LX 186-87); see also Fayuan zhulin A$AJ3* 46 (640a). I have given here the pag
number in the Taish6 shinshi^ daizoky6 edition of this Tang Buddhist encyclopedia, which is hereaf
abbreviated as FYZL; it is text no. 2122 in the Taish6 edition. On the use of human bones as medicin
see de Groot, Religious System, 4:402ff.
52See, for example, Yiyuan juan 6 item 35 (6.5a), and Soushen houji juan 2 item 16 (2.6a)-the latt
case involves a mei M. and not a gui. I have used the edition of this text published in the HWCS; I c
it by juan and item number followed in parentheses by juan and page number.

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 29

mutual respect, even to the extent of sharing their meals. " W

concerning relations between local bureaucrats newly arrived a
dead predecessors.54

Play between the living and the dead

Occasions for interaction between the living and the dead ar
narratives as running even to such simple and pleasant pursuit
performances, or a good jug of wine or an engaging conversation. Here again we
see a complex network of moral relations emerging between people and ghosts, for,
as Gadamer has shown, "play"-which is what all these activities essentially amount
to - presupposes a rule-governed realm of to-and-fro interactions.55 We read of ghosts
responding appreciatively to travelers who play the flute or pipa in desolate places. 56
In several stories, ghosts enter into lengthy, learned discussions or poetry contests with
the living: a person who was learned and witty in life apparently loses none of his or
her intellectual powers after death. "
If ghosts and living humans could become partners in games and friendly con-
tests, they could also indulge in trickery and deceit; they were capable, that is, of
violating the rules of the game. There is, for instance, the remarkable and humorous
story of Song Dingbo, who pretended to be a recently deceased ghost in order to trick
a real ghost into revealing its fatal weakness - namely, fear of human saliva; the man
uses this weakness to "fix" his ghostly companion's form and sell him for a profit
in a city market."8 In another tale, a man tricks a ghost into making him rich by
constantly daring the ghost to prove its power by tossing coins onto the floor.59
These lighthearted stories are offset by others in which deception is punished: in one,
for instance, a dead man, whom certain persons found it convenient to accuse of
embezzling public money, returns as a ghost to vindicate his name.60 Clearly, to
hoodwink the dead was not thought of as an easy task, nor one without risk.

53 As in Shuyi ji item 35 (LX 174) (also TPGJ 323 [26.16a]), a very unusual story. See also the Shiyi
ji story (Foster, trans., "The Shih-i chi," 251-52) in which a loyal vassal, mourning and making offerings
of chicken and wine beside his lord's grave, is visited by his spirit and the two share a meal and
conversation together.
54See, for instance, Shuyi ji item 34 (LX 174), in which a bad official after his death appears to a
good official and warns him. Compare ibid., item 77 (LX 189), in which a dead official asks his
successor to send him one of his beloved possessions by burning it.
56See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 91ff.
56 E.g. Yiyuan juan 6 item 7 (6.1b) and Linggui zhi item 8 (LX 198-99); the latter tale is translated in
Kao, ed., Classical Chinese Tales, 123-24.
57E.g. the charming story in Qi Xie ji item 11 (LX 235), TPGJ 321 (26.8b); Youming lu item 99
(LX 267, and compare the version in TPGJ 317 [25.42b]), in which a ghost appears to Wang Bi as he
writes his commentary to the YijinggJ A; and Shiyiji (Foster, trans., "The Shih-i chi," 261), in which the
encounter--a learned conversation with ancient sages on the Yijing-takes place in a dream. See also Yu,
"Ghosts," 430-31.
58Lieyi zhuan item 28 (LX 141-42), TPGJ 321 (26.10b-lla), FYZL 6 (316c). This story has rightly
attracted the attention of scholars; see the trans. in Kao, ed., Classical Chinese Tales, 59-61, and the trans.
and discussion in Yu, "Ghosts," 406-7.
59Shuyi ji item 57 (LX 184-85), TPGJ 325 (26.24b-25a).
60Lieyi zhuan item 11 (LX 136-37).

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30 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

Love relations across the great divide

We have seen an astonishing array of possible relationships between the living
and the dead. But nowhere are the intimacy and poignancy of their encounters
captured more completely than in stories of love across the great divide.61 A great
many stories depict the deceased member of a couple appearing as a ghost to the
surviving member. Here is an example:

Yu Miao and a girl named Guo Ning were having an illicit affair. Before the altar
to the earth god he agreed to take her as his concubine and [they swore] that if either
of them proved disloyal, that one should die. Yu Miao remained unwilling to marry
any other girls. Two years had gone by when suddenly one day Yu heard that Guo
Ning had suffered a violent death. He went out the door and looked off into the
distance, whereupon he caught sight of a person coming towards him; it was Guo
Ning. He joined his hands and uttered a cry of lament over her. She told him:
"I was coming back from North Village when I met a bandit on the road. He pulled
out a knife and threatened me, and I was afraid to die so I submitted to him. Since
I was unable to preserve my virtue, 62 I was blamed (ze * ) by the earth god. I began
to feel pain, and after one night I expired." Yu Miao then said to her, "Why don't
you stay here tonight?" But she answered, "People and ghosts travel different paths,
so you mustn't trouble your thoughts with such things." Then she wept until her
tears soaked her collar.63

In another story, a man and woman were betrothed; the woman died suddenly one
stormy night without the man's knowledge. That same night, her ghost came to his
door in the soaking rain to give him a brocade cloth she had been weaving for him,
then departed, saying they must be separated forever. Only the next day did the man
learn from her father that his fiancee had died, and that the brocade cloth on which
she had been working was missing.64 A third tale of this type tells of how a dead
man appears to his mother and widow; they talk and drink together. The wife then
grows sick and refuses medicine so that she can join her dead husband in the other
world all the sooner.65
Such stories as these emphasize the difference and distance separating the dead
from the living: though ghosts are able to appear briefly and to converse with the
living, the couple cannot enjoy the sort of relationship they had while both wer
alive. In other stories we read of shamanic specialists who could arrange intimat
but ephemeral meetings between people and their dear ones in the other world.
Here is an example.

At Yingling in Beihai there was a monk (daoren ifl ) who could cause living and
dead people to meet. A man in that commandery whose wife had died several years
earlier heard of him, so this man went to see [the monk], saying: "I wish you to
enable me to see a certain dead person just once, even if it costs me my life." So

61 On this theme generally, see Yu, "Ghosts," 423-34.

62The Chinese is shoujie ii , which could also be translated as "keep our agreement."
63 Shuyi ji item 81 (LX 190).
64See Shuyi ji item 82 (LX 190-91), translated in Kao, ed., Classical Chinese Tales, 155-56.
65See Shuyi ji item 84 (LX 191), TPGJ 318 (25.44b); compare ibid., item 85 (LX 191), TPGJ 322
(26.12b-13a).

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 31

[the monk] instructed him in how to see her. And thus he had a me
Their conversation was sad and happy by turns; their feelings were
[the wife] was alive. After a long while they heard an urgent drumm
meant that] he would not be able to get out the door. He fled just
slamming shut, and the bottom of his robe got caught as the door closed on it;
but he managed to tear it off and get away.
Several years later this man died. As his family was burying him, they opened
[the family tomb] and saw protruding from underneath the lid of her coffin the
bottom of a robe.66

Here, the intimacy of the meeting is compromised by its brevity: not even a skilled
adept could skirt the terrible cosmic law that, ultimately, "the living and the dead
follow different paths."

In the Six Dynasties period, then, ghosts - the returned souls of people to whom
one was not kin-came to be represented as able to demand or request a wide array
of things from the living: acknowledgment, respect, food and drink, reburial and care
for the corpse, healing, friendship, learned conversation, companionship in drinking
or gaming or travel, love, revenge. They had the power to reciprocate with many
kinds of blessings or curses, although their power had limits. The living, for their part,
could make a similar if not quite identical set of demands and requests of ghosts.
The boundary between life and death had become quite a bit more complex than
before, partly because the boundary separating the dead of one lineage from the
living of another lineage was quickly opening up. The zhiguai texts not only mirror
these processes as they were occurring in contemporary Chinese society; they may
also have given rise in actual practice to the sorts of relations they described by
imaginatively creating the possibility of relating to the dead in those ways. By giving
narrative shape and descriptive body to this new field of social relations, in other
words, zhiguai tales may have helped to create it as a social reality.

Relations with Ancestors and Other Kinfolk

So far we have examined the ways in which zhiguai authors mapped out new
kinds of relations between living people and ghosts. What, then, of ancestors? What
sorts of models of and for relations with the ancestors did the zhiguai authors
transmit, and how do these models compare with those for relations with ghosts?
A full answer to this question will not be attempted here; I will only record a few
observations relevant to the concerns of this essay.

66Lieyi zhuan item 31 (LX 143), based on Taiping yulan juan 884. A somewhat more detailed and
coherent version of this story appears at Soushen ji 2.14 (15) and is translated in Kenneth DeWoskin,
"In Search of the Supernatural: Selections from Sou-shen chi," Renditions 7 (Spring 1977):110; I translate
the Lieyi zhuan version for purposes of comparison. The Soushen ji version includes the critical detail
that the drum beat is the monk's signal to the man to return. DeWoskin translates daoren (lit. "person
of the Tao" or "person of the Path") as "Taoist master," which may be correct, but this vague term was
usually used during the Six Dynasties to denote a Buddhist monk or adept; the expected term for a
Taoist would be daoshi *tjc.

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32 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

We have seen that in ancient times, at least according to the standard writing
that remain to us, a sharp distinction was made between what one owed to one's
own ancestors and what one owed and could properly give to other people's ancestors.
To sacrifice to a soul with whom one lacked a relation of lineage descent was not an
act of supererogatory merit or largesse; it was deemed presumptuous and impious,
for, to put the matter at its simplest, to sacrifice was to repay and give thanks for
(bao) the blessings and favor (en) one had received from above, from the ancestor.
What could one possibly owe someone else's ancestor?
In the zhiguai narratives one can see clearly reflected the changes that this older
model was undergoing during the centuries in which they were written. In these tales,
as in contemporary religious doctrine and ritual, the very distinction between what
one owed to the two types of souls began to blur. For one thing, we have seen ample
evidence to suggest that one could now "owe" a great many things to other people's
ancestors; one could enter into a vast array of relations with them, relations that
both presumed and created structures of mutual obligation and reciprocity. For
another thing, ancestors for their part were not always one-dimensionally helpful
towards their descendants (nor had they ever been); the relationship between ancestors
and living descendants continued to be complex and ambivalent. So the distinction
between ancestors and ghosts became harder to maintain: some ghosts acted sur-
prisingly like ancestors, and some ancestors acted surprisingly like ghosts.
It is significant that relatively few stories in the zhiguai texts involve deceased
ancestors. For Chinese collectors of "strange" reports, the ancestor cult was part of
the normal, assumed background of life against which strange events stood out;
it became an instance of the "strange" only when relations between ancestors and
their descendants took an unusual turn. These unusual cases in the zhiguai corpus
fall into two categories: instances of excessive hostility of ancestors toward their own
descendants, and instances in which the effects of the help of ancestors from beyond
the grave were particularly clear and undeniable. The first sort of case was morally
shocking, since ancestors were usually expected to help their living kin or at least
to remain quiescent. The second was epistemically shocking, since the real influence
of ancestral spirits on living people's lives was usually muted and hard to discern.
I will here mention only two of the most striking stories of beneficent ancestors. One
involves the soul of a man who is temporarily reborn as a ghost (one of the Buddhist
paths of rebirth) in order to serve as surrogate father to his orphaned younger brother-
in-law. Once this spirit has helped his young relative through what would otherwise
have been a difficult four or five years, he departs to be reborn in the world.67 The
other story is that of Peng Huzi, who as a youth maintained that ghosts and spirits
do not exist. After his mother died, a shamaness warned him and his family that the
spiritual "killers" who had taken his mother's life would return to the same house to
kill again, and that they should all leave to escape this fate. Huzi's family fled, but
he remained. During the night several beings entered the house and searched about for a
victim. Out of desperation, Huzi crawled into a large urn and covered it with a board.
He then felt his mother's spirit on top of the board as another voice asked, "Is there
anyone underneath that board?" and she replied, "No one." Thus he was spared.68

67See Youming lu item 126 (LX 275), TPGJ 320 (26.7a-b).

68 Youming lu item 260 (LX 318).

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 CAMPANY Ghosts Matter 33

Perhaps the most memorable of all zhiguai stories of h

of Humu Ban, recorded in Gan Bao's Soushen ji. It well illu
emotional complexities surrounding relations with ancestors,
haziness of the distinction between the behavior of ghosts an
the zhiguai tales. Since it has been translated elsewhere, I will only summarize it
here.69 Humu Ban, a native of Taishan - location of the famous Eastern Marchmount,
one of the favorite destinations of the dead in folklore and ritual-was once passing
by the foot of that sacred mountain when he was summoned into the presence of its
deity, styled "the Governor of Taishan Commandery" (Taishan fujun 4k IL;d ), and
requested to carry a letter to the deity's son-in-law, the Yellow River God (Hebo
~q ).70 Ban complied, and was rewarded by the River God with a banquet and a
pair of silk slippers. A year later Ban was again passing the foot of the mountain,
so he stopped to pay his respects to the Governor of Taishan. While in the Governor's
chambers he suddenly saw his father's ghost walking by, bound in shackles. When
asked why, his father's ghost said: "I died an unlucky death and was banished for
three years, two of which have already passed. My imprisonment is unbearably difficult.
Since you are now an acquaintance of the Commandery Governor (Mingfu At* ),
you can make a plea on my behalf. Beg him to release me from this servitude. I wish
to be appointed to [the post of] local earth god (shegong a z ).""7 The divine Gover-
nor granted this request, but only after warning that "the living and the dead travel
different paths, and cannot grow close to one another." Back home, Ban saw almost
all of his sons die one by one, so after another year he went again to see the Governor.
After reminding Ban of his former warning, the Governor summoned in Ban's father
and asked him: "Before, you requested to return to your own village temple, where you
were expected to bring blessings to the local families. Instead your own grandsons have
died until there are hardly any left. Why?" The father replied: "Having been away from
my village so long, I was naturally delighted to be back; and when I received such a
plentitude of wine and food in offering, I missed my grandsons terribly. So I sum-
moned them." At this, Ban's father was relieved of his post, and Ban later had more
sons all of whom remained healthy.
A more telling narrative embodiment of the ambivalence and "ghostly" behavior
of an ancestor can hardly be imagined. Ancestors want to draw close to their living
kin, but in order to do so they must often violate the web of obligations surrounding
their relations with descendants, and they then illegitimately cross the divide separating
the two groups. What makes the story so poignant is that the ancestor's good
intentions toward members of his own family causes their untimely deaths. Even
here, then, just as in the case of ghosts, the living and the dead must ultimately
"travel different paths."

69Soushen ji 4.4 (27-29); see Kao, ed., Classical Chinese Tales, 69-71. The protagonist, Humu Ban,
is also mentioned in Lieyi zhuan item 20 (LX 139); there he is said to be the secretariat of Taishan
Commandery, and in the story, he asks the River God to accept a pair of finely crafted silk shoes as
an offering, thus reversing the gift described in the Soushen ji tale.
70For a similar case of a deity-in fact, the same deity-sending a letter by a human messenger, and
the messenger receiving a reward for his service (in this case the revivification of his dead), see Lieyi
zhuan item 41 (LX 145, cf. TPGJjuan 375), translated in Kao, ed., Classical Chinese Tales, 58-59.
71 As becomes clear later in the story, the father's request is to be installed as shegong in his native
village.

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34 Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 13 (1991)

Summary

R. C. Finucane, in his history of Western thought and practice concerning

spectral phenomena, documents a Reformation-era debate between Catholics and
Protestants over the nature and the resulting significance of ghosts. Protestants for
the most part saw ghostly apparitions as mere illusions sent by the devil to trick
humanity; therefore they maintained that we have no obligations to such illusory
beings. Catholics, with their concept of Purgatory long established, tended to see
such apparitions as real visits by the souls of the dead to the living; the visit was for
the purpose of making a claim on its recipient, a claim for the fulfillment of which
there existed regular cultic channels involving suffrages and masses for the dead.72
What I have tried to show, based on a reading of the corpus of pre-Tang zhiguai
ghost narratives, is, first, that something like the same split occurred in Six Dynasties
China; and, second, that the authors and collectors of zhiguai stories took the
"Catholic" and rejected the "Protestant" view. For the zhiguai authors, in other
words, ghosts mattered, and their aim was to show and to convince others that
ghosts mattered. Against sceptics who maintained that ghosts do not really exist,
or traditionalists who maintained that the living are under no moral or cultic obli-
gation to revere and nourish souls with whom they are not kin, these authors used
the medium of ghost narratives to argue that ghosts do exist and that they exert
serious claims on the living. Concurrently with Buddhist and Taoist liturgical
developments that created new ritual structures of relations between people and
ghosts, then, there emerged a narrative genre that depicted a whole new array of
obligations and interactions across the boundaries separating the living from the
dead and members of one lineage from those of another. The collecting, writing,
and reading of such stories helped to shape a new mode of religious and social
activity; it helped to create and make binding a new set of obligations to all the
dead, not just to the ancestors. It did so by imparting new levels of vividness,
specificity, narrativity, and complexity to the ways in which human encounters with
ghosts could be culturally imagined. These stories shed new light for us on an
important chapter of the history of the afterlife in China, because they, along with
other available genres of activity, helped to create that history.

72 See R.C. Finucane, Appearances of the Dead: A Cultural History of Ghosts (New York: Prometheus
Books, 1984), chap. 4.

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