Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

But who would like such an existence spent in utter gloom?1

  And in yet another quatrain from the end of his life, Bai Juyi does not pity but ridicules the rat that has acquired its wings:

  One rat achieved immortal bliss and grew a pair of wings:

  How jealous were the other rodents when they saw these things!

  They did not know that way before it would have reached the sky

  It would be captured in its flight and swallowed by a kite.2

  From the beginning of the second millennium, the idea that rats can turn

  into bats is increasingly rejected by traditional literati. But the same scholars who rejected this transformation probably would give credence to the statement that field rats each year in spring change into quails, because the claim to that effect is found in some ancient texts (the quails presumably turned back into rats later in the year, though this is nowhere stated).3 They also probably would be willing to entertain the notion that mice and rats, like

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  foxes and cats, at an advanced age and under the right circumstances were

  able to assume a human shape—and in that shape would try to seduce men

  and women in order to rob them of their jing (seed, semen, vital energy) so as to speed up their own process of transformation and the attainment of

  immortality. Starting from the Tang dynasty, we find stories about rats and mice that are able to take on a human shape. One of the most famous classical tales of the Tang, Wang Du’s The Ancient Mirror (Gujing ji) of the early seventh century, contains, for instance, an episode in which the three daughters of a district magistrate are visited each night by demon lovers, one of whom eventually turns out to be a fat, naked, toothless rat.4 Such stories continued to develop in later centuries, but the largest collection of stories of animals taking on human shape and in that guise interacting with humans, Pu

  Songling’s Strange Stories from Make­Do Studio, contains only one story about a rodent assuming a human shape. This story, “Axian,” may well be based on

  a local Shandong legend. The wealth of the lovely and virtuous maiden Axian, who ensures her husband’s prosperity, consists in stores of grain, so she most likely is a hamster and not a mouse or a rat.5 Perhaps Pu Songling’s thunder had been stolen by the story of the seductive white mouse that woos the holy monk Xuanzang, as well as by the tale of the Five Rats that create chaos in the Eastern Capital.

  The White Mouse

  During the Tang dynasty, the white mouse was believed to be an emanation

  of gold and silver, as we learn from an entry from the Record of Strange Affairs (Luyi ji) that was copied into the Extensive Records of the Taiping Era (Taiping guangji), a huge compilation of records of anomalies and miracle stories from the second to the late tenth century: “A white mouse has a fur that is brilliantly white; its ears and legs are red and its eye sockets are crimson. Crimson is the essence of gold and jade, so if you dig out the places from which it emerges, you are bound to find gold and jade. It is also said that mice turn white at the age of five hundred years and that if their ears and legs are not red, they are common mice.”6

  This belief also was current in the Song dynasty, and it may well be con-

  nected to the widespread belief in later centuries that squeaking mice were counting money. But white mice engendered few stories of any complexity

  until the White Mouse Demon set out to wed and bed the pilgrim Xuanzang

  in the sixteenth-century novel The Journey to the West (Xiyou ji). The earliest references to the White Mouse Demon (by her alternative name, Lady

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  Emerging from the Earth [Diyong Furen]) date from the fifteenth century

  but do not yet provide any details about the nature of her involvement with the holy monk.7

  The seventh-century Chinese monk Xuanzang risked his life to make the

  long pilgrimage through Central Asia to India, where he spent many years

  studying Buddhism. Upon his return to Chang’an, he not only dedicated

  his life to the translation of the many Sanskrit texts he had brought back

  from India, but at the request of the emperor he also wrote an account of

  the regions and cities he had traveled through. Upon his death, his eventful life was chronicled in an extensive biography. This life amply provided the stuff of legend, and in the popular imagination Xuanzang’s journey to India soon became a pilgrimage to the Western Paradise, there to obtain those

  Buddhist scriptures that were lacking in China. The earliest, still quite

  simple account of this pious legend may date from the twelfth century, but

  in subsequent retellings the story would continue to grow until it reached

  its culmination in the hundred-chapter vernacular novel The Journey to the West, which was first printed in 1592 and is usually ascribed to a certain Wu Cheng’en. In the novel, Xuanzang rides a magnificent steed and is accompanied by three servants, the monkey Sun Wukong, the pig Zhu Bajie, and

  the monk Sha. If the steed represents the will, the pig is the embodiment of lust, while the monkey symbolizes the unruly mind—the monkey’s major

  weapon is a stick he can extend or minimize according to his desire. Most

  of the monsters they meet on their long journey want to devour Xuanzang

  or to have sex with him, because the pious monk has not spent one drop of

  semen in this life or his seven previous incarnations and so is an optimal

  supply of vital energy for any creature that wants to speed up its process of transformation. The Old Mouse Demon (by her full title the Golden-Nosed

  White-Furred Old Mouse Demon), whose true nature is of course revealed

  only at the very end, certainly is not the only animal monster that wants to have sex with Xuanzang, but is by far the most persistent, and the narrative of her attempts to bed the monk fills no less than four chapters (80–83) of The Journey to the West.8

  When at the conclusion of an earlier adventure the pilgrims set out again,

  they stop in a dense wood. After Sun Wukong has left to find some food,

  Xuanzang hears faint cries for help and finds a girl whose upper body is tied to a tree by vines, while her lower body is buried in the ground. She tells him she had been left there in this condition after four bandits who had abducted her had failed to reach an agreement on who would get her. The pious monk

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  frees her with the enthusiastic participation of Zhu Bajie and sternly chides the protesting Sun Wukong, who immediately recognizes her as a monster.

  As they move on, the girl riding the horse and the monk now walking, they

  come to an old Lamaist monastery, where they receive hospitality, while the girl is housed in a separate room in the back. When the pilgrims are forced to stay at this monastery for a few days because of a sudden indisposition of Xuanzang, they learn that some young monks of the monastery have mysteriously disappeared, leaving only their clothes and skeletons. When Sun

  Wukong turns himself into a young monk to investigate, he soon finds out

  that their female companion has first sed
uced and then eaten them. When

  she also tries to seduce him, he engages her in a fierce fight, in which both of them make full use of their magic powers. When the girl eventually is

  defeated, she leaves a shoe that assumes her shape and continues the fight.

  This feint allows her to flee, and as she flees she takes Xuanzang with her to her Bottomless Cave on Mount Pitfall.

  The next morning Sun Wukong returns to the place where they first met

  the girl and learns from the local god of the soil where she lives. When he enters her cave, he finds himself in an alternative world, and eventually he manages to find Xuanzang, who is trying to ward off the advances of the girl.

  But Sun Wukong’s attempt to enter into her stomach as a tiny insect in a

  bubble in the wine Xuanzang offers to her fails, and he has to flee the cave.

  Sun Wukong reenters the cave as a fly and instructs Xuanzang to go to the

  garden in back and offer the girl a peach, and when she opens her mouth he

  enters her throat as a worm in the peach. Once inside her stomach he causes the girl such pain she consents to free Xuanzang. Once she has done so, she and Sun Wukong again engage in battle, but when she is defeated and again

  uses the feint of the transformed shoe to flee into her cave, she again takes Xuanzang with her. When Sun Wukong follows them inside the cave, he

  fails to find the couple in its maze of corridors, but comes across a room in which incense is burned before tablets dedicated to “Honored Father Devaraja Li” and “Honored Brother Third Prince Nezha.” Sun Wukong now goes up

  to heaven and appeals to the Buddha, accusing the Heavenly King of the

  North Li Jing and his son of dereliction of duty. The Heavenly King initially furiously denies all charges, but has to change his tune when Nezha reminds him that he has an adoptive daughter, a mouse spirit that three centuries ago had in heaven devoured the Buddha’s flowers and candles. When he was

  dispatched against her, he should have beaten her to death, but had spared

  her, whereupon she had fled to the world below and set up these tablets in

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  gratitude. When the Heavenly King and Nezha, with their heavenly hosts,

  accompany Sun Wukong on yet another attack on the Bottomless Cave, the

  girl is captured and taken to heaven for judgment, allowing Xuanzang to

  pursue his pilgrimage.

  While the characters in the story learn the girl’s mysterious identity only at the end of this episode, the narrator had informed the readers already in the episode at the Lamaist monastery when she and Sun Wukong fight their

  first battle. He did so in a passage in verse, which in the rhyming translation by Anthony Yu reads:

  She has

  A nose of gold

  And fur like snow.

  She dwells in tunnels underground

  Where every part’s both safe and sound.

  A breath she nourished three hundred years before

  Had sent her a few times to Mount Spirit’s shore.

  Of candles and flowers once she ate her fill,

  She was banished by Tathagata’s will.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Scurrying here and there,

  She defies the River Han or the Yangzi’s breadth and length;

  Scampering up and down

  The heights of Mount Tai or Heng is her special strength.

  When you behold her looks seductive and sweet,

  Who’d think that she’s a rodent-spirit in heat?9

  Once the relation of the white mouse to the Heavenly King of the North

  Vaishravana (or by his Chinese name, Li Jing) is revealed it is clear that her origin is his iconic animal, the mongoose.10 The mongoose may in many

  places be welcomed as an enemy of rodents, but in China it was as a relatively small, furry animal classified as a shu and eventually was turned into a mouse or rat.

  The four chapters on the attempts of the Golden-Nosed White-Furred

  Old Mouse Demon to wed and bed Xuanzang were also adapted for the stage.

  The full-length Peking opera Bottomless Cave (Wudidong) tells the story in a strict chronological order starting from the mouse’s misbehavior in heaven and her subjugation by Li Jing and Nezha. The pageantry of play is enhanced because the White Mouse has been given four female rodent companions.11

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  The play enjoyed considerable popularity before 1949, because its many fighting scenes pitching the mouse demon against the monkey king allowed a

  martial dan actor ample opportunity to show his or her skills.12 Another reason must have been its blatant sensuality in the scenes in which she tries to seduce Xuanzang or his simian servant. The play also adds a scene in which Sun Wukong joins the White Mouse and her four companions in the water

  when they go skinny-dipping.13 Borrowing a detail from the story of the Five Rats creating havoc in the Eastern Capital, the full play ends only when in the final battle one of the gods (the fierce Erlang) transforms himself into a cat, scaring the White Mouse into showing her true shape. In the old days

  the White Mouse, eager to be the bride, was dressed in red, but when the play was revived in 1957 the lead actress’s costume was changed to mouse gray

  and she also wore a “mouse helmet” with prominent mouse ears.14

  One of the most intriguing New Year prints devoted to mice was produced

  in the last years of the Qing dynasty by a print shop in Yangliuqing, near

  Tianjin, and is titled The Lament of the Mouse (Laoshu zitan). This oblong print measuring 580 by 1,040 millimeters is divided into three layers. The

  lowest layer shows three round tables, each surrounded by a group of fashionable ladies and some servants and children. Each of the tables carries a wire cage in which one or more rodents are locked up. One of the cages also contains a treadmill, and another cage a ladder, allowing the rodents to perform their tricks. On the floor below the tables one observes a mouse caught in a trap and a mouse caught by a cat, as well as a rodent that has been set on fire.

  The middle layer is made up of the three thought balloons of the captive

  rodents in their cages, representing their memories of their days of freedom.

  The middle balloon shows the performance of the granary-filling sacrifice,

  a ceremony conducted in early spring, during which rodents were implored

  not to damage the grain stores too much. The left balloon shows an episode

  from the late nineteenth-century novel The Seven Heroes and Five Gal ants (Qixia wuyi), in which some of the Five Rats are fighting a criminal at the behest of Judge Bao. The right-hand balloon shows the White Mouse Demon

  battling Sun Wukong. The upper layer of the print is taken up by the long text of the lament of the mouse, written in short columns of ten characters each.15

  This lament of the mouse is written in the voice of a son of the White Mouse Demon and starts out with an account of the life of his mother, blaming Nezha for not saving her from the divine cat:

  When Heaven created the ten thousand beings

  Each of them got their own strength,

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  But I never would have thought that most bitter

  Would be the fate of our kind.

  We live our life in this world to no purpose,

  Neither bird nor beast, neither yin nor yang.

  During the day we hide in the holes of a wall—

  How would we dare be observed by men?

  And if by chance we encounter a cat,

  It is the same as appearing before King Yama.

  If we fail to avoid him for even a moment,

  Our lives are bound to be lost to the Yellow Springs!16

  Originally we lived at Pitfall Mountain,

  Where the Bottomless Cave was our home.

  By tradition we were a literary family,

  But more recently we abandoned the arts for the military,

  And sword and spear became our craft.

  It’s not that I want to brag on behalf of my mother,

  But she had transformed into a human shape

  And had practiced self-cultivation for over five hundred years.

  She had lived through quite some battues and hunting parties,

  Had experienced quite some thunderclaps and lightning flashes,

  But already expected on any moment to become an immortal.

  Who could have known

  That disaster would come down from heaven?

  It was all because she venerated this spirit tablet—

  The Heavenly King who supports a Pagoda17 had saved her life:

  A favor that weighs heavier than a mountain!

  But it can be said she’d been devout in showing her gratitude.

  Who had thought

  That the Tang monk would travel to the Western Paradise seeking sutras?

  That Sun Wukong is really impossible to tie down:

  He loves to meddle in all kinds of business—

  Why are these things your concern?

  He stole this spirit tablet and ascended to heaven,

  Where he brazenly entered the Divine-Welkin Hall