Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

  And without reason lodged an accusation, claiming to be wronged.

  Alas, that muddleheaded Jade Emperor

  Did not investigate blue or yellow, white or black,

  But dispatched celestial troops and celestial officers,

  And the divine cat dashed through heaven’s gate.

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  Commanding Nezha and Erlang,

  Sun set out the large battle array of the celestial immortals

  And spread out the net of Heaven and the sein of Earth.

  My mother’s infantry was exhausted, her cavalry diminished,

  So that Sun Wukong with one stroke of his rod

  Crushed her many years of devotion to the Dao.

  My uncle Nezha didn’t care for the affection between siblings

  But promptly issued the order to bring out the troops and engage in battle.

  As soon as that divine cat widely opened its maw,

  It swallowed my mother whole, with hide and hair.

  Because she venerated your father’s spirit tablet,

  She called down this disaster that covers heaven.

  Uncle, how can you be without any conscience?

  To this very day this enmity has not been revenged,

  Each and every day I flee trouble by seeking the wilds.

  The text of the lament next proceeds through a long catalog of the dangers

  that threaten a mouse in its daily existence, such as hunting, arsenic, mousetraps and cruel pranks:

  I definitely should go and see the Jade Emperor

  To tell him the wrongs that we have suffered,

  But alas I can only bite my tongue and swallow my breath

  While hiding in the space between ceiling and roof.

  As soon as I take one step that is too heavy,

  People will say that their day will be unlucky.

  As for that family’s leftover rice and coarse chaff,

  I will venture outside late at night to find food,

  And when I slip and fall into a vat filled with flour,

  They will laugh at me for showing the white of my eyes,18

  Without any concern that my life is in imminent danger!

  What I fear most is a fuse and a fowling gun

  By which they kill us in such great numbers,

  And without pity for the corpses that cover the fields,

  They’ll say that should be enough for a moleskin jacket

  That can be worn inside out when the fur is shorn.19

  What I fear most are those paperers

  Who put arsenic in the space between ceiling and roof

  With the intention of killing everyone in my family!

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  What I fear most is that someone develops a boil on his neck

  And they will cut off my balls for compounding the medicine,

  Turning us into the likes of those eunuchs!

  What I fear most are the bricklayers—

  With these bricks the cat plays many evil tricks,

  So when hunting for food I will fall into his trap.

  But most detestable is

  That they may nail me to a pillar—

  How miserable it is to starve on an empty stomach!

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

  What I fear most are those ignorant people who want to have some fun

  And put a black bean up my asshole

  And sew it tight with needle and thread,

  Killing me in such a way that all turns black before my eyes

  And in my panic I’ll bite half of my children to death.

  Alas, we are all together so poor

  That we don’t have any stores

  And we have to find our way in the dark

  When we search for some tea and rice.

  Hunger will even make us so desperate

  That we cannot but chew through a camphor box

  So we’ll be blamed for damaging the stored clothes.

  As soon as the pipe on its carpet falls down,

  We can only make ourselves scarce with lowered heads.

  When we’ve been lucky enough to escape with our lives and climb a table

  We’re suddenly struck by a strong fragrance,

  Because a dainty piece of quince has been placed there.

  When overcome by desire

  You want to have a little taste,

  You cannot avoid the stick that strikes down!

  And they say

  They’ll happily give an emerald rice bowl for such a mechanical

  mousetrap!

  When the house is old

  And the room filled with smoke,

  It is also because we stole the awning in front.

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  The Lament of the Mouse concludes by contrasting the present misery of the mouse with the days of glory when the Five Rats wrought havoc in the

  Eastern Capital:

  Once long ago

  We were the first of the twelve hours,

  We, the rodents of zi, were the champions!

  As for our ancestors,

  Those five brothers displayed their talents:

  At Heaven’s behest and obeying fate

  They descended to earth to be born here below:

  Jiang Ping, Xu Qing, Zhan Xiongfei, Han Zhang, and Bai Yutang

  Arrested that scoundrel Bright Butterfly

  And in the greenwoods were counted as heroes.

  The Five Rats created havoc in the Eastern Capital,

  Which was written up as a case of Judge Bao,

  So their heroic name is transmitted for all eternity.

  But nowadays

  Their offspring of sons and grandsons have turned into weaklings,

  And as a result they run as soon as they see a person approaching—

  And still it is said that mice in their nests fight with lances!

  The twenty-fifth of the First Month

  Is the day when we celebrate our weddings.

  We don’t light candles

  And do everything on the sly.

  But this is also called “Filling the Granary”:

  Such is the downhill road of the life of a mouse.

  The Five R ats

  The story of the five rats that have the uncanny ability to take on not only human shape but also the exact features of individuals has been widely popular since the sixteenth century.20 This story has shown the same capacity for transformation as the five rats that are its main characters. The five rats may be animals with an uncanny ability to take on the guise of specific human beings that are eventually subdued by Judge Bao with the assistance of a celestial cat, or they may be greenwood heroes with sobriquets that include the element

  “rat” and turn into Judge Bao’s ablest assistants in his war on crime.

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  From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century th
e story of the five animal

  rats is best known in the version that starts out with the seduction of the wife of the student Shi Jun by Rat Five after it has taken on the likeness of her husband and ends when the five rats are subdued by the legendary Judge

  Bao after he has gone to the Western Paradise and borrowed the jade-faced

  cat of the Buddha.21 This version circulated in many adaptations, but it was not the only version. In a tale included in Karmic Retribution That Awakens the World (Lunhui xingshi), two rats take on the shape of the student Liu Shu and his wife, Lady Mei, and when the true Liu Shu appeals to the magistrate, the three other rats take on the shape of the local magistrate, the Heavenly Master Zhang (the highly respected patriarch of the Zhengyi school of Daoism), and the emperor himself, and chaos results as no one is able to tell real from fake. Even the Jade Emperor and his celestial forces fail to subdue these masters of impersonation, and at his wit’s end the deity appeals to the bodhisattva of compassion, Guanyin:

  Thereupon he sent a note to the bodhisattva of compassion ordering her

  to submit them to her will. As soon as the bodhisattva looked down from

  her cloud, she said, “These are the five rat demons! Only a cat can conquer them. The force of all you divinities is of no avail. The Buddha of the Western Paradise has a sutra-reading white cat of the essence of metal with eyes of fire that can catch these!” Thereupon she rode her purple cloud over to

  the Western Heaven. She greeted the Buddha and borrowed the cat to take

  it back with her to the Eastern Capital. The divinities at court brought the two Sons of Heaven into the hall, while the others knelt down outside. From the sky the bodhisattva of compassion sent down the white cat: Its two eyes resembled two red suns, and its four paws resembled twenty steel swords; its voice resembled the thunder, and its speed resembled lightning. By circling the palace hall once, it made heaven dark and earth black: all people fell to the ground. When after a while heaven turned bright again and the people

  lifted their heads to have a look, they saw a white cat as big as an elephant; it held one rat in its maw and pinned down the other four rats with its paws.

  After it had thrown them down from the sky, the white cat disappeared on

  a cloud, while the five rats all died because of their ripped flesh and bashed-out brains—each rat weighed in at more than one hundred pounds.22

  Liu Shu and his wife’s adventures are explained as a punishment for the sins they both committed in their former lives, yet one cannot but feel that that explanation was added in order to include an exciting story in a moralistic tract.

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  When the compiler of the One Hundred Court Cases (Baijia gong’an), a vernacular novel published in 1594 that provides accounts of one hundred

  cases solved by Judge Bao, included as chapter 58 a version of the story that starts with the seduction of Shi Jun’s wife, he already noted the existence of two different versions: “This court case is called ‘Five Rats Create Chaos in the Eastern Capital’ and is also called ‘The Judgment on the False Humane

  Ancestor.’ There are two versions current that are quite dissimilar. I obtained this one from a printed text from the capital. I don’t know which version is the correct one, so I follow what others have transmitted.”23

  The version on which the One Hundred Court Cases is based can now be identified with a prosimetric ballad probably printed in the sixteenth century and titled A Newly Printed Story of the Song Dynasty: The Five Rats Create Havoc in the Eastern Capital (Xinkan Songchao gushi Wushu danao Dongjing ji).

  This text in the collection of the late scholar Zhou Shaoliang has not yet been published, but it has been studied in detail by Pan Jianguo.24 Most likely this text belongs to the same genre as the “ballad-tales for singing and narrating”

  ( shuochang cihua) that were printed in Beijing in the second part of the fifteenth century and that we know because of a chance find in 1967. A number of these prosimetric texts deal with court cases of Judge Bao.25 The character of Judge Bao is based on that of the official Bao Zheng (999–1062), who served at court and in the provinces during the peaceful reign of Emperor Renzong (the

  Humane Ancestor; r. 1022–1063). Bao Zheng was also known as Wenzheng and

  Dragon Design (Longtu), and his spectacular incorruptibility and honesty

  during his lifetime became the stuff of legend quickly after his death. His exploits were adapted as vernacular stories, plays, and ballads, in which he not only was described as an incarnation of the Star of Literature (Wenquxing)

  because of his skill in civil administration but also was said to hear cases during the day as prefect of the metropolitan prefecture of Kaifeng and at night as a judge in the underworld, replacing King Yama. In the prosimetric ballads of the Yuan and early Ming, the famous Judge Bao does not hesitate to take

  on the most powerful men and monsters in the land, and the tale of the five rats would make a wonderful addition to that corpus.26

  Beyond the prosimetric ballad, one may point for the same motif to a ver-

  nacular story that was reprinted as chapter 36 of Feng Menglong’s Stories to Caution the World (Jingshi tongyan) of 1625. This text, which is dated by Patrick Hanan to the period 1250–1450, tells the story of an official who upon his return from his posting finds his wife living with a double that, after many complications and divine interventions, is unmasked by a wildcat as a rat. The introductory story of this text also concerns a rat that in the guise of a student This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:32 UTC

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  marries the sister of one of his friends.27 If we accept Hanan’s early dating of the vernacular story, the prosimetric ballad may well be read as a later attempt to exhaust the possibilities of this theme by increasing the number of rats.

  Once the prosimetric ballad had been turned into prose as chapter 58 of

  the One Hundred Court Cases, the story was also adapted into chapter 95

  of the late sixteenth-century novel The Popular Exposition of the Record of the Eunuch Sanbao’s Journey to the Western Ocean (Sanbao taijian xia Xiyang ji tongsu yanyi) and served as the model for the short story “The Jade-Faced

  Cat” (Yumian mao) in The Court Cases of Judge Bao (Longtu gong’an), which continued to be widely reprinted throughout the Qing dynasty.28 The same

  chapter most likely also served as the basis for a full-length novel written circa 1600 by a certain Wu Huanchu and titled Newly Printed and Completely Il ustrated: The Five Rats Upset the Eastern Capital (Xinke quanxiang Wushu nao Dongjing). This short novel was later reprinted with some changes, and

  in that shape served as the basis of The Five Rats Create Havoc in the Eastern Capital: Judge Bao Subdues the Demons (Wushu nao Dongjing Baogong

  shouyao zhuan).29 The story was also adapted in various genres of prosimetric narrative and narrative song.30

  When Pan Jianguo earlier discussed Wu Huanchu’s novel on the five rats,

  he assumed, following a number of earlier scholars, that the second version mentioned by the author of the One Hundred Court Cases could be identified with the tale in Karmic Retribution That Awakens the World.31 As we saw, this version features quite different characters, such as the Heavenly Master

  Zhang, the hereditary leader of the Zhengyi Daoists who held court at Mount Longhu (Dragon-Tiger) in Jiangxi, and the bodhisattva Guanyin, who goes

  to the Western Paradise and borrows the Buddha’s cat. Judge Bao makes no

  appe
arance in that version at all, so one can wonder whether the author of

  the One Hundred Court Cases had that tale in mind when he mentioned a second version. Recently, when discussing the prosimetric ballad from the

  collection of Zhou Shaoliang, Pan Jianguo revisited the issue and drew attention to the fourteenth-century play Golden Rats and a Silver Cat: Li Bao (Jinshu yinmao Li Bao). The play has been lost except for a few stray arias, enough to allow the conclusion that it included a scene of a student leaving his wife to take part in the examinations but not enough to conclude much else. Pan

  Jianguo suggests, however, that the play may have survived to some extent

  in a play in the repertoire of errenzhuan, a genre of traditional theater that is popular in northeastern China. In this play the girl Liu Jinchan is murdered by the bandit Li Bao, whereupon her father wrongly accuses his nephew Yan

  Chasan. When Judge Bao mistakenly orders Yan Chasan chopped in two,

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  the body refuses to fall down. When Judge Bao’s soul thereupon visits the

  underworld, he mistakenly kills another five ghosts. These ghosts then turn into the five rat demons that greatly disturb the Eastern Capital. The Song ruler thereupon orders the twelve-year-old prime minister Gan Luo to restore order, and only after he has borrowed a cat from the Queen-Mother of the