Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Page 8
Once upon a time there was an animal that was similar to a rabbit but
smaller. It ate the grain in the fields. When the grain was ripe and the farmer took it home upon harvesting, this animal that was similar to a rabbit but
smaller also followed him there and hid itself in the farmer’s house. It was an expert thief and time and again stealthily ate from the grain. It could even figure out the time when people would leave and return. The owner hated
the animal and thereupon called it a “rat.”
He wanted to select an animal that would have the talent to catch it and
appoint it to office. People told him, “In the far-off wilderness lives an animal that is named a ‘wildcat.’ With the help of its claws and fangs it eats other animals and it is filled with rage. That has the talents fit to catch rats.”
Thereupon he went there, waited till it had given birth, and took a kitten
home with him, where he raised it. When it grew up, it was indeed an expert in catching rats. Whenever it came across rats, it would, filled with rage, pounce on them, catching these rats on behalf of its master. Because it killed and ate them, the rats didn’t dare leave their holes. Even when the cat had already eaten its fill, it still would pounce on them! Because of this, people were freed from the pest of thieving rats. So why not change its name of
wildcat because of this merit for the people? So they called it a “cat.”
But “cat” ( mao) means “end” ( mo).40 The far-off wilderness was its origin, and the service to the farmer was its “end.” Once it had been tamed by
humans, it despised its origin and glorified its end. That’s why it was called a cat. Now the cat was living in the house of the farmer, its kittens were not enraged by rats. That is because they received the rats that their mother had killed as food, so they believed that they could eat them without catching
them. Because they never saw their mother catch rats, they didn’t know
about rage. Their kittens believed that they, like the rats, were fed by the owner and had no intention to harm the rats. They had the same hearts like
rats and became robbers just like the rats.
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The farmer thereupon heaved a sigh and said, “My dear cat, I employed
you because you would, filled with rage, control these thieving rats for me.
But now you are not enraged by rats, you have truly lost your function. You even cohabit with these rats! Having lost the ancestral use of your claws and fangs, you lead the rats on to become robbers. You have really disappointed me!” Thereupon he took the cats to the wilderness and selected another new-born kitten. When he brought it home and raised it, it was as good a rat-
catcher as the first one.41
But this essay also makes clear that in the Tang dynasty mao had indeed become the designation for a domestic cat that had never known life in the wilds.42
From the Tang dynasty we also have anecdotes that indicate that the
domestic cat was becoming more common. Two such anecdotes concern
Empress Wu Zetian (r. 690–705). When Empress Wu had imprisoned and
cruelly mutilated her former rivals for the affection of Emperor Gaozong
(r. 650–683) and visited them in jail, one showed herself very submissive, but the other stated she hoped she would become a cat upon rebirth and Empress
Wu a rat, so she would be able to kill her in reincarnation upon reincarna-
tion.43 It is said that because of this curse Empress Wu had all cats expelled from the imperial palace. A story that is set some decades later tells that Empress Wu had trained a cat to lie down next to a parrot ( yingwu), but when she wanted to show the couple as a sign of peace to her officials, the cat killed the bird, to her great mortification.44
The first recorded obsessive cat lover in Chinese history appears to be a
certain Zhang Bo who also lived during the Tang dynasty: “Grand Master
Zhang Bo of Lianshan loved to raise cats: all color patterns were present and he had given each a beautiful name. Whenever he arrived at the middle gate
[to his private quarters] after taking care of business, tens of them circled him with lowered tails and outstretched necks as he entered. The curtains
[of his bedstead] were made of red gauze, and with his cats he enjoyed himself inside these, so some people called Bo a cat demon.”45
Two further anecdotes from the Tang deal with conflicts about the owner-
ship of a cat. Reliable Stories from the Kaiyuan Period (Kaiyuan chuanxin ji) preserves, for instance, the following anecdote:
During the Tang, Pei Kuan’s (674–754) son Xu (719–793) also served as pre-
fect of Henan (Luoyang). Xu loved to make fun of people. . . . Two women
together submitted a statement in which they disputed each other the
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ownership of a cat. The statement said: “If this is your cat, then it is your cat, but if it isn’t your cat, then it isn’t your cat.” Xu had a good laugh and judged as follows:
The kitten doesn’t know its master;
It catches mice around the house.
There is no need for you to fight:
Just give your pussy to the boss.
He then kept the cat, and the two fighting parties did not pursue the case.46
This cat fared much better than the poor animal that is portrayed in a famous gong’an (koan) found in The Col ected Essentials of the Five Lamps (Wudeng huiyuan) and featuring the Chan master Nanquan Puyuan (748–834):
The Chan master Nanquan Puyuan of Chizhou mediated between the monks
of the eastern hall and the western hall who were fighting over a cat. He told them, “If you can say the right thing, you have saved the cat. If you can’t say the right thing, I will cut it in two.” When none replied, the master cut the cat in two. When the Chan master Zhaozhou returned from some outside business, the master mentioned his earlier words and showed him the cat, where-
upon Zhaozhou took off his shoes, put them on his head, and left. The master said, “If you had been here, you would have been able to save the cat.”47
Buddhist Cats
Despite the impression that may have been created by the draconic verdict
of Puyuan, Buddhist monasteries continued to provide a hospitable habitat
to cats throughout East Asia during the Tang dynasty and beyond, and many
monks wrote poems about their pet cats.48 Some later traditions even ascribe the introduction of the cat into China to the famous seventh-century Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang, who spent many years in South Asia before return-
ing to the land of his birth.49 Huang Han in his Garden of Cats, quoting Wings to Approaching the Refined (Erya yi) by Luo Yuan (1136–1184), repeats this theory to reject it with patriotic fervor:
The cat is the fiercest of the small beasts. Initially it was not found in China.
Because the Buddhists found that rats and mice were damaging their books,
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the Chan master Sanzang (Xuanzang) of the Tang brought it with him from
India, the Western Heaven. It had not received the energy of the M
iddle
Country.
Com m e n ta ry of H ua ng H a n: This is also mentioned in Jade
Shards (Yuxie), where it is said that it is a kind of animal that derives from the Western Regions. But at the beginning of heaven and earth the birds
and beasts were born together with all other creatures, and that is why
one finds the word “cat” in the Five Classics.50 Why would we have to wait
for Buddhists to bring such an animal from the Western Regions? I had
not thought that the Wings to Approaching the Refined would include this theory!51
Actually, the presently available editions of Wings to Approaching the
Refined, a compendium of animal knowledge, do not include any reference to a possible foreign origin of the cat, so Huang Han’s indignation is mis-directed. The theory is included in the Jade Shards, which in this case refers not to the well-known Song-dynasty collection of comments on poetry
known as Jade Shards of the Poets (Shiren yuxie) but to an obscure encyclopedia of the last century of the Ming dynasty titled Jade Shards of Essays (Shiwen yuxie), which contains the following account:
Cats Kept by Buddhist Monks
The cat is not native to China but comes from India in the West. Because
it was not engendered by the air of China, the tip of its nose is always cold and only warm on the one day of summer solstice. In general one does not
eat its meat, and when it dies it is not buried in the ground but hung from a tree.52 Because mice and rats damage the sutras of the Buddhist monks
by their chewing, Sanzang of the Tang dynasty brought one back with him
when he went to the West to fetch sutras and kept it, and these cats are its descendants.53
The theory may well predate the Ming dynasty, because a model contract
for buying a cat that already mentions Xuanzang’s role in bringing the cat to China accompanies a short text preserved as Handbook for Acquiring a Cat (Namao jing) that is ascribed to a certain Yu Zongben who lived during the
Yuan dynasty (1260–1368).54 According to the many legends of the Five Rats, the original home of the cat was not simply sublunary India but the Western Paradise itself. The purring of a cat was often compared to the sound of a
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monk reading the sutras or reciting the name of the Buddha, further stressing the pious nature of the animal. The more the cat was aware of its Buddhist
background, the more it resented its imposed duty of killing rodents, because Buddhism deemed the taking of life a sin.
Buddhism introduced to China foreign stories not only about mice but
also about cats. One of these concerns an old cat that, too slow to catch mice, claims to have turned to religion in order to seduce its prey to approach. A non-Buddhist version of this tale is already encountered in the Panchatantra, and a Buddhist version was introduced to China in one of the works of the
famous monk Yijing (625–702):
Now, once upon a time, in a faraway country there was a mouse king with
five hundred mice that were his dependents. Now, there also was a cat named Fireflame that, in his younger years, had killed many mice. Later, when more advanced in years, he thought, “When I was still young I had great strength and was strong enough to catch and eat those mice. But now I am worn down
by age and my strength is gone, and I have lost the ability to catch them. So by what means can I still catch mice?” After he had pondered this question, he observed the land all around and saw a mouse king with five hundred mice that were his dependents, and settled down in that place. In front of the mouse hole he feigned to be seated in meditation. When those mice left their hole to roam, they saw that old cat peacefully seated in meditation, and they asked,
“Dear uncle, what are you doing?” The old cat replied, “In the past when I was young and had great strength I committed numberless sins, so now I want to
cultivate blessing to remove these former sins.” When those mice heard these words, they all were filled with compassion: “Now this old cat is practicing the good dharma.” With other mice they circumambulated that old cat, and
after they had done so three times, they went back into their hole, but the old cat grasped the one that was the very last and ate it. Very soon the number of mice started to diminish. When the king of the mice noticed this, he
thought to himself, “Our numbers are getting smaller, but that cat is gaining in strength, so there must be some connection.” That mouse king set out to
investigate the matter, and found mouse hair and mouse bones in the cat’s
feces, so he thought to himself, “The old cat eats us mice, so let me find out how he catches us mice.” With this intention he observed the cat from his
hole and saw that the cat grasped and ate the very last one.55
This story of self-serving hypocrisy escaped the confines of the Buddhist
canon, and we encounter it a millennium later in joke books of the Ming and This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:29 UTC
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Qing dynasties in various shapes.56 The tale was also well known enough to
be featured in at least one New Year print.
Good Mousers and Lazy Pets
By the beginning of the second millennium the mao has completed its transformation from ferocious wildcat to domestic cat. In the twelfth century, Luo Yuan in his Wings to Approaching the Refined describes the animal as a very recognizable domestic cat:
The cat ( mao) is the fiercest of the small beasts. Its nature being yin, it fears the cold. Even in the greatest heat it will not fear the full sun. The tip of its nose is cold and wet in all four seasons, except for the longest day of the year when it is warm. The pupils are round in the early morning and in the evening, but at noon they are like threads. After it has caught mice, its ears become frayed like a saw, just like the sawlike ears of a tiger after it has eaten a man.
When it washes its face up to behind its ears, a superior guest will arrive. Its colors are like that of a wildcat ( li), and both varieties together are called li.57
By the eleventh century domestic cats had indeed become a common
presence in the homes of literati, the educated cultural elite. As a result, cats and kittens now start to appear in the poetry of the time. One of the best-known examples is a quatrain by Huang Tingjian (1045–1105) in which he
requests a kitten in return for some fish:
Requesting a Kitten
Since this last fall the mice and rats abuse my cat’s demise:
They peep in vats, turn over pots, and rob me of my sleep.
Your pussy, I have been informed, had a full nest of kittens:
I bought some fish, strung on a twig, to ask one cricket-snatcher.58
In his “Thanking Zhou Wenzhi for Sending Me a Kitten” Huang Tingjian
showed himself greatly pleased with the animal he received, tracing its martial spirit back to the impact of Zhou Wenzhi’s distant forefather Zhou Yafu (d. 143 BCE), who as commander of the military installation at Slender Willows established a reputation for his strict discipline:
The little kitten that you raised established battle merit:
The general at Slender Willows’ family tradition!
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Not sated at its single meal with its poor fare of fish
It’s bound to empty out the rat holes in all walls.59
If Huang Tingjian had to confess that he could provide his newly acquired
kitten only a single meal of fish each day, another Song-dynasty poet, Lu You (1125–1200), confessed that his poverty did not enable him to feed his cat any fish at all:
On a Cat That Was Given to Me
I brought this little kitten home for just a pinch of salt:
May it protect the many books here in my humble dwelling!
But to my shame I am but poor and failed in my career:
I cannot give it a warm cushion, cannot feed it fish.60
Quatrains on domestic cats became something of a genre, and after com-
paring several examples, one connoisseur gave first place to a poem by the
author Liu Ji (1311–1375):
On a Painted Cat
This green-eyed cat Black Roundels that is fed on fish
Looks up at butterflies while squatting on the steps:
As spring winds gently blow through flower shadows
It freely lets in eastern suburbs rats all turn to quails.61
Liu Ji’s cat is fed on fish but also apparently has lost the drive to catch mice—
but then it is only a painted cat.
To what extent cats had become pampered pets in elite families of the
Southern Song dynasty also becomes clear from the following anecdote
concerning the missing cat of the granddaughter of the all-powerful prime
minister Qin Gui (1090–1155):
Qin Gui’s granddaughter was ennobled as Lady of Chong, but she was
called Lady Boy, which must have been her childhood name. She kept a
lion cat and when it suddenly disappeared, the prefecture of Lin’an (Hang-
zhou) was promptly set a date for its recovery. The officers and officials were in a panic, and walked around on foot to look for the cat. All lion cats were captured, but when they were delivered [to her mansion] none was the
right one. Thereupon [the officials] bribed an old soldier who served in
the mansion to find out its features, and produced one hundred posters
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